CATHERINE DE ZEGHER
SPIRITUALITY IS A WORD contemporary art and theory strenuously avoid. However, a heightened receptivity both within and beyond was present at the inception of modernist abstraction and has never entirely faded away. Some artists in the second part of the twentieth century sustained the legacy of Kazimir Malevich, Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, et al.—notably Gego, Nasreen Mohamedi, and Agnes Martin, who shared an impulse toward abstraction that can be seen as the materialization of a mental space striving for an impossible perfection. Their mesmerizing grids, in particular from the 1970s, emphasize the concern to eliminate egotism, in contradistinction to many artists of the time who rather focused on the individual. Ideas regarding the whole of being instead of one’s particularity in separation are key to their work practices. “To live as the ocean rather than as the bubble of foam on the ocean,” Jack Youngerman once observed about Martin’s aspiration.1
Touching on the sublime and bearing poetic titles—Flower in the Wind, Tideline, Red Bird, The Underside of the Leaf, to name a few—Martin’s regular grid drawings and paintings often convey ideas of a unity with nature, or, more exactly, with an animate world in which all is alive and interdependent, the human and the nonhuman being. Martin’s profound attention to an earthly web of relations resonates with the words of Young Chief of the Cayuse tribe on signing over their lands to the US government in 1855: “I wonder if the Ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said?”
If the traced grid can be seen as an objectifying mapping tool intended to purge our material reality of the unreliability and unpredictability of subjective experience, Martin’s painting method and titles refer to a living (color) field, an open and dynamic landscape. Even the weave of community is apparent in the weave of the canvas, as our life and the world’s life are conceived as being deeply intertwined. Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, “To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.”2 Remember, the prairie was Martin’s homeland—the prairie and the grids that have been imposed on it. . . .
Next to the demonstrable and quantifiable, Martin introduces the fluid realm of immediate sensory experience, as her grid structure seems to shift, dissolve, and dematerialize in our attention—its deliquium brought to being in our changes of viewing distance. Moreover, the artist’s palette contributes to this effect, as Martin used primary colors but diluted them, so that they became translucent, soft pastel, and fragile. Taking on the “objective” grid and the “industrial” primary colors, Martin succeeded not in divesting them of their associative meanings but in conceiving them in a different relation, reconfiguring language in such a way that a subjective awareness of the phenomenal world can open, and a greater intersubjective experience, too, as some of her titles, like I Love the Whole World (emphasis mine), suggest. At the level of phenomenology, and chiming with her interest in Taoist philosophy, Martin’s oeuvre implies a subtly critical statement on the ruptures and separations that were caused by and partly constituted modernity, but her work also embodies the anticipation of a necessary healing process that considers the multiplicity of otherness.
Catherine de Zegher is a curator and writer and the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium.
NOTES
1. Benita Eisler, “Life Lines,” New Yorker, January 25, 1993, 76.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), viii–ix.
