An Aesthetics of Dispersal: Succession and Seriality

Philosopher and critic Arthur C. Danto once reflected upon the different ways in which works of art might exist “in ordered sets” – an outline, in other words, of what we might call an aesthetics of succession. For indeed succession, in which works are considered to form a series, implies a more complex experience than the viewing of a single painting (or in our particular case, drawing) precisely because, as Danto wrote, “the fact that each is part of the series must enter somehow as part of the experience of each.” The generative principle underlying the set is a crucial determinant of that experience, and Danto provided us with three possible classifications, three aesthetic modes of succession: the first he termed the sequence, in which the set was defined by a narrative structure, each element telling part of a complete story; the second was the suite, in which the set illustrates a text or a theme exterior to the work itself; the last was called the series proper, which is characterized by its very openness, its lack of narrative closure. For Danto, the guarantee of the unity of the series lies nowhere else than in the artist him- or herself, the unity of this set somehow an existential mirror for the unity of the modern creative subject.

These classifications prove a useful guide for navigating our way through the various “ordered sets” of drawings selected from the collection of Werner H. Kramarsky. Pressed to identify a narrative sequence in this array of non-objective work, we might nevertheless point to Jill Baroff’s Wax/Wane Series (1995) as embodying a certain sequential logic: each of the fourteen drawings in the two portfolios comprises one moment of an extended natural drama. Rhythms and intensities vary according to the density of inked lines and the nature of the rice paper overlay; their logic perhaps defies linear progression, but adheres to some apparent necessity – remove one and the sequence would be incomplete. Ellsworth Kelly’s eleven-part Mallarmé Suite (1991) provides us with a clear exemplar of Danto’s second category, the set whose completeness is determined by a text lying outside itself that it illustrates. We might imagine these collages as accompaniments to the work of the late nineteenth-century French symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé; and if they are not exactly literal illustrations of the latter’s verse, they do seem to propose a visual equivalent to his sense of poetry as “the expression…, reduced to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of aspects of existence.” (And through Mallarmé, we see Kelly paying homage to his great model, Henri Matisse, particularly the latter’s découpages or paper cut-out works; it is probably no coincidence that in 1932 Matisse had designed and illustrated his own first suite – a special edition of the Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé.)

Sara Sosnowy’s Stripes, three examples of which (all 1995) are on view, constitute a Danto-esque series: an open set of works that all possess the same basic formal impulse, in this instance the identical scale, the vertical bars, and the slightly off-putting colors and textures of the works that lend them their particular strength and beauty. These shared qualities appear not as the results of a foreordained plan – we imagine that the thought of a “stripes” series occurred to Sosnowy only sometime after having made the first of them – but of a kind of platonic notion of the Stripes that, in Danto’s words, “defines the series from without (or toward which the series converges, if we think of it as mathematical).” The critic’s formulation brings to mind Augustine’s dialectic of distentio animi and intentio animi, the interplay of dispersal and integration, discordance and concordance, within the soul: on one hand the self is necessarily scattered across the temporalities of past, present, and future; while on the other hand there is the countervailing tendency of the psyche’s identity over time. As philosopher Richard Kearney has described, “the resulting drama between these two tendencies … makes each life a temporal plot in search of an ultimate author.” An analogous dynamic is at work in series such as Sosnowy’s Stripes, whose aesthetic drama derives from the tension between their dispersal across the numerically open series and their final integration as a coherent set based upon their ultimate reference point – the artist as author, as unified self, as origin of the gestures that make up the drawings.

In retrospect we can see that what underpins all three aesthetics of succession is narrative: more or less traditional, literary narrative in the sequence and the suite, and in the series, an existential sense of the artist’s self-employment and temporality. Implicit in Danto’s categories is a faith in art’s power of reference, and with the series in particular its expressive qualities – a given drawing’s meaning is seen as deriving from its capacity to make present what is no longer here, to bring again before our eyes in its unique and unrepeatable performance the figure who once created it. However, many of the “ordered sets” assembled here rely on a very different aesthetic of succession, one that refused narrative and the existential guarantee of the unified artist-subject and that replaced the interplay of distentio and intentio with a radical dispersal across both spatial and temporal dimensions.

These series were born of the formal logic of the art of the Sixties and Seventies, of Minimalism’s infinitely repeatable geometry and Pop Art’s successions of everyday, standardized imagery. In his classic apologia of 1967, “Serial Art Systems: Solipsism,” a young Mel Bochner announced serial art’s rigorous break with any notion of art as expression, as capable of signifying absent events or values. Recent structuralist theories of language had thrown such models of transparent reference into doubt; instead, as Bochner would later describe it,

Language in itself is now understood to be a system of elements – a threshold
above which is difference and below which is similitude. Freed from transparency,
language is order, and the order form becomes the content.

If art itself constituted a kind of language, then according to this reasoning it must abandon its longstanding attempt to define or explain the world of things, and limit itself to naming or describing that world. Content would not be predicated on reference but on what we might call display – on the sheer material or factual presence of the work of art itself. Its significance, in other words, would no longer be transcendent but purely immanent, located nowhere else but in the ordering of the language given the artist. Bochner’s drawing, Theory of Painting (1-4) (1969), may serve as an illustration of these positions: no “meaning” inheres in the original square form (so overlaid with symbolic import through early twentieth-century abstraction) traced onto sheets of paper laid upon the floor, but resides only in the varying configurations – alternately “neat” or “messy,” in a wry parody of Wölfflinian aesthetic theory – that its constituent elements compose.

Simiarly, when in 1973 Richard Serra repeatedly passed an inked roller onto sheets of paper to produce Untitled (14 Part Roller Drawing), his work procedure could tell us nothing about himself as existential point of origin of those gestures; instead he invited us to understand “work” much more literally, as a set of de-skilled, de-cathected, repeatable actions undertaken by the artist as producer. The meaning of the resulting drawings does not lie anywhere else than on the surface which they display; their significance is no longer transcendent but purely immanent in their process – exactly fourteen passes of the roller on each of fourteen equally-sized sheets of paper, the passes alternating from one sheet to the next from left to right, beginning at 14/0 and ending at 0/14. Of course such a procedure stresses the materiality or factualness of the resulting drawing; once we grasp the simple system used to make it, we understand the varying densities of black ink, the regularly-repeated irregularities caused by anomalies on the surface of the roller, and so forth. But the work’s meaning does not inhere so much in that materiality as in its repetition and extension across the fourteen sheets.

If the logic of this aesthetics of seriality derives from the structuralist thinking of early Minimalism, Serra’s post-minimalist practice reminds us, too, that Pop Art had something to say about the image’s potentially endless recurrence: Serra’s debt to Warhol is signaled clearly in Untitled (14 Part Roller Drawing) by his use of the inked roller, which stands in for the latter’s squeegee and silkscreen. For Warhol in particular, seriality spoke to two concerns – the ubiquity of the commodity on one hand, and the flickering of the filmic image on the other. It is the latter which concerns us here, for it is the notion of the cinematic that seems to place the series firmly within the stream of time. Minimalist sculptors could introduce temporality into their works in the guise of what critic Michael Fried called “theatricality” – the address of the art object to the viewer, its insistence on the mobile body of the spectator to experience the work as a succession of views. While a series like Laurie Reid’s Gravity’s Fancy I-IV (1996) suggests how this visual experience could be translated into watercolor on paper, with each image seeming to present us, despite its crude liquidity, a different shot of a movie camera – distance, close-up, reverse-shot, as if we are looking at the storyboard of a film – other artists working in two dimensions are much more likely to exploit the contradiction between the static nature of their medium and the momentum suggested by cinematic vision.

This tension between immobility and succession is present in Stefana McClure’s Decalogue (one to ten): English Subtitles to a Film by Krzysztof Kieslowski (2000). A velvety carbonized paper is pasted to each sheet (itself having the proportions reminiscent of a cinema screen), on which McClure traces, through photocopied sheets of paper, the succession of subtitles that appears at the bottom of each of the ten parts of the Kieslowski film; the pressure lifts the carbon from the surface, leaving a whitened tracing of the pencil. As the language builds up in the movie, the carbon substrate is eaten away, becoming a formless white streak across the bottom of the silvery black rectangle: narrative now is not the unfolding of a story to its ultimate point of clarity but the progressive muddying of sense, it is not the comprehensible progression through time but an opaque, cacophonous simultaneity. This is a far cry from Danto’s aesthetics of succession, with its transcendent guarantees of meaning through narrativity; time has ceased to be the continuum of subjective integrity, but has become the space of the psyche’s dispersal across the screen-like surface of the drawing itself.

Citation:
D’Souza, Aruna and Tom McDonough. “An Aesthetics of Dispersal: Succession and Seriality.” Ad Infinitum. New York, NY: Fifth Floor Foundation, 2002. © Aruna D'Souza and Tom McDonough