The Panza collection contained a lot of odd art, from things such as a fold-up bed with a paper mache sculpture placed next to it. When I first looked at this, to be honest I did not know what to think, I was very confused. Then I walked through the entire exhibit without paying too much attention to any specific piece of work to grasp the concept of what minimalism really is, without the definition provided to us from our teacher. Slowly I noticed similar features within all the different works, they all were composed in a way that makes you think outside the box. They all tell different stories but through the same sense of direction, making your mind work to put the pieces together.
I really enjoyed the artist Joseph Kosuth who made the piece Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass-a Description in 1965. This was five giant cubes that each contained a different word describing the cube. All of these words are appropriate to describe all of these boxes. There is no word that cannot be applied to each cube, they all are exactly the same. The concept of having so many descriptions for the same thing in our everyday lives can be applied to the ways we chose to describe thing. There is a different descriptions we can place on the same object without even noticing. Kosuth plays with this idea and allows his audience to see how irrelevant objects can describe our irrelevant ways of describing different things.
Another artist I really enjoyed was Jan Dibbets who created the work called Flood Tide in 1969. This was a collection of photos demonstrating a flood tide that dissolves the pathway to the water at a beach. As the photos get closer to the beach, the more clear they are and the less sand we see. It is very simple with little action going on, but to me it conveys a deep message. As we go down our path in life, just like the walkway developed in the photos, we can see things in our life more clearly. The things that seemed blurry or complicated to understand become more understandable through the years. By the time we reach the shore, there is no pathway visible anymore, that is the end of our life. We can only see the calmness of the waters that lead us to serenity.
At first, this Panza exhibit was really complicated for me to understand making me feel weird about it. But when I stopped and really took a good amount of time to pay attention to every detail of the picture and let the picture capture me, rather than me capture the picture, I began to understand its meaning. It is a process that causes the audience to really meditate with the artwork. Minimalism maybe the most difficult concept I had to grasp so far within art, but it is definitely worth the time to understand it. Art can be weird, but minimalism gives weirdness a whole new meaning.
