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Hollis Frampton. #3 (28 Painting Getty Tomb) Hollis Frampton. #3 (28 painting Getty Tomb). 1958–1962. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA / Art Resource, NY © Estate of Hollis Frampton. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00353 by guest on 26 September 2021 A Picture Is a Shaped Thing* MEGAN R. LUKE A thing is a hole in a thing it is not. —Carl Andre In one statement, Carl Andre gives two definitions for “a thing.”1 First, it is a hole, which is to say, it is a void, the opposite of anything we might grasp or take hold of. And a hole, as a homophone for whole, recalls through absence something unified and indivisible. Second, a thing is a hole in a thing it is not, which is to say, it is noniden- tical to the thinking, beholding subject, to concepts we might use to define it, or to other objects in the world with which we might wish to align it. A thing so conceived violates the closed integrity of all that surrounds it, even as those same surroundings embed and incorporate that thing. In short, the identity of any thing is here under- stood negatively, not in terms of its potential continuity or uniformity with a prior model or matrix, but rather in terms of its difference from the very field to which it belongs, even constitutes. A thing so conceived has no name. Andre formulated this conception of a thing in an effort to express the differ- ence between ideation and execution, between the capacity of language to “symbol- ize” and the power of art “to create something that wouldn’t exist unless you made it.”2 How might his statement describe the relationship between critical discourse and artistic praxis? I want to pursue this question for the case of the early shaped canvases of Frank Stella, for I can think of no other body of work whose reception remains so closely bound to the terms set by its first and most perspicacious critic. Is it possible to write an account of Stella’s art that is not also an account of Michael Fried’s criticism? Is it possible, in other words, to pry apart the identity the criticism has come to have * This essay appeared in German translation as “Ein Bild ist ein geformtes Ding,” in Michael Frieds “Shape as Form” und die Kritik der Form von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart, eds. Ralph Ubl and Rahel Villinger (Munich: Wilhelm. Fink, 2018), pp. 103–122. Many of the ideas presented here were first inspired by an exhibition of the work of Gerard Byrne at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, in 2011. I thank Hamza Walker and Ralph Ubl for encouraging me to return to them. 1. Statement at Bradford Junior College Symposium, February 8, 1968, cited by Lucy Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 40. See also Carl Andre, Cuts: Texts 1959–2004, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 84 and 305, which dates this remark to a symposium at Windham College on April 30, 1968. 2. Andre, in Lippard, Six Years, p. 40. OCTOBER 168, Spring 2019, pp. 148–165. © 2019 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00353 by guest on 26 September 2021 150 OCTOBER with the paintings so that we might begin to see both differently? This line of thought encourages us to reconsider, in light of Andre’s negative dialectics, what Fried under - stood to be Stella’s pursuit of “the viability of shape” and “its power to hold, to stamp itself out, and in —as verisimilitude and narrative and symbolism used to impress themselves—compelling conviction.” 3 Recall, for instance, the naming crisis that was the subject of “The New Nihilism or New Art?,” an hour-long conversation between the critic Bruce Glaser and Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin recorded at the New York radio sta - tion WBAI on February 15, 1964. (This broadcast became a major critical source through the abridged and heavily edited transcript published by Lucy Lippard in Art News in September 1966.) 4 Glaser had launched this discussion by asking the participants to respond to a spate of recent exhibitions that aimed to categorize and label contemporary art, which had, as he put it, “a minimal plastic effect.” Stella was the first to weigh in, arguing that the compulsion to name was sympto - matic of a pervasive suspicion among critics that abstraction is “hard to talk about, because there’s not enough there to talk about.” He dismissed their impulse to group it under a single name so they “can oppose it basically to something like Pop Art.” 5 Stella recognized that such an effort affirmed a faith in the inevitable exchange between comparatively “complicated” and “simple” form—a movement wherein his painting could appear as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism that “was bound to happen in one way or another.” Stella’s understanding of the history of what he called “European geometric painting” relied on his acceptance of the mandate that modernist painting must simultaneously affirm and exceed its own objecthood. Pressed to respond to the idea that his approach to abstraction was continuous with that of Piet Mondrian, Stella chose instead to articulate his difference from his European contempo - raries. Searching for the names of François Morellet and the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, he replied to Glaser that they’ve actually painted before I did all the patterns, the basic designs that are in my painting—not the way I did it, but you could find the schemes, or what are actually the sketches I make for my own paintings, have been painted in France by Vasarely and that sort of group over the 3. Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 77. 4. Lucy Lippard, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” Art News 65, no. 5 (September 1966), pp. 55– 61; republished in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology , ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 148–64. Lippard excised Flavin’s contribution at his request, and her text combines excerpts from the WBAI interview and a later conversation Glaser had with Judd in his studio. See James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 87 and 285n55. All quotations are taken from the recording of the WBAI broadcast, “New Nihilism or New Art,” New York, February 15, 1964, Pacifica Radio Archives, California, tape #BB3394. 5. The main example Glaser cited was an exhibition with the Wölfflinian title The Classic Spirit in 20th Century Art , then on view at Sidney Janis Gallery, in which works by artists like Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Larry Poons were placed in a lineage initiated by Mondrian and extended through Max Bill, among others. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00353 by guest on 26 September 2021 A Picture Is a Shaped Thing 151 last seven or eight years, and I didn’t even know about it. But in spite of the fact that they used those ideas, those basic schemes, it doesn’t have really anything to do with me. As he put it, the difference was not a matter of genealogy but of “motivation.” How does painted composition acknowledge and respond to its own limits? Stella felt that European geometric painters worked to establish the equilibrium of part/whole relationships across the full span of the pictorial surface (“like you would do something in one corner and you would balance it with something in the other corner”). Against such “relational painting,” he famously asserted his “non-relational painting,” which abandoned balance in favor of symmetry and dispersed composition through the allover so as to fully identify the surface with the support. Fried did not pick up Stella’s anti-name of “non-relational painting” as he pursued his own investigations into the consequences of the shaped canvas, which the painter had introduced to eradicate the last vestiges of any difference between figure and ground, to “make the paintings flatter . and keep the paint on top.” 6 Rather, Fried maintained the difference between “literal” and “depicted” shape and, indeed, argued for the necessity of their relationship. Furthermore, by mis - aligning the iteration of Morellet’s equally symmetrical and allover patterns with “relational painting,” Stella left open the question of what, precisely, motivated form in both of their work. Is literal shape a norm that regulates the pattern it frames, or is that shape a consequence of that pattern? The answer to this question did not demand allegiance to either “optical illusionism” or “literalism,” but lay somewhere else entirely. 7 There is, one might say, no it at all. —Michael Fried The WBAI broadcast set the stage for a time, as Fried himself later recalled, “when the same body of work was seen in different ways.” 8 For a “literalist sensi - bility,” the space of Stella’s striped paintings was “real space,” a realm where the movement of vision coincided completely with the movement of the body and where our attention was shunted away from internal relationships of form out into the world. By contrast, Fried was convinced that Stella’s painting signaled a shift in the history of modernist painting and its self-reflexive acknowledgement of its own physicality, away from the flatness of the picture plane to its shape.
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