What's made Frank Stella a household name many times over isn't necessarily what makes him import... more What's made Frank Stella a household name many times over isn't necessarily what makes him important. He's been swept up in a number of styles and modes that couldn't exhaust his inquiry. His ambition and canny sense of place within the canon have produced an oeuvre that stays focused philosophically while being stylistically promiscuous. If you haven't yet, you should catch his career-spanning retrospective at the Fort Worth Modern before it comes down in September. The exhibition is organized roughly in chronological order and does a beautiful job of linking up very different bodies of work; threading us through an organic, 50-plus-year evolution of physical and intellectual play. Stella's an important artist because he's been equally invested in understanding the history of Western painting and in finding relevant ways to innovate that history in the present. Or as he puts it: " There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. " Stella came in on the heels of Abstract Expressionism in New York, where artists were breathing new life into modern painting by unifying shape with gesture, and the time of looking with the act of making. He and Rauschenberg and some other young whippersnappers were at the time impressed by Pollock and De Kooning, but were also poking around for chinks in their armor. They needed to find a way to push the ball forward. For Stella, it was his black stripe paintings that struck a sweet note. In works like, " The Marriage of Reason and Squalor " , and " Die Fahne Hoch! " , both from 1959, he established an elegant unity of action and perception, mark and material, that also eliminated the melodrama of expression. His dictum " What you see is what you see " rang out through minimalism and was taken to literalist extremes by Judd. It only partly applies to Stella's own project. Where Judd wanted to abolish illusion of any kind from his objects, Stella actually only wanted to sever the mimetic from pictorial space and rebuild its " illusions " on the bedrock facts of shape and surface. He basically updated what Mondrian was doing in his Ocean and Pier series, or what Diebenkorn would enumerate in his Ocean Park works (minus the California light). Where he departs is in reiterating the shape of the substrate as the composition. Mondrian created an equal tension of marks around the canvas, Stella fused those marks to the frame, lifting the abstraction out into our space. The modernist project included, among other things, a hope that in unraveling pictures with all of their socially coded ways of attaching meaning to visuals, we could somehow construct newer, truer pictures. Pictures that could speak from outside conventional subject positions; that could speak to everyone equally; that could pry the lid off illusions of all kinds, not only those of representational imagery, but also of semiotics. Abstraction seemed to be the prescription. Stella's early development crests with this high-modernism and then eases into funkier terrain. Through the late 70's, 80's the works get busier, gaudier, layered up, fractured and bent. His hard-edged ideas about painting start trying on tacky clothes. He has the kind of feel for what he's doing that's allowed him to flirt with appearing inconsistent, or downright silly. " Talladega " , from 1980 is a complete overload of swiss-cheese and chain-link chaos. It's more like a stage set for a musical about painting than it is a typical painting. This remove, present in much of his work, cools down the wacked-out dynamism of the compositions. There's a kind of dialectic of space in each element, leveraged against each other to balance the readings of real and illusory. The pieces hover between worlds.
What's made Frank Stella a household name many times over isn't necessarily what makes him import... more What's made Frank Stella a household name many times over isn't necessarily what makes him important. He's been swept up in a number of styles and modes that couldn't exhaust his inquiry. His ambition and canny sense of place within the canon have produced an oeuvre that stays focused philosophically while being stylistically promiscuous. If you haven't yet, you should catch his career-spanning retrospective at the Fort Worth Modern before it comes down in September. The exhibition is organized roughly in chronological order and does a beautiful job of linking up very different bodies of work; threading us through an organic, 50-plus-year evolution of physical and intellectual play. Stella's an important artist because he's been equally invested in understanding the history of Western painting and in finding relevant ways to innovate that history in the present. Or as he puts it: " There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. " Stella came in on the heels of Abstract Expressionism in New York, where artists were breathing new life into modern painting by unifying shape with gesture, and the time of looking with the act of making. He and Rauschenberg and some other young whippersnappers were at the time impressed by Pollock and De Kooning, but were also poking around for chinks in their armor. They needed to find a way to push the ball forward. For Stella, it was his black stripe paintings that struck a sweet note. In works like, " The Marriage of Reason and Squalor " , and " Die Fahne Hoch! " , both from 1959, he established an elegant unity of action and perception, mark and material, that also eliminated the melodrama of expression. His dictum " What you see is what you see " rang out through minimalism and was taken to literalist extremes by Judd. It only partly applies to Stella's own project. Where Judd wanted to abolish illusion of any kind from his objects, Stella actually only wanted to sever the mimetic from pictorial space and rebuild its " illusions " on the bedrock facts of shape and surface. He basically updated what Mondrian was doing in his Ocean and Pier series, or what Diebenkorn would enumerate in his Ocean Park works (minus the California light). Where he departs is in reiterating the shape of the substrate as the composition. Mondrian created an equal tension of marks around the canvas, Stella fused those marks to the frame, lifting the abstraction out into our space. The modernist project included, among other things, a hope that in unraveling pictures with all of their socially coded ways of attaching meaning to visuals, we could somehow construct newer, truer pictures. Pictures that could speak from outside conventional subject positions; that could speak to everyone equally; that could pry the lid off illusions of all kinds, not only those of representational imagery, but also of semiotics. Abstraction seemed to be the prescription. Stella's early development crests with this high-modernism and then eases into funkier terrain. Through the late 70's, 80's the works get busier, gaudier, layered up, fractured and bent. His hard-edged ideas about painting start trying on tacky clothes. He has the kind of feel for what he's doing that's allowed him to flirt with appearing inconsistent, or downright silly. " Talladega " , from 1980 is a complete overload of swiss-cheese and chain-link chaos. It's more like a stage set for a musical about painting than it is a typical painting. This remove, present in much of his work, cools down the wacked-out dynamism of the compositions. There's a kind of dialectic of space in each element, leveraged against each other to balance the readings of real and illusory. The pieces hover between worlds.
Uploads
Papers by Michael Blair