Over this past weekend, my wife, Stacey, surprised me with a trip to New York City for my birthday. She knows how much I enjoy roaming Chelsea and visiting museums, so I was thrilled about the trip. While hopping from gallery to gallery, something struck me. The vast majority of the art in Chelsea is in a style we’ve seen before. I saw Abstract Expressionistic work. I saw video work. I saw landscape paintings. I saw photography. I saw hodge-podge installation work. We’ve seen it all before. Some of it in the past 10 years, some of it the past 100 years. Obviously I have no problem with showing work that falls into styles already established. I’m not sure that there can be truly new art. And new doesn’t equate, necessarily, with good.
But what I have noticed on my past few trips to Chelsea is that there is very, very little minimal or reductive work being shown. I use those terms in the broadest sense possible. I know for a fact there remain many artists working in that vein today. I consider myself one of them. We strive to bring something new to the style and make as good of work as we can. So why doesn’t it seem that anyone wants to show it? Do gallerists feel that the genre has been finished? Will the work not sell? Why is ho-hum AbEx work still thrown up on so many gallery walls? It has a longer history than Minimalism. On top of that, Minimalism has not been depleted. It got a bum rap in some circles due to the coldness of work being made by Judd, Andre (on view now in Chelsea), et al. But there is so much minimal/reductive work being made with an enormous amount of sensitivity. In a time of such turmoil/chaos/uncertainty, I’m shocked that at least some gallerists haven’t brought more focus on contemporary minimal/reductive art. I think that type of art can be such a great escape from the real world.
My guess… minimal/reductive art is seen by many fashionable art world folks as irrelevant. I think they’re so incredibly wrong about that. I just wish more galleries were brave enough to find out.
Question to readers: Is there a gallery in Chelsea that focuses on minimal/reductive art? If not now, when was the last time there was (I know Chelsea has only been the center for a relatively short period so expand the question to SoHo, upper east side, or wherever the center was at the time)?
