BARE MINIMAL.(Two art exhibitions of Minimalist Art.)

A bicoastal brace of mighty exhibitions--"A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968," at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and "Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present," at the Guggenheim--scans minimalism, the dominant idea in art of the past forty years. The moca show is powerful, though a mite oppressive. The Guggenheim show is full of delights, albeit softheaded. The stereo effect of the two gives depth to one's thoughts about a cultural revolution that encompasses our era--identifiably in music, architecture, and design, and tacitly in most other fields--much as the Baroque did that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a movement in the nineteen-sixties, minimalism corresponded with the rise of a new art world. Gone were the reigns of bohemian geniuses like Picasso and Pollock--the idols of poets, black-sheep heirs, and assorted amateur cognoscenti on small scenes in big cities. In came waves of academically trained artists, curators, and critics; prestige-mongering dealers; celebrity collectors and patrons; and other players in a rolling spectacle of success for success's sake. Minimalist emphasis on contexts--art as a phenomenon in real space and time--exalted "white-box" museums and ad-hoc venues, including, in the instance of earthworks, the great outdoors. The movement's theoretical cast spawned a thousand Ph.D. theses, written to be footnoted in other Ph.D. theses. Minimalism triumphed without ever becoming popular. As a type of art, it is boring, on purpose.

Both shows center on canonical figures from minimalism's high heyday in the early sixties: Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Frank Stella. Both also feature artists who, in the late sixties, launched post-minimalism, the deltalike spread of derived practices that continues to this day: Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra. Other points of overlap are the hedonistic West Coast variant of minimalism--colorfully enamelled planks by John McCracken, tinted glass boxes by Larry Bell--and such abstract painters as resisted a Draconian tendency to spurn all painting as "illusionist": Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman. But the shows differ sharply. The Guggenheim's curators, Lisa Dennison and Nancy Spector, dilate; moca's Ann Goldstein homes in. "Singular Forms" adduces a fuzzy "reductive sensibility"--"an abiding impulse to pare a work of art down to its elemental core"--that casts minimalism as the extreme extension of a time-honored taste, with such predecessors as Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian (who are not in the show) and Ad Reinhardt (who is). This approach makes room for plangent abstractions by Ellsworth Kelly, and trippy space-and-light installations by Robert Irwin and James Turrell. It gives the leading role in the movement to Judd, whose astringent aesthetic was also a decorative style, inflecting obdurate objects with seductive surfaces and gorgeous color: wall-hung cubical mod-ules in polished brass and pink Plexiglas, for example.

By contrast, moca's "A Minimal Future?" insists on the movement's jagged break with all past art. The show begins--and climaxes--with a tremendous installation in a vast white room: "black paintings" from the years 1958-1959 by Stella, and blunt geometric arrangements of wooden beams, bricks, and steel tiles from the sixties by Andre. The room's effect is definitive of high minimalism: enveloping and saturnine. It feels less like the beginning of something than like a funeral. Of course, most art movements are arguments that start with their conclusions. Think of analytical Cubism, and of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings: alphas that were also omegas, leaving subsequent artists to tease out implicit possibilities. Really big ideas in art, as in politics, transfix the culture until some new insight provides a way to see through and around them. I had hoped, apropos of the Guggenheim and moca shows, to announce that minimalism is at last firmly historical--over, that is, as the background model of what it means to address contemporary reality honestly and creatively on a public scale. No such luck. The Andre/Stella room, in Los Angeles, retains crushing authority. It is deathless, if only because, in order to die, a thing must first live. Minimalism forced all vitality out of art and into its surroundings, the sphere of a self-conscious, mythical being who has starred in art discourse all these years: "the spectator," whom ...