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Brian Clarke Grids

Brian Clarkes grids contain a fundamental conflict, if not direct contradiction,

between two incommensurable elements: strict geometrical formalism and

painterly informalism. Clarke has spoken openly of his efforts to both explore this

conflict of elements and to elaborate a dialogue between them within his gridpieces Ive become very interested in the juxtaposition of conflicting elements,

so that, by the introduction in a formal grid of a very informal series of marks,

you become aware of the innate structure. By that counterpoint you highlight the

strength of each element.i The application of a grid construction within his

glassworks has led him to explore its formal limits while repeatedly attempting to

transgress them. This bold effort at visual transgression in both his glassworks

and paintings is part of how Clarke has forged what Martin Harrison has called a

legible, modern, pictorial language.ii Yet one might ask how it is we are to

understand what the conflict expressed within grids per se actually is? Indeed,

such analysis might in fact be necessary before attempting to speculate on thenature of the pictorial dialogue at the heart of Clarkes own grids.

Perhaps what is at issue is a contradiction between materialism and spiritualism

in the way art theorist Rosalind Krauss has identified in her seminal essay

Gridsiii. She argues that this conflict is handled, resolved and repressed by grids

in a specifically modernist fashion - the grid becomes paradigmatic of a

modernist ambition to establish an absolute caesura between art, language and

nature. The coordinates of the grids sterile formalism define an autonomous

visual realm that is completely antithetical to the way things appear in natural

organic space, and is well-suited to defining the non-representational and anti-

narrative ethos of modernity. The grid is what art looks like when it entirely

rejects organic nature. It forces out any of the aberrant dimensions associated

with reality and replaces them with a formal and abstract aesthetic schema that

is aggressively non-representative. It defines its own autonomous pictorial and

aesthetic relationships as emerging within its own materiality and as something

demonstrably separate from, and superior to, nature.

However, with the development of this modernist and materialist aesthetic a

fundamental paradox emerged - none of the artists actually ever talked about

their work in this way. With reference to Mondrian and Malevich, Krauss argues

that the grid is repeatedly expressed by artists as a refined means for exploringthe immateriality of Being, Mind or Spirit. In other words, it is seen by those who

utilise it as a direct aesthetic means for accessing the universal realm, whilst

remaining entirely indifferent to the concrete material realm of the work itself.

This paradox, expressed as an irresolvable tension between its inherent

materiality and its spiritual ambitions, situates it within an ongoing historical and

cultural drama, concerning the sacred and the secular. The modernist artist,

when confronted with both the inexorable fracturing of the sacred and the post-

Enlightenment emergence of the secular and the scientific, was faced with

having to make a decision between two modes of visual expression the

spiritual and the material. The intriguing aspect of the grid as a modernistaesthetic construct is how it represents an effort to try and avoid having to make

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a decision between the sacred and the secular. It continues to try and express

both tendencies. Krauss writes:

In the increasingly de-sacralized space of the nineteenth century, art had

become the refuge for religious emotion; it became, as it has remained, a

secular form of belief...In the cultist space of modern art, the grid serves not onlyas emblem but also as myth. For like all myths, it deals with paradox or

contradiction not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradiction, but by

covering them over so that they seem (but only seem) to go away. iv

The grid has the capacity to dramatically present the conflict between matter

and spirit. It has a mythic power which forces us into thinking that we can

experience and overcome that conflict through purely aesthetic means. Grids

suggest that we are able to affect a mystical release into an immaterial realm of

belief. How is the grid able to have this bivalent and schizophrenic structure? The

answer lies in its ability to simultaneously present two different forms of dynamic

movement, one centrifugal and the other centripetal. Present within the material

of the grid is a visual force operating outwards to infinity which forces us to

acknowledge a realm existing beyond the visual confines of the work. More often

than not this consists of purely abstract and de-realised indications that this area

beyond the work is otherwise than natures organic appearance, more akin to an

immaterial spiritual reality. At the same time a force operates to compel us

inward, drawing our attention to the material interiority of the work: those

aspects that separate it from and thus render it incommensurable with the realm

of organic nature outside it.

