Minimalism: Space. Light. Object. the first exhibition on the art form in Southeast Asia, is an eye-opening encounter with the beginnings and progress of art that moves beyond convention.
Held in Singapore and organised by National Gallery Singapore in collaboration with ArtScience Museum, Singapore, the exhibition features seminal artworks in the Minimalism movement from the 1950s to the present day. Visitors to the exhibition can view over 100 major works by 70 artists, including Donald Judd, Mark Rothko, Mona Hatoum, Anish Kapoor, Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson and Haegue Yang.
Instead of viewing a framed artwork on a wall passively, at a distance, Minimalism shifted the focus to the physical encounter with the artwork, and the space it occupies. As Frank Stella famously said, "What you see is what you see". The phrase is now inextricably linked with Minimalism, which as the name implies, is about stripping everything away until only the bare essentials are left.
Industrial materials, natural materials and repetitive shapes are some of the hallmarks of Minimalism. Materials evolved in the post-Minimalist period towards the use of soft and more fluid materials. Gravity and chance could play a part in the work.
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| A work in black by Rothko. |
The theme is black to begin with. Some of the works nearest the entrance at the Singtel Special Exhibition Gallery look to be almost completely black - and by different artists. Mark Rothko's No. 5 is a rectangle of black with a black frame; Ad Reinhardt's black artwork includes other colours; while Barnett Newman has his signature 'zip', down his Queen of the Night 1.
Patterns are next. Stella has two works on black, with equidistant lines spaced the width of a house painter's brush; while Yayoi Kusuma began with a black canvas and painstakingly added scarlet paint to create what looks like tiny black triangles on a scarlet ground (No. H. Red, part of the Infinity Nets series). Intriguing works on display at the National Gallery include:
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| Untitled, by Morris. |
Robert Morris'
Untitled. A collection of mirrored cubes constantly interact with the gallery space and visitors.
Mona Hatoum's
Impenetrable. What looks like a cube made up of fine black threads hanging from the ceiling resolves into lines of dangerous barbed wire and a more chilling message. Hatoum often explores themes of conflict and violence. Here she plays on Jesus Soto's
Penetrable cube works, which visitors can walk through, and conveys how violence can be inherent in everyday life.
Minimalist artists also used light in their installations.
Neon Light Installations by Peter Kennedy is likened by the artist to being in the middle of a rainbow. The brilliant colours stand out against a dark blue background and reflect on the floor, while some may also hear a faint hum from the neon lamps.
Kapoor, forever known as the artist linked to the pigment colloquially known as 'the blackest black', has a geometric bowl shaped object on display.
Void is clearly dark blue on the convex outside, but when viewed full on it is so black it is hard to tell if it is a flat surface, or a concave one. It is all about emptiness and infinity.
Olafur Eliasson's
Room for One Colour is completely empty, except for orange-toned lights that challenge our idea of visual perception. His message is not to accept things just the way they are. Everyone is turned one-dimensional and monochrome, like walking newspaper cutouts. The eye turns everything bluish after leaving the room.
John McCracken's
Red Plank is ground-breaking for being placed on the floor, instead of on a pedestal or plinth. The glossy red plank has influences from shiny cars and surfboards in California in the mid-sixties. The surface comes from coating plywood with fibreglass, then layering polyester mixed with resin and pigment.
Rasheed Araeen created wall-mounted latticed forms that were influenced by industrial architecture and the geometry found in Islamic art.
(3R+2B)SW and
Basant are both acrylic on wood, created in the early seventies.
Singapore-born artist Kim Lim's ladder-like
Intervals I plus II, has repetition as a key motif. The work can be displayed in different configurations, creating different light, shadow and textural patterns.
Kite Traps made of rubber strips, by Filipino artist Roberto Chabet.
The work is a homage to Eva Hesse and made of rubber strips tied to a wooden frame.
A sculpture made of white thread: Kazuko Miyamoto's
Male I. This looks solid at the top where the threads are denser, and seems to fade into invisibility at the bottom. The work links wall and floor, and interacts with a shifting play of shadows and patterns as the viewer walks around it.
The Monoha
(ăăźæŽŸ) movement in Japan was embraced by Minimalists as advocating the same principles as Minimalism. Monoha artists favour raw natural or industrial materials in their work.
There is a box made out of paper with a granite rock placed within, as well as boxes of concrete and wood, filled with concrete and wood chips respectively. The boxes are by Jiro Takamatsu, and titled
Oneness of Concrete, as well as
Oneness of Wood.
Pushing the boundaries further, Bruce Nauman is shown in a grainy video doing performance art, a revolutionary idea at the time. In
Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square Nauman hitches up his hips as he walks around a square, showing how the moving human body can be used as art. The video is at the end of the corridor housing
Neon Light Installations, providing a monochrome contrast to the colourful neon.
The ultimate in Minimalism must be the digital version of eight minutes of unexposed 16mm film, playing in a loop - all the viewer sees is the occasional dust mote and scratches on the film. The director of
Zen for Film, Nam June Paik, is a friend of John Cage, whose well-known
4′33″ is the film where the performer(s) do not play
their instrument(s) for four minutes and 33 seconds. The only sound heard is that in the room and from the audience. A major Zen concept is about emptying one's mind to focus better.
Everyday things are transformed on the Minimalist journey. The space under a chair is immortalised in resin. Three rectangles of thin porcelain are hung on a wall, curving slightly at the bottom, looking for all the world like three paintings on a wall, reduced to a tabula rasa made out of paper. The work by Liu Jianhua is indeed called
Blank Paper, a canvas where viewers can project their own meaning.
A glossy white slab on the floor is not what it seems, either. Visitors might expect to see porcelain or perhaps polished stone, but it is in fact a slab of white marble, on which a thin layer of milk is poured so that it is just covered with the liquid. Titled Milkstone, this work by Wolfgang Laib treated the surface of the marble so that it would hold the milk better. The work represents tension between elements. The milk is perishable and must be replaced daily, while the marble is solid and permanent.
Ai Weiwei has two works on show: a ton of pu er tea, compressed into a cube, and an area about ankle-deep in one-of-a-kind sunflower seeds, each one created by hand.
The porcelain Sunflower Seeds challenge the idea that 'made in China' means cheap mass production when each seed is individually hand-crafted. The number of seeds may refer to the huge Chinese population. The sunflower, which turns to the sun, was also used as an image during the Cultural Revolution to represent the people looking towards to their leadership.
Ton of Tea, on the other hand, builds on Minimalist cubic sculptures by Morris and Richard Serra that Ai would have seen when he lived in the US. The size of the work alludes to the large scale of Chinese tea trade, while the shape is very much about the traditional way of transporting tea in China - by compressing it into large blocks.
Then there is a lamp, in a dark corner, just going on and off continuously. It is just you and the work, and maybe a sense of impending doom.
Details:
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Minimalism: Space. Light. Object.
Till 14 April 2019
At dual venues: Concourse Galleries and Singtel Special Exhibition Galleries at the National Gallery and at the ArtScience Museum, which houses the larger installations
There are two audio tours available at the National Gallery:
Minimalism Highlights, and
The More You Look At It.
Book a ticket
Hashtag: #minimalismsg
*The guided tour was sponsored by Singtel.
