THE MINIMALIST DISPOSITION THAT CONSTRUCTS THE SURFACE THROUGH DECENTERED AND SIMULTANEOUS REPETITIONS OF MASS, OBJECT, AND IMAGE, THROUGH SEQUENTIAL ORDER AESTHETICS, THROUGH GRID OR MODULAR FORM, IS VALUED HERE FOR THE PURPOSE OF GENERATING AN INTELLECTUAL AND RATIONAL LOGIC OR RATIONALE. IN CERTAIN ARTISTS, THIS CONDITION, THE EFFORT TO DEVELOP AN IDEA OF ORDER THAT TRANSFORMS THROUGH FORMAL REPETITION INTO A COMPOSITION, APPEARS TO HAVE GRADUALLY BECOME AN INTERNAL NECESSITY, PUSHING AGAINST THE IMPLICATIONS OF MINIMALISM WITHIN A PROCESS OF PERSONAL STYLISTIC FORMATION.

the need for a psychic and cultural implication

It is precisely at this juncture that Sol LeWitt distinguishes himself: arriving at imagistic totality through geometric formal repetition and density, yet diversifying this approach through painterly color fields extended onto wall surfaces. LeWitt layers the question of rhythm and repetition, through alternative dimensioning experiments that generate pattern, with a far more psychic and cultural implication, preferring to produce site-specific, varied, and proliferating solutions through the direct relationships he establishes within space. The structural implication’s priority, grounded in the rejection of narrative connections or possibilities, and the object-form’s state of isolation at the threshold of the abstract and the simple, leaves nothing but a reference to its own solitude.

The Minimalist disposition that constructs the surface through decentered and simultaneous repetitions of mass, object, and image, through sequential order aesthetics, through grid or modular form, is valued here for the purpose of generating an intellectual and rational logic or rationale. In certain artists, this condition, the effort to develop an idea of order that transforms through formal repetition into a composition, appears to have gradually become an internal necessity, pushing against the implications of Minimalism within a process of personal stylistic formation. Sol LeWitt’s increasingly color-enriched use of form and motif serves as an effective illustration of this reality. (3) The artist continued in subsequent years on a journey in search of a new aesthetic sensibility, one taking the shape of modular form-pattern configurations, accompanied by the rhythmic and compelling visual effects produced by repetition-based order.

Minimalist artists, in production practices that move between sculpture and installation, doubtless employ the object in accordance with a principle of order, harmony, or tension, much as Donald Judd’s practice exemplifies. (4) That is to say, a great many works are concerned with the meaning, simplicity, and directness of an existing order. The similarity, companionship, and multiplicity of forms is also of primary importance in this context. To return to the beginning: the general harmony achieved through repetition functions as a shared goal. This condition, related to the overall visual order, may be explained in the cases of Judd and Morris through the relationship that similar and sequential forms belonging to an interior experiential register establish with the exterior within this field of experience. Purely in this respect, the sculptural arrangements of Judd and Morris contain the psychological intimacy of a meaning confined within the massive presence of forms. What is remarkable is that within this environment, which appears sufficiently unemotional and sterile, this psychological weight nonetheless confronts us as a possibility or intensity of minimal coherence and meaning. Yet the very idea of psychological intimacy, fragmented by the multiplicity of the object and drained of its force by repetition, would be expected to reject this manner of being understood through experience. In any case, the geometric form and repetition tendency of Judd and Morris, or of Serra and LeWitt, as a practice of creating a static and synthetic internal order, already distances sculpture thoroughly from Minimalism at this point.