Homage to the Square, 1958, Installation Shot, Architecture Studio, 2Nd FL (The Bank), Marfa, Texas 49

48 Homage to the Square, 1958, installation shot, Architecture Studio, 2nd FL (The Bank), Marfa, Texas 49 Jailbreaking Geometric Abstraction 1 A wide array of work in both these E v a D í a z categories was showcased in the 2008 art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York Color Chart: Reinventing Color from 1950 to Today. Organized by curator I There are no “masterpieces” in Josef Albers’ career. His work Ann Temkin, Color Chart’s exhibition strategy toggled between most often emerges, in series, from the success of its forerunner to treating color as a ready-made— initiate the exploration of its successor. Nor did Albers cultivate emphasizing artist’s use of unmixed paint and paint chips (in this vein disciples. It must be remembered that his students followed diverse Frank Stella’s quip, “I tried to keep trajectories even as they credited him as an important mentor. the paint as good as it was in the can,” was mentioned in the show’s So what, then, can be said to be the legacy of Josef Albers today? press release and subsequently quoted in the New York Times If no one artwork, no one thread of inheritance, encapsulates the review of the exhibition)—and “Josef Albers model,” it is because the method itself is the galvanic Albers’ notion of the relativity and relationality of color perception. element of his work: Albers’ practice of experimental testing towards 2 pedagogical ends wields growing infuence today. According to a 2012 article, Tomma Abts’ 48 × 38 cm paintings (the stan- dardized size she works in) go for $120,000. See “Art+Auction's 50 Morphologically, it may seem as though painters like Tomma Abts, Next Most Collectible Artists, From Tauba Auerbach, Mark Grotjahn, and Sarah Morris are obvious Tomma Abts to Hector Zamora,” Art+Auction, June 19 (2012). In a 2014 inheritors of the Albers project—artists whose works refer to his Phillips auction in New York a idea of the relativity of color, or continue practices of hard-edged 2011 Auerbach canvas sold for $1.8 million, surpassing its geometric abstraction.1 Abstraction as a testing of the mutability $1.2 million estimate. See http:// of basic forms continues to be immensely generative as a means to www.bloomberg.com/news/2014- 05-15/rothko-painting-fetches-56- produce art, as it was for Albers. But one cannot help but wonder if 2-million-at-phillips-auction.html, accessed on June 27, 2014. According the social project of geometric abstraction in painting—the interest to artsy.net, Sarah Morris’ paintings, in radically changing habits of vision by training viewers in the frequently produced at a 213.36 × 213.36 cm scale, have average subtleties of perceptual experience—is as viable today as it once auction estimates of approximately was. This may have to do with the established market that hungrily $100,000 each. See http://artsy.net/ artist/sarah-morris/auction-results, swallows up abstract paintings, and the emptiness of promises about accessed June 1, 2014. Grotjahn’s paintings have been auctioned for the transformative power of abstraction—to make viewers into edu- more than one million dollars. See cated audiences, or potential producers—at a time when painting in http://galleristny.com/2011/10/mark- grotjahn-drunk-in-dallas-collapses- particular is caught in the swirl of market speculation and auction- as-painting-sells-for-1-m/, accessed ing.2 It makes one wonder what future may lie beyond the art market on June 1, 2014. How painters may feel about this is perhaps indicated for work that clearly wants to situate itself in a lineage of formalist in the title of the previous Web link. 50 projects, but that does not underscore, through a concerted under- taking of pedagogical outreach, the project of the alteration of perception as part of its discursive strategy. Albers made such an outreach a central part of his practice, and of his life. Pedagogy was not merely a hoped for outcome of his project of geometric abstraction, but its foundational principle. To Albers, the better “vision” of art that attentive perception triggers is an awareness of the ways in which the individual is situated in the larger feld of social relations. Attention to the details of visual and perceptual experience could, in Albers’ schema, translate to a keener awareness of the cognitive processes that habituate patterns both perceptual and social, and the manner in which cognition itself relies on the sometimes misleading perceptual data that mediates complex thought and the external world. Everything in the world has form, Albers claimed. Training the eye in the composition of form was a precondition for understanding and possibly transforming the world. He attempted to train the eyes not only of his students at the Bauhaus, where he began as a pupil and then taught from 1926 to 