Minimalist Design Movement
I've been wearing these shoes at this point for several months. I've worn them running, I've worn then walking the dog in sub-zero temperatures in Vermont, and I've worn them chasing the dog through deep snow in the woods. I’ve worn them hiking on wet rocks and leaves. And I wear them to the office almost every day. I wear them with and without socks, with wool socks for the cold and cotton in warmer weather.
They don’t look minimalist (which is a selling point!), but you’ll note that there is no heel whatsoever, no cushioning under the heel or the forefoot, and a wide flare at the fifth metatarsal to allow my foot to widen naturally. I can splay my toes in these walking downhill. The only other shoe I can do that in is my Vibrams. To compare them to my Vivo Dharmas, I once tried taking the Dharmas on a hike. My feet slipped around in the shoe, the shoe slipped on the side of the trail, and, in general, it was an experience I will not repeat. The Russell, on the other hand, with lacing over the instep and excellent traction, have been just fine on hikes.
Hiking in them is a different experience from Vibrams, and yet similar. Obviously you have much less ground feel than Vibrams, since the sole is much thicker. You can still feel rocks under your feet, however, and the total lack of cushioning means you must walk the same way as you would in Vibrams. Under foot there are three layers of leather and the sole. They’re unlike the Vibrams in that they have much better traction (even than the Trek), and they are much warmer. I’ve yet to have cold feet in them, and I’ve taken them out in below zero temperatures several times. (I wish I could report at what point my feet started getting cold, just to be thorough.)
The Newporter sole is terrific. With Vibram’s ice compound, the only thing I’ve found that they slip on is smooth ice. They get traction even on rough ice, and anything less slick than that is not a problem at all. I’m happy I took Richard’s advice.
I will point out that the toe spring (the curvature upward at the toe) looks excessive. The curve you see is actually what has occurred from my walking around in them. Wearing them, they feel no different from my Vibrams.
I like them a lot. In fact they're my favorite shoes. I wear them almost every day instead of my Vibrams or my Vivo Barefoot Dharmas, as they're less odd looking than the Vibrams, and fit and breathe better than the Vivos. They're much warmer than both, with the fairly thick (but flexible) Vibram sole. Plus I can wear them to work!
Surprisingly, they're the most breathable leather shoes I've ever worn. I prefer leather shoes after having a bad experience with man-made materials, but I’ve never experienced leather like this. They're so breathable that I regularly find my feet dry and the end of a day, which does not happen with any other shoe I’ve owned. I discussed this with Russell, and indeed their suede is known for this trait, which is of course why Ralph picked it for me. (As I said, I've learned a lot, I wasn't a fan of suede shoes prior to these.)
These shoes are made with the Munson last*, a product of the Army study that Ralph introduced me to. Ralph may have been one of the few people alive who was still aware of this study. Only three companies that I've been able to find still make shoes or boots on the Munson last, and Russell is the only one that will make a minimalist shoe on this tried-and-true barefoot-style last. (More about Munson later).
The Munson last was designed to allow natural foot movement, and it works as advertised. It's a far better design than what Vivo uses, since the Vivo lasts still constrict the toes while simultaneously being too wide through the middle of the foot.
Russell makes each shoe to fit your foot; so your first step in ordering a pair of Russells is to take detailed measurements and a tracing of your foot, and mail it to them. Email or fax is not OK, because the transmission process can alter the tracing. The only major drawback I’ve found is that since the shoes and boots are made-to-order, there is a bit of lead time to get yours, and they're not cheap. (Compared to Vivo Barefoot, they’re a bit more expensive.) But, as I'm learning, they're worth it. Russell also says that they have customers who’ve been using Russell moccasins for year or decades, and that they do hold up in the long run. I’m a happy customer of a product that is expensive up front but lasts for a long time.
My only complaint with these shoes has been that they were a bit snug around the ball of my foot. They’ve since stretched out, but, as Russell likes to say that you don’t have to break in a Russell moccasin, they suggested I send them back and they’d stretch them for me. I declined. I didn’t want to be left without them.
They're also making up the boot that originally inspired me to contact Russell. The first draft of that prototype was the nicest-looking boot I've ever seen. I can't wait to wear it out in the woods and the snow.
Russell also makes dress moccasins a.k.a. loafers. They can make any shoe or boot in their lineup with a Munson last and without a heel.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, art, especially visual and music, where the work is stripped of its most fundamental features. As a specific movement in art is identified with the evolution after World War II Western art, with more strength with the visual arts in America in late 1960 and early 1970. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris and Frank Stella. It is based on the reductive aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and a bridge to Postmodern art practices.
The term has been extended a movement in music that includes repetition and repetition, as in the compositions of Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, John Adams and Terry Riley. (See also postminimalism).
