-
Recent Posts
Currently Most Read Posts
Recent Comments
- Sharon McCarthy on Edges Early and Late
- Gregg Simpson on Empty Formalism of Education
- Martin Mugar on Those who make
- Martin Mugar on Unknown
- Peter peri on The Planar Dimension
Categories
- Abstraction and Society (196)
- American Modernism (168)
- Conceptualism and Painting (137)
- Current Affairs (84)
- Ethics of Abstraction (138)
- Italian Art (26)
- Latin American Abstraction (9)
- Principles of Abstraction (305)
- Uncategorized (277)
Tags
abstract art abstraction aesthetics autonomy backstory Boris Groys cubism Cézanne drawing emptiness feeling form Frank Stella Gego Gerhard Richter Greenberg grids illusion Jackson Pollock knowledge labor Linsley literature meaning nature Pablo Picasso painted reliefs place R.H.Quaytman Robert Motherwell science self-reflection series sex shaped canvas Shep Steiner Smithson society space subjectivity the inhuman time titles value Willem De Kooning-
Bookstore
-
Art and its Others (with Boris Groys)
Abstraction and Possibility Space (with Andreas Neufert)
Doors:River (with Joseph Drapell and David Moos)
Around the Episcene (with Scott Lyall)
Matrix of Surds (Mike Murphy and Wojciech Oleinik)
Non-Identical Abstraction Engine (with Jan Tumlir)
A CLOUDE OF UNKNOWYNG (Lee Henderson on Sasha Pierce)
Pictures and Picture Proofs (Wojciech Olejnik and James Brown)
On Parts You Can’t See (Polly Apfelbaum and Kelly Jazvac)
Links
Meta
Tag Archives: grids
Alexis Harding
One of my favorite contemporaries is Alexis Harding, an old friend. I think he uses gravity in a very good way, with a lot of intervention on the way down. He pours a grid of commercial enamel over artist’s oils, … Continue reading
Posted in Conceptualism and Painting, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Alberto Burri, Alexis Harding, feeling, grids, labor, Lucio Fontana, nature, sex, subjectivity
1 Comment
Polly Apfelbaum
I will soon add an interview with Polly Apfelbaum to the Publications page—actually a conversation between her and artist Kelly Jazvac. I very much admire this piece for its negative areas, the way that they flow together and make chains … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, drawing, emptiness, form, grids, Polly Apfelbaum, space
Leave a comment
Stella and the Past
Stella reveals a lot about his ambitions in the following comments on ceiling painting: “Pietro da Cortona, Fra Pozzi and even Tiepolo met the challenges of architectural decoration in a more measured, distanced manner than their predecessors. They worked the … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, emptiness, Frank Stella, grids, place, space, Tiepolo
Leave a comment
Noise
Following from the previous post, as an example of visual noise I would like to present any abstract work by Gerhard Richter. Pictures like this are the high class, supremely tasteful equivalent of stadium rock, a sclerotic form if there … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, form, Gerhard Richter, grids, labor, meaning, music, series
Leave a comment
Alighiero Boetti
A latecomer to Boetti’s work, I have no expertise in it. Right now I’m looking at this grid piece, “Niente da vedere niente da nascondere,” or “Nothing to see nothing to hide.” The title really adds something, and bears thought, … Continue reading
Bad Art
Going back to the conversation between Christopher Green and T.J.Clark that I mentioned before, one of Clark’s comments bothered me. He said that “hack” artists, bad ones, are certain that they have found the right way to render modernity. In … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, feeling, grids, Matisse, nature, Pablo Picasso, TJClark, value
Leave a comment
One thing beside another
Many abstract paintings, especially of the brushy variety, are collections of marks, shapes, strokes, glimpses, stuff all banging around on the canvas. In this they are just like life, which is also a matter of floating planes that get in … Continue reading
Shaped canvas 4
I’m happily surprised to find that this blog can be very productive for my work. I open my mouth to express what I believe, and find that I don’t believe it any more. I’ve been too doctrinaire about the organic … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, form, Frank Stella, grids, shaped canvas, Tiepolo
Leave a comment
A correction
Mitchell is usually grouped with the so-called second generation of abstract expressionists, and therefore automatically discounted. This is not right. If I could re-jig the canon of abstract expressionism I would definitely drop Rothko and include Mitchell. I saw this … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, feeling, form, grids, Joan Mitchell, space
1 Comment
So far
This blog is getting complex, and though I’m glad to be getting comments on older posts I’m also afraid that some good moments will be lost because of the very nature of a blog, which is that it is always … Continue reading
