Maximalism

This article is about the art movement. For other uses, see Maximalism (disambiguation).

In the arts, maximalism, a reaction against minimalism, is an aesthetic of excess.^[1] The philosophy can be summarized as "more is more", contrasting with the minimalist motto "less is more".

Literature

The term maximalism is sometimes associated with postmodern novels, such as those by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon,^[2] where digression, reference, and elaboration of detail occupy a great fraction of the text. It can refer to anything seen as excessive, overtly complex and "showy", providing redundant overkill in features and attachments, grossness in quantity and quality, or the tendency to add and accumulate to excess.

Novelist John Barth defines literary maximalism through the medieval Roman Catholic Church's opposition between "two...roads to grace:"

the via negativa of the monk's cell and the hermit's cave, and the via affirmativa of immersion in human affairs, of being in the world whether or not one is of it. Critics have aptly borrowed those terms to characterize the difference between Mr. Beckett, for example, and his erstwhile master James Joyce, himself a maximalist except in his early works.^[3]

Takayoshi Ishiwari elaborates on Barth's definition by including a postmodern approach to the notion of authenticity. Thus:

Under this label come such writers as, among others, Thomas Pynchon and Barth himself, whose bulky books are in marked contrast with Barthelme's relatively thin novels and collections of short stories. These maximalists are called by such an epithet because they, situated in the age of epistemological uncertainty and therefore knowing that they can never know what is authentic and inauthentic, attempt to include in their fiction everything belonging to that age, to take these authentic and inauthentic things as they are with all their uncertainty and inauthenticity included; their work intends to contain the maximum of the age, in other words, to be the age itself, and because of this their novels are often encyclopedic. As Tom LeClair argues in The Art of Excess, the authors of these ʺmasterworksʺ even ʺgather, represent, and reform the time's excesses into fictions that exceed the time's literary conventions and thereby master the time, the methods of fiction, and the readerʺ.^[4]

Maximalist novels

Stefano Ercolino lists these titles as maximalist novels:^[5]

• Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon, 1973)
• Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace, 1996)
• White Teeth (Zadie Smith, 2000)

Music

In music, Richard Taruskin uses the term "maximalism" to describe the modernism of the period from 1890 to 1914, especially in German-speaking regions, defining it as "a radical intensification of means toward accepted or traditional ends".^[6] This view has been challenged, however, on the grounds that Taruskin uses the term merely as an "empty signifier" that is filled with "a range of musical features—big orchestration, motivic and harmonic complexity, and so on—that he takes to be typical of modernism".^[7] Taruskin, in any case, did not originate this sense of the term, which had been used by the mid-1960s with reference to Russian composers of the same period, of whom Sergei Prokofiev was "the last".^[8] Contemporary maximalist music is defined by composer David A. Jaffe as that which "embraces heterogeneity and allows for complex systems of juxtapositions and collisions, in which all outside influences are viewed as potential raw material".^[9] Examples include the music of Edgard Varèse, Charles Ives, and Frank Zappa.^[10] In a different sense, Milton Babbitt has been described as a "professed maximalist", his goal being, "to make music as much as it can be rather than as little as one can get away with".^[11] Richard Toop, on the other hand, considers that musical maximalism "is to be understood at least partly as 'antiminimalism'".^[12] Phil Spector's highly influential "Wall of Sound" recording technique, present in recordings such as The Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (1966) (the former, produced by Spector) has been described as maximalist.^[13][14] English rock band Oasis' albums (What's The Story) Morning Glory? (1995) and Be Here Now (1997), along with rapper Kanye West's 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy have also been described as maximalist works.^{[15][16][17][18][19]} Charlemagne Palestine describes his drone-based music as maximalist.^[20]

Visual arts

Maximalism as a term in the plastic arts is used by art historian Robert Pincus-Witten to describe a group of artists, including future Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Schnabel and David Salle, associated with the turbulent beginnings of Neo-expressionism in the late 1970s. These artist were in part "stimulated out of sheer despair with so long a diet of Reductivist Minimalism".^[21] This maximalism was prefigured in the mid-1960s by certain psychoanalytically oriented paintings by Gary Stephan.^[22]

