For the theological/archeological concept, see Biblical maximalism.

For the political ideology, see Revisionist Maximalism

Revisionist Maximalism

Revisionist Maximalism was a Jewish fascist ideology which was part of the Brit HaBirionim faction of the Zionist Revisionist Movement created by Abba Ahimeir. Revisionist Maximalists strongly supported the Italian fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and wanted the creation of an Israel based on...

.

Maximalism is a term used in the arts

ARts

aRts, which stands for analog Real time synthesizer, is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It is best known for previously being used in KDE to simulate an analog synthesizer....

, including literature, visual art, music, and multimedia. It is used to explain a movement

Art movement

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...

 or trend by encompassing all factors under a multi-purpose umbrella term like expressionism

Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...

.

The term maximalism is sometimes associated with post-modern novels

Postmodern literature

The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...

, such as by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California...

 and Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...

, where digression, reference, and elaboration of detail occupy a great fraction of the text.

Novelist John Barth

John Barth

John Simmons Barth is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.-Life:...

 defines literary maximalism through the medieval Roman Catholic Church's opposition between, "two...roads to grace:"

the via negativa of the monkʹs cell and the hermitʹs cave, and the via affirmativa of immersion in human affairs, of being in the world whether or not one is of it. Critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

s have aptly borrowed those terms to characterize the difference between Mr. Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

, for example, and his erstwhile master James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

, himself a maximalist except in his early works.

Takayoshi Ishiwari elaborates on Barth's definition by including a postmodern approach to the notion authenticity

Authenticity (philosophy)

Authenticity is a technical term in existentialist philosophy, and is also used in the philosophy of art and psychology. In philosophy, the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures and influences which are very...

. Thus:

Under this label come such writers as, among others, Thomas Pynchon and Barth himself, whose bulky books are in marked contrast with Barthelmeʹs

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston , co-founder of Fiction Donald...

 relatively thin novels and collections of short stories. These maximalists are called by such an epithet because they, situated in the age of epistemological uncertainty and therefore knowing that they can never know what is authentic and inauthentic, attempt to include in their fiction everything belonging to that age, to take these authentic and inauthentic things as they are with all their uncertainty and inauthenticity included; their work intends to contain the maximum of the age, in other words, to be the age itself, and because of this their novels are often encyclopedic. As Tom LeClair argues in The Art of Excess, the authors of these ʺmasterwork

Masterpiece

Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....

sʺ even ʺgather, represent, and reform the timeʹs excesses into fictions that exceed the timeʹs literary conventions and thereby master the time, the methods of fiction, and the readerʺ.

Contemporary maximalist music is defined by composer David A. Jaffe

David A. Jaffe

David Aaron Jaffe is an American composer who has written over ninety works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, and electronics. He is best known for his use of technology as an electronic-music or computer-music composer in works such as Silicon Valley Breakdown, though his non-electronic...

 as that which, "embraces heterogeneity and allows for complex systems of juxtapositions and collisions, in which all outside influences are viewed as potential raw material." Examples include the music of Edgard Varèse

Edgard Varèse

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....

, Charles Ives

Charles Ives

Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...

, and Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa

Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...

.

Maximalism as a genre in the plastic arts is said to emphasise work-intensive practices and concentrate on the process of creation itself. Works from this genre are generally bright, sensual, and visually rich.

Charlotte Rivers describes how, "maximalism celebrates richness and excess in graphic design," characterized by decoration, sensuality, luxury and fantasy, with examples including the work of illustrator Kam Tang

Kam Tang

Kam Tang is an illustrator living and working in Brixton, London. His work is described as maximalist. After earning his degree from the University of Brighton he went on to do a masters at the Royal College of Art. Since graduating he has worked as a freelance creative...

 and artist Julie Verhoeven.

Iranian-born German-based artist Daryush Shokof

Daryush Shokof

Daryush Shokof is an Iranian artist, film director, philosopher, writer, art director, and film producer, and singer...

 claims to have popularized the term and concept in the visual art world. As described in his "Maximalist Manifesto" (1991) maximalist art works are:

1. Figurative.
2. Politically aware, with socially critical points of view.
3. Erotic.
4. Mostly include ironic and humorous perspectives in concept or in form.
5. Not made to simply oppose minimalist works of art.
6. Open to wide views and visionary dimensions that can be fantastic, but not deformed.

Assistant art history professor Gao Minglu connects maximalism in Chinese visual art to the literary definition by describing the emphasis on, "the spiritual experience of the artist in the process of creation as a self-contemplation outside and beyond the artwork itself...These artists pay more attention to the process of creation and the uncertainty of meaning and instability in a work. Meaning is not reflected directly in a work because they believe that what is in the artist's mind at the moment of creation may not necessarily appear in his work." Examples include in the work of artists Cao Kai, Ding Yi

Ding Yi

Ding Yi , style name Zhengli , a native of Pei , was a minister of Cao Wei during the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history....

, and Gu Dexin.

Further reading

• Delville, Michel and Norris, Andrew (2005). Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism. ISBN 1844710599.