Society (ARS), New York. Painting as Diagram: Five Notes on Frank Stellas Early Paintings, 19581959* BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH OCTOBER 143, Winter 2013, pp. 126144. 2013 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1. The Diagram In a famous radio conversation between Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Bruce Glaser in 1964, Stella made a rather surprising and suddenly aggressive remark. 1 It might have been partially triggered by an earlier comment that Robert Rosenblum had made when reviewing an exhibition of Stellas Black Paintings in which he had referred to them as diagrams. 2 Stella stated: A diagram is not a painting; its as simple as that. I can make a painting from a diagram, but can you? This remark allows us to instantly address one of the key questions that Stellas work from the moment of 195859 seems to pose: What type or variation of abstraction had been invented by Stella at that time, and how does it relate to the infinitely complex network of positions in abstraction found in both prewar and postwar painterly culture? In fact, one of the primary difficulties historians have faced has been precisely one of differentiating Stellas work from both the abstraction of the historical avant-garde andeven more sothe principles of * This essay was delivered at the conference on the early work of Frank Stella at Harvard University, April 8, 2006, organized by Harry Cooper and Megan Luke. At the time, the lecture was met with considerable consternation, not to say aggression, which kept me from publishing it. Following the counsel of my friends and colleagues at October, I have now agreed to publish it in unchanged and unedited form as a contribution to what seems to be an overdue reevaluation of Stellas fundamentally important early work. 1. Bruce Glaser, Questions to Stella and Judd, in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 156167. 2. Robert Rosenblum, Frank Stella (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 56. The page must be filled. Everything is equal, the good and the evil. The farcical and the sublimethe beautiful and the uglythe insignificant and the typical, they all become an exaltation of the statisti- cal. There are nothing but factsand phenomena. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pcuchet 128 OCTOBER modernist abst ract ion governing New York paint ing since t he Abst ract Expressionists, especially concerning the legacies of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. Already in 194950, one could encounter a multiplicity of operations performing acts of aesthetic withdrawal and negation by redeploying conventions of nonrepresentational painting in the most unorthodox and for the longest time illegible way. In a 1965 catalogue essay for the exhibition Three American Painters at the Fogg Art Museum, Michael Fried suggested that Stellas work had emerged from a dialogue with the key figures of Abstract Expressionism 3 it was not until 1970, with William Rubins 1970 monographic catalogue on the artist, that the degree to which Stella had also been in dialogue with the paintings of Jasper Johns became clear. 4 But if Stellas practice was entangled with and suspended between the contradictory positions in the work of his predecessors, his presenta- tion of the Black Paintings in 1959 constituted a decisive break, an assault on the formalist traditions of New York School modernism. Stellas remark about the diagram introduces a key term that points to the artists paradoxical conception of authorial identity. This will become all the more evident when we consider the impact of Stellas diagrammatic conception of the work on his Minimalist followers, especially, perhaps, Carl Andre. On the one hand, the statement asserts Stellas continuing confidence in artistic authorship, not to say originality (one would only have to think of statements and works made by Andy Warhol at the same time, or statements made by Dan Flavin slightly later, about the universal availability of artistic means and concepts of production to recognize the underlying conservative agenda in Stellas statement). After all, the statement stresses the uncontested primacy of painting as artistic practice (a posi- tion that Stella would voice again and again, often even disparaging the shift from painting to sculpture in the work of the Minimalists, and always belittling his own occasional attempts at sculpture at that time). Yet it also forces us to recognize that Stellas abstractionsunlike the Black Paintings by Rauschenberg, on the one hand, and Reinhardt, on the otherwould be the only ones that could in fact be rightfully called diagrammatic since they are actually enforcing a given spatial and linear symmetrical schema that rigorously displaces all claims and pretenses to compositional decision-making processes or authorial intentions. Rather than seeing Stellas abstraction as the culmination of modernist painting because of its medium-specificity, self-reflexivity, and opticality and its engagement with the strategies of painting as shape and deductive structurethe position for which Michael Fried has argued so powerfully again and againI want to suggest that the order of the diagram as a readymade formal organization of linear and spatial components might be the proper episteme to demarcate one 3. Michael Fried. Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965). 