Rediscovering Minimalists Close to your Home

KIASMA, (17.10. 2008 -- 18.1. 2009) FULL HOUSE -- THE KOURI COLLECTION AND AMERICAN MINIMALIST ADVENTURES

Art excludes unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. 

Carl Andre

"Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as ABC Art emerged in New York in the 1960s. It is regarded as a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism as well as the discourse, institutions and ideologies that supported it." So much about history at its dullest, as extracted from Wickipedia. A text in the brochure introducing us to the current exhibition in Kiasma focusing on American minimalism from Kouri collection and on international legacy of minimalism mainly from Solomon S. Guggenheim Museum (up to such contemporaries as Francis Alys who is a Belgian working in Mexico City and Olafur Eliasson, a Dane based mostly in Berlin --both among my personal favorites list of artists) uses paradoxical, but quite a witty title - "The Viewer is King". Of course, from one hand, it refers to an age old theoretical debate between the Greenbergian art critic Michael Fried ("Art and Objecthood", Artforum, 1967) and young artists who had emerged primarily in the New York scene since the middle of 60ies -- clearly expressed as a credo in a series of 4 essays by Robert Morris, ("Notes on Sculpture 1-3", Artforum, 1967 & "Notes on Sculpture4; Beyond Objects", 1969) back then an emerging artist and theorist. Fried, although critical of minimalism as a tendency and accusative towards its accolytes, got something really right, or as we may say, hit the vein, by claiming that Minimalist work was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He accused Morris in ending up in something spectacular, something theatrical, the harshest possible statement according to greenbergian logics, but something which after the change of paradigm, in Postmodern art, became a virtue and later in Postminimalism already something almost self-evident. The idea actually paradigmatically changed the whole process of engaging with art -- the viewer who earlier was supposed to focus onto the trancencent metaphysics of creation emanating from a single piece (a window to another world, an interface with authors soul) was now left walking around the (mostly industrially produced) art objects to hermeneutically experience the spacial relations, figure about the message in the seriality of repetitive details filling the room and ponder the logics of materials used. The installation art was born from there after a wee bit of flirting with much older surrealist logics of finding beauty in random meetings of everyday objects much like the famous "meeting of an umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table". From one hand it might be true -- a white cube full of coherent and inter-dependant works of one author composed into a compositional whole has taken over a single picture in a frame, as a minimal unit of communication most people familiar with contemporary art would expect when entering a contemporary art hall. It might not yet work here in Estonia, not at all times, not among the widest public, but it is a modus operandi of any ambitious exhibition nowdays, a principle of organizing its displays for any a self-conscious international contemporary art venue. But enough of the self evident, enough of playing around with the hold hat -- let's move to what we can now see in the fourth and fifth floor of Kiasma, to what makes this American show close to home so special for a potential Estonian viewer. 

Earlier in my life I have had luck seeing an enormous amount of museum displays on minimalism -- no wonder, as approving or at least being aware of some of the logics of minimalism comes as a key to understanding contemporary art. The scant direct experience of minimalism at its best -- I am even not referring to the almost unexistent knowledge about the  the theory of minimalism among art students or even professionals --  has led quite a lot of potential public of contemporary art in Estonia behind the doors of contemporary art perception. But on the other hand -- we do have early Arvo Pärt who extensively used endless minimalist modulations to bring it to the circles close to contemporary music and many international stars of Minimalism in music, like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk have performed live in Tallinn, or at least as is the case with Györgi Ligeti and Gavin Bryars their pieces have been also quite popular in the context of academic circles of new music in Estonia, imported by Olari Elts, the director at Nyyd Ensamble. And, a fact much more relevant in this context, we must not forget that the whole series of the most successful works by early Jaan Toomik namely "Windows", 1993, "Mirrors", 1993, "A Way to Sao Paolo", 1994, "Dancing Home", 1995, and "Truck", 1997, to name but a few, although mostly approached on the local scene through a rather vague term "Poetry of Nature" coined by Anders Härm for his thorough article on Estonian video art in "Nosy Nineties", 2000 represents one of the most intriguing dialogue with the legacy of minimalism on the East European art scene, the logics of Minimalism has not been widely approved or pondered upon among the Estonian artists. And what is even more important -- the further we move from mid 90ies the more is felt that the most important morale of Minimalism, that is avoiding personal and the cult of creative frenzy and the ideology of deprived genius, has been forgotten or replaced by a vague combination of confessional and harshly expressive. I mean minimalists did loose their battle to Neue Wilde in the end of 1980ies, but that is history, rather a closed chapter if we seek advise from international trends, progressively more and more interested in minimalist legacy since the early 1990-ies Stock Exchange crash and crises in Art Market. Once again every thing potentially ephemeral was in. And there is more to that than just sinusoids of fashion. 

