Books about Minimalism from Amazon.com

As one of the most important exponents of American minimal art, Donald Judd (1928–1994) has exerted a lasting influence in the field of architecture Among the lesser-known aspects of his work is a large collection of architectural designs, which explore the relationship of architecture and art. Of special importance for Judd’s work in this field is a former military fort in Marfa, Texas, part of which he purchased and then, beginning in 1971, systematically transformed into one of the largest existing ensembles of contemporary art.

This book is the first to address Judd’s built work from an architectural perspective. With this in view, the Marfa buildings have for the first time been carefully measured and drawn to scale by the author and his students. Using standard CAD drawings together with historical and contemporary photographs, this volume illustrates Judd’s architectural alterations to the buildings in Marfa, and discusses and describes them in its accompanying text. The result is an invaluable source of inspiration for contemporary architecture.

.
Price: $28.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Minimalist models of grammar are developed logically in this volume and the ways in which they contrast with GB analysis are clearly explained. Spanning a decade of minimalist thinking, the textbook will enable students to better understand the questions and problems that minimalism invites, and to master the techniques of minimalist analysis. Over 100 exercises are provided, encouraging students to put their new skills into practice. The book will be an invaluable text for intermediate and advanced students of syntactic theory, as well as a solid foundation for further study and research within Chomsky's minimalist framework..
Price: $14.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is the way the world ends. Three interlocked novels explore a landscape that stretches from the Pacific Northwest to the Nowhere Place. An art appraiserÂ’s trip through a haunted mansion is derailed by a death ray. A 14th-century Italian scion dies brokenhearted and spends eternity keeping tabs on every single suicide on earth. A Mesoamerican Jaguar god unveils a vision of Yankee Stadium as a post-apocalyptic tomb, then hands a pair of Gutenberg bibles to the sceneÂ’s horrified witness. Through its 600 pages, Icon proves to be more than a dark, sensitive and sweeping investigation of memory's inherent violence and implied oblivion; it may also prove to be the most unusual work of fiction you will ever read..
Price: $14.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $25.68 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Boeckx examines the foundations and explains the underlying philosophy of the Minimalist Program for linguistic theory, the most radical version to date of Noam Chomsky's naturalistic approach to language. He exemplifies its methods, considers the significance of its results, and explores its roots and antecedents. He disentangles and clarifies current debates and shows how the Minimalist Program lies at the centre of the enterprise to understand the human language faculty. The book is written for everyone in and outside the field who wants to know about current developments in theoretical linguistics..
Price: $30.61 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The term Minimalism has not always been used in a favorable sense, especially in architecture, and even today it may be the cause of some confusion and ambiguity The problem comes from the word's use in defining a creative current, school or trend when in fact it refers to an aesthetic. At the same time, this aesthetic is not chronologically well defined either and, moreover, interacts with different disciplines. This explains why we find minimalist buildings in periods very far apart from each other and in architects as different as Tadao Ando, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron or Luis Barragán, among others. Minimalism DesignSource investigates the minimalism movement, covering the last years of the decade of the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century to inquires into the origins of the term minimalism and in how the minimalism phenomenon played out in other fields like art, painting, fashion, and sculpture has affected minimalism in architecture, define the result of the use of pure and simple lines, the reduction of language elements and, as far as architecture is concerned, the investigation of the treatment of space and of building possibilities.

.
Price: $8.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The controversy surrounding Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII, made of 120 firebricks, gives an idea of the difficulty some people have in seeing such works as art. This book aims to show not only how "The Bricks" can be seen as art, but that sculpture such as this is some of the most interesting and imaginative work to come out of the 1960s. The term Minimalism has been applied to this type of art. Although the artists involved did not regard themselves as a group, the work is typically abstract, three-dimensional, modular, geometric, preconceived in design and industrial in execution. This introduction examines the implications of these characteristics. Looking in particular at the work of five key artists--Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris--the author highlights some of the important differences in the development and direction of each artist's work. This thought-provoking publication also looks at the varied types of criticism and interpretation to which Minimalism has been subjected over the years. It ends by discussing how Minimalism, which has had a huge influence on subsequent art, continues to inform the work of contemporary artists..
Price: $3.02 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For more than 20 years, Gregory Battcock's Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology has been the book on this deceptively simple approach to art-making, which sought to remove any trace of the artist's hand or emotion from the work. (Detractors naturally found it ludicrous that such reductive sculpture, often consisting of no more than a few basic modular units attached to the wall or placed on the floor, generated such a voluminous and dense stream of critical analysis, beginning in the mid-1960s.)

Part of Phaidon's Themes and Movements series, Minimalism offers the first straightforward and useful summary of the output and outlook of the artists associated with minimalism in its heyday, as well as its subsequent development into more nuanced visual forms and its relationship to postmodernism. Editor James Meyer is a specialist who has written extensively on Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt, four of the seminal minimalists (the fifth is Robert Morris). Despite the intellectual thorniness of this art, Meyer avoids the turgidity that marks much of the writing associated with it.

Tracing the origins of minimalism primarily to Frank Stella's "Black Paintings" of 1959, Meyer outlines the shifting, often warring definitions of this new kind of art. Once sculptors Andre and Judd had made their mark, there was doubt that painters could be minimalists. Brice Marden and Robert Ryman made the cut because their work was believed to be purely about the process of painting. Interestingly, although this was overwhelmingly a male club, curators also initially embraced the work of several women artists (including Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt) who retained such minimalist no-noes as irregular, handmade marks, color that could be perceived independently of form, and a belief in transcendent meaning.

The 141 pages of color and black-and-white photographs (including rare glimpses of early work by some artists) and a generous assembly of texts by such key commentators as Michael Fried, Barbara Rose, Rosalind Krauss, and the artists themselves (including previously unpublished or hard-to-find material) make this volume indispensable for anyone seriously interested in contemporary art. --Cathy Curtis.
Price: $20.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]