Grids — Rosalind Krauss (1979)

Rosalind Krauss, "Grids", in October 9 (Summer 1979), pp. 50–64, MIT Press. JSTOR stable URL jstor.org/stable/778321. Reprinted in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (MIT Press, 1985). German translation: "Raster", in Herta Wolf (ed.), Die Originalität der Avantgarde und andere Mythen der Moderne (Verlag der Kunst, Dresden, 2000).

About this file. The essay is under copyright. This file summarises the argument section by section, with short quotations and their page numbers. The JSTOR copy it was made from is kept in the vault as sources/Grids_Author_s_Rosalind_Krauss.pdf for personal study; JSTOR's terms do not allow it to be published. The essay is illustrated with works by Jasper Johns (Gray Numbers, 1958), Agnes Martin (Untitled, 1965), Robert Ryman, Caspar David Friedrich (View from the Painter's Studio), Odilon Redon (Le Jour, 1891), Piet Mondrian (Composition 1A, 1930) and Joseph Cornell.

The wiki's reading of the essay against van den Dorpel's work is on The Grid.

1. The grid as emblem (p. 51)

The grid appeared in the early twentieth century, "first in France and then in Russia and in Holland", surfaced in cubist painting and has since remained "emblematic of the modernist ambition within the visual arts". It announces "modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse". Krauss sees a cost in this: the barrier against language made a fortress of the visual arts, and the fortress "has increasingly become a ghetto". No form has lasted so long while being "so impervious to change": "As the experience of Mondrian amply demonstrates, development is precisely what the grid resists."

2. Space and time (pp. 51–52)

The grid declares modernity in two ways.

Spatially it states the autonomy of art. "Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature." Its order is "pure relationship", so it denies natural objects an order of their own, and it declares the space of art "at once autonomous and autotelic".

Temporally it is the sign of the new: "the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century, while appearing nowhere, nowhere at all, in the art of the last one." With the grid, cubism, De Stijl, Mondrian and Malevich "landed in the present, and everything else was declared to be the past."

Not perspective. The perspective lattices of Uccello, Leonardo and Dürer are not early grids. Perspective was "the science of the real", a way of mapping the world onto the picture. The grid maps the surface onto itself: "It is a transfer in which nothing changes place." Considered this way, "the bottom line of the grid is a naked and determined materialism."

3. Matter and spirit (pp. 52–54)

Artists never talked about the grid as matter. In their writings Mondrian and Malevich discuss "Being or Mind or Spirit"; for them "the grid is a staircase to the Universal". Ad Reinhardt, who insisted that "Art is art", painted black nine-square grids out of which a Greek cross emerges, and no Western painter can be unaware of what the cross opens.

Krauss places this indecision in a wider split between science and religion, with the Scopes trial and Nietzsche as her examples. In the nineteenth century art became "a secular form of belief", and by the twentieth it had become "indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence". The grid lets modern art live with this shame by masking it and revealing it at once.

4. The grid as myth (pp. 54–56)

In the "cultist space of modern art" the grid is emblem and myth. Myths deal with contradiction by covering it over, so that it seems to go away. "The grid's mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)." Reinhardt and Agnes Martin are her examples. Part of the power is that the grid looks so modern that nothing of the nineteenth century seems able to hide in it.

A grid is not a story, but Krauss uses the structuralist sense of myth. Claude Lévi-Strauss laid myths out in vertical columns to show the contradictions they cover. The contradiction does not resolve; it is repressed and returns as repetition, as in psychoanalysis. The grid is such a structure: it lets "a contradiction between the values of science and those of spiritualism" persist in the unconscious of modernism.

5. Sources: optics and the window (pp. 56–59)

Since the grid is absent from nineteenth-century painting, Krauss looks for its sources beside the paintings.

Physiological optics. Treatises on colour and perception by Chevreul, Charles Blanc, Ogden Rood, Helmholtz and Goethe were illustrated with grids, because they showed how colours act on one another across a continuous field, and the field was analysed "into the modular and repetitive structure of the grid". For artists the grid was "a matrix of knowledge" and "an emblem of the infrastructure of vision". It became visible in the neo-impressionism of Seurat and Signac, where, as the critic Félix Fénéon observed, science began to yield its opposite, symbolism.

The symbolist window. In symbolist art the grid appears as the bars of a window, "simultaneously transparent and opaque". The window admits light, or spirit, and it also reflects, so it is a mirror that locks the self into its own image. Krauss cites Mallarmé's Les Fenêtres (1863) and Redon's Le Jour (1891). Her central formulation: "behind every twentieth-century grid there lies—like a trauma that must be repressed—a symbolist window parading in the guise of a treatise on optics" (p. 59). This is why there are grids in Matisse's windows long before his cut-outs.

6. Centrifugal and centripetal (pp. 60–64)

The grid is "fully, even cheerfully, schizophrenic" (p. 60). Logically it extends to infinity, so a work can be read as "a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric". That is the centrifugal reading. The centripetal reading runs from the edge inward: the grid is "an introjection of the boundaries of the world into the interior of the work", "a mode of repetition, the content of which is the conventional nature of art" (p. 61). Mondrian does both: grids in diamond-shaped canvases read as a view through a window, while other paintings stop their lines short of the edge.

Centrifugal practice ranges from the perceptual field (Agnes Martin, Larry Poons) through man-made sign systems (the numbers and alphabets of Jasper Johns) and "photographic integers" (Warhol, Chuck Close) to architectural space (Louise Nevelson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rietveld, Vantongerloo); "Sol LeWitt's modules and lattices are a later manifestation of this position" (p. 63). One would expect the beyond-the-frame grid to carry science and the within-the-frame grid to carry symbolism. Krauss finds the opposite: centripetal grids (Alfred Jensen, Frank Stella) are the more materialist, while centrifugal ones often dissolve the surface "into perceptual flicker or implied motion" (p. 63). Many artists, "from Mondrian, to Albers, to Kelly, to LeWitt", think the grid both ways at once (p. 64). Her Albers is Josef Albers, the painter of the Homage to the Square.

7. Etiology, not history (p. 64)

Krauss calls her terms (repression, schizophrenia) analogies for a cultural structure. She asks for an etiology of the grid instead of a history: the conditions that came together in the nineteenth century and combined early in the twentieth. "But once the grid appears it seems quite resistant to change." The late careers of Mondrian and Albers do not develop, and that takes nothing from their quality: there is "no necessary connection between good art and change". The grid has become "a paradigm or model for the antidevelopmental, the antinarrative, the antihistorical", in music and dance as well, and she ends on a forthcoming collaboration of Philip Glass, Lucinda Childs and Sol LeWitt, Dance (1979), "projected as the mutually accessible space of the grid".

What the essay does not cover

The essay looks for the grid in painting, perspective, optics and the window. It does not mention weaving, the loom, graph paper as a working surface, or computing, although Conway's cellular automaton Game of Life (1970) and the spreadsheet program VisiCalc (1979) were contemporary with it. These omissions are where the wiki's reading starts (→ The Grid).