Dan Flavin
Untitled, To Donald Judd
1964
Everyone has their own path, so everyone will have to choose for themselves but for me, I do not think that art has anything to do with the beautiful. In my own experience, my tastes are constantly evolving as I am interacting with the world and learning new things. How can I stand in judgment of what is beautiful and what is not? What I find ugly today, I might that I find that is urgently needed and beautiful tomorrow. At the least, I would have to conclude that my taste has to be fickle and arbitrary at best, because it is never absolute and it is always changing. Now this an example of my personal experience, but what if we apply these questions across to a group of people? A community? A whole profession? Am I the only one? Maybe, but probably not.
Polykleitos
Doryphoros
450-440 B.C.
How often do we find something that we think is absolutely beautiful, only to get tired of it a few weeks later? Are we like the Greeks always striving for the beautiful form, looking for the absolute embodiment of perfection? Kenneth Clark tells the story of the famous Greek sculptor Polykleitos. He made two sculptures of human figures, one made according to popular taste, read naturalistic, and one according to his own needs as an artist. The first sculpture was ridiculed while the latter was admired. Of course he also thought that the body made of perfected proportions could transcend the real thing. I think that he felt that the form of our bodies and the things that we make are the most perfect expression of ourselves.
Is that really what art is about? Is art about what we know or what don't know? For me, one of the greatest things about twentieth century art is that we finally came to grips with understanding the best things in art are the things that we do not know, maybe it is what we can't know. When we go into our studios, do we go to work on things that we already know and reinforce our perceptions about the world?
Jasper Johns
0 Through 9
1961
I think that when we strive only for the beautiful form or the beautiful object, it is only about ourselves, our preconceptions of beauty at a single moment in time. It is not really beautiful but only a dull reflection of ourselves, but we love it because we see ourselves in it. That is what makes beauty so unsatisfying when it is the goal of the process, there is not a sense of life and the unexpected. It reflects back everything that we already know. We aren't nurtured and we do not grow from the experience. Frank Stella always believed that as soon a part of canvas was really beautiful you had to paint it out immediately. It is the whole painting that has to work and not just one part. If you try and paint around to highlight that one spot the result will probably be a disaster. I think that this is a common misunderstanding in art, that the beauty has to be protected. In the best works of art the question of whether something is beautiful or ugly is irrelevant. When you are confronted with a Pollock, the question of whether or not it is beautiful is beside the point.
Rachel Whiteread
Library
2001
The best art, as an artist and as a spectator, is that which helps us transcend our own limits. It separates us from our preconceptions and our fixed ideas about the world. It helps us grow and to become more than what we were before. It might make us more aware of our surroundings, or our experience as human beings. That is a very different experience than just looking for the beautiful form. When you are confronted with a beautiful form, it is like advertising, either you like or you don't but it short circuits a deeper experience.
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Mark Rothko
No. 9
1954
Barnett Newman was famous for saying that aesthetics for artists must be like ornithology is for the birds. Almost across the board, the best artists of the twentieth century did their best work when they finally got by their own preconceptions about art. More often than not they eventually moved awayed from beauty. Take a look at an early Rothko, especially his multiforms. They are beautiful but they are full of all his ideas about painting: bright colors, interesting technique, great composition. A few years later he learned that all of that was not necessary at all. Each painting was not a demonstration about everything that he knew about painting, it was a way of getting away from his own preconceptions. The same transformation occurred not just in the work of Rothko but in Newman, Pollock, De Kooning, Reinhardt and Kline just to name a few. How did they all figure out the same thing if it wasn't true? In each case, they made the process more difficult to get themselves out of the painting. De Kooning drew in the dark, Pollock dripped his paint so that he had to collaborate with physical properties of the paint on the canvas. The process was not about what they knew but what they didn't know.
Willem De Kooning
Door to the River
1960
This a quote from Chuck Close interview in Art in America from 1972 that is worth quoting at length because I think that it articulates something that is fundamental for a lot of the better artists:
"When everything in the world was a possibility I only tried three or four things over and over... I didn't take advantage of that supposed freedom, and once I decided I was going to have relatively severe limitations, everything opened up... I was never happy making interesting shapes and interesting color combinations because all I could think about was how other people had done it... Now there is no invention at all; I simply accept the subject matter. I accept the situation. There is still invention. It's "how to do it," and I find that, as a kind of invention, much more interesting."
Jasper Jones
Flag
1958
When Jasper Johns started working with letters and numbers, it wasn't because he thought that they that would allow some kind of original formal invention. He was working with them because they were common, effectively empty and available to anyone. The American flag literally belongs to every American. Looking back at the late 1950's, Johns' work should have been a dead end, except that he is genius and probably understood the work of the Abstract Expressionists better than they did. I mean what is the difference between De Kooning drawing in the dark or in front of the TV and Johns using stencils of things that are so common that are practically invisible any more. De Kooning found it in separating his eye from his hand, Johns in the objects that we use every day but are so common that we do not see them anymore. In both cases it is about reaching out to something that is beyond the preconceived ideas about art that it allows you to see the world in a new way.
