Spiritual Minimalism

The 1995 Carnegie International Exhibition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“Possibly steel is so beautiful because of all the movement associated with it, its strength and functions. . . . I am slightly pleased when I see rust on stainless material. The soft acid stain which denotes either contamination of iron from the grinding wheel or lack of balance in the alloy, or possibly it states philosophically that the stainless is not wholly pure and has a susceptibility, as do humans, to the stain of avowed purpose, to the actual.”

—David Smith as cited in Rosalind E. Krauss,
Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith.

Plywood, ash, metal screws, mill aluminum, chrome, felt, styro- foam, glass, astralon, heating cable, nails, cement, steel, vinyl, resin. These are new artists’ substances, materials alloyed together to create the works for the Carnegie International Exhibition held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, approximately every four years for the past century. The centennial International, which took place from November 5, 1995 through February 18, 1996 and was curated by Richard Armstrong, invited thirty-six artists from around the world. The International originated as a project of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, whose image, hovering over the bridged city of Pittsburgh, links the idea of industry—and therefore “progress”—to the arts and humanities like a loving grandfather bestowing his blessing upon a young bride and groom. His democratic, ultra-philanthropist concept for the exhibition was that “the gallery is for the masses of the people primarily, not for the educated few.” Big industry’s indelible mark in the area—especially steel-making and petro-chemical refining, bent glass production, and electrical power generation—have left legacies that continue to fuel the arts in this country and provide the raw materials to fund and promote the arts, even a century later.

Each International tends not to create a consensus of who’s who, like the Whitney Museum’s Biennial, but instead to center around a few loose themes in contemporary art production. The artists in such an intentional blockbuster exhibition as the Carnegie united this year to perform an über-realistic, sobering assembly of materials and concepts addressing, in my view, materiality itself, largely in terms of the body, and an exploration of negative space or the anti-form, anti-hero, anti-body. Materially and thematically, this exhibition seems to be underlined by the sobriety of a post-industrial landscape, not unlike the actual one in which it finds itself situated, the city of Pittsburgh. It searches for a certain minimalism of being; minimalism, in this sense, is a basic outlining structure, as if to lay bare the conflation of contemporary urbanity and convoluted aestheticism in favor of a back to the basics approach to art/life. I do not propose to bestow yeahs or nays on the curator, the choices made, or artists included/not included. That has already been done; but rather to articulate one version of the search for truth that any successful exhibition should inspire. It is the task at hand for both the contemporary artist and the contemporary audience.

Figure 1.

Leonardo Drew, Number 43, 1994. Wood, rust, fabric, cooton, string, and mixed media, 335.3 x 731.5 x 10.2 cm. Collection of the artist. Photo: Courtesy Tim Nye Porductions, New York.

In contrast to the criticism about the industrial world at its onset in late nineteenth-century Europe, in which it was largely considered to be mechanistic, dehumanizing, and de-personalizing, the materials and imagery of post-industry evoke the spiritual and often the romantic. The re-presentation of the remnants of industry and mechanism today convey the abstract personal, the substance of human spirit. They bring forth a sense of loss or vulnerability that tends now toward the organic. The rust and decay of the once seemingly indestructible mill façades now embody a sense of human susceptibility and the exhausted spirit of physical labor. One example is the work of African-American artist Leonardo Drew, entitled Number 43, which employs rusting, oxidized, and discarded materials of decaying industry and waste, transforming them into a personal homage to labor and its...