Monochrome
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Monochrome

Darkness and Light in Contemporary Art

Craig Staff

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Monochrome

Darkness and Light in Contemporary Art

Craig Staff

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About This Book

The monochrome - a single colour of paint applied over the entirety of a canvas - remains one of the more contentious modernist artistic inventions. But whilst the manufacture of these 'pictures of nothing' was ostensibly straightforward, their subsequent theorisation has been anything but. More than a history, Monochrome: Darkness and Light in Contemporary Art is the first account of the monochrome's lively role in contemporary art. Liberated from the burden of representation, the monochrome first stood for emancipation: an ideological and artistic impulse that characterised the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Historically, the monochrome embodied the most extreme form of abstraction and pure materiality. Yet more recently, adaptations of the art form have focused on a broader range of cultural and interpretive contexts. Provocative, innovative and timely, this book argues that the latest artistic strategies go beyond stylistic concerns and instead seek to re-engage with ideas around authorship, process and the conditions of the visible as they are given and understood through both light and darkness.
Discussing works by artists such as Katie Paterson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tom Friedman, Bruno Jakob, Sherrie Levine and Ceal Floyer, the book shows that the debates around an artwork's form and its possibility for meaning that the monochrome first engendered remain very much alive in contemporary visual culture.

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Information

Publisher
I.B. Tauris
Year
2015
ISBN
9780857739711

Part I
Of Darkness

1
Fathoming Darkness: Arrested Vision and Monochromacity in the Work of Balka, Whiteread and Paterson

The 0.10 exhibition opened on Saturday 19 December 1915 in what was, according to Linda S. Boersma, ‘one of the very few galleries for modern art in Russia.’ 1 Overlooking the Field of Mars, one of Petrograd’s largest municipal spaces, Madame Nadezhda Dobychina’s ‘Art Burea’ was, as Boersma notes, ‘one of the first private galleries in Russia to sell avant-garde art.’2 Whereas the zero in the title was suggestive of a perceived starting point wherein the habits of tradition, for all intents and purposes, could be expunged, (writing in a letter to the composer Mikhail Vasilievich Matiushin in May 1915, Kasimir Malevich claimed that ‘we intend to reduce everything to zero … [and] will then go beyond zero’), the ten denoted the original number of contributing artists.3 Within the gap that became inscribed between the zero and the ten, the conditions of possibility for an entirely novel form of artistic practice, it was envisaged, would necessarily emerge.
The exhibition presented approximately 150 works by artists including Liubov Popova, Zhenia Boguslavskaia, Ivan Puni, Maria Vasileva, Natan Altman and Vladimir Tatlin. Malevich was represented by a series of 39 paintings. Some of his canvases had titles such as Painterly Masses in Movement and Painterly Masses in Two Dimensions in a State of Rest, titles which, although somewhat generic in scope and import, nevertheless sought to elide overtly literal content in favour of evocations, at the very least, of potentially universal or universalising themes and principles. However, others were more explicit in their representational determination and included Painterly Realism of a Football Player – Color Masses of the Fourth Dimension. Taken collectively, and as Bruce Altshuler points out, the unifying characteristic of all of the 39 canvases was their nonformal content, content that was in one sense governed by a transcendentalist set of convictions: ‘With very different means he returns to the symbolist quest for a higher metaphysical reality, believing that the new man – and the new woman – would develop a sensibility able to transcend gross materiality.’4 This was also the case for Malevich’s Black Square, an oil painting on canvas measuring 53.5 × 53.5cm that, as a photograph taken at the time suggests, had been hung at a 90 degree angle in an elevated position between two of the gallery’s walls.
art/53048fig2.eps

