buchloh on stella

8/10/2019 Buchloh on Stella

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Frank Stella. Die Fahne Hoch. 1958. 2013 Frank Stella / Artists RightsSociety (ARS), New York.


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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 BruceGlaser in 1964, Stella made a rather surprising and suddenly aggressive remark.1 Itmight have been partially triggered by an earlier comment that Robert Rosenblumhad made when reviewing an exhibition of Stellas Black Paintings in which he hadreferred to them as diagrams.2 Stella stated: A diagram is not a painting; its assimple 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 thatStellas work from the moment of 195859 seems to pose: What type or variationof abstraction had been invented by Stella at that time, and how does it relate tothe infinitely complex network of positions in abstraction found in both prewarand postwar painterly culture? In fact, one of the primary difficulties historianshave faced has been precisely one of differentiating Stellas work from both theabstraction 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 HarvardUniversity, April 8, 2006, organized by Harry Cooper and Megan Luke. At the time, the lecture wasmet 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 inunchanged and unedited form as a contribution to what seems to be an overdue reevaluation ofStellas fundamentally important early work.1. Bruce Glaser, Questions to Stella and Judd, in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A CriticalAnthology(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


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128 OCTOBER

modernist abstraction governing New York painting since the AbstractExpressionists, especially concerning the legacies of Barnett Newman and AdReinhardt. Already in 194950, one could encounter a multiplicity of operationsperforming acts of aesthetic withdrawal and negation by redeploying conventions

of nonrepresentational painting in the most unorthodox and for the longest timeillegible way.In a 1965 catalogue essay for the exhibition Three American Painters at

the Fogg Art Museum, Michael Fried suggested that Stellas work had emergedfrom a dialogue with the key figures of Abstract Expressionism3it was not until1970, with William Rubins 1970 monographic catalogue on the artist, that thedegree to which Stella had also been in dialogue with the paintings of JasperJohns became clear.4 But if Stellas practice was entangled with and suspendedbetween 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 theformalist traditions of New York School modernism.

Stellas remark about the diagram introduces a key term that points to theartists paradoxical conception of authorial identity. This will become all the moreevident when we consider the impact of Stellas diagrammatic conception of thework on his Minimalist followers, especially, perhaps, Carl Andre. On the onehand, the statement asserts Stellas continuing confidence in artistic authorship,not to say originality (one would only have to think of statements and works madeby 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 torecognize the underlying conservative agenda in Stellas statement). After all, thestatement stresses the uncontested primacy of painting as artistic practice (a posi-

tion that Stella would voice again and again, often even disparaging the shift frompainting to sculpture in the work of the Minimalists, and always belittling his ownoccasional attempts at sculpture at that time). Yet it also forces us to recognize thatStellas abstractionsunlike the Black Paintings by Rauschenberg, on the onehand, and Reinhardt, on the otherwould be the only ones that could in fact berightfully called diagrammatic since they are actually enforcing a given spatialand linear symmetrical schema that rigorously displaces all claims and pretensesto compositional decision-making processes or authorial intentions.

Rather than seeing Stellas abstraction as the culmination of modernistpainting because of its medium-specificity, self-reflexivity, and opticality and itsengagement with the strategies of painting as shape and deductive structuretheposition for which Michael Fried has argued so powerfully again and againIwant to suggest that the order of the diagram as a readymade formal organizationof 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).


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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 imposedby his foremost critic at the time. And lastly, looking at the work in those termsmight even help us to overcome the binary opposition set up by critics in the1960s and 70s, in particular the opposition between Clement Greenberg andMichael Fried, on the one hand, and that of their most powerful opponent, LeoSteinberg, on the other.

The diagrammatic is the one variety of abstraction that recognizes externallyexisting 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 thatabstraction had recruited for its emerging morphologies in 1912with geometricand stereometric structures, biomorphic and mechanomorphic matrices, and thematrix of language itself. As with all the underlying epistemes deployed by abstrac-tion, the diagrammatic often operates in tandem with other resources but issufficiently differentiated from the other types to be recognizable as a distinctposition within the gamut of abstraction.

For example, Mondrians so-called Checkerboard paintings from 1919, with

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Stella. Reichstag. 1958. 2013 Frank Stella /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.


