“Grids”
Author: Rosalind Krauss
This article examined the paradoxicality of grids, a form which sustained autonomy over dimensionality and time, and despite resistance to development, declared a persistent emergence throughout history. It was inherently contradictory in nature; neither existing within the realm of sacred or secular, representation or reality, physical or aesthetic, which thus provided the artist automatic agency in the material and simultaneous interjection of spiritual supposition. Evidence of work by individual artists throughout history were examined, from the introduction of the grid in early modernist works by Mondrian, Malevich, and Stijl, wherefore the works itself recognized the function of the grid as a matrix of knowledge engaged in a distinct discourse. Comprehensive analyses within the context of etiological study, in addition to a discussion of grids through medical term analogies, defined parallels to the function of grids as simultaneously aesthetic objects and myth dependant on the conditions of the perpetually changing present, and therefore granted the grid preeminence in the absence of definitivity.
“Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”
Author: Sol Lewitt
The practice of conceptual art was defined as the realization of an idea, whereby the purpose of actualization was to satisfy the idea, but the idea itself was not dependant on materiality. This practice considered ways of communication to engage the viewer’s mind through space and form, by which the artist conducted full administration and execution of the work. Established as an intuitive process which need not to be rooted in logic, conceptual art assumed no interest with illustrating systems of psychology, mathematics, or philosophy for the practice was a single embodiment of an idea. Ultimately, the essay acknowledged, integral to the work of conceptual art–albeit contradictory to its simplicity– that perception of the work was individual to the viewer and inevitably, ideas were subject to change as the experience of the artist evolved.
