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.

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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 understood 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 difference 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.

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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.

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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.

6. Frank Stella to Henry Geldzahler, Making It New: Essays, Interviews, and Talks (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 56. 7. For one rehearsal of this false choice, see Meyer, Minimalism , p. 121. 8. Michael Fried in “Theories of Art After Minimalism and Pop,” in Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number One , ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), p. 79. See also Fried’s reflections in “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” in Art and Objecthood , pp. 70–71n67.

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Clement Greenberg had insisted that the essential trait of modernist painting was that it called attention to its material ground and its identity as a flat surface, but that it always did so through representation. Representation was only possi - ble insofar as we are able to sustain the recognition of the difference between the “literal flatness” of the picture plane and the “depicted flatness” of the image. 9 Fried appropriated Greenberg’s terminology to the shapes of Stella’s Irregular Polygons in his 1966 essay “Shape as Form” to distance the develop - ment of modernist painting from his mentor’s teleology of flatness. Yet like Greenberg, he felt the beholder’s recognition of a painting’s objecthood only mattered if it affirmed the autonomy of both the beholding subject and the painterly object—a conviction that he would develop in full force in “Art and Objecthood” the following year. 10 However, the lasting significance of “Shape as Form” may well rest with the revision Fried made to his own understanding of the motivation of form through “deductive structure,” that is, to the idea that painterly composition ought logically to derive from the shape of the framing edge of the canvas. 11 “Deductive struc - ture” disappears in Fried’s critical vocabulary with this essay, yet it still colored the history of modernist painting he narrated at its outset, which, in turn, served as a foil to his critical assessment of the achievement of the Irregular Polygons. 12 This was a history in which the relationship between literal and depicted shape was one of dominance and submission. Stella’s stripe paintings offered a climax to this story. Writing about the Aluminum Paintings, the painter’s first series of shaped canvases, Fried claimed that “the stripes appear to have been generated by the framing edge and, starting there, to have taken possession of the rest of the canvas as though the whole painting self-evidently followed from not merely the shape of the support, but its actual physical limits.” 13 His language here is explicitly propri - etary and implicitly gendered. Depicted shape is “dependent” upon literal shape, conforms to it completely, and is, in effect, derived entirely from it. Literal shape is experienced a priori , and thus the striped pattern unequivocally follows a temporal

9. Consider how Greenberg deploys these terms for Cubist painting in his 1959 essay “Collage”: “The main problem at this juncture became to keep the ‘inside’ of the picture—its content—from fus - ing with the ‘outside’—its literal surface. Depicted flatness—that is, the facet-planes—had to be kept sep - arate enough from literal flatness to permit a minimal illusion of three-dimensional space to survive between the two.” Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 71–72. 10 . Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” p. 11. 11 . The term appears in Fried’s May 1964 “New York Letter,” though the basic tenets are devel - oped in his May 25, 1963, “New York Letter,” both commissioned by Art International ; the concept received its fullest treatment in his essay for the 1965 exhibition Three American Painters . See Art and Objecthood , pp. 233, 251–55, 297, and 319. 12 . Fried explicitly abandoned “deductive structure” and replaced it with the imperative that pic - torial structure “acknowledge the shape of the support,” in “Jules Olitski” (1967), in Art and Objecthood , p. 146n13. See the important critique by William Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), pp. 54–60. 13 . Fried, “Shape as Form,” p. 79–80.

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progression from the outside inward, tracing an activity of “filling in” a pictorial surface wholly determined by the literal shape of its framing edges. Stella’s stripe painting might therefore be seen as the product of a panto - graphic operation—a repetitive, proportional, and systematic reduction of shape executed on the basis of a prototype. It is a reproductive operation that, on the surface, appears to mimic that of photography, an analogy ironically recorded in a series taken by Hollis Frampton of Stella painting Getty Tomb (1959) for the portfo - lio The Secret World of Frank Stella (1958–62). 14 Stella’s reinscription of the paint - ing’s edge steadily proceeds from the outer limit in toward the center, yet Frampton’s photographs show that the painter did not begin by laying his black bands at that edge, but at an arbi - trary point within the empty expanse of canvas. Indeed, throughout the portfo - lio, Frampton cannily figured the work - ings of his own photographic medium as a series of disruptions to what Fried had described as the “mechanical” logic of the deductive structure of Stella’s paintings. 15 Again and again, he used the frame of the photographic image to unsettle the priority and integrity of their literal shapes, and the effect is the irruption of the artist’s body in the optical field. In a pair of photographs, Frampton radically cropped Stella’s Aluminum Avicenna (1960) around its central hole, eradi - cating the painting’s irregular perime - ter to make it conform to the rectangle of the photograph instead. In one Frampton. #9 (100 formal ¾ profile). 1958–1962. Addison Gallery of American print, the painter’s left hand (with its Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA / Art severed index finger) pokes out from Resource, NY © Estate of Hollis Frampton. this metallic vortex like a tongue, and in the other, this void is made to coin -

