Frank Srdla: Oltropol/11, 1971,

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ANARCHY AND OBJECTHOOD

A full-scale Franli. Stella retrospective in Gernl tny argues for the non-Minimalist tendencies-frotn narrative to illusionis1n-in even his earliest worli.s.

By Marli. Prince
TJ IE CLOSER ONE COMES to Frank Stella's stripe paintings from the late 1950s and early '60s, th e more they confound their immediate graphic profile. Paradoxically, given th e resolute abstraction of their idiom, these paintings emerge from the onset of the television age, which they both critique and exploit by reflecting a distinction between the brief 5watch of attention that the burgeoning mass media was seeking from its nascent viewers and a more protracted perception that might be its forsaken alternative. Stella's stripes reveal a complexity of painterly detail that belies the seductively simple design premises to which they initially appear to conform. In the first years of his career, Stella methodically et about designing compositional templates only to erode their authority in his execution of the paintings. AbstractExpressionist scale was condensed into a structural totality, a straight flush registering with ruthless efficiency on a retina distracted by the postmodern era's competing artificial stimuli. From the stripes of Morro Castle (1958), a very early example from the "Black Paintings"series (1958-60), to those of Tuxedo junctio11 (1960), one of the last, Stell a tautened his com posi tion from a relatively loose linear serialism, still 1Ll0 DECI dBER 2012 t suggesting a questing subjectivity, to a rigorous geometric design that tersely maintained a contrast between gl oss bl ack st r ipes (their width determined by the size of his brushes) and the fine gaps of pale matte canvas separating them. lv!orro Castle is composed of a stack of two half squares of concentric stripes, centered within a wide rectangular canvas. Unstriped black margins to the left and right intim ate a figure/ground relationship which Stella would reject as the series progressed. The stripes are woolly-edged and tend to bend slightly, so the half-squares appear to lean. In contrast ro J\1orro Castle's irregularities, all of Tux<'llo jruution's terms are graspable within a few seconds. ll1e vertical composition divides into two halves, each ;\ lozenge shape formed of concentric stripes around a central seed. And yet, this overall image-sign reveals, on dose inspection, not a hard -edged generalization, but an accretion of modest manual gesn1res, which, in lv!orro Castle, were pronounced enough to erode the painting's graphic cohesion.The double diamond composition of Tuxedo junction, with its perspectiva l diagonals, reins this detail into a concise sign for spat ial recession, an illusion that the painting is simultaneously denying with its anti -illusionistic serial patterning an d its

CURRENTLY ON VIEW
"Frank Stella The Retrospec t"c Work< 1958 2012:
at KunstmU\CUm

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emphasis on pure materiality-basic attributes of a Minimal esthetic. Stella was demonstrating-or discovering as he paimed-how minimalist concerns and painting were essentially incompatible; how, in the medium of painting, pure materiality and process (except in the most arid instances of monochrome painting) submit to illusion to what we see into a canvas, rather than merely what we sec on it. THE KU1 STMUSEUM WOLFSBURC's main gallery-a notoriously high-ceilinged hall with chrome grillwork dividing up the skylight- tends ro dwarf its temporary walls and leave the art that hangs in its lower reaches looking miniaturist. And yet it proved to be a genial foil for the expansive scale and geometric complexity of Stella's arr. A selection of roughly 150 works, evenly covering all periods of the artist's career, evidenced no particular bias. Ironically, a vast single space was asked to accommodate one of the most circuitous artistic narratives of the second half of the 20th century, with a small mezzanine level given to models for Stella's architectural projects from the 1980s and '90s, and tiny maquettes for his recent uScarlatti K"series (2006-ongoing). The overview was inevitably dr: matized by a crucial rupture: Stella's mutation, in the 1960s, from monochrome l\linimalism-albeit a deeply ambivalent one-to something much more resistant to categorization.'TI1e "Irregular Polygon" (1965-67) and uProtractor" (1967-71) series diverge radically from the stripe paintings which precede them. Any pretense to providing clear cut Minimal repositories of an artwork's material parameters has been abandoned.These