Charlotte Rivers describes how "maximalism celebrates richness and excess in graphic design", characterized by decoration, sensuality, luxury and fantasy, citing examples from the work of illustrator Kam Tang and artist Julie Verhoeven.^[23]

Art historian Gao Minglu connects maximalism in Chinese visual art to the literary definition by describing the emphasis on "the spiritual experience of the artist in the process of creation as a self-contemplation outside and beyond the artwork itself...These artists pay more attention to the process of creation and the uncertainty of meaning and instability in a work. Meaning is not reflected directly in a work because they believe that what is in the artist's mind at the moment of creation may not necessarily appear in his work." Examples include the work of artists Ding Yi and Li Huasheng.^[24]

In 1995 the "antipreneurial" one-man artist group Stiletto (artist) []^[25] presented LESS function IS MORE fun as a post-neoist special waste sale of interpassive design-defuncts^[26] in a so-called Spätverkauf installation by Laura Kikauka at the Volksbühne Berlin, which she claimed as one of her projects of Maximalism.^[27][28]

See also

• Baroque
• Collage
• Horror vacui
• Hyperpop
• Hysterical realism
• Maximalist film
• New Complexity
• Postminimalism
• Principle of plenitude

References

1. It sparks joy. The rise of maximalism, where there's no such thing as too much|CBC News
2. "Minimalism vs. Maximalism", American Writers Museum
3. Barth, John. "A Few Words About Minimalism", The New York Times Book Review, p. 1. December 28, 1986.
4. Ishiwari, Takayoshi. ʺThe Body That Speaks: Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father as Installationʺ, Unpublished Master's thesis, p. 1. Osaka University, 1996. 2011-06-06 at the Wayback Machine
5. Stefano Ercolino (Summer 2012). "The Maximalist Novel". Comparative Literature. 64 (3). Duke University Press: 241–256. JSTOR 23252885.
6. Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century. Oxford History of Western Music 4 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 5. ISBN 978-0-19-522273-9, 978-0-19-516979-9.
7. J. P. E. Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton. Music in Context (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 22. ISBN 9780521765213.
8. Martin Cooper, Ideas and Music (London: Barrie & Rockliffe, 1965): 58.
9. Jaffe, David. "Orchestrating the Chimera—Musical Hybrids, Technology, and the Development of a 'Maximalist' Musical Style", Leonardo Music Journal. vol. 5, 1995.
10. Delville, Michel and Norris, Andrew. "Disciplined Excess: The Minimalist / Maximalist Interface in Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart", Interval(le)s, p. 4, vol. I, 1 (Autumn 2004).
11. Milton Babbitt, Words about Music, edited by Stephen Dembski and Joseph N. Straus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 183. Cited on p. 147 of Richard Kurth, (1994). Untitled review of An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt by Andrew Mead (1994), Intégral, vol. 8 (1994), pp. 147–182 (Subscription access). A similar statement from five years earlier is found in Contemporary Music 1982 Catalogue (New York: C. F. Peters Corporation, 1982), 10: "the goal of attempting to make music as much as it might be, rather than as little as one obviously can get away with music's being", cited by Joseph Dubiel, "Three Essays on Milton Babbitt (Part Two)", Perspectives of New Music 29, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 90–122, citation on pp. 94 & 119n13. A third citation is found in the sleeve notes to Milton Babbitt, Piano Works, Robert Taub (piano), Harmonia Mundi LP HMC 5160, CD HMC 90 5160, Cassette HMC 405 160 (Los Angeles: Harmonia Mundi U.S.A., 1986), cited by Dan Warburton on p. 142 of "A Working Terminology for Minimal Music", Intégral 2 (1988): 135–159.
12. Richard Toop, "On Complexity", Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 42–57, citation on p. 54.
13. Hamilton, Jack (2021-01-18). "Phil Spector Transformed Pop Music and Destroyed Lives". Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
14. Shah, Neil (2021-01-17). "Phil Spector, Pop-Music Revolutionary Convicted of Murder, Dies at 81". Wall Street Journal. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
