“Today the happening thing is just what is happening. We have reached the end of ‘isms’.” So Stephen Bayley lamented in his article entitled “Does Minimalism Matter?” commenting on the current exhibition John Pawson’s Plain Space at the Design Museum in London. He forecasted an obituary of sorts for minimalism, that unrivaled arch-snob of the art world; in fact, it was that minimalism has lost its throne that led Bayley to question its continued relevance. And yet, is that a fair characterization? Certainly, minimalism relaxes in the lounges of our highest social brows, but as I write this, I stare at the screen of a MacBook that is charging an iPod: two artifacts of a thoroughly populist impulse of unadornment. Bayley continued,
“Was minimalism the last absurd, exhausted spasm of neophilia, the cult of the new that so defined modern taste? Or is it still, and will it remain, the ultimate refinement of aesthetic sensibility: the place we go when we have been everywhere else?”
It’s a fair question, for John Pawson is responsible for both an austere Cistercian monastery in the Czech Republic and a Calvin Klein store in New York City.
Modernity is taxonomy; postmodernity is after that. That minimalism can inhabit both the realms of high art and the lowbrow pulses of style in the fashion industry perhaps testifies to its status as the last “ism.” Yet, it is peculiar that certain designers like Pawson so enthusiastically embrace the blurring of art and style. Stephen Bayley fears that this fusion will be the end of minimalism, but I wonder if it is not something within art and style that has birthed their recent interchangeability, but rather something in our postmodern conception of things. Until recent times– by which I mean, since the advent of mechanical means of reproduction such as film and photography– there always existed a sharp dichotomy between art and style based upon the opposite sources of the two: visual art represented the cosmos, while style represented an individual’s self-aware and introspective judgments and preferences. Thus, within visual art, there was a hierarchy and an order that was acknowledged and saluted with conventional paintings, sculptures, and buildings. There was a belief that there was objective meaning and form embedded into Creation that we, as the subjects thereof, passively received and represented in our art. Though we have always been mobile, there was a steadfast constancy that we could never escape this meaningful world.
On the contrary when considering minimalism, Plain Space has been described by Rowan Moore of The Guardian as “a sort of ultra-tourism, a consummation of the secret affinity between static architecture and travel, where both are about place and escape.” This could be why Pawson is still the only architect to have designed both a monastery and an airport. Perhaps it is minimalism that has the unique ability to bestow upon us both the titles of subject and object; we are its form and content. Could it be the ultimate in anthropocentric art? For whether we are contemplatively meandering through Plain Space or browsing the aisles of American Apparel in the spirit of the Helvetica typeface, we are conferring our humanity in all directions. This quality can only come about when the traditional hierarchy and cosmology of the universe has been lost, and the distinction between art and style ultimately collapses. There is then no reason to represent the physical world because there is no longer anything to represent, all that is left to serve as the objects of art are the subjective judgments of individuals.
There is something final and conclusive about minimalism that embodies the tension of our present age. Maybe it rests upon the notion that there really isn’t anything mysterious anymore about our surroundings after the endless dissection and analysis of modernity– that what is only and truly wondrous are the grand forms that we construct and impose onto our cosmos. And after all, what genre of art is better equipped to passively receive all those forms of ours than minimalism?