The year of living minimally: in response to several recent shows, the author rethinks Minimalism as the outcome of shifting formal imperatives, a global current, a forebear of postmodernism, a child of continental philosophy—in short, as anything but the monolithic movement its first exponents made it out to be

In March 1967, the cover of Arts Magazine posed the question: Would there be "A Minimal Future?" Thirty-five years later, we can give a definite answer: yes. Together with Pop art, Minimalism continues to provide the basic language of contemporary art. It has become the great patriarchal symbol against which artists and critics rebel, championing Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Realism or Neo-Mad Magazine, only to succumb to Minimalism's repetitious, all-embracing spell. But what is this art that retains such a hold on us? Three major exhibitions of 2004 undertook, directly or obliquely, to find out.

During the summer, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, "A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968" set canonical works by Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson into a broader American context. The curator, Ann Goldstein, included numerous paintings and sculptures by artists who utilized monochrome surfaces or simplified geometric forms but are not usually considered Minimalists, as well as some obscure early works by the better-known Minimalist artists. (1)

Goldstein's comparative approach was put to dramatic use right at the beginning of the exhibition. Entering the first room, the viewer encountered a grid of dark steel squares arranged on the floor, accompanied by a series of black canvases hung on the walls. The juxtaposition exemplified the majestic grimness of New York Minimalism, while signaling the personal links between the two artists, Carl Andre and Frank Stella: both men attended the prep school Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., in the early 1950s, and Andre wrote the catalogue statement for Stella's breakthrough exhibitions of 1959, at Oberlin College and the Museum of Modern Art. (2)

Walking into the second room of the exhibition, the viewer entered a different universe. Here, John McCracken's Yellow Pyramid and Blue Post and Lintel I were accompanied by Craig Kauffman's wall reliefs of curved, vacuum-formed Plexiglas, tinted with translucent pastel colors. It was the visual hedonism of Los Angeles "Fetish Finish"--the high-art version of the surfboards celebrated by the Beach Boys and the customized hot rods elegized in Tom Wolfe's 1963 article, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." (3)

A related exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s," opened up a different series of alternate universes. (Happily, the dates of the two L.A. shows overlapped. LACMA's exhibition is on tour, and can currently be seen at the Miami Art Museum.) At LACMA, curator Lynn Zelevansky placed Minimalism in a broad international context of movements employing a vocabulary of repetitive geometric forms. Drawing on examples from the United States, Latin America, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, England, Austria, Portugal, Eastern Europe and Japan, Zelevansky demonstrated the parallel and divergent evolution of numerous currents of abstract painting and sculpture during the four decades of the show's purview. A 1977 installation by the Polish artist Stanislaw Drozdz provided a metaphor for the exhibition as a whole. The letters of the Polish word "miedzy" (between) were painted in shifting sequences on the walls, floor and ceiling of a white room. Visitors were invited to doff their shoes and enter the room, so that they were physically between the linguistic elements of the room, which seemed potentially to spell out an infinite number of words. Zelevansky's jam-packed exhibition provided enough unfamiliar artworks (unfamiliar, at least, to most American art viewers) to keep scholars busy for some time. (4)

Earlier in the year, back in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum had presented "Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present," a history of the "reductive sensibility." The title, "Singular Forms," evoked that moment in the mid-1960s when everyone recognized that a distinctive new kind of art had emerged, but no one was sure what to call it. (Donald Judd suggested "specific objects," Robert Morris came up with "unitary forms," while the curator Kynaston McShine called his groundbreaking 1966 exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum "Primary Structures." In a 1965 article on this developing tendency, Barbara Rose called it "ABC art.") Roughly two-thirds of the Guggenheim's exhibition was devoted to the period 1958-75. (5)

Of the works from this period, more than half came from the Panza collection, from which the Guggenheim had acquired a significant body of work in 1990-92. The Panza acquisition was the subject of considerable debate at the time, in part because the Guggenheim financed it by selling early modern masterpieces by Kandinsky, Modigliani and Chagall, and in part because some of the sculptures in the Panza collection existed only as plans or instructions. (6) Although the Guggenheim has frequently included Panza works in other shows, this was the first major New York exhibition of Minimal sculpture from the collection. In that sense, it was a vindication for Guggenheim director Thomas Krens, who defended the acquisition in 1990 by saying, "I think the artists we've acquired in the Panza collection will be among the most important artists of the 20th century.... I believe that half of what we acquired at the very least are masterpieces." (7)