A little research into the Grid in Art
Why the Grid?
Rosalind Krauss called the grid emblematic of the modernist ambition. In my work the grid has recurred in several times prompting me to question its significance in my own work as well as its position in the art world. I have used the grid as an organizational tool. I have used it to structure and abstract my works loosely related to landscape. For me the grid also references science and technology, and has acted as a design tool. To better understand the history of the grid in contemporary art and my own motivation for employing it I turned to several authors including Rosalind Krauss, Margarita Tupitsyn and Hanna B. Higgins.
The most often quoted source for understanding the grid in modern art is Rosalind Krauss. In her 1979 article, Krauss presented the grid as an emblem of modernity. She sees the grid as functioning to “declare the modernity of modern art” in two ways, spatial and temporal. Spatially the grid flattens and orders. This is unnatural and unreal or as Krauss says, “antinatural, antimimetic, antireal”. The grid declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic (Krauss 50). According to Krauss the grid appears everywhere in art in the twentieth century but absolutely nowhere in the nineteenth century. In earlier times such as the fifteenth and sixteenth century the grid does appear but for technical reasons. Uccello, Leonardo and others used the grid, but Krauss reminds us that these uses are for the study of perspective. The grid is used to more accurately portray a nature. This contrasts markedly with the use of the grid in modern art where it is used to map out the surface of the painting if anything at all and not a relationship between the natural world and painting. She dates the modern use of the grid to Malevich and Mondrian and the movements of cubism and de Stijl. Most of Krauss’s discussion focuses on painting. The presence of the grid without reference to nature at first seems to speak of “naked and determined materialism”(Krauss 52). But for the originators of the grid and here Krauss sites Malevich and Mondrian, the grid was about the spiritual. For these artists Krauss calls the grid the staircase to the Universal. Krauss goes on to discuss the ambivalence about the grid in modern art. It seems to stand for materialism but also for the spiritual. She references Ad Reinhardt paintings of nine square grids, which in spite of the artists claim, “Art is art” take on the appearance of a Greek cross. The grid serves then two functions that seem to be contradictory. It deals with materialism but also seems to have a mythical power, as evidenced by works of Reinhardt or Agnes Martin.
What relationship does the grid have with the myth? Krauss references the writings Claude Levi-Strauss about structural anthropology. Levi-Strauss used the grid to frame the function of myths. The myth functions as a cultural attempt to deal with contradiction and the human condition. The structuralist analysis uses vertical columns to study oppositions. The grid is not a narrative but a structure that allows a “contradiction between values of science and those of spiritualism to maintain themselves within the consciousness of modernism” (Krauss 55).
Although grids were not present in nineteenth century art they did appear in the growing scientific field of optics. Painters of that time paid a great deal of attention to this developing study. Optics concentrated on light and color and how they were perceived. The writings about physiological optics were illustrated with grids. “Given all of this, it is not surprising that the grid –as an emblem of the infrastructure of vision – should become an increasingly insistent and visible feature of neo-impressionist painting.” Artists such as Seurat, Signac, Cross and Luce were learning about how one color affects a neighboring color. Krauss claims that as these artists applied the lessons they learned from the science of physiological optics, their paintings became more abstract (Krauss 57).
The symbolists who opposed any relationship between art and science would seem to be unlikely users of the grid. But they used the grid in the form of the window. Krauss gives View from the Painter’s Studio (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich and The Day (1891) by Odilon Redon as two examples. The window is functioning as a transparent vehicle that admits light or spirit into the room. The grid dividing the window helps to us to see or focus. “They function as the multilevel representation through which the work of art can allude, and even reconstitute, the forms of Being” (Krauss59).
Krauss then discusses the argument about the grid being either a centrifugal or a centripetal framework. The grid by its extensions outward suggests a world beyond the frame and by its repetition suggests infinity. Another reading of the grid is that it is centripetal, that maps the space into the frame rather than outward. Krauss uses several examples of Mondrian’s paintings to demonstrate both concepts. The centrifugal argument proposes the continuing of the artwork into the world, it supports ways of using the grid from abstract statement to explorations of the perceptual field such as in Agnes Martin’s work. Moving away from the abstract into man made symbols such as numbers, and letters, Krauss directs us to Jasper Johns as examples. Even more realistic uses of the grid, might be Warhol’s silkscreened celebrity photographs or Chuck Close’s portraits. For the centripetal use of the grid, a focus on the perimeter brings the work into the frame. In her concluding paragraphs, Krauss discusses briefly a handful of artists of the 1960s and 1970s and their use of the grid. She makes passing comments about Louis Nevelson and Frank Lloyd Wright as most of her discussion deals with painters. Finally Krauss predicts that the grid is here to stay that “ one of the most modernist things about it is its capacity to serve as a paradigm or model for the antidevelopment, the antinarrative and the antihistorical”(Krauss 64).