1933, at Black Mountain College, where he taught from 1933 to 1949, and at Yale University, where he led the design portion of art school from 1950 to 1958, but also the eyes of the viewers of his work. He produced paintings and prints that allowed viewers to test subtle distinctions in visual perception, using basic forms like squares as containers for experiments in serial variation, continually testing factors such as proportion and color. In his study of the fundamental elements—the material constitution and visual appearance—of form, a vocabulary of perceptual experience could be built up and shared among spectators. Understanding the importance of Albers’ project as testing perception, rather than as the production of abstract paintings, may require turning Albers on his head, or rather, turning the paintings themselves around. For behind each of his oil-on-Masonite paintings is, in Albers’ own hand, a “recipe” for the procedures undertaken to create the work, a proto-conceptualist instructional logic that allowed him, and others who were aware of these texts, to deploy the works as teaching studies. 51 Jill Magid, Homage to the Square, 1963, After Josef Albers, 2014 52 In order to chart the renewed interest in Albers’ model in contempo- 3 Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, rary art practices, one must acknowledge the criticisms he faced that, Jackson Pollock, and Josef Albers,” to a great extent, obscured the importance of his work and its impact in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. John during his lifetime. The deferred reception of Albers’ legacy in many O’Brian (Chicago and London: ways stems from the sometimes harsh treatment his art practice University of Chicago Press, 1986), 286. and pedagogical project received in their time. Albers’ technique of 4 Ibid. serial testing was often deemed too subtle and restrained, unoriginal even. In 1949, art critic Clement Greenberg singled out Albers as a 5 For example, speaking about an Albers work he owned, Donald Judd “sensuous, even original colorist,” while bestowing the faint com- claimed, “The scheme of squares mendation that his “strictly rectilinear art…adheres to the dogma and the corresponding change of color provides changes in propor- of the straight line.”3 Greenberg concluded the essay with the slam: tion, which is unusual in recent art, and which I am interested in my “Alas, Albers must be accounted another victim of Bauhaus modern- own work.” See Donald Judd, “Josef ism, with its doctrinairism, its static, machine-made, and logical art, Albers,” (1991) reprinted in Chinati Foundation Newsletter, no. 11 (2006): 4 its inability to rise above merely decorative motifs.” This would not 69. be the last time Albers’ artistic method was characterized as rigid or 6 Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” repetitive, and sometimes even his fans were skeptical. The recovery Arts Magazine (November 1964), reprinted in Chinati Foundation by minimalist artists of early twentieth century formalisms, such Newsletter, no. 11 (2006): 60. The as those innovated at the Bauhaus, foregrounded the relativity of exhibition was likely Homage to the Square at Sidney Janis Gallery, perception at the level of color and proportion, and in this context New York, which ran from artist-critic Donald Judd cited Albers as a precedent.5 Yet while September 28 to October 24, 1964. writing about a 1964 exhibition of works from Albers’ Homage to 7 Ibid. the Square series, Judd tempered his largely positive review with the 8 Coplans called Albers’ work “overtly claim that though some paintings were “frst rate,” there was a risk systematic” in his essay “Serial Imagery,” Artforum, vol. 7, no. 2 of the sequences becoming “predictable” when the colors within (October 1968): 34–43, reprinted as the works were too similar to one another.6 Judd pointed to the burnt “Serial Imagery: Defnition,” (1968) in Provocations: Writings by John ochres and sienna tones of Open Land (1963) as an example of works Coplans, ed. Stuart Morgan, within the series that were “too harmonious” and “somewhat pat.”7 (London: London Projects, 1996), 77–92, quote is on page 81. For a discussion of the import of this essay today, see Brian O’Doherty, In the years after Albers retired from full-time teaching, it became “Critically Literate; Provocations: clearer to some, including Judd, just how infuential Albers was, Writings by John Coplans,” Artforum (February 1998): 11–12. For further and the secondary reception of his work by those who were not his reading on discussions of seriality students continues. To a great extent, this infuence concerned how in the 1960s, see Lawrence Alloway, “Systemic Painting,” in Systemic visual and spatial perception occurs relationally, and is therefore a Painting, exh. cat. (New York: The Solomon R.

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