The Modern Blog

Clarity of Concept

Is it not the nature of creativity to be boundless and open-ended, free of restraint? Several of this summer’s educator workshops focused on the work of artists who decided on a clear set of limitations in which to work. Through intense looking in the galleries and considered discussion of a range of artworks, participants came to understand that it is precisely a narrowing of options that allows many artists to communicate what is essential in their work. Our investigation revealed that a complex set of ideas are sometimes most successfully conveyed when couched within the surety of creative restrictions.

The artists whose work we spent time with—Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Tony Feher, and Carl Andre—placed self-imposed boundaries on their working method and reduced their compositions to simple forms. Repetition of these forms served to clarify function. Through close attention to a carefully selected set of materials, each artist highlights the power of their preferred materials. These artists chose to leave the materials unembellished, adopting a set of rules and a clear formal strategy. Martin, for example, knew what she would paint next: a grid. Judd had a distinctive working method: to have fabricators build a series of identical steel and Plexiglas boxes. Feher does not search for subject matter or materials: use ordinary items that are stripped of their original signifying elements and give them new life. Andre, too, need not spend time looking for materials or subject matter: arrange “elements” (squares and strips of metal and blocks of wood) in a manner that follows what these materials want to do; wood blocks stack, strips of metal lay flat. By eliminating choices such as subject matter and narrative —and, often, the juxtaposition of shapes—each artist is freed from being driven by such things. Clarity of form translates to clarity of concept.

Through study of, and conversation on, works such as Martin’s Leaf (1965), Andre’s Slit (1981), Feher’s Just So (2002), and Judd’s Untitled (1967), many participating teachers felt the conceptual threads running through these works. Where perplexity and doubt cropped up, a return to fundamentals proved helpful. We talked about the notion that when confronted with work that is simple and reductive in nature, it is the ideas that come to the fore of the conversation. What concepts are driving the artist to make this work? How does it make me feel; how do I relate to it? For those teachers who began their time at the Modern unfamiliar with minimalist and minimal-looking works of art, these questions began to receive answers.

Between the Lines

Agnes Martin’s work has recently been reinstalled in one of the smaller galleries on the first floor. Leaf (1965), Untitled (1977), Untitled XVI (1996), and nine of the thirty prints from the suite On a Clear Day (1973) are displayed on four walls facing opposite each other, creating an environment that allows viewers to become completely immersed in the grids that are sketched on their surfaces.

Martin’s work evolved from representational imagery to biomorphic abstraction over the course of her career before she finally settled on geometric forms as an appropriate means of conveying spiritual content. According to Barbara Haskell’s book titled Agnes Martin, the artist once wrote that her decision to paint rectangles was inspired by the phrase, “surely the people are grass,” a passage from Isaiah 40:7. “All the people were like those rectangles; they are just like grass,” Martin wrote. “That’s the way to freedom. If you can imagine you’re a grain of sand… all your troubles fall away.… In a big picture a blade of grass amounts to not very much.”

While the titles of several paintings allude to grass, trees, and other elements of the natural world, it is the transcendence associated with opening oneself up to nature—rather than imposing oneself on it— that Martin sought to convey in her work. When asked why she had titled a painting Grey Geese Descending, for example, Martin replied, “We have certain feelings when birds descend. And that’s what the painting is about…descending feelings. They’re beyond words.” Haskell also notes in her book that “it was not that geometry could represent the reality of the sublime, but that it could offer a means of attaining ‘a plane of awareness’ upon which the perception of sublimity depended.” That sense of sublimity that Martin had in mind revealed itself as I gazed at her On A Clear Day suite: lines and columns of various densities, alternating between open and compact grids that expand or contract on the page like ripples on a pond. Ultimately, Martin hoped her work would evoke “a state of perfect restfulness; not a slackened, closed, or unconscious state (like sleep), but an expansive, meditative consciousness.”