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which Stellas paintings were initially compared on several occasions, clearly exem-plify a type of abstraction whose inner logic and spatial organization aim at adialectics 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 thisdescription alone it is obvious that a comparison between Mondrian and Stella isultimately nonsensical, since Mondrians paintings obviously do not conform to thedefinition of the diagram as a purely quantitative order or as a schema of registrationand data collection. Even less do Mondrians Checkerboards qualify to be alignedwith 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 quiteappropriate 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 flatbedpicture 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, bulletinboards, any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on whichdata is entered, on which information may be received, printed,impressedwhether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of thelast fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation in whichthe painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience ofnature, but of operational processes.5

2. The Striations

Stellas work prior to the Black Paintings is defined by the almost total andsystematic abolition of planar chromatic forms in the manner of Rothko, forexample, whom Stella apparently admired early on, or of Reinhardt, who repre-sented for Stella, along with Barnett Newman and Pollock, one of the foundationsof postwar American abstraction. Stella had acquired a Black Painting byReinhardt upon the completion of his own series of Black Paintings in 1960, andin 1967, on the occasion of Reinhardts death, he said: He cant play the gameanymore, but nobody can get around the paintings anymore either. If you don'tknow what theyre about you dont know what painting is about.6

In Three American Painters, Michael Fried argues that it was the discoveryof 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 thepicture surface by an accumulation of parallel bands. By contrast, William Rubinand others argued that Stella had not actually encountered any work by Newman

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5. Leo Steinberg, Other Criter ia, 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, AdReinhardt(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), p. 197, note 2.


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before Newmans exhibition at French & Co. in 1959, but that he had not onlyseen 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 wouldhave seen all of Johnss key works from 1954 onwards.

While there can be no doubt about the absolute importance to Stella of hisdiscovery of Johns, it is astonishing to see that the presence and impact ofRauschenberg (whom Stella met as early as 1957 and whose worka BlackPaintinghe also acquired) have disappeared almost entirely from the discussionof 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 yearslater in the Fogg catalogue on Stellas early work).7

It seems obvious from a comparison of Stellas early 1958 paintings and apainting 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 tothe tremendous shock triggered by his discovery of Johnss Flag (195455). It isvery likely that Stella saw Yoicks along with Rauschenbergs Red Paintings and thefirst Combines when they were shown together at the Egan Gallery in 1954, butquestions of influence are not my concern here. What I am interested in are the


7. Harry Cooper and Megan Luke, Frank Stel la 1958 (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum,Harvard University, 2006).

Robert Rauschenberg.Yoicks.1953. Robert RauschenbergFoundation / Licensed by VAGA,New York, NY.


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formal shifts and procedural licenses that paintings such as Yoicks offered toStellas early work.

Rauschenbergs linear painting and cumulative composition provide themost dramatic evidence of the way in which he and Johns systematically emptied

out that which had been regarded in Abstract Expressionism as the most sacredsite of the subjects articulation: painterly gesture and the ductusof 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 ostentatiousdiffidence with regard to the manual execution of painting, negating skill just asmuch as expressivity.

At the same time, the more or less regularized stacking of randomly executedstriations betrayed an indifference to traditional compositional demands. Thesewould 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 formationswould become systematized and fully regular ized in the diagrams of the Black

Paintings, and before they would be forged into a symmetrical scheme that wouldprohibit even the last residual compositional decision or slightest deviation).

But it should also be mentioned immediately that the very schema of amerely striational accumulation of linear marks traversing the entire picture

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Robert Ryman. Untitled. 1958. 2013 Robert Ryman /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.


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plane will not only emerge as one of Stellas early key pictorial strategies, it willsimultaneously become the matrix of the work of Robert Ryman, Stellas counter-figure and great historical complement, ignored or simply written out of thathistorical moment by Fried and Rubin in their formalist criticism.

The exclusion of Ryman from Rubins and Frieds modernist formalismprobably resulted not only from the difficulty of seeing his work in Greenbergianterms but also, and perhaps more so, from their inability to see that Ryman, verysimilarly to Stella, had actually achieved a synthesis of modernist abstraction andDuchampian 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 theprincipal formal organization in Stellas work after Rauschenberg and Johns.Stellas Coney Island, along with Blue Horizon and Astoria, undoubtedly some of thekey 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 painterlyexecution, Stella both regularizes and steadily works at detaching the striations


Ryman. A Painting of Twelve Strokes, Measuring 11 1/4" x11 1/4" Signed at the Bottom Right Corner. 1961.

