Response to Second article
“Grids” is an article that Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1979 and it explores the perspective that the grid has resisted development over the years. The author suggests that the grid is the fundamental structure or modernist art (Krauss, 1979). He also explores the idea that the grid is a representation of the modernity of contemporary art, both temporally and spatially. Krauss traces the history of the grid from the under painting to abstract, thereby exploring the grid that entails the universal and ignores the physical (Krauss, 1979). Krauss maintains that the grid illustrates the “modernity” of contemporary art in two particular ways that include the temporal and spatial. In regards to the spatial, she suggests that the grid illustrates and underlines the autonomy that exists in the artistic realms. “Flattened, ordered, geometricized, antireal, antinatural, and antimimetic” are some of the ideas she uses to discuss the grid (Krauss, 1979).
In her research, she also investigates other concepts such as the optical unconscious, pastiche, and formlessness, which categorize modernist practice in regards to varied explanatory grids from the avant-garde or progressive modernism. Moreover, Krauss understates the significance of the relationship between the grid in contemporary paintings and its functions in pre-modernist forms of art. She asserts that the grid outlined the “modernity of modern art,” it illustrated modernism’s repudiation of the past as well as its exclusive visually (Krauss, 1979). Essentially, she implies that the grid plays the role of a modernist’s primary “myth,” covering the incompetence of concealed religiosity with elements that are unauthentic. Irrespective of the fact that Krauss’s arguments are engaging and descriptive of characteristics of art, such as Mondrian’s, they are polemical; therefore, unable to elucidate the number of modern artists that have used a “framework of spaced parallel bars” (Krauss, 1979).
Response to Second Article
“Yves Klein, or The Dead Dealer” is an article that Thierry de Duve and Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1989. In the article, the authors describe the Klein’s Here Lies Space, a piece that was completed before his death. The authors reject a formalist reading and interpretation of Klein’s works, as well as the process of analysing artists based purely on psychological constructs (De Duve and Krauss, 1989). Nevertheless, the authors commence the essay with some psychological examination of Klein, especially in relation to Warhol Andy and Beuys Joseph. They also make several other efforts to psychoanalyse Klein in different sections of the article. Perhaps, such a contradiction is warranted and acceptable because the authors indicate that the article serves as a part of a larger book that scrutinises how modernist art relates to the congruence between the political-economic field and aesthetic field (De Duve and Krauss, 1989).
A critical examination of the article’s introduction indicates that the authors intend to evaluate or examine Klein’s works from a Marxist perspective, to reveal new meanings and interpretations (De Duve and Krauss, 1989). As a result, they use a Marxist lens to describe and interpret Klein’s works in most sections of the auricle. For example, the authors use terms such as use-value, labour-power, exchange-value, and owners of means of artistic production to evaluate Klein’s works. In fact, in some sections of the essay, the authors include Marx’s arguments and concepts and describe his interpretation of the term labour as well as his theory (Walter, 1996).
References
De Duve, T. and Krauss, R. (1989). “Yves Klein, or The Dead Dealer.” JSTOR. The MIT Press, 72--‐90. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/778734.
Krauss, R. (1979). . "Grids.". JSTOR. The MIT Press. Available at <http://www.jstor.org/stable/778321>.
Walter, B. (1996). "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Art in Theory: 1900 - 1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996