Figure 2. Photo of installation of 0.10 exhibition, St Petersburg, 1915. Collection of Charlotte Douglas, New York
Of the five extant photographs taken of the 0.10 exhibition, two are of single works by Vladimir Tatlin and Ivan Kluin. One consists of a portrait and the other two are installation shots, the first of which shows two reliefs made by Tatlin whilst the second shows part of the room where Malevich’s work was hung.5 In one sense, the artist’s own desire to conflate Black Square with a set of meanings that extended beyond the logico-empirical was given through the position it tendentiously occupied within the physical space of the exhibition. According to Alison Hilton:
The spiritual focus of the home was the icon corner, located diagonally opposite the oven. Called the krasny ugol (“red” or “beautiful corner”), it had at least one icon, sometimes an icon case (bozhnitsa or kiot), and usually a small table holding candles and family mementoes beneath. Anyone entering the izbe [peasant house] would bow to the icons before greeting the hosts or speaking. Guests of honor were seated in the icon corner, and matchmaking rituals and parts of the marriage rites were conducted there. When a member of the family died, the body would be laid out so that the head lay closest to the icon corner, and the feet near the door.6
Whilst the critical response the painting engendered was certainly disparaging, if not unequivocally dismissive, being described as, inter alia, ‘a dead square,’ ‘a void’ and the ‘embodiment of emptiness,’ on one level such pejorative descriptions remained entirely apposite.7 Unsurprisingly, Malevich’s own understanding of the painting differed somewhat, considering the monochrome as a tangible expression of the infinite as it was given through non-objectivity. Indeed, according to Branislav Jakovljevic, the artist ‘saw Black Square as the simplest possible declaration of non-objectivity. The first non-objective painting is not only without objects represented in it. It is also without objective: without an end and endless at the same time.’8
Although the painting was characterised by a singular determination of form, a determination that appeared to be without precedent, the artist had already begun to explore its possibilities within the set designs he had been working on during 1913 for Victory Over the Sun, an opera for the St Petersburg Union of Youth. As John Golding notes, these were inflected by the innovative approaches to representation that had first been instigated by Cubo-Futurism. Accordingly, ‘the curtain for Act II, Scene 5, consisted of a simple square against a white background; and it is possible that when Malevich saw this geometric emblem hanging motionless in the theatrical arc lights it appeared to him all of a sudden strangely numinous, filled with some breathless, expectant hidden truth.’9 Indeed, the artist inscribed on the back of one of the subsequent variants of the original Black Square the following: ‘Suprematism 1913 the initial element first manifested itself in Victory Over the Sun.’10
Setting out the artist’s intentions for the work that was included within the 0.10 exhibition was an accompanying pamphlet entitled ‘From Cubism to Suprematism. The New Painterly Realism.’11 Within it, Malevich declared that the ‘square is a living, regal infant.’12 As it was, Black Square was taken to be emblematic of both the perceived obsolescence of traditional approaches to painting and as ‘face of the new art.’13 However, for all of the shock and the incredulity the novelty of Black Square engendered, it wasn’t the first historical instance wherein the iconography of the black monochrome functioned, in effect, as a cipher for a metaphysical interpretation of the infinite.
Between 1617 and 1621 Utriusque cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica atque technica historiae or ‘The metaphysical, physical and technical history of the two worlds, namely the greater and the lesser’ was published. Written by the English physician and polymath Robert Fludd, the two worlds of which the title referred to were those of the microcosm and the macrocosm.14 Of the 60 engravings that were included within its five volumes, perhaps the most striking is the image of a black square, which is bracketed along each of its four sides with the words ‘Et sic in infinitum,’ (and so on indefinitely).
Fludd had intended his own black monochrome to signify the primordial, undifferentiated darkness prior to the beginning of time. In fact, a more pointed interpretation of the engraved black square can be developed if we consider the fact that amongst Fludd’s broad range of interests was the esoteric science of alchemy. To this end, it could be argued that one interpretation of the black square was that it denoted the etymological root of the term ‘alchemy’ that meant black earth or black soil. For the alchemists, this undifferentiated or so-called ‘first’ matter, matter that was nevertheless fecund, (just as the black soil was that derived from the banks of the River Nile and that had originally contributed to the provenance of the term), would then be transformed.15
Whether or not this is indeed the case, arguably both Fludd and Malevich sought to harness the illimitability of the black monochrome as a ploy wherein the limitations imposed upon the image by a normative set of representational conventions could be sidestepped, if not entirely outflanked. In so doing, and beyond what on one level was an ‘interpretation of Genesis in alchemical terms,’ Fludd’s adoption of the black square, of a black square wrestled, like Malevich’s own non-image or un-image, with the conditions of possibility for a separate modality of representation to become engendered.16
With regard to Malevich’s Black Square, and more broadly the operative characteristics of the colour it is organised around, Angeline Morrison has observed that:
The choice of the colour black is significant and also problematizes meaning. As the absence of all light, black represents the absence of sight. As light is the condition through which the human eye is able to apprehend visually, when light is taken away it leaves no possibility of seeing at all. The Black Square can thus be read as the ultimate painterly paradox: a visual image that tells of the impossibility of seeing, embodied in an object whose very reason for existing is to be seen.17
Through its tendentious withdrawal away from the assurances sight invariably provides, one is able to discern a comparable paradoxical state, albeit it upon a very different set of terms, and through a markedly separate set of material structures, within a work the artist Miroslaw Balka made in 2009.
art/53048fig3.eps

