Art: Blunt Objects

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A more parsimonious art could hardly be imagined, which was, of course, the point. After the egotistical uproar of Abstract Expressionism, all that emotional muck, this was an art of exemplary refusals, starting with a negation of the artist's hand and ending with the rejection of meaning itself. Seen in art-history terms, Minimalism has a feel of the inevitable, the terminus of ultrapure formalism that Western art had been heading toward for centuries. With its high-minded indifference to mere pleasure, it can also look oddly like one more outburst of the American Puritan strain. Yet unlike earlier 20th century abstraction, it made no reach toward the transcendent. It had none of the utopian ambitions of Kazimir Malevich or the spiritual yearnings of Piet Mondrian. Judd's boxes and Andre's bricks aren't about God or the future. What they are about is "object-ness."

Where does that leave you and me? Confronted with something like Morris' Untitled (L-beams), 1965, a work that offers the barest minimum of mental footholds, the dutiful museumgoer will make the most of the opportunity to contemplate object-ness and then wander off in search of something a little less impregnable. And sure enough, it's there in both shows. You don't even need to go to lovely, "impure" Minimalist painters like Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin, whose canvases are full of personal touches. In the Los Angeles exhibition, which was organized by MOCA senior curator Ann Goldstein, Sol LeWitt, a certified founder of Minimalism, is represented by his sculptural white grid structures of the mid-1960s, right-angle emblems of rationality that have always felt more like arid philosophical enterprises than works of art. But at the Guggenheim show, organized by curators Lisa Dennison and Nancy Spector, we get his intricate pencil-work wall drawings, madly fastidious decorative art presented in the disguise of high-minded conceptualism. (LeWitt conceives them but leaves it to studio assistants to carry out the actual drawing, removing the taint of the artist's hand.) In their orderly way, the best of them are laugh-out-loud gorgeous. His Wall Drawing 271 at the Guggenheim is one of thosea force field of pale color produced by laying a red square grid work over a pattern of radiating black circles and yellow and blue arcs. Your eyes could play in that web work all day.