Gabriel Congdon
Let’s Go Look At The Minimalism
“I rarely make it to the second floor when I’m with a friend. I do my third-floor spiel that starts with the Renaissance and ends with a lousy Matisse. By the time I’m done the museum is usually closing. I never make it to the Americans. American art has a bad rap and it’s my job to re-gift it. I’m the gal saying the Hudson River School is going to be the Impression of the 22nd century. Mark my words on a check.” She bounched her brows.
I have to admit, I like the pixie. Sure, she wears large wood earrings I think are kind of tacky, and the bull nosering I think is only kind of cool. But she’s so bubbly. I’d love to run with her lightning across the sky.
“Kant said the museum is a temple of aesthetics. Doesn’t it feel like we’re communing with the Platonic upper sphere, that Ideal of Beauty?”
“It sure does,” I said, “now tell me about this wall-sized Rorschach.”
“That?” Shala scrunched her face like a gourd. “That’s just a Warhol. We’re not keen on Warhol you and I. You see that double canvassed Elvis.” She pointed at a silkscreen Elvis in silver. The second canvas just silver paint. “The reason he connected that second canvas was so he could sell it for more.”
“That’s cool.”
“That’s not cool.”
Shala’s self-taught. Her intuitional cred is zero. There’s no endgame she’s aiming at either. No claim toward criticism, or academia, or art making. She studies all of this for its own end.
How about this: a line of boxes. The sides of the boxes were aluminum with centers of a light blue Plexiglas. Eight of them in a vertical line. (Donald Judd Untitled Stack 1967)
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Boxes in a vertical line.”
“Thanks Shawl.”
We looked at the boxes. I wanted to act cool, I did, but I wanted to give it a go as myself. Maybe I’d be right. Maybe this minimalism was a test.
“This is dumb.”
“As long as you accept the challenge and give it a go. You don’t have to like the work. I don’t think the boxes care if you like them or not.”
I groaned. “Ok, umm.”
“What the minimalists were most proud of was that they did away with llusions, both a and i.” Another line of thought that prismed off my brow. “You can see how it's made.”
“That’s important?” I was floored by this.
“So important. Illusionism is good for making fascists. You a fascist, Gabe? This is advanced stuff. See how everybody walks by it. Nobody has guts to actually give the attraction a ride.” To me, “Look at the damn boxes.”
I had the idea to start close up and step back at a very slow rate all the while keeping my eyes fixed on a single point. As I gradually moved back, I noticed the aluminum dimmed somewhat and the blue from the Plexiglas intensified in hue. The effect oscillated. The darks darkening, the deepening of the blue achieved by an optical trick. The longer I stared the more I saw these hidden colors. The boxes began to bow, they staircased into a scalar celestial. After I held there for longer still, I shot my eyes at the white museum wall and that shock briefly embossed the image onto the museum’s white wall. It was nothing short of psychedelic.
A teenager crept up and asked in a sotto voice, “What are you on?”
“The boxes. Minimalism fucks my shit up.” She recoiled at that and backpedaled away. Off to the lazy river’s next attraction: a white bed with a giant black rat perched atop a plaster dreamer. Like, a six-foot rat, with humany claws.
I told Shala my experience and she nodded. “That’s beginner stuff. But you’re on the right track. I’m proud of you. Let’s look at these other boxes.”
More boxes. I said, “Imagine what this Judd guy could have done with a triangle.”
This piece was a horizontal line of aluminum and on its underside were ultramarine boxes. Five boxes in total with the widest on the right diminishing to a thin box on the left. (Untitled 1976)
“Now, the Minimalists tell you how to think about their art so you got to play by their rules. But what if this piece was illusionistic? Is illusionism really lost in abstraction? Why?
And as far an allusion goes: that’s still ultramarine, or, as we say in the biz, Our Lady blue.” She pointed at the ultramarine boxes. “I know you’re not art history savvy but if you look at Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (1446), the Holy Spirit, represented by a beam of light, cuts across a blue background that looks exactly like this. This is what a modernist annunciation looks like. At least that's my theory”
I had nothing to say.
“Believe it or not, the Minimalists did more to influence architecture, décor, and design, than any Picasso or Monet picture. They and their predecessors, the Russian Constructionists, gave sight to Modernity with shit like this. The box is life. Life in a city is lived in a grid. We live in squares and walk on square sidewalks and look at square buildings. We see more geometry in an hour then our great-grandfathers saw their whole lives.”
A lanky museum guard announced that the museum would be closing in ten minutes. We saw two Judd pieces and the rat bed. All of us patrons walked toward the escalator in a docile shuffle. Shala seemed lost in thought. This was my moment, my time to say something. Something grand. I saw somebody with sunglasses on their head and said, “I heard on the news some kid snuck sunglasses into a museum of modern art and everyone thought it was a readymade.”
Shala shrugged her shoulders. “Oh yeah, how do you think I feel about that? Nobody’s visually literate so when some snot pulls a trick on them everyone gets a chuckle out of their own ignorance. I think that’s what the aesthetic temple does, it allows you see bullshit things like sunglasses or flowers that you might otherwise screen away in everyday life. It’s why we have the genre of still life. And, those same people strolled by Rauschenberg, nobody gives them crap about that. People wouldn’t notice a masterpiece if it was in front of them, you think they’re going to catch onto sunglasses?”
God, I knew I shouldn’t have brought up the sunglass. It was something I heard on NPR. Pre-arranged material never works out. “Besides,” Shala softened, “That was in California. Californians venerate their sunglasses.”
Shala dug the tip of her boot on the escalator step. I think she was a little embarrassed by this outburst. I thought of all those other people she took to the museum. Maybe they said something out of line too. Maybe they didn’t like having to look at boxes for forty minutes. Maybe none of those friends ever came back to the museum with her. Maybe Shala was never successful in her endeavors.
Anyway, it didn’t bother me.
We stepped out and a wind slapped us, awkward seagulls hung on it, and the hacky sack clouds were being kicked across the sky by it. “This is the best part,” she said, “Life is very vivid after going to the museum.”
Gabe Congdon grew up in Grand Junction Colorado, and now resides in Seattle, Washington. His stories have appeared in Bartleby Snopes, Jokes Review, and decomP. He's currently working on a novella about the Renaissance.