4. William Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: the Museum of Modern Art, 1970). of the fundamental differences between modernist abstraction and Stellas work. This proposal would also allow us to see more common historical determinations, situating Stellas work in a context broader than the strictly formalist one imposed by his foremost critic at the time. And lastly, looking at the work in those terms might even help us to overcome the binary opposition set up by critics in the 1960s and 70s, in particular the opposition between Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, on the one hand, and that of their most powerful opponent, Leo Steinberg, on the other. The diagrammatic is the one variety of abstraction that recognizes externally existing and pre-given systems of spatio-temporal quantification and schemata for the statistical collection of data as necessarily and primarily determining a pictor- ial order. The diagram works in analogue with the other orders and schemata that abstraction had recruited for its emerging morphologies in 1912with geometric and stereometric structures, biomorphic and mechanomorphic matrices, and the matrix of language itself. As with all the underlying epistemes deployed by abstrac- tion, the diagrammatic often operates in tandem with other resources but is sufficiently differentiated from the other types to be recognizable as a distinct position within the gamut of abstraction. For example, Mondrians so-called Checkerboard paintings from 1919, with Painting as Diagram 129 Stella. Reichstag. 1958. 2013 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. which Stellas paintings were initially compared on several occasions, clearly exem- plify a type of abstraction whose inner logic and spatial organization aim at a dialectics of oppositions and sublation, a model of spatial expansion, and the embod- iment of a universal abolition of hierarchical social relations, to name but a few of the most obvious and crucial parameters that the Checkerboards invoke. By this description alone it is obvious that a comparison between Mondrian and Stella is ultimately nonsensical, since Mondrians paintings obviously do not conform to the definition of the diagram as a purely quantitative order or as a schema of registration and data collection. Even less do Mondrians Checkerboards qualify to be aligned with an episteme of order and control, let alone with one of overdetermined confine- ment and spatial restriction. The latter description, however, would seem to be quite appropriate for a first diagnostic identification of the features of Stellas paintings, once one has overcome the predominance of the formalist terminology. Thus, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Leo Steinbergs definition of the flatbed picture clearly contains elements that could easily be transferred from his discussion of Rauschenbergs and Johnss work to that of Stella in 1958 when he says, The flatbed picture makes its symbolic allusion to . . . charts, bulletin boards, any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressedwhether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature, but of operational processes. 5 2. The Striations Stellas work prior to the Black Paintings is defined by the almost total and systematic abolition of planar chromatic forms in the manner of Rothko, for example, whom Stella apparently admired early on, or of Reinhardt, who repre- sented for Stella, along with Barnett Newman and Pollock, one of the foundations of post war American abstract ion. Stella had acquired a Black Paint ing by Reinhardt upon the completion of his own series of Black Paintings in 1960, and in 1967, on the occasion of Reinhardts death, he said: He cant play the game anymore, but nobody can get around the paintings anymore either. If you don't know what theyre about you dont know what painting is about. 6 In Three American Painters, Michael Fried argues that it was the discovery of the singularity of linear forms in Newman that inspired Stellas strategy of divid- ing a painting into a system of more or less regular striations, thereby defining the picture surface by an accumulation of parallel bands. By contrast, William Rubin and others argued that Stella had not actually encountered any work by Newman OCTOBER 130 5. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 79. 6. Stellas obituary note from the October 1967 Arts Canada, quoted in Lucy Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), p. 197, note 2. before Newmans exhibition at French & Co. in 1959, but that he had not only seen reproductions of the work of Jasper Johns as early as 1957, but, more impor- tant, had visited Johnss first exhibition at Leo Castelli in 1958, where he would have seen all of Johnss key works from 1954 onwards. While there can be no doubt about the absolute importance to Stella of his discovery of Johns, it is astonishing to see that the presence and impact of Rauschenberg (whom Stella met as early as 1957 and whose worka Black Paintinghe also acquired) have disappeared almost entirely from the discussion of Stellas formation (he is mentioned once in passing in Frieds magisterial essay, not at all in Rubins monograph, and only makes a passing appearance thirty years later in the Fogg catalogue on Stellas early work). 