Smoke and mirrors

MINIMALISTS and post-minimalists are the subject of an exhibition at the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Less is More

IT is a half-century since Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, unless you subscribe to some alternative hypothesis about what happened on August 5, 1962. Next year will be the semi-centenary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, and all too soon it will be five decades since the momentous events in the northern spring of 1968, in Paris and in Prague, which in their different ways represented the beginning of the end for the communist model - the end of an intellectual fantasy of revolution in France and of the reality of dictatorship in Czechoslovakia.

Each new generation is disconcerted to find their vivid present settling into the sediment of history. Incorrigibly, we keep believing it will be different this time; how can erstwhile avant-gardists turn into rich old men and women, tenured academics, trustees of art galleries - or indeed forgotten have-beens?

It is already a long time since lecturers could observe to students that they were too young to remember May 1968; now some of their parents are too young. And all the provocative gestures of late modernism in the 1960s and incipient postmodernism in the 70s are now as distant from us as the Edwardian period was for the post-World War II generation.

At the same time, those decades are still too close to us to see them with adequate clarity and detachment. And the art of the post-war decades was packaged in an unprecedented volume of pseudo-theoretical promotional writing. Tom Wolfe was the first to lampoon the abuse of criticism for the purposes of marketing, in The Painted Word (1975), but things have got much worse since, fuelled, like everything else, by the amount of money that is at stake. All this verbiage, unfortunately popular with academics who earn their living by recycling it, eventually will have to be unwrapped so that the work itself can be seen in relation to the history of art, the realities of its time and the ultimate context of human relevance.

The years immediately after World War II were those of the sudden and unexpected American ascendancy in art. It's hard today for many people to realise that American art was hardly more significant on the international scene than Australian until the war. Paris and London, as it has often been noted, were shocked to find themselves elbowed aside by New York as the new capital of world art. The movement that arose there turned out to be the last spectacular phase of modernism. Abstract expressionism was more extreme than any previous style in its attempts to wipe the slate clean, erase memory and start again.

Absolute originality, spontaneity, immediacy and authenticity were what Jackson Pollock's style of painting stood for. That ideal tended to be presented by the supporters of the movement as a kind of millennial consummation of the destiny of the art of painting, whereas it was at least in part, as was recognised by the more clear-sighted, a retreat from the rising tide of kitsch that dominated commercial culture.

But abstract expressionism could not quite live up to these high ideals. All too often, as we can see in the current retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Canberra, the work was as vacuous as it was pretentious; content-free paintings that became the perfect market commodity.

The response of pop, of course, was to embrace the world of kitsch and commercialism with both hands - it was a large part of Andy Warhol's peculiar genius that, making no claims to high-mindedness at all, and in fact strenuously denying any higher objectives, he never had to apologise for loving the gaudy and the trashy. Days after Monroe died he went out and bought a studio photograph of her, enlarged it and screenprinted it on canvas. The work became the centrepiece of his first one-man show in New York in later 1962 and established his reputation.

The minimalists, the subject of an exhibition at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, accompanied by a valuable catalogue, took an entirely different approach. While turning away from action painting and the cult of the artist as heroic creator, they continued to avoid kitsch and to pursue the modernist aims of immediacy and authenticity. Their work became more austere by sacrificing the personal and the expressive and concentrating on making the object itself in the simplest possible form.

One can see a certain natural progression from hard-edge abstraction to minimalism, although as Sue Cramer, editor of the exhibition catalogue, points out, this continuity is actually more characteristic of the Australian followers of the style than of its New York originators, who tended to work in sculpture. But many things remain imperfectly clear about the history of this movement - as Cramer acknowledges, most of the artists we now think of as minimalists didn't care for the reductivist implications of the term.

There are also important differences between the flat abstraction represented in Australia by The Field exhibition in 1968 and the flat paintings of the minimalist style. A large black picture by Peter Booth, for example, represents the earlier style and it is determinedly self-contained. The viewer sinks into its mute darkness in the same way that the light that strikes the black surface is absorbed and none of the spectrum visible to the human eye as colour is reflected.

