MINIMAL ART AND ARTISTS

This book is is a study of Minimal art and artists, particularly painters, sculptors, 3-D, installation and land artists.

All of the key practitioners and theoreticians of the still-influential 1960s Minimal art movement and style are studied here: Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, Robert Smithson, Brice Marden, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and many land artists (such as Robert Smithson, Christo, James Turrell and Michael Heizer).

Chapters include: Minimal aesthetics; Minimal painting and painters; Minimal sculptors and sculpture; Minimal art and land artists; and Minimal art today.

Fully illustrated. 232 pages. Large format.

The text has been fully revised for this edition, with new illustrations added. www.crmoon.com.

The Minimal artists did not consider themselves a group; they did not produce manifestos; they did not agree on aesthetics or working practices (though some were friends); they tended not to be directly involved in political art (Minimal art was more conservative than counter-culture); and they disliked the term 'minimalism'.

It tended to be the critics (as usual) who came up with the terms for the new art. Lucy Lippard used the term 'structurist', 'dematerialization' and 'eccentric abstraction'; Michael Fried had 'literalist' and 'objecthood'; Peter Hutchinson used 'Mannerist'; Barbara Rose coined 'ABC Art'; Lawrence Alloway had 'systematic painting'; Robert Morris took up 'unitary forms' and 'anti-form'; and Donald Judd employed 'speci c objects'.

Probably the premier Minimal artist (and philosopher) is Donald Judd; Judd stands at the centre of Minimal art, and no account of Minimalism is complete without placing Judd in the foreground. Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Morris and Carl Andre have been among the most lucid of theorists among artists.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it seemed as if every artist went through a Minimal period at some time in their career, as well as a painting-as-sculpture period, and a brush with performance art (and perhaps body art). Both a Conceptual art phase and an on-going installation art preoccupation were mandatory for contemporary artists, it seems. All contemporary art can be viewed as basically Conceptual art, and a increasing proportion of it is installation art

In Resonant Matter, Lutz Koepnick considers contemporary sound and installation art as a unique laboratory of hospitality amid inhospitable times. Inspired by Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel video installation The Visitors (2012), the book explores resonance—the ability of objects to be affected by the vibrations of other objects—as a model of art’s fleeting promise to make us coexist with things strange and other. In a series of nuanced readings, Koepnick follows the echoes of distant, unexpected, and unheard sounds in twenty-first century art to reflect on the attachments we pursue to sustain our lives and the walls we need to tear down to secure possible futures. The book’s nine chapters approach The Visitors from ever-different conceptual angles while bringing it into dialogue with the work of other artists and musicians such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Guillermo Galindo, Mischa Kuball, Philipp Lachenmann, Alvien Lucier, Teresa Margolles, Carsten Nicolai, Camille Norment, Susan Philipsz, David Rothenberg, Juliana Snapper, and Tanya Tagaq. With this book, Koepnick situates resonance as a vital concept of contemporary art criticism and sound studies. His analysis encourages us not only to expand our understanding of the role of sound in art, of sound art, but to attune our critical encounter with art to art’s own resonant thinking.

This comparative and interdisciplinary study focuses on a cluster of epoch-making themes that emerged in the late sixteenth century. Michelangelo and Giordano Bruno are taken as the founding fathers of the Baroque, and we see that beyond the Alps their lessons were echoed in Montaigne, Cervantes, and the Counter-Reformation culture of the Mediterranean basin. Maiorino shows that the common denominator that links the origins of the Baroque to its maturity is the concept of form as "process," which is then articulated into chapters on the formative unity of the arts, art forms at the threshold, and the development from humanist perfection to Baroque perfectibility. Such an evolution in literature and the arts is situated in relation to the age of explorations (Columbus), scientific inventions (the telescope), and the fundamental shift from the enclosed Ptolemic system to the open universe of the Copernican revolution.

At the Baroque point of origin, the inner vitality of Michelangelo's emphasis on creation as "process" rather than completed act taught a crucial lesson to Baroque artists. Their response to the infinite and open universe of the "New Science" was one that took part to be as dynamic and metamorphic as life itself. It is in the context of "open" forms within an "open" universe that this study moves from Michelangelo to Bruno. His poetics of immeasurable abundance set "process" at the very core of the Baroque art, thought, and science.

Applied to the forms of art, growth and metamorphosis are linked to what Maiorino calls (borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin) the Baroque chronotope of formation, which refers to forms responding to the dynamics of space-time interactions. Such interactions were exhaustive and even tested the boundaries between reality and fiction, creation and denial, conformity and criticism from picaresque Spain to middle-class Holland. And it is the painting of a Dutch artist--Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer-- that is taken as a symbol of the Baroque reconciliation of humanist learning with human or humane understanding. Such a humanizing attitude also marked the final transformation of humanist ideals of perfection into the Baroque experience of human perfectibility.

This book will be of importance to all scholars concerned with the history of ideas, cultural history, and the Baroque in literature and art.

Includes 100 blank pages. Hardbound with gray cloth veneer.

Beginning in the late 1970s, a number of visual artists in downtown New York City returned to an exploration of the cinematic across mediums. Vera Dika considers their work within a greater cultural context and probes for a deeper understanding of the practice.