PRUDENCE PEIFFER
DESCRIBING AGNES MARTIN’S PAINTINGS in these pages in 1967, Annette Michelson wrote of their “ultimate ineffability.” That same year, Martin herself seemed to act out this escape from language: Following the sudden death of her friend Ad Reinhardt, the loss of her studio and apartment, and her traumatic admittance to Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward for a schizophrenic episode, Martin gave away her art supplies and left New York, camping out in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest before settling in remote New Mexico. She also gave up words, announcing that she would try not to speak for three years.
When Martin began to make and exhibit work again in the early 1970s, her “return” was not just to painting but also to public language, though of an idiosyncratic kind that developed in parallel with her painting yet by no means elucidated it. She contributed parables about happiness and perception to the catalogue for her 1973 survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and delivered a series of related lectures around the country; in April of that year, Artforum published her piece “Reflections,” which tautologically began, “I’d like to talk about the perfection underlying life/when the mind is covered over with perfection.” Since then, many writings have appeared; the largest compendium is found in Arne Glimcher’s lavish Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances (Phaidon, 2012), in which facsimiles of handwritten passages in looping script on lined paper are interspersed among reproductions of her spare abstractions. Silence and discourse oscillate from page to page.
It’s by now a cliché of modernism that its most laconic works trigger the most verbose reactions—jamming the critical machine in their resolute composure and refusals of metaphor. But the apparatus itself was rejiggered in the ’60s. The witty, dogmatic writing of Reinhardt (who was born a year after Martin, in 1913) was a cynosure for a younger generation of Minimalist and Conceptualist artist-writers, whose engaged essays and reviews mark a historical ascendancy of text in artistic practice. With its proliferation of language, Reinhardt’s prose stands in stark contrast to the reticent black paintings he made for the last fourteen years of his life. He was Martin’s closest ally in the pursuit of pure abstraction; his strategies to promote and protect his art through writing offer an important analogue and departure point for engaging Martin’s own texts.
Like abstraction, language requires systematic order and spacing to achieve meaning. (This may explain why Reinhardt and Martin were drawn to writing that doesn’t immediately disclose its message, ranging from Buddhist aphorisms to the work of Gertrude Stein.) They shared a background in pedagogy (both trained at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York) and structured their wording through pragmatic formal devices, whether the list in Reinhardt’s “Twelve Rules for a New Academy” or the obscure simplicity of Martin’s koan-like fables, which, she granted, one might not comprehend for years.
Through writing, Reinhardt forwarded a theory of praxis set apart from that of his Abstract Expressionist colleagues, in which constraint led to radical aesthetic freedom. As he put it: “THE STRICTEST FORMULA FOR THE FREEST ARTISTIC FREEDOM.” In copious essays over three decades, as anthologized by Barbara Rose in the 1975 Art as Art, he insisted on the importance of unromantic, difficult work; on the need to clear one’s mind; and on abstraction as a moral pursuit: “The one freedom is realized only through the strictest art discipline and through the most similar studio ritual.”
Martin’s working process would also appear to reflect a total commitment to discipline: She adhered to strict guidelines, often using a T square to create her paintings’ measured geometries, and she destroyed the majority of her canvases. Freedom was a state of perception through antitheses, necessary evacuations not just within the work’s composition (echoing Reinhardt, Martin stated in 1966 that “my paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything—no forms”) but in the site of its making. And her notes also fixate on a clean studio, in which “an artist must have no interruptions from himself or anyone else. Interruptions are disasters.”
“Interruptions from himself” is hardly a poetic aside for an artist who suffered from aural hallucinations and, occasionally, catatonia. Through writing, Martin affirmed her own voice. And through repetition, proscription, and mystical digressions on the natural world, she forged language into a controlled desideratum of perception.
In part, this explains a surprising term, everywhere in Martin’s texts, that sharply veers from Reinhardt’s vocabulary: love. Though it was the subject of her close friend Robert Indiana’s iconic 1965 work, love—sentimental, emotional, always underlying late-’60s and ’70s counterculture—seems hard to square with Martin’s oeuvre. She misdirects any reader looking for intimate exegesis, presenting the emotion as a timeless, communal abstraction countering a specific, personal solitude. In Religion of Love (Walther König, 2015), a book of her writing edited and illustrated by her friend Richard Tuttle, Martin states, “Love makes us want to do all the good things. Get up in the morning and work for life.” Martin’s writing insists on commitment—another definition of love. And so even those texts we are still waiting to understand emphasize her abstraction’s relevance today, alive in its oppositions and patient for our response.
Prudence Peiffer is a senior editor of Artforum.
