[MUSIC PLAYING]
This talk was originally planned
to take place at the National
Gallery during the run
of the exhibition The Serial
Impulse at Gemini G.E.L..
Unfortunately, 24 inches of snow
scotched that plan.
So this recording exists
in a funny kind of limbo--
part and not part of the thing
it was built to address which
may be kind of appropriate.
Although the talk was organized
to augment Serial Impulse,
I'm not actually going to talk
much about the works
in the show.
To quote Robert Rauschenberg,
"if it's interesting by itself,
it doesn't need me."
All of the things in this show
are capable of speaking
for themselves.
It's one of the great advantages
of the series.
The parts are all there.
Unfortunately, we rarely get
the chance to experience series
the way the artists intended.
In museums and galleries,
just one or two pieces are often
asked to stand in for the whole.
For the viewer, it's like being
asked to evaluate a great novel
on the basis of a couple
of isolated non-sequential
chapters--
a young man meets
some acquaintances on Long
Island.
A different man throws
a big party at his big house.
You might get a sense
of the style but the plot, which
is to say the point,
remains a mystery.
Now, there are
obvious and practical reasons
why abridgment is the norm.
All museums have more art
than wall space, and some things
have to give.
And this is what makes
this exhibition so remarkable.
Viewers have been given
the chance to read
the whole book, as it were--
to ferret out the rules
of inference
that join and separate
the parts--
to move
through the spatial and
conceptual current set in place
so carefully by the artists.
The individual works within each
of these theories
also have independent power,
of course, much as a quote
from The Great Gatsby--
even out of context--
can take your breath away.
But with a series,
much of the content
lies in the spaces
between things.
And the process of puzzling out
the shapes of those spaces--
what the relationships
and their implications are--
is
the critical, singular
experience that is made possible
here.
And I don't want to ruin it
with spoilers.
So rather than just put up
slides of things that can be
better seen in person and rather
than anatomize qualities you can
have much more fun chasing down
by yourselves, I thought I would
offer some related and adjacent
ideas--
a, kind of, field guide
to various species of sequences
and groupings--
and also posit some thoughts
as to why the series has become
so essential to the art
of our time.
So this is what happens when you
ask an art historian to talk
about contemporary art.
You immediately get a slide
of the Middle Kingdom.
Suffice it to say,
pictorial series have been
with us a long time.
As human beings,
we are hardwired for narrative,
and we are hardwired
for pattern.
And as a result, we habitually
try to explain
and picture the world
through episodic repetition.
In that sense, there's
little difference
between the Beni Hasan
Necropolis and the Arena Chapel.
Both take a cosmology
and break it down
into manageable,
formally repetitious clumps that
can be fit together like LEGO
bricks into a larger whole.
We do it with everything--
music, literature, mathematics,
art.
But it is with the triumph
of printing in Europe, however,
that the pictorial series
becomes a pandemic presence
in European life
and European thought.
And just about the first things
we made with print and paper are
playing cards--
like these ones-- and episodic
Bible stories--
like this one.
This is Albrecht Durer's
great Life of the Virgin.
In other words, we make patterns
and we make narratives.
But now, they aren't stuck
to the wall of a building,
and you don't have to share them
if you don't want to.
Now, the story is something you
can carry around with you.
You can choose whether to spread
it out all at once,
or to glue the scenes
into a book,
or to just put one in front
of you as you pray,
or to mount your favorites
on the wall.
The pictorial world has become
sortable and manipulatable
in a new way.
Among many other options,
prints could be masked together
to build something big--
something that
is
both monumental and contingent.
This is another Durer woodblock.
It is one of the 195
that come together to compose
the Triumphal Arch
of the Emperor Maximilian.
And the arch is effectively
another kind of series or set.
Each print is a piece
of a puzzle in the most literal
of ways--
so pattern, narrative,
and monuments.
And one of the most powerful
things about prints
is that they are collectible.
In the early 16th century,
Ferdinand Columbus,
Christopher's son,
amassed more than 3,000 prints
to augment his library of 15,000
books.
It was the largest
private collection of its kind.
And it was organized not
around aesthetic pleasure
but around principles
of knowledge.