2013 Robert Ryman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.


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from the last residues of an expressive, to say nothing of a representational, func-tion. Increasingly, this process of regularization and serial repetition came toeliminate even the last remnants of the authorial investment that Rauschenbergand 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 withthe convention of the painted horizon line in works such as Plum Island (Luncheonon the Grass) (1958), which mimic the landscape genre, towards a more deadpanand seemingly self-referential placement and execution of striations in his subse-quent paintings. Both the sheer flamboyant violence of Rauschenbergs assault onpictorial and painterly conventions and the extreme subtlety of Johnss ironic andmelancholic mourning of the loss of modernisms abstract morphologies and com-positions are now deleted from Stellas increasingly rigorous structuralorganizations of process and picture.

Paradoxically, as though still in dialogue with Johnss scriptural and textualthresholds 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 andRymans paintings of that moment emphasize the laterality of reading a paintingin opposition to the vertical/horizontal scanning of its traditional spatial/percep-tual order). And the regularity of the cumulative lines points more towards theorder 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 ofcourse to be found in both American and European work of the 1950s and 60s: inNewman, for example; Johnss white and Piero Manzonis achromatic paintings;and in Stellas shift to the Black Paintings, which are distinctly achromatic. Stellahad repeatedly emphasized during the first reception of his Black Paintings thathe 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 Stellascommitment to black in 1959. Each of these artists had of course rather differentmotivations for their epurationof the chromatic. Their engagement with themonochrome or the achromepronounced different historical inflections.Nevertheless, they are contextually linked (by, if nothing else, their shared contes-tation of color, the absolute necessity of denaturing the painting, and by theirshared strategies of depleting and homogenizing the painterly surface in favor ofa unified tone and hue). They also invite comparisons with the work of at leastsome of the key figures (e.g., Newman and Johns) in bringing about the sameoppositions of color/non-color, even if in extremely different terms. The dialecti-

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8. Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography (1931), in Michael Jennings et al., eds.,Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,vol. 2, part 2: 19311934 (Harvard Universit y Press, Cambridge, MA,.2005), p. 518.

cal halves of an opposition of pure monochrome and achrome were confrontedeither 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 thewithdrawal 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. Itseems 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 moregeneral 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 tothe emphatic elimination of modeling and the illusions of depth and volume thathe almost fanatically insisted upon in the shift towards the Black Paintings in1958. Reading his emphatic statements about the absolute necessity of forcingdepth and volume out of his painting (and with the removal of depth and volumethe spatial registers of the subjects reading projections) could remind us at timesof Walter Benjamins description of Atgets achievement as one of having suckedout 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 eventhe slightest reminiscence of corporeality, of bodily plenitude, of the fullness ofthe somatic register of painting, from painting itself? This strategy must point to amajor 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 BlackPaintings, three of whichDie Fahne Hoch, Reichstag, and Arbeit Macht Freinotori-ously made explicit references to the Fascist history of Nazi Germany and theHolocaust. For modernist art historians, the precarious questions posed by the titlinghave for the most part, and until very recently, been either ignored or repressed inwhat 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 Stellasseemingly flip reminiscences of having seen Nazi architecture and newsreels. Hebrushes them aside by explaining them in terms of the slightly juvenile delinquency


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and overall provocative callousness that the artist seems to have been known for atthe time. But Rubin immediately accompanies those brief comments with the firmand prohibitive caveat that Stella would be horrified at the idea that the viewermight use them as a springboard to content. Tellingly, the title that Rubin omits

altogether is clearly the most stunning and provocative reference altogether: ArbeitMacht Frei, the infamous inscription over the gate to the Nazi death camp atAuschwitz Birkenau.

