To be sure, contemplating minimalism in Las Vegas has an air of cognitive dissonance, but anyone examining one of the last half-century's major art trends will find no better setting.
The Las Vegas Art Museum's recently opened Southern California Minimalism invites consideration of the distinctions between East and West Coast art, and minimalism certainly offers a clutter-free environment for doing that. At the same time, and oh-so-many miles away, two Downtown galleries project contrasting visions of the minimalist movement: the blunt, brutalist prints of Richard Serra: Trajectories and Transversals at Godt-Cleary Projects (see the Weekly, January 19-25), and the chewy confections of rock-et pop: Angela Kallus at Dust Gallery.
The enigmatic title of Kallus' show evokes an assortment of associations, from "rock and pop," as in music; to "rocket pop," as in a Lichtenstein or Rosenquist image from the 1960s; to "rock" and "pop," as in the rocklike objectivity of minimalism vs. the allusive properties of pop art. Kallus riffs on all of these meanings in her large-scale, mostly square acrylic paintings. Dispensing with her rococo cake-decoration—dense clusters of acrylic rosettes and the like—Kallus has limited herself to circular platters of raised ridges that cannot avoid being seen as what we used to call "records" in the 1960s heyday of rock, pop, pop art and minimalism. The paintings' titles are names of desserts and treats, and her lively palette of secondary and tertiary tones tempts the viewer to dismiss them as froth. But while the airbrushed white and orange of "dream bar" milk memories of ice cream truck evenings, the painting and its fellow popsicles are as rigorously objective as anything at LVAM.
In a review for Arts Monthly of A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968, a 2004 survey of minimalism at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, critic Michael Archer notes that the exhibition outlined the differences not only between East Coast and West Coast art, but between pop and minimalism. Archer comments on catalog essayist Jonathan Flatley's comparison of pop's Andy Warhol and minimalist titan Donald Judd: "... [H]e suggests that in the increasingly technologised, consumer culture of the time, both artists had concluded that 'the only affecting art was one that appeared to be utterly affectless.'"
In other words, whether or not a work of art referred to something else, the times called for it to be entirely dispassionate—an odd prescription, when you think about it, for such a passionate decade. But each movement asked the viewer to consider facts beyond the artwork. Pop wanted you to reflect on consumer culture, and minimalism, at its best, prompted you not only to reconsider what you expected of art, but to understand your presence in space.
Appropriately, when you walk into Southern California Minimalism, your immediate impression is of open space uncomplicated by art. Both Judy Chicago's "Trinity" (1965) and John McCracken's "Untitled (blue sheet)" (1966), at the far end of the gallery, lend it an ad hoc ambiance—especially McCracken's lacquered plank, which leans upright against the wall, "taking an ambiguous position between painting and sculpture," as The New York Times' Grace Glueck put it in a review of a McCracken gallery show last year. In the center of the room stands one of the least-substantial works in the show, Robert Irwin's "Column" (1967), a clear-acrylic, chevron-shaped shaft that flings sweeping curves of refracted light along the travertine floor. Although rail-thin and transparent, it rules the room.
And so it goes, each work in its way asking you to reassess your assumptions about what it is and where you are: Two light-projection pieces by James Turrell that seem to shape-shift as they shape their darkened rooms; Peter Alexander's endlessly engaging, cast-resin cube (1966) that has trapped a sphere in amber; Irwin's "Untitled (#2221)" (1968), a cast acrylic disk that seems to deliquesce as it casts overlapping shadows.
In her essay for the show's brochure, LVAM's consulting executive director, Libby Lumpkin, asserts that California minimalism, compared with that of the East Coast, is "more elegant and glamorous, often more romantic, and always more cool." That helps explain the candy-flaked, lozenge-like works of Craig Kauffman, which no one would expect to have originated east of the Mississippi. Writing about Judy Chicago in The Nation, Arthur C. Danto observes that the young artist, then Judy Gerowitz, had won inclusion in the groundbreaking minimalist exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum in 1966 by conforming, as she saw it, to the austere modern style of the male-dominated art world. Her use of color might have betrayed "a certain feminine sensibility," writes Danto, but at the time it was considered very LA.
Chicago's two works at LVAM, like Kallus' at Dust, can be read as feminine or Fresno, depending on your take. More important, they point to the possibility of making art that is at once deceptively simple and appealingly complex. That's Vegas, baby.