ANNE M. WAGNER
AS AGNES MARTIN and Anne Truitt used them, the two time-honored disciplines, painting and sculpture, pictorial field and solid object, remained importantly distinct. And this is true no matter how far individual works—Martin’s White Flower, 1960, say, or Truitt’s Valley Forge,1963—push the familiar envelope of form. What brings these artists together is not a matter of one or another medium. They are linked because, looking at their artworks, we are given such compelling experiences of time. They offer examples of what—however provisionally, even tendentiously—I’m going to call, borrowing a phrase from Julia Kristeva, “women’s time.”
I’m not suggesting that the experiences Martin and Truitt provide cannot be shared by men—but it is the case that those experiences go against the model of temporality that ruled the New York art world in the 1960s, when, artistically speaking, both artists came of age. This was a man’s world; though women were far from absent, at the time it seemed (wrongly, in retrospect) to be chiefly shaped and inhabited by men. In the ’60s, it was Minimalism, above all as practiced and argued for by Donald Judd and Robert Morris, that in the US offered the most radical and influential model of perception—a model that reduced art’s temporal demands to, well, a minimum, for both viewer and maker alike.
Repetition and solid geometries were Minimalism’s main resources. This was clear from the start. But what is much less obvious is how and why some users of these same ’60s devices—Martin and Truitt among them—achieved such utterly different perceptual effects. Truitt’s columns, for example, generally resemble Morris’s plywood polyhedrons, of which his Column, 1961, was the first, in that they too employ shapes—mostly square or rectangular uprights produced to measure, often in series, by a commercial fabricator. Yet despite Truitt’s use of standardized and subcontracted methods of production, her work, unlike Minimalist objects, never takes a shape we can trust we really know. From the beginning, her forms ensured a process of viewing as conceptually open as her methods are physically or materially controlled.
In Martin’s paintings and drawings, time, shape, and system have different roles to play. Each line is systematically planned and plotted, yet no system this dependent on its maker’s skills and concentration could entirely conceal its human origins: The exact circumstances of its making are always recorded in the qualities of a mark left by a handheld pencil or brush. Such making is self-evidently sequential—Judd’s model of “one thing after another” isn’t far away—but the effect is of accumulated difference, as much or more than the defining similarity that brings each mark to be. What counts most, in other words, are the precise characteristics of each line: They insist, so Briony Fer argues, on the “infinitesimal difference between things.” The verdict leads her to a breathtaking summary of the artist’s purposes: “Repetition,” Fer writes, “is understood as a means not of deadening but heightening experience.” Which is to say (though Fer doesn’t quite do so) that in looking at a work by Martin, we are inevitably drawn to the factors that assert, and also characterize, human repetition: not merely the system itself but also the moments of minor “system failure,” we might call it, when her hand wobbles or wavers, or the pencil dulls, or paint runs out, or a line must be retraced.
For some viewers—I count myself among them—what matters most in this process are the multiple moments in the tissue or fabric of marks that declare that the maker’s movements were not merely mechanical. These occur when the marks betray their origin in the actions of a single body wielding pencil or brush: a brief faltering, say, or a change in pressure, or a starting again. They insist that in the making of Martin’s paintings, the artist’s rational mind yielded to the body’s muscular movements, interrupted rhythms to which our own looking is tied. Such antimechanical moments insist that the body is not a machine. And they remove her painting from the tireless continuity, the endlessness, of mechanical time—while also belying the illusion that the body has its own on-and-off switch.
What do they offer instead? There is no one answer to this question. My own response is doubt. I never cease being struck by how hard it is to know any of Martin’s works. In place of confidence, there is only uncertainty about precisely what is to be seen. Each canvas instead offers a coming-in and going-out of knowledge: To see a part of it means losing sight of the whole. But to see the whole is to watch the surface fade from view. And even the critic’s magic moment and optimal distance of viewing—what Kasha Linville called “hazy, velvety” and Rosalind Krauss “the /cloud/”—deploys an image of vision’s muffling or erasure. Knowledge only emerges when sight falls away. Or stated rather differently, as time goes by. Knowledge is a passage filled with small and large epiphanies in vision that accumulate as an invisible whole.
Truitt’s works also open the question of what we think we know. For her, too, knowledge seems to be the elusive product of time and vision, though mostly when sculpture is the key medium, with painting assisting its goals. From the outset, in First, 1961, and Two, 1962, this meant playing the shape and the color off each other, much to the bemusement of those critics who couldn’t see the point. Late in life, Truitt tried to recapture the moment at which she understood why sculpture mattered most: “I was standing in the sunshine of our living room one morning when it suddenly came to me perfectly clearly that a sculpture stood . . . on a line of gravity that disarmed time. Stood alone as a person stands alone, bathed in the light that marks the passage of time, not subject to time but illuminated by it.”
How can this idea of a revelatory passage of time be actively, overtly figured as what a sculpture can show? (For implicitly, of course, sculptural three-dimensionality is always a matter of time.) If, as I have argued earlier in these pages, sculpture is presence, then Truitt’s color does its best to alter presence through time: Here color assumes its identity as a transitive verb. Or perhaps Truitt’s own word, illuminate, says best what her color can do. It allows sculpture to take control of light, and light to undo shape.
In the work of Martin and Truitt I continue to find ideas and sensations I value because they are steeped in the sense of time’s threats and promises. In fact, one reason to write about these two artists is as a means of understanding, and maybe even extending, both the intensely immediate present and an inevitably uncertain past and future in still evolving ways. I say “evolving” because I remain convinced that abstraction is essential to feminism; how better to convey the necessary love and anger, doubt and vision? Abstraction, like feminism, leads to new worlds, as Martin and Truitt have shown. Their versions insist on stoppages and beginnings and on the productive excitement of not being certain, not quite knowing what you see. Which is to say that women’s time helps us to imagine reception as part of creation. It is shaped by knowledge and memory and the elusiveness of both. And it embraces neither the possibility of progress nor the inevitability of the cyclical as its basic rule. There is no denying that time will never entirely surrender to our efforts to disarm it, but in measuring its limits and discontinuities, we have the means of reshaping it, and thus of discovering the way toward a fragile treaty with the years behind us and a lasting truce with those to come.
Anne M. Wagner is a contributing editor of Artforum. She is currently working on a book about materiality and sculpture.
