Postminimalism

Absurdity is key to this exhibition and bringing some humour or levity to minimalist art which otherwise is too often seen as confrontational, anti-humanist, emotionless and intellectually cold. Minimalism may hide its humour behind imposing machine-made structures or recontextualized ready made industrialized forms, but curator John Hampton attempts to show a lighter side of minimalism, he attempts to show us that it is inherently absurd that we take it so seriously. Upon entering the space, even before we ascend the stairs we are met with a cartoonish cacophony of bird like sounds which immediately engages the listener in a light-hearted welcome. At the top of the stairs, we are met with Jon Sasaki’s Slab, Base for a Future Monument, 2014, a rudimentary box placed on a blue tarp filled with cement that has been modified to never set. Scrawled into the wet cement are the words “This is not art”. This elicited a good smirk from me and my partner, we are immediately engaging with the art in a non-serious way. While I didn’t think this was visually particularly representative of minimalism, the form being quite messy, it was in principal. The use of simple, everyday objects from the hardware store, implying that the art is accessible and not specialized in any way pokes fun at the seriousness of art and in particular contemporary art practice. The fact that the cement has been modified to never set, allows for an interactive time specific, ever-changing piece that is no…

mid-1950s, in America, several artists were attached to small movements such as, Neo-Dada and Funk Art in which they were including articles of mass culture. They wanted art to be more broad than traditional styles like Abstract Expressionism, so the use of non-art materials were incorporated. This focused on ordinary and easily identifiable subjects that expressed the popular culture of the day. By the 1960s the movement's initial affect had been adjusted, yet its methods and supporters…