Agnes Martin and Ian Curtis
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UNKNOWN ARCHITECTURES: AGNES MARTIN AND IAN CURTIS A Dissertation by JAMES ANDREW WESTWATER Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, Stephen Caffey Committee Members, Gabriel Esquivel Philip Galanter Kirk Hamilton Head of Department, Robert Warden May 2017 Major Subject: Architecture Copyright 2017 James Andrew Westwater ABSTRACT This study focuses on the affective role of the built space of artistic production––the studio, the writing room, the rehearsal space, and the city––to examine, through the lens of architecture, mechanisms of artistic creativity such as inspiration, insight problem solving, nature, and the sublime. Architecture is defined here as human-built, natural, or conceptual space, place, or object. The romantic image of the suffering artist––the artist who suffers for their art––is well known, but to what extent does an artist make work because of their suffering or despite their suffering? In order to represent both hypotheses embedded in the question, two specific artists were selected for case study. The Canadian-American artist Agnes Martin (1912–2004) is known for her abstract geometric paintings, writings and lectures, and the decision to turn her back on the New York art scene and move to rural Northern New Mexico where she lived for almost 50 years. Martin overcame schizophrenia to become one of the most successful artists of her generation. The English singer-songwriter-musician Ian Curtis (1956–1980), lead singer of the influential postpunk band Joy Division, lived most of his life in or close to the northern English city of Manchester. Curtis suffered from epilepsy and committed suicide at the age of 23 the day before Joy Division’s first American tour. The study takes a mixed methods approach, which includes historiography, autoethnography, and hermeneutics, to examine the effect and affect of architecture on the two case study subjects, Martin and Curtis, and how place and space is expressed via Martin’s and Curtis’s work to locate both artist and audience. The study finds that Martin and Curtis were influenced and inspired by their surroundings, as evidenced in their work. Both artists also altered space or place in order to facilitate control and creativity. Last, the artists’ lives and works are reflected back at their respective region or city to bring the effect and affect of architecture full circle. ii DEDICATION To my wife, Naomi Alena Sachs iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my committee chair, Dr. Caffey, and my committee members, Profs. Esquivel, Galanter, and Hamilton, for their inspired and inspiring counsel. Additional thanks go to friends and colleagues, particularly my warm, talented, international cohort, and the gifted and able department faculty and staff. My gratitude also to Dr. Stephen H. Daniel and Dr. Steven M. Smith, whose classes on John Locke’s Essay and cognitive psychology, respectively, made the sections on Locke’s aesthetics and insight problem solving possible. Finally, thank you to my mother and father for their love and their love of design and the arts, and to Benjamin and Jacqueline Sachs for their forbearance and support and for their beautiful, brilliant, loving daughter, Naomi. iv CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES Contributors This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professor Stephen M. Caffey, advisor, and Professors Gabriel Esquivel and D. Kirk Hamilton of the Department of Architecture and Professor Philip Galanter of the Department of Visualization. All work for the dissertation was completed independently by the student. Funding Sources Graduate study was supported in part by scholarships from Texas A&M University. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION ...................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................. iv CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES ................................................................. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ...................................................................................................... vi LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITION OF TERMS ...................................... 1 Definition of Terms ..................................................................................... 3 CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................... 24 Purpose and Methodology of the Literature Review ................................... 24 Challenges to the Literature Review ........................................................... 24 Finding Patterns ........................................................................................... 29 Themes in the Literature on Painting and Agnes Martin ............................ 32 Themes in the Literature on Music and Ian Curtis ...................................... 39 Themes in the Literature on Architecture, Agnes Martin, and Ian Curtis ... 44 Theoretical Framework ............................................................................... 50 CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................ 51 Data Collection ............................................................................................ 51 Data Analysis .............................................................................................. 53 CHAPTER IV CASE STUDY: AGNES MARTIN .............................................................. 55 Transcendent Spaces: Inspiration and the Artist ......................................... 55 Inner Architectures ...................................................................................... 64 A Response to Landscape: Nature’s Affect in Martin’s Work ................... 77 CHAPTER V CASE STUDY: IAN CURTIS ....................................................................... 82 City and Singer: The Case for Cause and Effect ......................................... 82 Beauty in Service of Reason: Locke, Aesthetics, and the Sublime ............. 92 Postprodution and the Curtis Meme ............................................................ 105 CHAPTER VI PAINTING, MUSIC, AND ARCHITECTURE ........................................... 114 Architecture as a Vehicle for Locating Self: Agnes Martin and Ian Curtis ..................................................................................................... 114 Towards an Expanded Definition of Architecture ...................................... 127 CHAPTER VII CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................................... 141 REFERENCES ...................................................................................................................... 144 vi LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE Page 1 Agnes Martin’s painting The Tree ......................................................................... 61 2 Agnes Martin at her studio in Galisteo, New Mexico ........................................... 81 3 An early version of Curtis’s lyrics for the Joy Division song ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ ..................................................................................... 84 4 Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover .................................................. 88 5 Deborah and Ian Curtis’s house at 77 Barton Street, Macclesfield ....................... 109 6 Ian Curtis at Joy Division’s T. J. Davidson rehearsal space, Manchester ............. 111 7 Joy Division on the Epping Walk Bridge over Princess Parkway in Hulme, Manchester ................................................................................................ 120 8 Agnes Martin’s 1979 series The Islands ................................................................ 121 9 Agnes Martin at her house near Cuba, New Mexico ............................................. 131 10 Ian Curtis performing with Joy Division at Queen’s Hall, Leeds ......................... 143 vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITION OF TERMS The painter Agnes Martin and the musician and singer-songwriter Ian Curtis conceptualized and produced the forms of their creative expressions in geographical locations–– frames of place––that have become synonymous with the artists and their work. Although Martin was born in the remote, big sky vastness of Saskatchewan (she described a train viewed in the distance taking all morning to cross from one side of the horizon to the other) and worked for 10 years in New York City, Martin lived and worked for almost half a century in Northern New Mexico (Princenthal, 2015a). It is the paintings produced in Martin’s three main New Mexico studios in or near Cuba, Galisteo, and Taos––the horizontally banded, pastel colored, acrylic washes, and penciled lines on square canvases of human scale, in that mystic and mythic plenum of all things mid-to-late-Martin––that have come to define the states and statuses of the artist and her oeuvre (Ackermann et al., 2015; Anastas et al., 2011; Princenthal, 2015a). Curtis, on the other hand, was born in bombed-out, gritty,