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2012 Agnes Martin, by Lynne Cooke et al. Dia Art Foundation: New York and Yale University Press: New Haven, 2011 (Book Review) Vittorio Colaizzi Old Dominion University

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Repository Citation Colaizzi, Vittorio, "Agnes Martin, by Lynne Cooke et al. Dia Art Foundation: New York and Yale University Press: New Haven, 2011 (Book Review)" (2012). Art Faculty Publications. 7. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/art_pubs/7 Original Publication Citation Colaizzi, V. (2012). Agnes Martin, by Lynne Cooke et al. Dia Art Foundation: New York and Yale University Press: New Haven, 2011 (Book Review). Woman's Art Journal, 33(2), 50-53.

This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Art at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Art Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. unconsciously linking her fear of the public here" (9). Her Excellency sees forming an X. The hands are a symbol or abandonment with her fear of death, and Bourgeois's spiders as linked to her sign of human interconnections. creating, as in the towers, a mother who memories of her mother; she adds that Other works in the exhibition range is both good and bad (the spider eats her the spider in the Holy Qur'an wove a from red gouache "flowers," created in young). Finally, for Larratt-Smith, web that protected the Prophet from his 2009, to a womblike, bronze hanging Bourgeois herself becomes the master enemies. This information further piece Fee Couturiere (1963), to fabric spider, creator, and tale-spinner. His universalizes the spider and gives webs and a fabric head, and metal and concise yet powerful essay contains Westerners and non-Muslims added marble sculpture pieces, including Cell fresh psychoanalytical insights into the insights into another culture. XV (for JMW Turner) (2000), a work in artist's work: The exhibition title, "Conscious and which water spirals together from two Unconscious," is related to a slender sources. Entrenched psychic conflicts sculpture with two sorts of towers. A This exhibition catalog seems condemned the artist to a life of stack of sponge-like white fabric shapes important both for the intimacy of its repetition .... Thus art was at once recall the spinal column and stand for theme and for its range of work focusing an indication of her underlying order and the conscious mind. Nearby, on on layered psychoanalytical readings psychic disorder and a means of a pole, a blue rubber pear shape is pierced about relationships between children making herself whole. It was both with five needles, each holding a small and their mothers. This universal subject symptom and cure. In the place of spool of thread. "The thread represents deserves more attention worldwide; it's Freud's talking cure, which she the unspooling of time, the sewing of the refreshing to think that the exhibition has rejected as inadequate, Bourgeois mother-weaver, the spider's web, the opened some minds to women's (and found another "royal road to the fragility of human relationships, and the human rights) issues as well as to art that unconscious" in the making of art, tenuous linkage to memory," according requires some thought. • which she called her "form of to Larratt-Smith (15). psychoanalysis" (12-13). The dual language QMA catalog, in Jan Garden Castro is Contributing The catalog introduction by QMA English and Arabic, is richly illustrated, Editor for Sculpture and for Ceramics: Art Chairperson Her Excellency Sheikha Al and the cover image (Fig. 1 ), two life­ & Perception. Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al­ sized pairs of pink marble hands Thani states that Maman's new home clasped together, suggests closeness, Notes (since 2011) at the National Convention warmth, and friendship between people 1. See my article on the towers, "Louise Center Qatar Foundation "has already and cultures. In the full untitled work, Bourgeois: Turning Myths Inside Out," inspired writers, artists and members of the four limbs stop below the elbow, Sculpture, 20:1 (Jan/Feb 2001): 16-23.

