If it's not really contributing...

"You're a minimalist," said the voice across the table.

"Yes, but I wasn't always," I heard my own voice saying.

My mind went straight to 1998, when I was living in a minimalist space, where it was six steps from my bed to my writing spot, and many nights my dinner was two pieces of toast eaten on the fly. At first there was no TV, but eventually I got one and I mostly watched The Ovation Channel. One night there was documentary on Robert Irwin. I understood very little of what he was talking about, but I loved his enthusiasm. Last night, I dug out the old VHS tape I made, looking for these words: 

More and more I began to understand that a painting had its own set of rules, that there was a physics of seeing at play in a painting; for example, that two things could not occupy the same spot at the same time. So a lot of the gestures and colors had volumes, they had weight, and these things as they structured themselves in the painting had to make sense within those physics of seeing. Everything in the painting either works for you or it works against you by the fact that it's simply there. It takes up space, it takes up time, it distracts, so if it's not really contributing, there's no reason for it. So I began very slowly to take things out of the painting that were not really necessary. 

Over the weekend, a friend asked me to edit a piece he had written about why he was running for public office. He has to write effectively in his line of work, so it was by no means a remedial assignment. I didn't change a word; I just took out entire sentences, in bunches. The document he sent me was 650 words. The document I sent back to him was 391 words.