L’idée de pensée de derrière la tête

'There are two ways in which the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art. One is spatial; the other is temporal. In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface. In the overall regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationship in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final. The grid declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic.

In the temporal dimension, the grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century, while appearing nowhere, nowhere at all, in the art of the last one. In that great chain of reactions by which modernism was born out of the efforts of the nineteenth century, one final shift resulted in breaking the chain. By "discovering" the grid, cubism, de Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich… landed in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before. Which is to say, they landed in the present, and everything else was declared to b the past.

One has to travel a long way back into the history of art to find previous examples of grids. One has to go to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to treatises on perspective and to those exquisite studies by Uccello or Leonardo or Dürer, where the perspective lattice is inscribed on the depicted world as the armature of its organization. But perspective studies are not really instances of grids. Perspective was, after all, the science of the real, not the mode of withdrawal from it. Perspective was the demonstration of the way reality and its representation could be mapped onto one another, the way the painted image and its real-world referent did in fact relate to one another—the first being a form of knowledge about the second. Everything about the grid opposes that relationship, cuts it off from the very beginning. Unlike perspective, the grid does not map the space of a room or a landscape or a group of figures onto the surface of a painting. Indeed, if it maps anything, it maps the surface of the painting itself. It is a transfer in which nothing changes place. The physical qualities of the surface, we could say, are mapped onto the aesthetic dimensions of the same surface. And those two planes—the physical and the aesthetic—are demonstrated to be the same plane: coextensive, and, through the abscissas and ordinates of the grid, coordinate. Considered in this way, the bottom line of the grid is a naked and determined materialism.

But if it is materialism that the grid would make us talk about—and there seems to be no other logical way to discuss it—that is not the way that artists have ever discussed it. If we open any tract—Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance—we will find that 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 in the Concrete.'

'… it can be said that the first use of serial imagery in recent painting is shared by two artists, Ad Reinhardt and Yves Klein. Klein's serial painting (begun about 1957) is marked by the systematic use of one canvas size and one grainy textured color. The similarity of color together with the low textural level of organically clustered paint grain, while it slowed down scan, was insufficient to defeat an inherent tendency towards inert uniformity. Reinhardt's use of serial imagery, on the other hand, though also basically entropic as an enterprise, is more important for a number of reasons. Reinhardt's serial usage predates that of Klein, and unlike the overtly systematic look of Albers' art, Reinhardt's serial forms imply the use of a structure whose order is inherent but concealed. In various paintings (as far back as 1955) Reinhardt employed as a structural principle a series of fundamentally positioned forms that repeated at the framing edge. At times he united four square canvases to form a larger square. This modular division of the overall format was further reiterated by the horizontal and vertical squares symmetrically placed within each segment. His early systematic use of symmetry served to purge his painting of an outdated rhetoric, which he campaigned against equally in his systematically reiterated writings.

Reinhardt clearly is a key figure in the evolution of serial imagery in the United States, as Klein was not. If, apart from the inherent entropic tendency of his painting, any deficiency could be isolated it would be his manner of paint application, which never sufficiently deactivated the internal time-flow of the structure. His method of facture, consisting of a layer-upon-layer application of flat paint over a preexistent image, left traces of a "local" time track. In his last works, however, the black overlay of paint fused more into a one-to-one relationship with his structure. As the paintings got blacker they became more and more neutral. The formal importance of Reinhardt's painting therefore resides in its quality of indetermination, its neutral emptiness. This indeterminate quality would not be remarkable in itself if it were not allied to an emphasis on symmetry and macro-structure: that which raises no claim to stand for the work in its own right, but which controls the development of the individual paintings within a series. What Reinhardt set into motion was the idea of a network of choices and limitations which were pre-formed but not logically apparent on the surface of the picture or within the whole series. Until now it has always been assumed that Reinhardt was only repeating one painting rather than painting a series. On the other hand Reinhardt's work also proved that once the hierarchical links are solved and ironed out it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve contrast, that is, to give each painting a positive identity without reasserting rank or becoming overbearingly redundant. Nevertheless, his painting was a forceful step in the serial direction and of great importance to a later generation.'

'Three basic operating assumptions separate serially ordered works from multiple variants:

1. The derivation of the terms or interior divisions of the work is by means of a numerical or otherwise systematically predetermined process (permutation, progression, rotation, reversal).

2. The order takes precedence over the execution.

3. The completed work is fundamentally parsimonious and systematically self exhausting.'

'Rejecting the determinist notion of natural necessity as unknowable, and also rejecting Epicurean randomness, Kant selects necessity that we create, on the model of law or legislation.'

'We play what the day recommends.'

(Disappointment as a response to a losing confrontation between imagination and the actual.)

'This distinction did away with the idea that one could use common sense to answer everything coherently.'

'… one suspects a race between authorities to see who could prosecute the man whose 1999 single introduced the phrase "bling bling" both to the public and to Merriam-Webster's dictionary.'