Centre for Culture and Ecology Seminar Series - Dr Michael Dango

'Minimalism and Styles of Repairing Environmental Crisis'

This talk re-reads the canon of high minimalist art in the 1960s-1980s United States—from La Monte Young’s droning music to the sculptures of Donald Judd and Robert Morris and the sentences of Raymond Carver and Mary Robison—as a practice of detoxification. This is why minimalism emerged in the United States the same decade that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring launched what Lawrence Buell would later call “toxic discourse.” The talk also considers the afterlife of minimalism in lifestyle fads today (such as Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up), when the paradigmatic environmental crisis has shifted in the public imagination from pollution to climate change.