In her book, Haskell states that Martin’s “pictorial style” is influenced by an idea that was popular in antiquity. “The Greeks,” Martin wrote, “made a great discovery. They discovered that in nature there are no perfect circles or straight lines or equal spaces. Yet they discovered that their interest and inclination was in the perfection of circles and lines, and that in their minds they could see them, and that they were then able to make them.” In short, Agnes Martin and the Greeks recognized that, “the mind knows what the eye has not seen, but that what the mind knows is perfection.”

Details

“The level of detail and craft is something that’s inscribed within the original design concept. And so when I begin to draw, I know what kind of detailing I want the building to have.” Tadao Ando

Photos by The Modern’s summer photo intern, Max Fields.

Full Circle

Every time I walk past the Modern’s Cornwall Summer Circle, 1995, by Richard Long, it reminds me of Stonehenge. The two structures share the obvious circular/stone construction, but there are also underlying elements of ritual and a shared sense of void. (Stonehenge is composed of a series of concentric circles, formed by monumental rocks that were hauled and placed there by Neolithic people in three phases beginning around 3100 BCE. Long’s Cornwall Summer Circle is a single circular outline populated by 237 slate stones.)

While stones are used in both structures, their physical appearances are quite different. The rocks in Stonehenge are monumental in size, smooth and rounded by time spent in the elements. The rocks in Cornwall Summer Circle are, by comparison, smaller and more angular. The sharp, pointed objects of Long’s work lie in contrast to their arrangement. If Stonehenge can be considered a symbol of early man’s triumph over his natural environment, (the stones that compose the historical site were hauled more than 150 miles by man, according to National Geographic), Long’s work too can be associated with the triumph of nature—the rocks as a component of the natural world recontextualized within a manmade environment.

An article in the New York Times asserts that Stonehenge was at least in part a burial ground, but National Geographic contends that the circular configuration was possibly intended for worship. The circle has symbolic ties to many elements in the natural world: it is the shape of the planets; it holds astronomical implications; and suggests the cyclical nature of the seasons, as well as the most basic cycle of all, life.  Long frequently incorporates circles, as well as lines and spirals, into his work, stating that archetypal shapes and their basic elements carry a sense of symbolism and ritual. And the circular nature of both spaces can be linked to the idea of ritual if one considers the act of circumambulation, to ritualistically circle something on foot.

Our ability to walk around the circular formation of Long’s work accentuates the most powerful aspect of Cornwall Summer Circle: the central void created by the rocks. The desire to experience the empty space is a fundamental part of both the artwork and Stonehenge. There is a perceived sense of importance granted to the center of the circle, made even more profound by the inaccessibility of the space: the surrounding rocks make it nearly impossible to experience in Cornwall Summer Circle, and the conservationists at Stonehenge have roped off the structure prohibiting foot traffic.

All we can do is walk around both structures, admiring them for their complexity as well as their simplicity…until at last, we come full circle.

Remember when. Remember how. Richard Tuttle’s Relative to Our Society

A yellow light bulb, soon to become obsolete, casts a dull glow that faintly washes the once white, now jaundiced wall.

One, two, three, four, five, maybe six, small, milky-white light bulbs line up horizontally with one out of step.

Red. Red. Red. A red stick branching out and straight down as if looking for water. Another red branch in relation to the small, milky bulbs. And again a red stick, bringing to mind a red wheelbarrow and a white chicken, or something like that. There’s also my grandmother’s little red hatchet given to a black-eyed girl at an early age, before the world knew better.

A chain hangs. A presence, doubled up and cool, leaving its trace and moving on. My heart beats solid and swift, enjoying the absence and the desire that it left behind. The thought becomes a feeling, moving to my throat and then to my core. Saliva gathers and forms white clouds stuffed in cloud compartments.

How do you make a shape without a name and make something heavy behave as if it is weightless? Puncture the shape with countless holes. Let it breathe without sinking it. Have it touch down on twin points. Make contact, but no commitment.

Plugged in and lit up.

Made for one viewer at a time.

That’s how I remember it.