Figure 3. Miroslaw Balka 1958 –, The Unilever Series: Miroslaw Balka, How It Is, 13th October 2009 – 5th April 2010, Turbine Hall October 2009 – April 2010, steel, 13 × 30 metres. © Tate Photography 2009 © Miroslaw Balka/White Cube
Broadly resembling an oversized shipping container, (although its heft is far more imposing than even the largest standardized unit), the structure stands on a series of two-metre stilts which affords its viewing audience the opportunity to orient themselves both around and underneath it.18 Approaching the work along one of the two 30 metre length sides of the structure, the entrance is reached by ascending a ramp that bridges the exterior space of the Turbine Hall with the cavernous space of the container. Upon initially entering the structure, the proximity of other viewers can be discerned. However, moving further into the space the visibility, if not the physical presence of others begins to recede. It is from this point that the viewer is forced to become increasingly reliant upon their intuitive and proprioceptive grasp of what constitutes their immediate surroundings. By divesting reliance upon the faculty of sight, any further progress within what is now virtual darkness is awkward, hesitant and at times clumsy. It is at this point that many gravitate towards the interior sidewalls of the space, privileging the assurances offered by touch rather than the more ill-defined information being relayed both visually and aurally. Interestingly, the walls have been lined with a black, felt-like material that has the twofold effect of dampening the proclivity for the space to be echoic whilst at the same time absorbing any remaining sources of vestigial light. Eventually, and now enveloped within a blanket of almost complete darkness, the end wall is broached. Whilst physically one is unable to move any further through and into the space, by turning around to face the entrance and having the faculty of sight partially returned, what can now be determined are the silhouettes of those viewers who are positioned at the work’s entrance.
If we are to apply Morrison’s statement to How It Is, the question is thus: within the veiled darkness of the space and within the impossibility of seeing, what is to be seen?
Arguably, the response to this question would work outwards from an admission that whilst How It Is can be understood with regard to artistic precedent, what makes the work arguably more compelling, and, for that matter, most demanding, is the bearing it has on the idea of collective memory and trauma.19 To this end, Balka takes the limitations of both perception and representation and situates these questions, questions that previously had pertained to the monochrome, and applies them to the context of Germany’s recent history. Paulo Herkenhoff has sought to articulate this particular thread that is indelibly woven through Balka’s imposing structure:
Babi Yar is a ravine in Kiev (Ukraine). In 1941, an estimated 33,771 Jews were killed in a single massacre by Sonderkommande 4. The Jews were herded to the bottom of the ravine to be shot. The site became the largest collective tomb of the Shoah … How It Is becomes a vicarious memorial for the yar, described in Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar as the ‘soundless scream.’ Darkness is Balka’s mode of sculpting the depths of the ravine of uncertainty in the history of the holocaust. He works with lightless vision to make a primal step into that uncertainty, which motivates him to draw, with dramatic containment, an association with an earthly hell.20
More broadly, as Herkenhoff observes, ‘How It Is addresses its critical versatility both to the hidden spaces of the extermination camps and to exhibitionist Nazi architecture.’21
Although War Room (1967–68/2002) by Wally Hedrick functions not so much as a memorial, vicarious or otherwise, being more akin to a makeshift bunker or indeed a temporary shelter, it too can be seen to address the conflation of architecture with historical memory. Moreover, the monochrome’s disarticulation of the work of art from normative representational schemas, an idea that Black Square ushered in and that How It Is both adopts and adapts also functions as the conceptual underpinning for War Room.
art/53048fig4.eps

Figure 4. Wally Hedrick, War Room, 1967–68/2002, oil on canvas, eight panels, each 11′ × 5′ 6′′. Image courtesy of the Estate of Wally Hedrick and The Box, Los Angeles. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen
Originally begun in 1967, War Room consists of a total of eight monochromatic canvases, each eight feet high and five feet wide that have been attached to each other to form a square-sha...

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