7 It seems obvious from a comparison of Stellas early 1958 paintings and a painting such as Rauschenbergs Yoicks (1953) that several key questions concern- ing both color and compositional organization were already fully established in Rauschenbergs work and that they could have had an impact on Stella similar to the tremendous shock triggered by his discovery of Johnss Flag (195455). It is very likely that Stella saw Yoicks along with Rauschenbergs Red Paintings and the first Combines when they were shown together at the Egan Gallery in 1954, but questions of influence are not my concern here. What I am interested in are the Painting as Diagram 131 7. Harry Cooper and Megan Luke, Frank Stella 1958 (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 2006). Robert Rauschenberg. Yoicks. 1953. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. formal shifts and procedural licenses that paintings such as Yoicks offered to Stellas early work. Rauschenbergs linear painting and cumulative composition provide the most dramatic evidence of the way in which he and Johns systematically emptied out that which had been regarded in Abstract Expressionism as the most sacred site of the subjects articulation: painterly gesture and the ductus of the brushwork. Both produced that peculiar type of linear formation that bordered on the trav- esty of gesture, hovering near random mechanicity, and displayed an ostentatious diffidence with regard to the manual execution of painting, negating skill just as much as expressivity. At the same time, the more or less regularized stacking of randomly executed striations betrayed an indifference to traditional compositional demands. These would also become, as I will argue, the primary characteristics of Stellas composi- tional striations in the early paintings of 1958 (that is, before the linear formations would become systematized and fully regularized in the diagrams of the Black Paintings, and before they would be forged into a symmetrical scheme that would prohibit even the last residual compositional decision or slightest deviation). But it should also be mentioned immediately that the very schema of a merely striational accumulation of linear marks traversing the entire picture OCTOBER 132 Robert Ryman. Untitled. 1958. 2013 Robert Ryman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. plane will not only emerge as one of Stellas early key pictorial strategies, it will simultaneously become the matrix of the work of Robert Ryman, Stellas counter- figure and great historical complement, ignored or simply written out of that historical moment by Fried and Rubin in their formalist criticism. The exclusion of Ryman from Rubins and Frieds modernist formalism probably resulted not only from the difficulty of seeing his work in Greenbergian terms but also, and perhaps more so, from their inability to see that Ryman, very similarly to Stella, had actually achieved a synthesis of modernist abstraction and Duchampian theories of the readymade that had previously only been established by Johns and Rauschenberg. It is this kind of exact duplication of newly emerging pictorial strategies that allows us to identify what could possibly motivate the structure of striation as the principal formal organization in Stellas work after Rauschenberg and Johns. Stellas Coney Island, along with Blue Horizon and Astoria, undoubtedly some of the key paintings prior to the Black Paintings and all from 1958, give us the opportu- nity to clarify the comparison. First of all, on the level of ductus and painterly execution, Stella both regularizes and steadily works at detaching the striations Painting as Diagram 133 Ryman. A Painting of Twelve Strokes, Measuring 11 1/4" x 11 1/4" Signed at the Bottom Right Corner. 1961. 2013 Robert Ryman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. from the last residues of an expressive, to say nothing of a representational, func- tion. Increasingly, this process of regularization and serial repetition came to eliminate even the last remnants of the authorial investment that Rauschenberg and Johns had maintained, even if only in a gesture of parody or travesty. In this process of gradual elimination, one can easily see the shift from ironical play with the convention of the painted horizon line in works such as Plum Island (Luncheon on the Grass) (1958), which mimic the landscape genre, towards a more deadpan and seemingly self-referential placement and execution of striations in his subse- quent paintings. Both the sheer flamboyant violence of Rauschenbergs assault on pictorial and painterly conventions and the extreme subtlety of Johnss ironic and melancholic mourning of the loss of modernisms abstract morphologies and com- posit ions are now deleted from Stellas increasingly rigorous structural organizations of process and picture. Paradoxically, as though still in dialogue with Johnss scriptural and textual thresholds of painting, Stellas linear accumulations seem to aspire to the scrip- tural at the same time as they bid farewell to the gestural (in fact, both Stellas and Rymans paintings of that moment emphasize the laterality of reading a painting in opposition to the vertical/horizontal scanning of its traditional spatial/percep- tual order). And the regularity of the cumulative lines points more towards the order of text on a panel or on a page than towards a planarity of expansive ges- tures of painterly subjectivity, even if that subjectivity was to be ironically canceled, as it had been with Rauschenberg and Johns. 