Remarks on Minimalism (expanded)

Minimalism is like a germ, a seed:  compact, yet containing the whole fruit in posse.

Compare the art of the miniature:  molto   in petto.

It was in the art of the miniature … that the Elizabethans achieved perfection in the plastic arts.  When there was so much over-elaboration, and furniture and dress  were alike  stiff with richness, and extravagantly swollen in line -- one sees the same inflation in the bulbous legs of tables  as in the farthingales of the women --it is well to note tht the Elizabethans could achieve elegance and simplicity of proportion  as in so much of their silver.  In particular their favourite design of the steeple cup  is a model of precision and grace.

-- A. L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth (1950)

Minimalism is spare, but not impoverished.

Gordon Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (1932), observes that the ballad is characterized by “telling a story in terms of its crucial or concluding incident, to the neglect of the chain of events that precedes it, and permitting the action to interpret itself  with the minimum of comment and descriptive setting.”   E.K. Chambers similarly speaks of “a stern economy in the reduction of the unessential to a formula”.

And with this formal spareness goes an emotional restraint:

Even ballads with a grim background of deadly feud… which must have been made and sung by folk who were intensely partisan, are singularly restrained.

            -- Gordon Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition

It all hangs together.  (Tout se tient.)

Minimalist Hotel:  the Presidential Suite

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Minimalism is an established term of arts criticism, which I am accordingly not obliged to define, being responsible only for (following Chomsky in) attempting to apply the term (perhaps without good warrant) to new areas, principally scientific thought.   But the term is problematic even in its original sphere.

Thus, considered Warhol’s 1963 milestone Sleep.   The film lasts over five hours, and simply observes, with a motionless camera, a man sleeping, naked, in an empty room.  (At least it purports to;  the actual film was artsied up in various ways.  My remarks apply to an ideal doppelgänger film, shot strictly in real time.)   No purer tribute to the Aristotelian unities can be imagined.  Surely this is a pinnacle of minimalism -- not necessarily an interesting pinnacle, but formally speaking, a pinnacle nonetheless.

And yet -- au contraire, Pierre !   Art consists largely in leaving things out, and minimalism in leaving a whole lot out.  Only, this film leaves nothing out, of the admittedly modest turf it covers.  Here, the map is exactly the territory.

I was reminded of Warhol’s classic jest, by the success of the current film (in minimal-limited distro) Clock.  It’s sort of like the TV show 24, in that it purports to show things happening at the hour they are ‘actually’ happening, for a full twenty-four hours.   Neither is actually an analogue of (the ideal) movie Sleep, since neither actually follows anything, real or fictional, over such a time period.  24 collapses what could only happen over several busy days or weeks (with an elaborate tangle of semi-independent story-lines -- Aristotle would puke) into a compressed imaginary schedule, and Clock stitches together snippets of various films showing various things and, oh look, a clock showing “5:10”.  24 is standard thriller fare; Clock is utterly meta.

After all, it’s not surprising that it’s hard to apply a modern term like minimalist clearly and consistently, to a body of work  much of which is devoted to baffling our expectations and abolishing the boundaries between categories.

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[update 30 July 2011]

From the world of political minimalism -- this just in !

Cracking down on increasingly subtle silent protests, Belarussian authorities prohibit standing together and doing nothing.