Working Space (2)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Working Space by Frank Stella.
Working Space by Frank Stella is so dense with useful insights that I’m moving it off the ASBC track to my personal reading track, where I can dig into it at a depth that most DMJ readers are unlikely to want to follow. Stella seemed blessed with a peculiar synesthesia that allowed him to detect phenomena like this (p. 28):
When Caravaggio relit the half-rounded, silhouette-like character of sixteenth-century figuration, he revealed the uniqueness of painting. Painting is always face forward, always confrontational. There is no reverse or back side to painting. Bad paintings (that is, paintings that are less than they should be) are bland and dark on the reverse, while good paintings pull themselves miraculously inside out to ensure their forward-looking presence as we imagine ourselves moving around them. Good paintings always seem to face the viewer, turning effortlessly as we try to slip behind them to test their illusionism. But more than that, from any vantage point the hidden and apparently blank parts of good painting never appear lifeless or dark. Great painting creates space and spreads the light.
And imagine how high your standards have to be to feel compelled to admit this to an audience of Harvard intellectuals (p. 42):
[A] provincialism has crept into abstract painting in America, and those who believe that they are both right and advanced may be digging their own graves. What some foresaw as an embarrassment of riches is turning out to be a plethora of trinkets. The new, recent abstraction of the 1980s is unfortunately different from the old, post-World War II abstraction; the spatial impoverishment of the former has become a serious problem. Normally abstraction considers fluctuation in quality its only real problem, but it appears now that the whole nature of the enterprise is being subverted, undermined by a fundamental weakness.
Much of abstract painting today has lost touch with the fullness and mobility of the pictorial space of the past in a mistaken effort to locate art in the novel exclusivity of technique, thus fulfilling the most (and probably lowest) common definition of abstract painting, which suggests that knowledge of abstract painting is knowledge of how to make an interesting mess. …most of the new suburban abstraction is just that—a piece of an effort to make a painting. What we are left with is a lot of work which almost by self-definition is less than whole. In addition, this simple glorification of technique and materials feeds the growth of an academic outlook: knowledge of how to do something is substituted for knowledge of what to do.
But the passage that entranced me is this one (p. 35):
What painting wants more than anything else is working space—space to grow with and expand into, pictorial space that is capable of direction and movement, pictorial space that encourages unlimited orientation and extension. Painting does not want to be confined by boundaries of edge and surface. It knows from the experience of Caravaggio that if its working space is perceived as real and palpably present, the depicted action will have a chance—it will have room to move and breathe. This is why Caravaggio appears so casual and untroubled, and Annibale Carracci so tortured and unsure.
It’s more than figurative anthropomorphism. Painting, and art more generally, could be said to have a kind of will. An ambitious artist has a responsibility to make work both personal and significant. This entails dual accountability to oneself and one’s audience. The former is usually a simple affair—just do what you feel like doing. Simple does not mean easy. One sometimes commits to a path that ends without leading to another. You then have to decide whether to take a machete to the proverbial brush, scale the proverbial cliff, or backtrack to where things were working and try a different avenue. But it’s simple in that all you need to do is be honest with yourself about what’s going on in your guts and in your work.
Of whom or what that audience consists is more complicated. It may be the literal audience or consumers of your work. But the creative audience, the one implied by the artist’s studio and the activity therein, is likely something else. Describing it requires a brief detour into economics.
Because art circles persist in entertaining socialism, you’ve likely heard of the labor theory of value. You probably don’t know that it was long ago discredited and replaced with the theory of marginal utility. Value is subjective. If you owned one shirt, it would be precious to you. If you owned seven shirts, you’d have one for every day of the week, and losing one would be troublesome but not a disaster. If you owned twenty shirts, you might give a couple to a friend who owned one, gladly. If you owned a thousand shirts, you would have a shirt storage problem. You would rather have money than shirts and you would put on a shirt sale.
This is the margin: value is determined by the worth of a hypothetical next unit. Hypthothetical Shirt #3 would be a huge improvement of condition (what economists call utility), which is how one understands the value of Actual Shirt #2. Hypothetical Shirt #30,000 is a slight degradation relative to Actual Shirt #29,999 and obliges you to work in the shirt business.
The creative audience is an indeterminate number of hypothetical next selves. You make art for someone who understands you and your motivations so intimately that he would have to be you to manifest in actuality. And there is more than one of these selves, just differentiated enough from you to feel that you are making art for them as well as yourself. That these people only exist hypothetically doesn’t matter. They’re your real audience, and they’re rooting for you to succeed.
If you’re lucky, you also have friends who love your work and understand what you’re doing, though the latter is optional. Such friends are precious because the hypothetical next selves are short on perspective and new ideas. (In any case, they can’t outdo yours.) If you’re luckier still, you have a customer base buying your work. The value of making art for your friends depends on the quality of your friends. Making art for your customer base is usually a trap because the commercial audience is fickle and indifferent to your motivations. Financially successful artists sometimes get sick of their work before their audience does.
Art, understood anthropomorphically, is the third party in the ménage à trois that includes the self and the creative audience. She—she’s definitely a she—looks upon the relationship between you and your hypothetical next selves and determines whether she wants to be involved intimately. Like such arrangements in the real world, if the situation fails to entice her or she doesn’t think she would be putting herself in skillful hands, she will decline your invitations. That requires you to think about what benefits her.
So what does painting want? What does it know, given its history? How do you match that knowledge and fulfill those desires? So far as I know, Stella is the first artist to consider those questions expressly. We might fruitfully continue to ask them.
This is just scratching the surface of Working Space, but I get the sense that it’s time to move on. Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism edited by Jed Perl. As already noted, we will be reading it two weeks and eighty pages at a time, interspersed with other books, the first of which will be What Is Art? by Tolstoy.
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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.
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"decide whether to take a machete to the proverbial brush, scale the proverbial cliff, or backtrack... " ~ OMG Let's make a role-playing game where the characters are Artists developing their careers!
SIMPLE DOES NOT MEAN EASY. 😲👍