In recalling, revisiting, and reconsidering Richard Tuttle’s Relative to Our Society, 1990, recently reinstalled in the Modern’s galleries, I was drawn to the concept, “no ideas but in things.” This profound little quip of the early twentieth century American poetry movement—imagism—relates to my initial encounter with Tuttle’s sculpture. Looking carefully and naming the elements, those that could be named, it seemed clear to me that meaning in this sculpture is in the materials, the parts, the things. With every individual element maintaining its own identity, Relative to Our Society speaks to the modernist/imagist poet William Carlos Williams’s claim that a poem “must be real, not ‘realism,’ but a reality itself.” I remember sitting for as much as an hour, drawing every detail, every connection of this piece when it was first installed about five years ago. My pencil followed where it went in and where it came out, learning it as I looked. I thought I was committing the piece to memory, but I wasn’t because it resists being known in that way, in a single memory. I thought that to memorize it was to conquer it, to own it, to display it as a trophy—a lifeless trophy hanging in the brain, collecting dust along with other such trophies. I’m glad I was wrong. I’m glad that Relative to Our Society defies memory, making it forever new.

TAP Post: Spring 2011 Wrap-Up

Part of the TAP Group in front of a Kazuo Shiraga painting at the Rachofsky House

“The spring 2011 semester of the Teen-Artist Project was an absolute joy. I may be a little sad that my time as a TAP Intern has come to an end, but I am even happier to have worked with such great students, artists, and Museum staff.  My time as a TAP Intern rejuvenated my artistic practice and my spirit by giving me the opportunity to pass on the flame of creativity to a younger generation.

The students, with all of their talent, dedication, and eagerness to learn new techniques and concepts, inspired a new kind of eagerness within my own artistic practice. And while I taught them, I also got to learn alongside them each time we worked with a guest artist. This semester we learned that shrubs can have wheels, how to build books that go for miles, and where our memories go after we have left their physical place of origin. During these truly magical learning experiences, we came to intimately know the Ed Ruscha: Road Tested exhibition, the permanent collection, the architecture of the Modern, and the staff at Museum. The Teen-Artist Project has heightened my adoration for this incredible institution.

I am so happy to have helped inspire and nurture young, burgeoning artists. These students will go on to do great things with what they learned this semester. I believe that the Modern’s Teen-Artist Project is building a brighter future for our community’s youth, and I will always cherish my time as a TAP Intern.”

– Beatriz Cabrera, Spring 2011 TAP intern

The Modern’s Teen-Artist Project (TAP) pairs area high school students with artists as teachers. The program aims to expand each student’s art practice, introducing new concepts, approaches, artists, and media. Each visiting artist leads students through an investigation of modern and contemporary art in the galleries and related projects in the Museum studio. Participants also spend an afternoon visiting museums and galleries throughout the DFW Metroplex, further expanding their knowledge of art as found in their own community.

You can keep up with TAP at their blog: http://theteenartistproject.wordpress.com/

Kerouac’s On the Road gets Road Tested

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”
– Carlo Marx (Jack Kerouac’s On the Road)

Since Ed Ruscha’s illustrated version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is such a key component of the Modern’s exhibition Ed Ruscha: Road Tested, I decided to read the book. I had heard of it in a couple of English classes, but never read it before and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.

It turned out to be one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a long time. More importantly, it provided me with a different context and a new perspective on the theme of travel in Ruscha’s work.

On the Road, which was published in 1957, revolves around the lives of two teenage boys, Sal Paradise (the book’s narrator) and Dean Moriarty. Both are dissatisfied with their lives for one reason or another: Sal is frustrated by writer’s block and Dean is trying to escape a bad marriage. The story details the experiences of both characters as they travel back and forth across the country in search of a better life.

As I read the book, I became intensely aware of the dual impulses that inspired Sal and Dean’s cross-country journeys: both expressed a simultaneous need to escape a present condition (often in the form of an unfulfilling job, a deteriorating marriage, or a sense of boredom) combined with an overwhelming optimism that the condition would improve with the next stop. However, once they reached their destination, the same sense of unrest and dissatisfaction inevitably returned, and they hit the road again. It soon became clear that the characters are happiest, and feel most alive, when they are in transit between destinations.