3. Color Loss A final, sometimes decisive, withdrawal of color from postwar painting is of course to be found in both American and European work of the 1950s and 60s: in Newman, for example; Johnss white and Piero Manzonis achromatic paintings; and in Stellas shift to the Black Paintings, which are distinctly achromatic. Stella had repeatedly emphasized during the first reception of his Black Paintings that he did not want these paintings to be perceived as black paintings, but as paint- ings painted with the non-color black. To recognize the full spectrum of these extreme reductions or total with- drawals of color after 1945 is in many ways crucial to an understanding of Stellas commitment to black in 1959. Each of these artists had of course rather different motivations for their epuration of the chromatic. Their engagement with the monochrome or the achrome pronounced different historical inflect ions. Nevertheless, they are contextually linked (by, if nothing else, their shared contes- tation of color, the absolute necessity of denaturing the painting, and by their shared strategies of depleting and homogenizing the painterly surface in favor of a unified tone and hue). They also invite comparisons with the work of at least some of the key figures (e.g., Newman and Johns) in bringing about the same oppositions of color/non-color, even if in extremely different terms. The dialecti- OCTOBER 134 Painting as Diagram 135 8. Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography (1931), in Michael Jennings et al., eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2: 19311934 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,. 2005), p. 518. cal halves of an opposition of pure monochrome and achrome were confronted either with the rigor of colors reduction to the primaries or the hazard of ran- domly deployed industrial colors. We can say at least with some certainty that the withdrawal of color, or the reductivism of the monochrome, in the work of the artists of that generation surpassed even the modernist desire for either purifica- tion or a positivist verifiability of the data and processes of painterly perception. It seems that color was now subtracted, withheld, or even bleached out of the canvas- es. It appears in fact that the withdrawal of color articulated not only acts of resis- tance or refusal, but also declared loss and withdrawal, corresponding to a more general loss of access to psychic plenitude and somatic experience. In this manner, it becomes clear the extent to which the chromatic denatur- ing of painting effected by Stellas choice of the non-color black corresponds to the emphatic elimination of modeling and the illusions of depth and volume that he almost fanatically insisted upon in the shift towards the Black Paintings in 1958. Reading his emphatic statements about the absolute necessity of forcing depth and volume out of his painting (and with the removal of depth and volume the spatial registers of the subjects reading projections) could remind us at times of Walter Benjamins description of Atgets achievement as one of having sucked out the aura from the photograph like water from a sinking ship. 8 Beyond the mere enforcement of the obvious necessity of denaturing paint- ing or detaching it from all illusionistic references, what could possibly be the rea- son for that fanatical positivism, the compulsion to withdraw and withhold even the slightest reminiscence of corporeality, of bodily plenitude, of the fullness of the somatic register of painting, from painting itself ? This strategy must point to a major prohibition, a banning of the subjects body from the pictorial representa- tion whose causes still remain unclear, certainly unspoken. 4. From The Flag to Die Fahne Hoch And then, of course, there is the painful question of the titling of the Black Paintings, three of whichDie Fahne Hoch, Reichstag, and Arbeit Macht Freinotori- ously made explicit references to the Fascist history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. For modernist art historians, the precarious questions posed by the titling have for the most part, and until very recently, been either ignored or repressed in what appear at times rather cumbersome maneuvers. Thus, for example, Rubin men- tions and discusses only two of the three titles very briefly in his monograph, neutralizing them through what appear to be his patent explanations of Stellas seemingly flip reminiscences of having seen Nazi architecture and newsreels. He brushes them aside by explaining them in terms of the slightly juvenile delinquency and overall provocative callousness that the artist seems to have been known for at the time. But Rubin immediately accompanies those brief comments with the firm and prohibitive caveat that Stella would be horrified at the idea that the viewer might use them as a springboard to content. Tellingly, the title that Rubin omits altogether is clearly the most stunning and provocative reference altogether: Arbeit Macht Frei, the infamous inscription over the gate to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz Birkenau. Six years later, in an essential catalogue devoted entirely to the Black Paintings, Brenda Richardson provided the most exhaustive information on the titles and their historical references. But in her overall argument, she attempts to convey the sense that in overarching mood and subject matter, the Black Paintings merely concern generic disasters. And these disasters, according to Richardson, just inexplicably happened to range from the Nazi Holocaust to crime-ridden African-American New York neighborhoods, from drug and jazz clubs (e.g., Club Onyx) to the tragic girlfriends sometimes encountered in these clubs (i.e., Jill). 9 Perhaps not surprisingly, art historians in Germany, where Stella has enjoyed an amazingly strong reception history and remains a central artistic figure for a number of the formalist art historians there, pass over the implications of these titles altogether. They seem to follow all too gladly Rubins lead, granting Stella an exemption from the burdens of historical reference by diagnosing his decision to use these titles as mere pranksterism and insisting on withdrawing the artists titles from any interpretive account: neither Gottfried Boehm in his essay on the Black Paintings in 1977 nor Gudrun Inboden or Johannes Meinhardt in their essays of 1989 pay any attention whatsoever to the three Nazi titles in particular or the titles of the Black series in general. This non-reaction confirms what Stella himself must have sensed when rup- turing the repressive coating of modernist painting in 1958. Namely, that the history of modernist abstraction would eventually be associated with an actual memory of what was then the still-recent totalitarian destruction of bourgeois sub- jectivity, and that abstraction would have to be probed in terms of its participation in a history of the disavowal and repression of that destruction. Or, as Jaleh Mansoor aptly phrases it in her discussion of Piero Manzonis work: postwar monochromes and their diagrammatic compositional matrices articulate the irrationality folded within modernist rationality, the gulag in the modernist grid. 10 Thus, I would like to advance an admittedly speculative argu- ment to complicate the matter and, if nothing else, to at least attempt to rupture the repressive silence around the titles of Stellas Black Paintings. It is clear that Stella wishes to position Die Fahne Hoch in a dialogic relation- ship with Johnss American Flags, be they red, white, and blue or monochrome OCTOBER 136 9. Brenda Richardson, Frank Stella: The Black Paintings (Baltimore MD: the Baltimore Museum of Art, 1976). 10. Jaleh Mansoor, Piero Manzoni: We Want to Organize Disintegration, in October 95 (Winter 2001), pp. 2853. Painting as Diagram 137 white. And we are not suggesting that the dialogic relationship between Stellas flag and Johnss Flag would be any less complex or differentiated than had been the relat ionship bet ween Johnss st ars and stripes and the Abstract Expressionist demands for the Americanness of American painting. This had clearly been one facet of the spectrum along which Johns positioned himself with infinite precision at the outset of his artistic project in response to the con- cepts of a mythical identity and virility of American art at the time. And in order to position his work, and himself as a gay subject, he had to perform a number of maneuvers, both manifest and clandestine, to make the work res- onate in the full multiplicity of its subversive intentions. Another comparison between these two generations thus suggests itself: what if we consider Stellas Die Fahne Hoch as operating in a manner similar to the way that Rauschenbergs Erased de Kooning Drawing had related in 1953 to the mas- ter of Abstract Expressionism? Are these dialogic interactions between artistic generations not performing precisely the infinitely complex process of what we would call classic cases of good artistic oedipality and necessary symbolic parri- cide? Or, in terms of history rather than of psycho-history, are they not performing a proper Hegelian project of continuous progress through negation Frank Stella. Arbeit Macht Frei. 1958. 2013. Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. and dialectical sublation? Or are we looking at a particular and unique type of conversation and dialogic relation that can only take place between two particular artists at a specific moment? In these relations, it seems, the venerable predecessors always have to be completely annihilated before they can be sublated within the pictorial memory of that which has been displaced. Each new generation has to perform the process of abolition and annihilation, as though to manifestly signal to the world that the new artistic subject could only be born from the parricidal dialoguethat the new subject can only appear after having vandalized and internalized the previous generation, their fragments torn and worn on the victors forehead like the mark of Cain. As had been the case with Rauschenbergs assault on de Koonings expressive gesture and Johnss assault on Pollocks allover ritualistic performance, Stellas assault on Johns was exhaustive, devastating, and complete. One of the most provocative scandals in Johns had been the fact that painting had once again become iconic (after all, one of the paradoxes with which Flag had confronted its audiences was precisely this sudden return to an unfathomable condition of iconicity within an otherwise rigorously diagrammatic order). One only has to read the fulminating vehemence with which Carl Andre, one of Stellas closest friends at the time, ridicules that return to a popular iconicity in the early 1960s to get a sense of where Stella might have stood on that subject. With Stellas Black Paintings, Pop Arts new and emerging iconicity would now be barred, if not immediately erased, and painting would once again be manifestly subjected to the readymade symmetry and reduced to the suffocatingly anti-compositional order of the diagram. What we witness in Stellas Black Paintings first of all is the manifest transfor- OCTOBER 138 Johns. White Flag. 1955. Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. mation of what had been once the emancipatory promises of the modernist grid and of monochrome paint ing into carceral diagrammat ic structures. The repressed dark underside of the modernist grid and of monochromy returns now as an episteme of confinement and control, and the inscription of the spatial sym- met r y and ornament al order now operate wit hin a reduct ivist space of symmetrical overdetermination. After all, these are the features that distinguish the diagram from all other epistemes of abstraction (the musical, the linguistic, the biomorphic, the geometrical, the stereometrical, the mechanomorphic) in that the diagram (like the readymade) explicitly acknowledges the ruling condi- t ions of external control and product ion as anterior and superior to the subjectivist aesthetic intention of artistic authorship. Johnss very subtle and complex set of operations in terms of color applica- tioncarefully described once by Rosalind Krauss in regard to the White Flag (1955) as one in which color appears as if sandwiched between a coagulated ground of newspaper strips on the one hand and the waxy surface of encaustic on the other . . . 11 would now be reversed by Stella on all accounts. First of all, with his return to the non-color black, Johns had already aptly positioned himself in the achromatic reductions to white and gray. Second, leaving texture and sheen to accidental variations resulting from the handling and positioning of the mechanically executed paint deposit itself, Stella would now bring back Pollocks industrial enamel and Rodchenkos house- painters brush in order to displace Johnss somewhat fussy encaustic application and precious pigment-and-wax combination. Lastly, it is easy to imagine that the twenty-three-year- old Frank Stella, renowned gamesman and athletic trickster, would have known immediately where and how to place his masculinist shots against the by then already somewhat parochial and comforting lore surrounding Johnss Flag, from his origin story claiming that the idea of painting a flag had come to him in a dream, to the queer and quaint nod to Betsy Ross. Of course, we know all too well that painterly or artistic oeuvres do not acquire their historical identity from a single work. At the same time, we recognize the defining power of one particular invention or inter- vention, the singular work or gesture that signals a decisive departure, epistemic break, or historical reorientation that an artist can initiate. Johnss Flag undoubtedly was one of those moments in which the place and function of painting in the present are fundamentally redefined. And Stellas Black Paintings undoubtedly responded to and challenged that definition on all accounts, including what I would like to call Stellas renewal of the law of the father in painting. It is then through the series of Black Paintings that Stella repositions himself in direct dialogue with Barnett Newman, across and above the encounter and Painting as Diagram 139 11. Rosalind Krauss, Jasper Johns: The Functions of Irony, October 2 (Summer 1976), p. 95. OCTOBER 140 12. Richardson, p. 23. 13. Godfreys groundbreaking study was not known to me yet when I delivered this essay as a lec- ture at the 2006 Stella conference since it was only published in the fall of 2007. Nor did I know at that time David Joselits important essay on diagrams in Dada, which would explore with great lucidity the question of the diagrammatic as one of the crucial models in abstraction at an earlier moment in histo- ry. See David Joselit, Dadas Diagrams, Leah Dickerman, ed., with Matthew S. Witkovsky, The Dada Seminars (Washington: the National Gallery of Art; New York: D.A.P., 2005), pp. 22139. mediation with the utterly different approaches to abstraction in the work of Rauschenberg and Johns. After all, Stellas tripartite incantation of the actual conditions governing historical experience after Fascism made good on questions that had been insis- tently if covertly posed by Newman. The work of Johns and Rauschenberg by contrast had either shifted the debate completely away from any of the questions concerning the (im)-possibility of the production of a post-totalitarian culture or had blissfully ignored these questions, disputing their relevance. Stellas Black Paintings signal to us that paintings intricate intertwining with history could ulti- mately not be passed over by a mere prohibition or the maneuvers of a formalist sublimation of the historical dimension of the work of art. Therefore it would seem all the more appropriate at this point in time not to walk away from Stellas titles with the kind of falsely comforting complacency that can be seen in Richardsons antiseptic text on Arbeit Macht Frei when she writes that both Die Fahne Hoch and Arbeit Macht Frei were assigned Nazi related titles that would indicate a relationship between the cross pattern of the paintings and the cross references of the titles. Stella rejected titles specifically referential to religion, suggesting that he did not find them meaningful. He felt that religious symbols or allusions had less referential potency over time than did political symbols or allusions. 12 But in the present it is simply no longer possible to completely disregard Stellas textual strategies in linking the second, third, and eighth paintings of the first group of fifteen Black Paintings to the history of the totalitarian destruction of bourgeois Enlightenment culture. Or to simply repress the ramifications of those paintings (in the manner that Arbeit Macht Frei seems to have been almost totally excluded from exhibitions, undoubtedly because of its title, since as late as 1976, in Brenda Richardsons catalogue, it is the only painting listed with the entry exhibition history: none). We are in no way proposing a simple reversal of the prohibition of reading a painting according to its title (after all, it is all too evident throughout Stellas sub- sequent oeuvre that the titles articulate, for the most part at least, the condition of a non-motivated relationship between title and workexcept for, of course, once again, the series of paintings bearing the titles of destroyed Polish syna- gogues, as Mark Godfrey has recently explored and interpreted in great detail). 