Only yesterday, it seems, one could safely consider Minimalism to be art. Once the initial shock and irritation had passed, the insolent muteness of Donald Judd’s boxes, Frank Stella’s pinstripe paintings, and similar works of the Sixties registered as evidence of a dogged kind of artistic integrity. No rhetoric, no sensuousness, no recourse to “exhausted” conventions such as compositional hierarchies—just the facts. And the facts were invariably aesthetic in nature. Now, however, we learn that we’ve been wrong all along. Minimalism wasn’t mute; we were just deaf to its voice, a voice sharply political in character and raised in criticism of bourgeois society, the art gallery, and the museum.
Such at least was the reading we were asked to accept at a symposium held at the School of Visual Arts last February 26 entitled “The Crux of Minimalism: Style or Politics?” Although one might wonder, Why Minimalism now?, the question didn’t seem to bother the many people who showed up for the event. The cramped, dark auditorium was filled to overflowing, and not just with students. In the audience were art-world personages ranging from dealers Jay Gorney of the East Village and Sidney Janis fils to the art historian Irving Sandler, who is currently preparing a study of Sixties art as part of his history of the New York School.
Still, for some of us the question persisted: Why the sudden interest in this movement? Had something long overlooked finally been discovered? Well, not exactly. The catalyst
