Minimalism: The problem of meaning (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns)

This dissertation examines the development of Minimalism in relation to the problem of meaning, particularly in connection with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Abstract Expressionism. Although Wittgenstein's philosophy is intrinsic to our historical understanding of Minimalism, the thesis argues that Minimalism developed not as a philosophical movement, but rather as technical question about ontological character of the painterly mark. Minimalism began as a question about painting. The thesis explains that the artworks produced between 1959 and 1962/63 were painterly investigations that converted Abstract Expressionism's model expressive content and painterly “style” into the problem of meaning and intention. Minimalism thus emerged not from a rejection of painting, but rather a confrontation with its source of value in the pictorial mark. Wittgenstein's importance, the thesis argues, emerges in relation to proto-Minimalist artwork, rather than the canonical Minimalist “specific object.” And it emerges in a non-uniform manner. Through an examination of early Minimalist artworks, we trace a series of influences that stem from Frank Stella and Jasper Johns to the Minimalists that bifurcate along the lines of two models of meaning: fact and meaning as use.; Fundamental to this examination is a critical understanding of those models of meaning, and the way in which artists and critics employed them to identify the Minimalist strategies, models of both semantic and technical potential. At the same time, the thesis shows that by 1965/66 Minimalism had become over-determined by these models and attempted to dispense with them altogether by introducing a technique they learned from painting, that is, repetition. Repetition had the advantage of posing an event without a model of meaning by virtue of the fact that there was no longer an isolated object as such to be taken up as a kind of assertion or proposition.; Finally, although the dissertation poses questions about the historical details of Minimalism's emergence, it also poses questions about models of meaning in general.