Reinventing the grid
In 1972 John Elderfield wrote in Artforum, “…if grids has their heyday in minimalism and in the 1960s, clearly they are not worked out yet.”1 Twenty-two years later it seems that the significance of this paradoxical and enduring emblem is still being explored, the latest example being the exhibition Reinventing the Grid.
The grid is literarly and metaphorically infinite, potentially occupying both material and spiritual realms. With its occupying both material and spiritual realms. With its associative and descriptive properties, the grid may appear at once illusory and logical, utilitarian and beautiful. This duality of functions may disorientate the viewer who is confronted by objects that might allude simultaneously to the cool rationality of science (the quasi-scientific fields of measuring and mapping) and to the utopian ideals of high modernism (geometric abstraction as the model of a social ideal). The grids veiled complexity (or deceptive simplicity) resists quick conclusions – after all, your abstraction may be mu figuration.
By definition a grid cannot be reinvented, it is simply a network of lines. Vessel-like, however, the neutrality of those intersecting lines is transformative. The work selected for this show refuted a singular, coherent reading and what emerges is the grid’s resistances to be neatly catalogued, with contradictory interpretations arising as every intersection.
Decentralised the grid is anti-narrative. There is no beginning here and no end, the support merely operating as a container, or snap-shot, of a moment in space. Playing with this authority of infinity, Angela Brennan’s work Untitled 1994 utilises smudged, fragile, pastel colours that intimate rather than state the presence of the grid that floats disempowered in a finite expanse. Conversely, Louise Paramor’s sculpture Shazam