PLAY IT AGAIN: Geometric Abstraction and the Remake
Geometric abstraction, dreadfully serious purists may argue, is besieged territory. Design sweeps right in, the plunderer’s ruthless lust in its eye, whenever it needs a ready-made language that gives off the whiff of sleek smartness without demanding an actual investment of thought in return. In this way, what was once the militant visual wing of progressive lines of political thought has been reduced to the lowest common denominator of showrooms, trade fair stalls, boutiques, corporate lobbies, websites and easy-to-digest graphics. But geometric abstractionists, incorrigible and determined, continue to organize pockets of resistance. They search on for strategies through which they can re-insert a level of criticality into their practices. In recent years one of the most effective of these has been the remake. The remake is the name that has been given to one of Hollywood’s most disliked products: the film that simply copies an earlier one. Even hardcore movie geeks look down on it, when they don’t neglect it altogether. In its poverty, however, it provided an interesting vehicle for a slew of cinephilic video and filmic artists who came of age in the 1990s. As Sven Lutticken has proposed, artist such as Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe initiated an alternative form of the remake as a critical practice which “sees the first film not as an original to be followed, if only for its storyline, but as something which is to be questioned, and which in turn questions the present.”1 The original—and the context from which it emerges—is an object that should be interrogated, and that should be used to interrogate present historical circumstances, the context of the remake. Although the remake entered art production through video and filmic installation, in recent years it has found a warm reception among certain painters. It should be pointed out that in its transition from the moving-image context to that of painting’s static and flat plane, it has undergone necessary readjustments. At the Musee de la Ville de Paris in 2007, Francois Morellet exhibited a series of paintings that “copied” eleven tiny works he produced in 1952. The only difference was that the size of the remakes was calculated so that they would be exactly four times as large as the originals. Morellet titled the exhibition Blow-Up. In this way he not only addressed the governing process of production employed and called up the ghost of Antonioni, already spooking things up a bit, but invoked Brian De Palma and the economy of remake. After all, one should remember that Blow-Up was “remade” in 1981as Blow-Out, a haunted house of a movie, populated by all the dead who spook the scene of American politics; a movie that perhaps even signals the death of the scene itself as something independent from the Big Interests that now fund it. Being haunted by lost possibilities was precisely what animated Morellet’s cleverly playful show. Between drawing on the notion of the remake and staying within the bounds of the systems-aesthetics/geometric abstraction that has characterized his practice, Morellet invited a number of questions. Is he enlarging the repertoire of systems-aesthetics through the remake or is there an ulterior motive? Is he enlarging the work so that it can participate in our attention economies? (The original paintings would obviously make too small a splash in the sites of spectacle, which include both galleries and museums these days.) Is he adjusting to market demands—not in some vulgar sense of trying to cash in, but by acknowledging that a certain size is necessary to cross out of a new threshold of “invisibility”? And if this is the case, if Morellet’s “blowing up” is a reactive move, can it still have a redemptive edge or a critical aspect? These questions, left answered, are what allows us—or forces us—to consider how Morellet’s remakes function against the horizon provided by current socio-economic conditions. In other words, haunted by unanswerable questions, by the certainty that some previously available critical possibilities are no longer available to his paintings, Morellet’s remakes force us to consider them against existing material conditions, against that which has eradicated those very possibilities. Eugenio Espinoza, like Morellet, has also been spending time in the realm of the remake in recent years. While he was still a student, in 1972, he was invited to present a project at the Ateneo de Caracas, a sort of grungy kunsthalle. At the time, he chose to construct his first “Impenetable”—a grid painting that was the same size as the floor area of the room in which it is exhibited. Instead of being hung on the wall, however, it was laid out horizontally, at knee-to-thigh-height. Covering the entire exhibition area, it forbade the viewer access to this very area, to the “natural” location of the viewer vis-à-vis paintings. It served as a barricade that forced a shift in attention: rather than considering the work itself, the viewer had to consider instead her own situation, the mise en scene that the painting created by refusing her entry into the room where the work was. The original “Impenetrable” is very much of its time. It took off from and added to certain currents of thought that were in the air. In the late 1960s, Venezuelan-German artist Gego had turned geometric abstraction—the grid in particular—into an exploration of the contingent architectural features of an exhibition site, while extending the work beyond its physical limitations by including the use of light and the play of shadow as compositional elements. Helio Oiticica was working on interactive, participatory environments that violated the previously extant boundaries between viewer and work. Espinoza lined himself within this general field of thought, but he used geometric abstraction as a critical tool in a different way. While the two older artists immerse the viewer in phenomenologically complex experiences, Espinoza coldly kept her out of things. In the process, he made her think not so much of the experiential possibilities as much of discursive ones. The way his “Impenetrable” placed the viewer in a particular position served as an allegory of the way the institution itself provided as series of determinant factors that shaped the condition in which the viewer could function. Denying the viewer access was a way to return to her a kind spectatorial agency by engendering the possibility of making her self-aware of the conditions she functioned in. From the turn of the millennium on, Espinoza has been engaged in a kind of self-archeological project. He has been mining, rethinking and reproducing his own work from the 1970s and 1980s. Objects and proposals that have already lived a public life have been reappearing, creating a kind of parade of doppelgangers. In 2005, Espinoza remade his original “Impenetrable” at Locust Projects in Miami. Instead of blocking off the entire exhibition space, however, he divided it—and blocked access to only one part. This gave the work an almost specimen-like quality. Rather than the “Impenetrable” itself, we got the staged model of it. Literally doubled, it was doubled as a stage-set of itself, which meant that more than the reproduction of a previously existing object what we got was a proposal regarding the roles that have been closed to a painting that wants to function critically.