15. Josephs, Brian (November 22, 2015). "Revisiting the Radical Black Fever Dream of Kanye West's 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy'". Vice. Retrieved November 21, 2016.
16. Fleming, John (2020-09-27). ""(What's the Story) Morning Glory?" Could Have Been Even Better". Sound Words Central. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
17. Caramanica, Jon (November 17, 2010). "Kanye West, Still Unfiltered, on Eve of Fifth Album". The New York Times. Retrieved on 2016-11-21.
18. "Oasis' Be Here Now remains a glorious tribute to overproduced hubris". The A.V. Club. 2022-02-21. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
19. "Oasis \'Be Here Now\' Turns 20". Stereogum. 2017-08-18. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
20. Fifteen Questions Interview with Charlemagne Palestine: The Bare Maximum
21. Pincus-Witten 2002, p. 219.
22. Pincus-Witten 2002, p. 209.
23. Rivers, Charlotte (2008). Maximalism: The Graphic Design of Decadence& Excess, p. 11. ISBN 2-88893-019-6.
24. Kristin E. M. Riemer (October 9, 2003). "Chinese Maximalism debuts", UB Reporter.
25. "Stiletto, who describes himself as an ‘antipreneurship expert’ and the ‘head of one-man artist group Stiletto Studio,s’, started Design Vertreib (Vertreib is a made-up term, deliberately misspelling Vertrieb (distribution), in order to take on the meaning of Vertreibung (expulsion – as in ... from a consumer's paradise) as a deconstructive means of processive disturbation. Also Vertreib is the second half of the German word Zeitvertreib (pastime, diversion). It also recurs to one of Duchamp's explanations of Readymades as pastimes attempting the disposal of art.) in the 1990s as an undertaking for ‘Beleuchtungskörperbau’. Building upon the Readymade principle of his 1980s design-critical artworks, he follows a modular construction principle, relying almost entirely on pre-existing standard industrial components, that he describes as ‘liberated from design’." (in: Vitra Design Museum: Atlas of Furniture Design, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 2019, on CONSUMER'S REST Lounge Chair by Stiletto (Stiletto Studio,s), page 726)
26. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE on neoist interpassivity and Florian Cramer's relationship to neoism in a book review of Florian Cramer's book publication "Anti-Media." http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book2013Anti-Media.html
27. Danielle de Picciotto: Laura Kikauka: "Rediscovering the art of slowing down", Kaput – Magagazin für Insolvenz & Pop, 6 February 2018
28. QRT [de]:Handelskunst mit Angebots-Sondermüll (special waste offer), announcement and short review of the sales exhibition LESS function IS MORE fun as part of the Spätverkauf project by the artist group Funny Farm (Laura Kikauka and Gordon Monahan) at the Kiosk of the Volksbühne Berlin. (in (030) Magazin, No. 25/1995, [030] Media Verlag, Berlin, December 1995)

Sources

• Pincus-Witten, Robert (2002). "Gary Stephan: The Brief Against Matisse". In David Ryan (ed.). Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters. Routledge Harwood Critical Voices. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 208–220. ISBN 9780415276290.

Further reading

• Delville, Michel, and Andrew Norris (2005). Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishers. ISBN 1-84471-059-9.
• Jennings, Rebecca (14 October 2020). "Home design has gotten overstuffed, garish, and glorious. Good!". Vox magazine.
• Menezes, Flo (2014). Nova Ars Subtilior: Essays zur maximalistischen Musik, edited by Ralph Paland. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag. ISBN 978-3-95593-058-5.
• Pincus-Witten, Robert (1981). "Maximalism". Arts Magazine 55, no. 6:172–176.
• Pincus-Witten, Robert (1983). Entries (Maximalism): Art at the Turn of the Decade. Art and Criticism Series. New York: Out of London Press. ISBN 9780915570201.
• Pincus-Witten, Robert (1987). Postminimalism into Maximalism: American Art 1966–86. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.

External links

• "Maximalism or Minimalism?"—article on Esquire
• Maximal Nation—Pitchfork