Amanda Speight Thesis
Amanda Speight
Diploma of Education Secondary (Art/English) Bachelor of Arts Honours (Visual Arts)
op writing:
Text Ornamenting Vision
Thesis Submission for Doctor of Philosophy
Visual Arts CIF Research Office Queensland University of Technology 2008
1
Certificate recommending acceptance
2 Key Words Arts practice Art history-theory Contemporary visual arts Clement Greenberg Ornament and modern art Frank Stella Text and modern art Lawrence Weiner
3 Abstract:
The decorative and the textual have a complex and uneasy entanglement within the history and practice of modernist art. Sometimes celebrated as critical modernist strategies, sometimes denigrated or repressed as the opposite of Art, the decorative and the textual were understood as “foreign” forms that variously endangered, or, in turn, invigorated the power of art.
My creative practice, which includes installation, painting, photography, text and an exhibition catalogue, exploits and explores this decorative and textual instability within modernist art practice. In my work, (visual) codes conventionally associated with the fields of writing and pattern, are re- examined and problematised by placing them within the context of visual art. When writing and pattern become the subject of painting there is an intriguing oscillation, complication and dialogue between the spaces and codes of reading and seeing, writing and pattern, the decorative and the abstract.
The thesis also explores the decorative and textual instability within modernism by analysing some key contradictory moments in aesthetic thought and arts practice. In the writings of Clement Greenberg, a “decorative” painting is deemed the highest achievement of modernist abstract painting but to arrive at this goal, the decorative must be used against itself. In Frank Stella’s early abstract paintings, decorative patterns structure the work, and yet the artist and his commentators only see the work as a kind of pure, abstract painting. In Lawrence Weiner’s statement- sculptures, the terse, laconic text, that nominates materials and processes, is thought to be a “direct” form of art information that would remain unchanged even in reproduction. But as Weiner’s work is reproduced in journals and magazines, this “direct” form of art is complicated through a variety of reproductive forms – documentary photographs, transcription errors and differences in the visual format and typography of the text.
4 In these key moments of contradiction, concepts such as the decorative and the textual, that have often been regarded as peripheral to visual art, will be shown to have central significance in analysing its specific qualities.
5 Table of Contents:
Page
List of Figures 7
Introduction Re: Visions of the Decorative 11
Chapter 1 Divisions of the Decorative: 32 The decorative in early modernism
Chapter 2 Re-visions of the Decorative 1: 59 Clement Greenberg and the decorative that must be used against itself.
Chapter 3 Re-visions of the Decorative 2: 68 Frank Stella and the indirect decorative.
Chapter 4 Revisions of the Decorative: 92 How the Black series paintings became the white pin-striped paintings.
Chapter 5 The Writing of Materials and the Materials of 100 Writing: The statement-sculptures of Lawrence Weiner
Chapter 6 Suspicious Imaginings: 146 A story of Lawrence Weiner and statement- sculpture #001.
Chapter 7 How to See How to Write: 153 Revisions of translation.
Chapter 8 Interior Decorations: 181 Decorative translations of modernist abstraction.
Chapter 9 Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). 207
Chapter 10 Op Writing 222
Appendix Images of the exhibition Refabrication (2004) 239
Bibliography 255
6 List of Figures:
Page
Figure 1: Villa Primavesi, Winkelsdorf, designed by Josef Hoffmann, 36 1913.
Figure 2: Gustav Klimt wearing a houserobe featuring Waldidyll (1910/11) 38 by Carl Otto Czeschka.
Figure 3: Portrait of Friederike Beer-Monti (1916) by Gustav Klimt. 42
Figure 4: Die Fahne hoch (The Flag on High) (1959) Frank Stella. 73
Figure 5: Frank Stella (1959) 94
Figure 6: Die Fahne hoch (The Flag on High) (1959). Frank Stella. 96
Figure 7: Frank Stella (1959) 98
Figure 8: The cover and two sample pages from STATEMENTS (1968) by 113 Lawrence Weiner.
Figure 9: From Zang Tumb Tuum (1914) by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. 122
Figure 10: From Zang Tumb Tuum (1914) by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. 123
Figure 11: An example of how the statement-sculptures appear in books. 126
Figure 12: STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE , TURF (1968) by Lawrence 149 Weiner.
Figure 13 Starlite (1993) by Debra Dawes. 187
Figure 14 Transcription of Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). 208 Disgusting Scrutiny. Amanda Speight.
Figure 15 Transcription of Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). 209 Invisible Painting. Amanda Speight.
Figure 16 Transcription of Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). 210 Colours Written Backwards. Amanda Speight.
Figure 17 Transcription of Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). 211 Just out of Focus. Amanda Speight.
Figure 18 Transcription of Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). 212 Kissing Distance. Amanda Speight.
Figure 19 Transcription of Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). 213 Light or Colour. Amanda Speight.
Figure 20 Transcription of Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). 214 Shadows or Colours? Amanda Speight.
Figure 21 Transcription of Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). 215 Souvenir of a Painting. Amanda Speight.
7 List of Figures Continued …
Figure 22 Transcription of Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). 216 Successive Resemblance. Amanda Speight.
Figure 23 Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). Installation view. 217 Amanda Speight.
Figure 24 Commemorative Labyrinth by Florentius (945) 225
Figure 25 Part of the installation Dissemble (2003) Amanda Speight. 227
Figure 26 Dissemble (2003) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 228
Figure 27 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 228
Figure 28 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 228
Figure 29 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 232
Figure 30 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 232
Figure 31 A fragment of Souvenir of a Painting (2003 – 2004) 237 Amanda Speight.
Figure 32 Dissemble (2003) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 240
Figure 33 Dissemble (2003) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 241
Figure 34 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 241
Figure 35 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 241
Figure 36 Dissemble (2003) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 242
Figure 37 Dissemble (2003) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 242
Figure 38 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 243
Figure 39 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 243
Figure 40 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 244
Figure 41 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 244
Figure 42 Dissemble (2003) (detail). Amanda Speight. 244
Figure 43 Ensemble (2004) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 245
Figure 44 Ensemble (2004) (detail). Amanda Speight. 245
Figure 45 Ensemble (2004) (detail). Amanda Speight. 246
Figure 46 Ensemble (2004) (detail). Amanda Speight. 246
Figure 47 Ensemble (2004) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 247
8 List of Figures Continued …
Figure 48 Double Hues (2004) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 248
Figure 49 Double Hues (2004) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 248
Figure 50 Double Hues (2004) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 249
Figure 51 Double Hues (2004) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 249
Figure 52 Double Hues (2004) (detail). Amanda Speight. 250
Figure 53 Double Hues (2004) (detail). Amanda Speight. 250
Figure 54 Souvenir of a Painting (2003 – 2004). Installation view. 251 Amanda Speight.
Figure 55 Souvenir of a Painting (2003 – 2004) (detail). Amanda Speight. 251
Figure 56 Refabrication (2004) Installation view. Amanda Speight. 252
Figure 57 Refabrication (2004) (detail). Amanda Speight. 253
Figure 58 Refabrication (2004) (detail). Amanda Speight. 253
Figure 59 Refabrication (2004) (detail). Amanda Speight. 254
9 Statement of Original Authorship:
The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
Signed: ______
Date: ______
The Doctor of Philosophy consists of two interrelated research components: the creative practice (40%) and this thesis (60%).
Supervisory Team:
Dr Andrew Eamonn McNamara (P) Principal Supervisor IF49
Mr Mark Andrew Webb Associate Supervisor IF49
10 Introduction
Re: Visions of the Decorative
11 In this thesis, I present the diverse work of my creative practice as part of an ongoing dialogue with some key quandaries in the history and practice of modernist abstract painting.1 The creative practice includes installation, painting, photography, text and an exhibition-catalogue. Exploring the decorative and graphic possibilities of writing, the creative practice engages with (visual) codes conventionally associated with the fields of writing and pattern, and places them within the context of visual art. Many of the works in my creative practice contain letters of the alphabet that have been doubled, mirrored and rotated to make decorative patterns. When this patterned writing becomes the subject of painting there is an intriguing oscillation and complication between reading and seeing, writing and pattern, the decorative and the abstract. The tasks of the thesis are to contextualise and examine this form of creative practice. But the effort to accomplish these tasks raises key questions of the research thesis: What am I seeing when I look at a work of art? How am I to describe what I am seeing? And how am I to construct the story of my seeing?
This thesis examines the creative practice through two shifting conceptual frameworks: the decorative and the textual.2 It is through considering the complex roles of the decorative and the textual that I arrive at the key questions concerning seeing and describing a work of visual art. The irony is that the decorative and the textual, which often have been regarded as peripheral to visual art, will be shown to play a key role in analysing some of its specific qualities.
The decorative and the textual have a complex and uneasy entanglement within the history and practice of modernist abstract art practices. Sometimes celebrated as critical modernist strategies, sometimes denigrated or repressed as the opposite of Art, the decorative and the textual were understood as “foreign” forms that variously endangered, or, in turn,
1 Certainly there are other possibilities for representing the work for example as an ongoing dialogue with some key quandaries in the history and practice of “feminist” art. 2 The decorative has a twin term “the ornamental”. The decorative and the ornamental are sometimes differentiated. (See McNamara, 1997:6 or Grabar, 1992:xxiii – xxiv) But in much that I have researched – and will be quoting in this thesis - both words are used interchangeably.
12 invigorated the power of art. The first chapter of the thesis examines some of these inconsistent and contradictory ideas of the “decorative”.
Through the influence of the writings of John Ruskin, the decorative became an important concept of innovation and self-expression in bourgeois domestic interior design in early modernism. (Reed, 1996; Tiersten, 1996) In magazines and journals, bourgeois women were encouraged to arrange their home as if it were a work of art and to use modernist strategies of design and composition in the selection and arrangement of furniture and fittings. (Tiersten, 1996) This interest in a domestic and decorative modernism was due, in part, to a modernist concern with the entire built environment including buildings, living spaces, wallpapers, furnishings and even the clothes of the inhabitants.
One such designed environment was the Villa Primavesi in Winkelsdorf, Moravia designed by Josef Hoffmann. The first chapter examines how decorative patterns in the Villa Primavesi are given as much prominence and importance as any other design feature of the architectural construction. The decorative architecture and lavish, detailed interior of the Villa Primavesi were understood by Hoffman to be a new form of decoration appropriate for the modern age. (Völker, 1994:54-58; Simmons, 2001) The thesis examines how the use of the decorative in architecture and interior design in Hoffmann’s Villa Primavesi complicates the ways of traditionally categorising and describing the decorative in modern Western architecture as the “decoration of construction”. If understood as a “decoration of construction”, the decorative becomes a kind of negative surplus that can be easily distinguished and separated from structure. (Sankovitch, 1998) In the Villa Primavesi, elements of the structure - such as the thick, rectangular columns that support the roof - are also a decorative feature. The supporting columns are painted with ornate patterns and designs, and it is this painted decoration that draws attention to the way the columns project from the wall and regularly “stripe” and decorate its surface. The columns are both structural and decorative, functional and indulgent. In the Villa Primavesi, structure and
13 ornament become “not opposites but elements in tension”. (Carboni, 1991:110)
The first chapter investigates how the decorative was used in early modernism as a way to disrupt Western codes of painted representation – particularly conventions of perspective, modelling and deep space. (Reed, 1996:12; Troy, 1996:115) Gustav Klimt, for instance, introduced clashing visual codes of representation from textile designs and eastern art practices into Western forms of portraiture. In his paintings, Klimt used an abundance of elaborate patterns to undermine a particular kind of Western visual mastery that emphasised visual consistency as well as clarity through spatial organisation and clear figure / ground distinctions. Klimt’s complex work also destabilises the boundaries between figurative and abstract codes, because while his paintings of Viennese women are within the traditions of Western portraiture, the paintings also resemble icons. The thesis argues that these paintings are a “portrait” of patterns and different codes of representation as much as they are a “portrait” of a particular Viennese woman.
The above examples demonstrate that the decorative, as part of domestic architecture, interior design and painting, was valued as a form of early modernism. The thesis also examines how, between 1890 and 1914, the positive status of the decorative within particular discourses of modernism was eroded, contested and displaced to a marginal position. (Troy, 1996:114) With the establishment of the avant-garde and the rising prominence of functionalism (form following function) and abstraction in early modernism, the process of differentiating and denigrating decorative practices from avant-garde art led to the distinguishing between what was avant-garde and what was “vulgar” bourgeois taste.
While the bourgeois housewife’s decoration and arrangement of the home was valued as an artistic endeavour in some discourses of early modernism, it was later dismissed as an example of “bourgeois philistinism” by Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Courbusier). Baudelaire, Flaubert and Le Courbusier were particularly
14 concerned that, as the status of décor was elevated, the status of art was eroded due to the fact that the bourgeoise were unable to distinguish between a “true work of art” and a “bibelot”. (Tiersten, 1996:22; Gronberg, 1992:551) The art object, marked by the signature of the artist, was deemed a product of innovative intellectual property, while objects bought for the bourgeois home were dismissed as a product of industry and consumerism rather than of art and culture.
The vehement essays of Adolf Loos were also a key factor in the rewriting and re-evaluation of ornament. (McNamara, 1997:11-12) Ornament, usually associated with high culture, was regarded as culturally backward and criminal by Loos. (Loos, 1982) In his writings about architecture, fashion, furniture design, plumbing and interior design, Loos associated the decorative with “primitive”, non-Western cultures. He deemed it unsuitable for a modern, progressive and cultured society at the turn of the twentieth century. Loos’ writing celebrated the rational, chaste beauty of modern machines and functionalism. He associated the use of the decorative in Western culture, however, with the sensuality and seduction of women’s clothing, the indulgent extravagance of the aristocracy, and the production of inferior surrogates by pretentious would-be poets, artists and architects. (Loos, 1982:5,11,100) The precedent for Loos’ rational style of functional modernism was the male suit, designed in London. Simple, practical and well-cut, the man’s suit allowed quick movement and productive labour. It did not disguise the fact that it was made of sheep’s wool but displayed its materials directly and honestly. (Loos, 1982:12, 65) The thesis argues that, in Loos’ writing, differentiating and denigrating the decorative became a way of distinguishing what was modern from what was not modern, what was a rational aesthetic form from what was mere sensual seduction, and what was honest and direct from what was devious and cluttered. Ironically, many of the “unornamented”, functional objects Loos admired (the bicycle for example) utilised concepts of ornamentation: smooth, shiny surface finishes or designs that relied on the repetition of elements organised in patterns of symmetry (the arrangement of spokes in a bicycle wheel for example). For Loos to argue that the functional was a new aesthetic was legitimate, but to
15 describe the functional as that which is without ornament is inaccurate and limiting in that it forecloses, ignores and devalues the presence of the decorative.
While some Viennese artists used eclectic decorative patterns to find a new aesthetic appropriate for the modern age, other modernist artists moved away from figurative representation. Chapter One also examines how the move away from figuration to abstraction created problems for avant-garde artists who had to distinguish their abstract art from the pre-existing forms of pattern and design. (Gombrich, 1984:61) Wassily Kandinsky, an artist often described as one of the pioneers of modernist abstraction, was a keen participant in decorative design and the applied arts at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Kandinsky began to work as a painter experimenting with abstraction, however, he distanced himself from these earlier involvements with decorative design. (Broude, 1982; Kandinsky, 1992b) Kandinsky warned that as art moved towards “pure” colour and “independent” form it could slide into geometric ornament and be comparable to neckties or carpet. (Brüderlin, 2001:113) Although Kandinsky argued that ornamental form was beautiful, it had a mere physical effect rather than an inner or spiritual effect on the viewer. He believed that the abstract forms in his paintings, created through intuition and decisions of feeling, achieved the spiritual effect required of Art, rather than being the mere decorative forms produced through calculated methods of design. (Kandinsky, 1992b) Contrary to Kandinsky’s claims, Chapter One argues that Kandinsky’s work, and some of the concepts and visual codes that he relied on, were the concepts and visual codes that he learned and developed from the decorative arts.
So successful was this early campaign against the decorative, an artwork described as or associated with the “decorative” was often dismissed as “not art”. During his vehement support of the work of Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg was haunted by whispers that Pollock’s work was “wallpaper”. (McNamara, 1997:10) The second chapter of the thesis argues that for Greenberg, the decorative was a difficult, dangerous but necessary spectre
16 that haunted painting. (1993b:43) With his rhetoric of painting’s gradual development towards its defining characteristics of flatness and the delimiting of flatness, Greenberg realised that “flatness” was something that was not peculiar and exclusive to painting, but rather something that was also significant to the decorative.
To overcome this glitch in his carefully constructed and seductive narrative of modernist painting, Greenberg insisted that painting had to “use the decorative against itself”. (1993b:43) One way that Greenberg proposed to “use the decorative against itself” was to emphasise medium at the expense of “design” or composition. So while Greenberg upheld particular aspects of the decorative as the epitome of abstract painting, he also cautioned that “the decorative” could easily become “mechanical design” or “Good Design”, a repeatable style if it did not extend the possibilities of the medium. (Greenberg, 1993c; Greenberg, 1967) The thesis argues that Greenberg’s emphasis on the literal properties of the support, the medium and “all over” surface treatment did not, however, establish an essential identity for painting, but instead drew attention to and reinvigorated painting’s entanglement with design, pattern, sculpture, objects, fashion and the spaces of exhibition.
Positioned between the High Modernism of abstract expressionism and new practices later called minimalism, the early paintings of Frank Stella in the late 1950s and early 1960s make use of decorative patterns. Known collectively as the Black series paintings, Stella’s early paintings provide useful examples by which to closely examine these entanglements of modernist painting and the decorative. Of course, these early paintings were not seen as patterned paintings. Chapter Three analyses how these paintings were represented by Stella and Donald Judd as formal, abstract compositions that required particular ways of seeing and understanding the visual experience of the work. These paintings demanded a direct, powerful visual experience because of their simple, bold composition achieved through a technique similar to a housepainter. What a viewer would see would be immediately obvious and self-evident: thin strips of raw canvas
17 alternating with bands of black enamel paint applied in a “straight-forward” symmetrical pattern. This “directness” and simplicity was represented as a more powerful visual experience than the complicated viewing of the “fussy” and “busy” paintings of abstract expressionism or European abstract painting that relied on ideas of “balancing” the composition. (Glaser, 1964:149)
By examining Stella’s Black series, in particular the painting Die Hahne hoch (The Flag on High) (1959), the thesis argues that Stella’s paintings are not simple, self-evident or straight forward but tap into the long, complex history of pattern design. If read through the visual codes of pattern, Stella’s compositions cannot be described as “straight forward” symmetries that can be seen “directly” or as “wholes”. Rather, his compositions are built up from fragmentary pieces that are repeated, and utilise the three symmetries of pattern design (translation, reflection and rotation) to create an overall field pattern. As a field pattern, the figure/ground distinctions in the painting also become ambiguous. The thesis argues that the painting’s indistinct and ambiguous surface ensures that there will always be different narrative accounts of what can be seen in the painting.
The thesis also examines how Judd understood Stella’s paintings as not only an important development in painting, but as a precursor to the latest development in modernist, American abstraction – “specific objects”. (Fried, 1966:88-89) In this argument, the formal elements employed in Stella’s painting reinforce the shape of the canvas support as a definite shape. This shape, in turn, establishes a logical correspondence with the formal qualities of the architectural context. The thesis argues, however, that this logical relationship between art object and architectural context is in fact the revision and recuperation of a domestic, decorative modernist aesthetic. Judd’s account of Stella’s painting and his developmental narrative of modern American abstraction is linked, once again, back to important aesthetic principles of the decorative.
While Stella and Judd certainly had diverse ways of understanding the work of art and the viewing process, their ideas also have some things in common.
18 Although differently articulated, concepts of the viewing experience of the art work as “direct” and/or “powerful”, and the art work’s being seen as logical, complete or “whole”, are common in the writing and statements of Stella and Judd. (Judd, 1965b:813; Glaser,1964) These concepts of “directness” of viewing and “wholeness” of the art object were used in artwriting to justify why a particular set of New York art practices, including Stella’s, were successful as Art and worthy successors to the legacy of European Art. The thesis, however, questions Stella’s and Judd’s claims about this powerful, direct viewing experience by examining several inconsistencies in their rhetoric and by examining alternative accounts of viewing these “minimalist” objects.
First, Stella’s Black series paintings do not seem to produce a direct or powerful, visual experience. For example, even Stella is unable to articulate, at least publicly, what he sees in these paintings. Instead, Stella constantly relies on the visions and words of his friends, Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, to explain what can be seen in his early paintings. (Jones, 1996:119)
Second, far from being seen “directly” as “wholes”, “minimalist” objects were, according to Harold Rosenberg, covered with a myriad of formal details such as minute changes in tone, light or dimension. This excess of details not only invited a fragmented and “distasteful” viewing process but encouraged a deficient, ingratiating kind of artwriting. (Rosenberg,1967: 305-306) Because these objects also required extensive textual support to be appreciated by an audience, they also appeared incapable of providing a “direct” or “whole” viewing experience. According to Rosenberg, these types of objects were not the next greatest development in art but were a kind of anti-art, their genealogy traceable back to the dangerous and destructive dada. (Rosenberg,1967:305 - 306)
Third, the thesis analyses the ways in which Robert Smithson questioned Judd’s understanding of the wholeness and self-evidence of the art object and its material qualities. In the discussions of the materials used in the
19 construction of his art work such as plexiglass and cold rolled steel, Judd states that the “facts” of materials are obdurate, objective and stable. (Fried, 1967:142-143) Smithson argues however, that Judd remained blind to the “uncanny” implications of particular qualities in these materials such as their shiny surfaces and the reflections in their surfaces that, in some ways, made the shape of the objects hard to see. (Meyer, 2001:138) The viewer’s (or the artist’s) ability to see and understand materials, Smithson argues, is always fragmentary and inconsistent because the materials and the language the viewer (or artist) uses to describe them are also fragmented and unstable. (Smithson, 1968:866, 868) Judd’s rhetoric does not describe a direct, literal experience of viewing the art object (whether it is his own work or Stella’s paintings), but rather some ornate discursive patterns for organising, shaping and understanding that experience.
Finally, Judd’s and Stella’s rhetoric of “directness” of the viewing experience was complicated and disrupted through the reproduction of Stella’s paintings as photographs in journals and magazines. For Stella, the reproduction of his paintings in photographs raised concerns that viewers saw an inadequate or misleading representation of the artwork. Journalists, who had only seen photographs of Stella’s Black series paintings, described the paintings as the white “pin-striped” paintings. (Rubin, 1970:16) Chapter Four argues that Stella’s dismay at this description was not only due to the undermining of his formalist rhetoric, but also because his paintings were associated with a fabric pattern and the uniform of corporate America - the pin-striped suit. The “directness” of the viewing experience and the formal purity of these paintings is interrupted and disrupted by the disfiguring “distance” of reception produced by reproductive technology. If the rhetoric of “directness” was shown to be doubtful, then so too was Judd and Stella’s claim that this kind of “minimal” painting was a worthy successor to European Art.
The thesis argues, however, that photographic reproduction, rather than being understood as inadequate and disfiguring, emphasises the condition of the art object as visually ambiguous and indistinct. By examining a photographic reproduction of Stella’s early painting Die Hahne hoch (The
20 Flag on High) (1959) through a decorative framework and vocabulary, Chapter Four performs a re-vision of the painting and a revision of Stella’s and Judd’s formalist rhetoric. Through this decorative, discursive pattern, a different “painting” is seen – a painting which is not “direct” or whole - but rather displays the admirable characteristics of the signifier with its potential to always signify something else. In this contrary reading of Stella’s painting, other possibilities for understanding and viewing Stella’s painting as a pattern and as a symbol/signature of the artist are explored. Through this exploration, the entanglement of Stella’s abstract painting with pattern and text is again demonstrated.
Stella’s “direct” paintings are constantly shown to be “indirect” not only through their contrary readings as pattern and text, but also in the way that many viewers encountered these paintings as reproductions in magazines and journals, rather than seeing the actual paintings. For some artists in the late 1960s, the “problem” of encountering art only through reproductions in magazines and journals demonstrated the need to develop an alternative art object and alternative space for viewing the art object. One such development was the production of exhibition-catalogues by the art dealer Seth Siegelaub and the group of artists associated with him. Even though it was a printed publication, the exhibition-catalogue was the art, not a reproduction of it. In December 1968, the artist Lawrence Weiner published the small book STATEMENTS, an exhibition-catalogue, which consisted of the written description of twenty-four art works such as #008:
ONE AEROSOL CAN OF ENAMEL SPRAYED TO CONCLUSION DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR (Transcription of #008 as it appears in Schwarz, 1989:10)
The texts of STATEMENTS are simultaneously art, descriptions of art or art processes, as well as the titles of art works. This movement to a linguistic art was, in part, motivated by Weiner’s conviction that art had to radically alter both its form and its mode of distribution to be more accessible to a wider (or at least different) audience. As text art, Weiner’s work could be widely
21 distributed through publication in the book form as an exhibition-catalogue rather than shown to a limited audience in an art gallery. (Alberro, 2003:97- 98) Weiner’s text art supposedly had an added advantage: even if the viewer encountered the work of art as a reproduction, the work’s existence as text meant that it was still presented to the viewer in its “primary” form, as art information, rather than in its more problematic “secondary” form of photograph and/or artwriting, as information about art.
By avoiding a particular kind of visuality, Weiner also believed that his text art avoided the “absolute pretension” of the abstract expressionist assertion that “(a) painting is good if it works”. (Norvell, 1969a:108) Weiner insisted that abstract expressionism could only be understood by a cultural elite who possessed a specific visual literacy. In contrast, he argued that his linguistic art, which named “everyday” materials and processes, was easy to understand and was therefore a direct way of communicating art information to the viewer. (Norvell, 1969a)
Contrary to Weiner’s claims, however, Chapter Five argues that the statement-sculptures are not a form of “direct” art information because they are consistently complex and contradictory in their operations. This becomes evident in the ways his text work is reproduced in books and magazines. Through an extended examination, the thesis analyses contemporary representations of Weiner’s statement-sculptures in various reproductive forms - as documentary photographs of the work’s making, as photographic “titles”, as transcriptions and as a particular typographic form. When Weiner’s statement-sculptures are reproduced in books and journals, for example, it is often not in the work’s “primary” form as text, but as a documentary photograph, with the statement-sculpture (the “primary” work) appearing underneath as a title and/or explanatory label. As a title/label to a photograph, the statement-sculptures appear to be limited to that particular realisation of the work. The potential endlessness of the linguistic form of the statement-sculptures (to be imaginatively reconstructed again and again, to be a repetition of differences) is “shut down” in this form of reproduction. In other reproductions of the statement-sculptures, there are mistakes in the
22 transcription of the text. (Alberro, 2003:194; 1998:47) Weiner’s direct, art information – even if it is just one line of text – is always at the risk from ubiquitous errors in editorial transcription. In other instances, it is the specific visual form of the text (its typography, its context) that complicates and contradicts the artist’s claims for the work. For example, Weiner insists that his work is about the materials and processes he nominates in his statement- sculptures, and yet he fails to acknowledge the material from which his statement-sculptures are formed – writing. (Batchelor, 1989:257) In Weiner’s publication WORKS (1977), for example, the format and typography of the book have connotations of authority and permanence. The block capitals, Times New Roman text that forms the statement-sculptures declares their importance and demands attention. Yet this reading of Weiner’s work is contrary to his stated intentions. The statement-sculptures are meant to be democratic and egalitarian in their simple, understandable message. While Weiner may intend for the viewer to “see” only the materials he nominates in his statement-sculptures (driveways, plywood and paint), the materiality of the writing is also an important part of the “reading” of the work. In these examples, the complexity of Weiner’s work is particularly evident in the struggle between the spaces and codes of seeing and reading, and in the relationships between text and photograph, textuality and materiality, art information and information about art.
Despite these complications that occur when his work is reproduced, Weiner has long held the belief that his statement-sculptures are a kind of “pure” information that can be understood by “the everyman” and transferred unproblematically from one culture and language to another, from one historical moment to another. (Batchelor, 1989:254, 257; Pelzer, 1999:90) Weiner’s understanding of his work and its political potential is framed by a traditional understanding of language as transparent, objective and as corresponding to an empirical reality. Chapter Five also questions Weiner’s view of his linguistic work and his understanding of language by examining the ways in which Weiner’s statement-sculptures celebrate a tough, working- class masculinity and the way the works are socially and historically located within particular discourses of post-war, American modernist art.
23
As the thesis has mapped out through the various entanglements of abstract painting and decorative design and the complication of textuality and materiality in the work of Lawrence Weiner, the process of viewing art and writing about art is never simple or direct. In very different ways Stella and Weiner strived to produce an art that would somehow allow the viewer to experience art “directly”. Contrary to the claims made by these artists, the thesis argues that the art object is always visually ambiguous and complex. The art objects’ ambiguity and complexity means that it is always difficult to “see” or understand definitively. How is a viewer to understand and take account of this visual ambiguity? If the art object is difficult to see clearly, then how is the object to be written about? What implications does the visually ambiguous and complex art object have for understanding the viewing process and the task of the viewer? The second part of the thesis strives to answer these questions.
Chapter Seven posits that writing about art is a form of translation. In traditional theories of translation, the task of the translator (in this case the artwriter) would be to convey the form and meaning of the original (the artwork) as accurately as possible from one language (the language of art) to another (artwriting). By examining Walter Benjamin’s essay The Task of the Translator3, the thesis analyses how the process of translation (and by implication, the way language works) has been understood historically and, more recently, by particular post-structuralist writers and theorists. In these post-structuralist understandings of language and translation, concepts such as “communication” (of a definitive nature) and the ability of language to correspond to an empirical reality constitute an impossible ideal. This is because translation draws attention to the multiple and divided meanings within the words of the original by displacing them with another set of words whose meanings are equally multiple and divided. If the words of the original are already divided and unstable, then it follows that the recovery of a lost,
3 Walter Benjamin’s essay The Task of the Translator was written in German and published in 1923. This essay was an introduction to Benjamin’s German translations of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens.
24 “hidden” or definitive meaning is not possible. If there are gaps and instabilities within the language of the original, then if follows that the language and meanings of the original will always exceed and escape even the intentions of the author/artist. There is no simple communication of (art) information to the reader/viewer, nor is there a complete knowledge of the work by the author/artist. Rather, there is always the task of translation – an active interpretation of the (art)work.
Through this examination and analysis of translation and language, the thesis develops key ideas and strategies for understanding the instability and incompleteness (the visual ambiguity) of the “original” (the artwork). The thesis proposes that these qualities of instability, incompleteness and ambiguity are a way of understanding the “success” of a work of art because these qualities allow the work to “live on”. The work of art, in its instability, remains open to future acts of interpretation. It can be translated (that is reinterpreted, redeployed) in many different ways including through the work of other artists or through artwriting. If the art object is incomplete and visually ambiguous, then the thesis argues that the discursive patterns that frame the work and its viewing experience must acknowledge this possibility if they are to provide convincing and “successful” accounts of the work. In this respect, the thesis proposes that translation - as both a critical and creative device – provides an exemplary set of concepts from which to explore the fragmented and unstable terrain of artwriting as practice.
As discussed throughout the thesis, modernism’s entanglement with the decorative is an area of instability, circulating with inconsistent and contradictory ideas. Artists, in recent decades, have exploited and explored this decorative instability, leading to the claim that much post-second world war abstraction can be understood as a kind of “ornamentalisation of the formal language of earlier non-figurative art”. (Brüderlin, 2001:19) In the last thirty years, the decorative has been used by some artists, curators and artwriters to translate, question and rework the material and discursive legacies of the avant-garde, modernist abstraction and formalism. In Chapter Eight, the thesis examines the artwriting accompanying two exhibitions
25 centred around the decorative translation of modernist abstraction: Ornament and Abstraction (2001) curated by Markus Brüderlin; and Ornamentalism (1997) curated by Andrew McNamara. It is within these different decorative translations that I contextualise some aspects of my creative practice.
Brüderlin, the curator of Ornament and Abstraction and editor of Ornament and Abstraction: The Dialogue between non-Western, modern and contemporary Art, performs a translation of key modernist abstract artworks and the discursive legacies of the avant-garde, modernist abstraction and formalism that surrounded these artworks. Rather than accepting the idea that abstract art developed from naturalistic representation (as it does in Greenberg’s narrative of modernist abstraction), Brüderlin uses the ornamental as a model for abstraction. The ornamental motif that Brüderlin develops is the arabesque – that curving line that winds it way across surfaces.
The arabesque has three forms: the organic, the straight-lined guilloche and the calligraphic. (Brüderlin, 2001:98) It is into these three categories that Brüderlin redeploys some of the paintings of modernist abstraction. In the lineage of the organic arabesque, for example, is Philipp Otto Runge, Art Nouveau, Henry van de Velde’s modern conception of the line, Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock. (Brüderlin, 2001:23) In some dominant accounts of art history, the linear art of Art Nouveau and Kandinsky’s abstract paintings are marginalised because they do not fit comfortably in the narrative that abstraction develops from cubism. In Brüderlin’s narrative, these marginalised practices are re-examined, re-evaluated and redeployed as significant practices through their various translations of the organic, arabesque line. In this decorative translation through the lineage of the organic arabesque, Art Nouveau is reinstated, alongside cubism, as another possible “gateway” to abstraction while, in turn, the sinuous, continuous line of Art Nouveau is translated, through Kandinsky’s paintings, to become a dissonant, fragmented line appropriate for the modern age. (Brüderlin, 2001:108, 118) In understanding the paintings of Kandinsky as a translation
26 of the organic arabesque line, the avant-garde claims of innovation and progress are also questioned and problematised. (Brüderlin, 2001:204-206) The various translations of the organic arabesque line are not understood as the unique innovation of a particular artist, but rather as a continuing repetition and redeployment of a cultural, ornamental form.
Another way that the arabesque interests Brüderlin is in the instability of its (potentially) endless bifurcating form. The bifurcating arabesque is self- replicating: it continually abandons and reconstitutes its figurations through organic/geometric, referential/abstract forms such as “buds”, “blossoms”, “leaves”, spirals or interlacements. (Schimmel in Brüderlin, 2001:31) In the model of the arabesque, the instability and tension between the organic/geometric and abstract/figurative forms, becomes a way of understanding and articulating those same instabilities – often “neglected in theories of abstract art” - in the work of many artists of the last four decades. (Brüderlin, 2001:24)
In the exhibition Ornamentalism (1997) curated by Andrew McNamara and in the catalogue essays accompanying the exhibition, however, the instability between the abstract and the referential has been examined. In the work of some Australian artists, it is the inability to definitively identify “abstract” or “referential” that questions the claims of self-referential purity within modernist abstraction. (McNamara, 1997:9; Broadfoot, 1997:42) In Starlite (1993) by Australian artist Debra Dawes, for example, the individual, repeating panels of the painting reference the emblems of modernist abstraction and self-referentiality: the grid form and serial repetition. But the individual, repeating panels of the painting - layered vertically, one on top of the other - also reference the pattern, and mimic the construction technique, of a Starlite brick wall. The iconic image of an Australian, suburban patio wall appears to be equivalent to the iconic purity of modernist abstraction. (Broadfoot, 1997:41-42) It is in the equivocal play of these references to modernist abstraction and the quotidian that raises the important question of “what makes both responses feasible?” (McNamara, 1997:9) What makes both responses feasible is that the “purity” of modernist abstraction was
27 never pure: it has always been entangled with other visual codes, conventions and techniques including pattern, design, fabric and a suburban patio wall. Thus, it is with a sense of a self-conscious irony to the inconsistencies of the avant-garde that McNamara reads Dawes’ painting and the other art practices (including my own) in the exhibition Ornamentalism (1997).
While Brüderlin’s decorative translation of modernist abstraction acknowledges the debt that abstract painting owes to the ornamental, the specificities of different ornamental practices, which many contemporary artists reference in their work, remain largely unexamined.4 The ways in which to adequately acknowledge the specificity of ornamental practices and the ways these practices have informed the work of artists, has been problematic since the early 1980s. In her discussions of Miriam Shapiro’s art work, Norma Broude argued that to understand the decorative as part of abstraction would be unproductive because it would only value decorative work if it was removed from the context of the decorative (and its association with women’s craft) and given significance and elevation as art. (1982:327) In a traditional but problematic narrative strategy of early feminist artwriting, Broude also argues that, because the decorative has been denigrated in modernism, a new and separate category of decorative art practices needs to be written. (Broude, 1982) The thesis argues that it is neither possible nor desirable to develop a separate category of decorative art practices since the discourses of modernism and the decorative are always and already thoroughly entangled. Rather, the thesis argues that it is the “teasing out” of these entanglements that will be productive of many re-visions of modernist painting and revisions of modernist discursive patterns. The thesis examines the specific incidence of op art and its entanglement with op fashion to argue that decorative, non-art practices – such as fashion - can also perform a translation (a reworking, a redeployment) of modernist art practices.
4 Discussions of decorative practices, which inform the work of artists, are outside the stated parameters of both Brüderlin (2001) and McNamara (1997).
28 It is within the decorative translation of modernist abstraction that the thesis contextualises my own creative practice. But even though I have found this contextual niche, I am still left with the further task of examining the creative practice. This involves the daunting tasks of seeing and translating the individual works of my creative practice into artwriting. These are daunting tasks because, as the thesis has demonstrated through the entanglements of the abstract and the decorative, and textuality and visuality, the processes of viewing and writing about art are never simple or direct. The art object seems to be constantly elusive. Chapter Nine of the thesis engages specifically with questions of the viewing process and of trying to see and describe this elusive art object. It does this by introducing a work from the creative practice – Scripts of Devision (2003-2004) - into the discursive space of the thesis.
While Scripts of Devision (2003-2004) engages with questions of seeing and describing the elusive art object, Chapter Ten of the thesis performs a translation of some of the art works in the exhibition Refabrication (2004). In these translations, there is a further elaboration of the complex play of the decorative and the abstract, the textual and the visual within the works of my creative practice. The diverse works of my creative practice have letters (of the Western alphabet) worked through a patterned and coloured surface. Often, these letters have been doubled, mirrored, reversed and inversed to form their own intricate patterns which slide into illegible designs or begin to resemble non-Western scripts: Farsi, Urdu, Arabic or Singhalese. When I make and look at these letterly paintings, I think about the difference between reading writing and seeing writing. (Burn, 1993) In the ideal site of reading, the materiality and decorativeness of writing must be overlooked so that the words can become transparent symbols to things other than themselves. (Lanham, 1993:4, 5, 33) But writing is visual, decorative, graphic and is as good for seeing as it is for reading and speaking. When the letter is mirrored, the transparent writing of reading, of communication has been turned on itself – doubled, mirrored – and slips into the opacity of pattern and the oscillating, uncertain spaces of art. In the space of art, the patterned letter and the lettered pattern alternate, unwriting the writing of the other.
29
The decorative and the visual are also implicated within my practice of artwriting. Across these two interrelated practices, there is a kind of labyrinthine play with writing because the thesis is a writing of the visual but the creative practice is of the visual in writing. I call this site of doubled writing, “op writing”. Op writing is a term borrowed from Gregory Ulmer. (1986) Ulmer’s uses the term in a particular way to describe the Writing practice of Jacques Derrida.5 Ulmer argues that Derrida’s creative practice is a major innovation in rhetoric. It develops a sustained and complex description and expansion of images (a postcard, a painting of an unlaced shoe) and their functioning as a model. As a model, the expanded graphic image is used to question key assumptions in Western philosophical discourse and develop abstract levels of thought. (Ulmer, 1986:xi-xii) The “image” that Ulmer in turn uses to describe the functioning of Derrida’s Writing practice are the particular effects of op art – such as the moire effect – a trembling and disturbing effect of the double grid. Just as the double grid in op art appears to tremble and shift creating disconcerting visual effects, Derrida’s Writing practice creates a similar trembling and shift in language and in writing. Derrida’s compositional strategies are described by Ulmer as a “double-valued” Writing which redresses the balance between the phonetic and visual elements of writing. The primary function of writing has long been theorised as the representation of the voice but there is much in writing that complicates this assumption. Derrida’s “double-valued” Writing makes use of those visual elements of writing such as visual puns where words look like other, unrelated words with different meanings, homophones, images and models. (Ulmer, 1985:15, 39)
Ulmer’s idea for describing Derrida’s practice of Writing has slipped into relative obscurity. But this obscurity has given me courage to reuse this term. I have adopted and adapted “Op Writing” to op writing: a clumsy, far less grand, particular kind of viewing and writing experience that works in humble but complex ways across image and text, visuality and textuality, art
5 Ulmer always capitalises “Writing” when talking about Derrida’s practice. (Ulmer, 1985).
30 and writing about art. While Ulmer, writing in the 1980s, emphasised the critical and political strategies of a Derridesque Op Writing, in op writing of the 2000s, it is necessary to make some decorative adjustments. The thesis constructs a confounding decorative where the implied viewer and/or artist is short-sighted, dazzled and confused about what or how something can be seen. I use the word “confound” here rather than the more obvious and traditional word “challenge” because I understand the decorative as a mischievous, confusing and playful way of working beside established traditions (the decorative in the role of court jester?). The word “challenge” connotes a more serious, critical stance too close to the ideals of a progressive avant-garde.
In op writing, the decorative is used as a way of confounding the inherited rhetorical problems of modernism, while in some ways still remaining enthralled, flattered and seduced by these problems. The confounding decorative is a discursive pattern that combines the logic and pleasure of argumentation with the excesses and pleasures of bewitchment and seduction of these traditional narrative patterns. It is always artful, sometimes artless and often exasperating.
31 Chapter 1
Divisions of the Decorative: The decorative division in early modernism
32 In the nineteenth century, there was an interest in a domestic, decorative modernism. John Ruskin, who as a little boy was denied toys but found pleasure in the patterns of carpets, bedcovers, dresses, or wallpapers, argued that the modern home should not be made or filled with industrially produced products that signified a kind of slavery for the people who had to produce them. (Krauss, 1993:1; Reed, 1996:12-13) Rather, the home should feature carefully crafted products that satisfied their maker as much as their user. In Ruskin’s writings, the social and moral health of Britain was linked to the look of the home. (Reed, 1996:12-14)
These kinds of ideals were also disseminated through the writings of William Morris, a prominent entrepreneur of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. Although the industrialisation and centralisation of textile manufacturing produced advances in innovative technology, Morris argued that there was little development or improvement in the design of textiles. He believed that the emphasis on technological innovation in textile manufacture and printing came at the expense of artistic principles and pride. (Parry, 1988:13) Morris, who adopted block printing techniques in his textile factories rather than the more cost effective engraved roller, believed that the block printing technique allowed the craft worker (designer, printer, weaver, embroiderer) “better control over the translation of designs and the entire manufacturing process”. (Parry, 1988:28) If craft workers had more control over their designs, Morris believed that they would find pleasure and satisfaction in their work. Through the use of natural dyes and block printing techniques, textiles produced for the home would be part of a modern, decorative aesthetic. Morris proclaimed: …(m)y extravagant hope is that people will some day learn something of art, and so long for more, and will find, as I have, that there is no getting it save by the general acknowledgement of the right of every man to have fit work to do in a beautiful home. (quoted in Reed, 1996:13)
The home was to be, through the application of artistic ideals (and William Morris wallpaper and textiles), a place of beauty and comfort. The writings of Morris and Ruskin were also widely published in books and journals along
33 with illustrations of architecture and design influenced by the principles they promoted. The refiguring of the domestic interior, in an era of increasing industrialisation, was to be a catalyst for aesthetic and social reform. (Reed, 1996:13)
In France of the 1880’s, art magazines, decorating handbooks and interior design journals were plentiful and promoted the home and its interior as a site of modernism. Aimed at a middle class readership, these books and journals encouraged their readers (bourgeois women) to decorate their homes rather than employing expensive professional decorators. Readers were discouraged from following established, neoclassical styles of taste, and urged to develop a modern look by selecting furnishings from a variety of styles that appealed to their personal sensibility. This eclecticism challenged the traditional (aristocratic) aesthetic codes that valued unity achieved through the accumulation of period pieces. Although many bourgeois women did not inherit heirlooms, they were able to create a comfortable home with personal significance by purchasing what they liked and needed from department stores.6 (Tiersten, 1996:20 - 28)
In these books and journals, personal choice was a valued form of self- expression and celebrated as a modern, aesthetic activity. Every kind of experience could be approached aesthetically and bourgeois women were encouraged to understand themselves as “modern artist(s) of the domestic interior”7 and to “compose a room as they would a canvas”. (Tiersten, 1996:18, 29) While different to a “canonical modernism”, domestic modernism did share some ideological, modernist ideals, including the development of an individual style through self-expression.8 This domestic
6 M. Fresson, in a lecture to French furniture makers, argued that bourgeois decorating arose because ladies did not inherit family heirlooms and as a result, these ladies had to purchase goods with which to outfit the home. (Tiersten, 1996:20) 7 But Tiersten also notes that interior design magazines “conveyed two conflicting messages to women: that they were artists, yet that they were themselves objects of art”. (1996:30) A woman was also to harmonise her appearance with her home as if to become part of the composition. 8 Tiersten argues, “Art historians have tended to overlook the evidence of the feminine modern, taking modernists too much at their word by conceiving of the clinical eye of the male flâneur as the heart of the modernist project.” (1996:29)
34 modernism also emphasised modernist “rules” of design and composition such as the careful distribution of light and colour and a sensitive organisation of lines and angles. (Tiersten, 1996:28 - 29)
An interest in the home and its interior was due, in part, to a modernist concern with designing the entire built environment including buildings, living spaces, wallpapers, and furnishings. One example of this designed environment was the ornately decorated Villa Primavesi, Winkelsdorf, Moravia. (Völker, 1994:54 - 58) In 1913, the Primavesi family commissioned the design of their country house to the architect Josef Hoffmann, who was one of the founding members of the Wiener Werkstätte.9 Hoffmann’s design of the Primavesi family home incorporated eclectic architectural motifs and materials. Traditional Czech architectural materials, such as walls constructed of logs on a rubble stone foundation and a thatched roof, were teamed with a neoclassical plan and loggia supported by thick columns of oak. In contrast, there was also the modern convenience of a water turbine to generate electricity, while a tennis court and swimming pool provided spaces for modern leisure. (Simmons, 2001:251 – 252)
The interior design of the house was sumptuously decorated. Unfortunately, since the house burnt down in 1922, all researchers must rely on black and white photographs of the interior for their descriptions. (Völker, 1994:52) In the photograph of the dining room, the neoclassical architectural features of oak pillars and crossbeams, are visually matched by the strength of the different patterns in the room. Exposed beams, their edges emphasised by painted strips, cross the ceiling. The lintel doubles as a decorative cornice featuring a geometric frieze. Below the lintel / cornice, thick, rectangular, columnar supports regularly project from and decorate the wall space of the
9 The Wiener Werkstätte was founded in 1903 by Hoffmann, along with the painter Koloman Moser and the industrialist Fritz Waerndorfer. This multidisciplinary organisation bought together gold and silversmiths, jewellery makers, leather workers, bronze founders, painters, cabinetmakers and later textile and fashion designers. (Völker, 1994:7 – 8) Eugenie and Otto Primavesi, with family connections to wealthy bankers and industrialists of Moravia, were regular customers of the Wiener Werkstätte and in 1914 acquired a thirty percent interest in the company. (Simmons, 2001:250)
35 room. Each visible surface of these thick columns is accentuated by bands of painted patterns adapted from Moravian folk art.
Figure 1: Villa Primavesi, Winkelsdorf, designed by Josef Hoffmann, 1913. Top: Hall with curtains and chair upholstery featuring Rosengarten (1911/13) by Dagobert Peche. Bottom: Dining room with curtains featuring Hochwald (1910/11) by Ludwig H. Jungnickel. (Völker, 1994:55)
36 Consistently throughout the Villa Primavesi, pattern is given as much importance as any other aspect of the house’s design and architecture. The patterns are striking. Each band of painted motifs on the columns is different – a diamond pattern, a horizontal zig-zag pattern, circles, and a figure in an arch. The patterned bands all employ a similar alternation and contrast of tone. It is these painted patterns that draw attention to the way the columns project from the wall and “stripe” the wall. The columns are both structural and decorative, functional and indulgent. Structure and decoration in the Villa Primavesi are not oppositional but become ambiguous, functioning as “elements in tension”. (Carboni, 1991:110)
The painted designs are not confined to the columns. In the middle of the photograph, in between the left hand cupboard and centre doorway, is an area that is painted in the same pattern as the columns. But this painted area is spatially ambiguous since the strength of the ornament confuses the play of shadows that would ordinarily differentiate the projecting columns that decorate the recessed wall.
The Moravian folk art diamond pattern that features on the painted columns is used as a formal motif linking the architecture of the room with the objects in the room. Cupboard doors, the back rest of the dining room chairs and the wooden frame supporting the glass in the doors to the room all feature an open lattice in a diamond pattern. On the floor, the pathways between the doors of the room are marked by a striped pattern which references the strong stripes of columns across walls and beams across ceilings. This stripe pattern is then repeated in a smaller scale along the base of the chair seats and chair legs. The soft furnishings – curtains and a lampshade – feature the Wiener Werkstätte textile pattern Hochwald (1910/11) by Ludwig H. Jungnickel. This pattern, inspired by folk art, contains stylised motifs of conifers, flowers, and woodland creatures such as deer, squirrels, foxes, butterflies and birds. (Völker,1994:19, 55)
The photographs of the house show that other rooms were as equally ornate and detailed, employing the same logic of matching motifs and designs
37 across architectural features, furniture and soft furnishings. Throughout the villa, the soft furnishings including curtains, bedspreads, chair upholstery, wallpaper and lampshades featured at least eleven different lavish textile designs of the Wiener Werkstätte. But the logic of matching designs was not confined to the living spaces of the house. Guests invited to the elaborate parties at the villa were given a loose, silk house-robe made with fabric to match the patterns of their bedroom. 10 (Völker, 1994:52)
Figure 2: Gustav Klimt (and friends) in the Villa Primavesi, Winkelsdorf, wearing a houserobe featuring Waldidyll (1910/11) by Carl Otto Czeschka.
10 Other commentators state however, that there was a stock of different robes from which each guest could choose. (Simmons, 2001:252) But I prefer the story that the guest’s gown matched his or her bedroom! Gustav Klimt painted several people in such house robes for example Portrait of Eugenie Primavesi (1914) and there are quite a few photographs of people in these robes. (Simmons, 2001:251, 252; Völker, 1994)
38 The use of pattern as an important structuring device in the Villa Primavesi, destabilises the Western discourses of architecture that seek to polarise the terms structure / ornament. Sankovitch argues that the structure / ornament pair has been used to unproblematically understand and describe much of Western architecture. (1998) If the Villa Primavesi was understood through this binary of structure / ornament, the various architectural components and their painted patterns would be unambiguously identified as either “structure” or “ornament”. Through this binary, the Villa Primavesi could (theoretically) be visually stripped of its painted patterns and decorative cornices to leave the plain solidity of the “structure” – columns, lintels, walls and crossbeams. In this understanding of structure as opposed to ornament, the definition of “ornament” is narrowed so it becomes only detachable and devalued – for example seeing the processes of interior design in the Villa Primavesi as “merely” the decoration of construction.
But such an interpretation would ignore the way the regular placement of thick columns and lintels stripe the walls and ceilings of the villa or how the lintels also function as decorative cornices. The decorativeness of these construction techniques is then repeated in the fittings and furniture of the room. For example, the stripes of columns and lintels match the stripes featured in the flooring or slatted wood of the furnishings.
To see the processes of interior design in the Villa Primavesi as “merely” the decoration of construction would also devalue the significance of the painted patterns that are used as a structuring device for other features of the Villa’s architecture and furniture. For example, the painted diamond pattern that is refigured in wood as an open lattice, is both a framing and support device for securing the glass panels in doorways. Through its combination and complication of architecture and pattern, construction and design, the Villa Primavesi was a modernist Gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art.
In Germany and Austria, the collaborative work of modernist painters, sculptors and designers promoted an ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk where a particular aesthetic would govern the entire look of an interior – including the
39 clothes of the inhabitants. (Reed, 1996:13) This aesthetic environment was different to a Gestaltung (design) of the Dutch artists and architects of the De Stijl group. The Gestaltung was to encompass all aspects of life as a type of democratic and social reform to improve people’s lives. (Stahlhut in Brüderlin, 2001:133 – 134) In contrast, the Gesamtkunstwerk was a kind of indulgence, a luxury culture. Theo van Doesburg argued that Hoffmann’s designs were an “aesthetic speculation”, a kind of frivolous, indulgent diversion from the modernist project of “rational-constructivism” as advocated by the De Stijl group.11 (Stahlhut in Brüderlin, 2001:133 – 134)
While dismissed by advocates of a rational, functional modernism, the architectural and interior designs of Hoffmann and the textile designs of the Wiener Werkstätte used throughout the Villa Primavesi, contributed to the development of what was described as a modern “Viennese Style” across architecture, interior design, textile design and fashion. (Simmons, 2001:247) “Viennese Style” was a phrase coined in 1903 by Joseph August Lux, a writer for the journal Die Flache which featured and supported ornament. This phrase was used to identify the art practices of the Vienna Secessionists, the School of Applied Arts and the Wiener Werkstätte. Incorporating elements and adapting designs from Art Nouveau, traditional folk cultures of the Austria-Hungary empire, and ancient Greece and Byzantium, the “Viennese Style” appeared modern – a new ornamental style appropriate for the times. Lux supported the move away from historical ornament and argued that the “Viennese Style” also rendered obsolete the need for people to obtain their design models from Paris. (Simmons, 2001:247) The commercial success and expansion of the Wiener Werkstätte
11 Although, van Doesburg’s involvement with Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp in the Café Aubette project (1926 – 1928) suggests that Van Doesburg’s work could be described as both Gestaltung and Gesamtkunstwerk. (Thanks to Andrew McNamara for this observation.) Van Doesburg’s designs for the Café Aubette (a restaurant/nightclub/cinema in Strasbourg) included designs for ceilings, walls, lighting and furniture in a number of different rooms. The ceiling and walls featured the dynamic, diagonal and decorative forms of van Doesburg’s “Elementarism”. (Warncke, 1998:180) The public, however, did not approve of this form of decoration and when the Café Aubette was sold in 1938, its interior was totally redesigned and redecorated. Van Doesburg was outraged that the public did not understand the Café Aubette project. His strong retort: “The public want to live in shit and so they’ll have to die in shit”, however, suggests that the balance between the Gestaltung and the Gesamtkunstwerk of the project was certainly more towards the Gestaltung. (van Doesburg cited in Warncke, 1998:183)
40 (particularly its textile and fashion departments) demonstrates the contemporary acceptance and popularity of this modern, ornamental aesthetic which featured rich surface designs.12 (Simmons, 2001:249 – 252)
This modernist, ornamental aesthetic was also prominent in the work of the Vienna Secessionists, a group of artists who had distanced themselves from the official and conservative Wiener Kunstlerhaus (Vienna Artists’ Society). Gustav Klimt, a prominent member of the Secessionists, developed a notoriety for his richly ornate and sometimes eroticised paintings. Klimt painted several portraits of wealthy society women wearing original garments from the Wiener Werkstätte or garments made from Wiener Werkstätte fabric. (Völker, 1994:146 – 147) In the Portrait of Friederike Beer-Monti (1916), Klimt exploits the different visual codes of representation and cultural significance of the various dazzling patterns that cover the painting’s surface. (Völker, 1994:61) In the centre of the canvas, the figure of Beer-Monti is engulfed in the patterns of her garments. Klimt’s careful and detailed representation of these textile patterns has allowed researchers to identify Marina (1911/12), an organic, flowing, linear design in blues by Dagobert Peche. (Völker, 1994:146 – 147) Marina was used to make Beer-Monti’s dress which, in Klimt’s painting, puffs out softly around her legs and gathers in at her ankles. While this dress has been identified as a Wiener Werkstätte design, it also resembles popular French styles of “Oriental” gowns (“harem- pantaloons”) designed in 1911 by Parisian fashion designer Paul Poiret.13 The popularity of “oriental” styles and patterns is further demonstrated in Klimt’s painting by the representation of a Persian rug, scattered with an abstract floral motif, at the very bottom of the painting.
As well as Marina (1911/12), another unidentified but equally elaborate Wiener Werkstätte textile is represented in Klimt’s painting. This is a stylised, curvilinear pattern featuring arabesque tendrils in reds, pinks and purples that was used to make the lining of a fur coat. But Klimt, obviously wanting to
12 Branches of the Wiener Werkstätte were opened in Berlin, Zurich and New York. The success of the branches, however, was uneven. (Völker, 1994:8) 13 For a discussion and illustrations of Poiret’s “harem-pantaloons” and four styles of culottes refer to Wollen. (1987:10)
41 take advantage of yet another exquisite pattern, has depicted Beer-Monti wearing this coat inside-out so that the ornate patterns of the lining are visible. (Völker, 1994:146) As a result, the figure of Beer-Monti is encased within these two patterns like an icon – stiffly posed with only her face, hands and feet unmarked by decoration.
Figure 3: Portrait of Friederike Beer-Monti (1916) by Gustav Klimt. (Völker, 1994:61)
42 Beer-Monti’s stiff, upright pose contrasts with the swirling movement of the Chinese figurative design that forms the “background” of Klimt’s painting. Interrupted by the smaller, abstract textile patterns of Beer-Monti’s garments, this larger figurative “pattern” features Chinese figures engaged in battle. The Chinese “pattern” depicting battle is an appropriate narrative device through which to read Klimt’s painting which is after all, a clash of cultural patterns and codes of visual representation. Klimt signifies a shallow, flattened space – a spatial organisation similar to the Chinese art represented in the “background” of the painting. Klimt’s careful representation of the crowded, figurative design of traditional Chinese painting; the sparse, geometric, floral motifs of the Middle East; and the organic, abstract textile patterns of contemporary Vienna are visually confusing. His painting is not only crowded with lavish detail but the different visual codes of representation contradict each other. This visual strategy confounds a particular kind of Western visual mastery that emphasises a consistent and distinct spatial organisation through codes of perspective and modelling.
By featuring patterns in this painting, Klimt also confuses figure and ground, background and foreground.14 Refigured by ornament into an icon-like representation, this portrait does not feature and reveal its subject. Rather, the figure of the subject is camouflaged against a ground of surface pattern. As much as it is a “portrait” of Friederike, this painting is a portrait of pattern, a portrait of abstraction and figuration, and a portrait of non-Western codes of visual representation. Visual codes from the East, Middle East and the West form a kaleidoscope of patterns where the figurative is juxtaposed with the abstract; geometric abstraction is contrasted with organic abstraction; and a portrait is camouflaged as an icon.
Klimt’s work has occupied a contested space in recent histories of modernist art. His work is often disregarded because it is represented as “not unequivocally modern”. (Kuspit, 1986:118) Figurative, abstract and
14 Of course, this was not the sole reason that Klimt used pattern extensively in his work.
43 ornamental, the work did not seem to fit comfortably with modernist discourses that emphasised a progressive movement towards reductive abstraction. But Klimt’s painting is certainly modernist in that it questions established codes of Western representation. Specifically, his painting practice highlights the inadequacies of traditional, developmental narratives of modernism to account for painting practices that question those codes through the complex play of the decorative.15
These instances show that the decorative - as part of domestic architecture, interior design and painting - was valued as a part of modernism. Between 1890 and 1914, however, the positive status of the decorative within particular discourses of modernism and painting was eroded, contested and displaced to a marginal position. (Troy, 1996:114) The decorative became the “merely decorative”, a set of concepts and practices that the avant-garde sought to define themselves against. Reed argues: When we think of modern art, however, we do not generally think of domestic imagery or objects for the home, for in the arts the linkage of domesticity and modernism has been obscured by another conceptual invention of the nineteenth century: the idea of the “avant-garde.” As its military-derived name suggests, the avant-garde (literally “advance guard”) imagined itself away from home, marching toward glory on the battlefields of culture. (1996:7)
Consequently, the decorative arts and art practices that utilised decorative strategies were marginalised from a position within the fine arts.
While the bourgeois housewife’s decoration and arrangement of the home was valued as an artistic endeavour in some discourses of early modernism, it was later dismissed as an example of “bourgeois philistinism”. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert denigrated bourgeois taste as vulgar and were particularly concerned that as the status of décor was elevated, the
15 Klimt’s strategic use of pattern to disrupt Western codes of representation was not unique. The work of early modernists Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse used similar strategies. Indeed, Maurice Denis, in his role as an art critic, admired Gauguin’s paintings for their “decorative deformations” that shocked audiences used to the conventions of academic art. (Reed, 1996:12) In early modernism, the work of Gauguin, Denis, Vuillard and Matisse was often described as decorative but the decorative content of the work was understood as a significant and effective strategy of earliest modernist painting. (Troy, 1996:115)
44 status of Art was eroded. Of particular concern, was the bourgeois inability to distinguish between a “true work of art” and “the bibelot”. (Tiersten, 1996:22)
For the influential modernist architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, it was the artistic pretensions of young bourgeois ladies that particularly contributed to the confusion of fine arts, the decorative arts and the “bibelot” in the bourgeois home. Armed only with knowledge gained from magazines, young ladies decorated the home with what Le Corbusier condescendingly described as a “shopgirl’s aesthetic”. (Gronberg, 1992:551)
Le Corbusier’s association of home decoration and the decorative arts with shopping is significant in that it highlights the emerging importance of the department store as a cultural phenomenon. With its mass produced items displayed for sale, the department store encouraged a culture of consumption. This was the antithesis to the ideal of the “aesthetic claims of the museum” with unique objects on display. (Troy, 1996:116 –117) The art object, marked by the signature of the artist, was a product of innovation and intellectual property. Objects bought for display in bourgeois homes were marketable commodities – a product of industry rather than of art and culture. (Gronberg, 1992:548) The bourgeois housewife, encouraged by journals and books to be artistic, modern and to decorate her home according to her personal taste, was later refigured by Le Corbusier as merely a shopper – a consumer of commodities.
But with bourgeois décor increasingly becoming associated with the vulgar and the commodification of art, artists became concerned about selling their work for display in bourgeois homes. The artist, Wyndham Lewis from the England Vorticist movement, insisted that he would rather produce paintings for the city life of the modern man. In the city, a modern man is “very alert, combative, and capable of straight, hard thinking”. (Lewis quoted in Reed, 1996:11) This powerful city man is contrasted to his suburban existence,
45 where he is reduced to “an invalid bag of mediocre nerves, a silly child”. Lewis states: the best type of artist would rather give expression to the more energetic part of that City man’s life – do pictures to put in his office, where he is most alive – than manufacture sentimental and lazy images … for his wretched vegetable home existence.16 (quoted in Reed, 1996:11)
While particular aspects of the avant-garde sought to establish an identity for art that separated the true work of art from vulgar bourgeois taste or mediocre decorative domesticity, economically, most artists were dependent on bourgeois buyers wishing to display paintings in their homes. (Troy, 1996:114) This necessitated differentiating avant-garde forms of painting from “decorative” painting and re-establishing the bourgeois home as an appropriate place for “true” works of art.
The writers of the book Du “cubisme”, the cubist painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, articulated a position that distinguished the cubist painting from “decorative” painting.17 According to Gleizes and Metzinger, the cubist painting was a complete and independent entity. The decorative work of art, however, was incomplete and dependent because it relied on its relationship to an extended ensemble – the room in which it was located and the other objects around it. To ensure that the decorative work of art remained a part of its ensemble, it must neither interrupt nor distract the mind of the viewer from “the display which justifies and completes it”. (Gleizes and Metzinger quoted in Troy, 1996:114) While decorative painting had a logical connection with its surroundings, this logical connection was not something that was to “strike” the viewer. Rather, it was a logical connection that so absorbed the decorative painting that it was to be unremarkable.
In contrast, the cubist painting teased the mind of the viewer, gradually leading the mind towards “imaginative depths where burns the light of
16 In contrast to Lewis’ ideas, Henri Matisse advocated a comfortable, relaxed art that was “something like a good armchair”. (Matisse quoted in Robinson, 1996:99) This art would soothe the troubled mind of the modern man of business who was often overwhelmed by the mental and physical stresses of his city life. (Robinson, 1996) 17 The book Du “cubisme” was published in 1912.
46 organisation”. (Gleizes and Metzinger quoted in Troy, 1996:114) The decorative painting, if it was to operate as part of an ensemble, had to be passive, sensual, superficial while the cubist picture engaged the mind and inspired the imagination. In the writing of these artists, the decorative was devalued because it was thought to be frivolous, dependent and able to be absorbed by its context.
The cubist picture, however, functioned independently of its context. Because the cubist picture was complete in itself and capable of engaging the mind of the viewer, Gleizes and Metzinger argued that it was transportable and functional in any environment – whether church or drawing room, museum or study. (Troy, 1996:115) By implication, even if a cubist painting was bought for the drawing room of the bourgeois home, it did not loose its potency by merging with the domestic décor. Avant-garde artists need have no qualms about selling their work to bourgeois homes.
Ironically, Gleizes’ and Metzinger’s understanding of a transportable, independent, cubist painting relied on a characteristic most often associated with the decorative – its excessiveness and detachability. As discussed previously, a traditional understanding of the decorative within architectural discourse posited the decorative as that which was added-on to structure and therefore excessive and detachable because it served no “purpose”. But in a contradictory move, Gleizes and Metzinger refigured this quality of detachability so that it is described not as the excessive inessentialism of a detachable ornament but the complete essentialism of a detachable whole.
This incident also highlights a curious interdependence between structure and ornament. As Sankovitch states: Structure does not display ornament; rather, ornament reveals and makes present structure and it does so by pointing to and compensating for what structure lacks. It completes structure, but not in the way normally thought: it does so by allowing structure to become whole and present before ornament is put in place; at the same time, it is only when ornament appears on the scene that this (pre-ornamental) wholeness is achieved.” (1998:22-23)
47 Gleizes and Metzinger tried to distance avant-garde painting from the ornamental but instead recomplicated an already existing entanglement.18
The essays of Adolf Loos were also a key factor in the rewriting and re- evaluation of ornament. (McNamara, 1997:11-12) Until Loos’ constant arguments to the contrary, ornament was usually associated with high culture. Loos’ articles for newspapers and journals explored a variety of fields including architecture, fashion, furniture design, plumbing and interior design. Many of these articles had a common theme: they linked ornament to the backward, the primitive, the criminal but celebrated the beauty of modern machines and functionalism. (Loos, 1982) Some of the earlier essays (those of 1897 – 1900) were a strong critique of the work of Josef Hoffmann (one of the founders of the Wiener Werkstätte) although Hoffmann was never mentioned by name. 19
The article The Luxury Vehicle written for the Neue Freie Presse (3 July, 1898) is the first of Loos’ many “battle cries” against ornament. The article laments how the German arts and crafts worker seeks to ornament the coach maker’s already perfect form - the functional, unadorned vehicle. The ornament to be “attached” to this functional vehicle, is either the elaborate but finely crafted splendour of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire’s past – the ornament that adorned the state coaches of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries - or what Loos calls “modern decor” – a modern style of ornament such as Art Nouveau. Both types of ornament are unnecessary and culturally “backward” according to the social Darwinism of Loos: The lower the cultural level of a people, the more extravagant it is with its ornament, its decoration. The Indian covers every object, every boat, every oar, every arrow with layer upon layer of ornament. To see decoration as a sign of superiority means to stand at the level of the Indians. But we must overcome the Indian in us. The Indian says “This woman is beautiful because she wears gold rings in her nose and ears.” The man of high culture
18 Gleizes was not totally opposed to the decorative arts. For example, Gleizes later set up an artists’ colony (for artists and craftspeople) in South France. (Thanks to Andrew McNamara for this observation) 19 Loos notes that the publishing house of Kurt Wolff refused to publish his essays unless he removed the attacks on Josef Hoffmann. Promptly retrieving his articles, Loos had them published by Georges Crès. (Loos, 1982:130 –131)
48 says, “This woman is beautiful because she does not wear rings in her nose and ears.” To seek beauty only in form and not in ornament is the goal toward which all humanity is striving. (Loos, 1982:40)
Ornament, according to Loos, was superfluous to the “truly” modern age. Historical ornament kept Austria in its past, while modern ornament signified a “primitive” state of civilisation that needed to be overcome. The desire for ornament marked an inability to recognise the modern style – that which is without ornament. As mentioned in the Introduction, it is ironic that many of the “unornamented”, functional objects Loos admired (the bicycle for example) displayed qualities of ornamentation: smooth or shiny surface finishes or designs that relied on the repetition of elements organised in patterns of symmetry (the arrangement of spokes in a bicycle wheel for example). For Loos to argue that the functional was a new aesthetic was legitimate but to describe the functional as that which is without ornament is inaccurate and limiting in that it forecloses, ignores and devalues the presence of the decorative. The functional aesthetic advocated by Loos was the reinvention of a different kind of ornament that was developed through a different set of aesthetic principles. (McNamara, 1997:13; Carter, 1997:22)
Loos repeated and developed similar arguments against ornament in the vehemently zealous and deliberately outrageous articles such as Ladies’ Fashion (21 August 1898) and the lecture Ornament and Crime (1910).20 In Ladies’ Fashion, Loos argues that ladies’ fashion continues to embrace ornament because a woman was “forced to appeal to the man’s sensuality through her clothing”. (Loos, 1982:99) Since women lacked economic independence, her place in society depended on the position occupied by the man she married. To secure “the love of a strong man”, a woman needed to
20 Simmons describes Loos’ Ornament and Crime lecture as a “publicity-seeking polemic”. (2001:256) Simmons also notes the date of this lecture as 1910 when many other earlier references to Ornament and Crime list the date as 1908. (2001:256) In Loos’ articles it is sometimes difficult to separate what is written with an elaborate irony from what is written with a patronising condescension.
49 appeal to men’s constantly changing and unnatural sensuality through rapidly changing fashions featuring ornament and colour. 21 (Loos,1982:100)
But in this essay, ornament is linked not only to seduction and sensuality, but in a very disturbing way to crime. Loos finds direct correspondence between the form of women’s fashion – for example when the fashion emphasises a “child-like” appearance – and the rise in the numbers of sexual assaults against children. (1982:100) By appealing to some base, unnatural part of humanity, ornament inspires abhorrent, violent crime. For Loos, the need to eliminate ornament to obtain a chaste, rational form was a moral and social necessity.
In the later essay Ornament and Crime (1910), Loos’ argument against a criminal and erotic ornament receives further embellishment and detail. Loos attributes to ornament another crime – of slowing down cultural evolution. Hand-made ornaments were luxury items produced by exploited workers for the aristocrats of the Austrian empire’s past. Loos argues that the excessive amount of time and human labour required to make ornament means that the worker is not paid fairly for his or her time. In addition, the extra time and materials needed for ornamentation increases the production and retail costs of the item. (Loos, 1970:21 - 23) Unless ornament was standardised and mass produced, which resulted in ornament of an inferior quality, ornament was economically unsustainable. Ornament was not only an offence against reason but was a wasteful indulgence that “inflicts serious injury on people’s health, on the national budget and hence on cultural evolution.” (Loos, 1970:21)
A taste for ornamentation leads to a further crime: the production of inferior “surrogates”. The stucco worker imitates mouldings and ornaments exactly to look like the best stonemasonry. Wall coverings are made from paper but imitate the patterns of damask silk or tapestries. (Loos, 1982:64-65) In these absurd surrogates, the functional, honest qualities of materials and
21 Loos states that this sensuality is unnatural because “if man had remained a beast, then the love in his heart would have been aroused once a year”. (Loos, 1982:99)
50 processes are disfigured, obfuscated and cluttered by the application of an ornamental disguise. According to Loos, this ornamental deception is nothing less than a violation of materials that demonstrates a loss of respect for or pride in specific techniques of production. (Loos, 1982:64-65) Useful materials such as wall papers and cement did not have to conceal their humble but honest properties while book printers should print books that look like printed books and stucco workers should be proud of producing stucco.
In Loos essays, differentiating and denigrating the decorative became a way of distinguishing what was modern from what was not modern, what was a rational aesthetic form from what was mere sensual seduction and what was honest and direct from what was devious and cluttered. The indulgent, opulent ornament demanded by a wealthy aristocracy; the criminal, sensuous ornament of women’s fashion; and the devious, decorative “surrogates” demanded by those with neither elegance nor money, had to make way for the practical, precise industrial art of the engineer. After all it was the engineer who was the “aristocrat” and rational man of elegance in the modern age. (Wollen, 1987:5)
Unviolated materials and the unornamented forms of the bicycle and steam engine were the modern style but the precedent for this rational style of functional modernism was, according to Loos, men’s clothing. Men’s clothing throughout the ages had to be adapted to the tasks of the first machine – the active male body. For example, when the practicalities and necessities of thirteenth century equestrian knighthood created the need for pants, men’s clothing was freed from hampering long garments. (Loos, 1982:102) This improvement was eventually accompanied by the gradual disappearance of ornament.
The exemplary item of clothing in this evolutionary process was the man’s suit, found “at the centre of culture” - London. (Loos, 1982:12) Simple, practical, and well-cut, the man’s suit allowed quick movement and productive labour. It did not disguise the fact that it was made of sheep’s wool but displayed its humble yet practical materials directly and honestly.
51 (Loos, 1982:102, 65) Loos states “(i)f the leadership in clothing were left to the Viennese, sheep’s wool would be woven to look like velvet and satin.” (1982:65) Loos contrasts the efficient practicalities of a modern, working man’s suit to the ornate, impractical garments worn in the past by a leisured aristocracy and still worn by women and the clergy at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (1982:102) He also cannot resist making a snide comment about the clothes of his artistic and aesthetic rivals: The great poet, the great painter, the great architect dress like the English. The would-be poet, the would-be master painter, the budding architect, on the other hand, make temples of their bodies in which beauty in the form of velvet collars, aesthetic trouser fabric, and Secessionist neckties is to be worshiped. (Loos, 1982:11)
The modern age, now presided over by the productive city man appropriately suited, demanded greater efficiency and rationality through unornamented, functional form. (Loos, 1982:55) In this way, Loos: gave an exemplary prognosis for modernism: utility will supplant ornament, the engineer will supplant the leisure class, production will supplant consumption. Decoded, this meant the bourgeoisie will finally supplant the aristocracy, both culturally, politically as well as economically. (Wollen, 1987:24)
While Loos condescendingly (or with elaborate irony) notes the need for the Kaffir, the Persian, the Slovak peasant woman and his shoemaker to produce ornament “for they all have no other way of attaining the high points of their existence”, he declares that the “aristocrat” – which in the modern age is the productive, virile man of business - has no need for ornament because this need has been replaced by art. (Loos, 1970:24) He states: We have art, which has taken the place of ornament. After the toils and troubles of the day we go to Beethoven or to Tristan. This my shoemaker cannot do. I mustn’t deprive him of his joy [in ornament], since I have nothing else to put in its place. But anyone who goes to the Ninth Symphony and then sits down and designs a wallpaper pattern is either a confidence trickster or a degenerate. Absence of ornament has brought the other arts to unsuspected heights. (Loos, 1970:24)
52 But in this time of utility, rationality and efficiency that appeared to banish ornament, the “unsuspected heights” of some art – such as in the art practices of some modernist, abstract painters – there was a growing uncertainty and insecurity about “the decorative”: It was in the period when the creation of decorative forms was increasingly suppressed in favour of functional utility that what is called abstract art made its entry into the preserve of painting and sculpture. Admittedly this is a sensitive, not to say a neurotic point in twentieth century criticism. There is nothing the abstract painter used to dislike more than the term ‘decorative’, an epithet which reminded him of the familiar sneer that what he had produced was at best pleasant curtain material. The abstract art of the twentieth century looks for an ancestry far removed from the humble craft of decorative design. (Gombrich, 1984:61)
Wassily Kandinsky, an artist often described as one of the pioneers of modernist abstraction, was a keen participant in decorative design and the “applied” arts at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Duval, 1989:39) In a poster he designed for the first exhibition of the Phalanx Art Group in Munich in 1901, Kandinsky created a curvilinear design of stylised and flattened forms influenced by the Jugendstil (“youth style”) and the work of the Vienna Secessionists. During this time, Kandinsky was also an active member of the Society of Applied Art designing dresses, handbags, jewellery, furniture and embroidered wall-hangings. (Broude, 1982:316) But as Kandinsky began to work as a painter, he distanced these early involvements with decorative design, particularly as his paintings moved away from the representation of objects to “pure” abstraction. (Kandinsky, 1992b:97)
This move to “pure” abstraction – often linked to Kandinsky’s paintings of 1910 – was accompanied by essays explaining his motivations for seeking a new art form that was autonomous from naturalistic representation. 22 (Kandinsky, 1992c:86) In The Cologne Lecture, Kandinsky identified two aspects of the ornamental that he had to “circumnavigate” and “leave behind”
22 These included Concerning the Spiritual in Art published in 1911, and The Cologne Lecture of 1914.
53 to achieve significant, non-referential forms in painting. These included the flatness and superficiality of ornamental form. (Kandinsky, 1992b: 95 – 97)
Kandinsky employed a variety of complex compositional strategies and techniques to avoid flatness, which he believed could lead to the ornamental. (Kandinsky, 1992b:96) Colours, which now had to be understood as existing on the same plane, were carefully chosen and arranged according to Kandinsky’s idiosyncratic understanding of their different “inner weights”.23 I have always imagined Kandinsky, fastidiously dressed – for he always bragged that he was such a neat and careful painter he could paint in a dinner suit – surrounded by colours in his immaculate studio.24 He would be working intently (or sometimes in a trance), seeking a distribution of “weight” that would avoid an “architectonic centre” in his paintings.25 He would place a “heavy” weight at the top of the canvas, and a “light” weight at the bottom. The “middle” was kept weak, and the corners “strengthened”. (Kandinsky, 1992b: 95 – 96)
Kandinsky also strived to avoid ornamental form because it belonged “mainly to external beauty, which can be, and as a rule is outwardly expressive and inwardly expressionless”. (Kandinsky, 1992b:97) Beauty of form and colour was not enough if the artist was to paint abstractly yet avoid producing works that resembled neckties or carpet. When looking at ornamental form, Kandinsky explains: (t)he nerve vibrations are there (as we feel when confronted by applied art), but they get no further than the nerves because the corresponding vibrations of the spirit which they call forth are weak. (quoted in Broude, 1982:317)
23 What Kandinsky meant by this expression is hard to know but perhaps it referred to Kandinsky’s hypotheses of colour’s correspondence to music or more formal qualities such as colour intensity, density or saturation. 24 See Kandinsky for references to Kandinsky’s tidy studio and painting skills. (1992a:2) 25 According to Golding: Kandinsky came to insist that while he was at work, all the verbal, literary rationale underlying each individual painting evaporated or was transcended by pure feeling which took control of him so completely that many works dating from this period (1911 – 1914) were executed by him while in an almost trance- like state. (2000:95)
54 The ornamental form was attractive but it had a physical effect rather than an “inner” or spiritual effect. This form did not have sufficient “depth” to carry with it strong expression or significance that would somehow cause a corresponding spiritual vibration. So while ornamental form was admirable for its beauty and independence of nature, Kandinsky was seeking a new, spiritual form.
Spiritual forms could only be arrived at by an enlightened individual using intuition and relying on decisions of feeling rather than the calculated methods of design used to create ornamental forms. (Golding, 2000:86) For the enlightened viewer, these spiritual forms embodied an “inner” significance that touches deeply, causing a profound, spiritual vibration. 26 This spiritual vibration is not just the associative effects of a colour – say red – which has associations with flame and blood but also includes the other senses – taste, sound, touch, smell. In the spiritually aware individual, significant form will vibrate through the whole body – turning the body into a finely-tuned violin that responds to the slightest touch of the bow. (Kandinsky,1992c:93) Kandinsky believed that in his paintings, there was a perfect coincidence of the internal and external, of content and form, of medium and expression. This coincidence separated Art from non-art and allowed the “enlightened” viewer and the artist to be transported to a higher level of experience.27 (Golding, 2000:88)
Ornamental form did not fit with the mystical “spiritual” form sought by Kandinsky. The making of ornamental forms was learned knowledge passed from teacher to student in the “applied” arts or from mother to daughter in folk art. According to Kandinsky, these repeated forms were an empty imitation that arrived in the world like a “stillborn child”. (Kandinsky, 1992c: 87) However, these learnt forms are not “empty” but full of a socially received
26 Kandinsky has a hierarchical understanding of human experience and “spiritual” intelligence. Using the notorious narrative figure of the triangle, Kandinsky reserves the apex of the triangle for only a few privileged and enlightened artists and viewers at the highest level of spiritual development. (Kandinsky, 1992c:88) It is only the few on this level that will recognise the spiritual qualities of expressive, abstract form. 27 Kandinsky believed that the works he called Compositions achieved this perfect unity. (Golding, 2000:88)
55 and culturally coded content. So while Kandinsky admired the strong vibrant ornamental practices of traditional folk art of the Vologda region and the ornamental practices of Jugendstil and the Vienna Secessionists in his early career, he tried to disassociate his art from these ornamental practices. In contrast to the socially produced, “empty” and imitative forms of the ornamental, Kandinsky’s abstract paintings were represented as not only the unique creations of an enlightened individual but also as being full of spiritual significance.
Despite Kandinsky’s continual efforts to dismiss the appearance of the ornamental from his work, it continued to haunt his work in other ways. In his Reminiscences of 1912-13, Kandinsky, in a typical rhetorical strategy, related three profoundly affecting experiences from his past that influenced his move to an increasingly abstract art practice. The first was the experience, in 1896, of viewing two paintings – one of Monet’s “Haystacks” paintings, and one of Kandinsky’s paintings that had been left in the studio turned on its side. On both occasions, Kandinsky was unable to identify what these paintings represented and was struck by the understanding that a painting’s effect did not rely on a viewer’s recognition of the subject-matter. The second profoundly affecting experience for Kandinsky was listening to a performance of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He believed that somehow music could be understood in terms of colour and that painting could be as emotive and as abstract as music. (Golding, 2000:82) The third experience is of the ornamental.
In Kandinsky’s early career, he worked as an ethnographer in the province of Vologda, about 500 kilometres north of Moscow. The ornate, domestic interiors created by the people of this region deeply impressed Kandinsky. As he recounted: I shall never forget the great wooden houses covered with carving: They taught me to move within the picture, to live in the picture. I still remember how I entered the living room for the first time and stood rooted to the spot before the unexpected scene. Every object was covered with brightly coloured, elaborate ornaments … The ‘red’ [or icon] corner, thickly, completely covered with painted and printed pictures of the saints… I felt surrounded on all sides
56 by the painting, into which I had thus penetrated. (Kandinsky, quoted in Golding, 2000:82 – 83)
In this narrative, the ornamental has penetrated further than Kandinsky’s “nerves”. Not only did this ornate, domestic interior provide Kandinsky with an aesthetic model of an “all-over” surface worked through with crowded imagery, it also provided him with a model of a viewing process – of being optically engulfed. Golding states that this experience: was to be one of Kandinsky’s greatest achievements that in his first full maturity he created individual works of art, single canvases, that function as environmental entities. (2000:83)
Some of Kandinsky’s “optically engulfing” paintings – the works titled ‘Composition …’ - were quite large such as Composition VI (1913) which was approximately two metres wide and three metres long.
Kandinsky and some of his commentators developed a narrative that not only differentiated Kandinsky’s work from the decorative, but also worked to denigrate the decorative as an empty, insignificant form. It is only through this doubled process of differentiation and denigration that Kandinsky’s painting is represented as “true” art. But there are bizarre contradictions in Kandinsky’s and his commentator’s arguments. For instance, that his early work as a designer could be totally separated from his painting practice, or that ornamental form acted only superficially on the “nerves” and yet how profoundly affecting were those ornamental, domestic interiors of Vologda on him. These very contradictions demonstrate that the ornamental can be represented as an important structuring device for Kandinsky’s crowded compositions. The ornamental is also important in understanding how he considered the viewing experience of his early abstract paintings – as if they could engulf the spectator. The question remains then, why should Kandinsky’s painting be celebrated as “true art” if it is structured by the ornamental which the artist and his commentator often denigrated and condemned?
57 The ornamental seems to randomly interrupt and disrupt the uniformity of some dominant discourses of modernism. The avant-garde was interrupted and disrupted by a decorative, domestic modernism. Seeking to make the home an inspiring, beautiful yet comfortable place, this domestic modernism was then condemned for its (feminine) inability to distinguish Art from the “biblelot”. This same domestic, decorative space must then also be recuperated as a fitting place to house the art work of avant-garde artists who relied on middle-class, domestic purchases to sustain their practice.
Other types of decorative modernism also interrupted and disrupted the smooth developmental narratives of abstraction or functional modernism. Klimt’s ornate paintings and Kandinsky’s crowded, abstract paintings interrupted and disrupted the narratives that tried to explain the “origin” of abstraction as a development from naturalism to cubism. Hoffmann’s use of pattern and ornament in architectural design complicated the idea that “the decorative” was oppositional to “structure. And despite Loos’ vehement claims to the contrary, a functional modernism was not devoid of ornament but made use of important ornamental principles such as repetition, symmetry and highly finished surfaces. The key qualities and strategies of the decorative were, at times, despised, and then highly sought after and admired by a modernism that was always (and continues to be) contradictory and riven by interruptions and disruptions.
58 Chapter 2
Re-Visions of the Decorative 1:
Clement Greenberg and the decorative that must be used against itself
59 While clearly an important part of early modernism, the decorative - and its association with domestic interior decoration, textile designs, fashion and femininity – came to be considered a terrible liability from which art practices, particularly those of modernist abstraction, had to be distanced and disassociated. So successful was this early campaign against the decorative, some artists and art critics of modernist abstraction had to create a different vocabulary and rhetoric to describe an artwork that resembled or was associated with the “decorative”. This new rhetoric had to justify not only why the work was the next important development in modernist painting, but also create new and distinctive ways of seeing and understanding the visual experience of the work. This problem was taken up in three important instances by: the art critic Clement Greenberg during his support of Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings; the artist Frank Stella, whose paintings resembled decorative patterns; and the artist and artwriter Donald Judd who admired and wrote about Stella’s early painting.
Clement Greenberg was haunted by the whispers of “wallpaper” during his vehement support of the work of Jackson Pollock. (McNamara, 1997:10) This whisper suggested that Pollock’s abstract paintings resembled decorative patterns that were more appropriate for covering the walls of a domestic interior rather than being paintings worthy of gracing the walls of a museum. For Greenberg, however, this snide association with the decorative domesticity of wallpaper was not as damaging or demeaning as it might have been. In fact Greenberg admired particular qualities of wallpaper – the way its all-over repeating patterns could be extended indefinitely. (Greenberg, 1986b:223) Indeed, these qualities of wallpaper were something to emulate. Greenberg identified and admired these same qualities in the work of “advanced” abstract painters where repeating, all-over “elements” also had the potential to extend indefinitely beyond the boundaries of the painted canvas. (Greenberg, 1986b:222 - 223) These similarities between decorative forms such as wallpaper and modernist abstract art created problems in that it entangled domestic interior decoration with modernist abstract painting. Certainly, for Greenberg, the decorative was a difficult, dangerous but necessary spectre that haunted modernist, abstract painting.
60 (Greenberg, 1993b:43) But, just as Loos found the man’s suit an exemplary model for a functional modernism, Greenberg finds, in a particular understanding of “the decorative”, an exemplary model for modernist abstract painting practices.
The term “decorative” was used by Greenberg to distinguish “traditional Western easel painting” from the new “all-over” painting that he admired. (Greenberg, 1986b:221) Easel painting was “re-presentational” and relied on “dramatic effect” such as contrasts of light and shade or compositional techniques. These kinds of paintings also used conventions of modelling and perspective to achieve the “dramatic depth” of spatial recession. (Greenberg, 1986b:221) In easel paintings, diversity of form, colour and tone and contrasts between light and shade or background and foreground were emphasised. This diversity created the hierarchical distinctions within the painting that enabled its “dramatic effect” and its “re-presentational” qualities.
In contrast to easel painting, the “all-over” painting that Greenberg admired was “presentational”. It was true to the medium rather than true to nature. “All-over” painting emphasised a “decorative” and “undramatic surface” where all parts of the surface of the painting were given “equal” attention. Pictorial equivalence that emphasised surface resulted in a “decorative structure”. (Greenberg, 1986b:221-222) This ideal of decorative structure in painting eliminated the differentiation between the centre and periphery, surface and depth creating a uniform, “polyphonic” painting – quite different to the ideals so carefully developed by Kandinsky for example. The “polyphonic” painting was an “accumulation of similar units of sensation” that “repeats itself without strong variation from one end of the canvas to the other and dispenses, apparently, with beginning, middle, and ending”. (Greenberg, 1986b:222) It was in the work of some of the abstract expressionists that “decorative structure” as “pure” surface was achieved.28
28 The artists who were able to achieve this highpoint of painting, however, were few indeed. They included Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.
61 The equivalence of the all-over surface was a key principle of “decorative” modern art according to Greenberg. He states: Mondrian’s term, “equivalent”, is important …. Just as Schönberg makes every element, every voice and note in the composition of equal importance – different but equivalent – so these painters render every element, every part of the canvas equivalent; and they likewise weave the work of art into a tight mesh whose principle of formal unity is contained and recapitulated in each thread, so that we find the essence of the whole work in every one of its parts. (Greenberg, 1986b:224)
The coincidence and unity of painting and surface is very important for Greenberg since his developmental narrative of modern art relies on the assumption that abstract painting developed from the gradual flattening of the painting surface as an illusion of “a boxlike cavity into the wall behind it”. (Greenberg, 1986b:221) The moves towards abstract forms of painting made visible the defining characteristics of painting: flatness and the delimiting of flatness. The paintings that Greenberg most admired – the work of a few New York artists such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still - demonstrated these characteristics of a pure kind of painting where the flatness of the painting surface and the uniqueness of the medium of paint became paramount. It is in the “decorative picture that painting per se and the pictorial are inseparable”. (Kuspit, 1979:59)
These unique and irreducible features of painting that Greenberg identified were not peculiar or exclusive to painting. The principle of equivalence in a work of art, its formal unity, is a woven, tight mesh of threads.29 The textile
29 In the same essay, Greenberg uses another textile metaphor. This time the elements in an all-over painting are knitted together: …Monet and Pissarro anticipated at long remove a mode of painting, now practiced by some of our most “advanced” artists, that threatens the identity of the easel picture at precisely these points: the “decentralized,” “polyphonic,” all- over picture which, with a surface knit together of a multiplicity of identical or similar elements, repeats itself without strong variation from one end of the canvas to the other and dispenses, apparently, with beginning, middle, and ending. (Greenberg, 1986b:222) “Decentralized”, “polyphonic”, “a multiplicity of identical or similar elements”, “repeats itself without strong variation”, these are all phrases which could just as accurately describe the visual appearance of many a knitted garment or textile. These phrases could also describe the slight variations in colour or texture of the wool; the repeating, all-over pattern of knitting; the subtle differences in the tension of the wool that effects the size of a stitch; or the odd gap where a dropped stitch or snag in the wool interrupts consistent uniformity.
62 metaphor that Greenberg uses here to connect painting and surface is significant. It demonstrates that flatness and the various techniques of emphasising the flatness of the painting surface are already prominent and characteristic features of textile design and manufacture. In weaving, coloured threads are woven into “all over” surface patterns where colour and design are properties of the very thread that constructs the textile surface. Indeed, the concept of the “all over surface” and the problems, techniques and processes of creating the “all-over surface” have long been a concern in textile design and manufacture.
Greenberg admired a similar analogy to textile design and processes in the “stained” paintings of Helen Frankenthaler. These stained paintings became the next logical step in Greenberg’s argument concerning paintings’ gradual development towards flatness because the medium, diluted to the consistency of a dye, was absorbed into and hence became co-existent with the literal surface of the canvas. Of course this process is not exclusively a new development towards flatness in painting. The common textile technique of dyeing fabric to produce all over surface designs has its own long, complex history. But this connection to textile design and manufacture is de-emphasised and the technique recontextualised into the discourse of modernist painting practices.
With his rhetoric of painting’s gradual development towards its defining characteristics of flatness and the delimiting of flatness, Greenberg realised that “flatness” was something that was not peculiar and exclusive to painting, but rather something that was also significant to textiles and fabric design and hence the decorative. In his essay ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, Greenberg is forced to concede that a tacked up piece of canvas (a textile) exhibits the essence of painting: that is “flatness and the delimitation of flatness”. (Greenberg, 1993a:131) He neatly side-steps this glitch in his seductive narrative of modernist art by suggesting that although the tacked up piece of canvas “exists as a picture”, it is not necessarily a “successful one”. (Greenberg, 1993a:131-132) The important difference between a tacked up piece of canvas (or piece of printed fabric or a woven textile) and
63 the decorative structure of abstract painting was the particular visual experience that painting produced. Crucially, for him, this visual experience transformed a literal surface into a visual field.
It was the quality and perception of the “pure” surface of painting that was vitally important for Greenberg because he could distance, de-emphasise and disguise the close associations between textile designs and modernist abstraction. Greenberg’s vocabulary to describe this special perception and visual experience is as ornamental as it is vague and ambiguous. The “decorative structure” of successful modernist art was a “vital form” that was open, fresh and immediate. It was a surface that “breathe(d)” and extended “the organic possibilities of the medium”. (Greenberg, 1993e:156) Even though it was “pure” surface, a painting with decorative structure had an optical depth capable of conveying “infinite nuance”. (Greenberg cited in Kuspit, 1979:57 – 61)
Greenberg, however, argued that “decorative” painting had several problems. As “pure” surface, a decorative structure signified the collapse of the dramatic – that important quality of great art of the past. The dramatic, which depended on contrast, variation and hierarchical distinctions in the different parts of an “easel” painting, was cancelled in “decorative” painting through the equivalence of the surface as decorative structure. Decorative painting, if it did not have implicit drama, however, would be experienced as a “mere effect” that would once again entangle art with mechanical (textile) design.
Compared to a “decorative structure”, a “mechanical design” did not extend the possibilities of the medium but instead became a repeatable “style”. For Greenberg, Pablo Picasso’s post-cubist work became “exclusively and obviously decorative”, loaded with “decorative space fillers” because he failed to gain new mastery of his medium. (Greenberg, 1993c:31) In this argument, Greenberg differentiates the original and authentic “iteration” of decorative strategies in Picasso’s early work from inauthentic “citations” of these strategies in his later work. (Greenberg, 1993c:32-34) Greenberg also argued that other abstract art practices such as minimalism and op art
64 were “Good Design” rather than art that extended the possibilities of their medium. (Greenberg, 1967)
If decorative painting was not to result in a “flat” painting that relied on “the sum of its techniques” – a “mere” effect – it had to have “implicit drama”. The way to achieve “implicit drama” was, according to Greenberg, to use the decorative against itself. (Greenberg, 1993a:43) This raises the question of what it might mean to use the decorative against itself - for to use the decorative against itself, it is necessary to know what the decorative is. For Keith Broadfoot, this is an interesting paradox. He argues: (l)ike the ornamental, does the decorative not define ‘itself’ in relation to what it is added-on to? The decorative, therefore, would have no essence or being of its own. What then … would it mean to use the decorative against itself? Such is the paradox of a modernist practice as it is here proposed by Greenberg. How could the spectre of decoration ever be finally exorcised? How could modernist painting ever reveal an ultimate essence, one that would overcome an inessential decoration? (1997:39)
According to Greenberg, some of the work of Henri Matisse and Milton Avery achieved the implicit drama of using the decorative against itself. In the work of Matisse, for example, it was achieved through the use of scale as an “absolute aesthetic factor”. (Greenberg, 1993b:43) Donald Kuspit, in his examination of the importance of the decorative for Greenberg, argues that for Greenberg: …scale stretches the decorative to its limits, tensing it so that it seems to transcend itself. Monumental scale stretches a finite surface over a seemingly infinite field, putting it in opposition to itself. (1979:63)
The tension of the decorative being used “against itself” extended the possibilities of the medium making it “powerfully immediate”. (Kuspit, 1979:64) This example implies that the decorative is a finite, literal surface that is transformed, by its monumental scale, into an infinite visual field – that mysterious optical modernist space of infinite nuance.
According to Kuspit, Greenberg’s paradoxical position of using the decorative against itself was a “dialectical conversion” - a concept and rhetorical
65 strategy Greenberg used on a number of other occasions in his early discussions of modernist abstraction. (Kuspit, 1979:20 - 23) For example Greenberg’s states: The process by which Cubism, in pushing naturalism to its ultimate limits and over-emphasizing modelling – which is perhaps the most important means of naturalism in painting – arrived at the antithesis of naturalism, flat abstract art, might be considered a case of “dialectical conversion”. (Greenberg, 1986a:273)
In this “dialectical conversion”, “naturalism” is being used “against itself” to arrive at flat abstraction. As a rhetorical device, Greenberg’s “dialectical conversion” is used to support his developmental narrative of modernist art in which abstraction organically grows from naturalism, thus establishing a link between the great art of the past and his own narrative regarding post-war American abstraction.
The “dialectical conversion” that Greenberg identifies in the above quote however, could be understood quite differently. Instead, could not the over- emphasis on modelling re-emphasise the abstractness (the codes and conventions) of an already and always flat, abstract “naturalism”? (This is a kind of repetition with difference rather than a progressive development). In a similar way, is it not possible to argue that “using the decorative against itself”, rather than revealing the ultimate essence of modernist painting, instead repeats and re-emphasises the decorative codes and conventions (flatness and all-over surface patterns for example) that have always and already been a part of modernist painting?
Kuspit notes that explicit references to the idea of “dialectical conversion” were from early in Greenberg’s career in the late 1940’s when he was still committed to Marxism. As Greenberg distanced himself from this earlier “Marxist commitment”, some of the references to “dialectical conversion” were repressed or over-generalised in Greenberg’s Art and Culture of 1961
66 which revised these earlier articles.30 (Kuspit, 1979:20) For Kuspit, instances of Greenberg’s “dialectical conversion” – such as his statement of using the decorative against itself – should be understood in terms of an ongoing struggle and unpredictability within the processes of modernist abstraction.31 This struggle occurs as a kind of “wrench” where there is a re- exploration of “overlooked” or “still latent yet realizable possibilities” such as Greenberg’s rereading of Monet’s later works as abstraction rather than as impressionism. (Kuspit, 1979:23 – 24) Kuspit states “(d)ialectical conversion implies that the old problems, without having been solved, are replaced by new ones” and that “(new) problems define new conditions, and dialectical conversion is a sign that they have arrived”. (1979:27)
The decorative that must be “used against itself” can be understood as a sign that a different (not necessarily “new”) set of problems was being articulated in modernist art discourse and the practices of modernist abstraction. Greenberg, however, underestimated the implications of these “new” problems and conditions. Instead of reworking representation and abstraction within a narrow, discreet aesthetic experience that would reveal the essence of modernist painting, using “the decorative against itself” would re-emphasise and reinvigorate painting’s entanglement with design, pattern, sculpture, objects, fashion, textiles, domestic interior design and the spaces of exhibition. Some of the art practices that became prominent in the 1960s display this entanglement, particularly the paintings of Frank Stella.
30 Kuspit notes that Greenberg’s Marxist leanings, however should not be overemphasised. Greenberg’s use of the concept of the “dialectic” is neither Marxist nor Hegelian but Deweyan. He states: “Where Marxian dialectical materialism gives the object dominance over the subject in historical development, and Hegelian dialectical idealism gives the subject dominance over the object in spiritual development, Greenberg’s dialectical empiricism, as it can be called, gives them equal weight in aesthetic experience.” (Kuspit, 1979:28 – 29) 31 The series of interesting questions that Broadfoot raises concerning just what it might mean to use the decorative against itself (see page 65) are the very type of questions that this “dialectic conversion” should generate. (Broadfoot in McNamara, 1997:39)
67 Chapter 3
Re-Visions of the Decorative 2: Frank Stella and the indirect Decorative
68 Positioned between Greenberg’s High Modernism of abstract expressionism and new practices later called minimalism, the early paintings of Frank Stella in the late 1950s and early 1960s, make use of decorative patterns. According to Stella and Donald Judd however, these patterned compositions were formal, abstract paintings. These paintings were not only the next important development in modernist painting after abstract expressionism, but heralded new and particular ways of seeing and understanding the visual experience of modernist art.
While Stella and Judd certainly had diverse ways of understanding the work of art and the viewing process, their ideas also have some things in common. Although differently articulated, they described the viewing experience of the art work as “direct”, “immediate” and “powerful”. They also argued that the art work was able to be seen as logical, complete or “whole”. These concepts of “directness” of viewing and “wholeness” of the art object were used in artwriting to justify why a particular set of New York art practices, including Stella’s work, were successful and worthy successors to the legacy of European Art and the Greenbergian formalist understanding of abstract expressionism.
According to Stella, his early paintings such as the Black series, demanded a direct, powerful visual experience because of their simple, bold compositions and matter-of-fact techniques of production. In these paintings, bands of black enamel paint alternated with thin strips of raw canvas usually in a symmetrical (or near symmetrical) pattern. The paint was applied in a “straight-forward” manner – straight from the can - with a large brush.
Stella’s compositional strategies in the Black series paintings differed from those used in European traditions of abstract painting such as geometric abstraction or from abstract expressionism. Stella argued that European abstraction relied on complex strategies of composition in which an idea of
69 “balance” became crucial.32 If something was done in one corner, something else was done in the other corner to “balance” the composition. According to Stella, this resulted in paintings where the different parts of the painting and their relations were more important than an idea of the whole. (Glaser, 1964:149)
Also, the detail and complexity of abstract expressionist paintings were oddly threatening to Stella. He states: …(o)ne could stand in front of any Abstract-Expressionist work for a long time, and walk back and forth, and inspect the depths of the pigment and the inflection and all the painterly brushwork for hours. But I wouldn’t particularly want to do that and also I wouldn’t ask anyone to do that in front of my paintings. To go further, I would like to prohibit them from doing that in front of my painting. That’s why I make the paintings the way they are, more or less. … I feel that after a while you should know that you’re just sort of mutilating the paint. If you have some feeling about either color or direction of line …I think you can state it. You don’t have to knead the material and grind it up. That seems destructive to me; it makes me very nervous. (Stella in Glaser, 1964:159)
It was as if compositional or painterly detail not only created a kind of mutilated, fragmented painting but required a violent, destructive mode of production. For Stella it was neither the plenitude of marks on a surface nor the artist’s overbearing manipulation of paint that would make a painting worth looking at. Rather, some other qualities needed to be identified, described and employed.
To avoid the mutilated complexity of these detailed, “relational” paintings, Stella used symmetry in his schematic patterns of lines and shapes. He believed that the use of symmetry in his work and also the work of other artists such as Kenneth Noland was “new” in that it was used “in a non- relational way”. As an example, Stella states that Noland would place his
32 Recent commentators on minimalism note that this is a limited and simplistic understanding of early 20th century European painting. For example see Meyer (2001) Stella, however, was not the only one to make this simplistic summation. Judd and Morris also made reference to the idea of complex compositional balances in early 20th century art – an idea that artists such as Barnett Newman proposed before them.
70 circles in the centre of the canvas to achieve a composition that was simple, direct and forceful. (Glaser, 1964:149) He states: …(i)n the newer American painting we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical, but just to get a kind of force, just to get the thing on the canvas. The balance factor isn’t important. We’re not trying to jockey everything around.33 (Stella in Glaser, 1964:149)
Whether the circle (a very “balanced”, symmetrical shape) was placed in the middle, or placed to the side, it is difficult to insist that “balance” is not a valid factor in a formal reading of the work. Yet, Stella believed that somehow these more “direct” and “simple” compositions, so different from the inherent violence of abstract expressionism or the careful “balance” of European abstraction, would “state” an idea about a line, or direction, or colour more plainly.
When talking about his paintings of this time Stella asserts, “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there.” (Glaser, 1964:158) The factual, material properties of the paint were understood as an “explicit presence”.34 What a viewer would or should see when looking at the Black paintings of the late 1950s, for example, would be immediately obvious and self-evident: thin strips of raw canvas alternating with bands of black enamel paint applied in a “straight-forward” symmetrical composition. The black bands of this painting were obviously the figure of the painting, while the raw canvas was the ground. This rhetoric of directness and literality implies that the “facts” of materials were always already fixed and therefore static and unchangeable.
Stella believed that his particular way of painting was literal and direct in contrast to European and abstract expressionist traditions of painting that
33 Despite Stella’s assertions, it certainly can be argued that “getting things in the middle” and getting things symmetrical are also complex compositional strategies. Symmetry is also the basis of pattern and decoration – the nemesis of traditional abstract art. 34 Drucker states: Thus, red was red, a line was a line, a form a form and the redness, linearity, and formal arrangements were denied any assertive values or symbolic properties which might lead them to refer to anything other than their explicit presence. (1994:88)
71 alluded to something else (an object in the real world, spiritual truth, utopian goals or personal angst for example) besides the paint on the canvas. The titles of Stella’s Black series paintings, which often refer to places imbued with cultural significance, contradict these assertions. For example, the Black series paintings Clinton Plaza is named after a tenement in the Brooklyn slums and Die Fahne hoch (The Flag on High) references German nationalism.35 Ironically, the fact that Stella also constantly describes his work in terms of what it is not (not gestural like abstract expression; not composed like European, geometric abstraction; etc.) also demonstrates that what a viewer sees and understands in Stella’s work is not simply a matter of what is seen but what is not seen – that which marks the painting’s difference to other kinds of painting.
It was also necessary that the striped patterns created by the arrangement of the strips of raw canvas and bands of black paint remained immaterial to Stella. If read like a pattern, the composition of the Black Series painting Die Fahne hoch (The Flag on High) (1959) cannot be described as either simple or direct. Nor can it be described as a whole: the constructive logic of pattern design undermines such descriptions. To see and analyse (read) a pattern, it is important to distinguish which are the basic elements that build the pattern and then identify how these basic elements have been reproduced across the surface of the work.36 In Die Fahne hoch (The Flag on High) (1959), the white stripes intersect and mark a cross in the centre of the painting. This emphasises a four-part pattern construction that grids and fills the painted surface.
Read through pattern, this particular painting is divided into four quadrants with each quadrant being constructed from a white stripe that has been rotated and reflected to create a right angle.
35 Other Black series titles are names of transsexual nightclubs in Harlem, homosexual bars or new and unrecorded jazz tunes. (Jones, 1996:152) 36 Grabar describes ways of analysing a pattern as a “static, fixed, combination of repeated shapes” that can be used to identify how patterns rotate around a centre point. (1992:47, 130)
72
Figure 4: Die Fahne hoch (The Flag on High) (1959). Frank Stella. (Rubin,1970:19)
The white stripe with a right angle is then translated along a diagonal line to the edge of the painting.37 This “basic” pattern in one quadrant is then rotated and reflected to fill the remaining three quadrants of the work. Thus the work employs three symmetries of pattern design: translation, reflection, and rotation to create an overall field pattern. The composition of the painting is not really straightforward or simple but rather a technique of pattern design with a long, complex history. In this patterned reading of the painting, figure-ground distinctions also become ambiguous. The white stripes become the figure by which the pattern is read while the black bands become the ground. What is seen in the painting is not “direct” or
37 Translation is a technical term used in pattern design. (Gombrich, 1984:67)
73 straightforward. Its surface is indistinct, ambiguous and therefore productive of different narratives of what can be seen in the painting.
In modernist abstraction, the stripe was disassociated from its long history as a pattern or as decoration and isolated as a pure, neutral, independent form. For example, the artwriter Legrace Benson made some incredible claims for the pure neutrality of the stripe. He argues: …(t)he stripe seems to have been arrived at through the operation of various and independent intuitions, but became favored generally because of its affective neutrality as a form. Circles, triangles and squares all have accretions of associational meaning, but the stripe avoided these unwanted overlays and thus could be used with greater freedom. (Benson, 1969:36)
In artwriting about Stella’s painting, the link to pattern design (and all its messy complications and mundane associations) was de-emphasised to ensure that the painting’s composition was linked to a simple but powerful formal abstraction.
In keeping with his desire for directness in painting, Stella wanted “to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas” and “tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can”. (Glaser, 1964:157) Using paint straight from the can disposed of the need for an artist’s palette along with the fussy and destructive mixing of original colours. Instead, by using paint straight from a can, painting with large housepainters’ brushes and applying paint in a straight-forward manner to the canvas, Stella likened his practice to that of a housepainter – a hardworking, no-nonsense art worker. It was as if this was a kind of art that removed the art from Art. This further distanced his practice and ideology from the abstract expressionist stereotypes of artists – as angst-ridden, creative but also destructive individuals. (Jones, 1996:123- 124) What was achieved through the workmanlike candour and technique of a housepainter was “directness”, simplicity and a more powerful visual experience.
While it is compelling to think of seeing a painting that is so powerful and direct, this particular viewing experience reduces the painting to a particular
74 actualisation that is completely fixed and final. I cannot help but be reminded of Michael Fried’s less formal description of Stella’s ideal of vision. In an anecdote related to his contemporary Rosalind Krauss, Fried informs Krauss about Stella’s ideal of an immediate visual acuity. Krauss remembers: …we were speaking about Frank Stella, and Michael asked me, “Do you know who Frank thinks is the greatest living American?” Of course I didn’t. “Ted Williams.” And Michael covered my silence with his own glee. “Ted Williams sees faster than any other living human. He sees so fast that when the ball comes over the plate – 90 miles an hour – he can see the stitches. So he hits the ball right out of the park. That’s why Frank thinks he’s a genius.” (Fried cited in Krauss, 1993:7)
Ted William’s genius is his unique, visual acuity. He is able to see “quickly” and so surely – as if his eye is able to fasten on the light reflected from the object of the ball more quickly than most people. His powerful vision allows him to focus on the stitches of the ball even as it is speeding towards him. William’s body, under the complete control of his powerful vision, is able to swing the baseball bat with a precision that connects directly with the ball and sends it speeding away. It is as if the speeding white blur of the ball “could be exploded into pure contact, pure simultaneity, pure optical pattern: vision in touch with its own resources”. (Krauss, 1993:7) For Stella, this baseball metaphor gave him a way of imagining and describing an ideal visual experience - as a site where sight and insight coincide.
There is certainly something about the acuity and mastery of this vision that interests Stella. Perhaps the baseball player’s speed of vision is a natural metaphor for the “directness” that Stella strives for in painting; where the painting is somehow immediately “whole” to the viewer. In the experience of seeing one of Stella’s paintings, a viewer should be able to see at something like ninety miles an hour. What is seen in the painting, is what is there: an immediate, graspable experience.
I like to imagine Stella, adjusting his big, black framed glasses and making that most iconic and seemingly artless statement (in a loud American accent), “What you see is what you see.” (Glaser, 1964:158)
75
But Stella’s artless statement is artful. Stella’s statements and ideas about his work and the viewing experience are rarely his own. When asked to supply written statements to accompany exhibitions of his work, in public appearances and interviews, Stella would often give statements written by his friends Hollis Frampton or Carl Andre. (Jones, 1996:119) He later joked that what was written about his work reflected the ideas of his friends and that “he came to agree with (them)”. (Stella quoted in Jones, 1996:119) Publicly, Stella adopted the ideas and visions of his friends as his own but I often wonder how he saw and understood his paintings. Unlike the baseball player with his genius for seeing, Stella’s perceptual power and his ability to make a powerful connection with his paintings appears painfully lacking. His sight and insight do not seem to be simultaneous. It is as if he is rendered powerless and struck dumb by his paintings.
What is implied by his recourse to mediation is that these visually powerful paintings - that should be seen directly, immediately - appear difficult to see, difficult to describe, difficult to explain. The art of this art is that the processes of seeing and understanding the work as a seamless, self- identical whole must be seen to be effortless if the work is to live up to claims of powerful directness and immediacy. The hard work of trying to see what is there in a painting, and the hard work of trying to write or speak of that experience, must be denied. Awareness, concentration and the careful choice, construction and use of narrative patterns concerning how to see the work must be camouflaged and made invisible by the illusion of a perceptual certainty and effortlessness. In this respect, Stella’s own silence about his work and adoption of the narratives developed by his friends demonstrate that understanding and articulating “what you see” is not a direct, effortless experience but one of elaborate artifice and careful construction. All those photographs of Stella in his big, black framed glasses take on an ironic, if not cynical, significance.
To avoid such simplistic (and rather arrogant) cynicism, however, it is necessary to think of Stella’s foibles and large spectacles in a different way.
76 Throughout the text that is Stella the artist, his large, black spectacles and the mismatch between his rhetorical claims for his work and his recourse to the words and visions of his friends are odd, memorable fragments. They are what Roland Barthes would have called “biographemes”. 38 (Barthes, 1976:9)
For Barthes, the “biographeme” was one way of returning pleasure to the text. Returning pleasure to the text necessitates what Roland Barthes called “the amicable return” of the author – or in this case the artist. (1976:8) The artist who now returns in the post-structuralist text of pleasure, however, is not the same as the artist-genius who was celebrated in traditional, romantic discourses of art history. Barthes states: The author who leaves his text and comes into our life has no unity; he is a mere plural of “charms,” the site of a few tenuous details, yet the source of vivid novelistic glimmerings, a discontinuous chant of amiabilities, in which we nevertheless read death more certainly than in the epic of a fate; he is not a (civil, moral) person, he is a body. (1976:8)
Sometimes flawed, contradictory, inarticulate and, to an extent, blind, Stella the artist has no unity, no coherence. This glimpse of Stella’s “blindness” and silence about his painting are comforting (the artist is not infallible) but uncomfortable in that they raise many questions about the difficulties and challenges of looking at and writing about art. So close to their work, are artists subject to a kind of artistic myopia that makes their own work hard to see and describe? The artist’s (and Frampton’s and Andre’s) rhetoric about his work, while compelling, is shown to be so flawed. If the paintings are not productive of some kind of direct, powerful visual experience, then how can they be considered either as new developments or worthy heirs to the legacy of art after abstract expressionism or European abstraction?
For the artist and artwriter Donald Judd, Stella’s early paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s were significant because they were a precursor to a three dimensional art he called “specific objects”: the newest development in
38 Many thanks to Michael Baker for this reference.
77 his narrative of modernist art. A “specific object”, first described in Judd’s article “Specific Objects” published in 1965, is a new type of “three dimensional art”. Neither painting nor sculpture, a “specific object” is a form of art that not only challenges but moves beyond these significant but outmoded categories. (Judd, 1965b:809, 810) While Judd never dismissed traditional painting as insignificant, he regarded traditional forms of art, particularly European art, as not appropriate for his time. This is not surprising considering the post-war struggle for cultural supremacy between the art centres of New York and Paris.
Through his argument, Judd demonstrated that while specific objects resembled sculpture, it was an art form more closely related to significant developments in American abstract painting. According to Judd, painting that occurred before 1946 treated the rectangular boundary of the canvas as “a fairly neutral limit”. (1965b:811) Within this boundary, the compositional strategies used to organise the painting and the different elements of the painting (colour, line, form, texture) are all important parts of the work. For Judd, the multipart painting was “diluted” because it was constructed of an indefinable outworking of these different elements and compositional strategies. Pre-1946 painting also contained remnants of an inherited European tradition – those traces of illusion and references to things (objects in the world, spiritual truths) outside the painting. These competing parts created a complexity used to build the quality of the painting. (Judd, 1965b:810, 813)
In the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman, however, Judd argues that there is a movement towards what he understands as a more simple, plausible relationship to the rectangular edge of the canvas. Judd argues that in the paintings of these artists, the elements inside the painting correspond closely to the rectangular edge of the canvas. This indexical and therefore more plausible relationship between the inside and outside of the painting establishes the rectangular shape of
78 the canvas as a “definite form”. 39 (Judd, 1965b:810-811) Even though many of the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, Still and Newman contain different elements, Judd argues that these elements do not function as “parts” in an ordinary sense. Because the parts are simple, few in number and correspond more closely to the edge of the canvas, they are subordinate to the overall unity of the painting and thus produce a sense of “wholeness”. (1965b:810) As well as questioning “traditional” forms of abstract composition, it is possible to argue that Judd’s rhetoric of “wholeness” was also a strategy to refocus and rediscipline the processes of viewing (and the viewer).
The logical relationship between elements in the painting and the painting’s edge is developed further in Stella’s paintings. Stella’s simple lines, stripes or bands often reinforce not just the edge of the canvas, which is to acknowledge the literality of the support, but the literal shape of the canvas as an object. In Judd’s narrative of modernist art, Stella’s paintings-as- objects provide the link from modernist painting to the new three dimensional forms called “specific objects”. (Fried, 1966:88-89)
In addition to “wholeness”, Judd admires the way the paintings of Stella, Rothko, Still and Newman draw attention not only to the rectangular format of the canvas, but also produce a specific relationship to the wall on which the painting is hung. (Judd, 1965b:811) The corresponding planar surfaces of painting and wall parallel each other. The paintings that Judd admires have not only an internal coherence but also a logical correspondence with the formal qualities (the literality) of their architectural context.40
39 Of course the lines and elements in the paintings that Judd believes have a coherent relationship between the inside and outer edge of the painting could also be represented in other ways. For example the “zip” in a Barnett Newman painting does not necessarily have an exclusive relationship to the edge of the canvas but can also be understood as a “gap”. Meyer argues that Judd’s descriptions of the new art is more about Judd’s preferences and Judd’s art work than an attempt to examine the work of these artists. (2001:137-138) 40 The cube form in some minimalist and conceptualist art practices also make a visual connection with its context of the white cube gallery. Buchloh understands this coincidence of forms as “a phenomenological reflection on viewing space” that was “insistent on reincorporating architectural parameters into the conception of painting and sculpture”. (Buchloh cited in Lee, 2004:80)
79 But this more “plausible” relationship between art object and architectural space can also be understood as a decorative effect – a “matching” of forms. The inside of the painting “matches” the outside edge of the painting which in turn “matches” the wall of the gallery. It is an act of interior decoration as nicely coordinated as the cushion that matches a sofa that matches the paint of a room.41 As discussed in the second chapter, bourgeois women were praised, and later condemned, for working with the architectural space, furniture and fittings of the room as if they were all part of a single canvas. While for the cubists Gleizes and Metzinger, the weakness of decorative painting was its dependence and connections to its context: it was part of an ensemble that justified and completed it. But in Judd’s writing, that decorative, dependent tendency for objects or paintings to “match” their context is not associated with weakness, dependency or acts of feminine interior design. It is seen as a strong, significant feature of logical, formal connections that produce a quality of “wholeness”. Judd’s rational, formal aesthetic contrarily revises and recuperates a justification once associated with a denigrated, domestic, decorative aesthetic. The way Stella’s paintings “match” their context once again links his patterned paintings to a decorative modernism.
The decorative qualities in Stella’s paintings are revised by Judd as the visual effect of rational, formal “wholeness”. This “wholeness” in the work of Stella and other painters produces a rigorous, powerful intensity in their paintings. According to Judd: it isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful. (1965b:813)
41 Jim Isermann’s 1993 installation in an apartment in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Firminy-Vert, France exploits the kind of Modernist “homogenising impulse” that is exemplified not only in the idealist logic of Le Corbusier (the architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) who believed that all aspects of life could be treated as a streamlined design element, but also in Judd’s writing. Isermann’s installation covers the walls, ceilings, stairs, floor, furniture and soft furnishings of an apartment in Le Corbusier’s austere building with an aggressively patterned and coloured fabric and linoleum. (Pagel, 1997:72)
80 Judd explained that there were new and different qualities to see in the new three dimensional work and less of the type of qualities that viewers or critics were used to seeing in other forms of art such as abstract expressionism or representational art. He states that the new three dimensional work “has fewer of the devices of earlier art and more of its own” and that “many aspects often thought essential to art are missing, such as imagery and composition”. (Judd, 1964:152; Judd, 1965a:165) The new work was not visually poor but could not be described adequately in the types of genres that were prominent in modernist art criticism at that time. Different criteria and vocabulary were needed to construct an adequate description of the work.
But other artwriters raised questions about the ideas of “wholeness” when viewing those kinds of paintings (like Stella’s) that were “purged of inessentials” or the simple, bold shapes of minimalist objects. In an article written for The New Yorker42 February 25, 1967, Harold Rosenberg – with gleeful condescension and a certain apprehension - associated the viewing processes required to see a minimalist artwork with the meticulous scrutiny required to find a skin blemish.43 He writes: The monotonous shapes and bleak surfaces presented to him as objects wrapped in their own being compel him, if he is not to back out of the gallery, to simulate a professional sensitivity to abstruse contrasts of tone, light, and dimension. The more a work is purged of “inessentials” the closer the scrutiny required to “see” it and the more precious the sensibility required to react to it. A reviewer of paintings consisting of a few large forms recently put the matter in blunt terms: “To appreciate this difference [in the thickness of their contours] fully it is necessary to get very close to these sizable canvases and examine them as if for blackheads.” (Rosenberg,1967:305)
The “minimalist” works (paintings and three dimensional objects) that Rosenberg referred to have a tendency to simple, geometric forms and limited colour. This simplification seemed to make the work featureless in
42 Writing in 1939, Clement Greenberg referred to The New Yorker magazine as “high class kitsch”. (Greenberg, 1992:535). 43 It is important to note that the label of “minimalist” was applied to a range of work in the 1960s – some of which would not be considered as “minimalist” today.
81 those kinds of details normally described in art writing. These kinds of “minimalist” works at first appeared stark, plain and featureless, but if a viewer looked too closely, he or she would discover surfaces covered with barely discernible changes in tone, light and dimension.
While never describing the process in the crude terms of the anonymous reviewer he cited, Rosenberg implied that a viewer’s response to a minimalist work (if the viewer had the courage to remain in the gallery) was a kind of disgusting but absorbing scrutiny. Contrary to the immediate, direct viewing processes described by Stella and Judd where the eye of the viewer saw the work whole and complete, Rosenberg stated that the type of viewing needed to see a minimalist work was a kind of staccato scan and stare. The viewer peered closely at the work with saccadic eyes in order to detect minute differences in the surface. In Rosenberg’s understanding, a viewer must adopt not only this disgusting form of viewing but also a “precious” sensibility to react positively to the work. But this prissy, ingratiating sensibility is unaware of the inherent, historical dangers that Rosenberg detected in these geometrically austere objects.
Rosenberg argued that minimalism’s historical background was not from the tradition of geometric abstraction (Kasmir Malevich, Piet Mondrian or Joseph Albers) which it superficially resembled, but rather from the threatening violence of “the Dada assault on art, here mistaken for a return to aesthetic fundamentals.”44 (Rosenberg,1967:305) Of course Rosenberg emphasised only certain aspects of dada as minimalism’s historical precedent – that it was a kind of anti-art, while ignoring dada’s strategies of institutional critique
44 This is to counteract suggestions made by some critics (for example see Rose (1967) or Glaser (1964)) and artists (for example see Robert Morris (1966)) suggesting that there might be formal similarities between the works of Russian constructivists or geometric abstractionists such as Mondrian, Malevich and Albers to minimalist work. But these claims were denied by artists such as Judd and Stella. See Bruce Glaser’s interview with Donald Judd and Frank Stella. (1966:148-149) In this interview, Stella states that it was abstract expressionism’s fussiness and complexity that goaded other artists into making simpler forms and that minimalism’s emphasis on industrial materials was a logical development of Pollock’s use of industrial paint and exploitation of its material properties. While these are valid links, it is important to note that some artists such as Stella emphasised a break with European traditions in order to establish a “new”, separate American art with New York as its artistic centre.
82 for example. Rosenberg also suggested that minimalism’s artists and audiences were naively unaware of the dada joke (art seeking to undermine art) that, by implication, also inhabited minimalism.
While Rosenberg argued that there were similarities between minimalism and dada, he identified important differences between the ways dada and minimalism cast the spectator. The dada spectator was gleefully outraged at the desecration of art whereas the minimalist spectator was “converted” into an aesthete – a professed (perhaps brainwashed?) admirer of the “beautiful”. (Rosenberg, 1967:305) The aesthete, with his or her “precious” sensibility, reacted rapturously and effusively to the minimalist work, thus collaborating with the artist rather than examining and judging the work critically. But here Rosenberg identified what he understands as a dangerous and ironic undermining of minimalist art; that the ideal minimalist spectator, as aesthete, would no longer need art because he or she would find just as much to admire in “a table top of three boards hung on a wall.” (1968:306)
Modelling his description of the table top in the language of art criticism, which was used to describe some minimalist art works, Rosenberg writes about the table-top: … effects of the slight unevenness of the surface, the illusion of depth thus created, the differences in width of the crevices between the boards, the function of these crevices as lines, their control of the surface as parallels and as verticals and horizontals (depending on which way the work is hung), the relation of these lines to the edges of the table, the character of those edges (whether worn, bevelled, or sharp) and the degree of austerity they communicate to the whole, the color of the table as against that of the wall, the changes produced by framing the table or exposing its thickness, the – and so forth. Minimal Art is Dada in which the art critic has got into the act. (Rosenberg,1967:306)
Rosenberg’s choice of a table top is an appropriate link to dada. The table top, as “found material”, brings in that most infamous of dada objects - the readymade. 45 Rosenberg constructs a description of potentially inexhaustible, formal artistic details readily observable (yet somehow still
45 Thanks to Andrew McNamara for this observation.
83 hard to see) in this “table top”. In his description, he moves from inside the work to outside describing barely discernible differences in the surface of the work, then to how these small differences relate to the outer edge of the work and finally to how the outer edge of the work relates to the gallery wall. By organising his description from the inner to the outer edge of the painting/tabletop, Rosenberg suggests that it is the quotidian nature of the work that lets in what should be extraneous to the work - the quotidian nature of the blank gallery wall. Certainly that movement from the inner to the outer edge of the work and finally the work’s relationship to the wall is similar to the narrative trajectory employed by Judd when discussing some of Stella’s paintings. But Judd sees only those large indexical forms in Stella’s paintings that formally and logically unite the inner elements of the painting to the outer edge and shape of the canvas. (Judd, 1965b:812)
But, as Rosenberg notes in his example, there is much more to see than these larger “indexical” forms since the forms themselves have their own marks and qualities, which in turn would have their own, and so on. If taken “literally”, the minimalists’ insistence on “what you see is what you see” can become an invitation to describe each of these marks and its qualities to an absurd degree.
As discussed earlier, Stella certainly recognised the threat that complex detail posed for abstract expressionism in that it resulted in a kind of mutilated, fragmented painting that encouraged a violent scrutiny. (Glaser, 1964:159) Despite Stella’s best attempts to escape this kind of fragmented painting and accompanying destructive viewing processes, making bold, simple paintings does not result in “wholeness” or direct, powerful viewing experiences. Rather, these bold, simple paintings result in more fragmentation and potentially disgusting visual experiences. The minimalists, in their desire to remove the extraneous parts of art from art did not reveal a more focussed, strong and essential form of art but rather emphasised what was considered to be the non-artness of art (quotidian marks, design, pattern, the architectural context, the formal qualities of non-art objects etc).
84 No matter how industrial the material, no matter how mechanical the application of paint, there was potentially a plenitude of marks on the surface of “simple” or “direct” paintings and minimalist objects. The various attempts by artists such as Stella and Judd to remove the art from Art, that is to remove particular sorts of “marks” (gestural marks, coloured forms in asymmetrical compositions etc) from surfaces in order to make a “clearer statement”, made a myriad of other marks and thus other kinds of art available for seeing. Sometimes these marks were taken as significant signs – such as Judd’s example of the lines in Stella’s painting. But, equally so, some of these marks were seen as insignificant or accidental and therefore necessary to overlook - slight variations in the way paint was applied, colour variations in the materials, reflections in a shiny metal surface, a dint in the surface of the metal, a scratch in plastic, a gap between two pieces of wood, a dirty scuff mark.
In fact it was vital to the logic of Judd’s understanding of his work that these surface marks and reflections be ignored. Robert Smithson and Rosalind Krauss both noticed that the industrial materials from which Judd made his work often created a complexity of reflections. These reflections confused or disturbed the edges of his objects making them hard to distinguish – the very opposite of the effect that Judd believed he achieved by using these materials. (Meyer, 2001:138)
According to Rosenberg however, the absurd danger of endless (formal) scrutiny was not the only threat for art posed by minimalism. For Rosenberg, it was the quotidian viewing processes required to see minimalist objects that was damning for minimalism (and by implication for art), because it was a viewing process that could legitimately be applied to any object. Looking at minimalist art required not the careful, discerning sensibility of a connoisseur but rather the contrived response of the aesthete (an extreme formalist) who scrutinised the work with an absorbing attention to detail that became, through the analogy with searching for skin blemishes, disgusting. In confounding art and art viewing processes with the quotidian and disgusting
85 (tabletops and the search for skin blemishes), minimalism, at least in Rosenberg’s understanding, was anti-art and a return of dada.
Along with the desecration of any-object-as-art, Rosenberg was also worried about the desecration of art criticism – that it would become a kind of dada description. Rosenberg’s example suggested that minimalism, and the criticism which surrounded it, was the outworking of an extreme kind of modernist formalism. If Rosenberg’s rival – Clement Greenberg – was reluctant to admit the link between minimalism and his formalist criticism, Rosenberg was far from reticent.46 This extreme formal criticism required the patience to list those myriad of changes or flaws in the materials or forms of minimalist work. Art criticism was in danger of becoming an inventory of the painting rather than a carefully crafted and argued narrative. Because these inventories listed tiny details, they became verbose or even extravagant, thus exaggerating the significance of “minor” details. There is no hierarchy of information and everything in the work, and even the gallery wall, became important. Because of a lack of hierarchy and inexhaustible flow of details in this writing, nothing much seems to happen. Instead, this kind of dada criticism fills the page with contextual information, inflating the writing with an endless (in)significance.47
If “what you see is what you see”, each mark becomes (in)significant. Instead of seeing the “wholeness” of the “specific object” or the “fact” of its materiality, there were just surfaces – including the gallery wall - filled with innumerable details. By implication, the minimalist object, inscribed with (in)significant marks, was just another (in)significant “mark” on the gallery
46 Instead of a formal analysis of abstract expressionist paintings, Rosenberg’s artwriting constructs the traces of an event in Pollock’s painting. He was struck more by the blank canvas and its possibilities as an arena for action rather than in the finished works which, according to Yves-Alain Bois, he apparently avoided describing. (Bois and Krauss, 1997:28) According to Greenberg, Rosenberg’s account of abstract expressionist paintings was unsuccessful because it did not explain why these new artefacts should be considered artworks. (Carrier, 1987:41) 47 To write about the plenitude of marks that decorate/inscribe any surface would be a kind of surrealist writing. I am thinking here of the descriptions I have read about the writing of the French surrealist Raymond Roussel who experimented with problems of description. In “La Source” (1904), a spa that is pictured on the label of a bottle of mineral water is described for fifty pages. (Stewart, 1993:49)
86 wall. At best, minimalism was mere “decoration” or just a dirty scuff mark. At worst, minimalism was anti-art: it opened the back door of art to let in the violent intruder of dada. When the inside of art leaked onto and into its outside, those overlooked qualities of art - the quotidian, dada, design and decoration - become more visible.48 There was also the horror that ordinary objects might be capable of taking the place of art, that “fine art” might not be the only location for those qualities usually only associated with “fine art”.
The sheer amount of the factual, descriptive “criticism” of minimalism was also a concern for Rosenberg. In fact, he noted that minimalism was surrounded by words and argued that it was reliant on discursive supplements. He states “(n)o art has ever been more dependent on words than these works pledged to silent materiality” and finally quips “(t)he less there is to see, the more there is to say.” (Rosenberg, 1967:306) How much textual support an art work needs seems to be an indicator that the art work is lacking in some way.
In contrast to Rosenberg’s claim, however, all abstract art required textual support. The movement towards abstraction in early 20th century Western art, necessitated that the work be accompanied by various textual strategies such as manifestoes. (Erickson, 1995:26) Manifestoes and later forms of textual supplements such as art criticism, artist statements and interviews, constructed a context for abstract art – for example, as an image appropriate for the new age or as “truth” about paint or surface. Positioning the “new” art against representational art, decoration or institutionally entrenched art, these discourses produced a variety of frameworks for understanding different types of abstract art and viewing processes.
Of course Rosenberg highlighted important tensions between, first, the literalist rhetoric of particular artists and the fact that this “literality” must be constantly demonstrated discursively; and second, that minimalist art’s
48 Clement Greenberg also noticed aspects of design and “good taste” in minimalist objects and relegated minimalism to the category of “Good Design” along with pop, op and assemblage. (1967:184)
87 refusal of subject matter and suppression of the gestural (a refusal of traditional interpretation) seemed to increase the number of writers who sought to interpret their work. Along with the prolific amount of criticism and writing about the work, there were also lectures accompanying exhibitions of minimalist art. This was a concern for Rosenberg because it transformed the gallery into a lecture hall and amounted to a kind of educational indoctrination of the spectator. (Rosenberg, 1967:307) The spectator’s “conversion”, affected through this recourse to an inventory of inexhaustible, (in)significant detail and lectures, also suggests that Rosenberg detected a certain manipulation of trends and tastes in the art viewer.49 (Rosenberg, 1967:306)
Perhaps it was the antipathy to emotions or opinions in minimalist work and criticism that so antagonised Rosenberg. Minimalist writing did not move to a judgement of the work, neither did it attempt to clarify the work nor to understand the artist. The work of art as everyday object, written about with the factualness of the everyday was represented not as the trace of the lived experience of its maker but as the secondary experience of the viewer. It was a genre in which the everyday replaced the extraordinary. Rather than the discernment, imagination and critical skills of judgement, minimalist criticism required the mechanical practicalities of sharp eyes and dogged patience. Of course the subtext to Rosenberg’s critique of minimalism, and the writing that accompanies it, was his seminal essay ‘The American Action Painters’ of 1952.
In this essay, Rosenberg argued that the spectator of “Action Painting” must become a “connoisseur”, a critical judge who nevertheless had the sensitivity and empathy to discern the artist’s “mode of creation”. (1952:582) This was in contrast to his description of the spectator for minimalism, the already converted (and therefore not critical) aesthete. It is interesting to note
49 Obviously, Rosenberg believed that his own style of criticism was neither didactic nor a strategy of conversion. Perhaps he thought his style of criticism “informed” the spectator rather than “converted” him or her. But it can be argued that ‘The Action Painters of America’ was didactic and manipulative since it maintained, produced and transformed ways of understanding the work of abstract expressionist painters. All art writing, like other genres of writing articulates and advocates “differing methods of engagement with the text, differing modes of production and consumption.” (Stewart, 1993:16)
88 however that in Rosenberg’s “Action Painters” essay, he insisted that the task of art criticism was to first recognise “the assumptions inherent in [a painting’s] mode of creation” and that the spectator must adapt accordingly his understanding of the work and the vocabulary used to write and think about it. (1952:582) Fifteen years on, however, Rosenberg failed to extend this way of thinking to minimalist works.
Rosenberg’s arguments do, however, raise more questions about the claims made for Stella’s work. If this quality of “wholeness” so admired by Judd and Stella, was undone by the endless potential of detail in the materiality of the work, where would the quality and significance of this “new American art” come from? If this quality did not lie in “what you can see” - the materiality of the paint or the surface of the object – the rhetorical aspect of their account is inadequate to explain why their work is successful. At stake for Judd and Stella was not just the idea that their work was a legitimate and worthy heir to the European tradition of art and abstract expressionism, but also that their work would measure up to the quality of these forms of art.
Robert Smithson also questioned Judd’s understanding of the wholeness, self-evidence and therefore “directness” of the art object. This was because he disagreed with how Judd saw and understood the materials and the material qualities of Judd’s “new three dimensional work”. Judd’s understanding of the wholeness, self-evidence and “directness” of the art object made particular claims for the materials and their qualities: Materials vary greatly and are simply materials - formica, aluminum, cold rolled steel, plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material. (Judd quoted in Fried:1967:142-143)
Understood in this way, the materials from which a “new three dimensional” work was made were somehow thought to be self-evident, self-equivalent – they could only be themselves. This implies that the “fact” of the materials was always already fixed and therefore static and unchangeable. Judd
89 implies that a viewer’s experience of these materials was based only on encountering the brute fact of a “specific object’s” materiality.
When commissioned by Judd to write a catalogue for Judd’s work of 1964, Smithson undermined most of Judd’s argument developed in his well-known essay, Specific Objects.50 For example, Smithson notes how the surfaces of the shiny materials that Judd favoured (plexiglass, cold-rolled steel) had an “uncanny materiality” and ultimately made the objects more difficult to see rather than giving them a definite shape. (Smithson quoted in Meyer, 2001:138) Judd, in his various roles of artist, viewer and artwriter, overlooked these material qualities in his work. Were these qualities overlooked unconsciously or intentionally? Or was it the result of just lazy looking? Or perhaps Judd was so enthralled with his narrative of modernist abstraction, in which his “specific objects” were the latest, greatest development, that he chose to overlook other possibilities in his work?
Where Judd or Stella may see the obdurate, constant state of the material as literal and solidified in self-evidence, and the object as stable, complete, Smithson, in another essay, sees a material that contains “caverns and fissures” and “a collection of surfaces ready to be cracked”. 51 (Smithson, 1968:866) Smithson states: (s)eparate ‘things,’ ‘forms,’ ‘objects,’ ‘shapes,’ etc., with beginning and endings are mere convenient fictions: there is only an uncertain disintegrating order that transcends the limits of rational separations. (Smithson, 1968:868)
Smithson’s poetic writing recognised similar cracks appearing in the rhetorical style used to describe minimalist objects. The ideal of the literal “what you see is what you see” and the way particular artists described or named what they saw, suggested that there was an easy, comfortable coincidence between the names of the materials and the materials
50 Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’ was written in 1964 but was not published until the following year. (Meyer, 2001:134) 51 Smithson’s essay ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’ was originally published in Artforum of September 1968.
90 themselves. This understanding of visual experience relied on the assumption that the present was an immediate and graspable experience.
For Judd and Stella, the emphasis on the experience of the material disallowed the presence of memory, of knowledge of these materials in spaces and contexts outside of art, and prior to an encounter with the material as a specific object or as a painting. The pattern of lines and the possibilities and significance of pattern in Stella’s painting must be overlooked for Judd and Stella’s descriptions of Stella’s painting to be convincing.
Smithson did not see a direct link between “mind and matter”, only a similarity in a multiplicity of faults and gaps. In speaking of his own work practices involving language and earth, he states: (t)he names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other, because at the bottom of both the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. (Smithson, 1968:867)
The formalist and literalist rhetoric of Stella and Judd is split and ruptured by the flaws and inconsistencies in their arguments. The surfaces of Stella’s paintings are split and ruptured by their ambiguity. Judd and Stella (and Frampton and Andre) do not describe a direct, literal experience of viewing the work but rather some ornate discursive patterns for organising, shaping and understanding that experience. Certainly, what you see is what you see, but this seeing is not complete or powerful.
Stella’s (and Frampton’s and Andre’s) rhetoric of a “direct” perceptual experience reduces and denies the multiple rhetorical functions of his paintings which (thankfully) far exceed their stated purpose. What a viewer can see in these paintings is quite different to what Stella’s or Judd’s rhetoric claimed could or should be seen. After all, what many viewers saw was a photograph of Stella’s paintings.
91 Chapter 4
Revisions of the Decorative: How the Black series paintings became the
white pin-striped paintings
92 Much to Stella’s horror, his Black series paintings of 1958 – 1959 were described contrarily by journalists as the “white pin-striped” paintings. The journalists arrived at this description from looking at photographs of the work, not from a direct encounter with the specific object of the painting. (Rubin, 1970:16) Through a ghost-written letter (by his friend Hollis Frampton) to the editor of Newsweek, Stella/Frampton refuted the “white pin-stripes” description of his paintings. Stella/Frampton states “it is an observable physical fact that I have laid down paint in certain spaces, and have not done so in others”.52 (Stella/Frampton quoted in Rubin, 1970:151, note 20)
One of the most annoying and arrogant assumptions that seems to be implied by the rhetoric of Stella was that the paintings would always be available for seeing. According to Stella’s rhetoric of seeing, what should be explicitly present and visible in the Black series, at least according to the artist’s ideal of “what you see is what you see”, was black bands of enamel paint alternating with thin, raw canvas strips left between the bands. These material facts may have been observable when the viewer was actually in close proximity to the painting, but, in photographic reproduction, these facts become far less obvious.
The possibility of the Black series being contrarily described as the “white pin-striped” paintings undermined the modernist logic of explicit presence and self-evident, visual purity that framed Stella’s understanding of his work. In photographic reproduction, the figure/ground distinctions in these paintings become ambiguous. The unpainted canvas strips between the black bands became the figure by which the work was described and identified, while the black bands became areas of ground. Of course for Stella, it was the black bands that were the figure and the raw canvas the ground showing through in thin stripes.
52 This letter was never published. (quoted in Rubin, 1970:151, note 20).
93
Figure 5: Frank Stella, New York, 1959 in Rubin (1970:175)
94 When journalists described the Black series as “white pin-striped” paintings, they also transgressed the visual purity and self-evidence of the formal qualities of the paintings by linking the paintings’ formal qualities and composition to fabric, fashion and the corporate suit. At the time, such an association was not complementary and Stella was outraged. (Rubin, 1970:16, 18). Rather than associating his paintings with cutting-edge art, this description linked Stella’s painting not only to the dull predictability and ubiquitousness of a fabric pattern but to the uniform of corporate, conservative America – the pin-striped suit. The visual similarities to fabric design also questioned the identity of Stella’s paintings as “abstract”. The paintings could be understood as a representation of a fabric pattern.
Of course, this visual association of his paintings with a fabric pattern or with the corporate world of big business was contradictory to the image Stella cultivated of the paintings as the output of a “housepainter” (the honest, hardworking, but radical male artworker). But perhaps the idea of the pin- striped paintings was an appropriate “match” to the other image that Stella cultivated – that of the executive artist. (Jones, 1996:114-120). In his first public photograph as an artist, Stella dressed formally in a “stockbroker’s suit” and tie.53 Stella the executive artist also had a team of scriptwriters (Andre and Frampton) who wrote letters and statements about his work. He was also the “designer of diagrams and plans that the artist-worker could execute”. (Jones, 1996:124).
It is only when the reader sees a photograph of Stella in front of one of the Black series paintings that he / she realises the paintings’ dissimilarity in scale to pin-striped fabric. The black bands in the paintings were two and a half inches wide (six and a half centimetres) – far too wide to be mistaken as part of a pin stripe pattern. The bands were the width of the housepainter’s brush that Stella chose to produce his paintings. (Jones, 1996:125). It is
53 The photograph appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition “Sixteen Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959.
95 only in isolated photographs that the painting is shrunk to resemble “pin- striped” fabric.54
Figure 6: Die Fahne hoch (The Flag on High) (1959). Frank Stella. (Rubin,1970:19)
54 I have always described these paintings as pin stripes myself, until I did this research.
96 In the black and white photograph, the image of Die Fahne hoch (The Flag on High) (1959) is about twenty centimetres high and ten centimetres wide. The photograph of the painting is closely cropped so the painting’s image becomes framed by wide margins and isolated on the white, glossy page of a book.55 In this reproduction, the white stripes of the painting contrast sharply against the uneven, hazy darkness of the background creating a rippled, diagonal pattern across the surface of the work.
It is the white lines that read as the figure of this patterned painting. There is a cross formed from the intersection of the white horizontal and vertical stripes through the centre of the painting. There is also a counter cross – a cross on the diagonal – that seems to hover in the pattern. This hovering counter cross is produced by the diagonal, right-angle “ripples” of the white stripes as they are translated across the surface of the painting to its edge. The painting is thus marked by a double-cross creating a kind of star-shaped motif across the work. This stellar motif can be understood as a kind of signature of the artist, Stella, written as a pattern across the whole painting. This patterned painting seems to oscillate between abstraction and the ornamental, between visuality and textuality.
But it is the tension between the contrary formation of the crosses and the diagonal aberrations of the white pattern that have created a beautiful austerity that I have long admired – at least in this painting’s photographic reproduction. I wish I could have been there to see this painting, but, like the journalists, I only have access to photographic reproductions of Stella’s Black series paintings.
As I look through William S. Rubin’s monograph of Stella published in 1970, however, I notice another photographic text that visually links Stella’s paintings to a fabric pattern. The photograph, taken in 1959, is of Stella standing in front of one of his large Black Series paintings.56 It is a photograph of Stella in his studio. It shows a stack of canvas stretchers
55 The photograph of Die Fahne hoch (1959) that I am describing appears in Rubin (1970:19) 56 The photograph is not attributed.
97 propped against the wall on the left and a coat hanging on the wall, but most of the background of the photograph is taken up by a large (unidentified) Black series painting. It is one of the paintings that Donald Judd would have admired for its bands of black enamel paint and thin strips of raw canvas form rectangular shapes that conform to and therefore emphasise the rectangular shape of the canvas support.
Stella, wearing his glasses with the large, black frames, stands in front of this painting smoking a cigarette. He is dressed in working clothes befitting an artist - a dark shirt and light coloured pants that are filthy with paint smears. The shirt Stella wears is dark but features a pattern of lines in a light colour. The photographer has positioned Stella very carefully so that some of the lines of Stella’s patterned shirt visually coincide with the lines of raw canvas in Stella’s painting.
Figure 7: Frank Stella (1959) in Rubin (1970:47)
Even though Stella and many of his contemporaries were unwilling to acknowledge (or unable to recognise or see) the decorative references in his work, the anonymous photographer has exploited and emphasised these references. The photographic texts of Stella’s Black series paintings work in a way that undermines the ideals of “purity” and “self-evidence” that frame
98 the way his early work was understood in particular discourses of modernist abstraction. It was photographs of Stella’s paintings that lead to their reading as “pin-striped” by particular journalists and, in the photograph of Stella in front of his work, the photograph once again emphasises the similarities of Stella’s Black series with patterned fabric.
The book in which this photograph of Stella appears is William S. Rubin’s monograph, Frank Stella, published in 1970. Throughout the text, Rubin discusses the significance of pattern as a important structuring device in Stella’s painting, particularly in the formation of Stella’s “shaped” canvases. (Rubin, 1970:47-50) But the way pattern is discussed in Rubin’s text is strictly in terms of its formal qualities as abstract painting. It could be argued, however, that the photographic texts that accompany Rubin’s commentary undermine this strictly formalist reading. By emphasising Stella’s paintings’ similarities to fabric designs, the photographic texts raise questions: about the distinctions between ornamental practices, such as fabric design, and modernist painting; and about what is abstract and what is referential.
While the above questions may have been contrary to what Stella desired or intended for his paintings, the photographic reproductions of his paintings demonstrate interesting new ways of understanding his paintings. Rather than being understood as inadequate and disfiguring, photographic reproductions of Stella’s paintings emphasise the condition of painting as an indistinct and visually ambiguous object. This complexity is productive of diverse and often inconsistent descriptions of the painting.
99 Chapter 5
Art Information and Art (mis)information Written Materials Materials for writing and reading Reading Materials and the Materials of Reading Materials for Reading
Reading Without Seeing. Reading with too much to see.
The Writing of Materials and The Materials of Writing: the statement-sculptures of Lawrence Weiner
100 As the artist and critic Dan Graham perceptively recognised, most people encounter art in the pages of magazines and rarely see the original work of art. As discussed in the previous chapter, this mediated encounter with art caused anxiety for some artists, such as Stella when his Black series paintings were described as “pin-striped” paintings. Yet it also highlighted interesting and challenging problems. How was the viewer’s experience and (mis)understanding of art effected by reproductive technology and the dissemination of art through reproductions in journals and magazines? Was there a way of experiencing art “directly” through journals and magazines to guard against these kinds of (mis)understandings?
To the art dealer Seth Siegelaub and a particular group of artists associated with him, this quandary of a mediated encounter with art became known as the problem of “primary and secondary information”, where “primary information” is the art object and “secondary information” is the photographs and artwriting of that art object that appear in journals and magazines. In the late 1960s, Siegelaub’s solution to the problem of primary and secondary information was to develop an alternative art object and alternative space for viewing the art object: the exhibition-catalogue. Even though it was a printed publication, the exhibition-catalogue was the art, not a reproduction of it.57
In December 1968, Lawrence Weiner published the small book STATEMENTS, which consisted of twenty-four artworks, as an exhibition- catalogue organised by his art dealer, Seth Siegelaub. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:47) In its primary form, STATEMENTS consisted of text which came to be known as statement-sculptures.58 The works in STATEMENTS were split into two groups of specific and general statement- sculptures. Specific statement-sculptures detailed quantities and particular materials:
57 Although this was an ideal that was sometimes muddied, particularly by the documentary photographs of previously made work that often appeared in later exhibition-catalogues. 58 Throughout the thesis, the term “statement-sculpture” will be used as a general term to refer to Lawrence Weiner’s linguistic statements. The term STATEMENTS is the title of the exhibition-catalogue produced by Weiner in 1968 which contained twenty-four statement- sculptures.
101 ONE AEROSOL CAN OF ENAMEL SPRAYED TO CONCLUSION DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR
ONE HOLE IN THE GROUND APPROXIMATELY ONE FOOT BY ONE FOOT BY ONE FOOT ONE GALLON WATER BASE WHITE PAINT POURED INTO THIS HOLE
A TWO “ WIDE ONE “ DEEP TRENCH CUT ACROSS A STANDARD ONE CAR DRIVEWAY
(Transcription of #008, #010, #019 as they appear in Schwarz, 1989:10)
General statement-sculptures, however, avoided specific references to quantities:
A FIELD CRATERED BY STRUCTURED SIMULTANEOUS TNT EXPLOSIONS
A REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALL BOARD FROM A WALL
AN AMOUNT OF PAINT POURED DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR AND ALLOWED TO DRY
(Transcription of #30, #033, #036 as they appear in Schwarz, 1989:10)
Being text, Weiner’s statement-sculptures were a particularly suitable art form for publication as an exhibition-catalogue. Ideally, the work’s existence as text meant that even in reproduction the work was presented to the viewer in its primary, most direct form, as art information, rather than in its more problematic, mediated form of information about art, that is as photographs and/or artwriting. Weiner believed that the linguistic form of the statement– sculptures could be experienced “directly” and validly through verbal transmission and written transcription. (Siegelaub, 1969a:99) He was pursuing a similar ideal of art as Stella was – at least in effect - but through very different art forms.
Being both exhibition and catalogue, STATEMENTS (1968) could also be distributed to a larger and more diverse group of viewers. Rather than remain confined to a privileged audience within the network of established New York galleries, Weiner’s exhibition-catalogue had the accessibility of
102 printed media. It was economical to produce, portable and mailable so it could be distributed fairly widely. Whether the publication of just over a thousand exhibition-catalogues did in fact reach a wider audience is unknown but theoretically, its portability had the potential to be passed around from friend to friend, from dealer to dealer.
In 1969 Weiner also believed that the form of the exhibition-catalogue and its method of distribution avoided the “aesthetic fascism” that he associated with art works disguised and inserted into the text of a magazine or newspaper. (Norvell, 1969a:105) Works by Dan Graham or Joseph Kosuth, for example, utilised the fact that many people saw art only through magazines and journals. These art works were inserted into magazines or journals but it was not made clear to the unsuspecting reader that these were works of art. As a published book available for purchase, Weiner’s exhibition-catalogue did not impose on an unsuspecting reader. People had to be interested in the work and go out and buy the book in order to see it. He did not want to impose his art on a viewer that had no wish to see it. At the same time, Weiner was able to ensure his artwork was given its best chance of being appreciated by a sympathetic audience.
For Siegelaub, the exhibition-catalogue was a practical solution to problems specific to his role as an art dealer. Since Siegelaub had no gallery at the time of the release of STATEMENTS, the catalogue as exhibition was also a practical solution to the problem of presenting and distributing Weiner’s work to the public. (Schwarz, 1989:136) The exhibition-catalogue also doubled as an effective marketing tool in that Siegelaub could post the book to potential buyers in other cities and countries. (Alberro, 2003:57) Because it also contained artist’s statements59, information about who owned the work and the work’s number in Weiner’s cataloguing system, the exhibition-catalogue was a way of breaking down the distinctions between the spaces of exhibition and the spaces of publication, between artist and art critic, between
59 Some artists in the 1960s preferred to have an active role in what was said about their work rather than leaving this task to an art critic.
103 administrative document and art writing. (Buchloh, 1998:16; Alberro, 2001:10 -11)
Of course, the exhibition-catalogue was not just about overcoming the problem of “primary” and “secondary” information. In the late 1960s, the exhibition-catalogue STATEMENTS was radical and revolutionary in its questioning of institutional forms of art and art distribution. While pop and minimalism had already challenged and extended the definition of sculpture and painting through the introduction of new materials and processes, Weiner’s statement-sculptures went further by suggesting the possibility of abandoning materials altogether and insisting on language as a sufficient aesthetic form. Text, in some art practices of the 1960s, was being used as a sufficient aesthetic form instead of part of aesthetic form and content as it was in surrealist work or cubist collage for example. (Rorimer, 2001:71). The ideals of visuality understood as a “direct” aesthetic experience by abstract expressionism and a direct, phenomenological experience by minimalism, are complicated and questioned through Weiner’s linguistic “waiting-to-be-mades”.60
By shifting to a linguistic statement, Weiner hoped to avoid the “absolute pretension” of the abstract expressionist assertion that “(a) painting is good if it works.” (Norvell, 1969a:108) In an interview with Patricia Norvell, Weiner states: I’ve never yet heard anybody explain how it (an Abstract Expressionist painting) works. Except in the context of “Well, there’s a white mass here, and a red mass here, and a black mass here.” But that doesn’t work if you change it from one country’s aesthetics to another. It was just that that’s the absolute pretension of the expressionistic artist … that it works. Art doesn’t work. [Pause] Some art is more interesting than other art. Not better or worse just more interesting. (Norvell, 1969a:108)
In stating that abstract expressionism “didn’t work”, Weiner rightly recognised the cultural and institutional specificity of abstract expressionism’s aesthetic,
60 Richard employs this term to describe Weiner’s works. (1994:40) He states, that Weiner “offers not a resume of existing objects but the possibility of their realisation”. (Richard, 1994:40)
104 its formal qualities and its accompanying formalist criticism. The formal qualities of the work cannot communicate directly. Weiner implies that the specific appearance of an abstract expressionist work renders its content (whether understood as emotional, inner truth; or as purely formal) unknowable except to a cultural elite with a specific visual literacy.61 Weiner believed that his use of language, which created an art of generality, was a way to transcend the limits of the culturally specific appearance and aesthetic of the unique art object.
Ideally, the linguistic statement-sculptures allowed viewers to (re)construct the work imaginatively or physically, leaving a certain amount of responsibility for the work’s appearance on the viewer. Weiner’s statement-sculptures had the potential to be made many times by different people in different locations. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Weiner was involved in a number of international exhibitions which increased his interest and awareness of cultural differences in basic materials. He argued that in France and Germany, the material “white paint” was different because each country used different pigments and bases in the production of “white” paint. (Norvell, 1969a:107) This difference in “white” paint implied that different people understood “white” in varied ways. Because his statement-sculptures allowed for this multiplicity and variation in materials, Weiner believed his work challenged the specificity of the traditional, unique art object that would not “work” aesthetically (formally) in diverse cultures. According to Weiner’s understanding, the generality of written language as art required not an elite visual literacy, but a general literacy – the ability to read and imagine. The linguistic statement-sculptures did not rely on the unique “visual impact” of their appearance to function as art. This does not mean that the statement- sculptures lacked visual appeal or specificity but rather that he strived to communicate art information in a different way.
61 But Weiner’s statement assumes that non-American viewers and “ordinary” Americans would be incapable of appreciating or understanding an Abstract Expressionist painting in diverse ways – ways other than through particular ideas of expressionism or formalism.
105 Weiner’s presumption was that the statement-sculptures in STATEMENTS communicated art in a straight-forward manner supposedly by choosing language that named everyday, familiar materials. Weiner had long held the belief that the statement-sculptures were a transparent translation of a perceivable, objective reality. He states that art “should always be involved with empirical reality. … What you see you translate into language. Art is a legible, readable thing.” (Weiner cited in Batchelor, 1989:254, 257) In an attempt to ensure the statement-sculptures of STATEMENTS were understood by a diverse audience, Weiner names familiar and accessible materials - from different kinds of paint available at every local hardware store, to suburban driveways and lawns.62
In a 1969 interview however, Weiner states that his choice of materials was also a way of expanding what could validly be called art materials. (Norvell, 1969a:106) The materials named in the statement-sculptures are a form of institutional critique, and he actively sought to link his art materials and processes to “legitimate” acts and actions occurring in the workplaces of ordinary people. He believed that the “contrived” materials and processes of “Fine Art” also limited the experience and creation of visual art to a cultural elite. For example, Weiner argued that his reference to spraying paint on the floor represented a legitimate act because it was a “direct” link to the “everyday” work of car painters. These workers cleaned the nozzle of their spray gun by spraying at the floor. (Norvell, 1969a:106)
The action-technique of a car painter cleaning a spray gun nozzle is simple: potentially anyone could do it after a quick demonstration.63 In contrast, the technical skills of “Fine Art” painting or sculpture would be restricted to only highly trained individuals with a special gift. By implication, the legitimate is linked to the “everyday”, the utilitarian, the prosaic. But while the action- technique of a car painter cleaning a spray gun nozzle is certainly “everyday”, utilitarian and prosaic, it is also indicative of a particular working class
62 Except perhaps for the TNT – although who knows what citizens of the USA can get their hands on? 63 And yet this knowledge of how a car spray painter works is also “elitist” in that it is a particular task of a specific profession.
106 masculinity. The “legitimate”, in Weiner’s understanding, is also about a numerical supremacy - if more people can do a particular task, the more legitimate it is. Weiner believed that by referring to the “ordinary” (but gendered) processes of painting, his work assisted in the elimination of a “unique” art object and by implication the elimination of the “unique”, creative artist with specialist skills. (Norvell, 1969a:106)
The importance of “everyday” materials and processes is certainly evident in the words Weiner chooses for many of his statement-sculptures but this is not always the case.64 For example, the “ordinary” skills of labouring (digging holes or trenches) or trade skills (removing lathing) are evident but despite this link to the vernacular, some of Weiner’s other statement-sculptures also explicitly reference “Fine Art”. Some statement-sculptures reference his abstract Removal paintings of the mid 1960s such as #035:
A RECTANGULAR CANVAS AND STRETCHER SUPPORT WITH A RECTANGULAR REMOVAL FROM ONE OF THE FOUR CORNERS SPRAYED WITH PAINT FOR A TIME ELAPSURE
At other times, the work references sculptural processes such as removal or cutting away, mould making or casting #031:
A REMOVAL OF AN AMOUNT OF EARTH FROM THE GROUND THE INTRUSION INTO THIS HOLE OF A STANDARD PROCESSED MATERIAL
Abstract Expressionist painting processes of pouring or throwing (the legacy of Jackson Pollock) are also referenced such as in #002:
64 Weiner states that the materials he nominates in his work are, at times, dependent on whether the work is to occupy a public space or a gallery space. He explains: …with a work that I know is not going to go into a public impositional space, I’m freer to work with materials that perhaps are more specialized. When a person enters a museum situation, you can expect that they have or will acquire the knowledge to deal with it, but when confronted with the problem of Robson Street (the façade), I chose to use materials that didn’t require the other person to accept the obligation to find out what it was all about. (Weiner quoted in Holmes, 1990:112)
107 ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL
Critics such as Buchloh argue that Weiner’s choices of simple, everyday materials, such as plywood and spray enamel, are a kind of anti-minimalism and anti-pop in that they are not the heroic, hard materials of industry, nor are they the pop-cultural materials of formica or vinyl. Weiner disagrees, asserting that his materials are chosen because they are “everyman’s” materials and the “traditional” materials of art in the late 1960s. (Buchloh, 1998:13) Although Weiner admits that the “poured paint” statement of Nova Scotia (FIVE GALLONS WATER BASE TEMPERA PAINT POURED DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR AND ALLOWED TO REMAIN FOR THE DURATION OF THE EXHIBITION (1969)) is a kind of dialogue with the work of Jackson Pollock, he tends to avoid art historical references when discussing his work. (Buchloh, 1998:16) It is as if he believed his work could somehow be separated from, or at least remain unburdened by, the institutional and historical discourses of art history.
Of course Weiner’s “democratic” and inclusive strategies, supposedly achieved by his reference to “non-heroic”, “everyman’s” materials and processes, are in some instances gendered and celebrate a different heroics to that of minimalism. Weiner’s work celebrates a tough, “working-class” masculinity that is skilled (removing lathing), physically assertive (digging a one foot deep hole) and capable of a persistent and dogged patience (making a trench across a driveway).65 Just as Stella described his working method in terms of a “housepainter”, Weiner likened his role as artist to another kind of (male) art labourer. Despite the strategies of reinserting the vernacular or quotidian into his work, Weiner’s statement-sculptures are framed by and situated in art historical discourses including the history of “Fine Art”, its practices and processes as well as to contemporary practices such as minimalism and pop.
65 Weiner worked as a labourer in his early teens. He unloaded trucks and worked at the New York docks unloading cargo. (Diamondstein, 1994:269-270)
108 For Weiner, the ideal implication of the ordinary materials and processes named in the statement-sculptures is that “ordinary” people were familiar with these materials and processes. If the materials and processes were ordinary and familiar, then it should follow that a viewer’s understanding of the artwork was more easily accomplished. As much as Weiner tried to link his work to the vernacular, the statement-sculptures still proved challenging and often difficult to understand. Viewers were often unsure of what the statement- sculptures were. (Norvell, 1969a:103; Norvell, 1969b:42)
The statement-sculptures of STATEMENTS can be understood as descriptions of works which simultaneously merge with the works’ titles to become works themselves.66 The reader of STATEMENTS will notice the words are simple but not simplistic, being both formal and precise. There is an absence of punctuation but it is quite easy to break up the line of words into sense units. There is some alliteration and assonance throughout the statement, but the words defy a particular understanding of poetry. It is difficult to be intrigued by this work, but this work was meant to do something other than appeal to, or intrigue, the traditional, contemplative viewer.
For Weiner, it was the viewer’s participation in the “making” of the statement- sculptures that was an important part of the work. This viewer participation was achieved either through the imaginary construction of the work or by physically making the statement-sculptures. The imaginative experience that Weiner intends for the viewer, however, is alien to a traditional idea of poetic imagination that assumes the concept of an individual subject engaged with an interior life.
The subjectivity that returns in Weiner’s work is located in the viewer, but this subjectivity is social and cultural. It is an imaginative subjectivity that does not come from the private, separate realm of the inner being; but from the public, collective realm of everyday, social knowledge. (Best, 2004: no pagination) In the imaginative construction of the statement-sculptures, the
66 But, it is unseemly to describe the statement-sculptures of STATEMENTS as descriptions – they are just too non-descript.
109 viewer makes use of their knowledge of materials specific to his or her geographic or cultural particularities. “Everyday” experiences and ordinary materials are the generators of the imagination, not the rare gift of imagination only possessed by the Artist. If the art work was to be physically made, it could (potentially) be made by anyone, not just by the artist who possessed rarefied artistic or imaginative skills.
The ability of the viewer to participate in the “making” of the statement- sculptures was not self-evident, however, leaving viewers confused about the identity of these texts. In 1969, Seth Siegelaub, Weiner’s dealer and promoter, stated that Weiner’s work was confused with poetry because many viewers thought that words were “only capable of that type of information”. (Norvell, 1969b:42) It was important for Weiner, however, that his work was seen in the context of visual art not that of writing, literature or poetry. (Pelzer, 1999:90) This demarcation is not a new idea. Certainly within modernism there were many artists and artwriters declaring the need to separate visual art from poetry, literature and narrative.
The move away from representational works of visual art towards abstraction was one way some artists and artwriters sought to highlight a distinction between the textual and the visual. The strategy of abstraction was understood as a way to “free” visual art from its “dependence” on the narrative of the textual (historical or literary) and from the representation of objects. Abstraction was to be a kind of visual directness that rendered obsolete the need for the textual to explain, translate or supplement the image. The art historian Herbert Read, writing in 1954, states: The idea is the form, the form the idea. The composition is conceived, ab initio, in plastic terms. It cannot be translated into any other language and is not itself a translation from any other language. (cited in Drucker, 1994:236)
Weiner’s desire to separate visual art from the literary arts is different to these particular modernist ideals that perpetuated a conceptual opposition between visual presence and linguistic absence. Indeed, his move to statement-sculptures has been represented as a way of questioning the
110 assertion made by some abstract artists (and artwriters) that abstract paintings “work”, that is communicate “directly” with a viewer.
According to Weiner, the legitimate content of visual art is materials. He states: All art’s an expression of what you have to say. But your personal enlightenment or your personal angst is not a fit subject for art. It might be a fit subject for literature, or poetry perhaps, but art is about material objects. (Batchelor, 1989:255)
But it is not clear what Weiner means in the above quote. Does he mean that personal feelings are not a fit subject for visual art or the arts in general? And if he does mean the latter, is he asserting that poetry and literature are not art?
Weiner’s understanding of poetry and literature is particular and peculiar. He limits the proper place for feelings and emotions to literature and poetry. Why it is only these arts that can legitimately be a site for personal expression or emotion, Weiner never makes clear. Nor does he discuss how and why the content of literature and poetry are limited to the expression of emotions and feelings.
In understanding poetry and literature as a kind of expressionism, Weiner ignores (or is ignorant of) the modernist history of literature and poetry that seeks to complicate the idea that poetry or literature is a transparent medium that expresses emotion or bears meaning. For example, Roman Jakobson’s important essay What is Poetry written in 1933-34 states that: Poetry is present when a word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and internal form acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality. (Jakobson quoted in Drucker, 1994:29)
Jakobson’s essay examines how the material qualities and mass of language might also contribute to meaning. (Drucker, 1994:29)
111 Weiner understands personal feelings and emotions as either an authoritarian intervention or arbitrary interruption of the viewers’ experiences of the art object, and therefore unnecessary distractions in the art process. For example, he argued that his work of 1972 – 1973, which utilised empty parentheses, avoided imposing the artist’s personal, emotional choice of materials on the viewer.67 (Pelzer, 1999:97) Ideally, the empty parentheses would allow the viewer to substitute whatever words they chose into the work thus protecting the unsuspecting viewer from the imposition of the artist’s emotional choices. Such fastidiousness seems facile since it would be impossible for a viewer to distinguish between Weiner’s “emotional” or “objective” choice of materials. (And how Weiner distinguishes between these extremes as well.)
Weiner’s extreme anti-expressionist position is part of a general critique of expressionism and abstract expressionism evident in some art practices and artwriting of the 1950s and 1960s. Artists whose work came to be categorised as pop art, minimalism or conceptual art questioned the understanding of art as an expressive vehicle. Subjectivity, in the form of expressive emotion or description is de-emphasised or left out of Weiner’s linguistic work. Indeed, the language, typography and form of STATEMENTS strives for a kind of administrative neutrality, a common goal in some text art of the 1960s.68
The exhibition-catalogue is quite an important historical form so it is often disappointing that photographs of Weiner’s work, in their form as statement- sculptures in the exhibition-catalogue, are few in number. As a reader of Lawrence Weiner’s work, who only encounters his work in books or journal
67 Statements #331 for example: A ( ) C SHARPENED CARRIED DONE AGAIN PERHAPS … AC ( ) (A transcript of the work as it appears in Pelzer, 1999:96) 68 Some conceptual artists employed an administrative anti-poetics in their text/image work to defy the idea of the unique crafted object and the artist’s creative subjectivity. But the way different artists signified the impersonality and blandness of officialdom was very individual and novel.
112 articles, it is frustrating to discover that his work from the late 1960s is rarely photographed in its intended format as pages from a book or exhibition- catalogue. Instead, the statement-sculptures most often appear as documentary photographs of the physical making of the works; as texts on gallery walls; or as “transcriptions” camouflaged in the text of an article rather than as an “image” of the statement-sculpture. While the lack of photographs of Weiner’s text work in its format as exhibition-catalogue implies that it is not visually interesting or important, this format of the work needs to be examined to discover how it measures up to Weiner’s claims for the work. What happens to this form of art information when it is disseminated through books and magazines?
There are photographs of the cover of the exhibition-catalogue STATEMENTS (1968) and two of its statement-sculptures in the glossy book Lawrence Weiner published by Phaidon.
Figure 8: The cover and two sample pages from STATEMENTS (1968), Lawrence Weiner in (Buchloh, 1998:14)
The photographs of STATEMENTS, illustrating the Benjamin Buchloh and Weiner interview, do not reproduce well. The antithesis of the full colour photographs of a work that is the norm in celebratory monographs of art
113 historical publications, the photograph of a small line of black text across a greyish page seems particularly dull. The photograph is also “inaccurate” in that it disguises the fact that the work is contained in a book. Instead the cover of the exhibition-catalogue and two statement-sculptures are presented as if they were separate sheets.
The photograph of the exhibition-catalogue STATEMENTS (1968) features the cover of the book, probably because it is the most graphically complex, featuring different styles and sizes of text. Positioned just above the centre of the long thin cover page, there is the word STATEMENTS in a large, bold, simple font. The sans serif capital letters are tall, thin and placed close together. The text spans the cover leaving only narrow margins at the sides.
In a smaller font centred under the word STATEMENTS is the name of the artist Lawrence Weiner in title case. In the bottom right hand corner of the cover, in much smaller type, is the price $1.95.
Also seen in the photograph are sample pages from the exhibition-catalogue. The photograph is misleading in that it shows the sample pages side by side. In the exhibition-catalogue however, only one statement-sculpture appeared per opening, positioned below the halfway line on the recto page. From other written sources, I learn that STATEMENTS is printed in small, black, lower- case letters in Royal Typewriter Face on white paper. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:47) The typeset de-emphasises the book’s professional publishing and appears simple, inexpensive and bland. 69 It does not have the stark but striking graphics of modernist design or any of the hand-made qualities of an artist’s book. It is designed to look undesigned with none of the hand-made touches or unique features to suggest the emotional or physical touch of the sensitive artist or designer.
In the photograph, the Royal Typewriter font appears crisp and clean with none of the patchiness, smudges or idiosyncratic crookedness of ubiquitous typewritten text. In fact, the font does not look like a “typewriter” font as its
69 An edition of 1025 was published.
114 name suggests: perhaps it is more “royal” than it is “typewriter”. As a font style, the text is streamlined and precise with minimal serifs. There is no variation in the thickness of the line used to form the letters. Descenders and ascenders (the vertical strokes on “t” or “p”) barely reach above the uniform height of the other letters. The statement-sculptures begin with a capital letter but have no other forms of punctuation.
When compared to the typography of the cover of STATEMENTS however, the font of the statement-sculptures seems an odd choice. There is a disparity between the condensed and blocky verticality of the typography on the title page with the more generously spaced and delicate horizontality of the font of the statement-sculptures. It is a very curvaceous font that emphasises the roundness of many letters such as the “c”, “d”, “o”, “p”. The Royal Typewriter font also has little decorative touches: the tucked tail of the y, the curved end of the t, the beautiful proportions of the g and a. This choice of font not only contrasts with the title page of STATEMENTS but also with the types of typography (block caps, Times New Roman) that are subsequently used to transcribe most of Weiner’s work.
Framed on either side by wide margins, the statement-sculptures of STATEMENTS are sometimes awkwardly and abruptly cut off between syllables. For example:
A sheet of brown paper of arbitrary width and length of twice that width with a removal of the same proportio ns glued to the floor (transcription from photograph in Buchloh, 1998:14)
Breaking up the word “proportions” in such a way emphases the material qualities of language: words can be severed and letters separated. What results is a strange, latinised word “proportio” and an ungainly non-word or sound “ns”. This break in the word does not follow the conventions of good writing or reading where hyphens connect and smooth over breaks in words.
115 The awkward splitting of one of the words was a result of Weiner’s apparently flippant decisions in the pre-production process of publishing the exhibition- catalogue. Confronted by the need for specific directions to give the typesetters, Weiner quickly set the margins of a standard typewriter and typed the statement-sculptures to fit within these margins. (Norvell, 1969a:107) The typesetters used this format as their guide for the published book. Because of the lack of photographs and written descriptions of this work, I am not sure how many of the statement-sculptures contain interruptions of this kind but I imagine that many of them would have interruptive aberrations because of Weiner’s arbitrary setting of the typewriter margins.
Despite the interruptive aberrations in one statement-sculpture, the format of STATEMENTS seeks to concentrate the viewer’s attention on reading the text. The limiting of one statement-sculpture to the recto of an opening minimises visual or textual contamination between pages. The grammatical format of the individual statement-sculptures strengthen this effect. The plainness and simplicity of the words and their grammatical structure avoids any technique that would draw attention to the reflexivity of language or intertextual play.70 This grammatical form and word choice would seem to efface the presence of an author/artist in that there is no artfulness or technique to suggest the subjectivity of the romantic ideal of the author. (Drucker, 1994:95)
Implicit in the visual coding of the text and format, and in the plain simplicity of the words, is that the statement-sculptures are a transparent carrier of meaning. And yet, there are niggling interruptions in this smooth reading: the visual disparity between the typography of the title page and the rest of the exhibition-catalogue and the awkward breaking of words in some statement- sculptures. While these are small interruptions and disruptions, they are surprising.
70 Although, the breaking of words awkwardly between lines does suggest that text is used as if it was a material that could be cut-up and manipulated.
116 When Weiner’s statement-sculptures from STATEMENTS are transcribed in artwriting, they are usually in block capitals, in Times New Roman and show no awkward breaking of words. The visual specificity of the statement- sculptures in STATEMENTS is ignored while artwriters concentrate on the materials Weiner names and how these works challenge institutional and historical art discourses. Weiner may intend for the viewer to “see” the materials he nominates (such as driveways, plywood and paint) in his statement-sculptures but, at times, it is hard to “see” beyond the material that forms his statement-sculptures - writing.
In a later book by Weiner, WORKS (1977), the odd disparity in typography is eliminated and the statement-sculptures appear in a more familiar form. WORKS contains statement-sculptures completed during the period 1967- 1977. (Weiner, 1977) The front cover of WORKS features the title of the book and the artist’s name in block capitals, in white Times New Roman font (or a font that resembles Times New Roman). This white text appears on a royal blue background. Inside the book, the statement-sculptures are printed in blocks of justified text at the top of each page, or in a single vertical list on the left margin when the statement-sculpture consists of only one word. The text appears in block capitals in, what looks like, Times New Roman. At the bottom of each page, on the outside margins, is the number of the statement- sculptures – 001, 002 etc.
Times New Roman is one of those fonts – like Arial that forms most of the letters of this thesis – that has clearly defined letters designed to smooth the path of reading. This “heightened” visibility of the text, however, must also become “transparent” in that the text must not distract or delay the reader from the task of discerning the meaning of the words. It is an idealised font that must appear to be the transparent, neutral carrier of content. This idealised neutrality is carried over into the layout of the text. The plain layout of the text suggests little visible interference or intervention on the part of an author or printer, signifying an ideal neutrality. Within this neutrality, interference or resistance is minimised to allow a transparent reading where
117 meaning unfolds as the sequence is read. The book WORKS is visually designed to appear “sufficient in itself”.
The visual coding of text as “sufficient to itself” is part of a typographic tradition extending back to Gutenburg’s printing of the Bible. (Drucker, 1994:95, 96) In the early centuries of printing history, the biblical text was visually coded as an “unmarked text”. Its uniformly grey pages and simple blocks of text uninterrupted by headings were free of the marks or interventions of a printer or author. The plain simplicity of the typography suggests the self-sufficiency of the sacred text where the words were allowed to “speak for themselves”. With its link to a transcendent authority, this early visual printing convention was later extended to the “literary” text. The unmarked literary text was visually separated from popular or commercial texts that were marked by their textual diversity and variety of format. The marked texts’ diversity signified not only the intervention of an author or printer but also the possibility of different “voices” suggested by the variety of the text. (Drucker, 1994:95)
Weiner’s book WORKS (1977) fits within this genealogy of the unmarked, self-sufficient text. Not only is the plain visual format important in signifying a an authoritative, textual sufficiency in WORKS, but the block capitals from which Weiner constructs his statement-sculptures, have connotations of permanence and authority - something like a monumental inscription or a ponderous title or heading. The visuality of the statement-sculptures renders them as declarative or, at the very least, demanding attention.
Yet this reading of Weiner’s work is contrary to his stated intentions. It is often argued that Weiner was careful in the wording of his statement- sculptures to avoid the voice of authority. Imperatives such as “Set a series of stakes in the ground …” are avoided so that the work is neither a directive
118 to make the work nor is it a set of instructions. 71 (Osbourne, 2002:31) Instead of an imperative form, Weiner uses the past participle of the verb so that his statements seem like a brief, anonymous report on an already completed but unseen event. They are meant to be democratic in their simple, understandable, transparent message.72
Implicit in Weiner’s belief in the transparency of language, is that content is unaffected by the materiality of the signifier. In Weiner’s understanding, the material properties of the text – its colour, texture, size, typography – are insignificant variants of linguistic invariants. Weiner’s logocentrism requires a disembodied and transcendent understanding of writing. Drucker argues that: Writing, as the basic tool and premise of history, set free the text from historical circumstance and allowed it to function with an appearance of this [transcendental] objectivity. Writing, according to Husserl, was not merely the evidence of objectivity, but its precondition – since it permitted the text to function as if it had a fully autonomous and authoritative existence. (1994:41)
Writing, as the graphic residue of Weiner’s statement-sculptures, remains passive and subordinate. Its visual specificity is ignored.
Weiner’s insistence on the importance of materials as subject matter in his work is completely contradictory because he is not interested in the basic material stuff that forms his statement-sculptures – writing. Weiner’s indifference to (or blindness of) the material and materiality of writing is in stark contrast to earlier artists such as the futurists who exploited the materiality and malleability of writing. In the early twentieth century, the modern art practices of visual art and literature were distinct and very differently structured disciplines. But within the avant-garde - subsequently labelled as futurism, dada, cubism and vorticism - the imago and logos, as representational modes, were investigated. Typographic experimentation, as
71 Instructions for making art was an art form practiced by several artists including Lazslo Moholy-Nagy and Fluxus artists in the early 1960’s including George Brecht, Yoko Ono and Edward Kienholz. Weiner has always claimed that he had no knowledge of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s. 72 Of course, on occasion, Weiner chose to use words naming more obscure materials that could not be described as “everyday” materials.
119 part of a rising number of cross-disciplinary practices, was one strand of this investigation that takes place in literature and the visual arts within early modernism. Typographical experiments investigated both visuality and literariness. (Druckner, 1996:49)
In pamphlets that accompanied art exhibitions, in manifestos that incorporated images, and in poems, the visuality of the text became an important consideration for some futurist artists and poets. Influenced by the typographic variety and formats of 19th century advertising, futurist manifestos and pamphlets used boldface headings, CAPITAL LETTERS, bold colours, illustrations, underlining, 1. numbered 2. points, mixed fonts and un con ven tion al spa cing to create a visually provocative document meant to capture the attention of the viewer and exploit the signifying potential of font and layout. The verses and paragraphs that were traditionally important as visual and sense units in poetry and prose, became secondary considerations to the appearance of the whole page for the Russian futurists. In these interdisciplinary works, the stability and purity of genre and medium were questioned as poetry, prose, political statement, performance and image were grafted on to each other. (Perloff, 1986:92)
Russian futurist poets and artists also grafted text and image in an effort to change “the object” that traditionally appeared in art. These artists wanted to make the reader see the object as if for the first time. The object (the poem), to become “new” had to be “made strange”. This process of defamiliarisation could be achieved not only through choosing unusual combinations of words but also in changing the appearance of words by manipulating their typography and utilising the space of the page in unconventional ways. Instead of having the works printed by a typesetter, some Russian futurist poets collaborated with artists to produce books. In these artists books, the appearance of the handwritten, Cyrillic text often resembled the accompanying futurist style image (or vice versa). For example in Kruchenykh’s poem ‘Dyr bul shchyl’ and Mikhail Larionov’s drawing, both writing and image were constructed from thick, heavy lines, erratically
120 spaced.73 The lines of the image are sloped like handwriting, the sharp shape of the letters in the poem repeat the inky angles in the drawing and the staggered lines of words match the erratic edges of the drawing. Text and image take up the same amount of space on the page.
In the space between the two systems of representation - that of writing and that of visual art - in the Kruchenykh’s/Larionov’s poem/drawing, shifts occur between each “language” as similarities to drawing disarticulate the writing. This translation explores the incompleteness and inconsistencies in writing – its graphic materiality, its linearity, its contamination by the visual. Writing is not just an “image” of speech but contains many non-phonetic, visual elements. The shift between the languages of writing and drawing also can explore the reverse – those qualities of the visual that are like writing such as the codes and conventions that structure the visual. In Kruchenykh’s/ Larionov’s poem/drawing, neither text nor image takes precedence.
The Italian futurist Filippo Tomasso Marinetti called for a “typographic revolution” not only as a strategy of defamiliarisation but also as a way of expressing his particular Futurist ideas of speed, simultaneity and sensation. He was a poet who wanted to revolutionise the visual, literary and graphic form. (Drucker, 1994:105) Marinetti positioned his investigations and experiments with the typography and format of the page against the stylistics of conventional books that featured handmade paper and ornamentation in the form of garlands, goddesses, ribbons, large initials or roman numerals. The conventional “typographic harmony” of the page was also to be disrupted by “three or four different colored inks and twenty different typefaces on the same page if necessary”. (Marinetti quoted in Drucker, 1994:114)
73 This poem appeared in their book Pomada of 1913.
121 In Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tuuum, the text is constructed from a variety of fonts in different sizes which are arranged in vertical columns, horizontal bands, diagonal tangents or circular shapes.74
Figure 9: From Zang Tumb Tuuum (1914) by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. (Drucker, 1994:127)
74 Zang Tumb Tuuum was published in book form in 1914 but pages from this text also appeared as excerpts in journals from 1912-1914. Copies of one of the pages was even released from a Bulgarian aeroplane over a battlefield in a typical, extravagant gesture by Marinetti. (Drucker, 1994:128)
122
Figure 10: From Zang Tumb Tuuum (1914) by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. (Drucker, 1994:130)
In Zang Tumb Tuuum, individual words or phrases are made visually distinct through contrasting font styles: sans serif and serif fonts; fonts with rounded serifs and fonts with angular serifs; condensed or stretched fonts; full caps or lowercase; italics, bold or regular text. These different font treatments fragment, isolate and emphasise words or bands of words so they appear as a collage of texts rather than a formal unity or clear communication. Some
123 words are broken into repeated, stuttering syllables. Other words are drawn out and “smudged” by repeating letters as the word “vibrare” (Figure 10) becomes “vibbbrrrrrrrarrre” which in turn becomes onomatopeic. On occasion, Marinetti would include the phonetic representation of sounds such as ambulance sirens, slogans from advertisements, and plus and minus signs in his documents such as in ‘The Variety Theatre’ published in English in The Daily Mail, November 1913. Juxtaposition of these unusual elements with the body of the text interrupts a logical or sequential reading.
The futurists recognised that the appearance of the writing (its typeset or handwritten qualities), the format of the text, and arrangement of the elements on the page were important to how the viewer read, understood and responded to the work. (Perloff, 1986: xviii, 93) The 19th century concept that the poem will be read in the same way regardless of the way it appears in print is questioned in the work of these Russian poets/artists. Of course, design and typography always work at the edges of writing but in the work of futurist poets and artists, its work and presence was made central.
Just as Weiner claimed to be unaware of Fluxus, he also appeared unaware of these prior modernist practices which focused on the material and materiality of writing. In fact, Weiner is aggrieved when his work is framed by discourses that insist on the materiality, opaqueness, and rhetorical strategies of language and writing. At the Art and Literature symposium in Santiago de Compostella in April 1997, an older, frustrated Weiner blustered and swore at the symposium audience.75 With mounting frustration at the artwriters and curators who continued to complicate his work with post- structural (and other) theories of language, Weiner retaliated: All of my adult life I have listened to artists, intellectuals, curators, speaking nonsense about art and language. Can literature be art, can language be art, can this be art, can that be art. In fact it’s all bullshit. … I sat for the last two days and listened to people talk about Duchamp, talk about illuminated manuscripts. I sat and listened to them talk about language in art. I don’t get it. A piece of wood is a piece of wood. I choose to use the word wood, that word, when spoken in Spain, when spoken in the USA, when
75 This paper was later revised in December 1997.
124 spoken in Japan, seems different but as a statement of fact a piece of wood is a piece of wood. It either floats or holds something up or otherwise functions as a piece of wood. (Weiner, 1998:132)
While Weiner’s simplistic understanding of language as transparent may just be – at least in part - a way to generate some controversy or debate around his work, Weiner’s passionate, pugnacious speech is contradictory and ironic. He confuses the referent (that woodness that sometimes floats or holds something up) and its signification (the word “wood”) while at the same time demonstrating their distinction.
Despite the fact that Weiner’s work is designed to be communicable, there is a great deal that happens to the work, outside the control of the artist, that complicates an ideal of simple communication. The dissemination of Weiner’s work through the channels of art history and artwriting during the 1990s have added some interesting complications to this ideal. The visual blandness of Weiner’s early text works makes them less than photogenic. Their simplicity and tightly controlled textuality limits their written description. The photograph and written description are, of course, two important presentational strategies in written art discourse, particularly the monograph. All of this profoundly affects how Weiner’s work is experienced by viewers who encounter his work only through books or magazines.
In books examining Weiner’s early work of 1968 - 1969, the artwriting is often illustrated with a black and white, documentary-style photograph of Weiner making the work. In these photographs, Weiner is caught in “action” – not in the middle of an active, heroic gesture - but awkwardly crouched over a driveway or a pile of rocks, with a chisel or other tool in hand. He is totally focused on the task of making the work and seems oblivious to the presence of the camera. Underneath the photograph, occupying the space conventionally set aside for the title of the work shown in the photograph, is the statement-sculpture (the “real” work).
125
Figure 11: An example of how the statement-sculptures appear in books as a kind of “title” to a documentary photo rather than as the “real work”. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:47)
By conflating the statement-sculpture with the title, the conventional format in books about Weiner de-emphasise the possibility of the independence of the statement-sculpture from the photograph. As a viewer who has never had the opportunity to see any of Weiner’s work, except as it exists in books and magazines, my initial reading of the work was predicated on this presentational format. Not bothering to read the accompanying commentary, I assumed that the event of making the work, as recorded in the documentary photo, was the “real” work.
126 In this reading of Weiner’s work, the statement-sculpture is a title and Weiner’s laconic language renders this title as just an explanatory, fixed label. It is straightforward, verifiable and correlated to the photograph. In this understanding of Weiner’s work, a single photograph becomes metonymic for the work. The statement-sculpture as title is linked to a particular empirical reality foreclosing the possibility of the linguistic statement’s repetition at other times and other places.76 And as such, Weiner’s work appears prescriptive, uncomplicated, and - it must be admitted – terribly DULL. The verifiable correspondence between title and photograph permits the viewer to track the material processes of the work systematically. There seems little room permitted, however, for the viewer to engage in interpretative decoding or playful associations.
But the singleness and unity suggested by the metonymic photograph deflects attention away from the fragmentary incompleteness that inhabits Weiner’s work. It is only when the viewer reads the accompanying commentary to the photograph / title, that other possibilities for the work become apparent. In fact there is much interpretative decoding required to sort out just where and what is and what is not Weiner’s work. But to do that the viewer must become an avid reader. As a viewer and researcher who lives in Brisbane (on the periphery of a periphery), I have to rely on photographs and written descriptions of Weiner’s work from many different sources. This gives me a very peculiar and particular view of the art object.
In the discursive space of commentary, even the most prescriptive of the statement-sculptures from early in Weiner’s career, are difficult to read because I can only encounter their inscription in bizarre fragments – camouflaged in footnotes, disguised as labels, isolated in photographs, and inadequately and / or contrarily described. The linguistic object merges and interacts with the information around and about it. Some of the statement- sculptures need to be pieced together or to be re-written in order to be seen
76 Weiner recognised the danger of the documentation limiting the work’s appearance as early as 1969. (Norvell, 1969a:108)
127 and read. But the reader must be wary because there are even inaccuracies in the transcription of particular works.
In the transcription of the work A 2” WIDE 1” DEEP TRENCH CUT ACROSS A STANDARD ONE-CAR DRIVEWAY (1968), there is a confusion between the diacritical marks “ and ‘ (inch and foot respectively). Alberro’s texts transcribe the statement as a two inch wide one foot deep trench cut across a standard one car driveway. (2003:194; 1998:47) A reader of Weiner’s work in Alberro’s text is led astray in the imaginative construction of this work and any future maker of this work is condemned to making the trench one foot deep. This would be a difficult (if not impossible), fiddly task that would defeat even Weiner’s dogged, working-class masculinity.
In Buchloh’s essay the task is less of an ordeal with the trench transcribed as one inch deep. (1998:14, 15) Buchloh’s transcription is confirmed by the accompanying photo of the work as it originally appears in STATEMENTS (1968). (1998:14) This amusing confusion resulting from the “ubiquity of misreading [or mistakes in] translation”, demonstrates the necessity for clear visual reproductions and detailed written descriptions of even the most bland of artworks.77 But whether any kind of artwriting of Lawrence Weiner’s text work would ever be clear, accurate or factual is, in many instances, debatable and nor is it desirable. Weiner’s works which supposedly report empirical facts cannot be perceived, read and written about as if they were empirical facts. The movement to linguistic statements does not make the art work into an ideal of “primary (art) information”. In fact, the viewer must become an avid reader and researcher to see Weiner’s works and to attempt to disentangle them from the information that surrounds and frames them.
Art has always been framed by information in the form of the work’s title and provenance, art criticism, artist’s writings, manifestos, art history and art theory. In a 1969 interview with Norvell, Weiner insists that the information about the forms of art made in the 1960s is as essential as the art itself:
77 Thanks to Mark Webb for this astute but cutting observation.
128 You get a misinterpretation of practically anything you put out. And this is the first art, I think, where the information about the art is as important for knowing about the art as the art itself – which may be a lack and may not be because information about anything is necessary. (Norvell, 1969a:103)
While it is debatable that the art of the late 1960s was the first art where the information about art is as important as the art itself, it is perhaps the first time where it was openly admitted and celebrated. But, in some ways, conceptual art practices highlighted a general apprehension of the confusion between art and information about art. (Alberro and Norvell, 2001:8)
Developed as a way of minimizing the “problems” of primary and secondary information, the exhibition-catalogue, in some ways, further confused the distinction between art and information about art. The exhibition-catalogue was comprised of (and compromised by) multiple signifying practices including art, the work’s title, general description of the work, documentary photographs, publicity and legal document to record ownership of the works. For example, in the exhibition-catalogue January 5-31, 1969, there was a photograph documenting the physical making of Weiner’s statement- sculpture #027: Two minutes of spray paint directly upon the floor from a standard aerosol spray can (1968).78 Also included in the exhibition- catalogue were Weiner’s statement-sculptures. Yet Weiner was often concerned that the documentary photo would be mistaken for the work itself. (Norvell, 1969a:103) As discussed earlier, this misunderstanding still occurs.
The diverse and fragmentary forms of Weiner’s work (the linguistic statement-sculptures; the physical making of the statement-sculptures at different times and different places; the photographic documentation of this making; and, of course, the various kinds of information that supplement the work in the spaces of exhibition) also contribute to the way Weiner’s work is entangled with the information about it. Sometimes, Weiner exploits this
78 In the photograph of the exhibition-catalogue, the statement is written in lower case letters so I have chosen to transcribe it as lower-case letters rather than the block capitals often used to transcribe Weiner’s work in journals and books. Statement #027 was owned by Sol Lewitt.
129 entanglement. For example, even the invitation to Weiner’s 1969 exhibition of statement-sculptures and executed works at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, listed the works and the STATEMENT OF INTENT.79 Because the invitation card effectively “gave” Weiner’s work away to many people and thus challenged the private ownership of the work, it was considered an important part of the exhibition. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:48)
The Nova Scotia exhibition also included a student debate about the work and a television interview documenting Weiner constructing the work ONE STANDARD AIR FORCE DIE MARKER THROWN INTO THE SEA (1969). Fully grasping the historical importance of this televised event, a student (probably an eager sculpture student) dived into the ocean to retrieve the shell of the dye marker so it could be preserved in the school’s art collection. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:48)
Weiner’s work was also surrounded by information at other exhibitions. The exhibition Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner at Windham College in 1968 was supplemented by a symposium organised by Seth Siegelaub. The exhibition and the symposium were carefully orchestrated as they were well publicised and documented. In addition to the symposium, Siegelaub also arranged for Joseph Kosuth, who was working under the pseudonym of Arthur R. Rose, to write a review of the exhibition. (Alberro, 2003:26) The symposium and accompanying publicity was not only to inform but it also aimed to develop and prepare a new audience for this art.
The symposium, which coincided with the opening of the show on 30 April 1968, was moderated by Dan Graham, an aspiring artist and cultural critic
79 The STATEMENT OF INTENT, transcribed below, has accompanied all of Weiner’s work since 1969. This work will be discussed later in the chapter. 1. THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK 2. THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED 3. THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT EACH BEING EQUAL AND CONSISTENT WITH THE INTENT OF THE ARTIST THE DECISION AS TO CONDITION RESTS WITH THE RECEIVER UPON THE OCCASION OF RECEIVERSHIP
130 hired by Siegelaub.80 A photograph of this event shows “the panel” consisting of the artists and Graham sitting behind a long table.81 The panel members sit in front of a large chalkboard in a lecture hall. The educational nature of the setting lends weight and intellectual rigor to their discourse and their art practices. (Alberro, 2003:19-20) The photographs, symposiums, interviews and broadcasts demonstrate both the thoroughness of the documentary processes employed by Siegelaub and his awareness of the need for documentary evidence. This kind of documentary evidence assisted in the construction and maintenance of Siegelaub’s group of artists as historical subjects and their work as legitimate, art-historical objects.
Weiner’s close association with Siegelaub and the artists Siegelaub represented, such as Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler and Joseph Kosuth, often meant that his art practice was understood through the discourses of conceptual art practices. Weiner however, was not comfortable with this label of “conceptual artist”. In the Art Without Space symposium (a broadcast on WBAI-FM in New York, 1969), Seth Siegelaub and some of the artists he represented (Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner) discussed their work. The (edited) transcript records Weiner’s argument with an insistent Joseph Kosuth. Kosuth, who continued to emphasise the conceptual at the expense of other important aspects of Weiner’s work, is rebutted by Weiner’s flat contradiction: You like the word conceptual. For you, it’s fine. It fits you. I don’t really see it fitting me. …. I don’t think there is a preconceived concept because the material is so erratic. (Weiner quoted in Siegelaub, 1969a:99)
The fact that Weiner was not comfortable with his categorisation as a “conceptual” artist because of the “erratic” nature of materials, is significant. Because Weiner intended his statement-sculptures to be imaginatively or physically constructed by many people, it was only logical to assume that the appearance of the work would vary greatly. Thinking about these subtle,
80 At this time, Graham had run, for a short time, the John Daniels Gallery in New York which is where he came in contact with Weiner and Andre. Weiner and Andre later introduced him to Siegelaub. (Alberro, 2003:20) 81 Thanks to Kathleen Horton and her ideas about how artists appear in photographs.
131 endless differences in the appearances of his work was important and interesting to Weiner. For example, the material “beach” in the work A Shallow Trench from High Water Mark to Low Water Mark upon a North Atlantic Beach (1969), could have been a trench in either sand or through rocks. When talking about this work, Weiner enthuses: there really is no way it should look. … (I)f we went down twenty yards from where I did build the piece [Halifax, Nova Scotia], it would have been all sand. Where I built, it was all rocks. The same beach, same piece … But the beach down there was only, like, two yards wide, and where I built it, the beach was about twelve yards wide. (Norvell, 1969a:103)
However the work was made, each making of the work was valid despite the erratic nature of the material “beach” or the changes in the work’s appearance. (Siegelaub, 1969a:99)
While enthusing about the different possibilities of A Shallow Trench from High Water Mark to Low Water Mark upon a North Atlantic Beach (1969) however, Weiner also emphasises the inherent “fallibility” of words to signify definitively. The sheer number of minor differences that Weiner’s work can potentially generate seems to strive for a numerical sublimity and a “pleasure” in that this ordinary, simple act of digging a trench could be understood as art.
In 1968, Dan Flavin observed that art seemed to be moving towards “a neutral pleasure of seeing known to everyone”. (cited in Burn, 1993:no pagination). This contested the process of looking at and making art, understood through Greenberg’s high modernism, which required a rarefied, special talent occurring in a realm distinct and separate to everyday life. Perhaps what so excited Weiner (and Flavin) was that looking at and making art could also be understood as ordinary, everyday processes.
Forty years later, it is difficult to enthuse over their excitement at this inversion. Weiner’s enthusiasm for the different possibilities of A Shallow Trench from High Water Mark to Low Water Mark upon a North Atlantic Beach (1969), seems like an exercise of intolerable repetition or at best a
132 frustration. Nevertheless, each making of Weiner’s work results in one long line of supplements: a way of conceiving the sculptural or artistic object as an object whose appearance necessarily and continuously causes meanings to extend.
The works’ continuing variability also implies a difference in thinking about time and the viewing process. The immediacy of viewing and the complete object of Stella’s and Judd’s artwriting is overturned and reworked as an endless (bland) potential for viewing, a repetition of difference that is inexhaustible.82 This repetition of subtle differences recalls a similar mode of perception found in Greenberg’s comments about the pictorial field in which “decorative structure” resulted in barely perceptual differences that never-the- less had infinite nuance. Instead of remaining within the strictly pictorial field, however, the inexhaustible, repeated differences in Weiner’s work are translated temporally and spatially, through many appearances of the work, producing an endless object(s) in a social field.
In an early interview, Weiner states that his use of language “helps to get away from this thing of what something should look like and just deals with it as a general thing”. (Norvell, 1969a:107) The endlessness of this general object invites viewers to compulsively keep watch until some figure might emerge from its endless ground. Sometimes, a figure does emerge from the endless ground of Weiner’s statement-sculptures. This happens when those things that Weiner thinks are extraneous and not important in his work – the context, the architecture - are taken into consideration.83 Ironically, it is also the time when the artist often does not control the appearance of the work, such as when a particular owner or “receiver” of the work installs the work in a particular setting.
82 In its possibilities for different kinds of repetition and endlessness, some artwork of the 1960s (such as minimalism, the films of Andy Warhol or the date paintings of On Kawara), “might even represent a critical stance on the question of time, technology, and ends. For this repetition, to borrow from Deleuze, is a repetition with difference. Artists will take up its possibilities as a means to address working within the conditions of endlessness.” (Lee, 2004:277) 83 Weiner insists, “essentially all you have to remember is the meaning of the words. You don’t have to remember the architecture”. (Batchelor, 1989:257)
133 The statement-sculpture #462 MANY COLOURED OBJECTS PLACED SIDE BY SIDE TO FORM A ROW OF MANY COLOURED OBJECTS, first made in 1979, has had various translations literally and figuratively. It appeared written in German and English on an exterior architectural border of an exhibition building and on a paper band around the two volume catalogue for Documenta 7 in Kassel, 1982. (Batchelor, 1998:82) In this instance, it became a “label” that describes the art works in Documenta 7 as rows of many coloured objects – a meta-statement of art.84
Statement-sculpture #462 also appeared in large blue letters painted on the reddish brick wall of a factory in Ghent. Unlike many of Weiner’s works, this statement-sculpture in situ is very photogenic. In the large, glossy, colour photographs, the blue of the letters exactly matches the clear blue sky. The red colour of the factory wall intensifies the clean blue of the letters. The factory wall and its inscription faces the courtyard of a private residence. In another photograph, the work can be seen from the large glass windows of the residence. The angle of the photograph is carefully managed so that Weiner’s statement appears to be inscribed perfectly just below the top edge of the glass window of the residence.
The statement-sculpture describes the material fact of its inscription – the blue letters become a row of many, coloured objects. In addition, the statement also describes the site (the context) of its inscription. The red brick wall is now re-named, re-described and hence re-visualised as rows of many coloured objects, as art. The statement-sculpture as a “label” on this wall works to defamiliarise the site of its inscription. I await the work’s next installation to see if a narrative can continue. Because the work has this possibility of narrative, it is a work that has featured in artwriting with an extended commentary. In fact, Batchelor is one of the few writers who has concentrated on describing one of Weiner’s works and the way it interacts with its site of inscription. (Batchelor, 1998)85 I am not able to experience
84 Thanks to Andrew McNamara for this observation. 85 It is interesting to note that Weiner only talks generally about his work. He never specifically discusses any particular example of his work.
134 Weiner’s statement-sculptures as “a general thing” for writing and language are specific. Certainly, it is the specificity of Weiner’s work, its singular appearances, which interest me as a viewer, reader and researcher.
For Weiner, however, believing in the generality of his statement-sculptures is important for many reasons. In their terse description of materials and processes, Weiner understands his statement-sculptures as a kind of “pure information” that can be transferred at will from one culture and language to another, from one historical moment to another. Keen to ensure that as many people as possible will have access to (and hence benefit from) his work, Weiner begins to translate it. This interest in an international audience was a part of the general “internationalism” of some art practices later categorised as conceptual art. For example, in June of 1969, Siegelaub published an exhibition-catalogue that documented work made in several different countries by a number of artists including Lawrence Weiner. In the spirit of this new internationalism in visual art, the cover of the exhibition- catalogue featured a map of the world while the text and information about each work was written in English, French and German. (Siegelaub, 1969b)
By the early 1970s, Weiner was a dual resident of Amsterdam and New York. He had already participated in two European survey exhibitions in the first half of 1969: When Attitudes Become Form, Berne and op losse schroeven (Square Pegs in Round Holes), Amsterdam. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:48) With this international travel, the concept of translation became increasingly important, particularly since Weiner was so concerned with the communicative potential of art. Weiner, in collaboration with others, began translating some of his statement-sculptures into Dutch, German, French, Italian and other languages. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:52)
Although Weiner acknowledges that materials will vary in appearance from country to country, he believes that the function of the material will be exactly the same. He states “when you say a rubber ball, in German it’s like a Gummiball, which looks completely different than our Spalding pink ball. But its function is the same; it’s still a rubber ball.” (Weiner in Norvell, 1969a:107)
135 For Weiner, there is a general equivalence across cultures of “ordinary”, “everyday” materials such as the generic rubber ball – whether a pink Spalding ball or a Gummiball. This general equivalence extends to functionality, that is, there will be a universal (laddish) urge to toss a rubber ball over a waterfall as in the statement-sculptures of 1969 in English, French and German:
A rubber ball thrown into the American Falls Niagara Falls A rubber ball thrown into the Canadian Falls Niagara Falls
Balle de caoutchouc jetée dans les chutes Américaines du Niagara Falls Balle de caoutchouc jetée dans les chutes Canadiennes du Niagara Falls
Ein Gummiball in die Amerikanischen Fälle, Niagara Falls geworfen Ein Gummiball in die Kanadischen Fälle, Niagara Falls geworfen (Transcripts of the works from Siegelaub, 1969b:no pagination)
The concept of translation interested Weiner. He states, “(t)he work I do is designed for translation. It’s the exact opposite of what poetry is.” (Pelzer, 1999:90) When Weiner translated his work into languages other than English however, he encountered specific problems that complicate the idea that language can be “designed” for translation. In An Exhibition / Eine Ausstellung (1970), Gegenverkehr, Aachen, Germany, Weiner’s statement- sculptures worked with the way the German language conceptualised “saltwater” and “freshwater”. In German, “freshwater” is conceptualised as “sweetwater” (Süßwasser). In addition to this shift in the field of signifieds between the English “freshwater” and German “sweetwater”, the German word for water must also be “accompanied by an article and a preposition which determines location and direction and thus indicates whether it is an ocean (saltwater) or a river (sweetwater) which is the subject”. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:52) The complications continue. German nouns have genders, so the article before the nouns also contributes to the distinction between saltwater and sweetwater.86 In this work, Weiner manipulated the German language – playing with the syntax and order of all these particular parts of speech. The work therefore demonstrated that there was a
86 For example, the article “the” in German takes the forms of “der” for masculine nouns, “die” for feminine nouns and “das” for neuter nouns.
136 peculiarity in how the world was conceptualised in different languages. Thus it could be argued that Weiner’s linguistic statements could never be “designed” for translation in the original way he intended and, furthermore, that he enjoyed working with and manipulating the differences between languages.
Weiner’s understanding of translation (at least in his public interviews) is as a model of idealised transmission but as the Aachen exhibition demonstrates, the statement-sculptures are transformed and displaced through their translations and Weiner was aware, at least some of the time, of this fact. Languages, in their movement towards and away from each other in translation, disarticulate each other and emphasise not only the different ways each culture conceptualises phenomena, but also the particular complicated patterns of syntax that structure expression. In translation, the seemingly simple directness of language in the statement-sculptures is shown to be a detailed and peculiar pattern of words: an ornamental language.
Implicit in Weiner’s use of translation is Weiner’s belief in the universality, applicability and worthiness of his vision of art. While this is certainly a very particular Post-World-War-Two American vision, Weiner believes that it is possible to make an art that is ahistorical and acultural – something capable of transcending the social, cultural and historical values of its time. As a “true” picture of materials and processes, Weiner believed that his work was detachable from its historical and social context. Weiner states: Decent art, if it is a material reality for your own times, an honest apprehension of the material, can be used as a metaphor in any other time without imposing the values of that generation upon the generation that uses it next. If it’s a metaphor just upon the temporal situation it will work just at that moment. (Batchelor, 1989:255)
Weiner argues that if the work is honest, then it will be timeless and universal. As stated earlier, however, Weiner’s earlier work is located historically within the discourses of abstract expressionism, minimalism, pop, fluxus and conceptual art. Some of the statement-sculptures can also be
137 understood as a celebration of a particular kind of “working-class” masculinity. From the environmentally conscious hindsight of the early 2000s, some of Weiner’s works such as:
one hole in the ground approximately one foot by one foot by one foot. one gallon water base white paint poured into this hole (1968) and ONE QUART HEAVY GRADE MOTOR OIL POURED INTO THE GULF STREAM (1969) could even be considered politically incorrect and morally irresponsible. Weiner’s work is not “timeless” or detachable from its historic context.
While the diversity of appearance and materials in the physical making of the work at different times and different places was an important part of Weiner’s work, Weiner insisted that the statement-sculpture was the work. The work need not be built but could be imaginatively constructed. It was so simple, but many viewers still didn’t get it. Despite Weiner’s careful attempts at communication in his works – by moving to language, by avoiding imperatives in the structure of his statement-sculptures, by simplifying the message, by choosing “everyman’s” materials, by talking about his work in numerous interviews and symposiums - the “everyman” still often misunderstood Weiner’s work or, at least, his intentions for the work. It was as if in some compelling way the statement-sculptures demanded their making.87
To ensure that the imaginative construction of the work was a viable possibility, Weiner drew up the supplement that accompanies all of his work since 1969 – the STATEMENT OF INTENT.
87 Perhaps viewers felt compelled to make the work because this seemed to be the most obvious way of engaging with the work.
138 1. THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK 2. THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED 3. THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT EACH BEING EQUAL AND CONSISTENT WITH THE INTENT OF THE ARTIST THE DECISION AS TO CONDITION RESTS WITH THE RECEIVER UPON THE OCCASION OF RECEIVERSHIP.88
The STATEMENT OF INTENT accompanies Weiner’s work in many ways. It appears on the invitation card to his exhibitions, in exhibition-catalogues or alongside the statement-sculptures directly on the wall of the gallery. It is art but also information about the art that it accompanies. The STATEMENT OF INTENT, which reads almost like a legal document, puts a certain amount of responsibility for the work’s appearance on the receiver or owner of the work and is often celebrated by Weiner’s commentators as a radical decentring of the traditional role of the artist.89 These writers argue that the distinct line between the viewer and the artist is blurred, as the viewer is “given permission” to be a co-producer of the work. Despite its encouragement of an active spectator and the effacing of the final authority of the artist, the STATEMENT OF INTENT can also be understood as an inscription of the failure of reading. The STATEMENT OF INTENT shows the gap between the artist’s stated function or intention and his reception.
With the STATEMENT OF INTENT, it could be argued that Weiner abandoned the pretence of transparency, equality and inclusion. The need for the STATEMENT OF INTENT demonstrated the failure of the ideals of communication in that it inscribes into Weiner’s work, the “everyman’s” inability to read Weiner’s art works immediately and directly. In many ways, the “everyman” cannot read Weiner’s art and cannot read him as an artist. Confronted with contradictions, the viewer/reader/researcher (one must be all three to be a viewer of Weiner’s work) of Weiner’s work faces many challenges. The statement-sculptures are sometimes difficult to see clearly
88 The STATEMENT OF INTENT was first published in the catalogue of the exhibition January 5-31, 1969 which was the first major exhibition of conceptual art arranged by Seth Siegelaub. 89 For example see Alberro and Zimmerman (1998:51)
139 and even when the statement-sculptures can be seen, their typographic specificity, format and context signify in diverse and contrary ways. Even the artist’s intentions and assessments of his own work as legible, translatable are shown to be unreliable.
For the confused viewer/reader/researcher who cannot read Weiner’s work, the STATEMENT OF INTENT points to a crisis of agency. The STATEMENT OF INTENT is a “legal” statement standing in for the absent artist who must merge with letters and dictate from afar. The STATEMENT OF INTENT permanently splits Weiner’s “voice” that speaks through the unmarked self- sufficient text of his early statement-sculptures. It demands that he repeat and further dissimulate. It is within the continual need for supplements that Weiner’s work confronts the materiality of signs and language, which the artist announces he has no interest in. Alberro argues that it is in the:
… operation of fragmentation, where any part of the entire production and exhibition process is part of the work, (that) Weiner’s statements shared with LeWitt’s and Huebler’s conceptual art a self-reflexive acknowledgment of supplements. (Alberro, 2003:96)
Although Weiner insists that the statement-sculptures are a sufficient and complete communication, this “completeness” is ironic considering the fragmentary components of Weiner’s work. The need for the STATEMENT OF INTENT to accompany his work and the way the work can be repeated, by enacting or presenting the linguistic statement at different times and different places demonstrate the works’ incompleteness or, need for further explanation.
I am reminded again of Weiner’s discussion of abstract expressionism and its inability to “work”, that is communicate directly, through the visual. In this interview with Patricia Norvell, he is so carried away with his argument about the shortcomings of abstract expressionism that he also states that, “Art
140 doesn’t work. [Pause]”.90 One of the interesting things about Weiner’s statement is the [Pause]. Even though the silence is bracketed off from the reported words of the interview, it can be (mis)interpreted just as thoroughly as the rest of Weiner’s statement. In that [Pause], I imagine both interviewer, the young Patricia Norvell, and Weiner momentarily tongue-tied, their eyes quickly meeting in startled embarrassment over what could be understood as a slip-of-the-tongue, a social gaffe, a professional faux pas. (After all, Weiner has just spent most of the interview extolling the radical communicative potential of his statement-sculptures.)
In particular New York art circles in the 1960s, it became increasingly important for artists to develop a professionalisation of speech that emphasised an anti-institutional position.91 The blasé and confident Weiner, was already well-practised at interviews and symposiums organised by the indefatigable Siegelaub. Through-out the interview with Norvell, Weiner repeats all sorts of well-rehearsed phrases useful for understanding and describing his art practices but he is brought to a silent state by the logic of his argument. Weiner’s passionate argument against the arrogance of abstract expressionism and a universal, formalist understanding of the work has led to a perhaps careless, unrehearsed turn of phrase that escapes the body before it can be censored by that part of the mind that seeks to speak like it writes.92 Perhaps he is dismayed, or embarrassed, or impervious?
90 A reminder of Weiner’s speech. Weiner states: I’ve never yet heard anybody explain how it (an Abstract Expressionist painting) works. Except in the context of “Well, there’s a white mass here, and a red mass here, and a black mass here.” But that doesn’t work if you change it from one country’s aesthetics to another. It was just that that’s the absolute pretension of the expressionistic artist … that it works. Art doesn’t work. [Pause] Some art is more interesting than other art. Not better or worse just more interesting. (Norvell, 1969a:108, my emphasis) 91 Thanks to Andrew McNamara for the latter observation. 92 It is interesting to note that Joseph Kosuth took essays into his interview with Patricia Norvell so he could read out parts of his essays in response to her questions. (Alberro and Norvell, 2001) One can only suppose he wanted to avoid contradicting his carefully developed arguments used to promote “conceptual” art practices in other publications and events. Kosuth’s interview with Norvell becomes a kind of script for repetition rather than a dialogue that allows space for a reworking or reframing of ideas through contradiction or challenge or debate. (Not that I am suggesting that there is such a thing as an entirely unscripted interview!) Kosuth’s use of the essay also suggests that there was a certain predictability in the kinds of questions he would be asked and the answers he could give. (Thanks again to Andrew McNamara for this latter astute observation.)
141 Perhaps he is dumbfounded? Or perhaps he may even enjoy the irony of his logic? Does his art work? Does his continual consideration for the understanding of the viewer achieve a readable, understandable art? Despite all his radical strategies, are his statement-sculptures as unreadable as abstract expressionism?
But the [Pause] is not just Weiner’s silence: it is also the silence of his interviewer. Is Norvell, in the midst of her Master’s Degree in Art (of which the Weiner interview is a part), made painfully aware of the irony of her project? Her research project, which seeks to understand aspects of contemporary art practices, may be a useless task because all art – in some vital way - just doesn’t work?93 How can a viewer-researcher write about an object that just doesn’t work? In the [Pause] does Norvell wait expectantly for some bit of incredible wisdom from the scruffy but prophetic-looking Weiner that she can make use of in her thesis? But I like to imagine her raising a perfectly plucked and pencilled eyebrow and thinking, “Let’s see if you can pull yourself out of this one, you stupid, smug asshole!” (But its 1969 and perhaps the myth of the great, male artist is still perhaps too strong for this to happen.) After realising that art, even his own art, just doesn’t work, Weiner resorts to that handy old platitude or cliché that some art is more “interesting” than other art.
The STATEMENT OF INTENT, as the exemplary supplement, is itself supplemented at various times. The first song on the compact disc Monsters From the Deep (1997), a collaborative project between Ned Sublette and Weiner, is called AS IT STANDS, a musical version of the STATEMENT OF INTENT. In this musical version of the STATEMENT OF INTENT, there is also the addition of a fragment from another of Weiner’s works.94
93 As discussed earlier in this essay, Weiner’s STATEMENT OF INTENT (1969) which accompanied all of his work thereafter was an acknowledgement that his “direct” art also needed to be supplemented by extra information. 94 This fragment UNIQUE AND ALONE IN AN INDIFFERENT AND OFTEN HOSTILE WORLD is also part of an internet sound work which was part of the project UNTIL IT IS at the Ohio State University in 1997.
142
AS IT STANDS THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT EACH BEING EQUAL AND CONSISTENT WITH THE INTENT OF THE ARTIST THE DECISION AS TO CONDITION RESTS WITH THE RECEIVER UPON THE OCCASION OF RECEIVERSHIP
UNIQUE AND ALONE IN AN INDIFFERENT AND OFTEN HOSTILE WORLD THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT 95
In 1969, the STATEMENT OF INTENT was presented as revolutionary and as “a radical promise” - offering the viewer the power to participate in the work. (Buchloh, 1998:33) Collaged96 into the lyrics of an “easy-listening” jazz tune, the STATEMENT OF INTENT certainly loses its earnest, revolutionary zeal but for Weiner, this does not mean that the work is no longer important. When discussing the implications of AS IT STANDS, he states “(w)hy, in heaven’s name, when something (the STATEMENT OF INTENT) is taken off its pedestal, why does it have to be less important than it was before?” (Weiner cited in Buchloh, 1998:33) Of course Weiner avoids making any attempt at trying to articulate what this importance might be except to state “that it is art” and that it functions as art. (Buchloh, 1998:33) What happens to his statement-sculptures when they are collaged into lyrics or into space of particular kinds of popular music is left up to viewers and artwriters to decide.
95 As It Stands, the lyrics to the musical version of The STATEMENT OF INTENT as it appears on the cover sleeve of Monsters From the Deep. (Sublette and Weiner, 1997) 96 When the statement-sculptures are incorporated into lyrics, Weiner describes this process as collage. (Buchloh, 1998:31)
143 To make a lyric of the STATEMENT OF INTENT requires treating the statement as a material to be fragmented, repeated, emphasised, added to and rearranged. The dispassionate (and yet earnest) STATEMENT OF INTENT, being the unknown voice of the absent, revolutionary artist of four decades ago, is given a particular, evocative voice in AS IT STANDS; the low, soft voice of Kim Weston. Weston, “who really sings like that to make a living”, sings AS IT STANDS as a slow, standard jazz arrangement. (Weiner cited in Buchloh, 1998:31) But while the voice is particular, it is also strangely ambiguous, androgynous and perhaps unremarkable. Once again I must research to discover that Kim Weston is indeed a woman. (Batchelor, 1998:77) Her voice is lovely, professional but unremarkable in that it suits the type of “easy-listening” jazz treatment of Weiner’s pieces so well. I imagine one hundred similar voices singing “easy-listening” jazz in one hundred lounge bars across the United States. So perhaps it is incorrect to say that Weston’s voice is “particular”.
In AS IT STANDS, certain phrases are emphasised through repetition. The coda repeats the phrase THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT so it becomes a kind of chant or lament (or perhaps a way of drumming this information into listeners’ heads). In the second verse, the first three lines of the STATEMENT OF INTENT are broken off from the statement, and a fragment from another work is added. The addition of this fragment to the truncated STATEMENT OF INTENT changes the tone from the matter-of-factness of a “legal” document to an emotive, lyrical plea (or is it an ironic comment dissembled as a plea?). The second verse is as follows:
THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT UNIQUE AND ALONE IN AN INDIFFERENT AND OFTEN HOSTILE WORLD THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT
144 What is unique and alone? The art object? The artist? The artist and artwork misunderstood? An indifferent and hostile audience? Is not this the very antithesis of Weiner’s text works, his stated intentions, his portrayal as an artist?
Whether an emotive plea, ironic comment, or bitter farce (or something else entirely), the addition of the fragment to the STATEMENT OF INTENT allows me the freedom to reinterpret what I have read about the artist. While the stories of Weiner emphasise the political and egalitarian motives of his move to statement-sculptures, I have reason to suspect and distrust these stories. I begin to imagine more personal, emotional motivations for his move to statement-sculptures.
145 Chapter 6
Suspicious Imaginings: A story of Lawrence Weiner and statement-sculpture #001
146 I can imagine him back then even though he does not appear in the photograph documenting the work. It is April, 1968. He is young (around twenty-six), already with some success and hence filled with a young man’s extraordinary confidence.97 He would be extremely tall and thin with the beginnings of his trademark beard. 98 His clothes would look slightly scruffy. I imagine him in a pose made familiar by later photographs - bending over, squatting on his haunches, working low to the ground. Scattered around him are simple tools and materials - a hammer, a rusty stapler, some short stakes and a ball of hemp twine. He is fiddling with the twine, attaching it to a low stake to make his rectangle removed from a rectangle – STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (1968).99
Whether he has help or not to make the work, I don’t know, but in the early photographs he always appears alone. So I always imagine him working alone and silently except for the occasional banging of the hammer driving the stakes into the hard ground. He is totally absorbed in his task, in his art, in himself as an artist. He is unaware of the hostile stares of onlookers – the university students from Windham College (Vermont) - focussing only on the task in hand. Perhaps that is why he fails to notice the grimaces of impatience as the students make long detours around his work. (They won’t, or don’t want to, walk through it.) Perhaps that is why he doesn’t hear the discontented, muttered comments, “What does this fucker think he’s doing?” “Is this shitty piece of crap really art?” “How are we going to play our touch football match with this stuff all over the field?”
Oblivious to his hostile viewers, Lawrence Weiner works on, thinking about removing a rectangle from a rectangle. He concentrates on the feel of simple tools and materials in his hand. He likes the sensation of the fibrous twine as
97 By this time, Weiner has already exhibited his Propeller Paintings (1963-65) in at least two solo exhibitions organised by Seth Siegelaub at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery, New York. (Rorimer, 2001:77) 98 Weiner is 269 centimetres tall! (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:47) Although, due to the earlier transcription errors mentioned in Weiner’s work, I now hold doubts about the accuracy of Alberro’s transcriptions of measurement. 99 This work was part of an outdoor exhibition called Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner which was conceived by Chuck Ginnever and organised by Seth Siegelaub. (Rorimer, 2001:77)
147 it catches in the calloused skin of his fingers. He enjoys the physical effort and satisfaction of hammering the wooden stakes into the compacted, cold earth. The earth is just as an important material in this work as the stakes, twine and staples. The earth is like the plinth for this work. He imagines receivers100 walking in and moving over the piece101, being part of the art. He imagines them standing in the middle of the piece, turning around slowly so they can see all of the work – looking out from the inside of art. He imagines them sitting down on the grass inside of the piece, looking, thinking, understanding.102 He stands and stretches, rubbing his sore back. Moving over the work, he stands in its centre. From this viewing position inside the work, his gaze follows the lines of twine and then focuses on the stakes or patches of turf or earth. I try to imagine him being excited by the concept of removal, excited by staples, stakes, twine and turf, excited by looking out from the inside.
Of course in the year 1968 this was an innovative sculptural work in that it worked against traditional premises of sculpture and of the role of the viewer. The everyday coarseness and fragility of the work’s materials was far removed from the permanence of the traditional sculptural mediums of stone or metal. The linear openness of its string and stake grid made a structure lacking in the heavy solidity of traditional sculptural form. The use of earth and turf as both plinth and part of the sculpture forms a low expansiveness that loses itself in the landscape so the work is far from a distinct, commemorative marker. The title, which simply names the sculpture’s materials, is the antithesis of an evocative title referencing classical or literary sources.
There is not much in the work for a traditional viewer to admire or contemplate. Since the work resembles something more like the work of a surveyor, there is no obvious evidence of traditional artistic skills to admire.
100 “Receiver” is the term used by Weiner in the late 1960s to describe “the viewer” and is perhaps indicative of the passive role assigned to the viewer who is there to receive – intact, complete – the work as the artist intended. 101 “Piece” is a ubiquitous word for “art work” in the late 1960s. 102 In the symposium that accompanied the exhibition at Windham College, Weiner describes how a viewer could walk in and move over his work. (Lippard, 1973:48)
148 The materials used to form the work are raw, cheap and ordinary, so there is little to seduce and hold the eye. Excited by the possibilities of this non- sculptural sculpture, an eager sculpture student shows Weiner to the best vantage point and a photograph of the work is taken.
Figure 12: STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (1968). Lawrence Weiner. (photograph in Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:45)
The black and white, slightly blurred photograph of STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (1968) is taken from a distance and a height – perhaps out of the window of a two storey college building. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:45). In the foreground, the photograph records the college car park with an eclectic collection of cars and in the background a rural landscape interrupted by houses. STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (1968) occupies the middle ground. The twine and stakes look white, gridding the flat, patchy, area of turf and dirt stretching between two college buildings. Poorly framed
149 and too far away from its subject matter, the photograph does not provide a clear view of the work.103
I must read the accompanying text to interpret the photograph. There are thirty-four stakes and 426 metres of twine delineating this grid pattern. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:44) The work spans twenty-one metres by thirty metres, with a three metre by six metre section removed from the grid but it is hard to distinguish the removed section in the photograph.104 The work is low, only fifteen centimetres off the ground, ensuring that the dirt and turf are seen as part of the piece. I imagine cheap stakes of raw, unfinished wood with splinters for the unwary handler.105 The hemp twine would be cheap too – coarse, and light in colour. Up close, I imagine that the work would look raw, ugly, but also fragile.
It is easy to break the young Weiner’s painstaking work. A few well-aimed kicks easily loosens some of the stakes. Frustrated and angry, a group of students move over and through the work, kicking, pulling, cutting. The twine becomes loose and saggy.106 No one stops to look at the work from the inside but there are a few shouted comments of, “And this shit is meant to be art?”. Weiner’s “rectangle removed from a rectangle” is itself removed from the rectangle of the playing field. The group of students noisily and joyfully toss the bits of cheap twine and short stakes any-old-how in a corner of the field. Someone tosses the football and the game begins.
I imagine an embarrassed art lecturer explaining to Weiner what happened. “At least we documented the work with photographs!” the eager sculpture student exclaims. Weiner stares at the student for a while with his large, slightly droopy, blue eyes and then shifts his gaze to Carl, Bob and Dan who
103 The photograph of the work is so inadequate that in Alberro (2003:90), the white lines of the grid are digitally enhanced in a very obvious and crude manner. 104 These are approximate measurements. The exact measurements are 21.35 x 30.5 metres with a 3.05 x 6.1 metre removal. (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:44) 105 I have no idea what the stakes are made of since this detail is never mentioned in the commentary and is not distinguishable from the photograph. 106 This incident is briefly described in Alberro and Zimmerman (1998:45 – 46)
150 talk quietly among themselves. 107 He suspects they are silently smirking. He glances over at Seth. “Well, this is bullshit!” an angry Seth exclaims. “I was hoping to get some decent documentary photos done today. What the fuck are we going to do now?”
Through the beard, it is hard to tell if Weiner’s cheeks are stained a dull red. Perhaps he ponders about how to make art in “an indifferent and often hostile world”? (Sublette and Weiner:1997) Perhaps he smoulders silently, cursing the fact that it was only his work that was damaged and altered, while the work of those fuck-wits Bob and Carl was left untouched. After this incident, the young Weiner thinks and silently rages - about art that is unwanted and about unknown viewers and reactions.108 For despite STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (1968) differences to art, Weiner still relied on the work receiving the same respect as art. He imagined appreciative viewers who could see the art of this non-art.
It is perhaps the search for a different viewer, and/or a different kind of viewing, that motivated Weiner to abandon the materiality of his sculpture STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (1968) and to present it as sheer words, the sheer descriptive outline of his work. STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (1968) before its making at Windham College, originally existed as a notation - a linguistic, working drawing - made by the artist. (Rorimer, 1995:222). Weiner’s decision to let STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (1968) remain as a statement was certainly one way Weiner could protect his art, at least to a certain extent, from an indifferent and often hostile world.
During 1968, Weiner made the decision to make his linguistic working drawings become the basis of his work. Significantly, in the artist’s system of cataloguing his work, Statement #001 is:
107 Siegelaub organised a symposium on 30 April 1968 at Windham College to accompany the exhibition. Dan Graham was hired by Siegelaub to moderate the symposium in which the three artists, Robert Barry, Weiner and Carl Andre, participated. (Alberro, 2002:19-20). It is my supposition that Weiner’s work had already been destroyed by the students at this time, but there is no mention of when this actually occurred in the accounts I have researched. 108 Weiner was upset by this incident. (Rorimer, 2001:77)
151
A SERIES OF STAKES SET IN THE GROUND AT REGULAR INTERVALS TO FORM A RECTANGLE – TWINE STRUNG FROM STAKE TO STAKE TO DEMARK A GRID – A RECTANGLE REMOVED FROM THIS RECTANGLE (Transcript of #001 as it appears in Weiner, 1977)
Weiner’s numbering system for his statement-sculptures is not about chronology. For example, earlier constructed works that later became statement-sculptures such as Statement #030, A FIELD CRATERED BY STRUCTURED SIMULTANEOUS TNT EXPLOSIONS, had been physically enacted by Weiner in a national park in 1960. (Buchloh, 1998:8) Of course the movement from making the work STAPLES, STAKES, TWINE, TURF (1968) to the work’s translation as Statement #001 has never been represented as being about protecting art from the judgement of hostile viewers. When artwriters or Weiner talk about the Windham College incident, it is often discussed with the calmness of distance and hindsight. Weiner states that the incident just made him realise that the alteration to his work mattered little. After all, the work was not precious, but constructed from cheap materials quickly foraged from the “bargain bin” at the local hardware store a short time before Weiner made the work. (Lippard, 1973:48) The material artwork became a surplus, characterised as only a particular realisation of the idea. The “idea” of the work was not compromised since it still existed, intact, as a statement. (Pelzer, 1999:85) (Alberro and Zimmerman, 1998:46). Of course, this alternative representation of the aftermath of the Windham College incident is equally plausible. But uncertainty remains when the significance of this work’s labelling as Statement #001 marks it as the starting point of Weiner’s statement-sculptures – the work for which he is best known.
152 Chapter 7
How to See How to Write: Revisions of translation
153 The discussions so far have shown that the process of viewing art and writing about art is never as simple as it is often presumed. As discussed in earlier chapters, the ambiguity of the art object is emphasised and complicated by its representation in photographs and in artwriting. In photographs, the austerity and abstractness of some of Stella’s Black series paintings can transform into complex, ornamental patterns that reference fabric designs and textual symbols. The photographic text emphasises the uncertainties between distinctions of figure and ground in Stella’s paintings and also explores the limits of painting’s seeming autonomy – the inside and outside of abstract painting. Those things considered to be safely “outside” and distinct from the content and composition of abstract painting (such as pattern design) may be viewed as necessary conditions for the making, seeing and interpretation of Stella’s painting. Stella’s paintings do not simply show a resemblance or a reference to fabric design but rather the patterns of Stella’s paintings also display abstract paintings’ lack of interior self-identity or self-completion.
In the work of Weiner, on the other hand, the linguistic statement-sculptures acknowledge the necessity of, as well as the confusion between, art information (the art object) and information about art (artwriting, titles, documentary photographs of the art object). This acknowledgement of the entanglement of the textual with visual art turns out to be ironic, however, in Weiner’s case because the artist often ignores or de-emphasises the other side of this equation: the visuality of text. Weiner too assumes a certain transparency between intention and outcome in a work of art as well as a transparency of materials which is interrupted by the typography and format of his statement-sculptures.
Minimalism and conceptual art are usually considered to constitute a break form the mid-century formalist interpretation of modernism. Yet the examples of Stella and Weiner show that, at least in their cases, they actually thought they were extending principles central to that interpretation. The play and display of the visual and textual across the works of Stella and Weiner acknowledges that elements, such as pattern and text or typography and
154 format, that are often considered to be peripheral to visual art or written discourse respectively, are, in particular ways, significant and central to visual art and its written discourse.
The question arises how do elements eventually considered peripheral to modernist discourse – pattern, ornament, written discourse and typography – re-emerge to become central considerations to art practice in the wake of minimalism and conceptual art. First of all such considerations raise awareness of the complex play of the visual and the textual within and around the art object. Furthermore, the implication of this complex play raises further questions about the role of the viewing an artwork and also how the art object is to be written about.
According to David Carrier, effective art writing would acknowledge the entanglement between the history of art and the history of art history. (1991) Carrier states that there are significant parallels between the history of art and the history of art history, arguing that in modernism, both histories come to the self-conscious recognition that they are systems of representation. (Carrier, 1991:238) The emphasis on systems of representation in particular modernist art practices and art writing challenges the idea that the experience of looking at visual art is an act of pure perception or a direct emotional experience. For post-structuralist writers and practitioners, the making of art, the art object and the act of looking at and interpreting art is enmeshed in complex systems of social, cultural, institutional and political discourses.
One way of acknowledging art as a mediated experience is to examine how the art object operates like a language – as an arbitrary sign system. The art object, theorised as sign, undermines the idea that a work of art has a univocal or controlled meaning, or simply “reflects” an objective reality (as Lawrence Weiner would wish), or that the process of viewing art is an act of “direct” perception (as Judd and Stella would wish). The art object as sign is opaque, complex and ambiguous. But the art object does not operate exactly like a language.
155
There is an ongoing debate concerning textuality and the visual and the use of particular semiotic, structuralist or poststructuralist theories of language as frameworks underpinning artwriting and arts practice. (Barthes, 1985) (Bryson, 1988. 1991) (Burn, 1993) (Holly, 1996) (Krauss, 1993) (Melville, 1994) (Melville and Readings, 1995) (Mitchell, 1986) Within the textuality and visuality debate there are important theoretical differences among art writers. For example, according to Norman Bryson, the process of looking is thoroughly entangled in discourse. Bryson argues that art operates like a language system but suggests that a “sliding scale” indicating the “degree” of arbitrariness is necessary. He argues that throughout history, what a viewer understands as “realistic” or “naturalistic” representation is culturally and socially constructed. Bryson’s account questions the assumptions of “pure perception” that frame Ernst Gombrich’s understanding of the viewing process and art history. (Bryson, 1988. 1991) For example how Gombrich represents the history of painting as a gradual development towards greater naturalism.
While Stephen Melville agrees that visual art operates like a language, he questions Bryson’s starting point of Gombrich. According to Melville, Gombrich’s account of art is not particularly significant largely because it fails to account for modernism’s questioning of representation. While welcoming the insights gained by theories of language such as “deconstruction” for the visual arts, Melville is cautious. He insists that there are important differences between the textual and the visual that need to be examined. (Melville, 1991)
Melville argues that because visual art has differences to a language system, theories of language developed specifically to engage with philosophy or literature cannot simply be “applied” to the art object, which has its own particular history and context. (Melville, 1991. 1994) The straightforward “application” of a theory to the visual arts also suggests that the art object is lacking or without theory. Melville however, argues that the art object is already theoretical – its materials and forms already operating “in
156 deconstruction”. Art "has always already been in excess of its concepts, already deconstructive, and deconstruction the motor or movement or element of art". (Bennington quoted in Melville, 1994:42) The constant struggle and undermining of line and colour throughout the history of art would be one example of this artistic excessiveness and instability. Modernism’s investigation of representation would constitute another example, while the interruption and disruption of the decorative and the textual within modernist abstraction constitutes yet another. In addition, the materiality of the art object in some ways blocks and confounds language. Take the example of colour – how is colour to be identified accurately when it changes depending on the colours placed around it? (Melville, 1994)
The rhetorical strategies of art writing that theorise the art object as a (problematic) sign system, emphasise that each art writing is just one possibility among differing and deferring accounts of the art work. The art writer constructs a plausible, convincing story about the work. There would be an apt beginning to the story, there would be discussion of alternative approaches to the work and a conclusion that “achieves narrative closure”. (Carrier, 1991:240)
Some artwriters have experimented with different narrative styles as a way of emphasising and acknowledging the rhetorical strategies and narrative patterns that structure art history and art writing. In her book The Optical Unconscious published in 1993, Rosalind Krauss’ artwriting is comprised of (and compromised by) multiple signifying practices such as post-structuralist writing informed by Lacan, citations, biographemes, gossip, hearsay, personal memories, and anecdotes. Throughout Krauss’ academically rigorous arguments, italicised prose interrupts the argument and the reader. In this evocatively descriptive prose, which is repeated with minor differences throughout the text, the fascinated reader learns of the horror of Clement Greenberg’s mouth. Krauss writes: As always I am held by the arrogance of his mouth – fleshy, toothy, aggressive – and its pronouncements, which though voiced in the studied hesitancy of his Southern drawl are, as always, implacably final. (1993:309)
157
Her strategy of constructing this artwriting draws attention to a “paraliterary” space that confuses the distinction between literature, social discourses, art criticism and critical theory. This technique emphasises the “debate” and “partisanship” that inhabits the written discourses of art.109 Krauss, in an earlier essay explains: The paraliterary space is the space of debate, quotation, partisanship, betrayal, reconciliation; but it is not the space of unity, coherence, or resolution that we think of as constituting the work of literature. (Krauss, 1987:292)
Artwriting, as a kind of paraliterary space, is a space of controversy and contradiction; not of certainty or conclusion. Artwriting is neither an objective account of the artwork, nor is it the revealing of a “hidden” meaning behind or beyond the work. This instability and inconclusiveness of artwriting is not a weakness. Carrier argues that because each alternative account of the art work involves a debatable starting point, a demand for yet another account is created. (1991:240) Artwriting then, is a work of endless analysis where there is no final act of interpretation that would seek to replace the art work with its meaning. (Melville and Readings, 1995:22)
I have often thought of artwriting as a kind of translation. Artwriting strives to translate the visual “language” of art into a written discourse. A translation does not “replace” the work it translates: it is written beside the work. This metaphor/analogy seems at once obvious and suspect. Immediately there are objections and complications. An art object does not work exactly like a language so how could artwriting be a kind of translation? And yet the only way a viewer can see, describe and understand the art object is by and through language. The art object is an object but it is also an object in language. (Melville and Readings, 1995:21) Questions of seeing and
109 Krauss’ writing is modelled on the “paraliterary” writing of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. (Krauss, 1987) The “prose” genre that is juxtaposed with rigorous academic writing throughout Krauss’ book, The Optical Unconscious, can also be understood as a way of challenging the art critical discourse of her former teacher, Greenberg. As well as undermining Greenberg’s ideology of a modernism of pure opticality, Krauss’ method of constructing her writing through disparate genres of writing also undermines Greenberg’s insistence on disciplinary purity (among other things).
158 describing the art object also involve questions of language and this is a consideration that both Stella and Weiner lack.
Questions and objections regarding artwriting as a kind of translation necessarily concern the concept of translation itself. What is translation? How does translation “work”? What does “translation” have to do with art or artwriting and what does it bring to the discussion that is helpful in explaining how pattern, the decorative, typography and language came to be considered useful to the explanation and practice of visual art? A traditional theory of translation would posit that a translation strives to reproduce the form, content and meaning of a work in another language. But there is an uneasiness that accompanies this traditional theory of translation. Because the translation is thought to be just a copy of the original work, the translation will somehow never be able to measure up to that original work. There will be losses and gains between the translation and the original as words in the target language fail to capture either the effect, the nuance or the precise meaning of the words in the original language. The processes of translation demonstrate and investigate the limits and dilemmas of language and representation.
Translation, as a task and process, has occupied the thoughts of many writers, theorists and philosophers. By examining Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ or ‘The Task of the Translator’, this chapter analyses how the process of translation (and by implication, the way language works) has been understood historically and, more recently, by particular post-structuralist writers and theorists. Through this examination and analysis of translation and language, the problems of translation (its inability to capture the “essence” of the original text) in traditional theories of translation are shown to be not a failure of the translation but rather a significant quality of the original text: its incompleteness, instability and excessiveness. The tasks and problems of the translator, who is confronted by the instability of the original text, also constitute, I assert, the tasks and problems of the viewer and the art writer. The problems of artwriting are
159 problems of translation that concern the limits and dilemmas of language, description and representation.
Walter Benjamin's essay ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ or ‘The Task of the Translator’ was written in German and published in 1923. The essay was an introduction to Benjamin’s German translations of Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens written in French. Displaced from its original context as an introduction, the English translation of ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ appears as one of a collection of Walter Benjamin's essays in Illuminations. (1992) Throughout this complex essay, Benjamin questions traditional ideas of translation arguing that these ideas stem from an impoverished, static view of language. Instead, Benjamin is interested in how the work of translation opens new possibilities for thinking about the original text and the translation, and therefore a richer, more mobile view of language.
It is Benjamin's attention to language that has interested particular poststructuralist writers and theorists in recent years. These writers have mobilised the essay in a number of ways. Rochlitz (1996) examines how Benjamin’s theories of language and art change from this early essay to later essays. Jacobs (1993) reads Benjamin's essay as a subtext and supplement to Baudelaire's poems pointing to links between the two texts as they pass through one another. Andrew Benjamin (1989) reads Benjamin's essay as a subtext and supplement to the other Benjamin essays that appear in Illuminations. Derrida mobilises the text to discuss philosophy. The mobility of ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ suggests that it has special qualities - qualities that survive its dislocation from its original context, survive the passage of time, and exceed the specific processes and problems of translation.
But Benjamin's essay cannot be summarized as only a different way of thinking about language and translation. Paul de Man argues that Benjamin's essay is also "an example of what it states", that is, a self- reflexive essay. The reader of an English translation of Benjamin’s work then, must take heed of one of the metaphors that he uses to describe a
160 translation. He states that "the language of a translation envelopes its content like a royal robe with ample folds". (Benjamin translated by Zohn, 1992:76) Like a royal robe, the English language translation of Benjamin's essay is voluminous and rich with detail. If one tries to grasp one of its many folds, it is pulled away or slips away. There is no blessing of communication for the reader, rather there is always the task of translation.
From the start of Benjamin's essay, the relationship between the work of art and the concept of communication is problematic. Benjamin states (in Zohn's translation) "(i)n the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful" and later "(n)o poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener". (1992:70) For Benjamin, the work of art neither communicates with the reader nor is it concerned with the reader's understanding. 110 The work of art has little “to say”. For Benjamin, the only thing that is communicable is information. Yet a work of art conveys something additional to information. In Zohn's translation, Benjamin states that: (a translation's) essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information - hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information ... the unfathomable, the mysterious, the 'poetic,' something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet? (1992:70)
110 Rochlitz notes that Benjamin’s ideas about the communicable potential of art changed in later essays such as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin revised his ideas about the communicable potential of art after encountering particular surrealist art practices and the photocollage work of John Heartfield. The political content of this work was communicable and necessary in Europe during the rise of fascism. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, painting was left with only a limited future. (1996:178) But in a later “minor text”, Pariser Brief II. Malerei und Photographie (Parisian letter II: Painting and photography), painting is again “useful” in its political function. This includes painting with political subject matter and also “nonrealist” painting. Nonrealist painting was “destructive”, banned by particular governments, not because of its subject matter but because of how it was painted. (Rochlitz, 1996:178) In the 1990s, artwriters who concentrated on examining the political potential of how a painting was painted, described this kind of activity as an examination of “the politics of the signifier”. (Foster et al, 1993. 1994)
161 The transmission of what is considered to be “inessential”, that is information, is what happens whenever a work or a translation undertakes to serve the reader, to communicate with the reader.111 Communicable information renders translation impossible for Benjamin. (1992:81)
In relation to translations, this distance in reception is further emphasised by Benjamin. He argues that if an original text is inaccessible to the reader and does not exist for the sake of the reader, how could the translation be intended for the reader? (Benjamin, 1992:71) Who then is the translation for? Why have a translation? And in what kind of position does this place the reader of an English translation of Benjamin's essay? While communication to an ideal reader is certainly not one of Benjamin's concerns, the reader of a translation is in a privileged position. For in a translation, Benjamin argues, that the possibilities of language can become evident.
Benjamin's ideas are different to a traditional theory of translation based on a communicable model. A traditional theory of translation would posit that the task of the translator is to convey the form and meaning of the original as accurately as possible from one language to another. (Benjamin, 1992: 73) But for Benjamin, this understanding of translation neither defines what is meant by “accuracy” nor adds any understanding to what is important in a translation. This theory usually positions the translation as inferior to the original. The translator is never able to re-present the form and content of the original. There are losses where the translation misses some subtle nuance present in the original language. There are “gains” where the translator is accused of exceeding or distorting the original author's intentions.
There are a number of assumptions arising from a traditional theory of translation. Firstly, it assumes that that the original text has a definitive or
111 Certainly Benjamin’s premise is the opposite to Weiner’s understanding of art. Weiner explains that art “should always be involved with empirical reality. … What you see you translate into language. Art is a legible, readable thing”. (Weiner cited in Batchelor, 1989:254, 257)
162 determinable meaning. As a product of the coherent identity and personality of the author, the original work is thought to have a definitive meaning because it is closer and intimately linked to its source. This intimate link re- presents the intentions and thoughts of its author. One important aspect of this ideal of translation is that the “original” is granted the status of the eternal, while the translation dates. Rabassa, a Spanish and Portuguese translator, states: The fact is that there is a kind of continental drift that slowly works on language as words wander away from their original spot in the lexicon and suffer the accretion of subtle new nuances, which... result from distortions brought about by time and the events that people it. The choice made by an earlier translator, then, no longer obtains and we must choose again. Through some instinct wrought of genius, the author's original choices of word and idiom seem to endure. (quoted in Venuti, 1992:3)
For Rabassa, the original becomes valorised as an eternal and unchanging monument, able to transcend the linguistic, historical and cultural changes of which the translation is subject. Ironically, the continued translation of “a timeless original” helps to translate and generate its “timelessness”.112 The “timeless original” then reinforces the author's place as the unique creative genius. The original's meaning and significance somehow remains definitive, and by implication recoverable. To be successful and stand up to the test of time, a translation must, ideally, recover this original meaning - to find that which has been lost.
The possibility of a “recovery” of an original meaning, is also important in Heidegger's examination of the process of translation. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger discussed the Latin translation of the Greek word "physis". He argued that the Latin translation of this word as "nature", thrust aside the original meaning of this word and hence destroyed the philosophical force of the Greek word. (Heidegger cited in Benjamin, A. 1989:15) He states: (w)hat happens in this translation from the Greek into the Latin is not accidental and harmless; it marks the first stage in the process by which we cut ourselves off and alienated ourselves
112 Thanks to Andrew McNamara for this idea.
163 from the original essence of Greek philosophy. (Heidegger cited and translated by Andrew Benjamin, 1989:15)
So for Heidegger, the “recovery” of a lost, archaic meaning, would somehow restore the vitality of an intimate closeness with the language of Greek philosophy. Heidegger argues for the possibility of some archaic meaning adhering to the word "physis" - something belonging to the word itself. But how can it be claimed that the word "physis" had a delimited set of meanings - even among the ancient Greek peoples who used it? If the graphic marks of the word cannot contain this archaic meaning, how can meaning adhere to it?
While the first assumption of traditional theories of translation is that the original text has a definitive or determinable meaning, the second assumption is that a discernible content or meaning can be slipped transparently into the equivalent words of another language. In a traditional theory of translation, languages are thought to name an objective reality.113 Ideas, thoughts, feelings, natural phenomena and the world of objects should maintain some consistency across time, across cultures, and hence across languages. This also assumes that within the one language, the language of the original work, there will be consistency.
But finding equivalence between languages is an impossible ideal. For example, Zohn's title The Task of the Translator seems unproblematic until the reader begins to speculate about the choice of the word “task”, the alternative words available to the translator and how this word “task” approximates the German word Aufgabe. Aufgabe, of course, has connotations not recognisable in the English translation of the title. Aufgabe as well as meaning task can also mean the one who has to give up. De Man argues that Aufgabe, in the German title, carries with it that sense of the defeat or the giving up of the translator. (1986:80) The translator has to give up because he or she will not be able to re-present what is there in the
113 Certainly this is an ideal that frames much of Lawrence Weiner’s understanding of his work.
164 original. German readers are confronted with the impossibility of the translations of Baudelaire's poetry that follows Benjamin's original essay.
Certainly the sense of “giving up” in the German is not possible in the English word “task” - there is no equivalence. In a traditional idea of translation, this would be a typical fault. The language of the translation, as a copy of the original work, fails to capture the “essence” of the original. For the English reader then, even in the second word of Zohn's translation a loss is found. But if words in languages do not name or describe an independent reality, this “fault” is not a loss but a glimpse of the workings of language.
It is believed that a successful translation should resemble, or correspond to the original. But how is resemblance or correspondence to be judged? In recent history, translations have been criticised for their departure and incapacity to reproduce the original.114 For Walter Benjamin this idea is problematic.
Benjamin writes: Um das echte Verhältnis zwischen Original und Übersetzung zu erfassen, ist eine Erwägung anzustellen, deren Absicht durchaus den Gedankengangen analog ist, in denen die Erkenntniskritik die Unmöglichkeit einer Abbildtheorie zu erweisen hat. Wird dort gezeigt daß es in der Erkenntnis keine Objektivität und sogar nicht einmal den Anspruch darauf geben könnte, wenn sie in Abbildern des Wirklichen bestünde, so ist
114Although this was not always the case. In a letter addressed to Pammachius, Saint Jerome states: "The translator considers thought content a prisoner (quasi captivos sensus) which he transplants into his own language with the prerogative of a conqueror (iure victoris)." (Translated/quoted in Friedrich, 1992:12-13) This statement exemplifies a kind of “linguistic imperialism” that has sometimes been prevalent in translation theories. The foreign word is devalued but the foreign “content” is appropriated and dominated by the translator's own language. The Roman Quintilian also thought of the original text as something to improve. The original text could inspire new ideas and enrich his own language. (Friedrich, 1992:13). This idea was modified in particular European language theories in the Renaissance: ...the purpose of translation is to go beyond the appropriation of content to a releasing of those linguistic and aesthetic energies that heretofore had existed only as pure possibility in one's own language and had never been materialized before. ... Its most striking hallmark is its effort to 'enrich' (enrichir, arricchire, aumentar). Again, one does not move toward the original in this case. The original is brought over in order to reveal the latent stylistic possibilities in one's own language that are different from the original. (Friedrich, 1992:13)
165 hier erweisbar, daß keine Übersetzung möglich wäre, wenn sie Ähnlichkeit mit dem Original ihrem letzten Wesen nach anstreben würde. (Benjamin quoted in Jacobs, 1993:133)
In Zohn's translation this reads as: To grasp the genuine relationship between an original and a translation requires an investigation analogous to the argumentation by which a critique of cognition would have to prove the impossibility of an image theory. There it is a matter of showing that in cognition there could be no objectivity, not even a claim to it, if it dealt with images of reality; here it can be demonstrated that no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. (Benjamin, 1992:73)
I find this very hard to grasp, so I read Jacobs' translation of the same passage: In order to grasp the genuine relation between original and translation, we must set up a deliberation whose design is completely analogous to the train of thought in which a critique of cognition demonstrates the impossibility of a mimetic theory. [And tangentially the impossibility of traditional epistemology] If it is shown here that there could be no objectivity in knowledge - not even a claim to it - if it consisted in duplication of the real, then it can be proven here that no translation would be possible if it strove with its total being for similarity with the original. (Jacobs, 1993:133)
Although it is only a fragment, I also examine de Man's translation: In order to seize upon the real relationship between the original and its translation, we must start a reflection of which the intent is in general similar to modes of thought by means of which a critical epistemology [there's Kant, Erkenntniskritik] demonstrates the impossibility of a theory of simple imitation. (de Man, 1986:82)
As de Man acknowledges, Benjamin makes reference to a particular Kantian argument concerning the nature of images. According to Kant, it is "schemata, not images of objects, which underlie our pure sensible concepts." (A. Benjamin, 1989:91) Kant argues that: the image is a product of the empirical faculty of reproductive imagination; the schema of sensible concepts, such as of figures in space, is a product and as it were, a monogram, of pure a priori imagination, through which, and in accordance
166 with which, images themselves first became possible." (quoted in A. Benjamin, 1989:91)
The image is not to be understood in terms of an object, that is it is not an image of “the original”. Rather, the image is a product of “pure a priori imagination”, that is reproductive imagination. The work of the imagination cannot be reduced to just the reproduction of images. Andrew Benjamin argues "(c)oncepts, and hence the work of the a priori imagination are the condition of possibility for objects which then come to be reproduced." (1989:91) In a similar way, translation is not to be understood in terms of its resemblance to an original but rather in the way that the language of the original and the language of the translation supplement (and interact with) each other.
Instead of similarity between an original and its translation, Benjamin puts forward an idea of “kinship” to explain the link between original and translation. “Kinship” has nothing to do with likeness. Benjamin states: all suprahistorical kinship of languages rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole - an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: "pure language". (Benjamin, 1992:74)
Benjamin goes on to give the example of "Brot" and "pain", the German and French words for “bread” respectively. Both of these words “intend” the same object but Benjamin notes that their "modes of intention are not the same." (Zohn's translation, 1992:75) The field of signifieds delimiting the word “Brot” in German would be different to those delimiting “pain” in French. The words are not interchangeable. Benjamin acknowledges that “the modes of intention” of these two words cannot be simply seen as being the same, even if their intended objects are, in some instances, exactly the same. Jacobs states: The kinship between languages generates their difference: on what basis could translation claim to duplicate the original if no language, however original, in turn guarantees the objective reality of that which it names? (1993:133. Jacob's emphasis)
167 For Benjamin, it is in the space of translation that the working of language, of “pure language”, can be represented. Derrida, de Man, Andrew Benjamin and Jacobs understand Benjamin's term “pure language” as that which is in language. Andrew Benjamin states ... (t)he “pure language” then is not a language. It is language. It marks the sameness of languages while allowing for their differences. What comes to be released by the translator is the language inhering in a language. (1989:103)
Despite Walter Benjamin's use of the words “suprahistorical” and “pure language” (in Zohn’s translation) which suggest an original, supreme language, particular post-structuralist writers are convinced that Benjamin's theories of language always emphasise that language is always and already fragmentary. 115 The argument put forward by these writers relies, in part, on Benjamin's description of language as a broken vessel.
Zohn translates Benjamin as : Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. (Benjamin, 1992:79)
De Man's and Jacobs', however, question Zohn's translation of this passage. In these passages, Zohn tends to emphasise a futural totality of language and the vessel - and both de Man and Jacobs re-examine and retranslate Benjamin's text to emphasise the fragmentary nature of language and the vessel.
Jacobs translates Benjamin: Just as fragments of a vessel, in order to be articulated together, must follow one another in the smallest detail but
115 Rochlitz, however, examines the messianic and kabbalistic themes that frame Benjamin’s theories of language. (1996:25-31) According to Rochlitz, Benjamin speculates that languages in translations are becoming stretched and more accommodating of “foreign” forms of conception and expression – as if moving towards a resolution of the divine confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel. (1996:25)
168 need not resemble one another, so, instead of making itself similar to the meaning [Sinn] of the original, the translation must rather, lovingly and in detail, in its own language, form itself according to the manner of meaning [Art des Meinens] of the original, to make both recognizable as the broken part of a greater language, just as fragments are the broken part of a vessel. (1993:136)
The fragmentary nature of languages becomes more noticeable during the process of translation. Indeed the translations that Benjamin finds "exemplary" are those which would emphasise the fragmentary, broken pieces of languages. Benjamin uses Hölderlin's literal, German translation of Sophocles as an example. In Hölderlin's word by word translations "meaning plunges from abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths of language". (Benjamin - in Zohn's translation, 1992:82)
Benjamin states that literal translations demonstrate how a fidelity to reproducing the form of the original impedes the rendering of the sense and becomes instead a threat to comprehensibility. (1992:78) The Hölderlin translation remains faithful to the original text - following an exact method of reproduction - resulting in a progeny that in no way re-presents its parent text.
This faithful, literal reproduction of text that Benjamin so admires was described as "monstrous" by those seeking a traditional style of translation. And yet faithfulness to the original text is something that has been traditionally sought in most translations as a way of ensuring a re- presentation of the originals' content. In Zohn's translation, Benjamin states: "(t)he traditional concepts in any discussion of translations are fidelity and licence - the freedom of faithful reproduction and, in its service, fidelity to the word." (Benjamin, 1992:78) Trying to create a translation that fulfils these two ideals often places the translator in an inescapable double bind, choosing constantly between the letter and spirit of the word.
Benjamin also argues that even if there is an ideal of re-presenting the original, many translators seek to disguise the foreigness of the original so it
169 fits more neatly into the target language. Benjamin (translated by Jacobs) cites Rudolf Pannwitz: Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a false grounding: they wish to germanize Hindi, Greek, and English instead of hindicizing, grecizing, and anglicizing German. They have a much more significant respect for their own linguistic usage than for the spirit of the foreign work ... the fundamental error of the translator is that he holds fast to the incidental state of his own language instead of letting it be violently moved by the foreign. (Jacobs, 1993:130)
Seeking to germanise Hindi, Greek or English seems at odds with an ideal of “re-presentation” and bears a closer relationship with colonisation and assimilation of the original text.
Benjamin however, admires translations that have been "violently moved by the foreign". In these translations, once familiar words become incomprehensibly foreign in a number of ways: they can have different connotations or they can turn on their past or traditional meanings and gain new meanings. In the space between two languages, shifts occur between the languages as similarities to foreign words disarticulate the meanings of the word in the familiar language. Translation does not transform the original foreign language into the stability and recognisability of the familiar language but disarticulates the familiar, rendering it radically foreign and unrecognisable. That which was believed to be wholly “ours” unravels to a shifting and unstable “other”.
Indeed, there has been an interest in the transformative power of translation in modernist literature. Yao argues: In their efforts at cultural renewal, the modernists [Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce] employed languages other than English with such frequency that Pound’s famous injunction to “Make it New” seems in large measure to have meant “Make it Foreign”. … Indeed, much of the formal innovation in Modernist poetry embodies an attempt to infuse English with the energy of other languages and their “mechanisms of communication and registration”. (2002:6)
170 For Benjamin, the act of translation draws attention to the fragmentary language of the original and consequently emphasises particular characteristics about the language of the original that have been “forgotten” or “disguised” in traditional accounts of translation. Translation explores the incompleteness and inconsistencies in the language of the original: the marks and traces of other languages, interpretations of other texts, ambiguities, inconsistencies and differences. The unchanging, “definitive” original celebrated by Rabassa, is rethought by Benjamin as a mobile, complex text with multiple and divided meanings subject to historical change. Johnston paraphrasing Benjamin states: ...the meanings of words change, and even idiomatic forms and expressions mutate over the years. There is also the likelihood that the 'visible' features of a writer's style will change in the eyes of posterity; seemingly obvious stylistic tendencies may become less perceptible, while those that were only immanent may become more evident or important to later generations of readers. (1992:43)
Translation draws attention to the multiple and divided meanings within the language of the original by displacing them with another set of meanings equally multiple and divided. Gentzler argues: Translation, accordingly, ceases to be viewed as merely an operation carried out between two separate languages, but instead is seen as a process constantly in operation in single languages as well. Borderlines between languages disappear. In every linguistic system several languages are always already in operation - all languages contain elements from other languages, as well as an instability, an ambiguity, within their own terms. (1993:167)
It is possible that it is these instabilities and gaps in the original that some traditional theories of translation are called in to “disguise”. It is the translation that introduces the possibility of purity and unity in the original by subordinating itself as an impurity, as secondary. (Wigley, 1990:6) Mark Wigley states: The supplementary translation which appears as a violation of the purity of the work is actually the possibility of that very purity. Its violence to the original is a violent fidelity, a violence called for by the original precisely to construct itself as pure. The abuse of the text is called for by an abuse already within the text. Translation
171 exploits the conflict within the original to present the original as unified". (Wigley, 1990:6)
The devaluation of the translation is necessary in traditional theories of translation to maintain the ideal of the unchanging “original” work and the ideal of authorial intention.
If the words of the original are already divided and unstable, then it can be argued that the recovery of a lost archaic meaning or a definitive meaning is not possible. If there are gaps and instabilities within the language of the original, it can be argued that the language and meanings of the original will always exceed and escape the intentions of the author. And, if this is so, it is unsatisfactory to simply suggest that a translation is a departure from the original since the original is already fissured from within.
Derrida, in Alan Bass's translation argues:
In the limits to which it is possible, or at least appears possible, translation practices the difference between signified and signifier. But if this difference is never pure, no more so is translation, and for the notion of translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another. We will never have, and in fact have never had, to do with some 'transport' of pure signifieds from one language to another, or within one and the same language, that the signifying instrument would leave virgin and untouched. (1981:20 Derrida's emphasis)
So if a translation is a form of transformation - from one language to another or within the same language - the act of reading, even within one's own language, must also be considered an act of translation and hence transformation.
The original work, whether a poem, literature or visual art, always contains another version or structure. It is open to “foreign forms” that leave their marks and traces, disrupting the “purity” and “completeness” of the original work. In being open and unstable, the work of art is “incomplete”, not self- identical.
172
For some artwriters and artists such as Clement Greenberg, Frank Stella (and friends) and Donald Judd, the idea that a work of art was unstable, incomplete or not self-identical would be considered a kind of failure. The goal of modernist painting was, for Greenberg, to find the purity of painting – its unique and irreducible qualities – that Greenberg identified as flatness and the delimiting of flatness. But this search for the purity of painting re- emphasised painting’s contamination by “foreign forms” such as the decorative for example.
The ideals of “directness” and “wholeness” of paintings or objects were celebrated by Stella and Judd not only as a new development in the history of modernist painting but also as a way of overcoming the uncertain “outcomes” of detailed abstract expressionist paintings or the “part-by-part” composition of European abstraction. “Directness” or “wholeness” was a way of disposing of particular kinds of superfluous visual information – gestural brushstrokes, carefully mixed and placed colours, imagery and composition – to ensure a more powerful visual experience.
As has been argued in the first part of the thesis however, the “directness” of Stella’s Black series paintings allowed other kinds of “surplus” visual information to become visible. Stella’s Black series paintings were contrarily described as “white pin-striped” paintings, linked visually with the patterned fabric of Stella’s shirt and, in my reading of Die Fahne hoch (The Flag on High) (1959), seen as pattern and also as a symbol/signature of the artist. These contrary descriptions and associations of Stella’s paintings with patterned fabric and the textual demonstrate not only the ambiguity of figure/ground distinctions in these paintings but also the “contamination” of an aesthetic, formal purity by the decorative (textile design, fashion) and the textual. These paintings are not “direct” or complete but are digressive, divergent and open.
Lawrence Weiner’s linguistic statement-sculptures are also “incomplete” and productive of multiple and divided meanings. The need for Weiner to
173 supplement his statement-sculptures with the STATEMENT OF INTENT and the way the statement-sculptures become confused with the information about the statement-sculptures demonstrate a complicated co-dependency between art and information about art. The statement-sculptures are simultaneously art works, titles of art works, descriptions of art work and even function as explanatory commentary accompanying documentary photos of the works’ enactments. Contrary to the artist’s intentions, the typography and format complicate the reading/seeing of Weiner’s statement-sculptures. The materiality of the statement-sculptures interferes with and interrupts a transparent reading of the materials Weiner names in his statement sculptures.