14 . For photographs in this series that were not included in the portfolio, see Brenda Richardson, Frank Stella: The Black Paintings (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1976). 15 . Fried, “New York Letter” (May 25, 1963), in Art and Objecthood , p. 302. In this respect, it seems to me that Benjamin Buchloh elides the extent to which the diagrammatic “episteme of order and control” he posits for Stella’s Black Paintings is indebted to Fried’s conception of deductive structure. Unless we account for the specific ways Stella’s process undercuts our expectations for the total domination of materi - al by the concept that his patterning appears to promise (not to mention the deflating humor of Frampton’s photographic record), the order of the diagram can neither deliver a viable alternative to the critic’s purported “formalism” nor escape its terms. See Buchloh, “Painting as Diagram: Five Notes on Frank Stella’s Early Paintings, 1958–1959,” October 143 (Winter 2013), pp. 126–44.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00353 by guest on 26 September 2021 Frampton. (112 hand through hole in aluminum ptg). 1958–1962. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA / Art Resource, NY © Estate of Hollis Frampton.

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cide with the stare of his right eye. Untethered from the literal shape of painting yet no less corporeal, the gravitational pull of the black hole at the center now becomes generative for the photographic image. It transforms into a motif that structures other images in Frampton’s parody of the portrait of the artist as a young man, resurfacing as his bared navel released from the constriction of his belt buckle or as a “love” drain at the bullseye of the target shaped by the space between his legs. 16 “Is the world a prop or is Frank Stella?” Andre asked Frampton in 1963. “In a number of your Secret World prints I want to get rid of Frank Stella and in a num - ber of them I want to get rid of the world. Some work as poetic wholes and some as poetic holes.” 17 No doubt Frampton’s erotic and ironic Surrealism takes us far from Fried’s orbit. Yet, in light of Andre’s response, these photographs would seem to affirm the critic’s own judgment of Stella’s stripe paintings, namely, that “if any portion of his pictures tends to be problematic it is the center.” 18 In “Shape as Form,” he went on to argue that their difficulty lay in what he per - ceived to be their “conflictless” identi - fication of shape with the framing edge, a literalist endgame to the drama of control and dependency latent to deductive structure. This res - olution of conflict in identity risked eliminating the difference between depicted and literal form necessary for Frampton. #48 (505 valentine). 1958–1962. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips these paintings to “hold as shapes” Academy, Andover, MA / Art Resource, NY against a world of mere things. 19 © Estate of Hollis Frampton.

16 . Bruce Jenkins has noted that The Secret World of Frank Stella was a parody of The Private World of Pablo Picasso , a photobook by David Duncan published in 1958, and throughout, “Frampton often sim - ply inserts the figure of Stella into a characteristic scene,” in a travesty of photographic genre conven - tions. “The ‘Other Work’ of Hollis Frampton: A Tour,” in Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), pp. 18–19. 17 . Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, “On Forty Photographs and Consecutive Matters,” in 12 Dialogues, 1962–1963 , ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax: Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1980), p. 57. 18 . Fried, “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella,” in Art and Objecthood , p. 253. Fried opposed Stella here to the Cubists, who had “perimeter” problems. 19 . Here I condense several ideas presented in Fried, “Shape as Form,” pp. 81, 87–88, and 95. The centrality of conflict throughout this essay should therefore be understood as a symptom of Fried’s aversion to the inexorable logic of deductive structure.