13 What I am proposing, however, is that we recognize the necessity of exploring the peculiar difficulty that these paintings titling poses and proposesprecisely with regard to the possible and impossible forms of meaning-production within non- representational painting after World War II. Furthermore, we should develop more of an understanding of the particular rhetoric of provocative enunciation and the maneuvers of a simultaneous announcement and disavowal that the titles perform, even if, or particularly because, there are only three titles with Nazi ref- erences within the initial group of fifteen (eventually twenty-three) works, which otherwise tend to invoke a wide variety of calamities, sites of minor disaster, places of deviance. This strange imbalance between three and twenty could at first appear to simply dissolve the focus on those paintings that explicitly refer to the greatest catastrophe of human history. And we would have to wonder if their placement within that series would not even banalize the reference within a strange gesture of equivocation, effacement, if not scandalous equation of minor calamities with the incomparable event of the Holocaust. 5. Silences, Voids, Negation in Abstraction We will have to digress, then, for a moment to delineatehowever sketchi- lythe distinctions between three central positions on silence and aesthetic with- drawal (three precursors of diagrammatic abstraction) and their underlying con- cepts of a historically constituted subjectivity that intersected at the moment of Stellas Black Paintings in 1959. The first model is one I would associate with Malevichs abstraction and that of the Russian avant-garde at large. It conceived of itself as early as the prerevolutionary moment of 1915 as a cultural representation de-privileging the bourgeois subject and its cultural conventions, emphasizing instead the imminence of a newly emerging class of proletarian identity that would inevitably engender new forms of subjective articulation and collective cul- tural representation. Abstraction would induce cognitive and perceptual forms of experience that would adequately register and represent the newly emerging egal- itarian, proletarian subject, who would be freed from domination and hierarchi- cal order (a vision that would also motivate Mondrians commitment to an emerg- ing model of diagrammatic abstraction). From that perspective, it is of course deeply ironic that both Andre and Fried credited Stella in the early 1960s with being a Constructivist. In fact, noth- ing could be further from the ethos and aesthetic of the Russian and Soviet artists than Stellas historical place and position, and, most important, nothing could be more different from the history of the Soviet avant-garde than the historical con- text of post-Holocaust history from which Stellas work emerges. The second model would be John Cages dissolution of the subject after World War II. This approach is of course dramatically different from the revolu- tionary models of post-bourgeois subjectivity that had been pronounced by the Soviet and the de Stijl avant-gardes, and it was certainly central to the aesthetic Painting as Diagram 141 project of Stellas predecessors Rauschenberg and Johns. Nevertheless, it is by no means evident that Cages negations would have had any impact on the formation of Stellas own project of abstraction as refusal and negation. Inevitably, Cages propositions exclude any and all reflections on the class basis of subject forma- tion, and, even more important, they voluntarily forfeit the progressive trajectory of a cultural practice that envisages the constitution of new forms of subjectivity in sociopolitical agency. In opposition to the radical utopian models of de-subjectivization in the 1920s, Cage develops technologically overdetermined and liberally informed artistic strate- gies that internalize the technological and ideological de-sublimation of all cultural (i.e., musical) experiences as the irrefutable and finite parameters of postwar cultur- al production at large. He adapts to these conditions to such a degree that he discov- ers within their structures the sole potential for an otherwise unthinkable cultural experience. It will be one that would have to be situated, on the one hand, precisely within the advanced apparatus of technology and, on the other, within the nonhier- archical structures of anomic existence and total de-sublimation, since these are the singular common denominators of collective everyday experience. In Cages post-Duchampian project, the subject is given access to these last microscopic spaces of autonomy that late capitalism will still yield reluctantly, since theseowing to their technocratic and microcosmic structureswould never be transfigured into concrete acts of political opposition or articulations of collective agency, nor would they open up any new spaces of resistance reaching beyond the framework of subcultural critiques. Thus, in Cages model, subjectivity was both annihilated and simultaneously reconstituted in micrological acts of