Minimalism: Aram Saroyan's One-Word Poem to Ed Hawkins' Warming Stripes

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In 1965 poet Aram Saroyan wrote a poem consisting of one misspelled word, lighght, which won $750 in federal money and drew attacks in the Senate, including from Jesse Helms. The episode uses it to open a history of minimalism as a rebellion rather than a decorating style. In early 1960s New York, artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Frank Stella turned away from the emotional action painting of Jackson Pollock and made industrial objects of aluminum, plastic and fiberglass that referred to nothing but themselves. They drew on the Bauhaus, the Dutch De Stijl movement of Piet Mondrian and the monochromes Yves Klein painted as early as 1949. Critic Michael Fried dismissed them as literalists whose work only became art when a viewer entered the room.

The episode traces deeper roots to the Japanese ideas of ma, meaningful empty space, and wabi-sabi, beauty in plain and aging things, embodied in the Ryoan-ji rock garden in Kyoto. In 1980s Japan, Tadao Ando and Kazuyo Sejima used raw concrete, light and white surfaces against urban clutter, and John Pawson designed the Calvin Klein flagship in New York. Minimalism shaped Hemingway's iceberg theory, Raymond Carver's prose, the minimal music named by Michael Nyman in 1968, and the films of Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu. In 2018 climate scientist Ed Hawkins reduced a century of temperature data to colored warming stripes.

• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted less is more, and Buckminster Fuller spoke of doing more with less.
• The 90-90 rule asks whether you used an item in the last 90 days and will use it in the next 90.
• Steve Reich's phase shifting lets two identical piano patterns drift slowly out of sync.
• Klein's Monotone Symphony holds one chord for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence.
• Susie Faux is credited with the capsule wardrobe in the 1970s, and Donna Karan championed it in 1985.