Books about Minimalism from Amazon.com

The Vienna Workshop and the "total work of art" - Founded in 1903 by Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and Fritz Waemdorfer, the Wiener Werkstatte ("Vienna Workshop") was a collective of architects and craftsmen which aimed at fusing architecture and interior design into a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. Experimenting with various materials (gold, precious stones, and papier mache, for example), the artists of the Wiener Werkstatte created buildings and objects which combined classical elegance with streamlined functionality. Though the workshop lasted only thirty years, its influence is still strong today..
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Covering the entire 20th century, this text traces the roots of conceptual art to movements such as Dada, explaining its importance in the 1960s and 1970s and showing that it is still alive today. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp signed the name R. Mutt on a urinal and placed it in a gallery. Even the most strident modernists refused to accept this object as a work of art, however, Duchamp stuck to his guns, claiming that he had chosen the urinal as an art object so it must be art. Such arguments over the nature of art still continue today. Tony Godfrey sees the archetypal work of Conceptual Art as a question and a proposition joined together: "What is Art? This could be Art." This text seeks to demystify the subject by placing the art in its social and political context..
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Originating in America in the late 1960s Minimalism is one of the key movements in twentieth-century art, which has had an enormous impact on subsequent artists, architects, composers and designers. It aimed at reducing sculpture and painting to its most essential forms. Through the work of its key practitioners such as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol leWitt and Robert Morris, this book examines the defining characteristics – and the debates – of the art belonging to movement. Although all these clean-edged works can be identified by certain recurring elements – symmetry, repetition, seriality and factory production – this book documents the surprising variety of work produced within these rigid confines. Alongside images of the key works and the historical exhibitions of Minimalism, author James Meyer presents the sides in the debate around Minimalism from the 1960s to the present, with artists’ statements, reviews and commentary..
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In Six Years Lucy R. Lippard documents the chaotic network of ideas that has been labeled conceptual art. The book is arranged as an annotated chronology into which is woven a rich collection of original documents including texts by and taped discussions among and with the artists involved and by Lippard, who has also provided a new preface for this edition. The result is a book with the character of a lively contemporary forum that offers an invaluable record of the thinking of the artistsa historical survey and essential reference book for the period..
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It's time for blueblood Bernard Johnson to leave his boring life behind and go on The Vacation, a yearlong corporate-sponsored odyssey But instead of seeing the world, Bernard is captured by terrorists, becomes a key figure in secret drug wars, and, worse, doesn't once miss his secure American Dream..
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As one of the most important exponents of American minimal art, Donald Judd (1928–1994) has exerted a lasting influence in the field of architecture Among the lesser-known aspects of his work is a large collection of architectural designs, which explore the relationship of architecture and art. Of special importance for Judd’s work in this field is a former military fort in Marfa, Texas, part of which he purchased and then, beginning in 1971, systematically transformed into one of the largest existing ensembles of contemporary art.

This book is the first to address Judd’s built work from an architectural perspective. With this in view, the Marfa buildings have for the first time been carefully measured and drawn to scale by the author and his students. Using standard CAD drawings together with historical and contemporary photographs, this volume illustrates Judd’s architectural alterations to the buildings in Marfa, and discusses and describes them in its accompanying text. The result is an invaluable source of inspiration for contemporary architecture.

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Compared to other avant-garde movements that emerged in the 1960s, conceptual art has received relatively little serious attention from art historians and critics of the past twenty-five years. This landmark anthology collects for the first time the key historical documents that helped give definition and purpose to the movement. It also contains more recent memoirs by participants, as well as critical histories of the period by some of today's leading artists and art historians. Many of the essays and artists' statements have been translated into English specifically for this volume. A good portion of the exchange between artists, critics, and theorists took place in difficult-to-find limited-edition catalogs, small journals, and private correspondence. These influential documents are gathered here for the first time, along with a number of previously unpublished essays and interviews..
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The simple question “What is minimalism?” has defied simple answers Artists known as minimalists have distinctively different methods and points of view. This highly readable history of minimalist art shows how artists as diverse as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Anne Truitt came to be designated as minimalists during a series of exhibitions in the 1960s.

“I can think of no book that even undertakes a comparable art historical account—not merely tracing a movement year by year, but showing how the movement’s consciousness of itself emerged.” —Arthur Danto, Times Literary Supplement

“Many skeptics deem the sixties too close for comfort and hence not suitable for an art history in the grand tradition. James Meyer proves them wrong. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties establishes a historical precision and seriousness that many have thought lacking in the recent wave of writing about postwar American art.”—Christine Mehring, Art Journal

“By far the best account to date of Minimalism’s development and the essential point of departure for all future research on the subject.”—Pepe Karmel, Art in America

Selected by Architects Journal as one of the Books of the Year (2001)

James Meyer is associate professor of art history at Emory University.

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Minimalist models of grammar are developed logically in this volume and the ways in which they contrast with GB analysis are clearly explained. Spanning a decade of minimalist thinking, the textbook will enable students to better understand the questions and problems that minimalism invites, and to master the techniques of minimalist analysis. Over 100 exercises are provided, encouraging students to put their new skills into practice. The book will be an invaluable text for intermediate and advanced students of syntactic theory, as well as a solid foundation for further study and research within Chomsky's minimalist framework..
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