The term “minimalist” is often applied colloquially to designate anything which is spare or stripped to its essentials. Has also been used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, and even the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.
Musical Minimalism
In art music of the past 40 years, the term minimalism is sometimes applied to music which displays some or all of the following features: repetition (often of short musical phrases, with minimal variations over long periods of time, ostinato) or stasis (often in the form of drones and long tones); emphasis on consonant harmony, steady pulse, hypnotic effect, sometimes the use of phase shifting where sound waves gradually move out of sync with others. Prime examples are the compositions of John Cage, La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Terry Riley.
The term minimalism, endowed independently by critics composer Michael Nyman and Tom Johnson, has been controversial, but was in wide use in the 1970s. The implementation of a visual art term to music has been protested, however, not only minimalist sculpture and music share a certain spare simplicity of means and an aversion to ornamental detail, but many of the early minimalist concerts happened in relation to exposures of minimalist art of Sol LeWitt and others. Several composers associated with minimalism have disavowed the term, in particular, Philip Glass, who allegedly said: “That word should be eradicated!”
A more recent minimalist music is minimal techno, a sub-genre of Techno music. In its most basic form can consist of more than a single ostinato motive (often called a loop) played in common time with a bass drum sounds on the pulse of black. In other basic rhythmic patterns are at levels to create polyrhythmic accompaniment to the same 4 / 4 bass drum pulse. Sherburne (2004) calls for the popularization of the latter technique and the previous skeletalism. [3]
Minimalist design
The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture in which the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. Minimalist design has been greatly influenced by the design and traditional Japanese architecture. Moreover, the work of artists of De Stijl is an important source of reference for this type of work. De Stijl expanded the ideas could be expressed by using basic elements such as lines and planes organized in very particular ways.
Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto “Less is more” to describe his aesthetic tactics of the organization of the numerous necessary components of a building to create an impression of extreme simplicity, by enlisting every element and detail to serve multiple visual and functional purposes (such as designing a plant to also serve as the radiator, or a huge fireplace in the house also the bathroom). Designer Buckminster Fuller adopted engineer’’s goal of “doing more with less”, but his concerns were oriented towards technology and engineering rather than aesthetics. A similar sentiment was the theme of industrial designer Dieter Rams, “less but better”, adapted from van der Rohe. The structure uses relatively simple elegant designs. The beauty of the structure is also determined to play with lighting, using basic geometric shapes and patterns, using as a single or a small number of forms and of components of the design unit, tasteful, not bothersome brilliant color combinations, textures and colors are natural, and clean and fine finishes. Sometimes using the beauty of natural patterns of stone and wood enclosed within ordered structures simplified. The color balance can use the brightness and the contrast between surface colors to enhance visual aesthetics. The general structure, would the age of industrial and utility style space (lamps, stoves, stairs, etc.), clean and straight components (such as walls or steps) that appear to be machined with machines, flat or nearly flat roofs , nice negative spaces, and large windows. This and science fiction may have contributed to the late twentieth century architecture design futuristic and modern home decoration. Modern minimalist home architecture, with its unnecessary internal walls removed may have led to the popularity of kitchen and dining room style.
Another teacher who exemplifies modern reductionist ideas is Luis Barragan. On minimalism, the architectural designers pay special attention to the connection between perfect planes, elegant lighting and careful consideration of the empty spaces left by the removal of three-dimensional forms of architectural design. The most attractive aspect minimalist home designs are not truly minimalist, because the use of more expensive building materials and finishes, and are relatively larger.
Contemporary architects working in this tradition include John Pawson, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Alvaro Siza, Tadao Ando, Alberto Campo Baeza, Yoshio Taniguchi, Peter Zumthor, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Vincent Van Duysen, Claudio Silvestrin, Michael Gabellini and Richard Gluckman.
Minimalism in the visual artsMinimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as the literal art and ABC Art was raised in New York in the 1960s. It is seen as a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism and the discourse, institutions and ideologies that supported it. As an artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in 1977 the release of their latest catalog essay: Painting, minimalism did not reject claims on the reduction Clement Greenberg Modernist Painting of surfaces and materials as well as take his claims literally. Minimalism was the result, although the term “minimalism” was not generally accepted by the artists associated with it, and many minimalist art professionals appointed by the critics do not identify themselves as such a move.
Unlike the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists were influenced by the composers John Cage and La Monte Young, poet William Carlos Williams, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Quite explicitly that his art is not self-expression, in opposition to Abstract Expressionists of the previous decade. In general, Minimalism’s features included: geometric, often cubic forms largely purged of metaphor, equal parts, repetition, neutral surfaces and industrial materials.