Agnes Martin reinforce Martin's claim that "The cause to her credit that she will never be edited by Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, of the response is not traceable in the "canonical" in this sense, because her and Barbara Schroder work" (232). The question with which work is singular in its treatment of ges­ Dia Art Foundation and these essays grapple in light of these ture, scale, seriality, and image, as well Yale University Press, 2011 effects is: what could such phenomena as the complexities of meaning that are mean? How are the artist's ambitions never fully independent from her per­ Reviewed by Vittorio Colaizzi and conditions, as well as the conditions sona and career. This singularity makes of the viewer, inscribed upon them? her an especially appropriate artist to be he impression emerges, through Issuing from a colloquium sponsored housed in Dia:Beacon; her work needs Treading this anthology and by the Dia Art Foundation, in conjunc­ the luxurious attention that is less avail­ remembering the work, that Agnes tion with a series of focused exhibitions, able when placed in a room full of Martin's paintings are somehow not this anthology is, of course, a claim for obligatory heavy-hitters of either there. Their qualities and effects are of a Martin's importance, but at the same Abstract Expressionist or Minimalist second order, not directly tied to their time, particularly in the essays by Rhea generations. Because the opportunity to material facts, because as perceptions, Anastas and Jonathan D. Katz, a critique spend time with a sizable body of one they evade and exceed these facts. of the very notion of "importance" as it artist's work is all too rare, this book can Although it is entirely clear of what they is understood in the survey mode of tra­ stand as a literary accompaniment to consist and how they were made, ditional museums. That is to say, Dia' s holdings. viewers report constant dissolution and Martin's work cannot be placed, firmly "Literary," because in addition to its condensation of screens, veils, or mists and without reservation, in a causal scholarly rigor, it reads almost like a from the tiny elements on the surface. chain of generation-to-generation influ­ novel due to the recurrence of certain Emblems of the less than absolute ence. Although she is prized by many themes. One leitmotif is the constant sufficiency of empirical knowledge, they and her stature is likely to increase, it is tension or conflict as to pictorial effects,

WOMAN'S ART JOURNAL motivations, and principles. As several celebration of natural beauty is, for of the authors note, a consideration of Krauss, a diversion from what she sees as Martin's work often leads to multiple Martin's primary project, that of dualities, such as rigorous measurement objectivizing subjectivity, of using the versus handmade imperfections, frank grid and its dissolution as a signifier that materiality versus numinous haze, or highlights and destabilizes the apparent depth versus actual flatness, to sovereignty of individual perception. For say nothing of Martin's own personal this she draws on a description by Kasha mythos of artistic commitment coupled Linville that organizes perception of a with her abrupt abandonment of New painting by Martin into three states: the York, as well as her avowed classicism close-up view of individual pencil lines, against viewers' intimations of the a middle view of unstable mist, and (romantic) sublime. Martin's classicism finally a far view of solid opacity. 1 also contrasts with what she calls In the present volume, however, Fig. 1 Agnes Martin, Play (1966), acrylic on "turmoil" or "torment," an emotional nature will not just go away. While canvas, 72" x 72". Hirshhorn Museum and intensity and worldly chaos to which Martin insisted that her paintings are Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, she insisted she had "turned" her "Not about the world, or nature or things Washington, D.C. "back" (174, 68). like that" (75), she continued to make Douglas Crimp's refreshingly candid reference to mountains, trees, waterfalls, reminiscences of his contact with Martin etc., in her poetic statements as well as in she follows the overused word "nature" introduces three interrelated themes; her her titles, only some of which, in the through a history of its own, from anomalous 1976 film Gabriel (which 1960s, were devised by her then-partner, transcendentalism to ecological ruin. patiently chronicles a boy's walk Lenore Tawney (181). While certain shots After establishing Martin's shrewd alongside water, woods, and flowers), of Gabriel might look like "Agnes management of her own "gnomic" (120) the problematic place of nature in her Martins," no one who has seriously image, Hudson notes it would be oeuvre, and the above-mentioned studied her paintings can think that they "implausible" (124) for her to identify turmoil. Gabriel receives a more are, at bottom, clandestine landscapes. It her ambitions too closely with such a sustained consideration in Zoe Leonard's is, of course, important to temper the fraught term at the precise moment of generously illustrated essay. Leonard