To tell you the truth, most of the museum exhibitions on minimalism (particularly if they are part of permanent collection display) are mostly repetitive, without focusand -- which is even worse -- they mostly seem sort of "dead". That particularly applies to the large American museums I have visited -- each of them having enough money to purchase a set of works representing Minimalism as a chapter in an Art History book. And then, traveling from one grand museum to another, be them in America or in Europe, who all are displaying a set of same American authors having sold rather similar works to different institutions and by that made a discount and compromised one of the most fertile ideas of the Postminimalism, namely that of site specifity, might be an experience making you insensitive towards the all so important little nuances, programmed into good minimalist pieces. In this perspective I have but the praises to the Kiasma team for exhibiting a show focusing on live connections between Minimalist art and its aftermaths. The show is not only delicately installed, with enougth time-space for experiencing each of the works, but it also brings out many of the further links connecting the development of ideas starting from this textbook 60ies trend in NYC art scene to be experienced live, here and now, as the credo of this "movement" dictates. So it is not only Pentti Kouri collection donated to Kiasma -- and I have but to wonder how such a periferal country as Finland used to be two decades ago hosted a collector with such ambitions as to buy such early works as Frank Stella's "Sidney Guberman", 1964, Robert Morris'es "Untitled. Fiberglass Frame", 1968, James Turrell's "Shanta Pink", 1968, Bruce Nauman's "Green Light Corridor", 1970 and such an important work as Walter de Marias "Large Rod Series; 1990 or a even a huge installation by Jannis Kounellis "Untitled", 1988, which following a textbook approach would rather be labeled as Arte Povera but which serves well in an exhibition enlightening further mutations of this American infection, Minimalism. Most of the later works have been borrowed for the show from the most authoritative source, Guggenheim museum and even include some pieces and authors of which I had no glue about. Some of the most intriguing of the "fresh cream" were exactly the lesser known ones. John Pilson's "A la claire fontaine", 2000, an eight channel video installation with sound, working with standardized cubic nature of the architecture of New York skyskrapers, introducing a kind of "noise factor" into these interiors -- a young girl adventuring at those sterile spaces and occasionally taking control of the office space through spontaneous creative outbursts -- starting to sing on one screen while scribbling with her finger  on the window on another screen. It was a perfectly filmed set, with well orchestrated tempos of activities/inactivities on different screens, and to my great surprise, it only lasted 2 minutes 35 seconds, the whole loop. I guess I should also mention Ricci Albenda's "Portal to Another Dimension (Deborah) / Positive, 2001 and Koo Jeong-A's Oslo, 1998 both representing rather a different aspect of what has become of "sculptural" in contemporary art. The wall mounted works of Albenda, fiberglass forms in itsself, tend to take over the whole exhibition room as they melt into exhibition architecture quite seamlessly -- you have but to wonder if he has bought the whole wall along with him from America. The sculptures themselves depict intense, but abstract forms, indefinably somewhere between organic, modular and biological -- but they, as was marked in the exhibition brochure "could also refer to a portal into the viewers mind". In dialogue with the several older wall mounted works at the full house exhibition (Walter De Maria, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Wolfgang Leib, Richard Long) Korean Koo Jeong-A, who currently resides in Paris continues the scattered aesthetics of post minimalism, using crushed Aspirin tablets to create a strange snowy mountainous landscape. As often in his work, the subject may be monumental, but it si executed on a minuscule scale. 

As to return to the catch-phrases of the exhibition "Full House" and "The Viewer is the King" we cannot help commenting that although they both suit well to Minimalist rhetoric they have a certain cling to them smelling of the marketing departments heavy involvement -- they seem to imply a huge popular success, which probably is hard to get with such a reservedly well done exhibition which on the level of works is intrinsically politically loaded, but has only a few works of direct social commentary and none to point creating scandalous curiosity, a teaser for the media. I can only hail my respect to the Kiasma team for doing such a "hard" but really educational show on our scant times and wonder about our own cultural media having being successful  in ignoring the show. Not a mention. How Minimalist!