Art: Blunt Objects

Go to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles right now and you can see one of the most merciless cultural products of the 1960s, Carl Andre's 6 x 6 Den Haag Steel Lock, a mat of 36 steel plates arranged to form a black square. First assembled in 1968, it remains to this day one of the bluntest things that have ever presumed to radiate the aura of an art object--which may be what was bothering a recent visitor to the show "A Minimal Future? Art as Object: 1958-1968." The art lover, a guy who looked to be in his early 30s, with shoulder-length hair and a porkpie hat, gave the work a dirty look, furtively checked the gallery for security guards and then briskly walked right across the thing.

He may have thought that was a well-aimed insult. He probably didn't know that Andre actually intended the piece to be walked on. But that's how it is with Minimalism. It has a way of confounding its critics. Four decades after its peak years, the last and most rebarbative movement of High Modernism turns out to be durable stuff. Deeply embedded in the DNA of much of the art that came after, it has likewise become the vocabulary of choice for almost all monuments since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the semiofficial format of grief.

It's also the subject of major exhibitions in museums on both coasts, at MOCA and in New York City, where nearly the whole of the Guggenheim Museum has been given over to "Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present." While that show focuses mainly on the same crucial years as MOCA's, it also looks back to earlier prototypes--Robert Rauschenberg's all-white paintings, Ad Reinhardt's all-black ones--and forward to more recent artists who have slyly adapted what Minimalism first offered.

Though the original Minimalists didn't think of themselves as a school, to outsiders they always looked like one. Andre's steel plates and piles of bricks, Donald Judd's Plexiglas and wooden boxes, Robert Morris' big plywood L shapes, Dan Flavin's bare fluorescent light tubes, Frank Stella's pinstriped canvases--they all flowed from a shared premise. As much as possible, the art object should be based on a single form that announces itself all at once or on a repeated form that produces a similar effect. It should not involve varied surfaces or a balance of different compositional elements. It should appear manufactured, not uniquely handmade. It should not make a reference to any thing, feeling or idea outside of itself.