AL5 — Mining Minimalism
Eco-criticism meets a revisionist history of minimalism
WORDS BY NICOLAS HOLT
ILLUSTRATION BY XIAOTIAN WANG
During the 1960s, the glossy surfaces and industrial fabrication of minimalist painting and sculpture heralded a radical new approach to the usage of materials in art. What’s been left unsaid in the history of minimalism – and is an increasingly pressing concern today — are the extractive processes that produced many of minimalism’s iconic materials, such as aluminum and the crude oil byproduct, Plexiglas. There are two contemporaneous pieces that can help excavate the ways the process of extraction has materially informed minimalist art, and point towards an ecocritical revision of its history.
The first is Frank Stella’s Avicenna, first exhibited in 1960 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. Technically a dodecagon (a twelve-sided shape), this painting had one notch in each of its four corners. The apexes of those notches point diagonally to a cavity in the center of the canvas itself, exposing the wall upon which it is hung, thus creating a continuity with its exhibition space. Compositionally, the painting is nothing but stripes, but those stripes follow unflinchingly the painting’s straight lines and angles, such that the negative spaces created by the notches echo towards the central cavity. Avicenna was painted with aluminum-based paint, something Stella believed, because of its metallic shine, made the painting appear “less physically present in a way.” Stella’s paintings, with their hard edges, industrial materials, and novel relation to the gallery environment, anticipated much minimalist art to come.
The second is Mary Miss’s Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys of 1977/1978, exhibited on the grounds of the Nassau County Museum of Art. Three wooden towers and two semi-circular mounds surrounded the work’s most famous element: a subterranean courtyard, revealed only by a square cavity carved into the earth and the tip of a ladder, which grants access to it. It’s not surprising, then, that this was termed “Earth art,” a broad category of artistic production situated within and responsive not to galleries or museums, but the lands outside them. While there is also continuity between artwork and exhibition space here, it is articulated in more subtle and surprising ways. Miss writes that as a viewer makes their way through the work, they become “aware that the ground s/he has just walked across and presumed to be solid is undermined.”
While these two artworks no doubt strike the viewer as profoundly different, they similarly feature a central cavity exposing a space beyond. And whereas Miss’s work can be understood in part as that cavity, in the literal earth, Stella’s painting required a cavity in the earth to come into being. By this I mean, the aluminum of the paint that makes Avicenna appear “less physically present” is a product of the destructively physical process of resource extraction─in fact, it is the second-most mined metal on the planet. Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys reveals the undermining of solid ground, and Avicenna – perhaps at a distance – emerges from it.
Stella wasn’t the only minimalist artist whose media originated in extraction. Many of Tony Smith, Charlotte Posenenske, and Judy Chicago’s famous early sculptures were created from steel, which requires the extraction of iron, the most mined metal from our Earth’s surface. Richard Serra was a fan of lead, and Donald Judd, constructed many of his glossy surfaces from Plexiglas. This translucent plastic, as with all other plastics, is an industrial by-product of crude oil, a substance effectively emblematic of resource extraction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Now, to be clear, a concern for resource extraction in art history is a relatively recent phenomenon, one provoked by the consequences of our current energy economies and environmental conditions. Minimalist artists of the 1960s weren’t exactly concerned with resource extraction as we think of it today, even if they were deeply concerned with the specificity of their materials. What happens when we similarly attend to the specificity of minimalism’s materials in light of today’s emerging extractivist critiques?
A common account of minimalist sculpture is that by reducing visual complexity, turning towards industrial materials, and eliminating the trace of the individual artist, the artworks forced attention onto their surroundings in novel ways and, by consequence, forced attention onto the experience of the object in its specific context. This focus on space and experience proved to be a major inspiration for much art of the 1960s, and Earth art is usually framed as harnessing that focus towards ecological ends because of how it situates itself in direct relation to the planet’s terrain and materials.
But minimalist sculpture, if we keep in mind the extractive origin of its iconic media, never left the Earth behind─it simply excavated, undermined and transformed it. How this excavation might transform the history of minimalism, and its place in the longue durée of contemporary art, especially from the vantage of an ecologically-fraught present, remains to be seen. Perhaps this can serve as a critical reminder: amongst the hard edges, geometric forms, and exhibition space of minimalist artwork, echoes of a fragile world remain. These are echoes to which we must carefully listen, for they remind us of the Earth’s constant and material presence, even where it might be least expected.