(Fragment) Chapter Two: Post modern Grids

This chapter sets out to identify what definitions of postmodern grids might be and what characteristics provide the shift in meaning from the grid as understood in modernist thought.

It is important in the offset to point to the definitions of modernism and postmodernism being adopted here as those defined in Jean- François Lyotard’s essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?’ in which he says that realism, modernism and postmodernism operate concurrently and timelessly through art history. In his book on Lyotard, author Simon Malpas writes a succinct line to describe Lyotard’s positioning of postmodernism within this context, describing it as “a matter of aesthetic style rather than historical periodisation.” Lyotard, in his essay, argues that a work “can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Thus understood, postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent”.

Although concurring with Lyotard’s un-time-bound descriptors of modernism and postmodernism as conceptual constructs; accepting Lyotard’s idea that postmodernism is the constant nagger of modernism and its disruptive influence; this thesis does however hold that some of the programmatic forces of modernism were deconstructed in the 1960’s, markedly with the critique of minimalism and the rise of feminism. (Not to say of course that postmodernist minimalism is not a valid practice). Here, though, the critical concern is with contemporary paintings, and the assumptive position taken is that no aspect of abstraction in postmodernist painting relates to ideals of purity or notions of authenticity that characterise modernist painting, being careful not to use the past tense. The reverse is argued, demonstrating how grids, as once seductive device/escape/trap for painters (Krauss: 1986 ), are far removed from their status as the model of a modernist convention, inherently pure in its division of surface and space as a formal structure, and highlights the splintered, fragmentary and diverse nature of grids pervasion into the language of contemporary abstract painting.

A discussion of what actually constitutes the ‘abstract’ in painting is not specific to the central themes of this thesis, which assumes to start from the premise that absolute definitions of abstraction and figuration in contemporary painting are unclear and frequently -

- overlap and that the nature of contemporary imagery, infected heavily by processes of digitisation, is ambivalent to definitions of what might be representative of something ‘figurative’ or ‘abstract’, and where ‘real’ might sit in relation to these terms, as the concept of reality itself is contemporaneously so skewed.

However the implication of split definitions and slippery meanings so embraced by contemporary painting sits comfortably with the idea of ‘convoluted grids’: The term ‘convoluted grids’ is an invented one to describe the nature of grids and their polysemous use in contemporary painting; being argued through this textual thesis, and being demonstrated through the elaborate processes of the conjoined practical painted work. The term attempts to incorporate and explain the complex aesthetic positions of grids moving between modernism and postmodernism.

The ideological shift between modernist strategies for painting and painting as reflective of ideas belonging to postmodernism (having no ideology) is paralleled by the relationship of grids as having informed all aspects of 20th Century modern life, and the structure of urban spaces, to the comparative relevance of grids to contemporary life and culture, which, essential to architecture of the real built environment, finds its dominance in the cyber-architecture and virtual mechanisms of global communications within the cultural phenomena of the internet and digital revolution.

The argument of this thesis is that grids remain a dominant feature within the language of abstract painting and that the reasons for this are at once overtly simplistic, and extremely complex.

Simple? Because grids offer the perfect repetition of the horizontal and vertical axis that constitutes the traditional notion the outer frame of a painting and in this sense is compositionally flawless and perfectly integrative.

Therefore the ongoing usage of grids in contemporary painting might seem obvious. Why would Painters want to stop using a formal device so perfectly able to divide the picture plane? Or even, is it feasible to assume that painters could avoid it, given that successful composition traditionally finds some way of integrating the dynamic of figure(s), within composition, to their external frame.

Complex? Because of the paradoxical personality of grids; vapid on the one hand; mercurial on the other. Because one might assume that the distancing of contemporary painting from the dogmatic tendencies running right through modernism (from Mondrian’s appropriated ideas of theosophy and misogynistic mysticism in the early 20th Century to ‘late’ Modernisms Clement Greenberg and his doctrine of flatness as the solely important feature of painting) might include a very marked and deliberate absence of grids, per se, from the painted image. After all, grids are synonymous with an idea of a modernist programme; until there unpicking at the hand of pop art: But, did pop art undo, or ‘do for’ abstract painting? Andy Warhol’s matrixial repetitions of soup cans, electric chairs and car crashes can be interpreted as early instances of postmodernist ‘grid paintings’, pre-emptive of the omni-multi-screen (Windows) of digital fields and sardonically tapping into the societal sensory-deadening via mass communication of images.

Finding reasons for the painters’ desire to keep inventing new operations of grids across flat planes has complex implications.

There is the relationship between the painter and the sense of preserving the act of painting, in which grids play a perverse role – representing something of the rhetorical death of painting, and as such, providing the painter with in built ‘duende’.

This satisfies a mythical idea about painters, romantic and cynical both, and compelled in the face of all new media to continue to keep making paintings, in a tradition and by hand. Painting grids then, is an ultimately cynical and almost arrogant act, by way of association with particular modernist ideas that have been invalidated in terms of not being able to represent any sense of inclusiveness; the challenge to painters is to re-inscribe grids in painting with contemporary relevance regarding both the preservation and furtherance of painting practices, and their relationship to broader ideas about the position of making paintings in contemporary society; whether it (knows it) wants them or not. In short what is being said here is that grids are representative of all that threatens (and has threatened) painting’s continuance, from modernist doctrine to pixel power. Yet they continue, in the very fibre of contemporary painting, as if their signification of the death of painting is somehow the thrill of it.


Sarah Key, 2005