Grids and Agnes Martin

The grid, for Rosalind Krauss, ‘announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.’[1] Commenting on its qualities of flatness, geometry and order she conceives it as ‘antinatural, antimimetic, antireal:’ indeed it is ‘what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.’[2] Suggesting that the ‘naked and determined materialism’[3] is the ‘logical way to discuss’[4] the grid in the mid-to-late twentieth century[5] Krauss identifies ‘[i]n the overall regularity of its organization’ an order of ‘pure relationship’ that ‘crowd[s] out the dimensions of the real.’[6] Unlike perspective studies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that mapped ‘the space of a room or a landscape or a group of figures onto the surface of a painting’,[7] the grid references only itself.   Indeed, ‘if it maps anything, it maps the surface of the painting itself.  It is a transfer in which nothing takes place.’[8]  Although it is the materiality of the grid that today interests us Krauss argues, ‘that is not the way that artists have ever discussed it.’[9]

‘[…] Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter.  They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit.  From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below the concrete.’[10]

The ambivalence associated with the grid: ‘an indecision about its connection to matter on the one hand or spirit in the other,’[11] is the very quality that gives it its ‘peculiar power.’[12]  For Krauss, the grid both masks and reveals the condition of art as a ‘refuge for religious emotion’ and ‘a secular form of belief.’[13]

In the cultist space of modern art, the grid serves not only as an emblem but also as myth.  For like all myths, it deals with paradox and contradiction not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradiction, but by covering them over so that they seem (but only seem) to go away.  The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).’[14]

Agnes Martin’s grids are an instance of this power, Krauss suggests. Through the simple geometry of the grid, Martin found that ‘she could pursue a classical perfection that she described as absent from nature, held only in the mind’.[15]Though the grid is usually associated with ‘abstract, mathematical modes of conceptualization’[16] and ordinarily perceived as ‘a highly intellectual, geometric formulation that reflects the logical order of man’s mind’,[17] the slight irregularities in Martin’s hand-drawn grids[18] quietly destabilises its logic. 

Agnes Martin makes a place[19] in which expressions of subtle emotions and ‘wordless and silent experiences’[20]emerge in non-hierarchical relation to the grid, such that neither one nor the other incorporates or rejects the other.   In ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes,’ Griselda Pollock recalls a meeting with Martin in New Mexico in 1995 in which the artist explained that she dreamt her desire to keep making another painting.  And what do you dream?”  Was I hoping for the revelation of the iconographic meaning of the paintings of Agnes Martin?  She replied: “I dream another grid.”[21]

Unable to find reference to the grid in any dictionary of dream she consulted, nor in the indices of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Pollock found it difficult ‘to make the connection between dreaming and grids: between geometry and the unconscious.  Identifying its ‘mathematical, abstract, classical, rational connotation’ she questions :

‘[w]here or what is the grid in the unconscious?  What does it displace, condense?”[22]  Referring to the key terms of what Freud defined as dreamwork, Pollock asks: ‘Is the grid a dream thought, finding its form in something sensual and perceptual rather than our usual understanding of it as cognitive, abstract, mathematical, logical, ordering?  How can we think the grid as the wish-fulfillment that dreams covertly encode”[23]

For Pollock, 

‘[t]he grid is precisely a means of mapping on two dimensions the space that is both created by a series of more than two points and becomes the support for the structure.  The grid maps relations between elements thus organized into relations of discovered intelligibility, allowing not only the oppositions of the slashed pair but a system […] Thus the grid, in structuralist terms, is both structure and metaphor for thought – the mark of human meaning-making and consciousness.’[24]

Citing “Attention and Interpretation” a paper by British Kleinian analyst Wilfred Bion, Griselda Pollock discusses his ‘concept of inner space, an inner world that arises from what he calls “O,” which is theoretically akin to Lacan’s proposition of the real – the zone of the thing.’[25]  For Bion “O” ‘stands for the absolute truth in and of any object; it is assumed that this cannot be known by a human being; it can be known about, its presence can be recognized and felt, but it cannot be known.’[26]  Griselda Pollock suggests that art might offer a connection to processes in which inner subjectivised space is given ‘some kind of ordering, some thinkability, some limit:’ as well as becoming ‘also the other, the partner, the trans-subjective site of what Bracha Ettinger has called a necessary transference through which the endless play of possibilities and dangers are returned to the artist’.[27]   For Artist, theorist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger the soul of ‘[a]n abstract painting is the becoming visible of energetic potentialities and the relationship of these potentialities […]  The artist responds to and evokes a form by the same stroke.  A symbologenic instance of a real is thus created; a potential knowledge to be articulated.   For Kandinksy, the emotion of the soul of the artist plays a role by evoking the soul of the viewer; but this artistic soul, which vibrates with the interior “sound” of line or color in the painting, is no less than a universal openness, travelling from the artist to the viewer via the form.’[28]When art is dematerialised such that there is no interior “sound” of line or colour, where and how does the artistic soul vibrate? LeWitt’s work, when considered alongside that of Agnes Martin, generates conceptually through the medium of protocol that which she generates materially through the media of drawing and painting.  In his dematerialised works, the soul of the artist vibrates through the “idea of error” and the enactment of his protocols by other human hands rather than the representation of an ideated or ideal order.   