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Frampton. #30 (1017 navel [retake]). 1958–1962. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA / Art Resource, NY © Estate of Hollis Frampton.

The literal edge of the work was not a seam that sutured it to that world; it was what guaranteed the possibility of any communication between embodied and illusive space at all. When we recognize the difference between these two kinds of space, we are able to feel how vision is both bound by and released from the body. Our sense of our place in the world demands a position from which we can acknowledge it. And only by testing the limits of vision against the framing edge do we come to know where we stand. Fried’s commitment to this understanding of the edge had to be unshakable, for without it the beholder could not witness the dialectical exchange between tangible contour and illusive space. Ultimately, the dialectic of literal and depicted shape did not resolve itself in representation, but in our centered self-awareness. For Fried, this was the true accomplishment of the Irregular Polygons, before which “the beholder is in effect compelled not to experience the literal shape in its entirety.” 20 With these paint - ings, Stella appeared to negate his stripe paintings’ “conflictless” acknowledgement of their objecthood, demanding instead that we actively “unmake” the difference

20 . Ibid., p. 90.

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between literal and depicted shape entirely, to feel that there is “no it at all.”21 Literalness is no longer an artifact of a painting’s objecthood but of experience. In this series, the shape of the support is too irregular to hold as a gestalt, it is not repro- duced on the painted surface, and though it conditions every- thing that we see, it becomes, instead, a hole at the heart of perception—one that we must work to fill through a piecemeal recognition of parts that are themselves neither fully literal nor entirely depicted. In the end, the spatial relationship between the shapes we do see, even their very claim to existence, “lies somewhere out there, beyond the painting, waiting to be known.”22 At stake for the beholder was, Fried argued, nothing less than a knowledge that “is simultane- Stella. Sanbornville II. 1966. ously knowledge of painting LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur (i.e., what it must be in order to (Westfälisches Landesmuseum) / Acquired elicit conviction) and of himself with the support of the Land North Rhine Westphalia. Photograph Hanna Neander. (i.e., what he finds himself con- © 2019 Frank Stella / Artists Rights vinced by)—apprehended not Society (ARS), New York. as two distinct entities but in a single inextricable fruition.”23

If we want to attempt to define the function of iteration, it would consist in producing irritation. —Max Imdahl If we refuse to identify painting with the object, must we identify it with the beholding subject? Whereas Fried maintained the nonidentity of shape and objecthood, another early critic of Stella’s paintings was rather more concerned with how they asserted the nonidentity of form and cognition. In the American con- 21. Ibid., pp. 94–96. 22. Ibid., p. 94. 23. Ibid., p. 99n11.

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text, the work of Max Imdahl is virtually unknown, though it would be difficult to overstate his importance for the reception of postwar American art in Europe. 24 Imdahl also pursued an approach to interpretation through an immanent cri - tique of form, yet because he remained unburdened by the polemics that had defined the stakes of Fried’s criticism, he drew substan - tively different conclusions, particularly when it came to the matter of motivation. Imdahl took up the challenge of articulating the difference between the mod - François Morellet. Angles droits ular, repetitive, and symmet - concentriques. 1956. rical compositions by Stella Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, and Morellet. His compari - Mönchengladbach, Germany. son hinged on Morellet’s © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Angles droits concentriques (1956), a square field symmetrically divided by regularly spaced, nesting right angles. These angles demarcate a central × and their peaks all align with the verti - cal and horizontal axes that bisect the plane. For Imdahl, Morellet’s painting clearly pointed to a system that had governed its composition, but he insisted “it is impossible to deduce the system at first glance or with a single glance at all.” 25 The specific shape of the square support permits us to see the same thing in two ways: The nesting angles appear to originate from the outermost boundaries of the field, moving into the center, where they leave the × form “in reserve,” and these

