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It might be said that we are living through the paradoxical results of the success of minimalism. It was minimalism's destruction of pictorial illusion that has led to our contemporary understanding of the work of art as a simulacrum or an incident within a much wider "text", something having no inherent qualities of its own but only the effect of the various discourses about it. It was minimalism's acknowledgement of the presence of the spectator to the work and the work to its spectator that has led to our contemporary concern with the constitution of subjectivity in art (racial, sexual, linguistic, etcetera), the evaluation of the work of art not in terms of the work itself but in terms of who made it. It was minimalism's attempt to incorporate the physical and institutional spaces surrounding the work that has led to our own contemporary belief that everything in art is contextual, political, that every discourse but the aesthetic must be brought to bear on art. In general, it might be said that our post-modernism is nothing more than the continuation of minimalism by other means, that the history of post-modernism will prove to be only a brief episode within a much longer history of minimalism.
We might begin here by attempting to recapture just one moment from this history: the American art critic Clement Greenberg's rejection of minimalism (1959). For many at the time, minimalism seemed the perfect embodiment of Greenberg's theories about art: it was flat, conceptually- derived and non-illusionistic; it did not seek to hide the materials of which it was made. In this, it seemed to fit the logic of Greenberg's modernism as the reduction of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline