Absence of Clutter

"This book offers the first comprehensive critical account of minimal writing-works of text art, visual literature and poetry that are generally shorter than a sentence. Minimal writing can be beguilingly simple on the surface, but it can also present extreme interpretive challenges. Post-1960s visual art is strongly characterized by the "linguistic turn," and artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Lucy Lippard and Jenny Holzer built highly visible careers from text-based art. Stephens argues that minimal poets working during this same period produced work of equal complexity and power, and shows how minimal writing has enjoyed a recent resurgence among writers working with emergent publication platforms, as well as among those working with computer code. The rise of minimalism in the 1960s can also be understood in relation to new developments in media. Whereas many 60s pop artists and New York School poets gleefully included the detritus of mass culture in their work, minimal and conceptual artists and writers stripped language down to its most basic components. Presented is a pre-history of minimal writing beginning with modernism and continuing through concrete poetry in the 1950s, but the bulk of the book centers on a careful media-archival account of post-1965 poetry and text art"--