24 . Imdahl’s legacy in Germany is no less contested than Fried’s in the United States, and often on similar grounds. Here I can only hint at the value for a comparative analysis of their thought for the study of American modernist art. I direct readers to Max Imdahl, “At the Limit of Verbal Expression,” trans. Timothy Grundy, Art in Translation 3, no. 3 (2011), pp. 247–80, and to the study by Magdalena Nieslony, “Richard Serra in Germany: Perspectivity in Perspective,” trans. James Gussen, RES 53/54 (Spring–Autumn 2008), pp. 47–58. The epigraph is from Max Imdahl, “Über einige Werke Morellets in Blick auf Stella und Vasarely” (1971), reprinted in Max Imdahl: Gesammelte Schriften: Zur Kunst der Moderne , vol. 1, ed. Angeli Janhsen-Vukicevic (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 237. All translations from the German are my own; original quotations can be found in Luke, “Ein Bild ist ein geformtes Ding,” pp. 103–22. 25 . Max Imdahl, “Zur Bild-Objekt-Problematik in europäischer und amerikanischer Nachkriegskunst” (1986), reprinted in Max Imdahl: Gesammelte Schriften. Reflexion—Theorie—Methode , vol. 3, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 560.

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same four groups of angles read as echoes, reverberat - ing out from the central × to flesh out the ghostly + form of the central axes of the field. These opposing direc - tional possibilities irrupt in what Imdahl called “the irri - tation of the always-identi - cal.” 26 While the composi - tion encodes these differen - tial perceptual avenues simultaneously, it is impossi - ble to actually see them simultaneously. They cannot be resolved into each other, nor can the × ever obliterate the + (or vice versa). Each perceptual possibility sup - plants the other in a kind of endless loop. This relation - ship between iteration and irritation, between repeti - tion and difference, is the structuring principle of Morellet’s painting. The implied extension of the image beyond the sup - port in Morellet’s picture never resolves itself into a closed form the way it ulti - mately does for Stella’s paint - Stella. Tuxedo Junction . 1960. Collection Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, the ings. Imdahl made the com - Netherlands. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven, the parison with the Black Netherlands © 2019 Frank Stella / Painting Tuxedo Junction Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (1960), where no other depicted shape competes with the rhombus for our attention. 27 The formal struc - ture is inextricable from its material ground—that is, the canvas itself is, quite literal - ly, what we see—yet it is indifferent to its shape . This is even more evident when we compare it to Gezira (1960), a canvas with the same dimensions. The concentric lines

26 . Ibid., p. 561. 27 . Imdahl, “Über einige Werke Morellets,” pp. 231–35. In “Zur Bild-Objekt-Problematik,” he compares Morelett’s painting to Stella’s Jill (1959).

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are not deduced from the limits of either plane, but rather, the placement of the plane appears to be deduced from the axes of symmetry of the image, much as if we were looking through the shifting aperture of a camera’s viewfinder. Whereas the Morellet image affords us different, mutually exclusive modes of perception, which interfere with each other within a single image structured everywhere by identity, with Stella, we must contend with the independence of two kinds of closed form, of the image and of the picture plane itself. Imdahl argued that the shaped canvas had its origin in this implied extension of the image from the inside out, beyond the framing edge. Once we see the literal shape of Tuxedo Junction as an arbitrary excerpt of a larger field, the closed shape of the rhombus and the regularity of pattern allow us to easily complete the forms that have been cut off at the perimeter. Yet we also find the potential for the shaped can - vas in Stella’s open, cruciform-patterned Black Paintings. With Zambezi (1960), although the central × is the exposed ground of the canvas, it will always read as a figure against a black background, and so only the four triangles at the edge ever

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00353 by guest on 26 September 2021 Stella. Zambezi . 1959. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson. Photograph by Katherine Du Tiel © 2019 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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appear as “remainders.” By removing the material that remained in excess of his ideated pattern, Stella believed he could better achieve, as he put it to Glaser in the WBAI broadcast, “a whole thing.” 28 By contrast, because we can see the Morellet image moving in two directions, both the central × and the four triangles at the mar - gins can read as negative space (just not at the same time). Morellet’s image attains its coherence from the square support, and therefore, despite its equal commitment to a nonrelational, iterative structure, it cannot be thought apart from the normative format traditional for easel painting. 29 If it was imperative for Fried to read Stella’s stripe painting centripetally (from the outside in) in order for the shaped canvas to constitute a specific mode of self-knowledge, for Imdahl it was equally significant to read these paintings cen - trifugally (from the inside out). In his own account of the development of the Irregular Polygons from 1970, Imdahl considered the “regular” shaped canvases of Stella’s Notched V series to raise the question: What kind of totality emerges from a completely nonrelational, anti-hierarchical ordering of equivalent elements? A work like Qualthlamba (1964) was a configuration based on a single, repeating V- form, and while it is clear how its overall shape could be derived from that mod - ule, it is not entirely necessary that the module should derive from that shape. As a result, Imdahl argued, anyone could “mechanically recombine” the V-form mod - ule to work through the whole set of possible configurations, “no better and no