It was a kind
of virtual curiosity cabinet--
a miniature universe where you
could find everything--
nature and culture, physics
and metaphysics, the rare,
and the strange,
and the commonplace--
all the things that are or may
be.
But prints were
different from the specimens
in a curiosity cabinet
in one very important way.
As representations of things
rather than the things
themselves, they tended
toward the abstraction of types
rather than the specificity
of individual examples.
And because they were small,
light, inexpensive,
and portable,
it was possible to amass them
and compare them.
Linguists talk
about distinctive difference.
In English, we can understand
the word "car" whether it is
spoken with a hard American R,
a Scottish burr, or Texas
elision.
But pronounce the C as a B
and you are literally talking
about something else.
Questions
of distinctive difference
are
important
to visual representation
as well--
which details
are important to preserve when
rendering an image in which
are incidental given the fact
that you can never have them
all.
In printmaking, questions
of distinctive difference
arise at every step
of the process.
Until recently, most print
processes stripped away
color and smooth gradients
of tonality, and, in most cases,
scale and dimensionality.
And since many prints are
reproductive pictures
of another picture,
it raises another bevy
of questions.
And finally, at the reception
end, people were sensitized
to questions
of distinctive difference
when, like Ferdinand Columbus,
they accumulated
multiple examples claiming
to represent the same thing.
In this case, it's the Apollo
Belvedere, but it could just as
easily be frogs or the city
of Ulm.
Prints pushed people to think
systematically
about salient characteristics.
And all that accumulating
and comparing
encouraged the creation
of taxonomies based on vision
in which
salient, visual characteristics
became the basis of groupings,
themes, and variations.
And this, in turn,
changed the way we thought
about the world
and its underlying principles.
So prints, especially prints
in series, lead our culture
to two great things.
On the one hand, science--
and on the other, collect them
all.
Renaissance print publishers
churned out print series on just
about everything--
the five platonic solids,
the four seasons, the seven
deadly sins, the 10 labors
of Hercules,
and an endless number of fish.
And the pictorial series
continued to be a popular format
for centuries
from Callot's Miseries of War
to Piranesi's Views of Rome
to Goya's great Caprichos
and Disasters.
Nor is this simply a
Western phenomenon--
think of Hokusai's
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,
or Hiroshige's
Fifty-three Stations
of the Tokaido.
There were also painting series,
of course, but prints were
different because people used
them differently.
From the Renaissance onward,
paintings have aspired
to provide self-sufficient
universes.
A great painting provided
a fiction that was so tidally
composed, we didn't wonder what
was happening offstage.
We stand in front of them.
We look at them one at a time.
We walk into the frame.
But the print room is a place
where you group
and collect things that are
busy pointing to other things.
They point to other images,
to other members
of the same series,
to the other versions
of the subject,
to the other impressions
from that plate,
or just from the ink on paper
image to the template
that made it.
A print is always a node
in a network.
It is never self-sufficient.
What the print series promised
was
completeness through
accumulation.
You got the whole story--
all five senses, all seven
virtues.
When John James Audubon started
on his most famous work,
his goal was the depiction
of every species of bird
in North America.
18 years and 435 plates
later, he had completed one
of the greatest picture books
of all time.
But he had only covered about
half of the bird species
on the continent.
It was becoming clear by the end
of the 19th century
that the universe was far vaster
and its organizing principles
far less visible than we had
thought.
And the whole juggernaut
of taxonomies and encyclopedic
knowledge slipped beyond what
could be contained in a series
of prints.
Between them, Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle
and Godel's incompleteness
theorems rang the death knell
for any hope that accumulation--
even systematic accumulation--
would be our route to complete
understanding.
There will always be a hole.
And art turned its gaze inward
toward
the emotional and psychological
experience of the individual.
In 1943, Mark Rothko and Adolf
Gottlieb penned a letter
to the New York Times that
neatly summarizes what became
a set of mid-20th century
ambitions for art.
"It is our function as artists,"
they wrote "to make
the spectator see the world
our way not his way."
And later, "we favor
the simple expression
of the complex thought.
We are for the large shape
because it has the impact
of the unequivocal."
This did not bode well
for the print series which might
well be thought
of as the complex expression
of the simple thought.
