The thing's hollow—

A minimalist work of the 1960's made by Tony Smith reminded me of the monoliths in Arthur C. Clarke's series of Odyssey novels. Of course, the slabs that were later named Tycho Magnetic Anomalies were not actually made of stone. No one really knew what kind of material they were made of, if at all they represented anything material as matter is defined in the universe.

Tony Smith, Free Ride, 1962

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, together with a staff of designers, conceived the famous monolith of 2001 - A Space Odyssey in New York in November 1965, precisely when Minimal Art was first achieving recognition. In the film the monolith exactly fulfils the role of a ‘McGuffin’: it is the empty signifier that cannot be interpreted but which triggers the plot.

(Jorg Heiser, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/dark_side_of_the_room. Italics added)

As an empty signifier, the TMA monolith had been subjected to endless association and symbolisms, its minimalist format that should have represented an "operation of radical abstraction" and "avoidance of narrative" ironically re-activating many master narratives. In one sense, this is actually what we would have expected the monolith to do, which is to push forward the evolutionary narrative of humankind, but not something we may have expected if it were some minimalist artwork that is true to its aesthetic pronouncements. In this pairing, nothing else could be more antithetical.

Or, this could simply re-activate some old questions regarding the claims of minimalist art to "eliminate all non-essential features" or to exclude the "unnecessary," beginning with narrative and pictorial representation, and to emphasize the simplicity of "objects" in their own identity or quality. However the motto "Less is more" is interpreted, one thing could be agreed upon. The whole energy of minimalism is devoted to the discovery of what could still be left behind in art after all unnecessary elements have been taken out. Of course, in this case, the most minimal art would be nothing at all, since one artist's "necessity" may be another's "contingency." The disappearance of art, as an object, activity, sign, and concept seems to be the only logical end of this quest.

In Tony Smith's "Free ride," we have an obviously geometric object that could either be seen as an independent entity or as a part of a larger block. Are we supposed to trace it further and add all the missing beams, or  see it instead as a vanishing cube, with only three "parts" left slanted along the three dimensional axes of space (x, y, z)? As a pure coordinate marker, "Free ride" may not be an object after all, but abstracted space, or the eidolon of space, its signifier. Indeed, the space we all ride in, in whatever conceptualization, is a necessity for our existence.

In the famous Saturn scene where Bowman was heading for the monolith, he also discovered that this enormous object, whose polished surface bore no mark of damage from space debris after millions of years, was not really an object after all. Let me quote from that section of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey:

    "Now I'm right above it, hovering five hundred feet up. I don't want to waste any time, since Discovery will soon be out of range. I'm going to land. It's certainly solid enough—and if it isn't I'll blast off at once.

    "Just a minute—that's odd—"

    Bowman's voice died into the silence of utter bewilderment. He was not alarmed; he literally could not describe what he was seeing.

    He had been hanging above a large, flat rectangle, eight hundred feet long and two hundred wide, made of something that looked as solid as rock. But now it seemed to be receding from him; it was exactly like one of those optical illusions, when a three-dimensional object can, by an effort of will, appear to turn inside out—its near and far sides suddenly interchanging.

    That was happening to this huge, apparently solid structure. Impossibly, incredibly, it was no longer a monolith rearing high above a flat plain. What had seemed to be its roof had dropped away to infinite depths; for one dizzy moment, he seemed to be looking down into a vertical shaft—a rectangular duct which defied the laws of perspective, for its size did not decrease with distance. . . .

    The Eye of Japetus had blinked, as if to remove an irritating speck of dust. David Bowman had time for just one broken sentence which the waiting men in Mission Control, nine hundred million miles away and eighty minutes in the future, were never to forget:

    "The thing's hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it's full of stars!"

As a hyper-dimensional gateway, the monolith surpasses our notions of space, time, and matter. It's the most abstract item that the human mind could ever encounter. The last sentence that Bowman managed to say linked infinite ideas in one breath, in a locus where materiality and nonmateriality, emptiness and fullness, or time and timelessness also meet together in that other hollow thing we call "language."