DMC 2350.1.Ĭreated on the razor’s edge between utopia and dystopia, Continuous Monument took the modernist obsession with the grid to the ultimate degree to highlight the menacing domination of corporate modernist architecture. Photo-collage with pencil and crayon on wove paper pen and ink on trace, with green stroke, 35.5 × 50 mm. Superstudio, Continuous Monument: T’ien an-men, 1969–2015.
ROSALIND KRAUSS GRID SERIES
In Florence, Superstudio, for example, imagined a world where a gigantic, uninterrupted, reflective grid spanned the entire globe in their Continuous Monument series of 1969–70. In Italy, as modernist architecture and planning came under increasing fire from a younger generation of architects in the late 1960s, the grid was challenged and pushed to absurd extremes, whether to highlight its oppressive dominance or repurpose it for utopian aims. Photo-collage with pen and ink on wove paper pen & ink on trace pen & ink paper cut-out, 34.5 × 50 mm. Superstudio, Continous Monument Sul Lago, 1969–2015. After Vinciarelli moved to New York City, some of her first works were based on the grid however, after spending time in west Texas, her work took on a noticeably horizontal emphasis in her watercolour landscapes of the mid-1980s. The street grid, which orders the majority of Manhattan, was substituted for the horizontality of the American southwest. With few exceptions, after Martin moved to New Mexico in 1967, she maintained the geometry of the rectilinear picture plane, but virtually eliminated the grid, introducing horizontal bands that dominated her work for the remainder of her career.
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This geo-contextual correspondence between the grid layout of the city and the prevalence of the grid as a basis for art was especially pronounced in the work of Martin and LeWitt.
![rosalind krauss grid rosalind krauss grid](http://www.sethlambert.net/images/failure/7big.jpg)
It seems as though the grid, the emblem of modernity par excellence, had in many ways become an emblem of the contemporary city. Nicholas Baume has likewise compared LeWitt’s three-dimensional grid-like structures to the scaffolding of New York City, describing them as a ‘disavowal of readings of completeness’. From the work of Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt to Rem Koolhaas, Carl Andre, Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman, the grid was practically inescapable in 1970s New York (Koolhaas in fact wrote about the ‘culture of congestion’ as an architecturally generative device in the 1978 publication Delirious New York).
![rosalind krauss grid rosalind krauss grid](https://theseenjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/4299.LO_486_130328-005a1-852x1024.jpg)
Representing a continual breakdown of – and return to – the foundations of art and architecture, the grid would function as a ‘beginning’, an opportunity for infinite variations on a theme (in other words, seriality), and for some, the perfect platonic form waiting to be transgressed. The grid, according to Krauss, concretizes the distinction between perception and reality by way of flattening, geometricizing and ordering. As Krauss contended in her 1979 essay ‘Grids’, the roots of the recent return to the grid lay in this early modernist work – in cubism, Soviet avant-garde painting and De Stijl – where it functioned as an ‘emblem of modernity’. One need only look to iconic modernist examples by Le Corbusier (1887–1965) or Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) to see how the grid was used to determine plan and elevation. Although Krauss was referring to visual art, her pronouncement might be even more true for architecture. The grid has served as ‘the image of an absolute beginning’, as Rosalind Krauss affirmed in 1986 in ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Reichsbank Extension Berlin, 1933. This article seeks to redress this oversight with reference to two particularly striking examples.The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli.
![rosalind krauss grid rosalind krauss grid](https://iancocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/larry-spoons-spanish-dancer-2048x2048.jpeg)
Writing on the grid, it is said, has produced “reams and reams of artspeak” yet little in the way of sustained reflection on this visual tendency in art for the church. In recent years James Hugonin and Gerhard Richter have each produced a stained-glass window for the church using a grid system, here discussed in the terms set out in Krauss’s foundational text. Taking her essay as its basis, this article looks at the work of two contemporary artists known for their adoption of the grid as a guiding motif. The grid provided artists with a means to surreptitiously reintroduce the spiritual into an art form that appeared, on the surface, to be wholly material. Rosalind Krauss’s landmark essay of 1979 on the grid form in art characterized the grid in equivocal terms as centrifugal and centripetal, as structure and framework, and most significantly for this discussion, as a vehicle for the conjunction of art and spirit.