Post-Minimalism

Post-Minimalism. A term coined in 1971 by the American critic Robert Pincus-Witten (1935– ) to refer to developments in American art that succeeded Minimal art (which had been the dominant avant-garde trend of the 1960s); Pincus-Witten first used it in print in an article entitled ‘ Eva Hesse: Post-Minimalism into Sublime’ in the November 1971 issue of Artforum. It generally implies a reaction against the values of Minimalism, but sometimes it is used more neutrally, with the term ‘Anti-Minimalism’ being used to suggest a more deliberate antipathy. The broadness with which the terms are used can be gauged from the third edition (1986) of H. H. Arnason's History of Modern Art, in which chapter 24 is entitled ‘The Post-Minimal Seventies’ and embraces such phenomena as Conceptual art, Land art, Performance art, Process art, and Video art. The more or less common factor linking these was a desire to get away from ‘the emphatic object qualities of Minimalist art … along with the commercialism that had overtaken the art scene … To avoid the stigma of commercialism and to recover something of the moral distance traditionally maintained by the avant-garde in its relations with society at large, certain anti-Minimalists ceased to make objects altogether, except as containers of information, metaphors, symbols, and meaningful images.’

Pincus-Witten also coined the word ‘Maximalism’ as a ‘shock value journalistic term’ to characterize various forms of art that were fashionable in the early 1980s, notably Neo-Expressionism. It has also been used loosely as a synonym for Postmodernism. Pincus-Witten published Post-Minimalism: Essays 1966–76 in 1977 and Post-Minimalism into Maximalism: American Art 1966–86 in 1987.