The large shape
and the unequivocal
found expression above all
in painting--
singular, inwardly focused,
coherent.
The print series did not
disappear entirely,
but it did change character.
To take one famous example
relevant to this show, Picasso's
1946 Bull series.
It consists of 11
sequential states beginning
with this deft, naturalistic
rendering of an animal.
Picasso then reworked the stone
to make the bull more
expressive, then more schematic
and decorative, then more linear
and abstract.
Until finally, we are left
with just a handful of lines--
the purest essence that could
still be described as bull.
Prints are almost always
the result of working
and reworking the printing
template.
Sometimes the artist will proof
a number of prints or even
a whole edition
before going on to rework
the stone or the plate.
The recent Yes, No, Maybe
exhibition here of working
proofs from Crown Point Press
offered a terrific window
into that process.
What Picasso did in the Bull
series
was to take a routine production
expedient
and give it
a cinematic treatment.
You can imagine each state
as cells in an animation
or pages in a flip book.
And what we get from this series
is not a deeper understanding
of bulls but an exposition
of Picasso.
The transformation
is an illustration
of his vision, his genius, what
he could see that everyone else
missed.
There was in the first half
of the century another exemplar
of how you might use the print
series format.
Though this one did not
have so much impact at the time.
In 1934, Marcel Duchamp
published The Green Box--
a collection of 94 printed
facsimiles of notes,
and drawings, and photographs
related to Duchamp's
famous painting on glass
The Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors, Even.
The symbolism of Duchamp's
painting is famously arcane,
and the artist considered
neither the painting
nor the notes
to be fully independent works.
But anyone who expects
the contents of The Green Box
to explain the contents
of The Large Glass
is in for a disappointment.
If anything, these carefully
replicated scraps of paper
with their pictures
and their words
create an even more confusing
cloud of information.
The neuroscientist and AI
pioneer Demis Hassabis
has observed
that the information we receive
from the real world
by our perceptual apparatus
is always noisy and incomplete.
It is a perfect description
of Duchamp's creation.
Duchamp claimed
that in The Green Box,
he carefully reproduced
without editorial intervention.
"I wanted to reproduce them
as accurately as possible.
So I had all of these thoughts
lithographed in the same ink
which had been used
for the originals.
To find paper that was exactly
the same, I had to ransack
the most unlikely nooks
and crannies of Paris."
There is something obsessive
about all this, of course.
He had made templates so he
could replicate the exact shapes
of the torn paper.
All these details are given
as much attention--
as much weight-- as the words.
In the 1990s, when libraries
started chucking out
their bulky card files in favor
of searchable databases,
there was an outcry
from historians and bibliophiles
about all
the incidental information that
would be lost--
the specific handwriting,
the digressive notations,
the stains and rips for which
the databases had no fields.
Their point was that you cannot
know exactly what will prove
to be important in the future.
Abridgment in the name
of efficiency or clarity
is inevitably a form
of destruction like clearing
houses to make way for a more
efficient highway system.
And so Duchamp gives you
the archive in every particular.
Except, after Duchamp died
and his original notes became
publicly accessible,
it became clear that there were
actually a lot of differences
between the originals
and the facsimiles
and that those differences
seemed to be systematic rather
than accidental.
Jasper Johns has described
The Large Glass as quote, "a pun
on opaque meaning
and transparent material.
Duchamp presents
in literal terms the difficulty
of knowing what anything means.
You look through the glass
and don't see the piece itself."
The Green Box does
the same thing for the archive.
Duchamp, of course, would become
a tremendously powerful
influence
in the contemporary art
of the second half
of the century.
It was his approach that most
clearly offered a way out
of this solipsistic concern
with internal emotional life
that seemed to have reached
a dead end by the late 1950s.
As a paradigm,
the unequivocal, independent,
large shape was replaced
by the emphatically equivocal,
large glass and the shaggy train
of bits and bobs
that trailed along behind it.
The transition from modernism
to postmodernism has
myriad facets,
but among the most visible
is an embrace of complexity--
of the noisy
and
the incomplete as reflections
of lived
experience in the real world.
And right around the time Gemini
G.E.L. opened its doors, there's
a sudden eruption
of important works of art made
as print series.
