In our discussions on the ideas surrounding the collapse of Postmodernism we left off with the idea that vision - the way we see and understand - has been irrevocably changed through the rise of electronic culture. I thought it might be helpful to follow the career of Frank Stella a bit to see more clearly the split between the Materialists and the Programists.
Stella began his career with the black paintings. These paintings are really the logical outcome of the tenets behind the materialism of Abstract Expressionism. These tenets emphasized the materiality of paint, the surface of the painting and ultimately the physicality of the object. In other words painting was moving off the wall - no longer a window but a thing in itself. Stella's use of stripes - his use of strict geometry - was determined by the logic of the rectangular stretcher. The fact that he was one of the first - if not the first - American painter to use a deeper stretcher bar, quickly established the materiality and surface/structure of the painting for the generations that followed. Rosenberg's action painters were now displaced by painters in action. Stella did away with the idea of color by displacing it with the idea of material - later bringing in the bronze and aluminum paintings – both material based paints. Additionally he explored the structures of the allover composition by following the logic of geometry and it's ties to the surface support - moving sequentially from point to point. This is a mapping feature of the Renaissance - one needs only think of Alberti to understand this sequential logic. The difference for Stella was the vanishing point - the stripes didn't vanish in the distance - they ran out of material - making the vision a thought problem, i.e. what if these stripes continued over there or up there - the question of space is always off the canvas surface. The illusion was not in the painting but in the continuity of the painted grid – it's in the construction of the material itself. Finally the structure of the painting becomes all important. The thicker stretcher bar offsets the surface of the painting and moves it out of the frame. The raw canvas on the sides - rather than being an after thought - are carefully taped and covered so as to assert the clear physicality of the surface structure. Stella's precedent in moving the painting from window to box is still reverberating through abstraction today. Here are the beginning tenets of material logic. First, the isolation of technique in the stripe. Second, the isolation of space in sequential materiality. Third, the isolation of visual interplay through the physicality of the painted thing in itself. These are all strategies of cartography - a mapping of "reality" and the beginning of the POMO split.
As Stella's career progressed he moved quickly through many endgame changes following the logic of construction - adding fluorescent colors (a more optical/physical form of tint) and sophisticated geometry, making the works larger and thicker, bringing actual reliefs into the geometric space - until he finally made the break. This break is all important and begins the second phase of Postmodernism - the Programist phase. Stella began collaging elements in three dimensions, still hanging onto the materialist idea. His paintings were now free standing from the wall, actual elements that moved outward in to the viewers' space - a new sort of sculptural painting, not high relief sculpture but materialistic illusion of shallow space. The logic of the space is still undeniably tied to the material. A swoop of metal actually comes into our space, but Stella begins to deny that physicality by painting it back to the support structure. It's here that we begin to see the idea of programming becoming important. When standing in front of these reality-constructs one can not be surprised at how flat they appear. With this understanding of the painting Stella proceeded to overlay the material realities. Computers added this collaged space. Soon he was blowing smoke rings into small camera boxes, then photographing and digitizing them on computers, schematicizing them and having them etched in aluminum. The visual coding of his existence was being programmed and overlaid in the work - melding it to the physical attributes of the support structure and then denying the physical properties of the support through paint and program. Space was no longer on the surface or an allusion off the support, it was contained in the work and turned inside out. Space no longer receded in Alberti's vision, nor did it play on the surface like the Materialists but suddenly was lost in the vanishing point of the viewer standing in front of the painting. We were in the space - and maybe even in back of it - making us the subject of the work or if you prefer we are in Frank's psyche looking back at ourselves through the history of painting. The Von Kleist series, where Stella finally collapses the support back to the canvas plane, is among the most rich and exciting abstraction in the last 50 years. Here is the Programists doctrine in spades. First, the collaging of elements, codes, schematics, architectural elements, spatial anomalies and thought problems. Second, there is the marriage of lens visual culture, programming, and Renaissance visual space - this allows an overload of information to exist at once causing a melding of the visual DNA - if you've seen the movie the Fly, the encoding of both the scientist and the fly created a hybrid - this is exactly what happens here. Third the space is non-sequential, overlaid and complicated. It is the space of electronic life where existence is lived at different speeds, different physicalities and different probabilities. These are the strategies of the Programists and they encode information to define reality and the space it occupies.
