Enduring, eloquent, Minimalist

The landmark survey of Minimalist painting and sculpture currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art is titled with a question -- “A Minimal Future?” -- that was first posed in 1967 as the cover story in an art magazine. One answer to the question is at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, where a lovely exhibition of six new paintings, each a single-colored square by Los Angeles artist Alan Wayne, elegantly declares: Yes. Four decades on, Minimalism continues.

Wayne, 54, has been exhibiting for 25 years, and he’s hardly the only artist -- established, mid-career or young -- to work in this stripped-down manner. Any number of examples could be seen last weekend in the 50-plus galleries participating in the Scope Art Fair. Minimalist approaches have become a standard feature of the language of art.

That’s partly why the summer’s big event is especially noteworthy. Overlapping MOCA’s big show, which continues through Aug. 2, another mammoth survey will include a mini-survey of 1960s American Minimalism among its more globally oriented interests. “Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s” opens at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on June 13 and continues until October. The endurance of Minimal approaches today make its history especially fascinating.

Wayne’s monochromatic paintings are made by slowly, methodically, repetitively dragging a wide, paint-loaded brush from the top to the bottom of a carefully prepared square canvas. A horizontal canvas might suggest the landscape, with its wide lateral sweep, while a vertical one might reflect the presence of a person standing before it; by contrast, the equilateral dimensions of a square objectify stability. The painting locates itself between nature and culture, between window and mirror, between object and illusion -- between the world and you.

Popular interest in Minimalism today may partly be the residue of a decade-long wave of nostalgia for mid-20th century Modern design -- everything from Mies van der Rohe skyscrapers to the domestic architecture of Richard Neutra. Twenty years ago, those things were a tough sell. But the 21st century has been chaotic from the moment the Y2K worry dawned; Minimal art offers at least a promise of some clarity in experience.

Spend time examining one of Wayne’s paintings and what might appear initially to be a chunk of matte black slips into a rich, light absorbent field of indigo or velvety chocolate-gray. His paintings have no frames; so, a glance at the work from the side shows that the thick paintings are all surface -- a smooth plane of soft, lush color laid atop the exposed armature of stretcher bars and canvas, and made from layer upon sequential layer of paint. Looking back around at the front, another surprising optical shift unfolds: the color-plane begins to open up into deep, seemingly infinite space. Or it starts to close off into a visually impermeable mass. Two dimensions become three, three evaporate into four. Perceptual meditation assumes qualities both startling and serene.

The subject of LACMA’s “Beyond Geometry” is, according to press materials, “the role of radically simplified form and systemic strategies in the evolution of vanguard art across the West in the decades following World War II.” Nearly 200 works by more than 130 artists will be featured. Work by artists in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela will be seen alongside that of colleagues in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, as well as in the more familiar haunts of Western Europe and the U.S.

“Beyond Geometry” will also, as its title implies, look beyond Minimalism. The exploitation of geometric shape and form wasn’t the only way to suppress the subjective emotions of the artist, which New York made into a modern cliche in Expressionist art. Techniques like repetition, ritual, scientific classification and taxonomy, linguistic research and de-materialization -- many of them approaches that huddled under the umbrella of Conceptual art -- are among those that the show will consider. So are perceptual phenomena of Light and Space art, as well as kinetic and Op art. And for today’s post-Conceptual crowd drifting around the Internet, LACMA plans to post a program on the museum website that concentrates on about 20 works, complete with virtual visits to installation works and opportunities for interactive participation. The show represents a welcome trend toward internationalism in art historical study and curatorial practice since the 1990s.

Artists, of course, got there first. That fact is reflected in a traveling exhibition opening June 6 at the UCLA Hammer Museum. “Made in Mexico” surveys recent work by eight Mexican artists as well as by artists from Belgium, Germany, Britain, Spain, Russia, the U.S., Canada and Japan, who worked there. Minimal art of the 1960s was the first vanguard art to be immediately embraced by the American art establishment. Now that instant embrace is global.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The hot list

“A Minimal Future,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Continues through Aug. 2. $5-$8. (213) 626-6222.

“Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. June 13-Oct. 3. $5-$9; children free. Free the second Tuesday of the month and after 5 p.m. (323) 857-6000.