paintings partially reconstitute the stripe module of the earlier work, only to betray order in some places or neglect it altogether in others. Comprehending a categorical logic only to undermine it, Stella extends pictorial immediacy into a conceptual narrative, and riddles the shield-like graphic symbolism of hiMinimal work with irony. Once narrative enters the picture, it is difficult to contain. Indeed, these later works retroactively indicate that the earlier Minimal work is as concerned with presenting a narrative image of painterly application accrued over time as with conforming to Donald Judd's prescription for the "oneness" of Minimal objecthood and its temporal corollary, all-at-onceness. Sunapee I (1966) serves to demonstrate how far Stella came in the first half of the 1960s.The modulated stripes have broadened into one-off color zones, and symmetry has ceded to an off-kilter irregularity which accommodates a spectrum of emotional atonalities unavailable in the earlier work: comedy, helplessness, vulnerability, bathos. Stella has chosen to plunge into the complexities, contradictions and ambiguities of painterly illusion only by renouncing the unequivocal parameters of the "specific object." Sunapee I abo reclaims modernism's embodiment of subjectivity, a concern that 1inimal explicitly subjective dimension of Morro Castle that Stella was forced to expunge in order to acta in the ruthless consistency of the early tripe paintings.) Swwpu I resembles the geometric structure of a head, with a turquoise outer band as the jawl ine. You look at the painting, and it eems a stubborn individuality that the "Black Paintings" permit only

a subversive subplot. Significant!), as Stella's composition upsets h1s symmetrical template, his painterly facture begins to overspill the li mits he had previously conformed to.lhe bare camadivisions between color zones reveal the seep of underpainting-cad mium red oozing from beneath a tur quoise field or cobalt green asserting itself from under a slab of mars violet. Minimalist monochromy has been superseded by an emotionally diverse chromaticism. Ostropo/III (1973), from the "Polish Village"series (1971-73), converts the color fields of S11napee I into levered panels in relief, and enamel paint into colored felt : nd other tinted fabrics, such as burlap. Stelta's reliefs, in reproductions, tend to deceive the viewer: they appear much flatter than they are. In reality, they subvert the Rat geometric design-the air of the cypher or emblem-which their images suggest. 11lusionistic complexit) proves to be indistinguishable from, and entirely contingent upon, complexity of construction. Ostropol IIts jagged picture plane, in which recession phases into physical shadow, is a perceptual conundrum masquerading under the guise of a graphic composition as clear-cut as a corporate logo. Leblon I (1975), from the uBrazilian"series (1974-75), has exchanged the board supports of Ostropol Ill for conjoined panel s of aluminum onto which oil and enamel paint have been applied to form a slick, luminous skin which Stella differentiates into contrasting zones by juxtaposing styles of paint application-scribbling on the metal with a stubby brush, or streaking it with a loaded pal ette knife.1l1c painting might be a primarycolored compositional paradigm representing illusionistic recession, its blue and red triangles zooming into a predominant yellow field. But if one takes a side-on vantage, the painting opens into wedged chasms, with real shadows mimicking the oblique angles of il l usion. Stella makes us aware that the pivoting of painting from illusionistic vehicle to blatantly constructed objecthood is a humanistic trope. 1he effacement of illusionism, as the viewer registers the construction behind the image, introduces a consciousness of the work's unwieldy physicality, which corresponds to our sense of our own body weight. Exposed as a material construction, the painting reveals its vulnerability, its dependence on mere metal and glue to galvanize its surface into pictoriality. Ir is as if we become aware of the wires manipulating a marionette-its human agency becomes apparent, but not necessarily to the detriment of the fictional personality which the wires are jerking into life. Sprung into relief, Ostropol III and Leblon I can represent the initial steps toward a radical expansion of Stella's picture plane. By the end of th e '70s, a traditionally intact painting surface had been super eded of discrete metal clements-each individually decoratedand it was left to the viewer tO assemble a coherent pictoriality. Stella's reliefs of the late 1970s and early '80s enact a tussle between the legibility of geometric design and its disintegration under the assau l t of painterly gesture and material heterogeneity. The glitch, the drip, the manual slippage arc no longer rare exceptions but the
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foundations of the language. Premeditated design has ceded to spontaneous action and accommodated accident. Ifarewa (1978)-from the "Indian Bird" series (197779)-consists of a dense array of machine-cut aluminum shapes affixed ro a metal scaffolding, the co mon clement of the series. Its tangle of parts extends at least 5 feet ofT the wall, and sustained attention is required to pick a way through the thicket of formal clusters and chromatic dissonances.The willful anarchism of the composition may be taken as an outright rejection of the graph ic sign-images with which the early stripe p<tintings arrest one's eye, although its curved shapes comprise both invented forms and generic draftsman's templates.The axis between weightless illusion and humanized objccthood activated by Stella's reliefs corresponds to his personalization of the sign-shapes our of which the "Indian Bird" series is composed. Colored over in gestural sweeps of metallic paint and gl itter, the