Programists wish to define reality and Materialists wish to map reality. Stella has embodied this arc more than any other artist in the latter half of the 20th Century and is instrumental to understanding the next step we must take to move beyond this current painting conundrum.
End Part 2
Stella began his career with the black paintings. These paintings are really the logical outcome of the tenets behind the materialism of Abstract Expressionism. These tenets emphasized the materiality of paint, the surface of the painting and ultimately the physicality of the object. In other words painting was moving off the wall - no longer a window but a thing in itself. Stella's use of stripes - his use of strict geometry - was determined by the logic of the rectangular stretcher. The fact that he was one of the first - if not the first - American painter to use a deeper stretcher bar, quickly established the materiality and surface/structure of the painting for the generations that followed. Rosenberg's action painters were now displaced by painters in action. Stella did away with the idea of color by displacing it with the idea of material - later bringing in the bronze and aluminum paintings – both material based paints. Additionally he explored the structures of the allover composition by following the logic of geometry and it's ties to the surface support - moving sequentially from point to point. This is a mapping feature of the Renaissance - one needs only think of Alberti to understand this sequential logic. The difference for Stella was the vanishing point - the stripes didn't vanish in the distance - they ran out of material - making the vision a thought problem, i.e. what if these stripes continued over there or up there - the question of space is always off the canvas surface. The illusion was not in the painting but in the continuity of the painted grid – it's in the construction of the material itself. Finally the structure of the painting becomes all important. The thicker stretcher bar offsets the surface of the painting and moves it out of the frame. The raw canvas on the sides - rather than being an after thought - are carefully taped and covered so as to assert the clear physicality of the surface structure. Stella's precedent in moving the painting from window to box is still reverberating through abstraction today. Here are the beginning tenets of material logic. First, the isolation of technique in the stripe. Second, the isolation of space in sequential materiality. Third, the isolation of visual interplay through the physicality of the painted thing in itself. These are all strategies of cartography - a mapping of "reality" and the beginning of the POMO split.
As Stella's career progressed he moved quickly through many endgame changes following the logic of construction - adding fluorescent colors (a more optical/physical form of tint) and sophisticated geometry, making the works larger and thicker, bringing actual reliefs into the geometric space - until he finally made the break. This break is all important and begins the second phase of Postmodernism - the Programist phase. Stella began collaging elements in three dimensions, still hanging onto the materialist idea. His paintings were now free standing from the wall, actual elements that moved outward in to the viewers' space - a new sort of sculptural painting, not high relief sculpture but materialistic illusion of shallow space. The logic of the space is still undeniably tied to the material. A swoop of metal actually comes into our space, but Stella begins to deny that physicality by painting it back to the support structure. It's here that we begin to see the idea of programming becoming important. When standing in front of these reality-constructs one can not be surprised at how flat they appear. With this understanding of the painting Stella proceeded to overlay the material realities. Computers added this collaged space. Soon he was blowing smoke rings into small camera boxes, then photographing and digitizing them on computers, schematicizing them and having them etched in aluminum. The visual coding of his existence was being programmed and overlaid in the work - melding it to the physical attributes of the support structure and then denying the physical properties of the support through paint and program. Space was no longer on the surface or an allusion off the support, it was contained in the work and turned inside out. Space no longer receded in Alberti's vision, nor did it play on the surface like the Materialists but suddenly was lost in the vanishing point of the viewer standing in front of the painting. We were in the space - and maybe even in back of it - making us the subject of the work or if you prefer we are in Frank's psyche looking back at ourselves through the history of painting. The Von Kleist series, where Stella finally collapses the support back to the canvas plane, is among the most rich and exciting abstraction in the last 50 years. Here is the Programists doctrine in spades. First, the collaging of elements, codes, schematics, architectural elements, spatial anomalies and thought problems. Second, there is the marriage of lens visual culture, programming, and Renaissance visual space - this allows an overload of information to exist at once causing a melding of the visual DNA - if you've seen the movie the Fly, the encoding of both the scientist and the fly created a hybrid - this is exactly what happens here. Third the space is non-sequential, overlaid and complicated. It is the space of electronic life where existence is lived at different speeds, different physicalities and different probabilities. These are the strategies of the Programists and they encode information to define reality and the space it occupies.
Programists wish to define reality and Materialists wish to map reality. Stella has embodied this arc more than any other artist in the latter half of the 20th Century and is instrumental to understanding the next step we must take to move beyond this current painting conundrum.
End Part 2
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