III. From Concrete Boxes to Sleek Smartphones

 

There is no single root for minimalism. History tends to privilege certain groups’ stories (white male artists in Western economies) over others.  However, every artistic movement is the result of many long winding tributaries that come together at a specific moment in time, and like many rivers, eventually branch off into separate paths. 

 

The ‘easiest’ place to start would be 1960s New York, as this is where the term first came into common use. A group of New York artists began experimenting with geometric abstraction - playing with simple geometric shapes - as an opposing reaction to the abstract expressionism of post-war modern art. For instance, Donald Judd’s work, most famous for installations featuring plain concrete boxes, sought clarity and prioritized the use of space.. However, he and other artists opposed the term “minimalist”, because this term was levelled at them by critics like Richard Wollheim, who referred to minimalism as  “minimalism of  ideas” and considered their work as “minimal art”, meaning minimal artistic value, and the artists bristled at the implied “lack” in the term. 

 

No one likes having something forced upon them. Especially something that implies a deficit on our things, implying a deficit in us. 

 

Some art historians also find European roots of minimalist art in the Bauhaus movement, where Bauhaus himself lived by the ‘form follows function’ philosophy, or the Dutch De Stijl movement of paintings which influenced Swiss design. These all evinced a tendency to clarity and orderliness, using grids, shapes and lots of negative space. However, one might also note the long history of the use of geometric shapes and abstractions in Islamic art and the long history of spatial aesthetics found in Japanese Zen philosophy, like Ma (a pause in time or space) and Wabi-sabi (the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent or incomplete).

 

In music, minimalism often refers to works by composers like Steve Reich, Philip Glass and La Monte Young. The minimalism movement in music emerged around the same period in the 1960s. Musicians like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, inspired by music they heard from India and Southeast Asia, began to create music that often featured an undulating pulse and repetitive musical motifs that repeated over and over, only altering slightly after a certain passage of time. They took inspiration from the long traditions of Indian Classical music, such as the use of the tambura drone in Carnatic music, or the cyclical interlocking patterns and colotomic structures found in Indonesian gamelan music. 

 

In music, minimalism grew out of a complex underlying philosophy about making the music about process, rather than product, and making this apparent in the listening process. In visual art, it became about the use of space. Thus, minimalism initially was about distilling excess down to the simplest elements, to free up space for people to notice what framed or occupied it. 

 

So how did we get from radical concrete boxes to an internet clogged full of empty luxury mansions and monochrome flatlays? 

 

Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism, argues that current form minimalism manifests as a distortion of its origins. Chayka writes that the current trend of minimalism is extremely focused on the material. Modern minimalists focus on the items they own, and try to own less, or make use of less things. In my mind, I think of the popular internet challenges like ‘Project 333’, where people try to wear ‘only 33 items for 3 months’ and get rid of the rest. Or how influencers like Kelly Sutton ‘only own 51 items’. 

 

But Mr. Sutton, what constitutes your 51 items? The list starts with:

1. A laptop

2. A Kindle 

3. 2 hard drives

4. An iPad

The laptop can be an accountant, a calculator, a search engine, a storage device, a programming device or a tool of employability. The iPad can be a music player, a camera, a notepad, a gaming device or a drawing tablet. Sure, it’s an all-in-one that allows you to pare down the number of material items owned, but then does it really count as just one item? Numerically yes, but what about in terms of consumption and use of resources?

 

Chayka also argues that modern minimalism is incredibly focused on the aesthetics of cleanliness and emptiness, but his idea of minimalism is more about attention to one’s sensory experiences and relation to surroundings. Populist modern minimalist trends like those following the KonMari train are people’s way of trying to exert control over their surroundings, through decluttering and simplifying, but these solutions are just illusions of control. In its current form, minimalism resembles a lifestyle brand rather than a philosophy, with clear visual signifiers and identifiable archetypes. In many ways, minimalism in the capitalist economy has been subject to commodification, with an entire sub-industry of books, podcasts and ‘minimalist’-designed objects for people to consume. It’s just now a different style of consumption. 

 

To be honest, I couldn’t care less about Chayka’s philosophical gate-keeping, but I do agree with many of the points he raises, especially on the point of commodification. In many ways, Chayka attests to what makes me uncomfortable about modern minimalism - its anti-consumerist outer is merely masquerading a style of living still based on consumption - consumption of the books by the right minimalist authors, the consumption of the appetizing Netflix shows that ask you to consume less, the consumption of all the signifiers of the lifestyle. Read this book. Invest in this high quality object and throw out the 5 items it replaces. Invest in this expensive interior design layout. Capitalism has co-opted the movement for its own monetary gains. It’s not the minimalist individuals that are the problem, it’s the industry deception that draws well-meaning anti-hyper-consumerists right back into the trap of consumption and trappings of capitalist economy. It may seem like just an innocent mistake - we all get duped by genius marketing all the time.

 

However, the stakes are more than financial.  

 

The commodification of minimalism has made this movement largely elitist, incredibly tech-dependent, and seemingly largely catered to a specific demographic of people (read: wealthy and privileged). Just look at the Sutton list. Can we all really afford to own a laptop and a Kindle and an iPad and two external hard drives? It is easy to see how these amazing devices serve so many functions, and thus reduces the need for anything else, like calculators and notebooks and books, but not everyone has the capital and access to such a tech-saturated lifestyle. 

 

Moreover, the self-help tones that minimalism has taken on give it an air of moral superiority and enlightenment, which when combined with classism, make for a potent anti-poor social cocktail masquerading as social revolution when it’s also possibly just a superficial passing fad. Just think about the implications of the aesthetic of cleanliness. It implies order, control, and a put-togetherness that lifts one above the realm of the dirty and the disorderly. 