The artwriters Stephen Melville and Bill Readings describe the instability and incompleteness of the art object as “the fissuring of the art object”. This fissuring is a condition of the “postmodern sublime”. (Melville and Readings, 1995:20) The “postmodern sublime” references Jean-Francois Lyotard’s understanding of the work of particular avant-gardes, and is of course a rethinking of the Kantian idea of the sublime. The sublime is, according to Kant, an emotion that brings pleasure and pain where pleasure proceeds from pain. The sublime occurs when the imagination fails to present any object that could accord with a concept, even if only in principle. (Lyotard, 1992:19) Sublime painting will: … present something, but negatively: it will therefore avoid figuration or representation; …it will make one see only by prohibiting one from seeing; it will give pleasure only by giving pain. (Lyotard, translated by Pefanis and Thomas, 1992:20)
Because there is no possible presentation or knowledge of reality provided by sublime painting, it disrupts and obstructs an idea of the beautiful and the formation of set criteria for judgement. Lyotard argues that the avant-garde works without rules or boundaries and therefore cannot be judged by any pre-existing rules or categories. This is because the work investigates those very rules or categories. Their work is a mode of critical practice which questions “What is art to be?” and questions what has gone before. (Lyotard, 1992:20-24)
174
Lyotard identifies a differend (an incommensurable difference of opinion) in modern art practice; a differend between regret and experimentation. (1992:22) The postmodern sublime would be: … that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations. (Lyotard, translated by Pefanis and Thomas, 1992:24)
Melville and Readings argue that the postmodern sublime is a “rewriting of modernism in terms of what it has repressed by privileging the beautiful over the sublime.” (1995:19) The modernism of the beautiful tried to separate visual art from literature (poetry, narrative). (Melville and Readings, 1995:19- 20) The purifying of visual art from contamination by literature, was to ground and preserve each discipline in its own particularity. For Melville and Readings the postmodern sublime can be understood as “the active consequence of foregrounding the simultaneous incommensurability and intimacy of the visual and the textual.” (1995:20. Melville and Readings’ emphasis) The postmodern sublime would be an acknowledgement of the “shock of heterogeneity”, where the visual and textual co-exist but continue to interrupt and disrupt each other. (Melville and Readings, 1995: 20) The postmodern sublime would include those practices in modernism that acknowledge the necessary heterogeneity of the art object and the conditions of its institutional support (the gallery, the art market, the frame, the signature), those art practices that incorporate text/image and even those sites where there is an interaction between the object and its cultural textualisation including the object and its photographic reproduction or indeed reading abstraction through a decorative framework.
This co-existence and clash of the visual and textual, however, cannot be explained or described definitively. Melville and Readings state: We might, then, want to speak of this in terms of a working at the deconstruction of the binary opposition between aesthetic autonomy and a general history of cultural representation: a work that keeps open the aesthetic as a question by refusing either to
175 mystify art by claiming that art provides its own answers itself or to argue that the answers to the question of art can be exhaustively provided from elsewhere, from a general history of culture. (1995:20)
Stella’s paintings cannot be exhausted by an interpretation. There is no final act of interpretation in which a painting can be “replaced” by its meaning. (Melville and Readings, 1995:22) The various interpretations of Stella’s paintings (as formal abstract compositions, as decorative, as pattern/symbol/signature) each involve a debatable starting point and hence there is space (or even a demand) for yet another account of these paintings. (Carrier, 1991:240)
While the modernism of the beautiful sought for stability and purity within each discipline as a way of making the discipline stronger and ensuring its survival, the postmodern sublime would counteract with the claim that it is instability and incompleteness that ensures the art object’s future survival. The art object, in its instability, remains incomplete and open to future possibilities and acts of interpretation. It can be continually rethought and reinterpreted in art writing. It can be reworked and questioned in the work of other artists. Gentzler states: The original gives itself (aufgeben) in the very modifying of itself; it survives by its mutation, by its transformation. And in its renewal, the original too is thereby modified - it grows, matures. (1993:165).
From this theoretical viewpoint, a work of art - be it a poem, a painting, a symphony - must be open to translation if it is to survive. The essential element of the work - the unfathomable, the mysterious, the “poetic”, is its translatability. Benjamin, in Zohn's translation, states: Translatability is an essential quality of certain works , which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability. (1992:71)
So what is this “translatability” inherent in some works? Jacobs argues that translatability is that "which we might also call the critical text within".
176 (1993:138) It is a potential of the work itself. This critical element could take a number of forms.
According to de Man, translatability is that which in a text could be called a "mise en abyme structure, the kind of structure by means of which it is clear that the text becomes itself an example of what it exemplifies." (1986:86). The “translatability” of Benjamin's essay ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, its mise en abyme structure, is in its untranslatability - in its state of being what Jacobs calls a translation of a translation. (1993). Jacob's argues that: What Benjamin's essay performs ... is an act of translation. It is, to begin with, a translation of "translation" which then rapidly demands an equally violent translation of every term promising the key to its definition. ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ dislocates definitions rather than establishing them because, itself an uncanny translation of sorts, its concern is not the reader's comprehension nor is its essence communication. (1993:129).
It follows then that for the reader of an English translation of ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, there is a self-conscious awareness of the intermediate voice of the translator performing his task of transformation. De Man repeatedly asserts the “untranslatability” of Benjamin's text yet obviously the text has been translated many times into different languages. It is these very translations which “disarticulate” the text. Translation is never completed but it is never completely frustrated. Considering that the only access I have to the text is through an English translation by Harry Zohn and through quoted fragments by Paul de Man (1986) and Carol Jacobs (1993) who use their own translations of the text, I am already caught in the double bind between translatability and untranslatability. Each of these writers translates the text in different ways. There are shifts in meaning as different words, different sentence structures emphasise certain phrases, miss phrases and re- interpret others. This openness is a property of the text and the disarticulations of the translations seem to trace and retrace, to do and undo, to write and unwrite.
177 But for works of visual art, in terms of “mis en abyme”, it is necessary to be cautious at this point. The “mise en abyme structure” is sometimes used as a possible “methodological construal of deconstruction”. (Melville, 1994:36) Stephen Melville argues that at times these “methodological” uses of deconstruction are inadequate not only in the ways these kinds of writing restrict or limit “deconstruction” to a method but also that these methods do not sufficiently confront the specificity of the object studied. For Melville, those now “classic” examples of artwriting that examine “mis en abyme” (self- reflexivity) in painting (for example Michel Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas in the opening pages of The Order of Things or Michael Fried’s reading of Courbet’s Studio in Courbet’s Realism), are “not justified by anything parallel to the sustained meditation on the materiality of writing that gave rise to deconstructive practices in literary and philosophical contexts”. (Melville, 1994:36) He further argues that what will “count as either reflexivity or, more crucially, its disruption within the contexts of painting or sculpture remains unclear”. (Melville, 1994:36)
Theories of language cannot simply be imported and “applied” to the art object because as theories move from one field of study to another, the theories are changed by the specificity of the field and object of study. Because visual art has differences to a language system, theories of language developed specifically to engage with philosophy or literature (including deconstruction - or indeed, translation) cannot simply be “applied” to the art object, which has its own particular history and context. (Melville, 1991. 1994)
In recent decades, theories such as “deconstruction” have been redeployed and mobilised in art discourses including the visual arts. But, if the translation and the art object are marked by an inability to be self-identical, then it follows that a theory such as “deconstruction” would also be unstable and fissured. Mark Wigley, who has examined the ways in which “deconstruction” has been redeployed and mobilised in architectural discourses, argues:
178 To translate deconstruction in architectural discourse is not, therefore, to recover faithfully some original, undivided sense of deconstruction. … To translate deconstruction in architectural discourse is to examine the gaps in deconstructive writing that demand an architectural translation in order to constitute those texts as deconstructive. The architectural translation of deconstruction is literally the production of deconstruction. (1990:7)
Theories of language, such as deconstruction (and translation), are translated and changed as they move to another field, such as architecture and the visual arts.
Apart from the problematic “mise en abyme structure”, the translatability of a work of art can also be thought of in other ways. Benjamin links the mode of translation, and hence the “translatability” of a work of art, to the criticism and literary theory of German Romanticists such as Schlegel. (1992:76) Paul de Man states: The act of critical, theoretical reading performed by a critic like Friedrich Schlegel and performed by literary theory in general - by means of which the original work is not imitated or reproduced but is to some extent put in motion, de-canonized, questioned in a way which undoes its claim to canonical authority - is similar to what a translator performs. (1986:82-3)
Benjamin argues that both translation and criticism are important factors in the continued life of literary works. (1992:76) Derrida utilises this idea too. Andrew Benjamin states:
For Derrida the contrast between survival and death when removed to the source of interpretation and meaning can be rewritten in terms of a continual capacity for reinterpretation, rereading, and redeployment. The question of survival and thus of the text's capacity to live on is linked to the impossibility of a given context to delimit and therefore to define the meaning of a text. The text survives interpretation. It even survives in translation. (1989:5)
In translation there is the possibility of seeing language as always in the process of modifying the original text. Translatability, the essential element in a work of art, is now expressed in terms of the work of art's ability to live on. Andrew Benjamin argues that the "essential is re-expressed in terms of
179 translatability and now translatability has itself been re-expressed in terms of fortleben; i.e. in terms of after-life/survival; the capacity of the work to live on." (1989:90) From this theoretical viewpoint, a work of art is a work of “art” because it has the capacity for repeated, sustained and rigorous reinterpretation, rereading and redeployment.
A work of visual art, if it is to “live on”, must also have this quality of “translatability”. This translatability may take the form of artwriting or the form of other art works that continually re-interpret, reread and redeploy earlier work.
But how would artwriting, as a kind of translation, proceed? Benjamin, speaking of a translation, states: Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux. (translated by Zohn, 1992:80-81)
The translation’s light touch on the original is productive of a divergent, digressive kind of writing. This kind of translation is not singular or final. It does not aim to reproduce or replace the original. Instead, from a small point of contact, the translation redeploys and reworks the original – in this case the art object. Incomplete and open to many translations, the art object demonstrates its translatability (there is a story to tell) and untranslatability (there are always more translations). The original’s continued ability to be translated ensures its survival.
180 Chapter 8
Interior Decorations: Decorative Translations of Modernist Abstraction
181 As discussed in earlier chapters of the thesis, modernism’s entanglement with the decorative is an area of instability, circulating with inconsistent and contradictory ideas. Furthermore, as I have argued throughout, the decorative and the textual are two areas of general instability in modernist aesthetic thought. One way that modernist abstraction has, however, displayed its ability to “live on” is through its various translations: in the work of other artists, in artwriting and through permutations of its ideas. In recent decades, a productive site for the translation of modernist abstraction has been through concepts of the ornamental or the decorative. (Brüderlin, 2001; McNamara, 1997; Broude, 1982) Artists, in recent decades, have exploited and explored this decorative instability leading to the claim that much post- second world war abstraction can be understood as a kind of “ornamentalisation of the formal language of earlier non-figurative art”. (Brüderlin, 2001:19) Particularly in the last thirty years, the decorative or the ornamental have been key terms for understanding the work of a number of “post-minimalist” artists such as Philip Taaffe, Christopher Wool, Sigmar Polke, and Rosemarie Trockel. (Brüderlin, 2001:205) (Ferguson, 1991:96) An interest in the decorative has also continued into some contemporary art practices in Australia including the work of Tony Clark, Debra Dawes, Kate Mackay, Anne-Marie May, Helen Nicholson, Elizabeth Pulie, Bruce Reynolds, Constanze Zikos and the collaborative work between myself and Kathleen Horton. (McNamara, 1997:7)
This chapter of the thesis examines two different decorative translations of modernist abstraction - Markus Brüderlin’s Ornament and Abstraction (2001) and Andrew McNamara’s Ornamentalism (1997). Brüderlin’s decorative translation of modernist abstraction develops a new model for understanding the development of abstraction through the ornamental form of the arabesque; while in McNamara’s decorative translation there is an investigation of the monolithic claims of modernism and an “Australian” practice of the decorative. By examining these more recent negotiations and articulations of the decorative in both modernism and in contemporary art practices, this chapter situates my creative practice in an international
182 context particularly within Brüderlin’s category of a calligraphic arabesque and in an Australian context as part of an “ironic”, decorative practice.
Markus Brüderlin, curator of the exhibition Ornament and Abstraction (2001) and editor of the collection of essays in Ornament and Abstraction: The dialogue between non-Western, modern and contemporary art, performs a decorative translation of key modernist abstract artworks and the discursive legacies of the avant-garde, modernist abstraction and formalism that have surrounded these works. Through the exhibition and accompanying essays, the contradictions and inconsistencies that have haunted the representation of modernist abstraction and its entanglement with the ornamental are redressed. In Brüderlin’s argument, the ornamental is used to question not only how modernist abstract art has been understood and written about by artists and artwriters but also how the ornamental can be used to reinterpret and redeploy significant paintings of modernist abstraction. Decorative impulses within Art Nouveau (explicitly) and within Kandinsky (implicitly) are no longer marginalised (as in previous dominant accounts of art history), but are, in Brüderlin’s narrative, re-examined and redeployed as significant practices within a decorative translation of abstraction.
Greenberg argued, in his developmental narrative of art, that traditional Western easel painting has been subjected to an “uninterrupted process of attrition” from Manet on. (1986b:222) Traditional Western easel painting, projected “the illusion of a boxlike cavity into the wall behind it” but modernist painters began to gradually flatten out this cavity. (Greenberg, 1986b:221) Within this increasingly flattened space, the elements of modernist painting are reorganised and reoriented in terms of “flatness and frontality”. (Greenberg, 1986b:221-222) In Greenberg’s account of modernist painting, forming a link between traditional, representational masterpieces of art history through to the early European modernists and then to new forms of American abstract painting, was a vital strategy to not only legitimise American abstraction but to consolidate the claim that New York was the new centre of artistic innovation. His developmental argument continued a tradition from previous developmental narratives of art history, such as Ernst
183 Gombrich’s, that posited the development of painting as a move towards greater naturalism. (Carrier, 1987:98) In contrast to Greenberg’s earlier developmental narrative of abstraction, the narrative that Brüderlin develops does not rely on the idea that abstract art develops from “naturalistic” representations. Rather, the ornamental provides a model for abstraction; it does not define an identity for abstract art.
By translating modernist abstraction through the ornamental, Brüderlin identifies those broad theoretical concerns that abstract art shares with (or has plundered from) the ornamental. The treatment of surface as an all-over field, the manipulation of figure/ground distinctions, serial repetition, and patterns of symmetry are some of the aspects of two dimensional design that became increasingly important to early modernists working in ways that challenged the Western pictorial convention of painting as a “boxlike cavity into the wall behind it”.116
Translating abstract art through the ornamental requires a framework and vocabulary other than that used by the avant-garde, utopian or formalist discourses of modernist abstraction. Brüderlin looks to histories of ornament in the West - such as Alois Riegl’s book Stilfragen published in 1893 - and the ornamental practices and theories of medieval Islamic artists and architects (or at least a Western conception of these diverse and ancient practices) to embroider a different conceptual motif and vocabulary suitable for an ornamental abstraction. (2001:108, 109)
The motif/concept that Brüderlin chooses is a Westernised term: the arabesque. The arabesque is a curving line that splits as it winds its way across surfaces. It proceeds by a law of “eternal bifurcation”. As the arabesque line curves, it splits, forming into “buds“, “blossoms“, “leaves“, spirals, interlacements. Thus, it has no central or key motif, and no origin. It does not have a beginning or end but can indefinitely extend and expand.
116 In 1890, Maurice Denis declared, “a picture – before it is a battlehorse, a nude woman, or some anecdote – is essentially a plane surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order”. (Denis quoted in Moszynska, 1990:8)
184 (Schimmel in Brüderlin, 2001:31) The “eternal bifurcation” of the arabesque however, is also suggestive of a problematic within the modernist concept of self-referentiality. In the model of the arabesque, the purity, stability and self- evidence that “self-referentiality” implies is always divided, unstable and inconsistent. The instability between the organic/geometric and abstract/figurative forms, in the model of the arabesque, becomes a way of understanding and articulating those same instabilities in the work of many artists of the last four decades. (Brüderlin, 2001:24) For example, in the work of Frank Stella as he moves from the geometric patterns of his early paintings (such as the Black series of the late 1950s) to the organic curves of his aluminium and mixed media “reliefs” (such as the Exotic Birds series of the late 1970s).
The arabesque is also a prominent feature of much Islamic ornamentation. Islamic ornamentation has three categories; floral ornament, the straight lined guilloche, and calligraphy. The link between these categories of ornamentation is the constantly regenerating and mutating line of the arabesque. (Brüderlin, 2001:98) Floral ornament is the organic arabesque. The organic arabesque is open to constant metamorphosis as budding tendrils variously form flowers, vases and bird forms. The straight lined guilloche is the geometric arabesque. The geometric arabesque braids lines into complex interlacements and interlocks geometric shapes into patterns or tessellations. Calligraphy, figured by letter forms, repeatedly passes through the organic and geometric arabesque. (Brüderlin, 2001:98) The linear art of the arabesque continually abandons and reconstitutes its figurations as organic, geometric and calligraphic. For Brüderlin, the three forms of the arabesque are important structuring and compositional devices whose “inconsistencies” have been “consistently” useful to different art practices throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Brüderlin, 2001:21)
The organic metaphors and associations often used to describe the ornamental arabesque seem problematic to describe abstract art. But in Western art history, the arabesque has been understood as an exemplary abstract form. The precise “source” of “organic” ornament in the natural (as
185 stylised plant or animal forms) or for geometric ornament as imitation (of basket weaving or textiles) has been questioned and challenged since the late nineteenth century by writers such as Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer. In Stifragen (1893), Reigl argued that the arabesque “resulted from purely abstract formal transformations; and any approximation to models in nature was secondary.” (quoted in Brüderlin, 2001:21 note 17) Wilhelm Worringer also questioned the “source” of ornament in the natural. He states: …the process is that a pure ornament, that is, an abstract formation or image, is naturalised ex post, and not that a natural object is stylised ex post. This antithesis is decisive, for it means that what is primary is not the natural model but the law abstracted from it. (Worringer quoted in Brüderlin, 2001:102)
For Riegl and Worringer, the arabesque is a “pure” form that is abstract and crystalline. This form only incidentally resembles basket weaving and its figuring of floral or vase forms is a secondary effect. (Brüderlin, 2001: 21, 102)
If the ornamental arabesque cannot be traced to some original or primary source in nature or textiles, then it is a form that complicates the classical division between copy and original. The ornamental is a repetition of forms, an “infinite multiplication” that has never had a primary (and therefore “authentic”) prototype. (Carboni, 1991:111). While the establishment of what is “primary” (an abstract law rather than a natural model) was one of the issues concerning Riegl and Worringer, it is not a key issue in contemporary debates of the ornamental.
Indeed, some contemporary debates of the ornamental emphasise the endless play between the referential and the abstract in the work of particular Australian artists. (McNamara, 1997:9; Broadfoot, 1997:42) In the work of some of these Australian artists, it is the inability to definitively identify “abstract” or “referential” that is deemed significant. For example, in Starlite (1993) by Australian artist Debra Dawes, the individual, repeating panels of the painting reference the emblems of modernist abstraction and self- referentiality: the grid form and serial repetition. But the reference to the
186 Starlite bricks that form decorative feature walls and screens for suburban carports and patios (including in the suburb where I live) is just as strong and significant in this painting.
Figure 13: Starlite (1993) by Debra Dawes in McNamara (1997:38)
In Dawes’ painting, the modernist rhetoric of pure surface and self- referentiality of the grid and serial form, are refigured by the ornamental into an excessive display of references to the quotidian. (McNamara, 1997:9) In his introduction to the catalogue essays of the exhibition Ornamentalism (1997), the curator, Andrew McNamara observes: Australian avant-gardism has rarely been transgressive in the traditional sense. Indeed, Australian avant-gardism often assumes more ironic stances that are rarely iconoclastic, utopian or redemptive. Attempts to uphold a purity of (formal) conviction tend to be readily contaminated by the quotidian, the suburban and the provincial. (1997:7)
187 It is with a sense of a self-conscious irony to the inconsistencies of the avant- garde that McNamara reads the art practices that are included in the exhibition Ornamentalism (1997).117 That sense of irony and quotidian contamination, evident in Dawes’ painting Starlite (1993), is productive of an “extraordinary equation”. (Broadfoot, 1997:41-42) In this “extraordinary equation”, the ordinary iconic patio wall of suburban Australia is equal to the extraordinary, iconic purity of an International modernism. (Broadfoot, 1997:41-42) It is in the equivocal play of these references to modernist abstraction and the quotidian that raises the question of “what makes both responses feasible”? (McNamara, 1997:9) What makes both responses feasible is that the “purity” of modernist abstraction was never pure to begin with: it was never “purely” abstract, nor was it “purely” painting. Instead, the visual codes, conventions and techniques of abstract painting overlap with other visual codes – in this case, with the decorative patterns of a suburban building material.
In my creative practice, there is also a play between the abstract and the referential. As mentioned previously, the patterned surface of my work is made from letters of the alphabet. Letters are strange objects that have always complicated the idea of the referential. Letters of the alphabet have traditionally been thought of as symbols to represent the sound of the voice with unique letter combinations to represent individual phonemes. Of course, this mimetic, phonetic ideal is immediately frustrated: homonyms, inconsistent sounds and inconsistent spelling have been properties of written English from the beginning. This phonetic frustration lead linguists such as Ferdinand Saussure to exclaim that writing was tyrannical and distorted natural speech through “orthographic monstrosities” and “phonic deformations”. (Saussure quoted in Lipton and Miller, 1999:11) But, of course, the alphabet exceeds the voice (and the confines of its supposed mimetic function) in other ways, particularly in its graphic design.
117 The names of the artists in Ornamentalism (1997) were mentioned earlier in this chapter and include: Tony Clark, Debra Dawes, Kate Mackay, Anne-Marie May, Helen Nicholson, Elizabeth Pulie, Bruce Reynolds, Constanze Zikos and the collaborative work between myself and Kathleen Horton.
188 Throughout the history of book printing, the alphabet has been treated as either an idealised form or as a form to be manipulated and changed according to the logic of a rationalised system. Gutenberg’s fonts, for example, simulated some of the effects of handwriting while in the Renaissance, roman letters were designed according to idealised proportions of the human body and mathematical formulae “endowed with divine significance”. (Lupton and Miller, 1999:54) In 1693, a committee established by Louis XIV, made further changes to the alphabet based on ideals of scientific method. A grid was placed over traditional letterforms derived from handwritten styles. The letterforms were then “rationalised” to fit within this grid. The generation of italic forms of this alphabet was made possible by shifting this grid to an angle. (Lupton and Miller, 1999:54-55) In the late 18th century, Giambattista Bodoni and his contemporary François Ambroise Didot constructed different typefaces (Bodoni and Didot) that organised letters into oppositional elements – serifs and stems, thick and thin, horizontals and verticals. Bodoni and Didot treated the alphabet as a system of relations rather than a series of letterforms based on archetypal or idealised structures. Modern typography extends their ideas. Letters are treated as flexible units within a larger system where the relationship between letters in that system (or font) are just as important as the identity of the individual letters. (Lupton and Miller, 1999:57)
So the letterform’s two traditional mimetic or referential functions (as representing the voice, as mimicking handwritten forms) have been consistently frustrated or deliberately overturned. But this is not the end to the letterform’s complex play between the referential and the abstract. The letter is, of course, an abstract design. The letter (or number) that appears in art, however, does complicate an idea of the purely “abstract”. It does not matter that the letter has been painted – for it is still “a real” letter. (Burn, 1993:no pagination) In my creative practice, there is a further play with the complexity of the letterform as I often take letters and double, mirror and rotate them into complex patterns that sometimes resemble non-Western scripts (Farsi, Urdu, Arabic, Singhalese) or sometimes wallpaper. Again, this is yet another play with the abstract and the referential. Certainly Brüderlin’s
189 model of the eternally bifurcating and mutating line of the arabesque is appropriate for these instances of equivocal play between the abstract and the referential.
In an Australian context, the play between modernist abstraction and the quotidian referential has some further implications. Australian artwriter, Ian Burn, has speculated that it is as if the temporal and geographic distance of modernism from “the periphery” has given particular Australian art practices a different, wider view: a peripheral vision. (Broadfoot, 1997:41) With this peripheral vision, the inconsistencies of a centralised modernism are more noticeable. Rather than something to be slavishly imitated, high modernist abstraction became, in some Australian art practices such as Robert Rooney’s, something to engage in a dialogue. (Broadfoot, 1997:41; Pestorius, 1997) Rooney’s abstract paintings, with ironic titles such as Superknit (Numbers 1 – 6 of 1970), are a whimsical yet confronting combination of hard-edge abstraction, pop and a referential painting of a knitting pattern.
A peripheral vision is, of course, also inconsistent with the “frontality” of modernist painting. As mentioned earlier, Greenberg argued that modernist painting “organises its elements in terms of flatness and frontality”. (1986b:221-222) Perhaps the ironic references to the quotidian referential in Australian abstraction could be attributed to a peripheral vision of this “flatness and frontality”? From the periphery, odd glimpses of the suburban patio wall or knitting patterns keep intruding into the space of high modernist painting.
McNamara understands the ornamental abstraction of Australian art practices as “always relational (neither purely abstract or referential, formal or contextual)” and to this list could be added neither pure ornament nor pure abstraction, neither purely from the centre nor purely from the periphery. Instead, McNamara proposed (after de Duve) that these Australian practices perform a subtle reworking of modernism, negotiating a “mannerist” practice
190 that is not beyond modernism (in the sense of a post-modernism) but not the same as modernism. (1997:14)
This play, between the abstract and the referential, is evident in the work of many artists, Australian and international, whose work can be understood through the ornamental. Certainly the endlessness of abstract/referential play complicates and questions Riegl’s and Worringer’s search for a “primary” source for the ornamental form in the purely abstract. The key implication of Riegl’s and Worringer’s writing for Brüderlin, however, is that the ornamental also acknowledges a long history of a non-mimetic logic in Western art. This long history offers an alternative framework through which to re-examine modernist abstraction.
According to Brüderlin, the ornamental is also important because it provides a framework through which to question the grand narratives of the avant- garde. He explains his argument through a linguistic/mathematical formula (another extraordinary equation): “Abstraction – Avant-garde = Ornament”. (Brüderlin, 2001:205) The grand narratives of the avant-garde (a “dynamics of progress”, a “dogma” of novelty, a self-referential purity, a Utopian vision to bring about the unity of art and life, universal significance, the myth of the artist) “undergo their dialectic correction in ornamentation” particularly by the ornamental, abstract art practices of the post-minimalists. (Brüderlin, 2001:204 - 206)
The history of art, particularly modernist narratives of the history of art, is represented as a developmental progression through names of the masters - Manet, Cézanne, Picasso and so on. This succession of names signifies the importance and imperative of identifying the innovations of key individuals who become lionised by their inclusion in this select list. The ornamental however, is historicized and traced through a set of different names. Furthermore, these sets of names consist of broad cultural categories such as Egyptian lotus ornament, Ancient Greek palmette, the Roman acanthus,
191 the Northern interlace, the Islamic arabesque.118 (Brüderlin, 2001:18) Ornament is the art that cannot be linked with a personal name and becomes “art without the artist, art without aura”. (Carboni, 1991:106) Ornamental forms are socially transmitted and have a culturally coded content. As such, the ornamental can not be represented as a unique innovation of an individual artist.
Through the three arabesques of the ornamental, Brüderlin seeks to rewrite the genealogy of modernist abstraction. In this ornamental genealogy, practices that have been marginalised by dominant discourses of modernist abstraction are re-examined and redeployed as significant. For example, the narrative of the organic arabesque, with its writhing line, is traced through the work of artists and theorists such as Philipp Otto Runge, Art Nouveau, Henry van de Velde’s modern conception of the line, Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock. (Brüderlin, 2001:23) In this genealogy, art practices such as Art Nouveau that have been forgotten or marginalised, are rethought as significant early practices in the move towards an abstract modernism.
Through its display of sinuous, ornamental lines, Art Nouveau bought significance to what was thought to be safely outside the domain of art – the decorative. In Art Nouveau, the “peripheral elements of art had become pivotal; marginalia began to take over the composition”. (McNamara, 1997:12) The “floral” forms of Art Nouveau in Paris, Munich and Brussels were generally denigrated as “tapeworm style” or “noodle style” by van de Velde and Josef Hoffmann. Hoffmann preferred geometric, ornamental forms and van de Velde was interested in theories of “structuralist abstraction” that he thought were quite different to particular ideas of Art Nouveau. (Bruderlin, 2001:108, 118) Through the line of the organic arabesque however, Art Nouveau is reinstated alongside cubism as another possible “gateway” to abstraction. (Brüderlin, 2001:108,118)
118 Riegl’s history of ornament does rely on a narrative of development as he traces links between the Egyptian lotus ornament, the Greek palmette, the Roman acanthus and arabesque ornament in Islamic art. (Bruderlin, 2001:18)
192 Just as Art Nouveau was marginalised from dominant narratives of modernist abstraction, so were some abstract art practices, such as Kandinsky’s paintings. Although sometimes seen as part of a canonical modernism, Kandinsky’s paintings also do not fit comfortably in a traditional, progressive narrative of abstraction from cubism and, as a consequence, are sometimes dismissed as strange aberrances or failures.119 But in Brüderlin’s decorative genealogy, Kandinsky’s paintings are re-read as an important reworking of the Art Nouveau line. The sinuous, continuous line of Art Nouveau is translated in Kandinsky’s paintings into a dissonant, fragmented line suitable for a “modern, abstract, pictorial language”. (Brüderlin, 2001:108) Also in this new lineage are Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist paintings which are understood as a reworking of the organic, arabesque line as “gestural trace”.120 (Brüderlin, 2001:110) The various translations of the organic arabesque line are not understood as the unique innovation of a particular artist, but rather as a continuing repetition and redeployment of a cultural, ornamental form.
The lineage of the geometric arabesque is just as interesting as the organic arabesque. In this line, Brüderlin places the Vienna Secessionists, Piet Mondrian, the Bauhaus, De Stilj, Anni and Josef Albers, Sol Le Witt, and Frank Stella (among others). The geometric arabesque is understood as the
119 Clement Greenberg regarded Kandinsky’s paintings as failures in a number of different ways. Although Kandinsky was earnest in his admiration of a modernist abstract “style” developed in a metropolitan centre, he “fails in one way or another really to understand what it was about”. (Greenberg, 1986c:3) He had a good intellectual understanding of post-cubist painting and yet “failed in the end to understand it in practice”. (Greenberg, 1986c:4) While his paintings from 1909 to the early 1920s were his best works, his paintings from the middle twenties “represent a misconception, not only of cubism and its antecedents, but of the very art of putting paint on canvas to make a picture”. (Greenberg, 1986c:4) Kandinsky also rejected what Greenberg saw as: a prior and perhaps more essential achievement of avant-garde art than its deliverance of painting from representation: its recapture of the literal realization of the physical limitations and conditions of the medium and of the positive advantages to be gained from the exploitation of these very limitations. (Greenberg, 1986c:5) And so on, and so on. Greenberg concludes, “the example of [Kandinsky’s] work is dangerous to young painters”. (1986c:6) 120 Jackson Pollock’s work is incredibly translatable. I have read many accounts of his work that understand the work in diverse ways – through surrealism, as “Action Painting”, as Greenberg’s most successful “all-over” surface, as the informe and now through the ornamental.
193 acknowledgement of the surface of painting as a compositional structure. (Büttner in Brüderlin, 2001:88)
The modernist insistence on the importance of the “all-over” surface – “to give equal pictorial weight to every single area of the picture surface” - is often represented as a progressive development from Cézanne and cubism. (Golding, 2000:18) As part of this developmental narrative, Piet Mondrian’s grid and checkerboard paintings of 1917 – 1919, are represented as a further development of cubism. But this is a problematic assumption in that Mondrian was distancing himself from the influence of cubism at this time. (Brüderlin 2001:138) In Checkerboard Composition with Light Colours (1919) the surface of the canvas is divided by dark lines into a rectangular grid. This compositional structure was an attempt by Mondrian to “annul” the difference, the age old hierarchy, between figure and ground and line and colour. (Brüderlin, 2001:138)
While Mondrian’s treatment of the canvas surface can be represented as a development of cubism, it is also a technique that shares many concerns with an ornamental strategy of playing over the entire surface of an object or textile. (Büttner in Brüderlin, 2001:164) Treating each part of the surface as an “equivalence” is a basic problem in ornamentation – particularly in textile design where an all over pattern structures and fills the surface. (Brüderlin, 2001:138)
The third term of the ornamental is the calligraphic arabesque. But Brüderlin offers no sustained Western lineage of practices of the third arabesque. While this third term could be used to describe a continuing practice within Islamic cultures, Brüderlin gives only disjointed, isolated Western examples of the calligraphic arabesque rather than the “developmental” narratives he constructs for the organic and geometric arabesques. Included in this lineage are the illuminated manuscripts of the book of Kells, the work of Ümran Schelling-Tezcan, a Turkish artist living in Zurich, the frottage work of Ding Yi and a few works of Paul Klee that feature a spidery line.
194 In Western art practices, there are many artists who utilised text in some way: the experimental typographies of Italian and Russian futurists, cubist collages, the word plays and puns of the dada and surrealists, pop artists, fluxus artists, concrete poets, conceptual artists, or “feminist” artists of the 1980s. But these art practices are not progeny of Brüderlin’s lineage of the calligraphic arabesque. Does the calligraphic arabesque, with its infinite elaborations and ornamental, abstract vocabularies, exclude the communicative, didactic, polemical or political fervour of much text work? Are these text works completely alien to the kinds of density and opaqueness that inhabit an ornamental, arabesque calligraphy? If the work of some “post-minimalist” artists can be understood as a kind of “ornamentalisation of the formal language of earlier non-figurative art”, I begin to wonder if my art practice, which explores the decorative and graphic qualities of writing, could also be described as a kind of ornamentalisation of textual art practices?
My paintings and photographs feature patterns and text but the text in my work is only sometimes readable. When the text is readable, it is vague or descriptive rather than didactic or polemical. Instead, in most of my work, the decorative, graphic possibilities of text are displayed. Letter forms, with their decorative serifs, curving lines and careful proportions, are doubled, mirrored and rotated to make patterns. In some of the works, these patterns are then fragmented so that sometimes neither text nor pattern is recognisable unless the viewer stands at an oblique angle to (at the periphery of) the work. Certainly Brüderlin’s decorative genealogy offers a comfortable, contextual niche for my work in the lineage of the calligraphic arabesque. It is a lineage that neatly dovetails my interests in text and ornament. It is also a kind of rapprochement of what has sometimes been understood as oppositional: text and abstraction.
To speculate that the calligraphic arabesque could also be a kind of “ornamentalisation” of particular kinds of text practices is also useful. My art practice has been influenced by the text practices of some conceptual and “feminist” artists. But often, the philosophical frameworks or political ardour
195 of these works are problematic and/or quite different to my own.121 For example, Chapter Five of the thesis examined Lawrence Weiner’s statement- sculptures and the problematic theories of language that framed his work. Weiner believed in the ability of language to correspond to an empirical reality. By nominating “everyday” materials in his statement-sculptures and avoiding metaphorical language, Weiner believed his statement-sculptures would be “direct”, that is understandable to ordinary people – not just to those knowledgeable about art. He also believed that his use of language would be able to transcend historical, cultural and linguistic boundaries. But of course Weiner’s use of language is not only culturally and historically specific, but also works in complex and contradictory ways. It is not easily understood either by “the everyman” or indeed viewers with a knowledge of art. The materials and processes Weiner nominates in his statement- sculptures are enmeshed in art discourses and there is a revolutionary fervour that permeates the STATEMENT OF INTENT that locates the work in the late 1960s. Describing my art practice through the lineage of the calligraphic arabesque is a way of articulating my works’ divergences from these earlier text practices.
But while some aspects of the calligraphic arabesque are appealing, I have reservations and questions about Brüderlin’s decorative genealogy. Brüderlin’s translation of the history of modernist abstraction acknowledges the debt that abstract painting owes to the ornamental. The specificities of different ornamental practices, which many contemporary artists reference in their work, however, remain largely unexamined. For example, Brüderlin’s argument and organisation of the exhibition Ornament and Abstraction (2001) relies, in part, on a comparison of Western art with the diverse and ancient practices of architecture, tiling, manuscript illustration, sacred writings and ceramic ware of medieval Islamic culture. These diverse practices are often understood in the West as “ornamental art practices”. Whether these practices can be understood as “art” while ignoring their identity and context within distinct, complex, and diverse societies and cultural practices that are
121 The different philosophical frameworks of my creative practice are examined in the last chapter of the thesis.
196 not necessarily understood as “art” is a long, ongoing debate. Brüderlin’s translations repeats, in some ways, that avant-garde modernist strategy of appropriation from non-Western cultures. (Grabar, 1992; Said, 1995) Brüderlin does try to address these “post-colonial” issues by including in the exhibition and catalogue the work of artists and writers – from Islamic and other cultures – that specifically address these very problems in their art practices or artwriting. While the acknowledgement of these post-colonial problems of appropriation is admirable, there still remains the question of how to adequately acknowledge the specificity of ornamental practices.
The ways in which to adequately acknowledge the specificity of ornamental practices and the ways these practices have informed the work of artists, has been a concern since the early 1980s. In the early 1980s, “Feminist” art practices, such as Miriam Schapiro’s, were understood through the conflict of the decorative and modernist abstraction. (Broude, 1982) In her discussion of Schapiro’s art work, Norma Broude argues that to understand the decorative as part of abstraction is “fruitless” because such an exercise would only continue to value decorative work if it was removed from the context of the decorative (and its association with women’s craft) and given significance and elevation as art. (1982:327) She believed this occurred in the way Kandinsky and Henri Matisse understood their work. Broude argues: For in the works of both these artists, the influences of decoration are submerged and transformed by virtue of their placement within another context, through translation into the traditional high art methods and materials of paint on canvas or – in the case of Matisse’s late works – cut and pasted papers that might imitate the look but never the materials or procedures of the despised and lowly crafts. (1982:320)
The decorative arts were plundered for ideas and inspiration just as modernist artists such as Picasso had plundered ideas from the traditional artefacts and practices of non-Western cultures. Much of modernist art history represented the work of Kandinsky and Matisse in a way that refigured decorative practices to a form of “high art” and consequently reinforced “the separate and inferior status” of the decorative. (Broude, 1982:320)
197
The other criticism that Broude makes about the representation of decorative art practices in contemporary art writing, is that the specificities of decorative techniques and processes that these art practices reference are ignored and undervalued. To redress this inadequacy, Broude argues for a separate category of decorative art that would allow a historical re-evaluation of the work of decorative artists. (1982) She does not make clear, however, where this separate category is to be located; as a separate category within fine art, as a separate category from “abstract” art or as a separate category “outside” of traditional accounts of art history. Nor does Broude examine how this “separation” can occur in the work of Shapiro whose work is informed by Western art history, contemporary art practices, feminist interventions in art history and by “the decorative”.
It is only within a separate category however, that Broude believes a re- evaluation of the decorative can occur. This re-evaluation would uncover the underlying, “sexist” prejudices that have devalued decorative art practices as “merely decorative” and therefore “contentless”. (Broude, 1982:327 – 328) Like much “feminist” art writing of the 1980s, Broude wishes to rewrite the modernist canon so that it would include the names of decorative artists. This revision would, ideally, create a space for decorative art practices of the future that would not be marginalised or denigrated as the “merely decorative”. (Broude, 1982)
By raising questions about the representation of the decorative and decorative art practices within modernist discourses of art, Broude (and many others like her) did indeed create a space where “the decorative” has been re-evaluated and redeployed through art practices and in artwriting. Rather than creating a separate category of “decorative art” – an ideal which is deeply problematic - artwriters in the last decade have examined the ways in which the decorative has been a part of modernist art practice. For example, the first chapter of the thesis examined a domestic, decorative modernism in the work of John Ruskin, William Morris, Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt. The thesis also examined the ways in which this decorative modernism was
198 then contested and displaced to a marginal position through, for example, the writing of Adolf Loos, or the need for early abstract painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, to differentiate their work from the pre-existing forms of textile design.
To overlook the influence of the decorative in modernism, or to try to separate the decorative from modernism, is inaccurate and limiting in that it forecloses and devalues the presence of the decorative and the way that the decorative can be used as an alternative framework through which to question and rework discursive and material legacies of the avant-garde, modernist abstraction and formalism. This is not to say that Broude’s work is not useful. Her argument highlights why the differences and specificities of decorative practices need to be acknowledged and investigated (another translation) to construct a rigorous examination of this entanglement of the decorative and modernist art practices.
One of the most infamous examples of what was understood as the coincidence of modernist abstraction and a mass cultural decorative practice was op art in the 1960s. Op art became thoroughly entangled with op fashion and op interior design. Because of this entanglement with fashion and interior design, op art was often dismissed as a kind of “failure” because of its inability to distinguish itself from these mass cultural forms. According to the logic of Brüderlin’s decorative genealogy, op art could be redeployed within the lineage of the geometric arabesque. But while Brüderlin’s decorative translation may account for the “decorative” qualities of op art (treatment of surface as an all-over field, repetition and difference in repetition for example), it does not investigate the other “sides” of op art – op fashion or op interior design – and how these other “sides” might investigate and question the material and discursive legacies of the avant-garde.
The practitioners and supporters of what came to be called op art, considered op art to be a development of modernist abstraction. William C. Seitz, curator of The Responsive Eye, an exhibition of op art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1965, referred to the works in the show as
199 “perceptual abstraction”. In the promotional material surrounding the exhibition, Seitz also referred to scientific theories of perception and optics that he believed op art explored. (Lee, 2004:160-161) Despite Seitz’s rigorous attempts to situate op art firmly in the realm of serious, cutting-edge modernist abstraction, others saw its similarities to and potential as a fabric design.
Brigit Riley, considered to be perhaps the most important artist of op art, had the bitter experience of seeing her painting, Hesitate, illegally reproduced as dress fabric and refigured in the form of a simple, shift dress. (Lee, 2001:33) For the artist, this was nothing less than a betrayal and violation by Larry Aldrich, who owned Riley’s painting Hesitate, a work that appeared in The Responsive Eye (1965).122 As well as being a significant collector of contemporary art, Aldrich was a dress manufacturer, so his opportunism in making use of Riley’s Hesitate is logical and astute, even if it was not ethical. Aldrich produced a variety of op art dresses in the spring and summer season of 1965. The op fabric designs for these dresses all came from paintings in Aldrich’s collection. (Lee, 2004:168-9) This coincidence of fashion and art created opportunities for other op artists – namely Julian Stanczak, Richard Anuskiewicz, and Victor Vasarely – who willingly had their work refigured as fashion fabric. (Lee, 2001:33)
In fact, op art became thoroughly entangled with the fabric of fashion and interior design. Fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harpers, and design magazines identified op as an important trend. (Lee, 2004:169) At the opening of The Responsive Eye (1965), many people – including artists, collectors and socialites - dressed in black and white outfits of checks, dots, or stripes in keeping with the appearance of some of the work in the exhibition. (Lee, 2004:169) Even shop fronts were decorated with op during the course of the exhibition.
