TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 148
12 March 2019
Dear friends and colleagues
So, on to the National Gallery of Singapore’s Minimalism show. But, as the title (Minimalism: Space, Light, Object) suggests, it isn’t just about Minimalism. There has, I believe, never been a show of Minimalism proper in South-East Asia. This therefore is the first with works by Judd, Andre, Flavin, LeWitt and Morris. I am purist enough to really want an exhibition just of those five installed in a very minimal way. But, I accept, such a show in Singapore would attract little interest and indeed attract puzzled incomprehension, if not hatred.
The exhibition also includes equivalent Asian artists, especially of the Mono-Ha group.
Koshimizu, Suga, Takamatsu, Sekine.
Miyamoto, Lee Seung-taek, Wiener, Lee Ufan, Long, Tang Da Wu, Hatoum
There is one beautiful floor work by Lee Ufan, but curiously no painting by him. More curiously, the chronology in the catalogue begins not with early exhibitions of Judd or Andre but “c.1500-1200BCE. The Rigveda, a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns foundational to Hinduism is composed in India.” The first artist mentioned by name is Sengai Gibon who in the 1800s, “paints The Universe, an ink painting of a square, a triangle and a circle.”
This raises a big problem: if Minimalism is a materialist discourse can things that look like minimalism be minimal if they are concerned with transcendence?
I am very much in favour of bringing Western and Asian works together here but are we not concerned with muting the effect of hard-core minimalism by adding this nimbus of spirituality? Walking on a Carl Andre floor piece is an encounter with stuff, not the void. (Though you are not allowed to walk on the floor piece here – on loan from the John Kaldor Family Collection in Australia – Shame! Shame on them!)
The room with most of this hard-core minimalism (Room 3) also has works by Kusama, at one time Judd’s girlfriend and Tadaaki Kuwayama who lived in New York then and showed, like Judd, Flavin and Stella, at Green Gallery. “I never thought I was a Minimal artist, that came later. Maybe art critics gave it that name. I wanted to make pure art without history,” Kuwayama says in an interesting interview made especially for the catalogue.
Truitt, Morris, Judd, Andre, McCracken, LeWitt, Kusama, Kuwayama
So, my feelings are conflicted. It is nice that these connections are being made but it does get somewhat diffuse: we also have works by Anne Truit, McCracken and a mirror work by Ian Burn, which for me belongs to conceptual art. OK, they are connected, but they are not the same.
But, we have been standing here talking in room three. What happened in rooms 1 and 2? The first room has no object, just a recording of an early piece by Steve Reich Drumming. This seems very apt because, firstly, minimalist music happens very early, secondly, it puts an emphasis on the body, here, paused and listening.
Room two has “pre-minimal” works by Rothko, Newman, Stella, Reinhardt and Kuwayama. Putting in Rothko and Newman tilts the discussion again towards the spiritual or sublime. I do have to say, however, putting aside thoughts of the exhibition as a whole, what a pleasure to see a nice, somber Rothko and two Stella black paintings in South East Asia!
Stella, Rothko, Newman, Reinhardt, Kuwayama
For, above all else, there is a fantastic range of works on show in this exhibition: If I was still teaching students on an MA in contemporary art in Singapore I would bring them to this show a lot of times. One gets very few chances to experience these artists in this region.
But the exhibition really complicates for me in the fifth room, (room 4 was Dan Flavin) not with having Lee Ufan or some other Korean artists but by including a recent work by Mona Hatoum, her Impenetrable of 2009, where hanging wires form a large cube.
This exhibition also wants to show the influence of minimalism on art today.
Once you start spreading this far out you inevitably start to ask who are the omissions. Why no monochrome paintings, Agnes Martin or Robert Ryman or Alan Charlton? Eva Hesse is I gather almost impossible to borrow because they are so fragile, but why no Barry Le Va or Jackie Winsor, both far more interesting than Ann Truit?
And the focus seems so determinedly US versus Orient[1] that Europe seems rather forgotten. (And South Asia for, despite the rather ridiculous mention of the Rig Veda there isn’t an Indian in sight.) Why no Ulrich Ruckriem or Reiner Ruthenbeck? Though Charlotte Posenenske is included.
At the risk of being Devil’s advocate, if at an early point they had put in a Klein blue monochrome and a Manzoni Achrome they would have presented in a clear and gnomic pairing, the problematic of the show: materialist or idealist, dumb stuff or transcendent nothingness.
(The upcoming show in Shanghai of Yves Klein, Gunther Ueker, Lee Ufan and Ding Yi shows one different route this exhibition could have taken. Is Lee Ufan closer to Nul and Zero than Minimalism?)
Anyway, such musings aside, when you come across a very beautiful early work by Robert Irwin (Image 6) you are just pleased to see it there and well presented. Though then you realise you are in California and looking at another type of art, one of light and space.
Robert Irwin, Untitled, c. 1968
Then there is the pleasure of a room with a Fred Sandback thread installation, although he has to share the room with the ubiquitous Anish Kapoor. An anxious guard stands beside it – twice the thread has been broken by people tripping over it.
Following which there is an installation by Eliasson (a room drenched in sodium light), a sculpture by Montien Boonma, (a great work but in no way minimal), Po Po from Myanmar, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Haegue Yang, Ai Wei Wei and Martin Creed. Overall, this is wonderfully varied, or somewhat confusing, depending on your mood.
For myself I felt as if I was going through a very good museum of contemporary art, rather than an exhibition. I wish the National Gallery was always like this, blending Singaporean art (Kim Lim, Tang Da Wu) with other Asian art (Kuayama, Lee Ufan), with Western art (Judd, Sandback).
In the basement there was a big Tatsuo Miyajima installation. Originally the space was allocated for James Turrell but he was ill and withdrew from the show. Now this is a big hole in the show, for with no site-specific work by Irwin or Turrell – let alone Nordman or Wheeler who go unmentioned – Californian light and space art is pointed to, but absent.
Now all this time you have been wondering about my first image and you may notice the final two images are of the same work: Sopheap Pich’s Cargo, 2018, two containers made with rattan and bamboo. It is the first and last thing you see on entering and leaving the museum. I really like it: something heavy and utilitarian transformed into something delicate and light. In one of the catalogue’s twelve very useful interviews with living artists in the show Pich talks of his fixation with containers, their mystery, what is inside? And their beauty, “I am going to claim to be the first one to find shipping containers beautiful,” he says. He goes on to talk of how Buddhism underpins everything he does and that he thinks, “Minimalism is still alive and well, and it will still be when I am gone.” In Singapore, the second largest container port in the world (Shanghai is number 1) it has added resonance. I hope the museum can afford to buy it and keep it there.
Well, we haven’t got around all the exhibition yet: it continues at the Art and Science Museum. Next week, or the week after, we will go there – and also take a longer look at the catalogue. And think again about the problematics of this exhibition.
See you then!
Tony
- This is not a word I use often. East Asia or Far East are less ideologically loaded terms, but here because the notion of Oriental mysticism is so pervasive is seems the correct term ↑