Max Minimal

At the start, the rap against Minimal art was that it was -- well, minimally art. Lean to the point of malnutrition, in the eyes of detractors, the impersonal austerity of industrial materials, plain geometric configurations and deadpan paint did not live up to overheated aesthetic expectations, circa 1965.

Which, of course, was Minimalism’s point. Forget the romantic fancy of expressive painting and evocative sculpture; literalness would wipe the slate clean. When “what you see is what you see,” in the oft-quoted words of painter Frank Stella, the strange and compelling beauty of simple consciousness would reveal itself.

Applying a sharp, well-aimed jab to art’s solar plexus, Minimalism meant to stir up insurrection -- “a fiesta of subversion,” as one gleeful writer described the gambit. Two of its most prominent artists -- Donald Judd and Robert Morris -- also wrote art criticism, as did others loosely related to the genre, such as Robert Smithson. Just like Pop Art, the work gained traction by composing its specific forms as a fierce critique of established art. Where Pop lampooned, Minimalism argued.

The argument worked. Minimalism transformed art at the end of the century, as thoroughly as Cubism did at its start.

Pop has been the subject of historical surveys -- it’s user friendly -- but Minimalism, never. That is, until now. “A Minimal Future? Art as Object: 1958-1968” opened over the weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Seven years in the making and postponed more than once, this bracing event is likely to be the most important exhibition of contemporary art in an American museum this year.

MOCA’s show does not seek a rigorous history of definitive examples; it embraces the period’s messy vitality instead. It’s a maximal survey of Minimal art.

Paintings and various hybrid forms aren’t overlooked; they make up almost half the crowded show, which fills MOCA’s entire Grand Avenue building. But sculpture is all over the floor. Emblematic of Minimalism’s critique was the unexpected fate of sculpture’s pedestal.

If art was to function as a catalyst -- as the beginning of a viewer’s open-ended experience, rather than its conclusion -- it had to shake off tired conventions. Modern paintings had already shed their frames. So sculpture was yanked down off its pedestal and deposited on the floor.

Suddenly, art occupied the same terrestrial plane as you and I. Art no longer stood separate from casual experience, undisturbed in lofty ether.

Art had always been “up there,” speaking on behalf of an authoritative church, state or academy -- or at least a mossy art establishment. By contrast, a Carl Andre floor sculpture hugs the ground. Made from industrially fabricated, half-inch-thick plates of hot-rolled steel, arranged in a checkerboard pattern requiring no special skill to compose, the sculpture wears its democratic bona fides on its sleeve.

A show of American art from just five years before would not have looked like this. Pedestals here are ambiguous or superfluous.

John McCracken’s brightly colored, highly lacquered forms take their cues from architecture. Tony Smith’s 6-foot cube of rusted steel recalls a cenotaph -- giving caustic double meaning to the sculpture’s title, “Die.” If Judd’s big boxes of galvanized iron hopped up onto the wall, hanging like paintings, then Anne Truitt’s curious upright planks of painted wood suggest abstract paintings that have popped into three dimensions and leaped out into the room.

On the rare occasion that a pedestal is encountered -- say, the clear-plastic stands that raise up Larry Bell’s small glass boxes to viewing height -- their presence seems intentionally disconcerting. Not only are Bell’s pedestals transparent, as if disappearing before your eyes, they also leave viewers in a quandary. Are you meant to scrutinize them, like Brancusi’s hand-hewn pedestals of wood and stone? Or should they be ignored?

The nearly 20-foot-square checkerboard sculpture by Andre that greets visitors just inside the show’s first room lays the pedestal-dilemma at your feet. It also dares you to do something: The sculpture demands to be walked on. When you do it -- tentatively at first, eyeing the museum guard to see if you’ll be ejected from the building for touching the art -- the Minimalist banishment of pedestals blithely turns on its head. Suddenly, a sculpture that has thrown away its base becomes a pedestal itself.