Robert Morris, an influential theorist and artist, wrote three part test, “Notes on Sculpture 1-3″, originally published in three issues of Artforum in 1966. In these trials, Morris tried to define a conceptual framework and the formal elements for himself and covering the practices of their contemporaries. These essays paid great attention to the idea of Gestalt – “… the parties joined together in a way that creates a high resistance to separation of perception.” Morris later described an art represented by a “marked lateral extension and no units of regularization or symmetrical intervals …” in “Notes on Sculpture 4: Objects beyond,” originally published in Artforum, 1969, continues that “the indeterminacy of the arrangement of the parts is a literal aspect of the physical existence of the thing.” The overall change in the theory that this essay is an expression suggests that the transition in what later became known as postminimalism. One of the first artists specifically associated with minimalism, the painter, Frank Stella, whose principles of “band” paintings were exhibited at the Show of 1959, “16 Americans”, organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York . The width of the strips in the paintings of Frank Stella bands were determined by the dimensions of the wood, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side, used to build the support frame on which canvas is stretched. Decisions about the structure in the front surface of the material is therefore not entirely subjective, but pre-conditioned by a “specified property” of the physical construction of the aid. In the catalog, Carl Andre noted, “Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting.” These reductive works were in stark contrast to the energetic and seems to be very subjective and emotionally charged paintings of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline, and in terms of precedent among the previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more to less gestural, often somber color field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MOMA exhibition, artists like Kenneth Noland, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had begun to explore the rays, monochromatic and hard-edge formats from late 50s through the early 1960.
Due to a trend for minimalism to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal, there was a movement away from the pictorial and sculptural to the concerns. Donald Judd had begun as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, “specific objects” (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of the theory of the formation of the minimalist aesthetic. In this study, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of a number of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of “important preliminary” Judd was the work of George Ortman , which was encompassed and distilled paint most strikingly, hard, philosophically charged geometries. These specific objects inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects in question was in itself, and that they avoided easy association with worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of Judd’.”‘”.’s value.
In a much more broad and general, one could, in fact, find the European roots of Minimalism in painting geometric abstractions at the Bauhaus in the works of Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the movement DeStijl in Russian Constructivists and in the work of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.
This move was heavily criticized by art critics high modernist formalist and historians. Some art critics eager minimalist thinking represents a lack of understanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by the critic Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American criticism of painting in the period before the 1960s . The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a critic Greenberg, who opposed the work on the basis of its theatricality. ” In objectuality Art (published in Artforum in June 1967) stated that the work of minimalist art, minimalist sculpture in particular, is based on a physical commitment to the viewer. He argued that as the work of Robert Morris turned the act of seeing into a kind of show, which unveiled the device of the Law of observation and audience participation in the work. Fried saw this shift in the viewer’’s experience of aesthetic engagement inside at an event outside of the artwork as a failure of minimalist art. Fried dogmatic essay was immediately challenged by artist Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum magazine. Smithson, said: “What we fear most Fried is aware of what you are doing – ie being the same theater.”
Other Minimalist artists include Richard Allen, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Bell, Ronald Bladen, Mel Bochner, Norman Carlberg, Erwin Hauer, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, John McCracken, Paul Mogensen, David Novros , Ad Reinhardt, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, and Anne Truitt.
Ad Reinhardt, truly an artist of the Abstract Expressionist generation, but whose reductive almost all black paintings seemed to anticipate the minimalism, had this to say about the value of a reductionist approach of art: “The more things in it, the busiest of the artwork, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a clear threat to the hearing. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with getting rid of nature. ”
Literary minimalism
Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist authors refrain from adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in creating a story, to “take sides” based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than react to instructions from the author. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be exceptional.
Some 1940s-era detective fiction of writers like James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted a stripped-down, matter of prose style indeed, with considerable effect, and some classifiy this prose style as minimalism.
Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the trend of meta-fiction of the 1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Robert Coover, and William H. Gass). These authors also spare with prose and maintain a psychological distance from their subject.
Minimalist authors, or those who are identified with minimalism during certain periods of his career in writing, are: Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Ernest Hemingway, KJ Stevens, Amy Hempel, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Robinson, Frederick Barthelme, Richard Ford and Alicia Erian.
American poets like William Carlos Williams, early Ezra Pound, Robert Creeley, Robert Grenier, and Aram Saroyan are sometimes identified with their minimalist style. The term “minimalism” is also sometimes associated with the shortest of the genres of poetry, haiku, which originated in Japan but has been domesticated in English literature by poets such as Nick Virgilio, Raymond Roseliep and Swede George.
The Irish author Samuel Beckett is also known for his minimalist plays and prose.
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