MINIMAL GAINS: Tom McPhillips considers what it was like to find oneself in the midst of a Theatre of the Absurd performance.
Sheila’s writing about her experiences of “time” in and beyond the A Course, got me to thinking that I’ve been missing something rather fundamental all these years. In my earlier blog I described some of the contexts that I felt constituted the cultural environment of the A Course. We were given instructions, but no explanations. We in turn attempted to provide explanations to answer our own questions about what was happening and what lay behind the choices that had been made for us.
Sheila mentions Samuel Becket and describes the situation of the A Course as a form of theatre. Doubtless the staff were aiming to set up a situation that was as neutral as possible. Yet in order to achieve that faceless neutrality a lot of theatricality was involved. In order to appear detached and impersonal they actually had to put on performances daily, morning and matinee. They then had to maintain the personas they created for their own deportment. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched that if our teaching staff were actors appearing, if not onstage, but in studio, we were in turn the audience for the production that was the “A Course” starring Atkins, Evans, Harvey and Jones and furthermore the play was destined soon to be made into a movie! But as Sheila also remarks, having invited us in to see their production they neatly turned the tables on us - they were the ones who sat down to watch the show!
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| The-Locked-Room, Materials project, 1970 |
Being in the room it often felt as if we were in the middle of a Theatre of the Absurd performance. We came into the studio each morning to find teachers who didn’t teach, no talking please! No photography permitted! There were performances daily at appointed times, latecomers not allowed in until the second act, well, the parallels are pretty obvious… It was quite Kafkaesque, all of this, staff presenting themselves as faceless bureaucrats, offering no reason for what seemed their unreasonable behavior as they shuffled papers, gave carefully scripted replies to any variety of question, withheld information, requiring that we either accepted their terms or leave the space, no bending of the rules and no argument. Later the further absurdity of a square of chairs drawn up with our names on, where we were expected to sit in order for these speechless staff to observe our conversation, periods when talking was allowed but work was not. What astonishes me now is how consistent and self-disciplined they all were, keeping up appearances and careful to maintain their facade!
I say it resembled one of Kafka’s scenarios, but the truth is, I imagine, the staff were trying for something as un-authoritarian as possible. Yet the effect couldn’t help but seem authoritarian, there were the uncooperative operatives, the absurdism of explanation-refusal, the signage that constantly reminded us to obey “The Rules”, the theater of locking and unlocking the room several times a day. In trying to provide a situation in which we would enjoy as much freedom as possible, to achieve that objective, our actions were heavily restricted. It’s a kind of cautionary tale for what often happens when humans strive for utopia, what starts off as a “free” society might easily dissolve into a totalitarian one.
In putting the book together I’ve had several conversations with my fellow contributors and I was slightly surprised to find that almost everyone I spoke to were at the time fans of Minimalist Sculpture, specifically Don Judd, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. In fact, they all noted that it might have been the thing that had sparked their interest in doing a sculpture course. This was my own experience, particularly after seeing a show of Minimalist artists in London – I think it was at the Tate or the ICA - Why would I find that surprising? Well, in general, most of the work that we performed in the A Course wasn’t particularly minimal. As I noted in my previous post, “Process” was where we were at. When presented with a white cube we couldn’t just leave it untouched, we attacked it, broke it into fragments, almost obliterated it by turning it to dust. A white cube might have been a perfect object for Mr Judd to leave in its pristine state, but there was no way we could leave the thing intact, after all, we needed to fill our days and pass the time. We needed something to do!
The Minimalists attempted to make their works totally objective, unexpressive, and non-referential. Don Judd said that what they up to was removing subjectivity from the situation so that what would remain were purely “objective” objects. What this reminded me of was that when recently I was emailing Pete Eddlestone, one of my fellow A Coursers (who unfortunately isn’t one of our contributors since he was by far the funniest member of our group and I would have loved to read his take on those times). Well, anyway, he told me the following story - he had somehow got into conversation with Anthony Caro, the famous sculptor who headed the Advanced Course at the time. Caro was explaining very seriously that currently he was particularly interested in a particular level - he suddenly crouched down and stretched his hand out to indicate an area about seven inches above the floor. Pete remembered that it was such a supremely “Spinal Tap” moment, that it was all he could do to keep a straight face. His story reminded me of the famous Q&A between the sculptors Robert Morris and Tony Smith, talking about Smith’s six-foot steel cube:
Q: Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?
A: I was not making a monument.