Minimal art is a pedestal for you, whoever “you” might be. Your perceptions matter, big-time. Minimalism creates, isolates and examines a distinctly contemporary condition of attentive spectatorship.

Even now, 30-some years after my first encounter with an Andre floor-sculpture, the work gives me pause. (“Go ahead,” urged a museum staff person at a preview, as I tapped the edge of the checkerboard with my toe. “It’s OK to walk on it.”) I understand the work intellectually. I know in my head that the use of milled steel is a historical affront to sculpture’s enduring traditions of stone and bronze. I know that the serial repetition of shapes -- six across, six down -- asserts the anonymity of industrial production, rather than claiming the self-expressiveness of the artisan. And mine is the actual body that’s gone missing from the new geometric forms of ‘60s sculpture.

But, with Minimalism, ideas are inseparable from experience. You can’t fully comprehend this floor-sculpture by looking or thinking, only by striding purposefully out onto its plates. Your perceptions matter. It’s a lovely, oddly liberating feeling.

Phenomenology, often credited as an engine for Minimalist art, is the modern German philosophy that says consciousness is contingent upon the interaction between a thinking, perceiving subject and an object that is perceived. True enough. Yet equally salient is good old American pragmatism, which finds the meaning of a concept in the effects produced. There’s a reason Minimalism is the first art movement ever produced wholly by American-born artists: It’s as American as apple pie.

Minimalism’s finest examples remain surprisingly fresh and resilient. MOCA curator Ann Goldstein has assembled about 150 works by 40 artists. Among the classics are Stella’s black “pinstripe” paintings; Ronald Bladen’s trio of tilted monoliths; Jo Baer’s white rectangles of canvas with black borders; Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes, whose light bathes the room (and you); Robert Irwin’s line paintings, where distinctions between figure and ground disappear; Sol Lewitt’s open-framework structures; and Morris’ L-shaped beams of painted plywood.

There are also many middling works by minor artists and unexpected inclusions by major figures -- a skewed leopard-skin chair by Claes Oldenburg, a roomful of Richard Artschwager furniture sculptures. Given the latter two artists’ engagement with representation and illusion, they seem out of place among all the abstract art. And if them, why not Andy Warhol’s 1964 Brillo boxes?

If there’s a flaw in the jam-packed show, it’s an effort to encompass too much. A desire not to misrepresent or reduce a complex moment is salutary, but tangents can dilute the stunning impact of a radical position.

Certainly it’s interesting to note that many artists we now associate with later Conceptual art -- Lawrence Weiner, Michael Asher, Hans Haacke and a half-dozen more -- began with tentative Minimalist work. But too many minor objects by these artists are here. (Less is more.) There are moments when the show seems to propose that Minimalism is significant because it inspired artists that later became stalwarts of Conceptualism.

Still, these are small faults.

The installation opens with a savvy pair of displays -- one for New York artists, one for L.A. artists -- in a nod to “Primary Structures,” the landmark 1966 Minimalist show at Manhattan’s Jewish Museum. (That show’s actual bicoastal pairing -- Smithson and Judy Chicago, neither of whom made a lasting mark as a Minimalist -- is also partially re-created later in MOCA’s show.) Too often L.A.’s art history has been mistakenly characterized as a variation on Manhattan developments, but that doesn’t happen here.

Minimalist objects arose simultaneously in each city in response to advanced ideas in painting -- to Abstract Expressionism in New York and to Abstract Classicism (or hard-edge painting) in Los Angeles. One big difference between them is scale -- often monumental there, typically domestic here. That distinction likely results from coastal contrasts in conditions of spectatorship in the 1960s. New York art was made in anticipation that it would occupy institutional spaces, L.A.’s mostly for homes.

So, perhaps it’s especially momentous that a Los Angeles institution is now the first to accept the tough challenges posed by a survey of Minimal art.

The show, which will not travel, is historic.

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‘A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Monday and Friday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Closed Tuesday and Wednesday.

Ends: Aug. 2

Price: $5-$8

Contact: (213) 626-6222