The Politics of Minimalism
A reductive approach to interiors
“The spotless gallery wall, through a fragile evolutionary product of a highly specialized nature, is impure. It subsumes commerce and esthetics, artist and audience, ethics and expediency. It is in the image of the society that supports it, so it is a perfect surface off which to bounce our paranoias. The temptation should be resisted. The white cube kept philistinism at the door and allowed modernism to bring an endpoint to its relentless habit of self-definition” — Brian O’Doherty
Earlier this year the California estate that Kim Kardashian shares with Kanye West was featured in Architectural Digest. With the help of designers Axel Vervoodt (b. 1947) (whom Kanye met at antiques fairs and exhibitions in Maastricht and Venice) and Vincent Van Duysen (b. 1962), amongst others, after seven years, what had formerly been a relatively nondescript suburban McMansion was transformed into something approximating a “minimal monastery” (as Kim told Vogue, or perhaps, as has been suggested, a mental asylum, depending on one’s own aesthetic inclinations). Kim is a reality TV star and acolyte of pop culture, from a family now known for its vulgar excess, and so why exactly did she choose this esoteric ode to minimalism? Perhaps it was the choice of her husband, Kanye, a Trump supporting, quick tempered, patron of the arts, an inherent bundle of contradictions who sold his Maybach limousine to buy a Jean Royère Ours Polaire sofa; prescient perhaps, given it’s one of the few pieces of furniture to feature in the couples newly refurbished interiors, which on the whole, are perfectly pristine, empty spaces, chaste, spotless and unsullied by the bourgeois accouterments of everyday life. Entirely beige, or rather, varying shades of bleached wood and off-white plaster, one can only differentiate walls and floors by gradients of light and shadow. When Kim posted photographs of the home on her Instagram account the reaction was somewhat divided: “Only the rich can afford so much of nothing” one person commented. “A lot of people don’t like the minimalist style, but I live for it” wrote another.
Under construction, Maison de Verre, Paris (1932) by Pierre Chareau
B306 Chaise Longue (1928) designed by Perriand, pictured at Villa la Roche
This is all, essentially, a matter of taste, for this deliberate abundance of nothingness speaks of an aspirational trend for curated interiors. Traditionally the nouveau riche would fill their homes with all the trappings of wealth and riches as a visual reminder of their position in the world. Kim’s sparsely decorated intentional emptiness goes beyond mere wealth; it speaks of a desire to be taken seriously by a bracket of society who understand exactly what it takes to put together such a collection (as well as the perils of a knock off Senat chair), and who will immediately recognise the names behind her pricey collection of furniture and art; chairs by Pierre Jeanneret (1896-1967), lighting by Serge Mouille (1922-1988), sculptures by Vanessa Beecrofall (b. 1969) and Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), all, I’m sure, with an excellent pedigree behind them. These pieces speak of education and refinement, an appreciation of form, simplicity and an understanding of the beauty inherent in good design. “I really didn’t know anything about furniture before I met Kanye,” Kim told AD, “but being with him has been an extraordinary education. I take real pride now in knowing what we have and why it’s important.” Of course this is nothing new, and from very early in in the twentieth century, minimalism and simplicity became a sign of wealth. In 1925 after dining at the apartment of French interior designer and doyenne of reductive elegance Jean Michel Frank (1895-1941), the artist Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) wrote to a friend, “Very charming young man, pity the burglars took everything he had!”
As well as mere aesthetics, there was a socio-political aspect to why the wealthy suddenly desired simplicity. The haute bourgeoisie of interwar Europe felt the social pressures of a new age which called for simpler and more affordable furniture. By the mid-thirties the effects of the 1929 crash were being felt in Europe. The affluent classes — who during the golden age had commissioned entire suites of furniture — were no longer capable of supporting their former lavish lifestyles. Le Corbusier (1887-1965) declared that “A house is a machine for living in,” and architects like Eileen Gray (1878-1976), Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) and Pierre Chareau (1883-1950) designed furniture from glass and steel which, although less expensive than that veneered in precious woods, remained true to the high-quality craftsmanship that had set French decorative arts apart since the eighteenth century. Even more extreme in advocating a puritanical, stripped-back modernism, architects and designers of the German Bauhaus were using industrial materials to create domestic spaces inspired by hospitals and sanatoria. In 1926 the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (1889-1954) — referred to by some as the “unknown” Bauhaus director — sent a photograph to the art critic Adolf Behne, bearing the caption Die Wohnung (“The Apartment”), depicting a room staged by himself using found furniture and objects: several foldaway elements — a bed, a table topped by a gramophone, two chairs, one hanging on the wall, and a shelf unit holding jars containing unknown content. Distinguished as much by the absence of objects, and spatial characteristics, as the avant-garde nature of its design, Meyer was articulating a manifesto for a different principle of living, or rather, a radical, anti-bourgeois lifestyle. Prestige, he said, resides “in the attitude of the house-owner and not on the wall of a room.”
‘Die Wohnung’ (the apartment) (1926) by Hannes Meye, illustrated in Die Neue Welt
After the Nazis gained ascendancy in the Dessau elections, the Bauhaus was forced to close and following the occupation of Paris, architects like Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), Walter Gropius (1883-1969), and Le Corbusier were forced to flee Europe for America. The emerging architect Phillip Johnson (1906-2005) (then director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art), a renowned propagandist for a particular vision of architectural modernism, introduced American’s to their pared back aesthetic, which he branded the International Style. Johnson’s own Glass House, built in 1947-1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut, was a gathering place for artists, architects, and cultural figures. Contrary to the luxurious lifestyle played out within, Johnson’s house was a simple, minimalist glass box inspired by van der Rohe's earlier 1945 sketches for the as yet unbuilt Farnsworth House.
