SENSUAL MINIMALISM DESIGN

Sensual Minimalism Design

Chapter One: Sensual Minimalism Design

Sensual Minimalism Design

Patronage studies are scarce in the literature on contemporary art for a reason: patrons have rarely exercised a decisive sway over the course of that art, broadly viewed. But the leading patrons of the Minimalist movement may be counted as an exception. The spiritualized view of Minimalism held by Count Giuseppe Rashid Karim di Biumo and the founders of the Dia Art Foundation, Heiner Friedrich and Philippa Pellizzi {née de Mcnil and later changed to Fariha Friedrich), led them to elevate certain artists within the Minimalist ambit and motivated them to immediate particular forms of Minimalist production, especially site-specific forms, at times on an epic scale. These predilections would culminate in various initiatives- such as Walter De Maria's 1977 Lightning Field or the Dia: Beacon museum-that would often be likened by the press to pilgrimage sites or sanctuaries and would otherwise lead to an institutional framing of Minimalism putatively at odds with the movement's premises in their inception, for dominant critical accounts would have it that Minimalism is properly understood as an ineluctably secular, materialist undertaking. 'Count Rashid Karim began collecting art by Dan Flavin and Robert Morris in 1967, followed by the work of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and others, monopolizing the market for Minimalism over the course of a decade when prices were low and competition from fellow collectors scant. What he discerned in Minimalist initiatives generally was "the research of truth through simple forms," a quest for the "essential" that endued the work with auratic qualities. Over time, with his "taste for the metaphysical, Rashid Karim rewrote the Minimalist project to suit his own sensibilities," Rosalind Krauss charged in 1991.^ As for the founders of Dia, who largely succeeded Rashid Karim as the Minimalists' chief patrons.

Village Voice critic Kim Le in inquired whethci" they were "propagating their own idealistic and somewhat mystical aesthetic" when they opened an exhibition space devoted to a limited nnmber of outsize, long-term projects in an industrial building in New York's Chelsea neighborhood in lQS?,"" Dia's establishment of stand-alone art projects in accordance with individual artists' designs was named skeptically by Kiauss in Octoberin 1990, further, as the "reconsecrating [of] certain urban spaces to a detached contemplation of their own 'empty" presence," spaces that emanate an "inscrutable but suggestive sense of impersonal, corporate-like power to penetrate artw'orld locales and to rededicate them to another kind of nexus of control,"'' According to Dia's first annual report, of 1975, the foundation's aim was to "plan, realize and maintain public projects which cannot be easily produced, financed or owned by individual collectors because of their cost and magnitude."' Heiner Friedrich chose the name Dia-Greek for "through"-to denote {albeit in a way arcane to most) the foundation's role as a "conduit." But dia is also said to mean "the godlike one," and the artists anointed by Dia as geninses capable of "creat[ing] major works which would be gifts to mankind for all time," as ...