KEITH SONNIER AT THE MODERN
ONE WAY OF REGARDING modernist painting and sculpture finds in them the effort to specify certain ways in which meaning can be made, and made to persist as meaning.1 That is, the most successful modernist works not only achieve meaning, but in doing so they urge a certain concept of, or at least a precise feeling for, what sort of thing ought to count as meaning in a work of art, and therefore a certain notion of what ought to count as a work of art. What has since proven to be the most difficult and interesting tendency is that the art opposing itself to modernist aims began by viewing the achievement of meaning within the conventional modes of painting and sculpture as an instance of the more general and perhaps fundamental fact of the occurrence of meaning. In the perspective of an attempt to find the place of meaning within the world or within experience, painting and sculpture could be regarded simply as places where meaning occurred; the fact that they were taken to be privileged places could be explained as a consequence of their conventional nature or according to a reading of the situation of art objects as shaped by social values. Hence the possibility of making sculpture according to a notion of place such as Carl Andre’s, and the possibility of a view like the one with which Jack Burnham tried to dignify last season’s “Software” show, that art’s identity is a function of “positional circumstance.” The new art of the late ‘60s brought about a change in the meaning of meaning, a move available to modernism itself; but this particular move represented a change in the value of meaning, or rather a suspension of the question of whether, or how, one sense of meaning ought to be valued over another. If the task for art could be thought of as the disclosure of the conditions which make possible the occurrence of meaning, then the bare phenomenal appearance of significance could seem to be on an equal footing with the results of such a complicated human project as modernist painting. And as Robert Morris’ work showed, an attenuation of the concept of meaning began in such a way that the conditions permitting the appearance of meaning finally revealed themselves as the conditions of presence to the world, with only the possibility of absence, that is, subjection to time, to relieve an apparent plenum of “meaning.” By pushing things to this point, however, Morris did force the recognition that the notion of the spectator as a subjective perceiver was no longer adequate for an art not willing to operate in a conventional mode. In fact the notion had come under attack in various ways and degrees at least since Johns, but Morris proved it a positive dead end by making the intensity of the experience of oneself as a subjectivity virtually a quantitative index of the meaning of his work as art. Having exposed esthetic meaning to time, and having recognized that temporality poses the same threat to the entity of meaning, whether subjectivity is regarded as temporality or whether time is taken to cut across subjectivities, Morris retreated further and further into theory and un, disguised strategy, and even, so rumor has it, into fiction. The problem which he and almost everyone else either evaded or never confronted in the first place was: to show how temporality as an existential condition made possible the securing of meaning—in the strong sense—against time (which modernism seemed to be able to accomplish).2
An example of an artist who has been able to overthrow the need to oppose the modernist attitude toward meaning is Robert Smithson. His juxtaposition of tokens of interiority and exteriority, which began with the nonsites being literal and metaphorical at the same time, pointed to the conclusion that the notion of subjectivity itself is a strategy for maintaining a certain threshold grasp on the shifting stuff of the world, of which the term “subjectivity” is a part. As if to confirm Smithson’s inklings, numerous other artists toyed with information theory, topology, and other such material for constructs that would be “objective” in a sense unlike things such as rocks and air. A notion such as subjectivity is strategic in that it seems to make it possible to secure meaning or significance by allowing it a transcendence on the viewer’s side. Smithson’s dialectic of site and nonsite does not offer a way of arriving at meaning or a concept of it, yet offers a way of conceiving the relations between the presence and absence of meaning within . . . but that’s a crucial point about Smithson’s ideas—the place of meaning is subject to the dialectic as well. This may be seen by considering his recent interest in invoking prehistoric ages through their ambiguous traces, as in the Spiral Jetty. It seems intuitively clear that in a prehistoric period there could have been no such thing as meaning at all since man would not have existed, yet any attempt to imagine the world in such a condition necessarily introduces the human image into it. For Smithson the world is the place of meaning, but only because the human urge toward meaning is what makes the world a place at all; if the world is the site of significances, it is true of them, as of the contents of other Smithsonian sites, that they are scattered, random, “fugitive,” as he likes to say, and that they only exist as significances due to the construction of non-sites such as “subjectivity.”
While I feel that Smithson’s art will prove to be tremendously important (if only because it broaches the possibility of accounting for its own occurrence and transience in a nonmodernist way) its focus is too large or simply too changeable to address one of the key questions posed for that art which aspires to be postmodernist in something other than a chronological sense. Smithson’s art simply bounds over the issue without leaving us unsatisfied. The question to be answered is, I think, how the demonstrable success of modernist art is to be accounted for by something other than the modernist strategy. To answer that question would be to justify an opposition to modernist practice with something more than wistful appeals to temperament or ideology. One way of dealing with the question would be to show in some way, outside the conventional modes of painting and sculpture, how in principle the modernist way of making and securing meaning is possible.
