Marc Botha

The explosion of minimalism into the worlds of visual arts, music and literature in the mid-to-late twentieth century presents one of the most radical and decisive revolutions in aesthetic history. Detested by some, embraced by others, minimalism's influence was immediate, pervasive and lasting, significantly changing the way we hear music, see art and read literature. In The Theory of Minimalism, Marc Botha offers the first general theory of minimalism, equally applicable to literature, the visual arts and music. He argues that minimalism establishes an aesthetic paradigm for rethinking realism in genuinely radical terms. In dialogue with thinkers from both the analytic and continental traditions – including Kant, Danto, Agamben, Badiou and Meillassoux – Botha develops a constellation of concepts which together encapsulate the transhistorcial and transdisciplinary reach of minimalism. Illustrated by a range of historical, canonical and contemporary minimalist works of different media, from the caves of early Christian ascetics to Samuel Beckett's late prose, Botha offers a bold and provocative argument which will equip readers with the tools to engage critically with past, present and future minimalism, and to recognize how, in a culture caught between the poles of excess and austerity, minimalism still matters.

A Theory of Minimalism

Patricia Waugh

By interrogating the terms and concepts most central to cultural change, Future Theory interrogates how theory can play a central role in dynamic transition. It demonstrates how entangled the highly politicized spheres of cultural production, scientific invention, and intellectual discourse are in the contemporary world and how new concepts and forms of thinking are crucial to embarking upon change. Future Theory is built around five key concepts – change, boundaries, ruptures, assemblages, horizons – examined by leading international thinkers to build a vision of how theory can be applied to a constantly shifting world.

A Handbook to Critical Concepts

Future Theory

The minimalist explosion in the mid-twentieth century was an unprecedented phenomenon in aesthetic history – not only was the distinction between the everyday and the aesthetic decisively undermined, but for the first time in aesthetic history the materiality of the work was dislocated from its creator, and the significance of the work from its meaning. Persistence and Transfiguration is a transhistorical account of minimalism's genesis with an emphasis on the key concepts of persistence and transfiguration. Marc Botha develops a new and compelling formulation of minimalism through the concepts of quantity, mathematical and dynamical sublimity, and quantitative ontology in the works of philosophers from Parmenides through Kant and Hegel to Badiou. More than just a work about minimalism, this is a highly innovative contribution to aesthetics, critical theory and current debates around the ontology of art in general.

Marc Botha

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