It would be hard to find a night sky darker than the one over U.S. Route 67, on the way to Marfa, Texas. According to some accounts, it would be more difficult to miss the strange, floating balls of colored light known as the Marfa Lights, which occasionally float against the jet black horizon. Ever since the mysterious lights where “discovered” in 1883, crowds of onlookers have made their way to Marfa, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious phenomenon.

Whether you believe in the lights or not, the wide-open sky acts as an ideal blank canvas for the dancing lights. The effect must not have been lost on Donald Judd, one of Minimalism’s most famous figures, when he arrived in Marfa in 1971. Suffering from a brain overload after living and thriving in the New York City art scene for years, Judd rented a house in the wayward town. Over time, he amassed multiple buildings throughout the area and filled them with his sculpture and furniture.

Judd converted old military buildings into art galleries, knocking out walls and opening up spaces to the stark Texas sunlight. One old artillery shed in particular (pictured above) became the home of 100 milled aluminum box sculptures. Light floods into the space and bounces through the works. Each sculpture encapsulates it’s own unique, spatial dynamic that changes with the daily shifting of sunlight.

Judd intended his work to invoke an elemental object-ness that went beyond symbolism or illusory effects. He hoped that his work went beyond style — that it invoked “things” in themselves. In order to understand his work’s presence, one needed to come face to face with it in the most stark conditions possible. The landscape of Marfa provided Judd with this tabula rasa.

It’s interesting that while Minimalism (a term Judd himself despised) has become just one more art movement of the past, the “style” itself has become a valued tool in the exhibition of online design and artwork. The goal of minimal website design is the put the user interface in the background as a way to showcase content, be it images, video, or text. A few generic examples, taken from Minimal sites (where else?) illustrate the concept well.

The branding company Marque contains nothing but text, images, and a couple lines against a grey background. The approach is pretty standard: fonts are correctly sized for readability; the interface is straightforward; the background is a variation of white (although black is a sometimes acceptable alternative). The page simply focuses on the work itself, and if your work is good, then you’ll land your client.

Curt Cloninger, in his book Fresher Styles for Web Designers, talks about minimal website design and outlines a similar concept he calls “No Style.” The goal of Minimal design is to make the design vanish completely. However, some interface design is always necessary, and that uniqueness, be it in the navigation or font choice, will necessarily thwart the goal of eliminating design. At this point, Cloninger brings up the example of advertising agency Modernista!

In an effort to have “No Style,” the agency ditched their old baroque pop interface, replacing it with an amalgamation of standard web portals. Their homepage looks like Google, their print work is displayed via Flickr, and news updates can be found on Twitter. They take the concept of No Style a step forward by appropriating the designs of others. These interfaces have become so common that the whole thing seems a bit banal, until you observe their work, which is still as forward looking as ever.

Another example of fade-away web design can be found at Indexhibit: “A web application used to build and maintain an archetypal, invisible website format that combines text, image, movie and sound.” The program acts as a simple portfolio builder. You upload your work into the program and it creates a consistent layout, with navigation on one side, and text, video, or images on the other. While looked at from the perspective of just one artist, the project isn’t so interesting. However, taken as a whole, an aggregate of hundreds of artist’s work becomes easily comparable. Furthermore, the more time one spends on the site, the more the interface becomes second nature, melting into the background and leaving us with just the work.

A similar desire runs between Judd’s voluntary exile to Texas and portfolio designers of today. For Judd, Texas was “No Style.” After working in the claustrophobic world of New York for so long, he wanted to find a place where his work could be, quite simply, just about his work, and not about how it contrasted to gritty streets or the wafting smell of pizza. While the juxtapositions of cosmopolitan life can make for interesting comparisons, Judd wasn’t having it. He sought a place as close to Nothing as possible.

Beyond the desire for Nothing, the philosophy of Judd stands in marked contrast to those of today’s online designers. Judd wanted people to experience the physicality of his objects in a very phenomenal way that went far beyond images. The Texas prairie provided the backdrop for viewers to experience space, light, and time in his sculptures. In contrast, the nature of an online portfolio is devoid of objectness. While the lack of background design is appropriate to show the images of artists, the projects lack the physicality of “real” work. Judd believed that painting was passe; it only represented reality, while sculpture was reality. Even Abstract Art’s attempt at invoking internal consciousness was regarded as representational. To Judd, sculpture and architecture would pave the way to our understanding of existence.

Fast forward to today, and one can argue that many images evoke an emotional response greater than the physical presence of many objects. The impact of a film or even a catchy advertising campaign can influence our consciousness just as directly as the way light bounces off an aluminum box in the middle of Texas. Giant video screens on skyscrapers blast light particle powered images into our consciousness in a very visceral way. We’ve found that both images and space can have a profound affect on our psyche.

In the end, the work is what matters, but the context and the time always have an influence, whether it be graphic art against a No Style interface, blocky furniture set against sparten Texas plains, or flashing Marfa Lights against a black sky.

>Written by d/visible contributor Kevin Clement .

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 11:54 am and is filed under Industrial, Culture, Architecture, Art & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.