The conflict at the heart of the visual grid emerges from its attempt to create anentirely autonomous geometrical and material formalism which is to be used for

delimiting a hermetic aesthetic zone that has the capacity for transporting one to

an immaterial and invisible spiritual dimension. In other words, conflict is a

product of its effort to be an entirely material and secular vehicle for religious,

spiritual and mystical experiences. Whilst Krausss account undoubtedly holds an

influential and dominant position within much contemporary discourse around

the use of grids in modernist art, one must continue to ask to what extent her

account fully captures the type of ongoing visual conflict that is so evident in

Clarkes own grids. Whilst it captures an element of the visual conflict present

within them, i.e. between strict material formalism and immaterial informalism,arguably it fails to account for the way much that this work struggles to convey

through the continued and insistent use of the grid - a powerful sensation of the

dynamism of organic life. Clarkes grids, with their cool mathematical geometry,

pulse and vibrate with a vision of nature. Krausss account of the grid, erected as

it is on a negative conception of abstraction, i.e. the concentration on the anti-

natural, the non-organic and the de-realised visual space of the grid, simply

cannot capture this aspect. Does one, in fact, need a much more positive

account of the type of visual abstraction proffered by Clarkes grids to account

for their conflict and dynamism? Is it possible that the abstraction being enacted

by these grids is not one of complete renunciation of concrete organic forms, ortotal separation from nature?

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There is a sense that the formal abstraction of these grids is part of an effort to

commune with something very basic and primal in the very emergence of

organic form. There is an awareness that such visual abstraction holds the key to

configuring surprising ways to visualise new organic forms rather than simply

projecting us towards an immaterial spiritual beyond. Such positive abstraction is

imbued with the sense that there is a world of immanent possibilities beyond the

existing forms that can be represented. Grids become one part of a new visual

strategy for delimiting and introducing new and potential organic forms, and are

one of the ways an artist like Clarke negotiates new means, or new conditions,

whereby singular unforeseen organic forms can be produced aesthetically.

The grid is perhaps more of a net than a map. It is not about mapping the

completely de-realised realm in the way Krauss argues, rather, it is a means of

diagramming vital intensity through capturing unprecedented, unforeseen

potential and unknown possibilities. Clarkes grids represent a means of breaking

with the recognisable coordinates of organic representation for the sake ofallowing the visual frontiers of new and emergent forms to appear. There is

indeed the simultaneous expression of two forms of dynamism, centrifugal and

centripetal, as Krauss recognises, but it has little to do with an ongoing dialectic

between matter and spirit. In Clarkes grids what emerge and begin to take

shape, through informal and aberrant painterly marks which occur within and

overflow the grid, are invisible, abstract and previously unarticulated organic

forces and possibilities. What we are being forced to experience is not a

transcendental spiritual realm, but the very realm of nature in terms of its

invisible and as yet unrealised possibility. The abstract formalism of the grid

signals that the mode of conveyance is no longer one of visual recognition,rather, it is now one composed entirely of sensation and affect. Yet this is an

affect that remains strictly anchored to the real and not the ethereal spiritual

realm. The conflict being enacted here does not comfortably exemplify a

mythological struggle between the secular and the sacred, but is a dynamic and

vital process of organic becoming, one involving a necessary exchange between

the geometrical constraint of intense spaces of becoming andthe aberrant

organic marks which are allowed to emerge informally within the framing

construct of the grid. This type of exchange has little to do with any ongoing

conflict between the sacred and the secular as Krauss has argued. It is instead

indicative of a truly modern pictorial andaffective language capable of

expressing a real sensation of organic vitalism and the birth of forms.

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i Interview with Brian Clarke, 01/12/89 in Interviews with the Artists: Elements of Discourse, ed.NP James & SA Batiste (CV Publications, 1996)ii Martin Harrison, Brian Clarke: Tradition and Discontinuitiesiii Rosalind Krauss, Grids in October#9, Summer 1979iv Ibid, p. 54