lin- guistic, semiotic, and phonetic enunciation, suturing the subject within the exist- ing, universally accessible reality of technological and ideological reification. The third posit ion on silence and negat ion is of course Theodor W. Adornos denial of the historical accessibility of a continuing culture of the bour- geois subject. It constituted in many ways a total reversal of both the Soviet Unions revolutionary annihilation of the subject and Cages suturing of the sub- ject in an anomic and technological order. From the start, Adorno distances his project from even considering the option of a culture of revolutionary political aspirations, just as, to the same extent, he will eventually cast critical doubts on Cages culture of the collective acts of micrological liberation. Adornos is a posi- tion in which the destruction of bourgeois subjectivity (caused by World War II and the Holocaust as much as by the emerging powers of a universally controlling culture industry) is considered as a condition of finality: in tandem, these forces have annihilated the discursive conventions, psychic processes, and social institu- t ions that had previously induced the format ion of a (bourgeois) subject . Ultimately, Adornos radical negativityperhaps most importantdenies the credibility of any traditional form of cultural representation that claims to articu- late and mediate subjective experience, and, at least in this very negation, the OCTOBER 142 work of silence and refusal performs acts of solidarity with the actual subjects of physical and psychic annihilation in recent history. Yet Adornos aesthetic negativity is not only compelled by gestures of solidarity with the victims of the past; it also subverts and resists the ideological agenda of the linguistic apparatus of repression in the present. Adornos strategies of writerly with- drawal as a negation of immediate communication resist ideologys claim to appear once again as the natural. His syntactical and grammatical torsions and distortions dissolve what Roman Jakobson once called the grime of language: precisely those unconscious ideological identities that appear as seemingly guaranteed by the itera- tive and affirmative capacities of the language of the everyday in the same manner that Stella eliminates once again all possibilities of a reference to the iconicity of everyday life from his work. It is precisely this conflict, namely the situation of an avant-garde culture after the total failure of enlightenment, that Adorno and Horkheimer had recognized in 1947. Their description seems to match the conflict- ed forms of abstraction and meaning production that govern the Black Paintings and their titles, when they state the following: if Enlightenment does not accommo- date reflection on its recidivist element, then it seals its own fate. Pragmatized logic yields to the violence of rationalism and positivism. 14 It seems to me then that Leo Steinbergs once scandalous account of the conditions of American postwar abstraction (especially of the second-generation New York School artists who were so central to the writing of Greenberg, Fried, and Rubin) was descriptively accurate, if historically incomplete, in its analysis of the tendencies in early 1960s American painting and the criticism that accompa- nied it. It is worth quoting at length: In the criticism of the relevant paintings there is rarely a hint of expressive purpose, nor recognition that pictures function in human experience. The painters industry is a closed loop. The search for the holistic design is justified and self-perpetuating. Whether this search is still the exalted Kantian process of self-criticism seems questionable; the claim strikes me rather as a remote intellectual analogy. And other analogies suggest themselves, less intellectual but closer to home. It is probably no chance coincidence that the descriptive terms which have dominated American formalist criticism these past fifty years run paral- lel to the contemporaneous evolution of the Detroit automobile. 15 Situating the work of Frank Stella within that historical trajectory would also allow us to understand that to take the implications of his three titles in the Black Paintings seriously does not establish an unbridgeable chasm between the Black Painting as Diagram 143 14. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1987), p. 236. 15. Leo Steinberg, Reflections on the State of Criticism (1972), reprinted in Branden Joseph, ed., Robert Rauschenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 28. Paintings and the subsequent series of the Aluminum and Copper paintings: their apparently anodyne and totally dehistoricized expansion of abstraction into the field of the spatialthe sculptural, if not the quasi-architectural. Quite the oppo- site: the new technocratic order and the large scale of those series deliberately sus- pend themselves between the design culture of the corporate logo and the deco- ration of the lobby of the very corporation for which they might serve as brand. They quite accurately point to the historical affinity and continuity between totali- tarian politics in the recent past and corporate culture in the present. It is no small achievement for Stella to have envisioned the fate of abstraction as early as he did, and to have mimetically and relentlessly subjected abstraction itself to its proper historical dynamics: to relegate its utopian aspirations to the last resort of corporate decoration, of which Stellas later work would become a voluntary and inextricable part. OCTOBER 144