A showcase of the International Style, the Glass House is externally symmetrical, effectively a single room, organized around an interior brick cylinder, which stands in contrast to the incorporeality of its transparent skin (which Johnson once characterised as “very expensive wallpaper”). The only scant furniture is by van der Rohe, along with a freestanding kitchen island and wardrobe unit shielding a sleeping area. “Comfort is not one of my interests,” Johnson said. “You can feel comfortable in any environment that's beautiful.” The same thought process was presumably employed by Vervoordt in his designs for the Kardashian-West mansion, whose otherworldly aesthetic seems an unlikely backdrop to a family with four young children. When Forbes reporter Zack O’Malley Greenburg visited Kim and Kanye’s home in 2019, he was asked by a handler to cover his shoes with “little cloth booties,” so as to avoid damaging the Belgian plaster floors that, if scuffed, could only be repaired by a crew flown in from Europe.
Whilst the term “minimalist” is often used to describe such spartan, sterile interiors, its origins are altogether different. Minimalism emerged in Manhattan in the early 1960s among a group of young artists who were self-consciously renouncing recent art they thought had become stale and academic. Their sculptures were frequently fabricated from industrial materials — for e.g. Donald Judd’s (19280-1994) aluminium boxes and Dan Flavin’s (1933-1996) fluorescent light fixtures — and emphasized anonymity over the expressive excess of Abstract Expressionism. The term was first used by art theorist Richard Wollheim in a 1965 essay on Judd, Flavin and other artists whose work ostensibly had “minimal art content”. As Wollheim saw it, minimalism wasn’t a question of there being nothing to look at. Instead, it was about creating a complex encounter with a single object, often an everyday thing, such as a brick or fluorescent lighting tube, that otherwise could easily be overlooked. Looking back through the canon of modernist design, and applying this principle to interiors, the Wittgenstein house (1928), designed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein for his sister, Margaret, might be considered an early example of minimalism. Wittgenstein spent a year designing each of the radiators which, unusually, fold around corners, so as to preserve the symmetry of the rooms, and in the absence of any decoration, details like door-handles (simple bent brass tubes, with no covers or faceplates, fitted directly into the doors) become a guiding element of the overall interior aesthetic.
Philip Johnson’s Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut
Of course, when Wollheim coined the term, he could hardly have anticipated that it would persist up to the present as an important topic in art theory. Although it was initially conceptualised as defining the criteria that a work must fulfil so to qualify as “art” in an institutional sense, it soon became synonymous with a group of artists (Judd, Robert Morris (1931-2018), Flavin, Carl Andre (b. 1935), Robert Smithson (1938-1973) and Sol Le Witt (1928-2007)) whose work focused on positioning primary geometric objects around a gallery space. “The white wall’s apparent neutrality is an illusion,” the artist and critic Brian O’Doherty wrote in his seminal 1976 essay, also in Artforum, “Inside the White Cube”. It subsumes “commerce and esthetics, artist and audience, ethics and expediency. It is in the image of the society that supports it, so it is a perfect surface off which to bounce our paranoias.” In other words, whilst the minimalist architectural devices used by such galleries might present the illusion of artistic and intellectual integrity, they are in fact complicit in the problems of capitalism. (In the nineteen-nineties even Donald Trump, the high priest of gaudy gilt excess, with no obvious affinity for minimalism, asked Philip Johnson to redesign the entrance to his Casino in Atlantic city.) Discussing the physically empty, but conceptually overloaded conditions for exhibiting contemporary art, he adds, “The wall’s content becomes richer and richer (maybe a collector should buy an ‘empty’ gallery space).” (Perversely, Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) was essentially just that, other than a ramp under which out of sight, Acconci, allegedly, masturbated, basing his fantasies on the movements of the visitors above him.)
Subsequently, minimalism found its way into the context of various art disciplines, including theatre, music, literature and film. It was first used in the context of architecture and interiors from the late 1970s, almost unnoticed, to describe those works of an extremely reductive — minimal — appearance. Only from the mid-1980s do we see the widespread adoption of “minimalism” and “minimal architecture” to describe a new design movement characterized by a combination of basic essentials, context and place, emptiness, infinite space, limited colours, simplicity, and the use of concrete, glass, and natural materials and light. The white cube continues to inform the twenty-first century design aesthetic, and presumably, played a role, whether conscious or unconscious, in the vaulted interiors of the Kardashian-West residence, which, when taken to such an extreme, speak as much of wealth and aspiration as the pedimented stone edifices of the eighteenth century country house. This radically reductive approach to design is deliberately intended to evoke a gallery space, where each object is highlighted for its rarity and intellectual value. Such interiors are intended to project an image of cultural superiority, of artistic understanding and appreciation. The grotesque magnification of personal wealth has bred rampant consumerism and a rapacious greed for manufactured Pop culture. Since the 2008 financial crisis, we’ve seen a mad amplification of the luxury market. Collecting has always been an exclusive occupation, and in doing so “collectors” are able to set themselves apart from crowd. Perhaps, having conquered the world of reality television, Kim now has set her sights set on becoming this generations answer to Marie-Laure de Noailles.