In Blue Reflex (1966-67) by Ian Burn, on the other hand, the surface of the painting is a completely flat dark blue. The paint, which is multiple layers of automobile enamel on plywood, is mechanically applied without brushstrokes or any visible mark of having been created by a human hand. But although the artist as subject has disappeared entirely behind the work, the pictorial surface, because it is so dark and glossy, has become a mirror reflecting the viewer. In a sense we can't really see the painting as an object because it insists on echoing back our own world.

Another thing that is striking about Blue Reflex is that it would not achieve this effect if it were not made with the greatest care and attention to execution. One of the questions the minimalists asked themselves was how little was indispensable to make a work of art. In practice the answer could vary: Joseph Beuys, for example, could make works with a very low standard of craft execution because he was relying on the quasi-magical resonance of his characteristic motifs and materials. The American minimalists, however, eschewing all such natural associations, were left with the necessity of technical execution.

The best example in the exhibition is Donald Judd's Untitled (1969-71), which is also the finest and most complex work in the show. This sculpture consists of a very large box open at both ends, made of bare aluminium on the outside and painted on the inside, once again, in a very dark high-gloss automobile surface.

One sees at once that for this piece to achieve its ends, its production must be flawless - with the inhuman flawlessness, in fact, that can come only from mechanical processes.

The paint on the inside is so dark that a casual visitor might imagine it was black. The briefest moment of attention, however, reveals that it is really a very deep, inky blue, though this is visible only on the floor of the box, where it is struck by the ambient light of the gallery. But once you have noticed this, you begin to see more and more.

First you find that because of the size of the box, its position on the floor, and the distance from which you naturally find yourself viewing it, you cannot at first see through to the other side. Instead you look into what appears an infinite dark corridor, ending in an oblong of light on the floor reflecting the aperture at the other end. Depending on how you move from side to side, the oblong of light moves around in the oblong of darkness at the viewer's end, so dark and featureless that you can almost imagine you are looking at an animated version of a hard-edge abstract painting. But the work is not entirely abstract after all, since the oblong of light reflects the ceiling, with its beams and lamps.

If you then step back to the point where you can see through the tunnel to the gallery floor at the other end, the picture becomes only more complex, with three levels of reality implicated - the dark interior, the reflection of the ceiling and now the literal floor beyond. But in fact there is something much more intriguing: because the floor of the box at the far end also reflects its own sides and ceiling, and because the mirror reverses the effect of perspective, the floor of the box now appears to slope downwards, and the interior, even when we can see the way out on the other side, seems to draw us into an abyss of darkness.

This is a striking example of the way that such art can engage the viewer - not, as most pictures do, by appealing to our responses to human experience or the natural world but simply by playing on our psycho-physiological reactions to space, light and materiality. Robert Morris's Untitled (1970), although ostensibly entirely different, addresses the viewer in a similar way.

It is one of a series of works made from heavy-duty industrial felt, carefully (and of course mechanically) cut in five horizontal lines with a short vertical slit at each end, so that what was originally a single rectangle of fabric becomes a series of massively heavy ribbon shapes, hanging in long loops, the lowest resting on the ground, an immediate and physical metaphor of entropy.

These two works, incidentally, roughly sum up the subtle difference between minimalist, which tends to be geometric and precise, and post-minimalist, which employs more organic materials and less formal structures. The trouble with either variety of the style, of course, is that if it not done extremely well it can be terribly bland, and such is the fate of many of the local artists who try to follow in a relatively perilous path. An exception is Robert Hunter, whose minimalist paintings in shades of white reveal subtle variations in hue, tone and temperature to the patient viewer.

A sort of coda to the exhibition deals with the transition from minimalism to conceptualism. We meet Ian Burn again, now with a mirror piece pondering philosophical conundrums of identity and causality, as well as Dale Hickey's 100 White Walls, a grimly ascetic work from a painter. But conceptualism too is a form of late modernism rather than of postmodernism, concerned as it still is to determine some trace, however exiguous, of certainty and authenticity in a world of illusion.

Less is More: Minimalism and Post-Minimalism in Australia
Heide Museum of Modern Art
Bulleen, Victoria
Until November 4