Szu o pu /, 196(,, alk)d and cp" Y on ,,.,was, 127'2 b, 120 inchc Courtesy Edword Tyler Nahem r>ine
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impersonality of the "found" sig ns is subordinated ro subjectivity. Like Stella's titles, these received elements arc not so much functional signifiers of an external context as they are a means of gauging the discrepancy between the selfreferential world of an abstract painting and what it might allude to. Similarly, the more complicated compositions from the "Protractor"series, such as Lrfahan (1969), are experiments in allowing the illusionistic spatial dynamism of pure color combinations to play havoc with the integrated objecthood of the work as paint on cotton duck pulled over a stretcher. Stella seems not only to be rejecting Minimalist or thodoxy but to be sabotaging irs very foundations. THIS ANARCHIC VEIN is concentrated in the 1980s.lf Stella's 1960s work is warily cognizant of painting's potential for operating as a graphic sign, these painted reliefs do everything to atomize suc h legibility. In Belli' coml' il J(l/e ART IN MIERlCA

1-12 DECD!Bim 2012

,\ .\RCIIY

143

If Stella's 1960s worli is warily cognizant of painting' s potential for operating as a graphic sign, his painted reliefs of the '80s do everything to atomize such legibility.
(Dear as Salt, 1987), from the uCones and Pillars" series (l )84-87), a group of dynamically juxtaposed aluminum l'(n es and cylinders have been striped so that their individual forms submit to an overall composition of vivid color registers.The stripe module from 25 years earlier has been transformed from a basic element of geometri c construcnon into a device which confounds the visual autonomy of the forms it decorates and levels them inLO a nickering ptctorial unity. There is a circus air about the object-festive, celebratory, brashly procl aiming its own toppling : hs urdity. Tts planar complexity conveys a conviction that, ive n sufficient formal diversity, an abstract painting need 10t be referential or metaphorical ro generate narrative, nd to breach the potential solipsism of abstract painterly .u: ture.This kind of narrative docs not involve a critical agenda or ideological statement which can be detached at will from the object that representit-in the manner of so much conremporary uconceptual" painting-or even that ,,f mere accretive process occurring over time, as in Stella's ea rly l\1inimal stripe paintings. It is a specific embodiment of a series of conflations, conflicts and juxtapositions which comprehend a complex cultural context while integrally residing in the formal elements through which they arc realized.The viewer's eye must work to forge th ese elements into a pictorial order (a fusion that the illusionistic space of traditiona l painting will have already partially achieved for the viewer through its two-dimensionality). In his 1980s work, Stella's confidence in his abi lity to replace metaphor with the pictorial dynamism of abstract painterly structure makes one questi on the apparent metaphorical dimension of his earliest work. But look again at Morro Castle in light of Bene come if sale, and the ea rly painring's metaphorical assumption of urban dynamics-the geometric cut and thrust of city streets, for example appears compromised by the unbalanced architecture of its composition. It realizes a dichotomy between two distinct forms of narrative: the image-sign composed of modular repetition, and the relational structure of particular, unrepeatahle forms, with the latter prevailing. 1 l1orro Castle can be interpreted as a cartoonish deflation of the grand verticality of a Barnett Newman 7ip painting. Whereas J cwman's verticals stood as archetypal pictorial metaphors for autonomous human subjectivity-the vertical band, sandwiched between broad fields of color, reflecting the viewer's physical and psychological autonomy pressed in upon by gravity and the pressures of moral responsibilityStella's stripes bypass the metaphors they might ndumbrate, and defau lt to a pictorial embodiment of the basi c subjectivity of painterly appli cation.1l1e gesturalism of de Koonin g's 1-1 6 DEC81 BH 2012 I ANARCUY & OBJECTIJ OOD
FHA I<

