In the Curator’s Words is an occasional series that takes a critical look at current exhibitions through the eyes of curators.
Anita Feldman, the deputy director for curatorial affairs at The San Diego Museum of Art, talks about the Balboa Park museum’s newest exhibition, “american minimal,” which celebrates the Minimalist art movement in the United States. The exhibition, on display through June 1, was curated by Feldman in collaboration with Jennifer Findley and John Digesare.
Q: What kind of impact did Minimalism have in art in general, and how does this exhibition portray that impact?
A: In just the last year, we have witnessed the ing of a number of minimal artists — notably Fletcher Benton, Richard Serra, Frank Stella and, only a few weeks ago, Joe Goode — who have had a lasting impact on successive generations of artists. This installation pays homage to them and showcases their work, most notably Stella’s major painting “Flin Flon VIII” (1970), as well as the works of 50 other minimal artists working in the United States. Included are several women artists who have long been sidelined, such as Florence Arnold, Helen Odell Gilbert, June Harwood, Nancy Haynes, Helen Lundeberg and Helen Pashgian, as well as contemporary artists taking Minimalism into new directions such as Lita Albuquerque, Susan Chorpenning, Mary Corse, Gisela Colón and Gary Lang.
The movement is credited with starting in 1959 when Stella exhibited his geometric black-and-white paintings at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). He famously quipped “What you see is what you see,” which became the movement’s unofficial motto. In essence, the work defies abstraction, which is a reduction of something, and instead the art object is simply what it is. That is to say, Minimalism does not start with a representational subject. Attention is brought to the surface, and the “hand of the artist” — which was such so dominant in Abstract Expressionism with rapid gestures and brushstrokes — is completely eliminated.
Donald Judd’s work epitomized the new movement, and his “Table Object from Ten for Leo Castelli” (1967) is at the center of the first gallery, with its repeating stainless steel forms. While art critics in the 1960s and ’70s exhaustively discussed definitions of art — what is a sculpture, and what is a painting — these artists expanded and blurred boundaries until there were none. Today, we no longer demand these definitions. For example, some paintings project physically into the room, some move with kinetic polarized light subtly changing colors, and “sculpture” can be comprised of air, light or sound.
Unlike other art movements in this country, minimalism was not centered on the East Coast; what happened here in California was equally significant. Setting the stage, also in 1959, a group of four minimalist artists exhibited together in Los Angeles. These included Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin, all of whom are represented in the exhibition.
Advances in local technologies brought about by the aerospace industry enabled experimentation with new materials used by artists in California, including Harry Bertoia, who developed his sound sculptures years after working at the U.S. Navy Electronics Laboratory in Point Loma. The Light and Space movement was born from technical innovation and yet was inspired by nature with the captivating light and vast ocean and desert horizons of Southern California. DeWain Valentine is a perfect example, with his 1978 life-sized transparent disc in blue and violet resin in the exhibition that reflects and engulfs the viewer and our surroundings. He notably invented his own resins that expanded the medium’s capacity in size, while teaching plastics technology at UCLA.
Meanwhile, Claremont McKenna College had become a hub of activity for minimalist artists, including Florence Arnold, Karl Benjamin and Aaron Parazette. At UC Irvine, Tony DeLap’s students included John McCracken as well as James Turrell and Bruce Nauman. The surfboard and automobile culture of California also led to something known as “finish fetish,” with rich, sensual, slick surfaces, such as is apparent in McCracken’s “Saturn” (1988-92). Donald Lewallen fondly recalls attending art classes as a child at The San Diego Museum of Art as his earliest artistic inspiration.
It is also fair to say that Minimalism impacted not just the visual arts, but culture much more broadly, extending to music, dance, fashion and literature. In this exhibition, we include the work of John Cage, as well as photographs by Arnold Newman of minimalist composer Phillip Glass — who was an inspiration for Lita Albuquerque, and of Martha Graham, who introduced minimalism to dance and is depicted in her signature black dance costume against a white wall. We have also included concrete poetry by Carl Andre, which combine the literary word with a minimalist sensibility with red and black typewriter ink forming compositions of word blocks over four pages.
Q: In curating this exhibition, what were you hoping it would impart on the viewer?
A: The San Diego Museum of Art has always dedicated galleries to modern and contemporary art, and yet it may surprise many San Diegans that 90 percent of this exhibition is drawn from the museum’s permanent collection.
There is an opportunity in this exhibition to escape from daily news and chaos, and appreciate an art that allows one to take time in a quiet setting to appreciate the essence of an object in its most reduced state. Here we have nuances on the simple square and the all-encoming, continuous circle. We can take a moment to sit in the shadows with Larry Bell’s “Untitled (Corner Lamp)” (1980) and experience the colors and shapes of reflected and refracted light from a humble glass triangle in the corner.
San Diego Museum of Art presents ‘american minimal’
When: Through June 1
Where: The San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego
Tickets: $20 general ission, $15 for seniors 65 and over, free for youth under 17.
Phone: 619-232-7931
Online: sdmart.org