interpretation of abstraction as tacit its politicization. Martin's famous and Crimp's contributions are the most picture-making, which renders moot the account in which "the innocence of personal and inquisitive, and are perhaps very pictorial strategies to which Martin trees" incited a grid in her imagination the most true to Martin's somewhat committed. This issue demonstrates represents to Hudson the "cleav[ing]" of optimistic tone, which is not to say that what Crimp sees as the fundamental the referent from the sign, so that the they are frivolous; their searching (and compelling) irresolution of Martin's grid appears "unmoored" (127). Martin, character sets the stage for the more work; it denies referentiality, and wears Hudson concludes, decided to "forgo analytical approaches to come. In the that denial on its sleeve. Building on nature to preserve spirituality" (128). course of Leonard's essay, she never Martin's assertion that classicists "stand The nature issue leads to an even finds out "whether [Martin] was queer," with [their] back to the turmoil" (68), larger question: that of the generation of despite her admitted temptation to Crimp posits, "But surely it is the turmoil meaning in abstraction. In several of the speculate (98). This is a strength, not a away from which Martin turned (by leaving essays, meaning itself is productively deficiency, because as an artist herself, New York, perhaps) that constitutes the interrogated as not encoded within the Leonard provides a different order of tensions so many of us see in her work's form, but rather something (a experience to the reader, one not entirely paintings" (68). For Leonard, Martin's state of mind, perhaps, as in Leonard's based on knowledge, but equally work leads the viewer to nature by account) that emerges through the responsive and responsible to Martin's inducing a state of concentration. She experience of its properties. paintings. For his part, Crimp is the first evocatively describes her "mind Jonathan D. Katz argues that Martin's of many authors to introduce Rosalind mov[ing] past the painting" as she is entire practice-both painting and pub­ Krauss's 1993 essay, "Agnes Martin: The "held ... not stuck" by one of them, to lic construction through behavior, writ­ /Cloud/," which crops up repeatedly in contemplate her own recent experience ings, and statements-is a form of this book with the force of a character. of morning light in the city (85). "queer self-realization" (173), thereby Krauss rejects as a viable interpretive Suzanne Hudson addresses the participating in a broader reinvigoration rubric the "abstract sublime" and its nature problem most directly through a of abstraction on the part of scholars, concomitant evocation of nature. Also contextualization of Martin's rhetoric in critics, and artists that forwards specific engaging Martin's film, she finds, with relation to contemporaneous social and perspectives (race, gender, and orienta­ playful sarcasm, "one after another political history. Pointing to Rachel tion) against the ostensible universality 'Agnes Martin' painting" throughout the Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and the of modernism. Through a combination horizontal divisions of landscape. Such a growing environmentalist movement, of social history, literary parallels with

FALL/ WINTER 2012 the poetry of Gertrude Stein (which reference to Fried's writing on Frank beginning with a close view (one must Martin had invoked in an early state­ Stella. Interwoven in many of the essays always approach a painting at first ment), and some iconographical is the theme of Martin's exteriority to encounter), but ultimately valorizes her sleuthing that links a Zen Buddhist illus­ supposedly mainstream narratives. intensely contemporary reading. In tration with the painting Cow (1960), In "Self-Effacement, Self-Inscription: linking Linville's "red mist of uninflected Katz shows that Martin's queer abstrac­ Agnes Martin's Singular Quietude," anguish" to a "body ... vaporized by the tion is constituted by her pattern of Mansoor similarly makes a claim for an blast of a bomb," an allusion rife with the renunciations read against her historical activist Martin by addressing the ques­ anxieties of the Vietnam era (237), milieu (for example the widespread fir­ tion of the "self"; specifically, do post­ Wagner credits the paintings for ings and persecution of homosexuals structuralist critiques of the author allow renewability in the face of what the known as the Lavender Scare of the for the agency of a gendered and socially viewer brings. They are not blank slates 1950s, as well as Martin's studio envi­ specific subject? Mansoor argues that as much as webs that catch one's rons in Coenties Slip in Manhattan that Martin maintains artistic agency while thoughts, and, as Leonard noted, allow included Ellsworth Kelly and Robert still distancing herself from the self­ one to divert one's mind and follow it Indiana). The unresolved tension of expressive paradigm through a "negotia­ where it will. All of this reinforces simultaneous and intermingling oppo­ tion between adherence to the physical Martin's claim from which the title of