28 . Stella later physically excised this illusionistic ground to make the shaped canvas Tampa (1963), which retains the same pattern in a different color and scale. Lawrence Rubin, ed., Frank Stella: Paintings, 1958 to 1965: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1987), cat. 214. 29 . Imdahl, “Über einige Werke Morellets,” p. 235.

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worse than Stella himself.” 30 The evident rationality of the system meant that “as soon as the beholder has understood and analyzed the phenomenon, he has already assumed the role of its possible creator. By appropriating the phenome - non rationally, the beholder acquires the method to make it himself.” 31 Considered in this way, all possible configurations are latent in any individual work of the series, whose status as a “whole thing” is necessarily provisional. The total reflexivity of perception and process, production and reception, is, however, held in check by the objecthood of the literal shape of the painting—an utterly singular, “monistic” counterweight to the iteration of the module. 32 This tangible objecthood was just as decisive for the Irregular Polygons, where, by con - trast, the unique formal constellation of a given work excluded the possibility of a general rule (and, for Imdahl, denied each of Stella’s eleven shape-sets the status of a series). Their shaped supports were precisely what intensified the aporia of their spatial illusionism to the point of outward “aggressivity.” 33 And here, too, the negative example of Morellet is instructive for our understanding of what was at stake. For Stella, composition was not dependent upon the shape of easel paint - ing, whereas it was entirely contingent upon the materiality of that plane. For Morellet, the composition utterly relied upon the shape of the plane, but its specif - ic materiality was of no consequence. Indeed, his painting neutralized the assumed importance of the “original” work of art made by an individual hand. As Imdahl provocatively argued, the image, its contingency upon the pre-given shape of the rectangular picture plane, and its polyvalence for the beholder would be just as effective and valuable if we were seeing it in a photographic reproduction. 34

A painting—I don’t know—is a painting. —Frank Stella All the participants in the WBAI broadcast stressed their use of industrial materials and their desire to interfere with them as little as possible, avoiding any misguided celebration of the individuality of their handiwork. However, in a dis - cussion where Stella expressed his ideas about composition with confidence, he was conspicuously ambivalent about the materiality of his work. In the end, Dan Flavin precipitated the crux of their conversation by insisting on the distance between his practice and Stella’s continued commitment to painting: “My work becomes more and more an industrial object in the way I accept the fluorescent light for itself, you see. It is an industrial object. It’s just a reiteration of it or a dis - orientation of it,” and when it comes to “the painting as object, you know, as a

30 . Max Imdahl, Frank Stella: Sanbornville II (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970), p. 10. 31 . Ibid., pp. 10–11. 32 . Ibid., p. 16. 33 . Ibid., pp. 28–30. 34 . Imdahl, “Über einige Werke Morellets,” p. 243.

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physical object, I think that Frank is the farthest from that of us.” Stella met this claim with no small amount of protest: My paintings are sort of based on the fact that only what’s there is there. And that makes it an object, I mean, because it really is an object, and I think that anyone that actually does it or gets involved enough in it finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he’s doing. He’s making a thing. . . .

