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Many people are turning to a minimalist lifestyle to help improve their mood, boost their productivity and build stronger relationships with their family and friends. Minimalism is a wide-ranging concept that doesn’t have a rigid set of rules but instead uses guiding principles to challenge people to question their purchasing behaviors so that they can understand what has actual value in their life and what doesn’t. For many people, becoming a minimalist has massively improved their lives…….Continue reading…
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In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that emerged in the post-war era in western art. It is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism. The movement anticipated various post-minimalist practices contemporary act, which extend or critically reflect on minimalism’s original objectives.
Minimalism’s key objectives were to strip away conventional characterizations of art by bringing the importance of the object or the experience a viewer has for the object with minimal mediation from the artist. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella.
Minimalism in music features methods such as repetition and gradual variation, such as the works of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Julius Eastman, and John Adams. The term is sometimes used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.
In recent years, minimalism has come to refer to anything or anyone that is spare or stripped to its essentials. In a more general sense, minimalism as a visual strategy can be found in the geometric abstractions of painters associated with the Bauhaus movement, in the works of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and other artists associated with the De Stijl movement, the Russian Constructivist movement, and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși.
Minimalism as a formal strategy has been deployed in the paintings of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, and the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Yayoi Kusama, Giorgio Morandi, and others. Yves Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950—but his first public showing was the publication of the Artist’s book Yves: Peintures in November 1954.
Michael Fried called the minimalist artists literalists, and used literalism as a pejorative due to his position that the art should deliver transcendental experience with metaphors, symbolism, and stylization. Per Fried’s (controversial) view, the literalist art needs a spectator to validate it as art: an “object in a situation” only becomes art in the eyes of an observer. For example, for a regular sculpture its physical location is irrelevant, and its status as a work of art remains even when unseen.
Donald Judd’s pieces (see photo), on the other hand, are just objects sitting in the desert sun waiting for a visitor to discover them and accept them as art. The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture, wherein the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. Minimalist architectural designers focus on effectively using vacant space, neutral colors, and eliminating decoration, emphasizing materiality, tactility, texture, weight, and density.
Minimalist architecture became popular in the late 1980s in London and New York, whereby architects and fashion designers worked together in the boutiques to achieve simplicity, using white elements, cold lighting, and large spaces with minimal furniture and few decorative elements. The works of De Stijl artists are a major reference: De Stijl expanded the ideas of expression by meticulously organizing basic elements such as lines and planes.
In 1924, The Rietveld Schroder House was commissioned by Truus Schröder-Schräder, a precursor to minimalism. The house emphasizes its slabs, beams and posts reflecting De Stijl’s philosophy on the relationship between form and function. With regard to home design, more attractive “minimalistic” designs are not truly minimalistic because they are larger, and use more expensive building materials and finishes.
Minimalistic design has been highly influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture. There are observers who describe the emergence of minimalism as a response to the brashness and chaos of urban life. For example, minimalist architecture began to gain traction in 1980s Japan as a result of the country’s rising population and rapid expansion of cities. The design was considered an antidote to the “overpowering presence of traffic, advertising, jumbled building scales, and imposing roadways.”
The chaotic environment was not only driven by urbanization, industrialization, and technology but also the Japanese experience of constantly having to demolish structures on account of the destruction wrought by World War II and the earthquakes, including the calamities it entails such as fire. The minimalist design philosophy did not arrive in Japan by way of another country, as it was already part of the Japanese culture rooted on the Zen philosophy.
There are those who specifically attribute the design movement to Japan’s spirituality and view of nature.The concept of minimalist architecture is to strip everything down to its essential quality and achieve simplicity. The idea is not completely without ornamentation, but that all parts, details, and joinery are considered as reduced to a stage where no one can remove anything further to improve the design. The considerations for ‘essences’ are light, form, detail of material, space, place, and human condition.
Minimalist architects not only consider the physical qualities of the building. They consider the spiritual dimension and the invisible, by listening to the figure and paying attention to details, people, space, nature, and materials, believing this reveals the abstract quality of something that is invisible and aids the search for the essence of those invisible qualities such as natural light, sky, earth, and air. In addition, they “open a dialogue” with the surrounding environment to decide the most essential materials for the construction and create relationships between buildings and sites.
In minimalist architecture, design elements strive to convey the message of simplicity. The basic geometric forms, elements without decoration, simple materials, and the repetitions of structures represent a sense of order and essential quality. The movement of natural light in buildings reveals simple and clean spaces. In the late 19th century as the arts and crafts movement became popular in Britain, people valued the attitude of ‘truth to materials’ with respect to the profound and innate characteristics of materials.
Minimalist architects humbly ‘listen to figure’, seeking essence and simplicity by rediscovering the valuable qualities in simple and common materials. The core purpose of minimalist architecture is to declutter a space, while making it more functional and adding a sense of calmness and serenity to it, making it visually harmonious. The three principles that architects tend to follow while designing minimalist spaces are one in, one out rule, zone wise organisation, and the 90/90 rule.
The capsule wardrobe is an example of minimalism in fashion. Constructed of only a few staple pieces that do not go out of style, and generally dominated by only one or two colors, capsule wardrobes are meant to be light, flexible, and adaptable, and can be paired with seasonal pieces when the situation calls for them. The modern idea of a capsule wardrobe dates back to the 1970s, and is credited to London boutique owner Susie Faux. The concept was further popularized in the next decade by American fashion designer Donna Karan, who designed a seminal collection of capsule workwear pieces in 1985.
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