Q: Then why didn’t you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?
A: I was not making an object.
-an exchange one can either consider deeply profound or deeply trivial - I’m sure Christopher Guest could have made much hay if he’d aimed his lens at the art world and mocked it as affectionately as he did heavy metal and dog shows…
Getting back to what I was saying, I’ve always, even if rather facetiously, thought of the A Course as a product of Conceptualism. The conceit that the whole endeavor was a conceptual artwork with we students as the unwitting protagonists in a grand scheme that the staff would one day publish in ArtForum Magazine, is something I’ve always suspected. Concept Art was certainly the thing a lot of us were smitten with, it was very much the ruling movement of that moment in the early 70’s. It’s not hard to imagine our tutors presenting their Course as an art work – the defining of parameters that once being set in motion, would determine the outcomes - those interestingly open-ended and unpredictable dialogs of inceptors and incipitated.
Now, I think I’ve found a better key to the understanding of the genesis of the A Course – The Course was above all a reduction, if not quite a reductio ad absurdum, then at least to a very stripped-down practice of education. What it plainly was, was a product of Minimalism (Of course!) – by removing all possible subjective influences, of teaching, whether by direction, reference to art history or personal preferences, the staff above all sought to objectify education the way the Minimalists had sought to objectify Art.
One of Minimalism’s big ideas was to remove any hint of biography from the work. Our course staff were definitely onboard with that, they were trying very hard to be personality-free. They were also trying very hard to fabricate for us an experience that was devoid of their influence, a teaching style that took minimalism to the extreme. Provide a space, provide no art instruction and minimal amounts of the most basic materials, then only observe and avoid any further participation.
In googling around the subject, I found a New York Times article from 2016, by Kyle Chayka, who I think makes some very good points. Today what we call minimalism has taken on a different character – we talk of minimalism as a design aesthetic, or as a life style. Back in the 60’s “Minimalism” was the word the critics used to insult the artists, it was a put-down of the emerging movement accusing it of “minimal” art content, yet because it called it out so accurately, the word quickly became not only what the movement was called, but inevitably was also its very definition. Chaya writes:
“Still, the artists were maximalists of a sort: The austerity of their objects freed the viewer to experience the work in any way they wished- “Minimalism can return you to this basic state where you’re perceiving purely,” says David Raskin, a professor of contemporary art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “Less is more because you strip away the familiar,” opening an opportunity to see the world without preconceptions. The objects might look mundane, but rather than the plain metal box on the floor, it’s the stark sensory experience the object incites that is the art, no previous knowledge necessary. The artist opens a radical infinity of possibilities. “Minimalism in the 1960s was very much along the lines of taking LSD,” says Miguel de Baca, an associate professor of art history at Lake Forest College.”
That last comment by de Baca, I find really interesting – the idea that “Minimalism” is “mind-expanding” does make it more understandable as to why it arose from that particular generation of 60’s artists. Did the A Course by its minimalist attitude create an environment that was more “mind-expanding” than a more “typical” art course? Reading that NYTimes article I’m struck that, “Stripping away the familiar”, “Stark sensory experience”, “Basic state”, “Less is more”, “No previous knowledge necessary”, “A radical infinity of possibilities”, these are all slogans that feel very comfortable when talking about the A Course. I hope the answer to that question as to how it compared to other art courses, is something that will emerge from the investigation we are currently making into the history and outcomes of the Course.
From now on, when I consider the A Course I will think of Minimalism and I really have no evidence for that, the only substantiation I can offer is that at least three of our tutors were practicing artists, (only Atkins/Kardia would describe himself as primarily an educator), my suspicion is that they approached setting up and running the A Course with a not entirely different attitude to the one they applied to doing their own art. In this case they were producing the most minimal education experience they could come up with, to create an emptiness that they hoped their students’ experiences couldn’t help but flood into.
Sheila’s practice of Zen also brings up a thought that up until now, I hadn’t really put Minimalism and Zen together quite so strongly, but now I see those two terms in proximity, it’s pretty obvious they’ve always been closely related. Though Sheila will probably correct me, I think of Zen primarily as a reduction of experience to enable insight. Which, again is a reasonable way to define the A Course. Zen is tough to define, but Wikipedia says; “the emphasis on “suchness”, reality just-as-it-is, which has to be expressed in daily life, not in words. So, for now, I’ll concentrate on my suchness and write no more words…
Tom McPhillips
21 April 2018
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