These remarks are meant to provide a basis for showing that one of Keith Sonnier’s recent pieces accomplished such a demonstration, to some degree.
Late last spring Sonnier was given two galleries to work with in the Museum of Modern Art, the small room just off the foyer to the left and the next nearest room which serves both as a gallery and as a passage to the cafeteria. I assume most people encounter them in the described order starting from the foyer, though Sonnier stated that he was indifferent to the order in which they were seen. The first, smaller room has only one doorway. Sonnier sealed this doorway from the top down to a height of about four feet; a label on the wall cued one that something was on exhibition inside. Like many others of average adult height, I imagined that it was the doorway alone that had been reduced in height, and on entering the room I immediately bumped my head trying to stand erect. Sonnier had brought the whole ceiling of the room down to a height of about four feet, or so it appeared at first. At the far end of the now shallow room, there was an opening in the lowered ceiling, a rectangle of perhaps four by five feet through which bright red light poured from above. One naturally sought that position in order to be able to stand up and because it promised something else to see. Meanwhile, in getting there, one had the feeling of being forced to skulk physically through this lower space illuminated only by daylight from the foyer which now seemed very remote indeed. Standing straight up into the rectangular opening one saw the top half of the gallery bathed in an intense red light and empty except for lighting fixtures and a small TV camera mounted near the top center of the far wall and trained on the space in which one stood. In addition to the red light, a piercing electronic ringing sound, generated by feedback from the video equipment, filled the room. Standing in that space enforced a sense of having walked into a trap. After seeking relief from the crouching posture necessitated by the lowered ceiling, one stood up only to enter an unexpectedly hostile, febrile atmosphere. Eliot’s line, “the fever sings in mental wires,” crossed my mind. Once the video eye had been spotted, there was no turning away from it. In fact, the longer one stood, the more homogenized the space became owing to the saturation by light and sound, and the less the feeling of being watched seemed to depend upon the fixed camera point of view. The constancy of the electronic stare became identified with the persistence of the light and sound until the video gaze seemed to be coming from all around. The camera and one’s body seemed to become the poles of a pervasive field of surveillance.
Two telebeam projectors cast the image received by the video camera, divided down the center into positive and negative halves, onto the opposite walls of the second gallery. The division echoed the partitioning of the first gallery, though Sonnier remarked that this was done simply because “punching in” a portion in negative heightens contrast in the image. The image consisted of the camera’s view, though in larger close-up than one would have thought, of the opening as seen from above the partition in the first room. The choice of this image was perhaps the most pleasing aspect of the piece: if one wanted to apply illusionism to the limits of a real space such as a room, and if projections filled the two walls, then there could hardly have been a more appropriate image to use than that of another entrance to a real space, an image which repeats the nature of illusionism itself. After watching the projections for awhile, and seeing strangers appear truncated like puppets, one concluded that the transmission was in fact immediate rather than delayed, and that one could necessarily never see one’s own image.
With the experience of the second gallery it became clear that when standing in that constricted space within the camera’s view, one was actually standing in a pictorial space. Sonnier has noticed that video makes it technically possible for pictorial space and real space to coincide completely in the proper circumstances, and that this coincidence depends less upon how the two kinds of space are bounded than on a factual simultaneity. Video equipment capable of immediate transmission makes it feasible to sustain pictorial space in the present tense. This possibility of isolating pictorial space as an element enabled Sonnier to set up a situation which could clarify the way in which pictorial space secures meaning in the modernist sense, without concession to the conventions of picture-making, and without making illusionism falsely crucial.
