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The Grid
Extracted from a paper of the same name, by Hilary Ellis(2007)
If Mondrian intended his grid paintings to be more than a mere exercise in surface and containment, another artist who made extensive use of the grid in her work was Agnes Martin.
Although Agnes Martin is usually linked to the Minimalist movement which emerged in the 1960's, she has sometimes claimed a link with certain Abstract Expressionists of her own generation, but most frequently she positions herself within the classical tradition alongside the Egyptians, Greeks, Coptics and Chines.
Like Mondrian, Martin saw her grids as vehicles for expression. As she asserted in an interview with Suzan Campbell in 1989:
'When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then a grid came into my mind and I thought it represent innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied, I thought this is my vision'
(Campbell, 1989: pp. 10-11).
She has repeatedly affirmed that
'the function of the artwork ………. is the renewal of memories of moments of perfection'
(McEvilley, 1987: p.94). She believed that sensations experienced when contemplating the natural world - prairies, plains, deserts, the night sky, the ocean - could generate emotions of happiness innocence and beauty, and it was these conditions that she wished to convey through her work.
Martin came to her trademark grid format when she was already in her mid-forties and living in New York in the 1950's. Her first grids were related to the aesthetic of the throwaway which was prevalent in New York at that time. She used ' found' objects - wire and boat spikes to produce a grid format but soon abandoned these readymade materials in favour of more traditional drawing methods. Barbara Haskell described her works which drew on 'found' materials as 'more like talismans.' She comments that Martin found them 'too indebted to material reality and abandoned them.' (Haskell, 1992: p103). This retreat into spiritual essence coupled with her later retreat into the desert has come to dominate the way Martin is thought of as an artist.
Although abandoning ready made materials for the drawn line, her concern with the medium, her intricate covering of the surface, suggests the substitution of one kind of materiality for another. Her drawings at this stage do not appear to be concerned with fragmentation but with completeness, emphasised by the borders which surround her grids and stop them being seen as part of an extended continuum. In fact in her later grid works she dispenses with the borders, taking the lines of her grids to the edges of the canvas, thereby opening out the works as an expression of infinity.
Although Rosalind Krauss asserts that the grid: ……….
'... states the absolute autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti real. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature'
(Krauss, 1988: P.9)
when one looks at Agnes Martin's work, it can be seen that in terms of expressiveness the grid has much more to offer than Krauss's modernist interpretation. The imposition of such strict limits on her format, enabled Martin to explore the differences within it, and it is these infinitesimal differences and imperfections within the repetition that engender the expressiveness of her work.
The artist has often claimed that her paintings reflect her inner life, her spirituality, which is derived from eastern forms of thought where the infinite is expressed in a grain of sand or a blade of grass.
Hilary Ellis' work is featured here...
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Untitled
Agnes Martin (1962)
Acrylic priming, graphite and brass nails on Canvas
30.5 x 30.5 cm
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
Photo by Phillip Scholz Ritterman.