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Grids
ROSALIND KRAUSS
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by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respectto natural objects,to be both
prior and final.The grid declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and
autotelic.
In thetemporaldimension,thegridis an emblemofmodernitybybeingjust
that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century,while appearing
nowhere,nowhereat all, in theartof the last one. In thatgreatchain ofreactions
of the nineteenthcentury,one
by which modernismwas born out of the efforts
finalshiftresultedin breakingthe chain. By "discovering"the grid,cubism,de
Stijl, Mondrian,Malevich . . . landed in a place thatwas out ofreachof everything
else
thatwent before.Which is to say, theylanded in thepresent,and everything
was declared to be the past.
One has to travela long way back into the historyof art to findprevious
and sixteenthcenturies,to
examples of grids. One has to go to the fifteenth
treatiseson perspectiveand to those exquisite studiesby Uccello or Leonardo or
Diirer, where the perspectivelattice is inscribed on the depicted world as the
armatureof its organization.But perspectivestudiesare not reallyearlyinstances
of grids. Perspectivewas, after all, the science of the real, not the mode of
withdrawalfromit. Perspectivewas the demonstrationof the way realityand its
could be mapped onto one another,theway thepaintedimage and
representation
did in factrelateto one another-the firstbeing a formof
its real-worldreferent
second.
about
the
Everythingabout thegridopposes thatrelationship,
knowledge
cuts it offfromthe verybeginning.Unlike perspective,thegriddoes not map the
space of a room or a landscape or a group offiguresonto thesurfaceofa painting.
Indeed, if it maps anything,it maps the surfaceof the painting itself.It is a
in which nothingchanges place. The physicalqualities of thesurface,we
transfer
could say, are mapped onto the aestheticdimensionsof the same surface.And
thosetwo planes-the physicaland theaesthetic-are demonstratedto be thesame
plane: coextensive,and, throughthe abscissas and ordinatesof the grid,coordinate. Consideredin thisway,thebottomline of thegridis a naked and determined
materialism.
But if it is materialismthat the grid would make us talk about-and there
seems no otherlogical way to discuss it-that is not theway thatartistshave ever
discussedit. If we open any tract-Plastic Artand Pure Plastic Artor The NonObjective World,forinstance-we will findthat Mondrianand Malevich are not
discussing canvas or pigmentor graphiteor any otherformof matter.They are
talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From theirpoint of view, the grid is a
staircaseto the Universal,and theyare not interestedin what happens below in
the Concrete.Or, to take a more up-to-dateexample, we could think about Ad
Reinhardt who, despite his repeated insistencethat "Art is art," ended up by
painting a series of black nine-squaregridsin which the motifthatinescapably
emergesis a Greekcross. There is no painterin the Westwho can be unaware of
the symbolic power of the cruciformshape and the Pandora's box of spiritual
referencethatis opened once one uses it.
Agnes Martin. Untitled.1965.
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OCTOBER
Grids
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