Ed Ruscha’s attraction to the novel is, at first, easy enough to understand. As a 14-year-old boy growing up in Oklahoma, he hitch-hiked to Florida in order to evade rural life and see the world. Like Kerouac’s heroes, there was an element of wanderlust involved in Ruscha’s decision to travel. In his brief synopsis of On the Road in the exhibition’s wall text, Ruscha explains: “[The main characters] steal cars and just want to be on the road the whole time. I’ve always liked that notion.”

But beyond the notion of travel, what attracted Ruscha to Kerouac’s work? In a recent interview with Charissa Terranova for …might be good, he notes, “[Kerouac] got on the track of stream of consciousness, just blurting things out as they came and attacking the world in an unstructured way. I began to see value and hope in that. His use of language coupled with his ideas of just his friends and the fun that they were all having during this period was maybe a metaphor for something I found myself doing at the same time.”

Ruscha also understands Sal and Dean’s paradoxical emotions about their “home” town, as he reveals his own relationship with his own adopted home of Los Angeles: “I love it and hate it, and now I’m back to loving it again. I have mood swings about that city. . . . It’s my life in the place that is disturbing or unsettling. I feel like I want to get out of there but now I’m settled back into it. But I also have a place out in the desert, so it’s a place to get away to.” This conflicting idea of home is also prevalent throughout Kerouac’s On the Road, as the protagonists are constantly in transit to an idealized destination that, once reality sets in, becomes a place from which to escape.

Ruscha’s illustrations coincide with much of Kerouac’s book, incorporating items like sandwiches, jazz references, and car parts. But most significantly, there is a consistent focus on the road itself: photographs of endless blacktop stretching for miles, suggesting that the artist (like the author) concentrates on the journey more than the destination. This journey, and what it means to both men, is the heart of what ties Ruscha’s art and Kerouac’s novel together. As the character Dean Moriarty observed, “This road drives me!”

There is the road and there is the studio: personal fascination and physical manifestation

For Ruscha the road began as a means and became an end. The road took the young artist from Oklahoma to California. Before that, it took him on an early sojourn to Florida. Ruscha saw the road from the car, and on foot when he hitchhiked. But what he really saw was the landscape—rural and urban. The road is just a ribbon that runs between, that divides and defines. Buildings generally face the road. Fence lines trace its edge. Even nature is disrupted and conforms, falling on either side.

The road then became a point of perspective for Ruscha, a position from which to see buildings and text. Even though billboards are commercial spaces with specific messages, floating up above and often surrounded by sky, their texts and images are often isolated, viewed from great distances and at highway speeds. It is no surprise that when in the studio, after numerous road trips, Ruscha would depict objectlike words and phrases floating across a canvas. His experience from the road told him that words are pliable and don’t operate by the rules of physics. They don’t have assigned size or color, for example.  This point is made clear in some of his early paintings of words and phrases in which he strategically includes recognizable items carefully rendered in their actual size. Of course the inclusion of the odd and unexpected shifts and deepens contemplation, guiding the viewer to move beyond looking to thinking, much like the experience of the highway, seeing the landscape and its markers pass by until something suggests a story or just associations that lead to unrelated thoughts.

There is also the how of Ruscha’s art. Of course the bold graphic quality of many of his paintings is suggestive of the artist’s early interest in commercial art. But the formal decisions in all of Ruscha’s work are telling. It seems certain that there is meaning in his method. To begin with, despite training that focused on Abstract Expressionism, his is not process-based work. Atmosphere is completely sucked out of the early gas station paintings and prints—something Ruscha admired in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg—offering an unencumbered presentation, abstracted for clarity. Their subject is read as an isolated structure, an outcropping in a flat desolate landscape that builds in scale and impact as it is approached in a moving vehicle. The strong diagonal dramatizes the effect. For the most part there is an indifference to detail; no one part of the scene is favored. Each individual block of color seamlessly locks together with its neighbor to make the whole legible. These paintings stop one in one’s tracks, disrupting the mental wandering that sometimes comes with viewing art, and in this way replicates the experience of the road.