The first one I wanted to look
at is Barnett Newman's 18
Cantos.
This is interesting
because Newman was a peer
of Rothko and Gottlieb's
and, in fact,
help write their letter
to the New York Times.
For Newman, it was critical
that each of his work
represents a totality.
His canvases were large so they
would occupy
the viewers entire field
of vision.
And the vertical zips
of his compositions
would read not as stripes
on a surface
but as rends in the fabric
of the world.
Making prints raised a number
of problems for Newman.
The scale was modest
and the fact of the paper
margins announced a kind
of bifurcation--
a paper object on which
an inked image sat.
The zip in that circumstance
became a contained thing
and edged dangerously close
to decoration.
But the print series also
offered Newman something.
A painter working to solve
a pictorial problem will usually
work through multiple approaches
feeling her way
towards a final resolution.
Often, she may find
more than one equally satisfying
solution.
Only one of these, however, can
remain
as the final, visible surface.
To deal with this reality,
Newman painted in series.
In fact, his greatest
single work housed
in this museum is his painting
cycle Stations of the Cross.
But painting cycles are very
rarely kept together.
Usually the individual parts are
sold off
and the internal relationships
lost.
In Cantos, Newman orchestrated
a visual experience
that while it occurs
in discrete blocks
is intended
as a single, interconnected, and
interdependent entity.
The 18 prints were made
from seven
lithographic graphic stones
in various inkings,
combinations, and reworkings.
They have formal material
and procedural relationships.
The paper size and the size
and proportions of the margins
change from print to print,
making the entire page
an active, variable part
of the composition.
Each image has
a structural connection
to the others that can be
detected like musical motifs
that recur in different keys
or different voicings
within a composition.
These relationships are
intuitive--
meant to evoke
inexplicable, nonnarrative,
emotional responses just
as music does.
Cantos can be seen
as an adaptation of the Durer
Triumphal Arch idea--
many individual parts building
a single, large, coherent
structure.
But in the case of Cantos,
it plays out over time rather
than space.
Jasper Johns' 0 Through 9
was produced in the same studio
around the same time as Cantos
but uses the print series format
to very different ends.
In the late '50s,
Johns had begun making paintings
of targets,
and flags, and stenciled numbers
in order
to tease out
the fundamental workings
of image and representation.
When does an object become
an image?
How much can be changed
before we call it
by a different name?
Where does one thing--
one concept-- end and another
begin?
These questions are embedded
in the very structures
of printmaking.
The artist draws, or cuts,
or scratches one surface--
a template--
which is then used to engender
another object which is both
the same and the opposite.
Each impression in the edition
also carries ambiguity.
However identical it may appear
to the one printed just
before or just
after, it is a different set
of molecules
with a different trajectory
through time and space.
"Printmaking," Johns said
"changes your idea of what
becomes a unit."
As Picasso had done in his Bull
series, Johns chose to take
a single stone
and rework it
through successive states.
The initial zero gets changed
to a one, the one to a two,
and so on.
And as in the Picasso,
at each stage you can see traces
of what came before.
But the Picasso sequence
was linear.
It had a beginning and an end.
Johns' wraps round on itself.
In a base 10 system, any given
column is effectively a circle
in which zero follows nine
as surely as one follows zero.
And Johns has given us
the entire plot at the top
of the image.
There is no final aha discovery
in terms of content--
only in terms of execution.
Johns has written
about his interest
in depicting things the mind
already knows,
but this is usually seen
in terms of his reuse
of familiar objects and images.
In 0 Through 9, it extends
to the gaps between the elements
in the sequence.
All the stages-- all
the changes--
are known in advance.
Furthermore, no one
is any better, any clearer,
any more final than any other.
And, to emphasize that point,
the portfolio was printed
in three different versions--
gray, black, and color.
Each of these prints
is a part of something larger,
and each exists apart
from that something larger.
Each shares some qualities
and not others.
0 Through 9 can be seen
as an extension
of the early paradigm of series
as pattern, but it is no longer
just that.
It now has implications
of narrative,
of progress and recursion,
even of social relationships.
Belonging, John suggests,
is complicated.
David Hockney's etching series
A Rake's Progress,
also from 1963,
picks up on the print series
as narrative tradition
and complicates that.