Six years later, in an essential catalogue devoted entirely to the BlackPaintings, Brenda Richardson provided the most exhaustive information on thetitles and their historical references. But in her overall argument, she attempts toconvey the sense that in overarching mood and subject matter, the Black Paintingsmerely concern generic disasters. And these disasters, according to Richardson,just inexplicably happened to range from the Nazi Holocaust to crime-riddenAfrican-American New York neighborhoods, from drug and jazz clubs (e.g., ClubOnyx) to the tragic girlfriends sometimes encountered in these clubs (i.e.,Jill).9

Perhaps not surprisingly, art historians in Germany, where Stella has enjoyedan amazingly strong reception history and remains a central artistic figure for anumber of the formalist art historians there, pass over the implications of thesetitles altogether. They seem to follow all too gladly Rubins lead, granting Stella anexemption from the burdens of historical reference by diagnosing his decision touse these titles as mere pranksterism and insisting on withdrawing the artiststitles from any interpretive account: neither Gottfried Boehm in his essay on theBlack Paintings in 1977 nor Gudrun Inboden or Johannes Meinhardt in theiressays of 1989 pay any attention whatsoever to the three Nazi titles in particular orthe 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 thehistory of modernist abstraction would eventually be associated with an actualmemory 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 participationin a history of the disavowal and repression of that destruction.

Or, as Jaleh Mansoor aptly phrases it in her discussion of Piero Manzoniswork: postwar monochromes and their diagrammatic composit ional matricesarticulate the irrationality folded within modernist rationality, the gulag in themodernist 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 positionDie Fahne Hochin a dialogic relation-

ship with Johnss American Flags, be they red, white, and blue or monochrome

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9. Brenda Richardson,Frank Stella: The Black Paintings (Baltimore MD: the Baltimore Museumof Art, 1976).10. Jaleh Mansoor, Piero Manzoni: We Want to Organize Disintegration, in October 95 (Winter2001), pp. 2853.


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and dialectical sublation? Or are we looking at a particular and unique type ofconversation 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 ofthat which has been displaced. Each new generation has to perform the process ofabolition and annihilation, as though to manifestly signal to the world that thenew artistic subject could only be born from the parricidal dialoguethat the

new subject can only appear after having vandalized and internalized the previousgeneration, 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 mostprovocative scandals in Johns had been the fact that painting had once again

become iconic (after all, one of the paradoxes with which Flaghad confronted itsaudiences was precisely this sudden return to an unfathomable condition oficonicity within an otherwise rigorously diagrammatic order). One only has to

read the fulminating vehemence with which Carl Andre, one of Stellas closestfriends at the time, ridicules that return to a popular iconicity in the early 1960sto 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 notimmediately erased, and painting would once again be manifestly subjected to the

readymade symmetry and reduced to the suffocatingly anti-compositional orderof the diagram.

What we witness in Stellas Black Paintings first of all is the manifest transfor-

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Johns.White Flag. 1955. Jasper Johns / Licensed byVAGA, New York, NY.


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mation of what had been once the emancipatory promises of the modernist gridand of monochrome painting into carceral diagrammatic structures. Therepressed dark underside of the modernist grid and of monochromy returns nowas an episteme of confinement and control, and the inscription of the spatial sym-

metry and ornamental order now operate within a reductivist space ofsymmetrical overdetermination. After all, these are the features that distinguishthe diagram from all other epistemes of abstraction (the musical, the linguistic,the biomorphic, the geometrical, the stereometrical, the mechanomorphic) inthat the diagram (like the readymade) explicitly acknowledges the ruling condi-tions of external control and production as anterior and superior to thesubjectivist 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 coagulatedground of newspaper strips on the one hand and the waxy surface of encaustic on

the other . . . 11would 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 applicationand 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 somewhatparochial and comforting lore surrounding Johnss Flag, from his origin storyclaiming that the idea of painting a flag had come to him in a dream, to the queerand quaint nod to Betsy Ross. Of course, we know all too well that painterly orartistic oeuvres do not acquire their historical identity from a single work. At thesame time, we recognize the defining power of one particular invention or inter-vention, the singular work or gesture that signals a decisive departure, epistemicbreak, or historical reorientation that an artist can initiate.

JohnssFlagundoubtedly was one of those moments in which the place andfunction of painting in the present are fundamentally redefined. And StellasBlack Paintings undoubtedly responded to and challenged that definition on all

accounts, including what I would like to call Stellas renewal of the law of thefather in painting.

It is then through the series of Black Paintings that Stella repositions himselfin direct dialogue with Barnett Newman, across and above the encounter and


11. Rosalind Krauss, Jasper Johns: The Functions of Irony, October 2 (Summer 1976), p. 95.


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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 thattime David Joselits important essay on diagrams in Dada, which would explore with great lucidity thequestion 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 DadaSeminars(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 ofRauschenberg and Johns.

