Minimalism as Detoxification

Whether in La Monte Young’s 5-hour piano solos or Richard Serra’s 100-foot steel sculptures, minimalism has never been minimal. Nor would minimization explain what is distinctive about the sentences of Raymond Carver or Mary Robison when Ernest Hemingway simplified form 50 years earlier. This essay argues that late twentieth-century minimalism is best understood as a practice of detoxification. It emerged in the United States in the same decade that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring visualized an omnipresent threat to American domesticity from environmental pollution, a threat minimalists conflated with racial and sexual anxiety and sought to expunge in their style.