Minimalism and Zen Buddhism

On Kawara, Oct. 31, 1978 (Today Series, "Tuesday"), 1978

This essay by Nick Currie from Mousse Magazine explores the emotional capacity of minimalism, beginning with Carl Andre’s firebrick sculpture Equivalent VIII and continuing to the late Japanese artist On Kawara and his existentialist Today series (previously on view at the Art Institute—usurped by the Charles Ray exhibition), consisting of the current date painted simply and graphically usually on canvas on a black background.

Currie touches on the influence of Zen Buddhism (particularly professor D.T. Suzuki, author of An Introduction to Zen Buddhism and many other essays) in Western art, specifically on John Cage and Agnes Martin. Currie makes the distinction between Western thought as Romantic, or “ego glorifying and exaggerating,” and Eastern thought as Buddhist and without ego.

Maybe we can relate this and Erica Goode’s article, How Culture Molds Habits of Thought, particularly with the view that Asians tend to be more sensitive to context. We could push this even further by tying in Michael Fried’s definition of theatricality in Minimalism—that minimalist sculpture, particularly Donald Judd and Robert Morris, relies heavily on the bodily relationship between objects in space—or a “holistic view,” not simply “detach[ed] objects from their context” as Goode posits.

To push this even further, we could look at the correlation between Robert Morris’s installation at the Green Gallery, New York, 1964 and the rock gardens at Ryōan-ji which Stanley discussed as having an innate relationship in space that cannot be formulated analytically (Western perspective) but must be drawn out naturally.

Robert Morris, Installation view of Show, 1964, New York, Green Gallery

Rock Gardens at Ryōan-ji, Kyoto, Japan

This may give us some speculative insight into the natural aversion that seems to take place when viewing Minimalist sculpture, for example Donald Judd’s installations in Marfa. If with a Western sensibility one extracted the objects out of space and viewed them as singular objects, they may not be very interesting, but contextually—their interaction with space, the floor, with light, and other bodies moving through the architecture—we can begin to view them with a different lens, one that perhaps a still image cannot reproduce fully, but only a pilgrimage can fulfill.

Donald Judd, Untitled, 100 works in mill aluminum, 1982-1986

Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, Photo from Flickr.com