by Jon Lackman | 26 February 2006 | Conferences, Modern, News
Contributor Anne Byrd reports: “At Saturday morning’s Minimalism and the Common Culture panel, Anna Chave ground her Rosalind Krauss axe, while younger scholars Mitte Gieskes, Dominic Rahtz, and Nina Murayama offered historical readings of minimalism: Gieskes’s paper was a nuanced (if, as one questioner suggested, somewhat uncritical) discussion of Carl Andre, theories of contingency such as cybernetics and quantum mechanics, and the latter’s popularization in the Whole Earth Catalogue; Rahtz, also focusing on Andre, considered the impersonality and inactivity of minimalist surfaces in the context of the New Left’s attention to the self; Nina Murayama discussed Donald Judd’s furniture and the DIY approach, perhaps doing too little to distinguish anarchism from luxury (a fine line in this context, as it turns out). The Q&A was consumed by a meandering discussion of whether we need to address head-on the “Greenbergian hangover” that respondent Patricia Wells diagnosed in the literature on minimalism. Chave certainly felt that we did, contending that Krauss was Greenberg redux, that her “tentacles are everywhere,” and that James Meyer was one such tentacle. There were no visible suction cups on Meyer’s hand when he raised it to announce his presence, compliment the panelists, and suggest that their effort to uncover the particularities of the discourse around minimalism (rather than to repeat generalities about it) was entirely continuous with his own.”
