Diary of an Art Historian

Idea for suspended thread or rope grid in the nature reserve. Sketchbook page image.

More images of the grid in nature…

(See 29th August post for previous images and a film)

Are there any artists living in or near York? I’m going to be moving there in October to do a year-long History of Art MA and would like to meet other artists, with the potential to meet regularly to discuss work and maybe arrange some sort of exhibition together if things seem to gel together.

Please contact me or leave a comment if you live in the York area, or if you know of any existing groups in the area. Thanks!

Grids are informing my practice as both an artist- and an art historian-in-training. This week I’ve been getting to grips with Griselda Pollock’s and Rosalind Krauss’s analyses of Martin’s grid paintings/drawings. I have one main question springing up out of this dense reading. If anyone has an interest or expertise in this area and would like to comment I’d be more than grateful to discuss:

Both Krauss and Pollock find in Martin’s work (viewed at mid-distance) an experience of the formless. Krauss has written elsewhere on the formless or informe, derived from Georges Bataille’s use of the term to mean a breaking down of fixed categories. She uses this to challenge the feminist interpretation of surrealism as a masculine imaginary realm, in which women have no true voice (and are subjected to violence), pointing out that both female and male artists have used similar category-blurring strategies in a surrealist vein. However, I’m not sure yet whether the formless (as in openness or atmosphere) in Martin’s grids is intended by Krauss to be identified with the informe, or whether it’s a case of the same word having multiple art-theoretical meanings. By placing her essay on Martin in Bachelors, a book in which more than half of the essays deal directly with the surrealist informe in contemporary/modern art, Krauss seems to be suggesting that it is relevant to Martin…

Pollock calls upon ‘formless’ to describe an experience of openness, connection, movement, potentiality in the viewing of Martin’s grids – something that she relates to Irigaray’s concept of pre-subjectivity: when as a baby we didn’t have the ordering structure of language and we were more like one with our mother. The grid is then a sort of visual analogue for the arrival of thought itself, language-based structure in a sensory/sensual world. The problem is that although this open, pre-language, pre-subject ‘formless’ sounds rather like Bataille’s category-destroying informe, Pollock explicitly states that it is not. My thought so far is that she doesn’t want her feminist, interpretative work sullied with misogynistic, base materialism, but also that Pollock sees some kind of category of ‘feminine’ worth preserving. Any suggestions much appreciated!

The grid in my current work with visual/material stuff is way more playful (images to come tomorrow!); taking time out to think about that structure in my non-theory time (which is pretty scarce at present) seems to be making it easier for me to find the necessary connections in my hard reading and writing hours. Could it be that physically handling a forever collapsing wonky cardboard grid could help my mind to turn the grid concept over and over, letting it fall apart and figuring out what makes sense about it, and in what other theorists have made of it?

If the finished essay itself makes any sense, I’ll upload it to my portfolio and post a link.

Yesterday I took my cardboard grid out for a walk through the nature reserve near my flat. I took digital photographs of the flimsy white geometric thing flapping in the wind; I also took a 30 second video. It was a fascinating experience, watching a grid, approaching it from various angles – with a diagonal approach from a fair distance the grid looked curved, foreshortened like a crescent moon. I hung it on a prickly bush with bright lilac and magenta flowers.

Click here to see the video of the grid.