 

Chelsea Fagan writes about how minimalism has become a lifestyle brand and it is now another class signifier - certain minimalist archetype possessions that people own are a way for people to signify their wealth and their choice to own less despite having so much cash. She calls it “another boring product for the wealthy to buy”. And is she really wrong? The starter pack for the modern minimalist often includes the following: a super sleek chic Macbook to perform all necessary work tasks, a tablet like an iPad or e-reader like a Kindle for entertainment and not needing books ever again, a smart phone that can do almost everything you need - take pictures, take notes, calculate, google etc.etc., Scandinavian designed furniture in various shades of pine, large spacious concrete and glass houses with huge glass windows. It’s a style of hyper-curation that Fagan argues is “aping the connotations of simplicity and even, to a degree, asceticism, without actually having to give up those sweet, sweet class signifiers.” 

 

A lot of the blogs and processes out there also seem like an exercise in homogenization. Pursue these neutral tone palettes of white and greige (a cross between grey and beige, didn’t know you really could imagine new colors after all!), take this one size fits all approach (I’m looking at you, KonMari method), and erase quirk and eclecticness. Pursue order and visual serenity. You can persuade an individualistic society into conformity if it looks good for Instagram or Netflix apparently. 

 

The minimalist aesthetic says, hey, I don’t own much! Wow look at how much I can live without! But investing in that minimalist lifestyle requires a damn lot of capital. Is minimalism then anything more than an appropriation of a lifestyle in poverty, wrapped up as a stylish chic and morally superior way to live? Transcendent of the capitalist consumerist economy, even though it is this same economy that has put them at the top of the social food chain? 

 

Seems kind of hypocritical to me. 

 

I love Fagan’s line here: “But the truth is that, as with so many other social phenomena that insufferable white dudes have co-opted, this spiritual minimalism has essentially become yet another competition for who can be the best at whatever you’ve chosen, even if that ‘whatever’ is literally ‘having less shit’.” And often, having less shit isn’t even a privilege the poor can afford. Elite minimalists can afford to easily let things go, knowing if they need it again, they have the means to get it. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the people in poverty who develop hoarding problems, because living in scarcity entraps you in the ‘just in case’ mindset. How can you demand someone throw out most of their material items when these material items are possibly key to their material and (to some extent) emotional sustenance? At the superficial level, minimalism is simply another style masquerading as personal enlightenment and is, in reality, really condescending. 

 

Jia Tolentino continues such arguments by discussing how lifestyle minimalism, when framed as a tool of self-improvement, is but another tool weaponized by the market economy against us as individuals - shed your stuff, reduce your flaws, self-optimize. At the end of the day, is it about the minimalism of ideas, or the minimalism of things? Are we reducing our stuff so that we feel less suffocated, and thus pay more attention to our surroundings, or are we asserting our will to be less suffocated, and thus get rid of things? Like Fagan, Tolentino levels witty critique at the rich minimalist lifestyle, noting that “Less is more attractive when you’ve got a lot of money, and minimalism is easily transformed from a philosophy of intentional restraint into an aesthetic language through which to assert a form of walled-off luxury—a self-centered and competitive impulse that is not so different from the acquisitive attitude that minimalism purports to reject.” Again, the hypocrisy of rejecting consumerism when the consumer economy is what floats you to the top of the social food chain shows itself. 

 

What I get from Tolentino and Fagan is also this: lifestyle minimalism is hyper-focused on individual actions. Which I guess is why it appeals. Like Chayka says, lifestyle minimalism offers the illusion of choice and control in a chaotic and volatile world. 

 

But don’t be fooled. Minimalism is far less simple than it seems. Underneath the minimalist design of every Apple product is a ‘maximalist assemblage’, and the hardware hidden beneath has tentacles in the dark waters of sweatshop labour and unethical supply chain practices. Moreover, the digital movement may tout environmental friendliness by shifting demand away from material resources like paper, but it creates an incredible demand on Internet usage. We may have traded DVD libraries and CD towers for Netflix and Spotify, but the boom of data streaming services has invisible consequences. 

 

The rising ubiquity of streaming and the Internet of Things has sparked a data revolution and massively driven up the gigabytes of data we consume and upload. To fuel this data flow, we need servers to manage digital traffic. These servers are machines that, like our personal computers, get overheated after high usage. And given our constant demand for information, this results in the boom of server farms that keep our oh-so-precious Internet going. These server farms then produce insane amounts of heat and consume gargantuan amounts of energy to power the servers. Energy must also be consumed to keep these server farms cool.The environmental costs are huge. Technology researcher Anders Andrae estimates that the world's data centres alone in the next year could consume almost the entire electrical output of Canada across all its industries. That’s insane. According to network analytics firm Sandvine, streaming videos on platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video eat up 60.6% of all internet traffic. The digital world, especially with the rise of cloud computing, is a massive consumer of fossil fuels- enough to rival the aviation industry. 

 

By shifting from physical objects to digital, we may not really be doing much more good. 

 

Just because we don’t see the effects of consumption does not mean consumption doesn’t exist. The trap of the individualist minimalist movement is that it sets blinders on such big-picture issues on people’s paths to self-improvement. Capitalism is what is broken, but individual minimalism will tell you that we, the consumers, are the broken ones. Minimalism acts like a solution, but in reality perpetuates a whole host of invisible problems.

 

When capitalism co-opts anti-consumerist tenets for its own gain, how are we to fight the flow? Does it then absolve us of all responsibility and guilt? 

 

Minimalism isn’t really reducing consumption, it’s just a different way of consuming, really. The biggest irony of minimalism is that its popularity goes hand in hand with its commodification. And commodification comes with a cost.