DOES MINIMALISM MATTER?

PRINT EDITION CONTENTS past issues

PAST GALLERIES

It has been the defining style of our era, but now it’s in retreat. Stephen Bayley works out whether less will soon be no more...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2010

Last June I shared a cab with Grayson Perry, one of Britain’s best-known artists. He had just returned from the Basel art fair, where he had been struck by something. “Everything is now happening all at once,” he told me with a roll of the eyes. There was no longer a ruling style or taste, no common agreement on what is avant-garde and what is retrograde. Today the happening thing is just what is happening. We have reached the end of “isms”.

Minimalism was the last, and most curious, ism of all. The late 20th and early 21st centuries were peculiarly receptive to its poetics of purity—in architecture, in art, in food, in design. This autumn it receives what might be either its coronation or its obituary. “Plain Space” is the title of both an exhibition at the Design Museum in London, and a book by its subject, John Pawson—the elegant Old Etonian architect who, more than anyone, turned a cerebral art-world cult into a deluxe style for the stratum of society where fastidious aestheticism meets high net worth.

The exhibition is not, Pawson insists, a retrospective, but an account of work-in-progress. Still, when estate agents are touting properties as “minimalist-style”, you suspect that the vitality of this ism may have left the building. Was minimalism the last absurd, exhausted spasm of neophilia, the cult of the new that so defined modern taste? Or is it still, and will it remain, the ultimate refinement of aesthetic sensibility: the place we go when we have been everywhere else? The answer to both questions is yes.

In one sense, minimalism had a beginning and end as (nearly) precise as the beginning and end of, say, baroque or pre-Raphaelitism. German architects first used the term “Existenzminimum”—referring to low-cost social housing—in the mid-1920s. The term “minimal art” first appeared circa 1965. Journalists writing about interior design began mentioning minimalism in the mid-1980s. But, unlike baroque or the pre-Raphaelites, the minimal aesthetic has been a continuous element in European culture. It’s been with us in some form since the fifth century BC, when Socrates declared that a well-made dung bucket was better than a poorly made gold shield.

In the 18th century architectural theorists such as Carlo Lodoli—creator of the sternly beautiful Pilgrim’s Hospice in Venice—began to play with the idea of “functionalism”: that buildings must not be compromised by decoration. This idea that architecture must be driven by its function would later dominate the Modern Movement of the early 20th century. Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner, H.P. Berlage, Bruno Taut, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier all, in their different ways, stressed the importance of utility and their abhorrence of decoration. Loos entitled an essay “Ornament and Crime”. Le Corbusier studied aircraft and cars, before stating in 1923 that a house should be a simple “machine for living in”. Even Wittgenstein was at it. In 1928 he built a house on Vienna’s Parkgasse, designing every detail with a severe functionalist authority. Created for the gods, it is now the Bulgarian Cultural Institute.

Minimalism’s origins at the very beginning of organised European thought lend it lasting intellectual respectability. Yet its later 20th-century exponents—the sculptors Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, the architects Tadao Ando, Peter Zumthor and Pawson himself—disliked being described as minimalists. This denial is one of minimalism’s many paradoxes; another is that minimalism is not, as its name implies, simple, restricted and ascetic. Rather it is wide-ranging, engaging and nuanced: look at the absurd extremism and occult spirituality of the Bruder Klaus chapel in Switzerland, where Zumthor built a wooden structure, surrounded it with concrete, and then set fire to the core. The result is thrilling and beautiful. Similarly, nothing is quite so striking as the fearless spareness of a minimalist interior, with its repertoire of shadow gaps and perfect flush surfaces.

Nor, when it comes to buildings, is minimalism cheap. It costs a fortune to make things look simple. Flock wallpaper, scatter cushions, swags, sconces and escutcheons are convenient ways to disguise nasty constructional flaws or shoddy materials. Minimalism offers no such refuge. Your waxed white plaster walls and black macassar ebony floors are expensive to create (usually aligned by laser) and to maintain. If there is dirt in a minimalist house, it is tragically obvious. If living with less is the ultimate pose of the very rich, it can also be difficult to use.