I have been mostly taken up with reading for, and planning, essays… I’m particularly excited about my current work on Cornelia Parker’s ‘Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View’. It’s been interesting to think about it in terms of the modernist tropes of the grid and the monochrome.
While Parker’s installation is neither grid nor monochrome, its photographic documentation tends to present it as a dramatic black mass and it is hung from a wire ceiling support (in a gird shape). Its elements are actually carefuly ordered around the central lightbulb, starting with the tiniest fragment and expanding outwards to the largest sections of broken down shed – which form cross and grid shapes like barriers between the viewer and the work.
In particular I’ve been looking at Briony Fer and Rosalind Krauss’s writing on avant-garde originality and sequence. Both art historians are concerned with the fiction of origins, found in grids and monochrome works by artists such as Malevich.
By origins, Fer and Krauss mean both the artist as a unique creative genius, whose super self manifests unique works of art, and also the idea of the monochrome or grid as a radical paring down or peeling back of the picture to it ‘original’ or basic rectangular shape. Of course, both historians are highly suspiscious of these modernist beliefs. (I might go into this more if people are interested?)
To me, Parker’s presentation of a huge, frozen explosion in Cold Dark Matter harks back to these ideas of artistic origins, albeit in a rather slapstick or parodic idiom. I will be exploring in my essay what it is that Cold Dark Matter might help us to think about earlier art historical reliance on the idea of the original.
It would be interesting to hear from artists that are blogging on a-n who consider their contemporary practice in terms of an ongoing dialogue with modernist thought, figures or forms – this might be critical or pleasure-driven, or a form of re-working for the contemporary moment.
Please do get in touch as I’d like to do more work on this in the future.
ps – I’m really enjoying being on twitter. Following AxisWeb is especially helpful as they signpost interesting events and opportunities… I also hooked up with the wonderful Miro Dance Theatre in Philadelphia. Love being international!
pps – I have ordered Lucy Lippard’s novel, mentioned in my previous post, so will write more about that when it arrives. Can’t wait :)