Hockney takes the story
of his own youthful trip
to America and piggybacks it
on William Hogarth's hugely
successful engraving series
A Rake's Progress published
in 1734.
Hogarth's eight engravings tell
the sorry tale of a young heir
who falls into loose ways
and ends up
broke and dead in the madhouse.
Hockney's 16 etchings follow
a young artist on a, kind of,
loss of innocence tour.
Some of Hockney's images
map neatly to the Hogarth.
Both men received money
in prints
called The Inheritance.
Although, in Hockney's case,
this is just $18 from MOMA
curator William Lieberman
for the purchase of a print.
And both sets end in bedlam.
But Hockney does not appropriate
Hogarth's specific plot points,
visual style, compositions,
or profusion of detail.
He does, however, give us twice
as many images.
There are many more events--
most of which
exist in a, kind of,
narrative limbo.
Hogarth's series was didactic.
There is a right way
and a wrong way,
and this is the path
of the wrong way.
But Hockney's tale has no clear
cut moral.
It is a series of events
and experiences
that happen as events
and experiences do--
partly by design, mostly
by chance with mixed outcomes.
The allure
of the re-presented collection
combined with ambivalence
about imposing
a particular purpose
or interpretation
on that collection
is embodied in yet
another critically important
work that appeared in 1963.
Ed Ruscha's influential artists
book, Twentysix Gasoline
Stations, is a small paperback
that reproduces
black and white photographs
of gas stations along Route 66
between Los Angeles, where
Ruscha lived, and Oklahoma City,
where he was from.
Each photo is accompanied
by a caption that lists
the city--
a useful piece of information--
and the gas company--
for most of the pictures
a redundant piece
of information.
Most of the photographs
appear on the right-hand side
of the spread,
but some are paired
with another picture
and some extend over both sides
of the spread.
The stations are in roughly
geographic order moving west
to east, but some are out
of place.
Twentysix Gasoline Stations
doesn't claim to represent
all the gasoline stations,
or the most interesting gasoline
stations,
or even the most interesting
photographs of gasoline
stations.
Though the title echos
definitive sequences
like the seven deadly sins,
it was not dictated
by the content--
by the design.
In an interview, Ruscha said, "I
like the word gasoline,
and I like the specific quality
of 26.
If you look at the book,
you will see how well
the typography works.
I worked on all that before I
took the photographs."
With deadpan grace,
Ruscha suggests
the fundamentally, arbitrary
nature
of our cognitive structures,
of what we claim to know,
of truth.
Ruscha was very
proud of the fact
that Twentysix Gasoline Stations
was rejected by the Library
of Congress
for its quote, "unorthodox form
and supposed lack
of information."
Ruscha habitually plays
with photography, signage, word
formation, and the printed
image--
all the things that claim
to tell us what we need to know.
After 500 years of printing,
we are all
fluent in this language
of representation,
but somewhere in the backs
of our minds,
we are aware that these are
indeed small, incomplete,
and to some extent, falsified
shards of reality that exists
somewhere else.
And this persistent nibbling
anxiety is at the heart of what
it means to be postmodern.
In all these works,
you can see a savvy awareness
of how serial structures inform
and direct thought.
And in all but the Newman--
a certain caginess
about the result. After 1960,
many artists began to step back
from the goal of making
the viewer see the world
our way preferring simply to lay
options out on the table.
The series was
the natural vehicle for doing
this.
And by the end of the decade,
serialism was a designated
category of art production.
This is a chart for a Sol LeWitt
wall drawing from 1970.
To execute the drawing,
you divide the wall into 15
columns and fill each one using
parallel lines that run
vertically, horizontally,
or in both diagonal directions,
like so.
LeWitt defined the serial artist
as someone who does not attempt
to produce
a beautiful or mysterious object
but functions merely as a clerk
cataloging the results
of his premise.
The wall drawings that LeWitt
started making in 1968 all
consisted
of simple instructions--
a premise-- that often involved
permutational combinations
of parts.
The rules were explicit
and their execution, LeWitt
wrote, "was
a perfunctory affair."
But this perfunctory affair
could build permutationally
into something larger that
is both entirely
predictable and somehow,
in the end, unexpected.
