FOLDED TIME: THOUGHTS ON GRIDS AS SYNTHESIZERS OF COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS, THE CURRENT STATE OF INFORMATION DISSEMINATION, THE GRID’S RETURN AS SIMULTANEOUS INFORMATION SYNTHESIZER/BACKLASH AGAINST DRONE OF INTERNET-AGE, GRID IN CONSTANT STATE OF CONTRADICTION TO ITSELF, COMFORT OF GRID’S CONTRADICTION AS OUR OWN SELVES DISSOLVE
Rosalind Krauss wrote that the grid “allows a contradiction between the values of science and those of spiritualism to maintain themselves within the consciousness of modernism, or rather its unconscious, as something repressed” (13). Within modernism’s tendency to contain a spiritual reality within stylistic pieces (I.e, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin), grids helped to merge different kinds of planes, and this has occurred time and time again throughout the motif’s history. Krauss analyzes its history with a similar tone as Williamson; tracing its dual state of being as representing rationality as well as (or sometimes alongside) a type of contained chaos. We should consider Freud’s breakthrough, as he pushes the conceptual structure of a subconscious brewing underneath a conscious reality, the postwar sense of looming doom ready to break through to the comfort of our daily lives (Godzilla, the red scare), the references back to the grid as a simple tool of perception when two-dimensional art was refining itself before the 20th century challenged representation, the “parodying [of] the falseness of surface appearances in art and architecture”, the structuralists challenging the rationality of the grid (although, by utilizing it). Advertising in the 70s and 80s used grids as simplified fields of expansive being, a computerized and flattened version of reality, often being burst through by a ‘menacing beast’. It seems that no matter how much trust or distrust has been placed on the surface plane throughout the centuries, the grid manages to find a way to remain relevant, either as a simple optical tool, or a more complex optical tool merging on being an indicator of a collective optical understanding.
The grid speaks to a “perpetual flicker” and “implied motion”, as Krauss suggests. She found that given its history and current state of use at the time of her writing (1978, in this case), its capacity as an “antidevelopment”, “antinarrative”, “antihistorical” motif is useful for modernism. What, then, of postmodernism and contemporary art and contemporary life? Williamson argues that “the grid expresses the general theme, in opposition to modernism, of anti-rationality and even irrationality”. If this is generally the collective opinion, it is almost ironic to me that a flattened and simplified space represents the Universal or eternal or abstract, in its pointing to the possibility of abstraction behind something so formal. If it makes its point by pointing to something else, it’s a form of existing as (at least) two things at once.
We are in this digital age wherein a synchretic sensibility has begun to erupt; the merging of seemingly disparate ideologies is commonplace and the flattening/expansion of information (internet, etc) causes time to fold back on itself much of the time (see “folding time” grid). Our selves continue to dissolve as all sorts of binaries are challenged; gender, race, class, etc. I think grids will find their place again as a simultaneous resting place for our weary, data-soaked minds and also as perpetrator of information-flattening (spatial and text-based). Freud’s initial contributions to society in terms of distinguishing between consciousness and unconsciousness are well-seated and well-understood, and the “breaking through” of grids may not be the most relevant or common image.
If landscape painting remains an urge, then the urge for out-of-reach pinnacles and horizons remains. For me, as someone who is interested in time-based media as well as two dimensional paintings and drawings, landscapes, grids, small scale, subtle abstraction and limited pallettes may begin to satisfy my need for a temporal shift- not to something that’s been exhausted through, like minimalism, but to something that can work in conjunction with a time based world as a simultaneous resting point and jumping point, as it “points” to an absence, which in turn is possibility. If I am interested in painting an illusionistic symbolic reality, how do I react as the grid offers its services as a historically loaded surface plane?
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