Restoration
In the previous post I raised the stakes for my own work considerably, but before backing my bet I’ll explain what I meant by the last sentence of that post. Sometime in the late sixties or early seventies, it became … Continue reading
Vagueness and ambiguity
To talk about voiding the subject and art as nature is fascinating to me, and maybe to others, but it’s also probably too general, too abstract. All kinds of uninteresting work could qualify. As an artist I’m a pragmatist, not … Continue reading
Posted in Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, emptiness, grids, illusion, literature
Leave a comment
Infinity
Infinity is a trope—for all the possibilities not realized, paths not taken, forms not shaped, decisions not made, choices not faced. It appears in art as the illusion of an unbounded area. That’s the good kind of infinity, an emptiness … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics of Abstraction, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, Cézanne, emptiness, grids, literature, space, trope
Leave a comment
Lines in Space
A little while ago I received the following note from Richard Shiff, referring to an earlier post: “I agree with these lines of yours, with regard to Judd … ‘I think that an artist like Judd would probably assent, but … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Donald Judd, grids, Richard Shiff, space
Leave a comment
Grids Part 5
In a recent conversation with painter Yunhee Min I was provoked to the following thought about grids: What I find most interesting in what you are saying is your use of geometry to make an origin for yourself. [referring to … Continue reading
Newtonian Abstraction
In the Newtonian system there is a stable framework within which all bodies can be placed, an absolute space, an empty box that extends in all directions. Newton himself understood this as a simplification, and it is viewed by scientists … Continue reading
Grids in the World
It is possible that my argument that grids are too conceptual, meaning that they are too much a pre-existent form and therefore block experience, might apply less to three dimensional work than to two dimensional. So, apropos of Morellet, for … Continue reading
Island Folds
A series of works in which I tried something similar were the Island Folds, made of sheets of paper cut into irregular polygons and attached directly to the wall. The empty sections, which revealed the wall, were also irregular polygons, … Continue reading
Posted in Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, grids, illusion, Linsley, space
Leave a comment
The Grid and the Rectangle
As far as I know, there are two ways to negate the edge of a picture, and each one has the effect of drawing attention to that edge. The classical, frieze like arrangement uses verticals and horizontals and in modern … Continue reading
Posted in Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, grids, illusion, Linsley, society, space
Leave a comment
Grids Part 4
My objection to the grid has always been its a priori nature. It’s worse now that it is very widely, if not universally, taken as a given. I heard Richard Tuttle say something to the effect that in the absence … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics of Abstraction, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, grids, Linsley
Leave a comment
Grids Part 3
Gego’s grids definitely have something to do with painting, firstly because they sustain an illusion, something like a thin soap film or an almost invisible plane suspended across the gaps. This can’t be photographed, but it is objectively verifiable, and … Continue reading
Grids Part 2
If in some cases two-dimensional grids stand for one kind of reduction of painting, the question is how far can we generalize this notion—to which other artists does it apply, bearing in mind that they themselves may not hold this … Continue reading
Posted in Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Christian Bonnefoi, Eva Hesse, Gego, grids, illusion
Leave a comment
Grids
Greenberg suggested that instead of laying paint on top of the canvas, if paint was stained into the weave the canvas itself would then become the painting, both object and image. The artists of Supports/Surfaces took that kind of thinking … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Dezeuze, Greenberg, grids, Valensi
Leave a comment
Marisa Merz Part 2
Merz’s Scarpette are loosely woven out of nylon. A weaving is a grid, and in an art context the allusion to the conventional pictorial support is unavoidable. That they are slippers is charming, comical and a little shivery. In the … Continue reading
Posted in Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, grids, Marisa Merz, nature, space
Leave a comment