OTR Comment - September, 2003

The Matthew Barney exhibit at the Guggenheim has, nestled within it, a much smaller exhibit of the work of Kasimir Malevich. Walking from the main spiral where Barney’s objects and films dominate into the Malevich gallery is so abrupt as to affect one physically. It’s a startling thing. It is a shock effect that, in itself, consists in a ‘moment of art’ if one of the things that art does is to create reflection about experience. In fact, this is rather a good description especially since it is in the nature of experience and reflection to be in constant dialectic, or more strongly, to be intertwined. This is to say that experience can’t exist without reflection and vice versa. Experience and reflection are conditions for one another and never cease, at the same time, to condition one another.

It will create no controversy to declare that it is quite a different thing to witness the art of Matthew Barney and that of Kasimir Malevich. Thus the disconcerting feel of walking from one room into the other. A marked difference, of course, is the fact that Barney’s work has no relation to the canvas and Malevich’s work is fundamentally about the canvas, even though his later work with textile and ceramics is also represented in the show. But the feeling of difference is broader and more global than that. It comes from the sense that one has switched universes almost completely. And the universe of Kasimir Malevich is nothing if not geometric, abstract, Platonic. The universe of Barney is, well, not geometric nor abstract nor Platonic. It is organic and terrestial and, one might say, more Pre-Socratic than Platonic. The universes of Barney and Malevich are, thus, in something of an opposition. But this is also the first clue that they might be deeply related.

Clement Greenberg once declared that “Manes's became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted.” And if Manes was the first painter to be frank about the situation then Malevich was probably the first to revel in it outright. Whatever other things Malevich thought he was expressing in his Suprematist style the explosive idea written on every canvas that he painted was that painting simply is surface. Malevich declared of his own work that it was about “the supremacy of pure feeling.” One wants to ask what makes a feeling pure and what kind of feeling it would be if it became so. There isn’t a clear answer; neither in the texts nor the paintings themselves. It’s as if he simply wanted to make orthodox Kantians angry. But no matter. The effect of Malevich’s work was to render two things possible: Abstract Expressionism, with its ambiguous and never fully coherent relation to ‘pure feeling’, and Minimalism, with its obsessive need to strip down to fundaments. A clear intuition toward the latter is his famous painting White on White. The striking thing about White on White when it was painted in 1918, though it hasn’t ceased to be striking, was the way in which it was just barely a painting and, therefore, the way it was just barely art. By getting so dangerously close to being nothing at all it ended up renewing painting. It renewed painting by decisively freeing it from the pictorial. Lots of things could happen after that. If one ignores, for a moment, the aura of the absolute that can emanate from its simplicity, and which, again, is the route toward Abstract Expressionism, the painting can’t help but present itself as some lines, a plane, stretched canvass. It is the central idea of Minimalism that one can take such things very seriously, indeed, that one must take them seriously. The central idea of Minimalism is that art can get at the materiality of things and that the simplicity of materiality is a big and deep thing. And yet, it is still simple, which is to say that the bigness and deepness isn’t metaphysical but phenomenological, it’s just right there, showing itself. That is why Minimalism tends to like boxes and rectangles, lines and surfaces, light just as light.

Richard Serra was pretty well described as a Minimalist for much of his career though it is less clear in his work after the eighties. He’s worked in a good number of materials as well as painting and writing texts. But he will always be associated with metal, with sheets of steel and globs of molten lead. He’s always been obsessed with the materiality of metal. At the same time, a work like Right Angle Prop from 1969 bears a family resemblance to Malevich’s White on White. For what is it but two rectangles of the same material placed on top of one another, Lead on Lead? And the way many of his standing sheets of metal cut through space is reminiscent of Malevich’s planes and the way they cut through the space of the canvass. Yet, there is an important difference as well, a difference that Serra himself points to. Speaking of deciding to work with steel he says, “So I thought why not give myself the benefit of the doubt, even if the doubt is it's already an ‘art material’ having started with Picasso and Gonzales and a lot of people have mucked around with it in the 20th century. I thought the way that they've used it, seems to me, dealing still with pictorial problems. Like with ‘art’ problems. I thought I would just bring the material into an art concern and use it in the way industry had used it. . . . I mean the idea of using the weight of the material no one had done. The idea of using the stasis of the material, the idea of using the flexibility of the material, no one had really investigated the properties of the material.”  Talking about matter in this way, talking about matter as something that has a kind of potentiality that has to be explored and shown is an innovation of Minimalism. It emerges already out of things that Malevich had done but the implications had to be made explicit and this is one of the things that Serra accomplishes. There are pictures of him in the late sixties throwing around his molten lead, he looks like Vulcan. But the strange world that emerges out of those gallery spaces where he is hurling the lead are being determined, importantly, by the lead itself. Serra seems like a conduit of what the lead wants to do, he’s barely in control of it. The matter is very strong. Something of the same tension exists even in his later work with delicately shaped and balanced sheets of steel. The tension between form and matter is right there on the surface, the steelness of the steel seems like it’s going to overwhelm the whole thing at any moment. Serra’s work never ceases to be about matter even as it develops. It is always partly about the way some kind of matter affects space and time and thus, ultimately, the very bodies of the people who come into contact with it. Everything is being driven by the materiality.

One of the things about Matthew Barney’s work that doesn’t always get so much attention, probably do to all the bells and whistles elsewhere, is the question of matter. The one substance that Matthew Barney is probably most associated with is Vaseline. He used it in his earliest performance pieces and it figures prominently in the Cremaster Cycle. There is something ridiculous about using Vaseline. From a Minimalist perspective it’s absurd. While many Minimalists, including Serra, used various industrial materials in their work they always tended toward materials that have some definition, some form to them, some line. Vaseline has no such character. It doesn’t even have any defined quantity. Does a dollop of Vaseline constitute its fundamental measure, a handful, a smear? It is easy to talk about a sheet of steel or a block of wood. Vaseline is simply that much more inchoate, that much closer to prime, undifferentiated matter. And from the other direction, Vaseline is that much more derivative than steel or iron or lead. When Robert Chesebrough stumbled across it in 1859 it was a curious nuisance that built up on metal rods for drilling oil. It was a waste product of the industrial revolution. But workers would put it on their cuts because it helped them heal. This substance so many steps removed from nature had come round to be soft on the skin.

In Cremaster 3, the last of the movies to be produced and the middle of the overall narrative, Richard Serra stands near the top of the Guggenheim museum and splashes Vaseline at the foot of the circular walls. It is a clear reference to Serra’s earlier work with molten lead. He is in the same Hephaistean garb as in Splashing Molten Lead from 1969. The Vaseline runs down the museum having taken on a temporal dimension now, as the sand of a rather sticky hourglass. The image of Serra having his lead replaced with Vaseline is extraordinary. For there is a structural similarity in the way that Serra’s primordial lead works its way up into the elegant, tense sculptures of the Torqued Ellipses, and the way that the Vaseline works its way from formless glob, to sculptural object, to the films that finally fill out the world in which such objects could possibly reside.

And tucked within this world that unfolded out of Vaseline are the Suprematist works of Kasimir Malevich, like the genetic memory hidden within the DNA strands of the latest organism.

Morgan Meis is an OTR Editor.