the sites (grid/plane; measured/hand­ parameters of the discursive structure essay is taken: "The cause of the response wrought; figure-upon-ground/ figure­ and a break from them." While the tools is not traceable in the work." within-ground) that constitutes her for­ of "string and ruler act as surrogates for The other essays flesh out a picture of mal idiom, according to Katz, chall­ the binding frame," Martin "resisted the Martin as fully as any single volume can; enges "heteronormativity['s] ... policed ... grid's dictates" (156) through the Lynne Cooke provides a cogent survey of attachment to definitions of difference" unavoidable imperfection of the hand as her work and career, while Christina (187). By privileging ever more uncer­ well as the nuanced decisions she contin­ Bryan Rosenberger addresses her tain perceptual experience over the con­ ued to make as to color, configuration, exacting care with materials, while stant search for conceptual resolution and interior scale. Among Mansoor's stipulating that Martin saw technique as and, by implication, power, Katz finds most compelling claims is that through having "nothing to do with it" (104). Martin's work to achieve an almost "sheer composition," i.e., what she paint­ Again, Martin demanded that her work utopian freedom. ed and drew, Martin reinvigorated inten­ lay elsewhere than in its facts. Anastas, With a final rhetorical flourish-"It is tionality, not as self-absorption, but as an drawing on Laura Riding as well as a pure presentness, and it is grace" "ethical" self-effacement that acknowl­ Linda Nochlin, celebrates Martin's work (194)-Katz makes a veiled but obvious edged an "Other" (165). and life choices (particularly her exile reference to the last line in Michael Michael Newman's penultimate from New York) as an act of subversion Fried' s "Art and Objecthood" of 1967, 2 essay is dense with both textual against the presumed inevitability of the the same year Martin left New York. reference and attention to the experience art world's masculine, competitive This reference at first seems gratuitous, of Martin's works. He addresses their paradigm. In the course of this argument, until one remembers that Fried's claim unending and multifaceted irresolution, Anastas cites Martin's claim that that the highest achievement of particularly as to the simultaneous "Painting is not making paintings; it is a modernist art is to be entirely self­ phenomenological and structural development of awareness" (146), evident and independent appeals to a readings as outlined by Krauss, i.e., they reinforcing her work's fundamentally universality that would be denied to can never be wholly and definitively elusive character. Martin as a lesbian on an everyday known through perception, and at the Although densely penciled grids level. Moreover, the phenomenological same time the elements and states receive the most attention, not all of ebullience of her paintings would through which they pass take place in a Martin's paintings adhere to this probably have rendered them system of signs. He distinguishes the schema. Nevertheless, the careful and "theatrical" in Fried's view. Katz materiality of paint, canvas, and lively detail with which representative therefore appropriates the same promise graphite from the materiality of works are described makes the authors' that Fried advocated, but in Martin's language, and finds both in Martin's focus and purpose clear. Additional case it is achieved only through its linear constructs. For Newman, there is treatment, beyond Cooke's thoughtful conditioning by tragic cultural realities. no raw materiality in her lines, because but necessarily brief mention, of the At this point, the reader might also they always refer to, among other very late paintings that feature large, recall Anastas's citation of Lawrence things, writing and drawing, albeit in a black geometric figures on gray grounds Alloway' s careful distinction of Martin's "dismembered" state, a term he borrows would be most welcome, but some time work from the privileged quality of from Paul de Man (212-13). is needed to digest these in the context "opticality" in color-based abstract Anne M. Wagner's "The Cause of the of her life's work. painting (137-38), as well as Jaleh Response" provides a kind of coda that A relatively large selection of plates Mansoor's aside that with Martin, critiques Linville' s account for its for a critical anthology conveys well the "Shape ... is not form" (156), a clear "physical ... impossibil[ity ]" (233) of shape of Martin's career. Although they

