Skew: The Unruly Grid
The forms of geometrical abstraction, from Mondrian’s grids and Malevich’s polygons to Barnett Newman’s stripes and Ad Reinhardt’s black squares, were seen by their creators not as metaphors for the visible world but as ways of approaching the essence of the ordinary stuff of matter. These artists were evidencing an optimistic faith–if not in traditional religion, then in the possibility of reaching, through art, some higher form of awareness.
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Claudia Matzko’s grid tells a story in an untitled piece subtitled “He loves me, he loves me not,” a use of the grid that’s consistent with feminist critiques of abstraction. Twenty-five dried roses are mounted on silk in five rows. Scanning the rows as if reading a text, we see that each successive flower has fewer petals, until the last is only a stem. Here the grid guides the eye through a progression that refers to time’s decay–the fewer the petals, the more desiccated the flower–and to an individual’s gradual realization that an affair “isn’t working out.”
Michael Banicki’s obsessive paintings of his “ratings” of everything from baseball players to lakes to wildflowers and weeds are oddly personal as well. Falling somewhere between a scientific diagram and the nutty alternative worlds of much outsider art, Wildflower/Weed Rating has the names of 116 plants printed on both horizontal and vertical axes; tiny colored boxes where row meets column tell us how much he likes each compared with the others. Few of us are likely to care that he prefers locoweed to yucca, but the work is interesting as part of an eccentric autobiography. He seems to take his ratings seriously, even as he acknowledges their absurdity as records of the arbitrariness of his compulsively linear approach to evaluating things. Here the grid as a path to truth becomes ridiculously limited.
Smithson was first influenced by abstract expressionists, particularly Barnett Newman. He eventually learned, he recalled a year before his death, to “overcome” their “lurking pagan religious anthropomorphism” and “get into crystalline structures.” While most of the artists in “Skew” seek to bring the grid closer to everyday personal concerns, Smithson rejected even the more vaporous but arguably anthropocentric strivings of artists like Newman. Taking as his models structures from nature and concepts like entropy, he sought to locate the viewer less in the psychological self and more firmly in the physical aspects of our planet.