In contrast to Krauss who positions the grid as an emblem of modernism, Margarita Tupitsyn discusses a different use of the grid. In her essay focusing on Russian artists she discusses the use of the grid as a formal and ideological device. Her essay argues, “that the grid can still be an effective device in radical art practices as long as it is not perceived as an escapist structure that does not address the topics of today” (Tupitsyn 1). Tupitsyn presents Aleksandr Rodchenko and Luibov Popova as more relevant to the origin of the grid than Malevich. Malevich actually dealt with planes rather than lines. Rodchenko on the other hand presented the true grid of lines as in his painting Construction no.95 (1919). He derived his painting grids from architectural drawings. He was part of a Russian collective seeking to revolutionize architecture. The political and economic climate thwarted the realization of the architectural projects and many of his paintings reflect architectural influence. Papova also referenced architecture in her paintings. The grid which dominated Rodchenko and Papovaa’s paintings did not symbolize the autonomy of art as in western modernist painting instead it “offered an exit from two-dimensional production” “achieving the overcoming of art” (Tupitsyn 4). Rodchenko began using the grid with typographical elements in his handmade cover for the 5x5=25 exhibition that opened in 1921. In 1922, he used a grid in newsreels called Cine-Truth. These were to be shown in the streets and on factory walls. These grids became mobiles and optical mechanisms with speech. This differed from the Western grid, which according to Strauss demonstrated modern art’s will to silence. Rodchenko, by incorporating text, used to grid to communicate. Popova broke away from painting and brought the grid into a monumental structure for the mass festival, The Struggle and the Victory. She also designed oversized wooden lattices that the actors climbed on for the set designs of Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922 and Earth in Turmoil, 1922-3. In these instances the grid functioned “as a shield against mimetic stage designs associated with pre-Revolutionary theater”(Tupitsyn 4). The grid with its open geometry and structure similar to a prison cage came to represent the increasingly hazardous political climate.
The grid disappeared from Soviet Art in the 1930s but returned in the 1960s with the Movement group. This group of artists used geometric forms that they believed enhanced the human experience. They created three-dimensional grid like interactive installations like Francisco Infante’s installation, Galaxy (1967) in Moscow. In the 1970s Ilya Kabakov revisited the grid but delivered it with a verbal message in his work titled The Schedule for taking out the Garbage. In her discussion Tupitsyn goes on to give examples of the use of the grid into the twenty-first century. The use of the grid as discussed by Tupitsyn is more complex than in Krauss’s description. The grid “in its very structure is an opponent of mental and visual disorientation, and its subsequent marriage with documentary (factographic) material (made in Russia by constructivists and in Germany by the Bauhaus artists) changed the grid from being a structure of an ‘abbreviatory optic’ to being a tool for attaining what the Bauhaus artist Herbert Bayer called ‘the extended vision’ (Tupitsyn 11). As for the grid in the post modern art world Tupitsyn goes on to say that “Postmodern artists were the last to adopt collectively this second function of the grid, the paradigm of art making, now melting, like the artic glaciers in the global space of political, economic and social uncertainty” (Tupitsyn 11).
The most comprehensive discussion of the grid is a book by Hannah B. Higgins. The Grid Book published in 2009 traces the grid back to the beginnings of human civilization with the invention of the brick in 9000 BCE. She titles each of the ten chapters with a grid that changed the world. In her detailed book, each breakthrough grid gets its own chapter. She explains how the brick, tablet, gridiron, map, notation, ledger, screen, type, box and finally the network take their place in human civilization. She explores the grid not as a utensil of modernism, like Krauss, or as a formal or ideological tool (as Tupitsyn would say is a justified use of the grid) but more broadly as a mode of human cognition. She demonstrated throughout the book artists over the centuries that have used the grid. Her book “tells the story of the evolution of each grid from the handmade brick through the ethereal Internet in the language of a generalist (Higgins 7).
This brief review of grids has led me to think critically about my own use of the grid. I initially applied it as a design and organizational element. In exploring and recreating landscapes particularly the aerial view I used the grid to flatten and abstract the landscape. My interest in repeated patterns has also influenced my use of the grid. My respect for science has prompted me to imitate the gridded lines of the lab notebook in my latest work. A desire to put chaos of creation into a structure leads me apply the grid into my work as well. An awareness of the grid with its implications and seductive nature will hopefully lead to more meaningful work.
Works Cited
Higgins, Hannah B. The Grid Book. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2009. Print.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids.” October 9 (1979): 50. Print.
Tupitsyn, Margarita. “The Grid as a Checkpoint of Modernity.” Tate Papers, no. 12, Autumn 2009, Http://www.tate.org.uk/resaerch/publications/tate-papaers/12/the-grid-as-a-checkpointi-of-modernity March 2017
