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Defining the Problem and Perspectives
At the moment the American art critic Clement Greenberg wrote that "the best painting, the most distinguished painting of our times is almost exclusively abstract" in his famous essay "The Case for Abstract Art" (Saturday Evening Post, August 1959), this practice of painting was already losing ground. American art production of the first half of the sixties was characterized by a violent polemic between two dominant movements: on the one hand there was the painting of large, abstract color seas of Color Field painting, and, on the other hand, painting that ventured to leap into space, which would give rise to minimal art.
Color Field painting, with Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski as its most important representatives, was stigmatized as a purely optical, modernistic art. Its aim was to leave - in one flash - a complete impression of the painted surface on our retina. By contrast, minimal art wished to liberate itself from those purely optical and timeless experiential models. It reintroduced the categories of space and time within the experience of art and the accompanying physical and tactile processes of perception. Minimal art breaks with the transcendental space of modernist art. The minimalist work of art no longer 'conveys itself,' but takes a position between other 'objects' and enforces an experience that develops over time and space.
In art historical research a general consensus holds regarding the radical impact of minimal art on modern art production and its continuing importance for contemporary art. With minimalism, art reached its peak, its terminus while newly coming into being once again (cf. Hall Foster, The Return of the Real). Minimalist art production extends much further than Carl Andre's series, Dan Flavin's neon tubes, Donald Judd's 'specific objects,' Anne Truitt's boxes, Sol LeWitt's grids or the gestalts by Robert Morris. Its emphatic attention to the specificity of time and space of the exposition of the art work heralds the processual, conceptual, performative and socio-institutional critical practices of artists such as Daniel Buren, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke and Michael Asher. The impact of minimal art was probably felt strongest in painting. After minimal art, painting almost became taboo. Since the 1960s, painting has been frequently pronounced dead only to be reanimated. During Catherine David's Documenta X of 1997, painting was declared extinct for the umpteenth time.
In this research project, we would like to focus on the role of painting within minimal art. Is painting really banished with the advent of minimal art? What do Donald Judd's 'specific objects,' which are, in the artist's own words "neither painting nor sculpture," counteract? Furthermore, there is a limited number of important artists within the ranks of minimal art who continued to paint (abstractly), such as Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden and Robert Mangold. Minimal art is always associated with glimmering serial objects, whereas a significant amount of minimalist art production is painterly in its research and treatment. Strangely enough, up to now little or no attention has been paid to this aspect in overviews of minimal art. Even in important recent studies (James Meyer, Minimalism. Art and Polemics in the Sixties , 2001; Ann Goldstein, A Minimal Future? , 2004), the emphasis is still put on the sculptural object, while the painterly object is put aside. This awakens perplexity and demands analysis and research.
Why did - and still do - minimalist paintings not find a place - both literally and figuratively - within the dominant discourse on minimal art? Are they an obstacle in the formation of such a discourse? Is it because minimalist paintings - or painting tout court - do not fit within standard art theoretical analyses or within the description of minimal art as the practice that definitively breaks with the transcendental space of modernist painting, which was still present within abstract expressionism and Color Field painting? Does minimalist painting undermine the now customary thesis that minimal art reintroduced the experience of time and space in visual arts? But why would minimalist painting be animated by time while Color Field painting supposedly is not? Are minimalist paintings not as 'abstract' as their counterparts within Color Field painting? With artists such as Robert Ryman or Richard Tuttle the color fields were also applied all over the canvas. However, it is still maintained that Color Field painting acts on us via a purely optical flash, in an immediate and disembodied manner. Why is it that, by contrast, the experience of minimalist painting unfolds in space and time? Where exactly does one pinpoint the difference? Does it revolve around the application of thicker and pastier layers of paint in minimalist painting? Does the latter introduce a certain degree of tactility? Or does the difference reside in the usage of formats or in the different application of color patterns and lines on a flat surface (e.g. a canvas or a wall)? To what extent does geometry play a role in a possible diversification of opticality as opposed to the concrete presence of a painting? Or are we faced here with only an artificial bifurcation in the service of the needs of a well-structured art theoretical discourse, yet without grounding in the actuality of the art works themselves? Do the art theoretical binaries between opticality and tactility, between materiality and immateriality survive when confronted with the concrete experience of abstract and minimalist paintings?
The fundamental assumption of this research project is that the prototypical, designer-like objects of minimal art are not so much specific objects as they are hybrid objects. They occupy an in-between between abstract sculptures and paintings. Although minimalist sculptures may have enjoyed the limelight until today, it is now high time to focus upon and valorize the neglected aspect of minimal art, i.e. minimalist painting.
The discussion concerning abstract painting and minimal art has for the most part taken place in a North American context. However, this does not entail that similar issues were not raised in other parts of the art world, notably in Western Europe and South America (Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark,...). The artistic and institutional context however was very different. The discussions there were dominated to a lesser extent by the overwhelming voices of art critics - figures such as Clement Greenberg or Michael Fried in the US - and they were conducted within and between several artistic practices. Nevertheless, this did not prevent the discussion from sparking off in all its intensity in Europe between a number of fascinating and important figures such as Daniel Buren, Michelangelo Pistoletto or Lucio Fontana and between movements such as Zero or Nu. They committed themselves to a fundamental reflection on the role and meaning of abstract painting in the post-painterly epoch.
Also within the Belgian artistic context the question concerning minimalism was the focal point of some significant artistic practices. The work of figures such as Marthe Wéry, Jef Verheyen, Dan Van Severen, Amedée Cortier, Walter Leblanc, Guy Mees, Roger Raveel, Raoul De Keyser and Philippe Van Snick show affinities with both abstract and minimalist painting practices on several points. The work of Marthe Wéry for instance shows affinity with that of Robert Ryman. The widely acclaimed work of Jef Verheyen, the only full Belgian member of the international European Zero group of the early sixties, occupies a place in-between Color Field painting - with that of Jules Olitski in particular - and the material painting of one of the most important members of the Zero group, Lucio Fontana, with whom Verheyen in fact closely collaborated. Then there are Van Severen, Amedée Cortier as well as Leblanc who pay close attention to the materiality of the painterly medium. This concern can also be found to a greater or lesser extent in the figurative-abstract paintings of Roger Raveel and Raoul the Keyser. It can also be seen more recently in the oeuvre of Joris Ghekiere and Pieter Vermeersch.
Within this larger artistic context of abstract painting and minimal art of the sixties, the work of Philippe Van Snick takes its cue. Van Snick makes abstract and minimalist works, which, over the span of several years, have gradually evolved from spatial structures and interventions towards a questioning of the traditional painterly media such as the canvas, panel and wall. His works undertake a profound reflection on the initial 'insert' the eye can assume in a more synaesthetic experience of painting. His painterly practice provides a fundamental interrogation of the actual feasibility of the theoretical divide between the optical and the haptic. Through color mutations and linear patterns, Van Snick explores those points and moments of connection between the optical and the tactile.
By means of a rigorous theoretical reflection concerning abstract and minimalist painting, this research project aims at offering a framework for a thorough study of minimalist painting Belgium , and the work of Philippe Van Snick in particular. As such, the project replies to the manifest lack of a thorough and rigorous reception history of modern art in Belgium . By concentrating on a specific area of artistic production, the project anticipates the need and importance of an in-depth and fundamental study of modern and contemporary art in Belgium . There is still a wealth of source material that needs to be disclosed, mapped out, studied and interpreted.
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