Good Example Of The Double Negative: A New Syntax For Sculpture Research Paper

On Rosalind Krauss’ passages on modern culture, The Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture, minimalism is gaining popularity in modern days, changing the syntax for sculpture. Minimalism tends to reduce the idea of art to the point of emptiness (the subject is reduced to its necessary elements), and focuses on the publicness of artworks rather than their privacy. As an artist I believe that less is more, meaning that art needs to have only the necessary elements and in its simplest form, and hence minimalism is the right approach to art.
The film “Hand Catching Lead” has the striking aspects of quality in terms with regards to its relentless persistence of doing something over and over again without regarding success. The film was continuous with the sculptural tradition that had developed before. For Donald Judd, the quality of repetition was not just rationalistic and underlying, but it was more like that of continuity, one thing after the other. All art is based on systems that are built beforehand. The act of finding one thing after the other was a common compositional strategy at the time. Judd claimed that it was a way of finding out what the world is. Finding out about something was like giving it shape and propose a model for it or an image.
Minimalism, a concept that had gained much popularity among many artists and sculptors, pointed to the idea of reduction of art to a point of emptiness. It was more concerned with the basic units of a sculptor and the basic elements that would resist manipulation in their appearance. Minimal art put into use the materials that onto which the content of some specific kind had not been built yet. This was so as to enable it to deal with the readymade as an abstract unit. The minimal artists were attracted to repetitiveness. The repetition of mass produced elements meant that each object had an identical size and shape thus allowing identical relationships among them. Through repetition, there was no a determined point of focus or internally dictated limits. A minimal artist arrived at the set mode of composition from which the idea of inner necessity had been removed. In terms of abstract and structure, the compositional devices of the minimalists denied the logical importance of the interior space forms. An interior space, that had been celebrated the 20th century because of its symbolic importance, lacked meaning among the minimalists.
The initial response to minimalism was that it stood for the attack on the very possibility of the meaningfulness of a piece of art. Donald Judd rejected the idea of abstract expressionism notion of the individual self that supposes emotion, meaning and personality. Judd and other minimalists refuted the idea of uniqueness, privacy and the lack of accessibility of experience. This refutation was echoing the questions that were raised by philosophers regarding the way verbal language communicates internal and self-experience. Jasper John was also a radical critique of abstract expressionism and this was expressed through his art. His was a rejection of an ideal space that existed prior to existence. John’s Target or Ale Cans negated the abstract expressionist picture, simultaneously rejecting the innerness of its space and the privacy of the self for which the space was a model. The question of language and meaning helps us by analogy to see the positive side of minimalist behavior. For refusing to give artwork an interior, the minimal artists are simply re-evaluating the logic behind a particular source of meaning instead of denying meaning to the aesthetic object altogether. They are also being seen asking meaning to be seen as arising from the public rather than private. Minimalism sculptors are against the spiritual illusionism that is responsible for the conversion of a material into the signifier for the other. The ambition of minimalism was to relocate the origins of a sculpture’s meaning to the outside, no longer modeling its structure on the privacy of the psychological space but to the cultural space (public space).
As related to Rosalind Krauss’ article on minimalism, I am in total agreement that minimalism is the new syntax for sculpture. As an artist, I have always believed in focusing on the necessary details and in their simplest form which is in agreement with the minimalist idea. As with minimalism, one need not to know the confines of the past so as to understand and experience their sculptural forms and intentions, for they do not possess metaphorical references to the things that are not ready for themselves. They, for a fact, hold their constant meaning in limitless time by the virtue of the public experience of the piece. The viewer is made aware of the pieces in a particular space with the object in question. Rosalind’s views are in line with how I view aesthetic pieces as I tend to focus on the “little things” that count in artwork. I also believe in the publicness of aesthetic forms rather than their privacy. As it stands, minimalism is the way to go with regards to modern art as it brings out the best out of an artist through the focus on the finer details. To quote Rosalind Krauss on minimalism “the new is made comfortable by being made familiar, since it seen as having gradually evolved from the forms of the past”.