MATT SAUNDERS
I’M EVER FATED to recall a bizarre marquee: BASQUIAT VS. MARTIN. Granted, it makes little sense as a choice or proper bout. Yet it was a formative happy accident, visiting New York from Baltimore with all of seventeen years behind me, to find those two artists’ retrospectives facing off in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s fall 1992 lineup. Jean-Michel Basquiat had the compelling whiff of 1980s Gotham cool, a party I’d never get to attend. But Agnes Martin was an artist I thought I knew. I thought I “got” it, and I confess that with all the idiot swagger of youth, I almost skipped her show, which I assumed would be lovely, pious, and canonical. In the end, I went in. And Martin sure learned me. In my imagination, she and Basquiat—the hotshot forty-eight years her junior—fought to a draw, and I was the one who left humbled and impressed.
I’ve recently come back to pondering that near misstep. How was Martin so familiar and yet so unexpected? What about her paintings was hiding in plain sight? It wasn’t that I didn’t like her work; on the contrary, I was so sure that I did that there was no need to confront it. For many reasons—the straight-up beauty of it all, its austerity and recognizability, no doubt combined with stories of her personal integrity and the formidable influence of her generous, gnomic writings—Martin seems to sit like a Buddha on the side of the good. To be honest, that’s not always what we look for (especially at seventeen). We speak of artists being invisible to their hype, but what of those who are beatified beyond reproach? Controversy can keep work alive, admiration can become a cocoon: That’s my misgiving about how we treat Martin.
So it was good to see her in a fight. I learned simple things that day: the ways in which the surface of a painting can be inscribed, ideas of parts and the whole, and the conception of the picture as a page. Hopefully, the lessons are more nuanced now—though, true to Martin, I’d never say “original.” Originality’s not the only value her work embodies.
Despite her aura of quietude and assurance, Martin made work that is challengingly multivalent. “It turns out that having your back to the world does not preclude being of the world,” Briony Fer notes in the catalogue for the Martin retrospective opening this summer at Tate Modern in London. “Rather than being iconic,” Martin’s pale surfaces, Fer says, “behave like indexical screens, picking up the light and making their own in the process.”
I seek out Martins for pure and inexplicable painting experiences like this. It’s often remarked that her trademark grid of close lines makes a tone of gray when seen from a distance, but there are other, irreconcilable scales: the slightest waver of the hand to the line’s long sureness, or graphite slipping off the rounded mesa of a single thread compared with the cool eighteen handbreadths of the entire canvas. Color is perceived through its ghost. The measured brushiness—in what could otherwise be uninflected ground—speaks to an emphasis on care rather than a fetishization of craft.
These qualities are lovely. They’re also the quantum leaps within even the most unified surfaces, and remain confrontational to other disembodied, purely scalable notions of painting. Most painting has capacities that can’t be guessed outside of direct confrontation. We must not assume—particularly in the case of Martin’s work—that we easily know them. I’d rather keep going in person to look.
Matt Saunders is an artist based in Berlin and Cambridge, MA.
