Search for ‘Yve-Alain Bois’ (3 articles found)
Ellsworth Kelly's Dream of Impersonality
Kelly’s use of cropping has nothing to do with this paean to the subjective and transitory nature of experience—especially since, as one must always remember, what he crops is always flat (if it involves the visual field, and not, as is most often the case, a particular surface in it, it is the visual field as perceived with only one eye). More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that the cropping is itself an involuntary accident, almost like a hiccup or a Freudian slip of the tongue—the sudden “apparition” of a shape as it strikes a chord for being unrecognizable, for being recognized as something the artist consciously knows it is not. Either this shape echoes something already caught in the web of the matrix, or it appeals to Kelly for its potentiality as a score for a new piece, but a score whose material performance in the real world, an “already-made” unperceived by anyone but him, is only the material proof that it can, indeed, exist on its own. The process by which the “already-made” shape is suddenly available to Kelly—while it escapes most of us—is one of defamiliarization, of what the Russian formalists called ostranenie. It came upon the young Kelly years before he became an artist, and the strong memories he has about several childhood experiences is perhaps the reason his work remains so fresh. I’ll quote two such memories, but there are many more:
I remember that when I was about ten or twelve years old I was ill and fainted. And when I came to, my head was upside down. I looked at the room upside down, and, for a brief moment I couldn’t understand anything until my mind realized that I was upside down and I righted myself. But for the moment that I didn’t know where I was, it was fascinating. It was like a wonderful world.
And this, recalled by Hugh Davies, Director of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art:
On Halloween night in 1935, in rural Oradell, New Jersey, the twelve-year-old Ellsworth Kelly was trick-or-treating with friends in their neighborhood after dark. Upon approaching a house from a distance, he said: “I saw three colored shapes—red, black, and blue—in a ground-floor window. It confused me and I thought: ‘What is that?’ When I got close to the window, it was too high to look in easily and I didn’t want to be peeking. I was very curious and came at the window obliquely, and chinned myself up, only to look into a normal furnished living room. When I backed off to a distance, there it was again. I now realize that this was probably my first abstract vision—something like the three shapes in your Red Blue Green painting.”
The cropped view of a bourgeois interior seen by the young Kelly as peeping Tom is not the “source” of the San Diego painting. But these recollections offer perfect examples of the kind of defamiliarization allowed by the matrix, a kind of defamiliarization wonderfully analyzed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception, when he wrote that “to put an object upside down is to remove its signification from it” and noted how difficult it is, when walking along an avenue, “to see the spaces between the trees as things and the trees themselves as background.”
Interview with Rosalind Krauss
Yve-Alain Bois: I also remember that late in life, in one of the last interviews he gave, Foucault was asked about “poststructuralism,” and he said, “Listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was not even a structuralist and now you’re telling me I’m poststructuralist?” In the same interview (that was published in English in Telos, I remember), Foucault came in the defense of formalism, and he repeated that often during the last three to four years of his life, even more strongly than during the structuralist years. Barthes had done the same in the late ’70s, actually, saying something like “the enemies of formalism are our enemies.”
Krauss: Oh, really?
Bois: All these people who were branded as attacking formalism kept saying not to dismiss it so fast. Well, that’s where we came from.
Krauss: With Foucault, there’s the wonderful essay called “Fantasia of the Library,” which is the celebration of a kind of network of quotations and of course Walter Benjamin talks about wanting to make a book that is nothing but quotations. This network of quotation we could say has to do with this formalist sense of the structure of the book, and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet comes to mind as the great book of quotation. Foucault, obviously in that, is willing to think through a formal idea.
Bois: I think that’s a long debate we always had, that the notion of formalism as it has been discussed in America was only encaptured by Greenberg, who in a way ossified formalism. As I often wrote, there are many different kinds of formalist options. For me it was Russian Formalism that was important, and the Russian Formalists would not recognize themselves in Greenberg whatsoever. They would not articulate the work of art that way—but that’s another story, that’s not part of the book.
Krauss: Well, part of my whole concept of derivation, my whole concept of technical support, relates to Shklovsky’s concept of “laying bare the device” And the last chapter of the book, which is called “The Knights Move,” starts with Shklovsky.
Bois: To wrap up, the whole book—and right from the start with the account of your aneurysm—concerns the issue of memory, and so you have this articulation including a so-called Klein diagram about memory and forgetting. As you know, I am completely incapable of understanding diagrams, so I struggled with it for a while and said forget it. But nevertheless, as you present your Knights of the Medium, it seems that the mission they are to take on is to deal with the memory of the medium. But on the other hand, their task is to invent a new medium. How does that combine?
Krauss: That’s the notion of both remembering and forgetting. Remembering the importance of the medium, remembering Modernism, but then forgetting these specific, traditional supports …
Yve-Alain Bois on Martin Barre
Martin Barre, 60-T-44 (details), 1960, oil on canvas, 76 1/2 × 38 1/8”.
… In the second canvas, 60-T-44, dating from 1960, all this elaborate painterly cuisine so vaunted by the critical establishment that championed the JEP has disappeared. Any spatial ambiguity is gone. The white ground is plain, untextured, the paint almost mechanically applied. On this whitewashed surface, Barre has drawn colored lines using the tube of paint as his stylus: Two oblique lines (made of juxtaposed blue, white, and reddish-brown tracks) descend toward the center left of the canvas, from which hangs a thick rainbow of paratactic lines in clashing vibrant chromas—as if the canvas from one of Morris Louis’s Unfurleds had been gathered like striped drapery, regaining in the process enough matter to weigh down a clothesline. Here there’s no subtle mediation via the brush: The gesture is direct, prosaic. No play of underlayers, either, and very little color mixing. The only variation is in the speed of inscription: Sometimes the squeezed tube moved very fast over the white ground, and in these passages its track is thin; sometimes it went slowly, and the impasto built up. Line becomes a mere index of process. No transcendence, no illusion, what you see is what you see: With this work, and others of the same series—which he nicknamed his “Tubes”—Barre left post-Cubism and entered the ’60s.
At the time there were few artists among his Parisian group (the JEP) to make such a leap—in fact, Barre instantly lost his support system, the critics who had defended him now accusing him of treason. One could ascribe many causes to this radical turn in his art, but the most important catalyst is probably the great interest Barre took in Yves Klein, though Klein was deemed a thorough charlatan by Barre’s circle—and note that it is Restany, Klein’s champion, who came to Barre’s defense. The position may seem utterly banal now, but rare then was the artist who could at the same time maintain that painting was still a viable medium and admire Klein’s work, which had seemed in those days yet another celebration of the death of painting. One had to be able to look beyond Klein’s histrionics and consider Yves-le-Monochrome’s anticompositional stance as being more than a mere conceptual gesture. For his early admirers both in France (Restany, the Nouveaux Realistes group) and in the US (Donald Judd, among others), Klein represented a fundamental rupture with the (necessarily illusionistic) tradition of painting. “Sure, sure,” we can hear Barre saying, “but yet he still paints.” How to highlight the fragility of painting as medium while keeping it alive would remain Barre’s challenge in all the years to come.