For LeWitt, the print portfolio
offered another venue
for expanding on these premises
and for enumerating
the possibilities embedded
in a simple task.
This etching series is also
based
on the permutational combination
of vertical, horizontal, and
diagonal lines.
But here, rather than broken out
in 15 columns all on one wall,
each option is allotted
a half square on 10 sheets
of paper.
Now, many of LeWitt's titles
have the word "all" in them.
For example, All Combinations
of Arcs From Side and Corners,
Grids and Circles,
Using Four Colors or All
Combinations of Red, Yellow,
and Blue with Scribbles.
It was the frequency of the word
"all" in LeWitt's titles
that once prompted Robert
Smithson to call him a fascist.
More benignly, one might view it
as a reassertion
of the old ideal of completeness
that characterized 17th century
print production--
all seven deadly sins,
all combinations of lines.
But think about the premise
of this print portfolio.
You have four directions of line
and eight flavors
of half square.
That gives you 32
basic components even before you
begin combining them,
but there are only 10 etchings
in the set.
And though one gives you nine's
solution, you're still left well
short of a full pack.
For LeWitt, despite Smithson's
accusation, the point was not
the assertion of an absolute.
"All" was just one more option
on the table--
no better or worse
than any other.
As Kathan Brown of Crown Point
Press put it, LeWitt makes
choices not judgments.
I think
that for contemporary artists,
the print series has become
an important format because it
enables them to visibly deflect
certain kinds of power--
to show the difference
between choices and judgement.
For example, to allow
the arbitrary to be seen
for what it is, to communicate
both the longing for
completion
and the poignant acceptance
of its absence,
to admit to the whole
at the center of things.
In the Serial Impulse,
we see the return of a format
that once upon a time
contained the promise
of certainty.
It is back
but with a difference.
Our narratives are now
porous and ambiguous.
Our taxonomies ask you to puzzle
out their principles only
to reveal their arbitrariness.
Our archives are
precise yet indeterminate.
It is worth noting how
frequently the artists
in this show
picture the kinds of tools
we use to parse messy
and coherence
into manageable, manipulable
units--
numbers, geometry, notebook
pages, hands, machines,
photographs.
But then they arrange them
to demonstrate
a defiant, nonconforming
complexity--
noisy and incomplete.
Because whatever demonstrable,
visible qualities any one
of these images
has in and of itself,
it has another essence
in relation to the works
that surround it--
one that is not visible, per se,
but that is slung in our minds
between the two.
And this visible framing
of an invisible center far
from being
some abstruse, philosophical
proposition
reflects both the core realities
of the universe
as identified by Heisenberg
and Godel and a core reality
of being human.
We are each the person we feel
ourselves to be and the person
that other people think we are--
both always.
"One of the worst things
to happen to photography,"
John Baldessari once said,
"is that cameras have
viewfinders."
The viewfinder allows us
to compose the photograph
so that it behaves like
a well-designed painting--
a seamless and incoherent
lie to be seen
by a single and coherent eye.
To the degree that painting is
no longer the unquestioned king
of art, it may be because we
find ourselves nonplussed
by the naivete of painting's
historical strength--
it's dedication to picturing
a created world that made more
sense than the endlessly,
fragmentary, incomplete,
and confusing world we actually
live in.
Leo Steinberg dubbed Robert
Rauschenberg's
great contribution
to contemporary art
"the flatbed picture plane."
The flatbed is part
of a printing press--
the horizontal surface on which
all manner of things
might be collected and arranged
without recourse to horizon
lines, or perspectival space,
or the vertical orientation
of our own bipedal selves.
"A receptor surface," Steinberg
wrote, "on which objects are
scattered, on which data is
entered,
on which information may be
received, printed, and pressed."
The flatbed is where objects
become images, where images are
multiplied, and altered,
and adjoined where one must deal
with, as
Jasper Johns once described
his own interests, "a thing not
being what it was
with its becoming something
other than what it is--
with any moment in which one
identifies a thing precisely
and with the slipping away
of that moment."
No single image can provide all
of that.
It's a bit like the old Roue's
quip, "a drink before
and a cigarette after are
the three best things in life."
Sometimes the heart
of the matter
lies in the ellipse.
