DOES MINIMALISM MATTER?

Reading a piece in the current edition of Intelligent Life magazine I was surprised, and saddened by the facts announced within its pages. Stephen Bailey, cultural commentator and author of 'A-Z of design' charts his recent experiences. In a meeting with Grayson Perry, one of Britain's best-known artists he was faced with Perry's return from the Basle art fair where he had been struck with the fact that everything [art] was happening all at once.

"There is no longer a ruling style or taste", he repeated. "No common agreement on what is avant-garde and what is retrograde". In his judgement, today the all purveying thing is that the happening thing is just what is happening. He closes with the very essence of this all-embracing fact, "We have reached the end of isms".

Minimalism was the last, and the most curious. A comparison with architecture, art, food, and design. When estate agents are touting properties as 'minimalist-style', you somehow suspect that the vitality of the ism may have forelornly left the building long ago. Was minimalism the last absurd, exhausted spasm of neophilia, or will it remain, the ultimate refinement of sensibility: the last place for us to go when we've been everywhere? But for all that I adore minimalism.

I have adopted its disciplines and order when approaching special photography projects. It permits a certain cleansiness; an aesthetic order that allows creative sensibility. It has been with us since about the fifth century BC, when Socrates declared that a well-made dung bucket was better than a poorly made gold shield. I like the fuss-free restrictions. When I approach a challenge, a photographic dilemma I often think it through by a minimalistic initiation. It might be its fundemental clear-cut divisions, or the temporal posessions that induce a calm in my head, but come what may I repeatedly deduce the route I should take; never regretting the result. Space does furnish the mind.

  


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