Agnes Martin
White Flower
1960
Agnes Martin took a different path in that she found that she could escape form by using grids and horizontal lines. They are full of feeling but empty of form, empty of the object. There is nothing to hold on to: no ideas, no language, just your experience, just who you are at that moment. What more could you want from art? The art really isn't in the painting at all, it is already within you and the experience of the painting unlocks it in you. Art is the experience, the exchange that happens between you and the work.
Donald Judd
Untitled on the third floor of his studio on Spring Street
When Donald Judd starts using rectangular boxes out of wood and then later out of metal, it is not because he thought that the form was really interesting or that the form itself was some profound idea about sculpture. I think that this where a lot of people having misunderstanding of minimal art. They think that the idea was about stripping down everything except the form of the work. That might be an accurate description of Robert Morris' work but it does not apply to Judd because his work is about how you relate to the work with your body. Judd thought that his great innovation was the removal of the pedestal, or the device that separates a sculpture from its environment. Most galleries are an empty, more or less rectangular room. Judd's work is about how the volume of work measures and defines the volume of the larger space. The large empty rectangles capture the void, the emptiness of the room and changes the way that you perceive the space. Not to sound too Taoist but it is an example of the void, the hollowness, being more important than the form. It also why it is so difficult to separate the object from the installation. In the best contemporary art, the space that you inhabit and the space of the work become fused together. You can't have one without the other.
Judd's works gets more complex when the material properties of the rectangles are emphasized to clearly differentiate the material differences that exist between the work and the space. The form is the vehicle but the perception and experience of the space is the message. In the work installed in the artillery sheds at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, the work changes along with your perception of the light. In a way, the work is a ruler that allows you a new way measure your experience in the volume of space that you are in.
Roni Horn
Things that Happen Again
1986
Roni Horn placed the two copper tapered cylinders in an empty barrack at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. The cylinders are identical but are placed at opposite ends of the barracks and they are placed at different angles, so that when you first see them you are not sure if the cylinders are similar or are exactly the same. When you are looking at one of them, you are always comparing it to the other one with your mind's eye. It is more difficult than it seems because the tapering tends to exaggerate the perspective so you are never exactly sure if they are the same object. Your own memory and the way that you recall the experience of a space is the whole point of the work. While the cylinders are very beautiful, they could have been any shape, although because they are attractive you might look at them longer, and hence have a better recall, than if they were ugly. I think that Judd liked the work because it uses a language that is similar to his own but to completely different ends. Each and every viewer is an integral part to the experience of the work. No one else could remember it for you.
Felix Gonzales-Torres
Black Rod Licorice
1991
When Felix Gonzalez- Torres places a pile of candy in the corner or places a pile of posters on a wall of an exhibition space he takes the idea of viewer interaction to a new level. He literally lets you take the art home with you, or eat it there if you are really tired of walking through the museum. The work is a little bit of head scratcher because everything that you thought you understood about art and the formal object goes out the window and you have to start over. The work is formally beautiful because it is all wrapped up in silver foil and it looks good up against the wall. But what happens when one person takes a piece of candy and then so does the next person and so on until they have to pour more candy on the pile. How can the art be in the object if you can take it with you? How can it be art if it is continually dissolving as people walk through the room? Where is the art in that? The answer is that it is in lots of places but probably in his gift of candy to you. It is the exchange that is important. It is the expression of generosity at the literal expense of the formal object. When I ever come across one of his pieces, I always feel like he is pulling back to the curtain on the mystery of the museum. He is subverting the Victorian authority of the idea of a museum in a subtle way. I also think it is funny that whoever buys the work, is buying the right to effectively give away candy and the right to continuously replace it while it is on view.
Janine Antoni
Saddle
2000
The last work that I wanted to talk about is Janine Antoni's Saddle from 2000. I thought it was fitting to end an essay about form with a work that is about the emptiness in form. Saddle is about presence and absence. You can feel her presence in the work but she is not there. It is a little strange that you associate the contours of her body with her skin, but in the work you do not see her skin it is the skin of a cow. So there is a spatial and tactile dislocation that is central to the experience of the work. It is not a representation of skin but real skin, except that it is not hers. The skin was part of a living breathing animal not long before it came part of this sculpture. So you thought that the work was about her body but is it really about this cow, whose natural shape that you don't see but whose skin defines the work. Never having touched the work, I can imagine that it is very stiff like a dog's chew toy. So sooner or later you realize that you really do not understand about the human body. Once we understand something, we change again. Is the expression of ourselves about the form of the body or our memories and associations of it? If what we value does not have a form, how can it be perfected?
The best work has always been about freedom. Freedom to explore, freedom to see the world with fresh eyes, freedom to be more than what we were yesterday. Sometimes if we are very lucky we feel like particular work of art seems like it was made espeically for us, for who we are at that moment. Unfortunately, I think that most art that is based on form and aesthetics is the opposite of that experience. It is about closure, nailing down, perfecting an idea that like Polykleitos might not be able to exist in the real world. Ultimately, it is about the artist and not the viewer. There is nothing for the viewer to hold on to, nothing that they can make their own. Art that is based only on its formal properties is about the end of a process while the best art has always been about finding new ways to begin again.
By Arcy Douglass On February 18, 2008
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