Previous spread, view of Stcll.1's

retrospec tive
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t he Kun srmuscurn Wolfsl> urg, showing {lef t to ri,::ht), Btnr comr il sal<, 1987: Isfahan, 1969; Tbr Gr,lnd Arm.,da (IRS, No.6. 1XJ, 1989; >nd D.widgrod<i II. 1971. Photo lll>rck Kru,zewski .

version of Abstract Expressionism ichanneled into the straitjacket of a stripe, allowing the lean of its trajectory and the overspill of its edges to generate n narrative whi ch elaborates itself in contradistinction to that of the formal modularity of the painting's compositional template, and its urbanist/modernist implications. In Stella's recent art, new technology's capacity for granting metal and plastics the fluidity of paint has taken his reliefs as close to the three dimensions of scu l pture as they have yet come, although these wall- mounted tangles of cast materials-their surfaces only sporadically qualified with spray paint- always retain an attenuated lin k to the wall as their support, as their spatial dynamics remain invested in the pictorial illusionism of p<linting. With the expansion in technical capability- and formal fluidity- there has been a sacrifice: abstraction's freedom from being confined to too literal a reading. Structural com plexity has progressed from an aspect of painterly language to an image of itself K81 (2008), for example, resembles a prop from a dy topian high-tech splinter from a dismantled spaceship, or the head of a CGI robot, graffitied over in shrill, acidic colors. An air of the tcchnogically arcane localizes the object within a constellation of pop-cultural connotations.The work's brash futurism proves to be a limitation, a parenth etical sign that shows abstraction, by contrast, to have been so crucial an cl eme nt within Stella's vocabu lary. From his earli est work onward, abstraction was inseparable from matcri :1l transparency. So long as the materia l constituents of the works were open ly legible, they were protected from defaulting to a language of signifiers.This is an aspect of Stella's Minimalist grounding that has remained, until recently, a firm ba is his practice. But the skeins and arabesques of Protogen RPT and Corian-the synthetic materials Stella deploys in his uScarlatti K" reliefs-are so mysterious to the technologically uninformed eye that they seem to renounce their matcrialit), like pixels, and become illustrative convcpnces, signifier:. of advanced engineering. On the first floor of the Kunstmuseum was a cabinet display of Stella's early drawings. Four small sketches (1966) for the "Irregular Polygon"series possessed all the sci-fi weirdness of the "Scarlatti K"series while retaining an elusiveness that cannot be localized to pop-cultural associations.Their modest materials-colored pencil on paper-give the otherworldly abstraction of their forms a defiantly human qu ality. Their lines wobble; their geometry is hobbled. They a re ideal images that arc always coming back down to earth. 0 AHT IN ,\MIIUCA 147

Lo cr;orco UIIZtt
p11um, 1987,

painted etched magnc ium alum inu m and mixed medium,, 105 by 84lo by 64\t, inc h,s. Sammlung Froehli ch , Stuttgart. Photo lllarek
Ktu\zewsk i .