Austin & Ellsworth Kelly's Minimalist Apotheosis

OK, we're up and running again here at Art & Argument after a short trip to the hipster Mecca of Austin, Texas. My number one talking point upon our return is this: If it is true that, as Rudyard Kipling said of the tropical outposts of the Empire, "only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun," then we can fairly extrapolate that in Austin in June, the same can be said of Bostonians in town to attend a wedding. It's that hot.

Nevertheless, inveterate Northeasterners that we are, during our afternoon free time we tried to explore the neighborhoods around our hotel on foot. Even though we were close to the UT campus, it was like a ghost town. Weird, and I don't mean charmingly so, as in Keep Austin Weird. Undaunted, on Sunday we set out to walk the half mile down six-lane-wide MLK Jr. Blvd to the UT's Blanton Museum of Art. To the drivers blasting past in their trucks we must have looked like crazy or homeless people. I felt naked and stigmatized. I could hear the children in the back seats saying, "Mommy, why are those people walking?"

But it was worth the heat and humiliation. Just this spring, the Blanton unveiled the late Ellsworth Kelly's final work. Called "Austin," it isn't a painting, but rather a small building, essentially a sculpture that one enters. With its cruciform layout and other nods to Christianity, it can be considered Kelly's and the Blanton's answer to Houston's Rothko Chapel. Neither are places of worship, but rather places of contemplation and aesthetic immersion. Essentially all, or many, of Kelly's signature motifs are joined in dynamic harmony. Kelly's main practice was to make the viewer confront color and form in their purest, most stripped down state. Color and form as essence. The simplicity adds power. Small shifts in tone or angle pack a punch. The simplicity is also mystical. Why is color beautiful? Why do we actually feel it? Why are mathematical and geometric forms inherent to life?

One thing that makes this work unique is the play of light within the structure as the sun performs its migrations. Another is that that the intensely minimalist black and white panels are not painted, but made of marble. My favorite element of "Austin" is the elegantly curved totem that stands where the cross would go in a church. The viewer can complete the enormous implied circle or arc in his or her mind.

Our visit was briefer than it might have been, for a somewhat ironic reason. As we entered, we noticed a high pitched tone: steady, unwavering, and a little annoying. I thought, Well, Kelly's work represents the apotheosis of minimalism, so might they have determined that the appropriate sacred music for this space would be just a single note? Might the edge to the sound be the aural equivalent to the Zen Awakening Stick? When I asked the guard about this, she said, No, it's not intentional. The alarm system is broken, she said.

The launch of Kelly's Austin was a big deal in the arts press this spring. Just Google it and you will find many excellent articles on it. I'm posting a few pictures here, but one could easily post a dozen or more, since fascinating combinations and relationships abound, inside and out.