Minimum Review – Primitive, strangely weak, and proud of its mint man’s weight | art

A A perfect cone of white salt, taller than me. A low, circular mound of fine, granular soil rises to meet me, like swollen ocean waves. Not a speck escapes its edge. A roughly hemispherical dome of soft pressed clay, its surface cracked as it dried from the mold in which it was cast. The hemisphere stands on the ground like an igloo in the desert. Nearby, a wall of beeswax bends, smelling slightly of honey and pepper. It leads me to a dense barrier of tangled branches, leaves and autumn berries. Inside, it suddenly feels like Christmas, which I suspect is the effect the artist was aiming for.

American artist Meg Webster’s sculptures are round objects placed around a circular space that rises to a distant glass and iron roof on the Mercantile Exchange, which was originally built in the 1760s as a wheat silo and stock exchange. It later became the Paris Commodity Exchange, and now the stock exchange is home to French billionaire François Pinault’s art collection, which numbers more than 10,000 works of art. Dramatic, vulnerable, and strangely beautiful, Webster’s art suggests minimal art, but its materiality is somehow more primitive than that. I last saw her work at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York. Jessica Morgan, Dia’s director, sponsored Minimal, working with Pinault’s extensive collection and loans from other institutions.

But this is less structured than wrestling, as much with the massive building as with the art. The Stock Exchange is a kind of Tower of Babel, and Minimalism is a strange mixture of individual displays, like Webster’s, and rooms in which individual works by different artists are purchased together objectively, according to criteria of light, balance, surface, grid, monochrome, and materiality. Aside from spaces devoted to Webster, On Kawara, Robert Ryman, Brazilian neo-concrete designer Lygia Pape (a brief showcase in itself) and Japanese group Mono-ha, it often feels a bit rushed and routine.

Things start well, full of promise and delight, as we plunge into a room occupied by a magnificent group of small, late paintings by Riemann, whose white, pooled fields of pigment push, settle, and push the edges of their colorful canvas supports. White sings against rust red, dirty khaki, and muted green. Ryman did a lot with very little. His art is about surface, volume, nuance, touch, and knowing when to stop. A low, rectangular stack of wrapped white candy, the cellophane catching the light, lies on the floor beneath Ryman’s paintings. A reprise of Felix González Torres’s 1991 film Untitled (Portrait of a Father), the amount of candy (about 175 pounds or 79 kg) corresponds to the weight of the artist’s father. Visitors are allowed to help themselves to the mint. González Torres liked the idea that his art would leave a sweet taste in the mouth, a memory.

Around the perimeter of the central space hang antique cabinets in the corridor, originally installed here for the Universal Exposition of 1889. Each contains a single plate on the history of Karawa, in which white letters and numbers indicate the date of manufacture of the plate. If a Japanese artist is not finished by midnight, he has abandoned the work unfinished. Below the painting, in a box, is a page from today’s newspaper, from the city where On Karawa painted the painting. Under the plaque dated October 5, 1982, a newspaper tells us that Israeli planes attacked Syrian missile sites. In the box at the bottom is a June 20, 1975, full-page print advertisement for the movie Jaws, which opened in US theaters that day. The world passes and we pass with it

Including works produced between the 1950s and 2000s by artists working in the Americas, Europe and Asia, Minimal is less a show about Minimalism as a movement than about the “less is more, enough is enough” trend, and there’s plenty of it here. This is minimum to maximum.

From the sparse and somewhat depressing light of the basement, where things flicker and glow and look a little faded, all the way to the first floor, where Susumu Koshimizu’s block of hewn granite stands alone in a wonky, open cube of hemp paper, his bronze quadrilaterals leaning this way and that across the floor as part of a display dedicated to the Mono Ha or School of Things movement, we cross not just continents but worlds of the world. Thought.

The heavy galvanized steel air conditioning ducts you pass on the landing are sculptures by Charlotte Pozninski, who worked almost entirely with prefabricated industrial partitions. On the next floor, I was surrounded by frequently painted Agnes Martin paintings, in a room dedicated to the artist. It also includes a bas-relief in which heavy boat nails have been drilled into parts of the wood, and the roughly hexagonal nail heads are painted dark red and white. It is an uncanny response to the precision of her repetitive, hand-drawn lines and grids, and the infinitesimal shifts in the weight and rhythm of her art.

From Martin we go to a more general look at grids and grids – an Eva Hesse painting of rings, a Sol LeWitt grid drawing of arcs and circles, and a wonderful one-off painting by Bridget Riley from 1966 in which a network of little black ovals messes with your retina and seems to flash in your direction as you lean this way and that, as if there was too much mental stimulation for the brain to handle. British-Pakistani sculptor Rashid Araeen’s 16 large open wooden cubes, in red, yellow, blue and green, occupy a recess, and visitors are invited to re-stack, balance, tilt and configure them in any way they wish.

I soon stopped caring about the aesthetics of thematic displays. I need to take a deep breath and spend some time with Pep, whose career in Brazil included not only a great variety of materials, manners and styles, but also successive movements in Brazilian art, and whose art seemed to cover all the bases, whether minimal or not.

It’s one thing after another, though it’s fun to see New York artist Bryce Marden’s dreary diptych of the early 1970s, with its smooth, waxy surface, in relation to the bright panels of stitched-together, store-bought cotton fabrics stretched by the late German artist Blinky Palermo.

The objects hang from hemp ropes: stones used in Korean weaving practices that also reference shamanic beliefs, and lengths of wood bundled and strung by another rope. I think it’s all about balance, like Richard Serra leaning carelessly and unable to move against the wall. Lengths of barbed wire also hang from the wall, connected to lengths of chain designed by Melvin Edwards. Senga Nengudi’s bulging, tapered clear vinyl bags, partially filled with dyed water, flop and bulge from heavy ropes, suggesting bodies that are sprouting, leaking, and won’t behave.

Ryman appears again, with works more ordinary and more bizarre than those on the ground floor, and I long to find something by Cady Noland, but she is not here. No Bruce Nauman, no Robert Morris. More ropes and chains wind across the floor, in Hassinger’s Marin River, which is meant to evoke the depredations of nature and the voyages that took enslaved Africans to the Americas.

What connects these objects and images and what separates them? Can we look at them all the same way or should we treat them differently? It is very difficult not to just set the record straight, tick off the checklist, keep climbing the stairs and deliberating, chasing an endlessly postponed outcome. The minimum is always with us.