[-empyre-] more on the grid

[frederic neyrat]

(by the way, R Krauss seems to be able to reject avant-gardes
fantasies of the origin in forgetting the political aim of this
return: when Malévitch says "je me suis transfiguré dans le zéro des
formes", he's not stupid, he knows that he's not the inventor of the
zero - but he has to go through it to create something (as Sherrie
Levine definitely did it !): for the avant-gardes, zero, grid, silence
are materials for new worlds, new forms of life, not decorative
patterns ... at the end of the day, the problem is not the return, the
origin, the grid, the zero, but the danger to be immersed in them, to
not be able to leave the zero...
all my best
Frédéric Neyrat)


2009/11/16 virginia solomon <virginia.solomon at gmail.com>:
> hi zach
>
> the article I was actually thinking about was her "originality of the
> avant-garde," in which she discusses the use of the grid within historical
> avant-garde practices. specifically, through the use of the grid in
> modernist painting, she discusses the role that the trope of originality
> played within the historic avant-garde, and of course she undermines that
> trope. She discusses the grid to demonstrate the repressed quality of
> modernism, that its championing of originality comes through an engagement
> with a form that is a copy of a copy without an original at all (who
> invented the grid?). she then discusses postmodernism as practices that
> don't repress the fact that it is a copy of a copy without an original.
> there are things to be done with copies and seriality and repetition and
> proliferation, I think, but from a different direction than communications
> theory that might prove productive for your project.
>
> in terms of taking the grid as an emblem of our time, there are interesting
> contradictions between your discussion and location, and krauss', or more
> accurately, the practices in which krauss locates the grid. because she is
> locating it within formalist abstraction, which is precisely seeking to
> distance itself from the social field in its search for autonomy and medium
> specificity. so it is a very different kind of function, but one that I
> think can be really productive precisely because of the infections of which
> you speak. of course this makes me think of the general idea Infected (the c
> in the infected is a copyright sign but I don't know how to make that in
> gmail) series, where they did infected mondrians, duchamps, rietvelds, etc.
> which of course also gets us back to gay related immune deficiency.
>
>
> and then another question just came to me, concerning the difference between
> being-invisible and non-being. it seems to be like there are important
> differences between refusing to be on or taken up by the grid, and not being
> able to access the grid. maybe this is an old question, but I think it takes
> on nuances if we are discussing a queer practice of trying to refuse the
> modernist, enlightenment self and thing up other forms of subjectivity
> without simply invoking the privilege of being able to refuse.
>
> --
> Virginia Solomon
>
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