Content area
Full Text
Another Minimalism: Art after California Light and Space
Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh 14 November to 21 February
In Maurice Merleau-Ponty's i960 essay 'The Philosopher and His Shadow' we find this unusual analogy for the need to feel for the gaps in between philosophical thoughts and statements: 'the perceived world endures only through the reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons ... [which] would be destroyed by being subjected to analytic observation.' Robert Irwin once worked through Merleau-Ponty, and in her catalogue essay curator Melissa E Feldman occasionally refers to the philosopher's reinvention of phenomenology to explain correspondences with the need felt by Light and Space artists to initiate in their artwork a pre-analytical, embodied encounter with the world.
'Another Minimalism' highlights the influence on the work of ten younger European and American practitioners LA's 1960s Light and Space artists. This Californian version of Minimalism experimented with the effects of illumination on new materials like polyester resin and coated glass in work ranging from handheld translucent objects to sitespecific architectural installations that manipulated the space surrounding the viewer. California Light and Space deserves this attention now, Feldman holds, because of the neglect it has experienced, particularly at the hands of the more celebrated East Coast Minimalism of artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Robert Morris who were supposedly dismissive of their more perceptually orientated and less critically conceptual West Coast counterparts.
Two Light and Space works are included by Feldman as typical instigators of what follows. Robert Irwin's Untitled #2220,1969, is one of the quintessential disc works that establish a decisive break with his earlier gestural painting. The slightly convex...