After all, Stellas tripartite incantation of the actual conditions governinghistorical experience after Fascism made good on questions that had been insis-

tently if covertly posed by Newman. The work of Johns and Rauschenberg bycontrast had either shifted the debate completely away from any of the questionsconcerning the (im)-possibility of the production of a post-totalitarian culture orhad blissfully ignored these questions, disputing their relevance. Stellas BlackPaintings 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 formalistsublimation of the historical dimension of the work of art. Therefore it wouldseem all the more appropriate at this point in time not to walk away from Stellastitles with the kind of falsely comforting complacency that can be seen inRichardsons antiseptic text on Arbeit Macht Freiwhen she writes that

both Die Fahne Hoch and Arbeit Macht Freiwere assigned Nazi relatedtitles that would indicate a relationship between the cross pattern ofthe paintings and the cross references of the titles. Stella rejectedtitles specifically referential to religion, suggesting that he did not findthem meaningful. He felt that religious symbols or allusions had lessreferential potency over time than did political symbols or allusions.12

But in the present it is simply no longer possible to completely disregard Stellastextual strategies in linking the second, third, and eighth paintings of the firstgroup of fifteen Black Paintings to the history of the totalitarian destruction ofbourgeois Enlightenment culture. Or to simply repress the ramifications of those

paintings (in the manner that Arbeit Macht Frei seems to have been almost totallyexcluded from exhibitions, undoubtedly because of its title, since as late as 1976,in Brenda Richardsons catalogue, it is the only painting listed with the entryexhibition history: none).

We are in no way proposing a simple reversal of the prohibition of reading apainting 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 conditionof 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


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peculiar difficulty that these paintings titling poses and proposesprecisely withregard to the possible and impossible forms of meaning-production within non-representational painting after World War II. Furthermore, we should developmore of an understanding of the particular rhetoric of provocative enunciationand 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, whichotherwise tend to invoke a wide variety of calamities, sites of minor disaster, placesof deviance. This strange imbalance between three and twenty could at firstappear to simply dissolve the focus on those paintings that explicitly refer to thegreatest catastrophe of human history. And we would have to wonder if theirplacement within that series would not even banalize the reference within astrange gesture of equivocation, effacement, if not scandalous equation of minorcalamities 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 ofStellas Black Paintings in 1959. The first model is one I would associate withMalevichs abstraction and that of the Russian avant-garde at large. It conceived ofitself as early as the prerevolutionary moment of 1915 as a cultural representationde-privileging the bourgeois subject and its cultural conventions, emphasizinginstead the imminence of a newly emerging class of proletarian identity that

would inevitably engender new forms of subject ive articulation and collect ive cul-tural representation. Abstraction would induce cognitive and perceptual forms ofexperience 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 andFried 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 artiststhan 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 theSoviet and the de Stijl avant-gardes, and it was certainly central to the aesthetic



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project of Stellas predecessors Rauschenberg and Johns. Nevertheless, it is by nomeans evident that Cages negations would have had any impact on the formation

of Stellas own project of abstraction as refusal and negation. Inevitably, Cagespropositions exclude any and all reflections on the class basis of subject forma-

tion, and, even more important, they voluntarily forfeit the progressive trajectoryof a cultural practice that envisages the constitution of new forms of subjectivityin 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, preciselywithin the advanced apparatus of technology and, on the other, within the nonhier-

archical structures of anomic existence and total de-sublimation, since these are thesingular 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 structureswouldnever be transfigured into concrete acts of political opposition or articulations of

collective agency, nor would they open up any new spaces of resistance reachingbeyond 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 position on silence and negation 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 politicalaspirations, just as, to the same extent, he will eventually cast critical doubts onCages culture of the collective acts of micrological liberation. Adornos is a posi-

tion in which the destruction of bourgeois subjectivity (caused by World War IIand 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 forceshave annihilated the discursive conventions, psychic processes, and social institu-tions that had previously induced the formation of a (bourgeois) subject.

Ultimately, Adornos radical negativityperhaps most importantdenies thecredibility of any traditional form of cultural representation that claims to articu-late and mediate subjective experience, and, at least in this very negation, the

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Paintings and the subsequent series of the Aluminum and Copper paintings: theirapparently 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 ashe did, and to have mimetically and relentlessly subjected abstraction itself to its

proper historical dynamics: to relegate its utopian aspirations to the last resort ofcorporate decoration, of which Stellas later work would become a voluntary andinextricable part.

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