TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 150
26th March 2019
Dear friends and colleagues
And so we progress to see the second part of the Minimalism show in Singapore’s Art and Science Museum’
It was pleasing to see a serious show in this museum because under a previous director it has been unduly populist. Alas, though, it is a pig’s ear of a building: it is a big doughnut in the sky with some extra galleries in a basement. The galleries in the doughnut are cake-slice-shaped. The big Judd piece looked good in that. Though the dance videos and photographs by Wang Jian placed next to it were a bit of a distraction.
Donald Judd, Untitled (Six boxes) 1974. Dance videos and photos by Wang Jian 2009.
But this need to cram too much in became very problematic in the next cake-slice: the large sculpture of stones by Richard Long being totally wrecked by having a neon sculpture by Jeppe Hein right next to it. Ouch!
The Olofur Eliasson installation of many coloured translucent sheets was a real crowd pleaser, a haven for selfie takers and, when I was there, a very beautiful woman filming herself in various poses.
Why Kapoor’s sculpture from 1981 is here is a mystery to me. If that’s minimal, I’m a deep-sea diver. If you wanted an English based sculptor of that generation both Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon had a very real engagement with minimalism and how to extend out from it. Cragg’s 1976 sculpture Stack in which he piled all the stiff in his studio into an implacable 2x2x2 metre cube would have said far more than anything by Kapoor, or than Ai Wei Wei’s cube of tea leaves (Ton of Tea, 2006) which was in the show.
Down in the basement there was a piece with five video projections by Gerard Byrne, thinking about minimalism in various ways, recreating conversations and exhibitions. Witty and thoughtful, I really enjoyed it. Some artists here have said how much they enjoyed seeing it. I am not sure how much the average Singapore resident got from it!
In many ways this was a fantastic show for its time and place. It gave people in the region the chance to see a big range of interesting art: Rothko, Judd, Byrne, Halprin, Kuwayama, Reich, Sandback, Li Jianhua, Eliasson that they don’t often get to see. (There is a big Eliasson installation in Singapore but I don’t think many people have realised it is art and not just a very odd bit of architecture.)
The show made lots of links between Asian and non-Asian art.
Inevitably in doing all that it became a smorgasbord of an exhibition. As I said two weeks ago the show was diffuse rather than focused, but it would have formed a fantastic collection of late modern/contemporary art.
The Art Space Museum, is part of the Marina Bay Sands complex: a casino, a hotel with an enormous rooftop swimming pool and a top-end shopping mall. Leaving the museum, I wandered off through the mall in search of a not too overpriced cup of coffee. But I stopped when I saw an advert for the Minimal show in one fashion shop with beside it two minimalist dresses, one in red, one in black. If you want to look at the effect of minimalism isn’t this where it is, not just in art, but in fashion, interior and lifestyle? Why not have a few items of design and fashion in the exhibition that show that? The museum attendants could all be dressed like that! Why not?
As for the catalogue, is it worth getting? Definitely.
I still haven’t read all the essays but those I have were interesting. There is an anthology of previously published texts by Anne Truitt, Charlotte Posenenske, Fred Sandback and thirteen others. As I mentioned before there are twelve useful and entertaining short interviews with artists in the show.
In one of them Rei Naito, who is represented in the show by a tiny pillow made in silk organza, entitled Pillow for the Dead, is asked first whether she was influenced by minimalism. She replies, “I have never considered what minimalism means.” Asked later what the importance of minimalism today is, her reply is, “This is related to my answer to the first question. Things are manifested as the things themselves. They are living of their own accord. This is a happy thing, and I wonder why it touches people’s hearts. This is what I think about.”
One of the anthologized pieces is of Mona Hatoum interviewed by Janine Antoni and that makes me wonder why the pieces in chocolate and fat that Antoni did in the early Nineties were not included. They along with the lipstick pieces of Rachel Lachowicz (Andre and Serra remade with bright red lipstick) and the writings of Anna Chave constitute a feminist critique of Minimalism that is still pertinent.
After all, as Mel Bochner said to me in conversation in either 1996 or 97, the one thing that no-one says about the minimalists was that, with the exception of Sol LeWitt, they were all exceptionally horrible men.
Have a nice week!
Tony