With the books, Ruscha seems unconcerned with content and certainly uninterested in narrative. There is no story being told; there doesn’t even appear to be a compulsion to compose and show pictures. Apparently when in Europe as a young man, Ruscha came across some modestly constructed books being sold in the streets. He found their construction and format compelling and following their example, seems to have made his own books simply because he wanted them to exist—the way they come together, the serial quality of one page to the next, the placement of text and image, the way they are viewed/experienced, the way they travel and so forth. This exhibition (Ed Ruscha: Road Tested) includes Ruscha’s musing about facts concerning the books in a partial presentation of his text Information Man (1971), which reveals to some degree how he feels about the books and maybe his aspirations for them. Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) became the subject of his first book because he liked the word gasoline and the configuration of the number 26 spelled out. These fascinations became the matrix that directed the book and anyone at the time knew there was something special about this odd and simple but compelling piece. Twentysix Gasoline Stations is a source of curiosity and fascination, whether found in a gallery or a library, and elicits that head-scratching response the artist is after.

** This is the final installment of our series on Ed Ruscha: Road Tested by our Curator of Education, Terri Thornton. (View Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, or Part 5) **

…a voice from nowhere

The story of a young Ruscha having a eureka moment after seeing reproductions of Target with Four Faces (1955) by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’s “combine” Odalisk (1955/58), which includes an actual chicken, is an interesting lens through which to view his work. At the time, this discovery offered an escape from the dominance of Abstract Expressionism—a new way to see and consider art, a launch pad, a reason to cross the road. Ruscha has described it as “a voice from nowhere,” as, “music you’ve never heard before, so mysterious and sweet.”

In addition to the profound impact of Johns’s and Rauschenberg’s work, I can’t help but think how significant it is that Ruscha discovered these “paintings” as flat magazine reproductions. Their scale had to be imagined based on the known size of the real and cast objects. He held the magazine instead of standing in front of the paintings, making his experience purely visual rather than both visual and visceral. This secondhand encounter could arguably account for Ruscha’s graphic, hard-edge approach and his depiction of the “real” rather than its inclusion in his paintings, like that of Rauschenberg. What the artist seems to have taken away from that first exposure to a new visual vocabulary was disjointedness, a slippage and challenge of expectations. His attraction to Johns and Rauschenberg—and their lineage to Marcel Duchamp—explains a strangeness factor that keeps one from making complete sense of Ruscha’s choices. It has one asking why the torn Ten-Cent Western is in the corner of the painting of a Standard Station and never coming up with an entirely satisfactory answer, but nevertheless being glad its included, maybe even enjoying not knowing—a reminder, a reassurance that all things can be considered but not all things can be known.

** This is the fifth installment of our series on Ed Ruscha: Road Tested by our Curator of Education, Terri Thornton. (View Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, or Part 4) **

One side viewed from the other—or—Why the artist crossed the road…

Did the metaphor of crossing the road occur to Ruscha when he realized that to photograph one side of the street he had to be on the opposite side? Photography is an intriguing medium in that it has the ability to draw one into a two-dimensional space. It elevates that feeling of “being there” like no other medium. The photographs of Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963) project the slightest inclination that one is there, on site. But of course to see the subject the way the artist presents it, the viewer must theoretically be positioned across the street with the artist. This insight is made evident in the work Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). The accordion-style book consists of folded pages presented horizontally. Each page contains a continual strip of photographs of buildings at the top paralleled with another strip of buildings facing them from the bottom, leaving the center empty. What a brilliant way to capture the actual experience of the street and its architecture in the two-dimensional format of a book. This chosen method of presentation tells the viewer that the artist went up and then down, or down and then up, Sunset Strip to compile these continuous images broken by the folds. The work accounts for its making, a simple but profound realization, and reason enough to cross the road.

** This is the fourth installment of our series on Ed Ruscha: Road Tested by our Curator of Education, Terri Thornton. (Part 1 can be viewed here, Part 2 can be viewed here, and Part 3 can be viewed here.) **