122 Aldrich presented Riley with the Hesitate shift dress as a gift upon her arrival in New York for the opening of The Responsive Eye. (Lee, 2004:168-9)
200 The coincidence and intermingling of a mass cultural form such as fashion and an institutional discourse of “high art” has been a factor in the marginalisation (if not exclusion) of op art from some discourses of abstract modernist painting. The implications for op art and its entanglement with fashion, at least in some circles, were humiliating: op art looked like a print design for fabric and not at all like abstract art. Instead of being a critical development in modernist abstract painting, op art was destined to be of little consequence in a corrupted and commercialised production line of ever- changing “fine art” styles. Not only was op art easily confused with dress fabric, it was a frivolous exercise in fashion that would be short lived and easily superseded. Op was not art. For example, Clement Greenberg described op art as “Good Design” rather than art. 123 (1967:184)
I have often wondered if there is a connection between Greenberg’s description of op art as “Good Design” with the series of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) called Good Design. The Good Design series ran from 1950 – 1955. Like the series Useful Objects which preceded Good Design, items and products, such as advertisements, book jackets and consumer goods, were selected for exhibition largely because of their formal similarities to modern art rather than for specific design features such as functionality, durability or safety. (Lupton and Miller, 1999:193) The objects, which had the appearance of modernist art forms, exhibited in the Good Design series could be described as what Greenberg had previously called kitsch: The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. (1992:534)
The “rest” that is discarded by kitsch, is the difficult, critical function of art (along with “good” design if functionality, durability or safety were not
123 As discussed in earlier chapters, Greenberg also called minimalism, pop, op, and assemblage “Good Design”.
201 significant). Where an artist such as Picasso paints cause, a kitsch artist paints effects. (Greenberg, 1992:534)
In some important ways, however, it is inaccurate to describe op art as either “Good Design” or categorise it as a kind of kitsch. First, op art had the reputation of causing headaches, nausea, vomiting, dizziness and fainting. (Lee, 2004:173-176) These disturbing visual and bodily responses undermine the ideals of “good” design.
Second, the visual experience of op art that triggered these bodily responses, demonstrated the interconnectedness of eye and body. The embodied, dizzying vision evident through the viewing of op art challenged the claims of the dominance of the optical made by supporters and artists of op art. This embodied vision also questioned some of the dominant, contemporary narratives about the viewing experience of visual art as either a pure optical experience or as a strong gestalt. Op art’s embodied vision was the opposite to the disembodied, optical experience described by Greenberg, Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss that they thought was proper and exclusive to “advanced” modernist painting of the late 1950s and 1960s. For example, for Krauss, op art with its version of trompe l’oeil, was regressive and allowed the haptic back into what should be an exclusively optical experience. (Lee, 2004:178-179)
Op art’s confusing dazzle was also contrary to the visual ideal of a strong gestalt celebrated by some minimalist artists such as Robert Morris. To see an object all at once as a kind of “whole” was, according to Morris, the perceptual / conceptual effect of a strong gestalt. Objects with a strong gestalt – usually those “minimalist” objects with a simple geometric form such as Morris’ grey-painted plywood, “unitary” objects shown at Green Gallery of 1964 – have parts that are “bound together in such a way that they offer a maximum resistance to perceptual separation”. (Morris, 1966:815) Morris argued that once a gestalt was established, all information about the “unitary” object was exhausted. The viewer’s experience of the object as that shape remained constant and whole. (Morris, 1966:186) Thus, the most
202 “successful” unitary objects were objects with this “good” gestalt that allowed the mind to grasp a specific, perceptual whole.124
Op art, however, is anti-gestalt. In Riley’s painting Fission (1963), circles of flat, black paint on a white ground are regularly placed and spaced on the outer edges of the canvas. Towards the middle of the canvas however, the black circles are gradually altered – condensed into progressively thinner discs or slits of black – as if being compressed as they near a fault line along the centre line of the painting. But this progressive compression in the centre flips from left of centre line in the top half of the painting, to the right of centre line in the bottom half of the painting. In this central panel of the painting, there is a giddy instability as the viewer’s eyes fight to focus on how the pattern of dots alters from left to right, and from top to bottom. This clash and flip between vertical and horizontal planes is further complicated by the stark contrast between white ground and black circle. The viewer’s eyes are not allowed to organise and focus a “strong gestalt”. The circles, discs and slits of black colour are a repetition of difference and a difference in repetition over the surface of the painting. To view this difference in repetition and its dizzying effects is to experience a de-mastering of the eye. (Lee, 2004:164, 165, 180, 183). Op art undermines two particular discourses of modernist vision through the disturbance of a pure optical experience and a “strong gestalt”. In performing this critical function, op art cannot be dismissed as kitsch – at least in Greenberg’s definition.
The embodied vision produced by op art, was made visible and literal through the coincidence and entanglement between op art and fashion.
124 The simplicity of the shape, however, did not mean that the viewer’s experience of that object was simple or disembodied. Morris argued that while the apprehension of the gestalt was “immediate”, the viewer’s experience of the object occurred through time. Thus the object was not the only aspect of this “new aesthetic” but also the space in which the “unitary” form was encountered, the effects of varying light conditions, and the changing field of the viewer’s vision as he or she moved around the object and the space of the gallery. (Morris, 1966:818) These singular objects confronted the viewer and occupied the same space as the viewer, creating a particular kind of self-consciousness. This phenomenological reading qualified the ideal of the object understood through Gestalt theory. (Meyer, 2001:161) In Morris’ writing there is a literality in the directness of the unadorned materials and the shape of minimalist objects but also a critique of empirical, disembodied vision.
203 Rather than thinking of op fashion as the debasement of op art or of op art as a kind of failure because it looked too similar to fabric designs, op fashion performs a critical function “as an acutely embodied form of its [op art’s] reception”. (Lee, 2004:172)
If op art is understood as part of modernist abstraction (as indeed it was by Riley and by Seitz), then its entanglement with fashion marks one of many instances where an institutionalised discourse of knowledge was saturated by mass culture. The boundary between modernist abstraction and fashion was so blurred that they became evaluatively indistinguishable. It is possible to argue, however, that in the indistinctiveness of the “event” that was op art and fashion, there was a clash of cultural codes where the stability and identity of fashion and “fine art” were contested fields.
John Mowitt, in his examination of Roland Barthes’ writing on fashion and the text, argues that when mass culture (exemplified by fashion) saturates systems of institutional knowledge, it begins to redirect and reorganise that knowledge. Of course, in the late 1960s – the decade of the (re)rise of interdisciplinarity through the text and textuality - the mass cultural form of “the text” called into question the purity of the systems and disciplines of knowledge. (Mowitt, 1992:48 – 53). Mowitt argues that this characteristic of mass culture, which redirected and reorganised institutionalised knowledge, occurred in a particular historical moment characterised by a fragmentation of society and a social field that was articulated in diverse ways. One of the consequences of this social fragmentation is its resistance to narrative mastery including theoretical narratives. (Mowitt, 1992:51). The representation of the social became a contested field in which questions are continually raised about how knowledge is produced, circulated and evaluated. The “text” became “an institutional articulation of a popular contestation of the academy”. (Mowitt, 1992:53)
Perhaps re-reading modernist abstraction through the ornamental can also be understood as “an institutional articulation” of popular, decorative contestations (such as op fashion) of modernist abstraction? Mowitt’s
204 argument about the text acknowledges that a practice from mass culture has informed an academic, critical practice. In a similar way, decorative art practices as mass cultural forms (such as op fashion), can be acknowledged as productive cultural sites of critical discourse.
In the indistinctiveness between op art and fashion, it is inadequate to suggest that op art is a “falling-away” from the avant-garde (as Greenberg would) or indeed to suggest that op art did not quite manage to differentiate itself from the pre-existing art of “kitsch”. Both of these proposals posit op art as a kind of “failure” because it is not, definitively, this thing called “fine art” and, at the same time, denigrate and devalue decorative practices. Whenever there is an unquestioned separation of discourses, such as between the decorative and art, the interconnections between mass culture and the “progressive”, critical force of modernism are obscured. (Lupton and Miller, 1999:188)
Brüderlin’s ornamental genealogy is one way that the specific history and critical implications of the ornamental - the three forms of the arabesque – can be used to trace the interconnections between decorative practices and modernist abstraction. By challenging many of the key assumptions that undergrid a particular understanding of modernist abstraction, Brüderlin’s ornamental genealogy not only re-evaluates marginalised, decorative art practices such as Art Nouveau but also redeploys significant practices within modernist abstraction, such as Pollock’s, to acknowledge the importance of the decorative in modernism. In Brüderlin’s ornamental genealogy, I have also found a contextual niche for my practice within the lineage of a calligraphic arabesque.
In an Australian context, my creative practice also fits within an ironic, “mannerist” practice of the decorative identified and described by McNamara (1997) and Broadfoot (1997). But even though I have found these different contextual niches for my work, I am still left with the daunting tasks of seeing and translating the individual works of my creative practice into artwriting.
205 Translation, it must be remembered, emphasises the instability and incompleteness of the particular work that is being translated. The instability and incompleteness of an art work results in an object that is fissured: an object that is also an object, in language. This visual, textual object is difficult to see and describe definitively because the visual and the textual continually interrupt and disrupt each other. If the art object is difficult to see clearly, then how is the object to be written about?
The next chapter of the thesis engages with questions of seeing the art object by introducing a work from the creative practice into the discursive space of the thesis. This work is the exhibition-catalogue, Scripts of Devision (2003-2004) which was exhibited in Refrabrication (2004).
206 Chapter 9
Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004) (A transcription)
207 Disgusting Scrutiny:
I WISH YOU COULD HAVE BEEN THERE TO SEE THE PAINTINGS. HOW YOU WOULD HAVE LAUGHED! THE PAINTINGS CAUSED A BIT OF A DISTURBANCE REALLY. THERE WERE VIEWERS BENDING OVER, TWISTING AROUND TRYING TO SEE THE PAINTINGS. (AS IF SUCH STRANGE CONTORTIONS WOULD ADD SOMETHING TO THE VIEWING PROCESS!) OTHERS WOULD STAND AT THE EXTREME EDGE OF THE PAINTING, SQUINTING, WITH THEIR NOSES WRINKLED AND MOUTHS AGAPE, MAKING STRANGE VOCALISATIONS. (LIKE A READER SOUNDING OUT AN UNFAMILIAR WORD.) FOR THE PAINTINGS SEEMED TO INVITE A RATHER DISGUSTING AND DISTASTEFUL KIND OF SCRUTINY.
Figure 14: Transcription of Disgusting Scrutiny. Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). (detail). Amanda Speight.
208 Invisible Painting:
I wish you could have been there to see the paintings so you could have given me your expert opinion. For of course I saw all the paintings as one painting but no one I spoke to described the work in that way. The careful clues of colour co-ordination that connected stripe fragment to stripe fragment went completely undetected – even by an interior designer! And as for the “gaps” in the work, they were never described as stripes! It was as if most of the painting remained invisible to most people. By the end of the evening, I didn’t really know what I was looking at so I avoided talking about the painting.
Figure 15: Transcription of Invisible Painting. Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). (detail). Amanda Speight.
209 COLOURS WRITTEN BACKWARDS:
I WISH YOU COULD HAVE BEEN THERE TO SEE THE PAINTINGS. BUT, COME TO THINK OF IT, MAYBE YOU WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SEE THEM ANYWAY. AS I STOOD NEAR THE FLICKERING BLURS AND SPARKS OF BRIGHT, FRESH, “CITRUS” AND CRISP, “APPLE-GREEN”, I TRIED TO IMAGINE HOW YOU WOULD SEE THE PAINTING. A SLUGGISH SMUDGE PERHAPS WITH A STALE EGNARO AND A SOGGY NEERG? FOR YOU ONCE WROTE TO ME THAT YOU SAW SOME COLOURS AS IF THEY HAD BEEN WRITTEN BACKWARDS.
Figure 16: Transcription of Colours Written Backwards. Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). (detail). Amanda Speight.
210 Just out of focus:
I wish you could have been there to see the paintings. Between my myopia and your visual impairment who knows what we could have seen? I guess you’ve heard about that old urban legend of Op art paintings making people (especially ‘the ladies’) feel faint, dizzy or have an epileptic fit? Well these paintings didn’t cause such extreme bodily responses but they were a bit weird and disorienting. At first I thought that my glasses were smeared so I took them off to clean them. But my glasses were perfectly clean so I looked closely at the paintings again. The colours were really strange and luminous and appeared to hover in a haze in front of the work. This made the paintings always seem just out of focus.
Figure 17: Transcription of Just Out of Focus. Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). (detail). Amanda Speight.
211 Kissing distance:
I wish you could have been there to see the paintings. I would have liked to have seen your reaction. The work was so beautiful, so strangely coloured, it enticed a closer, kissing-distance viewing. But up close to the work, I could also see the wall between the paintings. It was then I noticed the disgusting pits and pock marks that scarred the wall’s complexion. After that, the work seemed distasteful and I never went closer than spitting- distance.
Figure 18: Transcription of Kissing Distance. Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). (detail). Amanda Speight.
212 Light or Colour:
I wish you could have been there to see the paintings. I would have liked to have heard your point of view. When I walked into the room and saw the paintings, I could not tell if they were deliberately painted with glaring, disturbing colours or if what I saw was an affect of the light. Frontally the paintings just sparkled but seen at an angle, the orange turned an acid, yellow-green and the khaki a luminous, serene blue. It sounds strange but I had to go right up to the work, peer at it closely and even touch the surface to see what was light and what was painted colour.
Figure 19: Transcription of Light or Colour. Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). (detail). Amanda Speight.
213 Shadows or colours?
I wish you could have been there to see the paintings. Now I know you wanted me to give you an account of the work but it is so difficult choosing just what to tell you. When I walked past the work, I thought it was just shadows making the work look so disorienting. But I had to stop, look again and take note of the colours. On one surface was a warm glow of orange and fragments of a dull, flat green. On the other surface was a brown stain and strokes of luminous lavender. But no amount of squinting or adjusting of my glasses seemed to help. I could not really tell if it was painted colour or strange shadows.
Figure 20: Transcription of Shadow or Colours? Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). (detail). Amanda Speight.
214 Souvenir of a Painting:
I wish you could have been there to see the painting. I needed your calm advice. It was so bewildering to look at the painting, I didn’t know where or how to start! I decided that the only way I could really see it was to take photographs of the areas that caught my attention – I guess I was looking for the picturesque. Later that day, I reassembled the photographs to make an excellent souvenir of the painting.
Figure 21: Transcription of Souvenir of a Painting. Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). (detail). Amanda Speight.
215 Successive Resemblance:
I wish you could have been there to see the paintings to tell me what you saw. I saw a succession of likenesses – Interior Design, Camouflage, Op, and Russian Constructivism. But that does not really tell you much about the work because the paintings were also too discordant and distasteful to be like Interior Design, too finely figured to be like Camouflage, too gestural and blurred to be like Op, and far too pretty to be like Russian Constructivism. They resembled successively something but then each nomination seemed to undo the previous name. I took photos of the work but even the photos do not match my memory of the work. Therefore, I can send you no accurate account of the paintings but will leave you to imagine how they appeared.
Figure 22: Transcription of Successive Resemblance. Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). (detail). Amanda Speight.
216 The exhibition-catalogue Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004) represents, through text and photographs, an earlier exhibition of my work called Wisdom and Other Unknowable Colours (August, 2003).125 Scripts for Devision (2003-2004) consists of nine “postcards” with text on one side and an image on the other. This rewritten exhibition was “re-exhibited” as an exhibition- catalogue as part of the exhibition Refabricated (2004).126
Figure 23: Scripts for Devision (2003 – 2004). Installation view. Amanda Speight.
Scripts of Devision (2003-2004) is a work that explores the frustrations of the desire to see and describe an object – those dilemmas of translatability and untranslatability - of not being able to see something clearly, of always knowing there is more to see and more to say. These frustrations and complications of seeing, describing and writing raise awareness of the complex play of the visual and the textual within and around art objects.
Some of the events described in Scripts for Devision (2003-2004) are autobiographical and represent how I experienced the work during its
125 The phrase “exhibition-catalogue” is borrowed from the practice of Weiner and Siegelaub of utilising the catalogue form as a space of exhibition. 126 The exhibition Refabricated (5 July – 10 July, 2004) was at The H Block Gallery, Queensland University of Technology.
217 making, its installation in the exhibition space, and its documentation through photography. Other texts recount conversations with viewers during the exhibition or describe my observations of how other viewers interacted with the work. Still other texts describe my reading of the documentary photographs of the installation or photographs of the work, in various states of disarray, in the studio. The exhibition-catalogue, Scripts of Devision (2003-2004), is a text that is comprised of (and compromised by) multiple signifying practices including documentary photographs, “staged” photographs, personal anecdotes, exaggeration, conversations, and particular discourses of art theory. Scripts of Devision (2003-2004) is a reminder of those other spaces of the art making process – the studio, the documentation of the work, the various acts of viewing and interpretation – that are often disregarded in the spaces of exhibition.
As I was writing the text for Scripts for Devision, I referred back to words or phrases I had been writing about in this thesis. Thus in Disgusting Scrutiny (one of the “postcards” of Scripts for Devision), my understanding of the work and how viewers interacted with it, was influenced by Rosenberg’s observations of how viewer’s looked at minimalist objects.127 At other times, the way I was looking at and thinking about my painting, influenced how I wrote about Stella’s work Die Fahne hoch.128 These continual interactions between the thesis and the studio practice are an important aspect of my work. I understand this interaction between thesis and practice as a way of acknowledging the fact that I do not make or see art with “fresh eyes” or a “unique vision” but rather my art-making, art-viewing and artwriting are always and already figured through the language and discourses of art history and theory.129
127 See Chapter Three. 128 See Chapters Three and Four. 129 Carrier argues: (t)he belief that I first confront the artwork as an isolated individual and then discover that my judgement may agree with other people’s underestimates the importance of critics. Knowing what Greenberg thinks of a painting, I am likely to look at it differently. I will not necessarily agree with him, but I, like everyone (I believe) form my taste partly in response to what others say. To believe that people can form judgements absolutely independent of what they hear and read shows unwarranted confidence in both their independence and capacity for introspection. (1987:37-38)
218
This calculated interaction between my practice of artwriting and my creative practice, however, can also be understood as a decorative strategy of “matching” – of making visible different kinds of links between artwriting and artmaking – a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. But inhabiting these strategies of interaction is an ironic humour that occasionally heckles and confounds the seriousness of my writing and creative practice. The references to “disgusting scrutiny” and the plaintive repetition of “I wish you had been there to see the paintings…” throughout the Scripts of Devision, is an irony that I hope is visible.
The phrase “I wish you had been there to see the paintings …” is also a phrase that haunts the writing of the thesis, for of course I wish I could have been there to see Stella’s paintings or Weiner’s statement-sculptures. My experience and understanding of these works (and modernist art) is primarily through photographs and written text – through someone else’s eyes and someone else’s interpretations. It is an experience of art that is peculiarly dispersed, distended and disparate. I am reminded of how Stephen Melville and Bill Readings describe the interpretation of an artwork as: not a move behind or beyond the representation to its hidden meaning: it is rather a work of prolongation of the object, its extension into other spaces, other contexts, and as such a prolongation it does not allow of any easy or final distinction between what is present in it or absent from it. (1995:22)
I see and write of only a particular kind of prolonged object: the prolonged object that occurs in the spaces and context of artwriting and mechanical reproduction.130 The first part of the thesis examined the peculiarities and complexities of these (particular) “prolonged objects” such as the photographs of Stella’s Black series paintings and Weiner’s statement- sculptures reproduced in books or journals.
130 While Melville and Reads description of the “prolonged” object refers to all interpretative acts including the reception, the writing of and the reproduction of the art object, I am using the term to refer to my particular experience of viewing art through art writing and mechanical means of reproduction.
219 Even though I have read (and written) many critiques of the idea of “immediacy” and Greenberg’s “optical modernism”, I still wonder about being there, right in front of Stella’s paintings and Weiner’s statement-sculptures. But, unfortunately, what Dan Graham observed four decades ago still applies: what I see is not the art object but a (particular) prolonged object that is dispersed and destabilised in photographs and in contradictory accounts of the object in artwriting. Sometimes I am worried that looking at and writing about these prolonged objects is somehow an illegitimate experience of art and hence an illegitimate attempt at artwriting. It is as if this kind of artwriting is merely a kind of “hearsay” – or, in this case, a kind of “readsee” of the art object.
Thinking of a prolonged object, however, is an interesting idea because for me, the word “prolonged” is full of irony and is therefore exemplary of the way I would describe my experience of visual art. The exquisite malleability of language and the visuality of writing allows me to look at this word “prolonged” and to play with its meaning. First, the prefix “pro” is both a prefix of priority in space or time (as is intended in Melville’s and Readings’ “prolonged object”), but “pro” is also a prefix indicating favour for some system or idea. So a pro-longed object is also a for-longed object. From a for-longed object it is then an easy visual step of reversal to the “longed-for” object. The phrase “prolonged object” (the object in language, in interpretation) has within its visual form the desire for its unachievable opposite: the “longed-for object” (the object as a kind of “directness”). Despite my interest in a prolonged art object that is thoroughly entangled with language, I still long-for that object that I can stand in front of, touch and see. I want to see Stella’s paintings too, not just see reproductions of them – even if that reproduction does have an interesting story to tell. But of course seeing the object does not give full knowledge of that object as Scripts of Devision (2003-2004) demonstrates in its texts.
While Scripts of Devision (2003-2004) engages with questions of seeing and describing the elusive art object, Chapter Ten performs a translation (and prolongation) of some of the art works in the exhibition Refabrication (2004).
220 In these translations, there is a further elaboration of the complex play of the visual and textual within the works of my creative practice and also within my practice of artwriting. Across these two interrelated practices, there is a kind of labyrinthine play with writing because the thesis is a writing of the visual but the creative practice is of the visual in writing.
221 Chapter 10:
Op Writing
222 According to Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, when writing is the subject of painting, such as Erté’s ornamental alphabet for Barthes and Chinese calligraphy for Derrida, it stages a critical engagement with the theories and conditions of language. (Barthes, 1986; Derrida, 1976). This seems a rather surprising claim when looking at Erté’s alphabet which, for all its “finely drawn” elegance, looks like “cheesecake” soft porn. Erté’s alphabet has each letter’s shape formed by figures - usually women - but sometimes angels.131 These figures, coloured in pale flesh pinks, beiges, sallows and blue-greys, are elaborately coiffed, or draped in garments. Their pallid but decorative forms are suspended in a field of black. The colour contrast is unsettling.
For Barthes, however, this strange, decorative alphabet guarantees the letter’s independence from language and the word. He argues that Erté’s letters have: …blocked the road which seems to run so naturally from the first articulation to the second, from the letter to the word, and have taken another road, not of language but of writing, not of communication but of signification. (Barthes, 1986:99-100)
One of the ways that Erté’s ornamental alphabet enters the condition of writing, of signification is through its oscillating origin. The shape of the letter dictates the forms of the figures and simultaneously the figures dictate the form of the letter. For example, the letter “O” necessitates that the figures are “slipped into the sheath of the letter” but the shape of the resulting “O” is uniquely figured by the shape and arrangement of the figures. (Barthes, 1986:101) Also, the letters which are simultaneously “women, adornments, coiffures, gestures, and lines” are “poetic” in that they: ‘depart’ in many directions and thereby potentially … manifest the infinite advance of the symbol, which one can never make into a final signified and which is … always the signifier of another signifier. (Barthes, 1986:124,125)
Barthes demonstrates the poetic potential of Erté’s alphabet through semiotic and psychoanalytic readings of the shapes of the letters and how
131 The first version of Erté’s Alphabet was painted in gouache and metallic paint in 1924 but another version was made using lithography in 1968.
223 they are figured. The letter “E”, for example, is formed from angels that face towards the left. These left-facing angels “undo” the “normal” direction of the letter “E” which always “faces” towards the right. (Barthes, 1986: 103-128)
Another way that Erté’s alphabet enters the condition of writing and of signification is that it liberates the letter from its function of making meaning through words and signifying sounds, that is representing the voice. Erté’s letters belong to no particular language and therefore are linked to no particular sound. The A, J and Y of Erté’s alphabet could be English, or they could be the A, J and Y of German.132 If letters of the alphabet are freed from their place in a word and therefore from within a particular language, they become mute. In their muteness letters become algebraic – a language that cannot be spoken. (Derrida, 1976: 300, 303) Writing, if it was to break all links with the spoken word, would become absolutely alien, at least in particular systems of Western thought. (Derrida, 1976:303-305)
When writing (or something that is like writing) appears in the space of art, its material qualities are emphasised. In the commemorative Labyrinth “written” by Florentius in 945, a playful tension is created through the letters, the written message and the way the letters and text of the message are formally arranged and presented. The words of the text are arranged in a labyrinthine manner which repeats numerous times, both vertically and horizontally, the request to remember the “unworthy” scribe (FLORENTIUS INDIGNUM MEMORARE). The unity of the text, however, is sacrificed to the individual display of the letters. With their serifs, variations in thickness and thinness of strokes and extravagant curves, the letters already exceed their function as a phonetic code. The letters also double as separate design elements that decorate the diamond pattern in which they are arranged.
The visual irony and puns of the commemorative labyrinth are extended into the formal qualities of the design. It has borders of labyrinth-like, interlacements and between each letter on the intersecting bands of the
132 In German, these letters phonetically sound like ‘R’, ‘Yatch’, ‘Ipsilon’ respectively.
224 diagonal grid, delicate linear patterns are “written”. This commemorative labyrinth can be read as a text that obfuscates the distinctions between writing and decoration, and between form and content. It allows for the examination of the visual in writing - that part of writing that cannot be spoken but can be spoken about - an ornamental writing.
Figure 24: Commemorative Labyrinth by Florentius, 945 in Williams (1977:51).
225 It has been claimed that there is “a sort of erotic attraction, … between writing and ornament, each moving toward the other.” (Carboni, 1991:106) Patterns have sometimes been mistaken for writing. In 1930, the archaeologist Persson discovered a jar with “writing” on its rim in a Mycenaean tomb. Recognising what he thought were several words that resembled Greek on the rim, Persson eagerly translated the inscription. Ventris, another archaelolgist, argued that the inscription was an incised pattern, particularly since the drawing ended in repeated decorative curves at one end. (Barthes, 1986:220). The overeager Persson, in translating an illegible pattern, exhibits a desire for that which has always been lost and will always remain an impossibility: presence (self-evidence, immediacy, truth) in representation. Persson wanted access to the truth of the writing; access to something that was beyond or behind the incised lines of what turned out to be a surface decoration.
The letters that make an appearance in my artworks are often doubled, mirrored and splayed into patterns. In these patterns, the letter is drawn from its place in a word, in language, and situated in another context where it becomes unfamiliar and illegible as a letter, but then becomes more familiar and legible as a pattern or design. As stated previously, my creative practice explores the possibilities of the decorative, graphic aspects of writing. I see my creative practice as part of an ongoing dialogue with some key quandaries in the history and practice of modernist, abstract painting. The appearance of letters or numbers in abstract art, such as Jasper Johns’ Zero through nine (1960), is nothing new in contemporary art. But the letter or number in abstract art does complicate an idea of the purely “abstract”.133 Whenever a letter appears – whether drawn, painted or sculpted in clay - it is “a real” letter. (Burn, 1993:no pagination)
133 See Chapter Eight for further discussions on how the letter form in my art practice makes numerous plays with concepts of the abstract and referential.
226
Figure 25: Part of the installation Dissemble (2003). This section has been disassembled from its fragmentary appearance in installation and re- assembled in the studio to show the patterns that cross its surface.
The letters that become patterns are an important part of the way I like to think about my work. The letter is, of course, primarily for making words. But letters are also beautiful designs, as good for seeing as they are for making words. When I make and look at these letterly paintings, I think about the difference between reading writing and seeing writing.134 (Burn, 1993). In the ideal site of reading, words become transparent symbols to things other
134 I also see this play between reading and seeing as a key idea in my practice of artwriting. In the previous chapter, I described my artwriting, which writes about reproductions of art rather than art objects, as a kind of “readsee” (rather than “hearsay”).
227
Figure 26: Dissemble (2003). Installation view. Amanda Speight.
Figures 27 and 28: Dissemble (2003). Detail. Amanda Speight.
228 than themselves. I look right through them in the act of reading, of communication. (Lanham, 1993:4, 5, 33) But when the letter is mirrored, the transparent writing of reading, of communication has been turned on itself – doubled, mirrored, splayed – and slips into the opacity of pattern and the oscillating, uncertain spaces of art. I see the pattern-like qualities of the mirrored letters and the letter-like qualities of the pattern. The patterned letter and the lettered pattern alternate, unwriting the writing of the other. Often, these letters that have been doubled and mirrored form their own intricate patterns which slide into illegible designs that, as mentioned earlier, begin to resemble non-Western scripts: Farsi, Urdu, Arabic or Singhalese. It is a process of defamiliarisation. Writing, like drawing, becomes marks on page.
I like looking at the shape of letters. The letters and letter combinations I use in my work are sometimes chosen for their formal qualities or for the similarities or contrasts in their formal qualities. At other times I chose particular letters because of the contradictions between their name and visual appearance such as “W” (double U) which is really written as a double V. Sometimes I choose letters because of the way they work together to confuse the idea that writing represents the voice. Letter combinations such as “ough” slip between sounds in “rough”, “thought”, “thorough”. Other letters I choose for their sibilance. Still others for their ability to sound like an artless expression “G” (Gee!), “M” (mmm), “R” (aaarrr!). Letters are so excessive in sight, in sound, in meanings. But when my paintings are installed in the exhibition space, these words and letters are much harder to see and read because of the work’s fragmented form as slats. From the extreme edges of the paintings however, a kind of stuttered but understandable pattern of words or letter combinations becomes visible. (See Figures 26, 27, 28).
These ornamental letters do not strive to be an efficient method of communication, but rather they become a (dis)play of excess, extension and elaboration. In other words these letterly patterns refer to an understanding of language as excessive, where “at once more and less words than
229 necessary; two words where one will do, or one word with two or more meanings”.135 (Newman, 1998: 147)
The excessive, ornamental condition of language sometimes has been regarded with suspicion. In the ancient schools of oratory, the ornamentation of speech was eloquently debated. According to Plato, Socrates warned his students (no doubt using some sophisticated rhetoric) about the seductive tricks and ornaments of sophistic oratory. Decorative speech was thought to conceal a “base purpose” in that it could distract the hearer from the substance of the argument. The decorative somehow deceives, diverts, deflects attention away from what should be given attention. It was as if the decorative beguiled the listener, seduced the unwary or weak of mind.
As an artist who makes use of the decorative however, I have always looked at the decorative with a “mind” that is not easily seduced, unwary or weak. But there is something attractive and distracting about the decorative. I often think of the spectator of art as an incidental stranger – a busy, passer-by who has his or her mind on something else. Art in this scenario has to become a distraction; an interruption and delay in passing by. It diverts and deflects attention away from what should be attended to and refocuses that attention.
“Passing by” has become an important way of structuring my work and its appearance and installation in the spaces of exhibition. The work relies on the movement of the spectator to “activate” its patterns that extend across its surfaces. Within the spaces of exhibition, I like to make use of thoroughfares in an effort to divert and delay the potential spectator (that distracted passer- by).
Because I think of the viewer as an unknowable, passing stranger, I cannot tell how the paintings can be seen but only my account of seeing them. Many of the works in the exhibition Refrabrication (2004) consist of thin slats placed at regular intervals along gallery walls to create a lateral spread – a
135 Certainly different to Lawrence Weiner’s understanding of language.
230 prolonged object.136 The thin, slatted paintings work across all their visible surfaces and are coloured and patterned in ways that take advantage of the movement of spectators through the spaces of exhibition. Seen frontally, the slat pieces appear as thin painted stripes spread laterally across the lengths of white walls and around corners. The slats are linked by colour similarities but otherwise appear as discrete fragments (if such a contradiction can be imagined).
As the lateral spread of the work encourages the spectator to move along the work, the side surfaces of the work become visible. In some works such as Dissemble (2003), the rectangular slats are painted in different colours on each side. These painted colours work to confuse vision in a successive play of observations and possibilities. Approached frontally, Dissemble (2003) is thin and covered with a rich orange and khaki design of arches and curving lines. But seen at an angle, the shallow sides of the painted slats are visible. If the viewer sees the paintings from the left, the sides of the slats are painted in horizontal bands in a pallid, quieter orange and a luminous lavender. These lighter, more luminous colours glow as if they were the effect of reflected light rather than a painted colour.
Moving back along the work, other more disturbing hues are visible on the right hand side of the slats. Flaxen, a beautiful yellowed hue, turns acid next to the orange, while a serene blue has enough luminescence to glow as if it were a cool shadow rather than a painted colour. These changes in colour, between the front and the sides of the paintings, momentarily confuse the viewing process as the colours on the side of the slats play with the colours on the front of the slats. Painted colour is variously seen and understood as shifting light, deeper shadows or effects of reflected light.
136 The exhibition Refrabrication (2004) was at H Block Gallery, Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove. The exhibition ran from 5-10 July, 2004.
231
Figure 29: Dissemble (2003). (detail). Amanda Speight.
Figure 30: Dissemble (2003). (detail). Amanda Speight.
232 Because of this uncertain play and shift of colour, shadow and reflection, I move up close to the work to try and understand what I am seeing. As a viewer, I tend to understand the viewing process as a succession of observations that often conflict with and contradict each other. The viewing process is fractured and interrupted. What is seen is not continuous or seamless but multiple, riven and contradictory.
In the middle section of Dissemble (2003), this technique of colour change, from front to sides of the slats, creates other effects. Viewed from an oblique angle, the painted areas on the front and side surfaces of the slats begin to spread and elongate into strange, hovering forms. The view of the white wall between the painted slats is gradually obscured as the angle of viewing becomes more extreme. But at this edge of painting, a legible “pattern” seems to spread and coalesce from the once disparate slat fragments. Viewing the paintings from an oblique angle (a peripheral vision) tends to make the patterns and letters of the paintings more legible.
I find that looking at the work is visually demanding and the process of viewing makes me aware of the physicality of my seeing.137 The colours resonate and flicker. Of course I realise the irony of the word “resonate” that I use to describe how I see the colours. Resonate is a quality of sound – a vibration that is prolonged – almost as if the colours could be felt. The colours are sometimes so uncomfortable, they seem to set up an arrhythmic beat, with a luminous crystalline blue pulsing in one eye, while a sandy sheen trembles in the other. But this choice of words is not about wanting to find a “natural” link between sound and colour but rather an awareness of the exquisite malleability and peculiarity of our language to describe perception. For “to see” is a rhetorical figure that includes any number of tactile, thermic, or auditory responses. (Eco, 2000:60). The colours irradiate and leak from the boundaries of their coloured forms. The flickering shimmer of colours
137 I spend hours experimenting with colour combinations, trying to achieve what I think of as an interesting but disconcerting opticality.
233 creates a glare or a kind of blurring of vision that is disorienting, uncomfortable, distasteful but also beautiful, intriguing, mesmerising.138
The glaring colours of the slats reflect on the white walls of the gallery. The natural light that enters the space exacerbates this effect. Of course, on closer examination, the “white walls” on which the colours reflect are smoothly-textured, mounted panels that form part of the work. These panels allow the colours of the paintings to reflect on the panels’ smooth surfaces – something that would not be as noticeable on the rough, pock-marked surface of the gallery wall. The panels cling to the rougher surfaces of the gallery walls, paraphrasing their lower surfaces. But the panels’ holds are precarious. They bow and bulge and lift slightly from gallery surfaces with the weight of the painted slats that adhere to their smooth surface.
This architectural paraphrase, accented by the sculptural reliefs of the slats, draws attention to the architectural language of the gallery. I notice the scuffed, scarred, pockmarked walls visible above the smooth, even panels of the work. I notice the internal and external corners of the gallery – some are covered by decorated slats, others are left bare but their line becomes a different kind of stripe - a substitute for a slat. I notice the silver picture rail that scores the wall above the work and the strange, black plastic strip that skirts the floor and underlines the work.
But the panels and slats also refer to another architectural space: a domestic, interior space. For, of course, these panels and slats are the mass
138 The colours of my paintings are not only difficult to see, but are also difficult to “capture” effectively in reproduction. In photographs, the colours fade or darken, loosing their peculiar luminosity. Instead, in some photographs, this luminosity tarnishes to an iron grey or metallic sheen, almost as if the photograph had been worked over with graphite. In other photographs, the works seem just out-of-focus even when I know they have been focussed properly. It is as if the automatic focussing mechanism of the printing process is unable to function properly when printing these unusually coloured works. The blurred photographs are quite accurate in a way because they are suggestive of the blurring effect of the works’ strange, luminous or glaring colours. The glaring colours of these works also seems to be a problem for reproductive technologies. In photographs or digital images of the works, if the wall is made white, the colours of the work fade and their luminosity becomes a pallid, vague stain. These difficulties in reproducing the work effectively or accurately is yet another irony between my creative practice and the writing of the thesis - particularly considering earlier parts of the thesis that discussed the problems of seeing art works only in reproduction.
234 produced, standardised wall panels and mouldings from the “do-it-yourself”, “renovate and decorate” section of every major hardware store. This work occupies the space of the gallery as an installation and as a kind of interior decoration. The 1800mm standardised panels and mouldings, however, are never quite uniformly standardised so there are niggling discrepancies in height, or bows and twists in the mouldings that frustrate a neat, precise or professional finish.
And of course the mouldings are sometimes used in ways that are contrary to their intended uses. In domestic interior spaces, flattened, slightly rounded mouldings are intended to cover up those inevitable but unsightly gaps in wall or ceiling panels. When painted the same colour as the wall or ceiling, these mouldings hide those unsightly gaps, replacing them with a streamlined, discreetly decorative feature. In the exhibition space, the painted, colourful slats are periodically spaced across the white panels to create an indiscrete, decorative repetition. The decorative designs and colour variations on each side of the slats draws attention to the decorative contours of their shape. These indiscreetly decorative slats only sometimes cover joins, sometimes leave joins visible, and sometimes emphasise the edges of panels.
The work of installation and the way it draws attention to the architectural spaces of the gallery are well established traditions within particular kinds of modernist art practice. The work, as a kind of interior decoration, is also a tradition in modernist practice, and this is what I seek to recall both in my practice and in my research. As discussed in the first half of the thesis, there was an early practice of a decorative, domestic modernism that concerned itself with the arrangement of art objects and furnishings in bourgeois homes, while in later forms of modernism, the abstract compositions of some American abstract painting not only “matched” the shape of the canvas support but also “matched” the shape of the gallery wall.
In fact, a viewer with a knowledge of art history and visual culture, could nominate historical art practices and visual codes that this work, at least superficially, references or resembles or translates – El Lizitsky’s exhibition
235 room, op art, relief sculpture, camouflage, interior design. But, as mentioned previously in the Scripts for Devision (2003-2004), the colours of the paintings are too discordant and unsettling to be like interior design, too finely figured to be like camouflage, too gestural and blurred to be like op, and far too pretty to be like El Lizitsky’s exhibition room. These slatted paintings resemble not simultaneously everything I have called them but successively something, something which remains elusively un-nameable. Each successive nomination seems to undo the previous name. Artwriting is not a stable process of communication (where there is a fixed meaning, where meaning is self-evident) but is a precarious process of signification (where meaning is deferred, where there is only a potential to signify something else). (Barthes, 1986:100, 226) Of course these multiple references are part of the intellectual pleasure of the work and are an acknowledgement of cultural and art historical influences (both accidental and deliberate) on the work.
Often the painting of my work is visually demanding. In the close-up space occupied by the artist, I have to continually adjust my way of seeing the work so I can make it. I have to read the work as “letterly” so I can see what to fill in with the right colour paint. Consistently my focus slips and I can’t see where to colour next because I am seeing the work rather than reading the work. I have to sit back and refocus my seeing to reading before I can see to paint again. In other ways, the painting of the work is quite simple. There is no complex technique of painting involving layering or careful consideration of viscosity or smoothness of application. Rather, it is the phenomenological processes of viewing that I like to try and make complex and layered. The work, with its complicated combinations of colour and use of pattern, constantly changes with the movement of the spectator throughout the space. Sometimes I think about these paintings as a making visible of the desire to see.
A frustration of the desire to see and read clearly is explored in another work in the exhibition called Souvenir of a Painting (2003-2004). Dispersed and prolonged in a line along the longest wall of the gallery, Souvenir of a
236 Painting (2003-2004) is comprised of a series of photographs of computer generated images. These photographic images contain text that has been dispersed, disfigured and intermingled with patterned designs. These small, glossy works are minutely patterned and variously coloured. Finely detailed, the work invites a closer scrutiny but adult viewers must bend down to look at them closely for they are placed fairly low on the wall.
The bright pink photograph is my favourite and I bend down to have a closer look. When looking at the work closely, I notice the flat, smooth surface of the photograph has a faint sheen and is slightly sticky to touch. At first glance, I see thin, brilliant blue lines gridding a pinky-purple background. The colours on this surface are dazzling but slightly disorienting so that it is difficult to look at the work for too long and I have to look away. Cautious now of the power of the colours, I look more closely. I no longer see a blue grid but instead pink bands edged in bright blue that have been woven into a dense surface pattern. Across this surface, a fine blue line makes a ragged embroidery, stitching the surface randomly.
Figure 31: A fragment of Souvenir of a Painting (2003 – 2004). Amanda Speight.
237 Blinking and squinting – those colours are intense - I move in closer to the work. (At last myopia is useful for something!) At this distance, the blue lines are textured, like a fine thread. The pink recedes while I focus intently on the thready blue line. It is netted in an intricacy of minute knots like the finest crochet or lace. Suspended across a pink field, this fine blue net is sometimes clotted – as though it has collected brilliant blue dust along some of its fine threads. I like the way this small work can complicate the viewing process. In a succession of observations, the detailed patterns and glaring colours work together to refigure the surface as a grid, as woven ground, or as suspended net.
In this writing about seeing, however, there are other things to be looked at besides the work: there is also the writing that is being read. One of the most interesting things I noticed about how I had written the seeing of the work, was the rhetorical patterns I employed to describe it – parallelisms, anastrophe, parentheses, asyndeta, antimetabole, anthimeria. In English, these patterns of rhetoric have been identified and used to ornament speech and writing since at least Tudor times. (Corbett, 1971:460). But like the decorative in particular histories of modern art, rhetorical patterns in writing have sometimes been accused of being superficial embellishments that clutter and obfuscate the transparency of plain speaking, of saying only the essential. But, as I looked at many of the rhetorical patterns I used in my writing, I realised that most were “essential” for standard grammar, “essential” for maintaining interest, “essential” for clarity. The ornament of rhetoric is the basis of the language I use to write. But the rhetorical strategies I have identified in my writing are merely smaller pattern elements used in constructing larger and perhaps more ornate rhetorical designs or systems, such as the rhetorical discourse of art. If the reader looks at the patterns within patterns used to construct these larger rhetorical designs, the reader may see the intricate ornament of an art that conceals its own art.
238 Appendix
Images of the exhibition Refabrication (2004)
an exhibition by Amanda Speight 5 – 10 July 2004 The Gallery H Block QUT Kelvin Grove
239
Figure 32: Dissemble (2003). Installation view. Amanda Speight.
240
Figure 33: Dissemble (2003). Installation view. Amanda Speight.
Figures 34 and 35: Dissemble (2003). Detail. Amanda Speight.
241
Figures 36 and 37: Dissemble (2003). Installation views. Amanda Speight.
242
Figures 38 and 39: Dissemble (2003). Detail. Amanda Speight.
243
Figures 40, 41 and 42: Dissemble (2003). Detail. Amanda Speight.
244
Figure 43: Ensemble (2004). Installation view. Amanda Speight.
Figure 44: Ensemble (2004). Detail. Amanda Speight.
245
Figures 45 and 46: Ensemble (2004). Detail. Amanda Speight.
246
Figure 47: Ensemble (2004). Installation view. Amanda Speight.
247
Figures 48 and 49: Double Hues (2004). Installation views. Amanda Speight.
248
Figures 50 and 51: Double Hues (2004). Installation views. Amanda Speight.
249
Figures 52 and 53: Double Hues (2004). Detail. Amanda Speight.
250
Figure 54: Souvenir of a Painting (2003 – 2004). Installation view. Amanda Speight.
Figure 55: Souvenir of a Painting (2003 – 2004). Detail. Amanda Speight.
251
Figure 56: Refabrication (2004). Installation view. Amanda Speight.
252
Figures 57 and 58: Refabrication (2004). Detail. Amanda Speight.
253
Figure 59: Refabrication (2004). Detail. Amanda Speight.
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