I think all that should be taken for granted, like I mean, basically, the discussion of the thing as object is sort of, in a sense, ridiculous. I mean, particularly as a painter. I mean, a painting—I don’t know—is a, is a painting. The thing that I would like to see is, if the thing is either lean enough, accurate enough, or right enough, you would just be able to look at it. In other words, all I want anyone to get out of my paint - ings or all I ever get out of them is the fact that you can see it all without any confusion. In that sense, what you see is what you see. 35 “What’s there is there.” “A painting is a painting.” “What you see is what you see.” Stella enlisted these tautologies to repel the threat of the image splintering in two, into what Josef Albers called its “actual fact” and its “factual fact”—that is, its quantifiable, material parameters and its felt or lived existence in perception, its phys - ical and virtual life. In a series of lectures at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in April 1965 (that is, a little over a year after the WBAI broadcast), Albers illustrated this dual identity of images by making reference to his pedagogical studies in simulta - neous color contrast, remarking that “both center colors are precisely the same color. However, being unable to actually see this, we demonstrate clearly, with colors, that we rarely see what we see.” 36 The implications of such a claim, more than even a bal - anced, “relational” approach to composition, are what drove Stella’s objection to European abstraction. As he put it, “There are two things working: you have deep space and then you have the actual way [the image] is painted. . . . You have paint applied in such a way that you can see how that’s done and then you can read how the figures work in the thing and what kind of depth there is.” Nevertheless, when we see Stella’s art against the critical field that opens up from the divergent responses advanced by Fried and Imdahl, I think we can imag - ine he might have shared a certain sympathy with Albers’s conviction that “only the artist is selling more than we pay for”—that the factual fact of an image always exceeds its actual fact. 37 By working to “keep the paint as good as it is in the can,” Stella was not advocating for a situation where, as Imdahl claimed with Morellet,

35 . “The New Nihilism or New Art,” February 15, 1964, Pacifica Radio Archives, tape #BB3394. 36 . Josef Albers, “One Plus One Equals Three and More: Factual Facts and Actual Facts,” in Search Versus Re-Search: Three Lectures by Josef Albers at Trinity College, April 1965 (Hartford: Trinity College Press, 1969), pp. 21 and 42. 37 . Ibid., p. 18.

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“the original made from the artist himself loses its meaning.” 38 Rather, the choice between seeing a painting as an image or as an object revealed that there are two givens the artist can never escape: materials and composition. (Indeed, this may account for why Stella repeated the same patterned structures in different colors, continually experimenting with miniature scale and adjusting the width of the space separating his stripes.) As much as Stella worked to rid his painting of care - fully balanced relationships or spatial illusionism, he felt that he nevertheless still had to compose, just as any European modernist: “We’re all left with that,” he admitted. “The problems aren’t any different. I have to compose a picture. . . . Our work isn’t that radical.” When Flavin confessed, in turn, that he had not found a solution that would permit him “to drop composition,” Glaser followed with the realization, “That even goes beyond eliminating nothing on the canvas. That means eliminating the canvas, doesn’t it?” When Stella declared that “what you see is what you see,” I believe what he meant is that what you see is all you can see, that there is only so far your subjective hold over the object can go but that there will always be something that escapes its grasp. The repetition in his language, therefore, signals an unspoken difference that escapes the tautology but that nevertheless shores it up. Flavin kept returning listeners to the idea that the shapes and thick stretchers of Stella’s canvases appear to emphasize the painting as a “distinct physical object” akin to his own fluores - cent tubes. Stella saw those same attributes quite differently. He wanted the beholder to stand directly in front of his paintings, and so his treatment of the stretcher emphasized the surface. There we would be able to apprehend a differ - ence between the picture plane and the wall, but we would have no access to the distance that separates the two. We would feel how painting is brought closer to us—indeed, is oriented to us—but only on the condition that we acknowledge that it had a side that would forever hide itself from view. For his part, Stella understood that to abandon composition would be to turn his back on his materials. And simply to posit these materials in lieu of com - position as the work itself—be it a blank canvas or fluorescent tubes—would be to identify one’s own thought with the world so thoroughly as to disavow the gap between concept and object, to deny their nonidentity. Once he realized that com - position and materiality were inescapable for the artist, but also that the two could never be identical, he embraced asymmetry and color composition to undermine the iteration of the series. 39 In the drive to eradicate part-to-whole relationships in composition, to do away with the solution of balancing out individual forms within a strictly delimited and autonomous image, and to achieve instead a “whole thing” through the deployment of repetition and symmetry, Stella discovered that the result was not unity after all, but rather excess and eccentricity.

38 . Imdahl, “Über einige Werke Morellets,” pp. 241–42. 39 . By the time of the WBAI broadcast, Stella had already worked out many of the compositions for the Irregular Polygons in a series of drawings, the earliest of which date to 1962 and 1963. Brian P. Kennedy, Frank Stella: Irregular Polygons, 1965 –66 (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2010), p. 60.

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