Minimalism

Description

Minimalism was a movement pioneered in America in the late 1960s that aimed at reducing sculpture and painting to its most essential forms. Through the work of its five key practitioners, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris, this book examines in words and pictures the defining characteristics - and the debates - of the art belonging to movement. Although all these clean-edged works can be identified by certain recurring elements - symmetry, repetition, seriality and factory production - this book documents the surprising variety of work produced within these rigid confines. Alongside images of the key works and the historical exhibitions of Minimalism, author James Meyer presents the sides in the debate around Minimalism from the late 1950s to the present day along with artists' statements, reviews and commentary.

James Meyer is a writer and art historian who has been teaching contemporary art and critical theory at Emory University, Atlanta, since 1994. He is a noted specialist and lecturer in Minimalism, as well as other forms of American art of the 1960s, and contemporary forms of institutional critique. Meyer has written extensively on Minimal artists. Publications include Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s (Yale, 2001); he has contributed essays to Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966 1973 (Yale, 1995); Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957 (Matthew Marks Gallery, 1998); Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2002); Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, Practice (Cambridge, 2004) and A Minimal Future (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2004). He is the editor of Carl Andre, Cuts=Texts, 1999 2004 (MIT Press, 2005) and has contributed to journals Artforum, Art Magazine, Flash Art and Parkett.

'Readers will learn as much about the subject as one book can be expected to deliver.' Barry Schwabsky, Bookforum 'well written - an excellent 'Documents' section that allows a proper investigation of the movement's theoretical bases' Art Review