 Discussing Bion’s ‘thoughts about thinking […] the drastic situation of the early human infant [who is] potentially overwhelmed by raw sensations and feelings’[29] Pollock outlines his suggestion that ‘the mother’s reverie’ exists ‘as a trans-subjective processor of the undigested anxieties’ that the child alone is unable to deal with and which she can only project at the mother.[30]  

‘Taking into herself these raw “beta” elements of the child’s life and death anxieties, the mother returns them to the child, modified and detoxified so that instead of nameless dread, the infant can digest a tamed “fear” […] The mother and child are what Bion calls a “thinking couple.”  Thus, if thoughts are a container of anxiety, they depend upon a trans-subjective container, a thinking otherness that then depends upon another kind of spatiality that is not actual, but invests movement between subjects with emotional purpose that is the condition of tolerating change, bearing uncertainty, developing itself.

Art is generated Pollock suggests, via ‘this circuit of projection and introjection’ – that which Bracha Ettinger theorizes as the m/other – and comes into being through the artist’s encounter with elements that are potentially threatening, vast, annihilating, nothing, chaotic’.[31] To create, ‘an artist has to tolerate a level of not knowing, not mastering, of working with uncertainty and lack.’ [32]

The grid for Rosalind Krauss was ‘stridently modern to look at, seeming to have no left no place of refuge, no room on the face of it, for vestiges of the nineteenth century to hide.’[33]  Perhaps protocol is a dematerialised form of the grid: a structure ‘that allows a contradiction between the values of science and those of spiritualism to maintain themselves within the consciousness [not of modernism, but of network society] or rather its unconscious, as something repressed.’[34] Rather than follow Krauss’ theorisation of the contradiction between science and spiritualism as myth, is there a different way to understand their relation: one that accounts for their co-existence? An ontology of co-poiesis?

[1] Rosalind Krauss (1997) ‘Grids” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. London: The MIT Press. pp 8-22  p.9

[2] Rosalind Krauss (1997). P. 9.

[3] krauss, page 10

[4] krauss page 10.

[5] This article was written 1978

[6] Kraus 197 p.9

[7] Krauss page 10

[8] krauss page 10

[9] krauss page 10.

[10] Krauss, page 10

[11] Krauss, page 12

[12] Krauss, page 12

[13] Krauss page 12

[14] Krauss, page 12

[15] Michael Govan Agnes Martin Essay for Dia Center http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs_b/martin/essay.html

[16] Anna C. Chave ‘Agnes Martin: “Humility, The Beautiful daughter…All of Her Ways are Empty’ in Haskell , Agnes martin

[17] the phrase is Frank Kolbert’s, cited in Hermann Kern, Agnes Martin, exh. Cat. (Munich: Kunstraum Munchen, 1973’ and then citedin Chave, Haskel

[18] after 10000 line drawing – she did use a ruler

[19] In ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’ Griselda Pollock suggests that Agnes Martin’s work is ‘place making not place taking’.

[20] In chave in haskell  Agnes martin ‘the still and silent’ in art

[21] Griselda Pollock ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’ in 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing p.164

[22] Griselda Pollock ‘Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes’ in 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing p.164

[23] ibid page 164

[24] ibid 165

[25] Griselda Pollock page 166.

[26] Bion, Attention and Interpretation, p.30 in Griselda Pollock 166

[27] Griselda Pollock ‘Agnes Dreaming’ page 169 – she references BLE “Trans-subjective Transferential Borderspace,” in Brian Massumi, ed. A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 21-39, and “From Transference to the Aesthetic Paradigm: A conversation with Felix Guattari,” in Ibid., 240-5

[28] Bracha Ettinger The Art-And-Healing Oeuvre: Metramorphic Relinquishment of the Soul-Spirit to the Spirit of the Cosmos, in 3 x Abstraction page 208

[29] Griselda Pollock page 166

[30] Griselda Pollock page 166

[31] Griselda Pollock page 166

[32] Griselda Pollock page 166

[33] Krauss page 12

[34] Krauss page 12