And clearly, the meaning of an attempt to undermine illusionism cannot be dissociated from the baggage that Western picture-making carried along with it. It is a rejection that inherently implies the disavowal of the notion of a constituting consciousness and the protocol language of a private Self. It is a rejection of a space that exists prior to experience, passively waiting to be filled; and of a psychological model in which a self exists replete with its meanings, prior to contact with its world. So if we wish to speak of the anti-illusionism of the art of the ’60s, we cannot limit our discourse to an ideology of form.

*

It is common enough to say of Stella’s painting that it is structured deductively—that all internal differentiations of its surfaces derive from the literal aspects of the canvas edge. (3) Thus in the early black paintings, like Die Fahne Hoch, we point to the way Stella begins with the midpoints of the vertical and horizontal sides and forces the stripes into a repetitive, unbroken declaration of the expanse of the painting’s four quadrants in a double set of mirror reversals. Or, in the later aluminum paintings where the canvases begin to be shaped, we note that the stripes perform a more self-evident reverberation inward from the shape of the support, and thereby seem even more nakedly dependent upon the literal features of that support. It seems easy enough to say this, and further to add that the effect of this surface, flashed continuously with the sign of its edge, has purged itself of illusionistic space, has achieved flatness. And that flatness, we think, is the flatness of an object—of a nonlinguistic thing. Yet we would be wrong, in the way that half-truths are wrong; for we would not have said enough.

The signs that haunt Stella’s early stripe painting are more than signifiers for their literal shapes. Die Fahne Hoch is deductively structured; so is Luis Miguel Dominguin. But both paintings arrive at a particular configuration, which is the configuration of a cross. We could call this accidental of course. Just as we could conceive it as accidental that the Cross itself relates to that most primitive sign of an object in space: the vertical of the foreground projected against the horizon-line of a nascent ground. But the three-way relationship that fuses along the striped surface of these pictures is a kind of argument for the logical connection between the cruciform of all pictoriality, of all intention to locate a thing within its world, and the way in which the conventional sign—in this case the Cross—arises naturally from a referent in the world. In canvas after canvas one finds oneself in the presence of a particular emblem, drawn from the common repertory of signs—stars, crosses, ring-interlocks, etc.—part of a language that belongs, so to speak, to the world, rather than to the private, originating capacity of Stella to invent shapes. But what Stella convinces us of is an account of the initial genesis of those signs. Because in these paintings we see how they are given birth through a series of natural and logical operations.

The logic of the deductive structure is therefore shown to be inseparable from the logic of the sign. Both seem to sponsor one another and in so doing to ask one to grasp the natural history of pictorial language as such. The real achievement of these paintings is to have fully immersed themselves in meaning, but to have made meaning itself a function of surface—of the external, the public, or a space that is in no way a signifier of the a priori, or of the privacy of intention.

The meaning of Stella’s expurgation of illusionism is unintelligible apart from a will to lodge all meanings within the (semiological) conventions of a public space. And to expose illusionistic space as a model of privacy—of the Self conceived as constituted prior to its contact with the space of the world. (4)

The conception of the Self had by the late 1950s already become an aspect of the literary experience of Beckett and of the nouveau roman. And it had emerged as the particularly urgent claim of the late philosophy of Wittgenstein, in which the language game was a therapy aimed at severing the connection (the logical connection) between meaning and mind. In the Blue Book, for example, Wittgenstein asks what it means to make the claim that we know a tune: does it mean that before we sing it we have quickly whistled it to ourselves silently; or that we have a picture of the score in our heads—a mental image of the tune—from which we read off the notes as we sing them? Is claiming to know the tune dependent upon having it stored up someplace inside us, like beads already positioned on a string and ready to be pulled out of our mouths? Or is it simply singing the tune, or perhaps hearing many tunes and saying, “that one just then is the right tune.” The tune, and the question of just where it is stored when we claim to know it, widens out in The Philosophical Investigations to memory images and to the bases for all claims to know. Again and again Wittgenstein tried to sever the certainty of these claims from a picture of a mental space in which definitions and rules are stored, awaiting application. His work became an attempt to confound our picture of the necessity that there be a private mental space (a space available only to the single self) in which meanings and intentions have to exist before they could issue into the space of the world. (5) The model of meaning that Wittgenstein implores us to accept is a model severed from the legitimizing claims of the private self.