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‘The Longing for Less’ Gets at the Big Appeal of Minimalism

As a millennial who graduated from college in 2010, in the lingering wake of the financial crisis, the cultural critic Kyle Chayka haltingly admits to being a minimalist, but only “by default.”

When he began writing “The Longing for Less,” he was put off by how minimalism had become commodified — a smug cure-all that countered late-capitalist malaise with self-help books by Marie Kondo and seasonal pilgrimages to The Container Store. His own minimalism was a consequence of living as an underpaid writer in New York: No basements and no closets meant no storage space for stuff.

But those two kinds of minimalism — sleek lifestyle branding and enforced austerity — don’t quite convey the enormity of the subject Chayka explores in this slender book. Delving into art, architecture, music and philosophy, he wants to learn why the idea of “less is more” keeps resurfacing. He sees it as a shadow to material progress, a reaction to abundance, a manifestation of civilization’s discontents. He remembers growing up in a three-story house with a two-car garage in rural Connecticut and feeling mildly oppressed by “detritus scattered at random all over the place.”

The book itself is like an exercise in decluttering, as Chayka cycles through different ideas in order to find those he wants to keep. An inevitable section on Kondo doesn’t find much to commend in her approach, deeming it a force for homogeneity and, like comparable books in the genre, “an exercise in banality.” For Chayka, Kondo’s method clearly doesn’t spark joy.

More generative for him are the examples of artists who became known as Minimalists even as they disavowed the term. Experiencing their work sharpens his senses; in place of the dull hum of overstimulation, Chayka gains a heightened existential awareness. Walter De Maria’s “The New York Earth Room,” a pile of loose soil that takes up the expanse of a second-floor loft in SoHo, evokes vivid memories of the woods near Chayka’s childhood home. Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes in Marfa, Tex., suggest an “absolute freedom” that the author finds “implacable, aggressive and intimidating.” Chayka is moved when he considers how Agnes Martin created her ghostly grid paintings by paying assiduous attention to each and every line, repeating her actions over and over again, a process as mindful as prayer.

But the vulgarity of the real world keeps threatening to intrude. “Art becomes retail surprisingly quickly,” Chayka writes of Marfa, where Judd’s work turned the remote town into a place where upscale tourists can easily procure a vegan sandwich or a glass of rosé. Driving on the highway nearby, Chayka gets waved through an immigration checkpoint; his Marfa trip in 2018 coincided with the first reports that border guards a mere 60 miles away were separating migrant parents from their children.

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Credit…Gregory Gentert

President Donald Trump, with his steaks and his golf courses and his gilded rooms, is like the anti-minimalist: opulent, ostentatious, overwhelming. Chayka, who mentions Trump at several points in the book, hopes minimalism might provide an antidote or a balm. He compares an exhibit of Martin’s paintings to a “visual spa treatment” after the November 2016 election; he recalls how the new administration’s “reckless enthusiasm” made him want to hide. “I had subconsciously started wearing all-gray clothing,” Chayka writes, as if he were trying to blend into the city’s unnatural landscape of concrete and steel.

What’s most striking about Chayka’s minimalist gestures is how frail they seem next to the larger upheavals that are taking place. And he knows this. Discussing the renunciatory philosophy of the Stoics and Henry David Thoreau, he discerns “a strategy of avoidance, especially in moments when society feels chaotic or catastrophic.” There’s a strain of this in contemporary lifestyle minimalism, which offers self-protection and retreat: “Your bedroom might be cleaner, but the world stays bad.”

The minimalism that Chayka seeks encourages not an escape from the world but a deeper engagement with it. In John Cage’s “4’33”,” silence is “radical and revolutionary,” forcing the audience to pause and actively listen to its surroundings. (When it was first performed in 1952, the setting was an old barn in the woods; the sounds of silence included rustling leaves and drizzling rain.) The music of Julius Eastman presents a kind of ecstatic minimalism — a bid to achieve, as the composer put it, “what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.” In the 1930s, the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki wrote “In Praise of Shadows,” noticing in darkness “a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.”

Chayka’s journey ends in a rock garden in Kyoto, where serene contemplation contends with jostling visitors. “What I saw,” he writes, “was dramatic simplicity side by side with unruly life.” Reconciliation in a setting like this seems possible. But what happens when life isn’t just “unruly” but something more overwhelming and sinister? Can you reconcile the “dramatic simplicity” of a Donald Judd sculpture with children in cages? Should you even try?

It’s an irreducible tension that’s never quite resolved, because resolution would be beside the point. “The Longing for Less” generates more questions than it answers — which is only appropriate, considering that the “deeper minimalism” Chayka pursues is more about vulnerability than control.

This vulnerability is an inextricable element of the human condition, even if the wealthiest Americans have the resources to erect fortresses around themselves — not necessarily of objects but of infrastructure, building personal safety nets while their fellow citizens scramble to make do. “Up through the 20th century, material accumulation and stability made sense as forms of security,” Chayka writes. “Little of this feels true today.” Tangible goods now cost exceedingly less, and intangible “forms of security” cost exceedingly more.

After all, it’s unlikely that the tchotchkes or the new TV set will toss you into financial straits; it’s the college tuition that will put you into crushing debt, the very real possibility you’ll outlive your meager retirement account, or the medical treatment not covered by insurance. Reading Chayka’s book put me in mind of a longing for less stuff, and a longing for more support.

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