WOMAN'S ART JOURNAL are a bit small on the page, they are ature, and the reader may want to gather models the complicated permutations of more faithful as to color and texture some of it for reference. Most frequently intention, perception, and meaning that than other reproductions in circulation, cited are the collected writings edited by inform an artist's reception. • and can trigger memories of actual Dieter Schwarz (1992), Krauss's "The encounters, while inducing a desire to /Cloud/" (1992), Briony Fer's "Drawing Vittorio Colaizzi is an assistant see the work again. As several of the Drawing: Agnes Martin's Infinity" professor of art history at Old Dominion authors note, the experience of Martin's (2005), Kasha Linville' s "Agnes Martin: University, and is currently completing paintings depends upon a variety of An Appreciation" (1971), Thomas a book on Robert Ryman. distances and vantage points, a "mating McEvilley's "Grey Geese Descending" dance" as Wagner calls it (233). This (1987), as well as the writings of Alloway Notes dance is impossible in reproduction, a (1973). The many critical treatments 1. Rosalind Krauss, "Agnes Martin: The state that is acknowledged by the close might make one dream about another /Cloud/," in Bache/ors, (Cambridge: MIT, details on the front and back covers and anthology of previously published 1999): 75-89. See also Kasha Linville, frontispiece to the plates, featuring materials, although the extensive "Agnes Martin: An Appreciation," Artforum 9, no. 10 (June 1971): 72-73. graphite and colored-pencil grids bibliography will assist the reader in respectively. Cloth binding echoes the procuring these sources. 2. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A texture of canvas that is so important to This book will be of particular value to Critical Anthology (New York: E.P. Dutton Martin's work, and a ribbon bookmark practicing artists in addition to art & Co., Inc., 1968), 147. attached to the spine gives the book-as­ historians and students, because of its object a pleasantly antiquated feel. protracted look at Martin's methods and The essays in this volume are very goals. Her tenacity is likely to inspire, and much in dialogue with previous liter- the variety of contributors' approaches

In Wonderland: varying perspectives. The essays also impact of surrealism in those countries The Surrealist Adventures deal with a range of historical periods, and for the relatively large number of of Women Artists in Mexico from the 1930s-when surrealism moved women artists who were associated with beyond the borders of Europe-to an it" (12). Some of the women featured in and the United States examination of surrealism's influence on the book, including the photographer edited by Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq later generations of women in the Lee Miller (1907-77) and painters with Terri Geis contemporary period. Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) and Delmonico Books and Prestel, 2012 More than two hundred high-quality Jacqueline Lamba (1910-93), were among images meticulously reproduce a variety those associated with surrealism in Paris Reviewed by Natalie Phillips of works, some of them well known but before the war and later became "part of not often exhibited, others little known. the movement's legacy in North ftentimes, exhibition catalogs Brief biographies written by Terri Geis on America" (12). Mexico City also drew a O are useful only to experts in the all forty-eight of the women featured in number of important surrealist emigres, field, rarely appealing to both the exhibition, as well as selected including painter Remedios Varo (1908- the general public and serious scholars. individual bibliographies, help to locate 63), photographer Kati Horna (1912- However, this catalog manages to do each artist in historical context. The 2000), and eventually, Carrington. both. In Wonderland: The Surrealist surrealist movement was dominated by Chadwick also notes that as early as the Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico men, many of whom viewed women as 1940s, women gallerists-Betty Parsons and the United States is a welcome muses, and as less capable of becoming and Peggy Guggenheim in New York resource. The catalog was published in artists in their own right. As Whitney and Carolina and Ines Amor in Mexico conjunction with an exhibition that was Chadwick notes in her prologue, this City-were exhibiting works by the jointly organized by the Los Angeles exhibition is the first to truly explore the surrealists, both male and female. County Museum of Art (LACMA) and role of women internationally in the Fort's introductory essay, "In the Land the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico surrealist movement. That said, many of of Reinvention," gives a historical City. Its short but thorough history of the women discussed in the catalog did overview of surrealism in the United women surrealists in Mexico and the not explicitly identify with surrealism States, including women surrealists United States is coupled with articles but rather drew influences from the working in the U.S. and exhibitions of that explore a variety of scholarly topics. movement that were relevant to their surrealist art. She notes several key Editors Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq own experiences as women. Chadwick themes that appear in the women's work, have included essays by well-known sets the tone for the catalog, saying that such as the refusal to sexualize the scholars in the field that feature a wide­ Mexico and the United States are "central female body like their male counterparts range of artists and topics, as well as to this narrative, both for the lasting had done. Instead, women used the FALL/ WINTER 2012 •