What I have called the first gallery (the one with the partitioned space) seemed to have been designed to feed all the temptations to misconceive the way in which pictorial space operates, while the second gallery served as a corrective to the misconceptions. It is tempting to feel, for instance, that because pictorial space, as it occurs in paintings, is something optical rather than literal, one necessarily enters it alone, so to speak, and that it is therefore available to one’s subjectivity in its distinct privacy. This sense of the availability of pictorial space seems to me to account for the fact that the adequacy of the notion of the viewer as subject, i.e., the bearer of a consciousness, did not come into question until pictorial space itself became problematic in painting. Until, for instance, Johns’ flag paintings, every painting—whether abstract or not—must have seemed to assure the spectator that it (the painting under scrutiny) and he already knew the nature of his identity as a viewer, even if such a question were posed. Thus, in Sonnier’s installation, one was put to an unusual effort to enter what appeared to be a private space, even though other people had room to enter as well. But once inside that space, one found that it lacked just that quality which would have defined its privacy—an opacity to the gaze of other people. Indeed, the experience of the enclosed space was like a paradigm of the experience of being watched by another person, especially by a stranger. The more the other stares, the stronger is one’s sense that one’s appearance is registering in another space, the space of the watcher’s consciousness. At the same time, one had the experience of one’s own body connecting distinct spaces, the upper and lower halves of the room. One found, of course, on visiting the piece in its entirety that one’s appearance had in fact registered in another space (a space to which one was inevitably denied simultaneous access) and that was a public space insofar as it was a space at all. Sonnier’s piece forced the recognition that pictorial space is public space and that this fact is what made it possible for pictorial space to be a means for guaranteeing the persistence of meaning. The publicness of pictorial content is what allows that content to transcend any particular experience of it, not in the way an object exceeds my perception of it or persists in time so that I can return to it, but in the way in which meanings of words are not private, that is, not determined by my use of them.
The second gallery, which contained the projections, added some weight to the idea that determinants of meaning are necessarily public, or perhaps to phrase it better, that elements of experience which cannot be made public cannot be determinants of meaning. The rather washed-out black and white images recording the presence of people in the first gallery conveyed no sense of the pressure and intensity one felt while there oneself. This apparent impoverishment of the experience might have been due simply to the sophistication of the equipment Sonnier had available, but it did serve as a reminder that within pictorial space the determinants of feeling and of meaning may be identical. This possibility helps explain the sense in which the experience of paintings is continuous with the bulk of experience and how the former experience can seem to inform the latter.
The space containing the projections was in a sense pictorial as well, not simply because the space was bounded partly by images, but because the content of the images—and not just the fact of the projection—was strictly contemporary with the experience of the real room. The terms of one’s relation to the image were also made public, or rather, the public aspect of one’s relation to the image was made to seem the only one that counted. One was either within the image, lending it content and definition, or one was within the space of projection, in which case one’s shadow would subtract from the image. (It was possible to view the projections without casting a shadow upon them but this was on account of the nature of that gallery as part room, part corridor.)
Sonnier’s piece consisted simply in his devising a situation of constant mediation for the experience of seeing and being seen by other people given the fact that a literally immediate pictorial space is possible with the proper use of video equipment. This situation compels the recognition that pictorial space works as a way of securing meaning not in spite of the fact that there are viewers other than oneself, but because of it. The determinants of meaning that may be used in pictorial space as it occurs in paintings are then available to all viewers in principle, not because every viewer is equally a subjectivity, but on the contrary, because every viewer as viewer is visible to other viewers in the same sense that they are visible to him. Therefore, any means of guaranteeing the persistence of meaning of a work of art must be public in nature. Sonnier got around the difficulty of the place of subjectivity by disclosing a concrete intersubjectivity as the condition for both meaning in the strong sense and a concept of meaning itself. It is the aspect of publicness that makes paintings and real space a common ground for the occurrence of meaning. What guarantees the possibility of making a meaning persist as meaning (and that possibility of persistence is the ground of concepts of meaning) is not merely presence to the world, but presence to others.
These notions were put across by Sonnier’s piece in a way that was quite unavailable to modernist painting; they may have been communicable only because of the possibility of freeing pictorial space from within pictures and allowing the spectator literally to enter it. This accomplishment of Sonnier’s work shows how the bounds of modernist convention could be broken without sacrificing strength of meaning and without direct appeal to the conventions of modernist painting for justification.
—Kenneth Baker
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NOTES
1. Perhaps the central question for modernist painting has been how the actual means and substance of painting could be disclosed. To try to answer this question within painting is to set for painting a task of self-definition. But it is essential in modernist works that the arbitrariness implied by an effort at self-definition be ruled out as much as possible, since the individual painting must somehow be made to speak for painting as an enterprise. A modernist painting has to justify its claim on behalf of painting in terms of its own claim to be a painting, that is, in terms of its present, apparent aspects, things one can point to.
This modernist pursuit of essence is really only possible within a conventional mode of making, in other words, only as long as it is taken to matter whether the work in question is a painting as something distinct from objects which are not paintings. As Michael Fried argued so persuasively, the survival of modernist painting (or at least of its integrity) was assured only when its “actual” nature was not taken to be its literal nature. Once that change in attitude had been accepted, there could no longer be the sense that innovations within painting altered the “actuality” of the terms of painting, posing the modernist problem afresh.
2. As I hope to show in another essay, only Richard Serra has so far been able to address this problem both directly and successfully.
