Vermeir and Heiremans’ Home Economics

Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans’ collaborative practice revolves around the house they inhabit and share, an industrial building the artists renovated into a loft, in the Brussels municipality of Schaerbeek. Since 2006, their joint oeuvre has taken the guise of a project titled A.I.R. (short for “artist in residence”), in which Vermeir and Heiremans conceive of the loft they co-own as both an artwork and a financial asset. This “art house,” as the loft is aptly called, remains inaccessible to the public but functions as the source material for what the artists call a set of “mediated extensions.” These mediated extensions, which are extrapolated and abstracted by the artists from their house, together form the artistic output of A.I.R. In this essay, I consider two works by Vermeir and Heiremans which are intimately connected to one another: Art House Index and MASQUERADE. Focusing especially on the latter piece, I will discuss how Vermeir and Heiremans’ work shows us the workings of real abstraction in both financialization and the attention economy. Ultimately, however, I am primarily interested in thinking about how this showing not only points toward what is properly unrepresentable about real abstraction, but also renders the work itself similarly elusive and, at times, mystifying. My discussion of Vermeir and Heiremans’ pieces, then, is fundamentally about how, if at all, artistic practice can currently grapple with real abstraction without becoming its mere mimicry.

Art House Index (henceforth: AHI) was first presented as a performance at the 2013 Istanbul Biennial, mimicking an “initial public offering” to the market of an index that the artists supposedly developed, a financial tool to render the economic value of both their art house and artistic practice based on this piece of real estate more transparent and more liquid (extension #21). The performance consisted of a halting public Skype conversation between the artists and a financial analyst, who discussed the possibility as well as the pros and cons of such an index. At first, the analyst appeared to be streaming in live from a stock exchange’s trading pit. Finally, however, in a decidedly Brechtian move, it became clear that he was performing in front of a green screen (the use of this technique being revealed by its malfunctioning), demonstrating that the whole set-up was staged, that the Skype itself was not a live stream but rather a prerecorded video, and that the index itself was a hoax. The disruptive nature of the performance was exacerbated when, unexpectedly, a group of activists unexpectedly interrupted AHI, draping themselves in protest banners and lying down in front of the artists during the performance, only to be escorted out one by one. They had taken the artwork for an earnest financialization scheme, and had therefore chosen the performance as the site for their protest against the corporate sponsorship and the political complacency of the biennial, which they saw as complicit with the gentrification of Istanbul: “At ten-minute intervals,” one account of the performance states, “someone would stand up from the crowd, show off a T-shirt and a faux-branded banner printed with the names of gentrifying neighborhoods in Istanbul, and then drape himself or herself on the floor in the middle of the room, only to be quickly picked up and hastily dispatched by three members of the [biennial’s] loyal production team.”[1]

The mock-index was presented again in a 2014 installation which also featured glossy hand-outs promoting the index (extension #22) and again in 2015, where partly in response to the Istanbul protesters’ perception of the work, the artists chose to actually develop the index they had initially only proposed. It is still active today as an algorithmic instrument charting the market value of the art house as well as its mediated extensions, collecting and balancing, in real-time, information from real estate and currency markets. Important for my purposes here, it also weighs in on the visibility of Vermeir and Heiremans’ artistic practice, which is benchmarked by, for instance, website clicks and Google search queries. The actual Art House Index (AHI) (extension #23) thus exists online as a live algorithm collecting and combining market information in real time. The index’s movement is visualized by a graph.[2]

In the same year, the duo went on to produce MASQUERADE, a video work which, like the original Istanbul performance of Art House Index, narrates and speculates about the initial public offering of the index. This time, however, the index was effectively operational by the time MASQUERADE was produced. The work uses some footage from the Istanbul performance and protests, but consists mostly of interviews and dramatic episodes taking place in sets vaguely reminiscent of such institutional settings as the auction house, the trading pit, and the courtroom. One interviewee is the financial analyst who appeared in the Istanbul performance, and whose name, we learn, is “Frank Goodman”—the name of a professional imposter who is the protagonist in Herman Melville’s satirical 1857 novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, which also lends the video its name.[3]

MASQUERADE is well characterized by its own opening credits, which state, almost as a disclaimer: “A film it is not, unless a film means 45 exchanges conducted by characters who might pass for the errata of artistic creation.” In that description, “45 exchanges” refers to the structure of the 51-minute video, mirroring Melville’s novel, which consists of 45 short chapters. These brief chapters, however, do not exactly add up to a linear narrative but rather form an impressionistic accumulation of more or less disjointed fragments all revolving around the index, making the work hard to describe in narrative terms. The fact that these separate exchanges average a time span of just over one minute each speaks to a particularly striking formal aspect of MASQUERADE, one that undoubtedly is inspired by the financial interactions that constitute its subject matter: its speed, and the sense of confusion and bewilderment it induces in its viewers. The various short snippets that make up the work are stitched together in such a way as to prevent narrative immersion and interpretation. As a consequence of the editing, the video strikes its viewers as an accumulation of impressions, brief dialogues or statements, and scenes, rather than as the straightforward narration of a story or an event. By and large, the video sets out with what appears to be a reception in celebration of the initial public offering of the index. These first few minutes of the video are followed by a long middle section which consists mostly of interviews or news report-style clips, with various commentators (including Frank Goodman, but also a variety of other characters) offering their perspectives on the index. MASQUERADE then culminates in the actual public offering, which is however interrupted by protesters—but not activists protesting against gentrification. The angry mob that briefly makes an appearance at the end of the video consists of ‘old school’ art collectors who fear that the index will render impossible their privileged position as an elite of art market insiders.

What makes it challenging to go beyond a very basic description of the events depicted in MASQUERADE is that there is yet another layer of editing at play in the video, one that further complicates the piece. Neither the single-channel (extension #27) nor the multi-screen (extension #28) installations of the work show MASQUERADE as a static, finished video piece. Instead, these installations are connected, via the Internet, to the actual AHI graph, the movement of which causes the video installations to alternate between two different versions of the work: one which is completely finished (the ‘A track’ of the video), and one which contains bloopers and errors of all sorts, and which was not post-produced (its ‘B track’). To put it simply: when the AHI graph goes up and the total financial value of Vermeir and Heiremans’ loft and artistic practice increases, the finalized film is shown. When the graph droops down, however, the viewer is presented with the unpolished version. This latter permutation, the unfinished video, is easily recognizable on account of its generally poor sound quality and the prevalence of non-operative green screens. Since the AHI graph is updated every ten seconds, this means that every ten seconds there is a potential ‘switch’ from MASQUERADE’s ‘A track’ to its ‘B track’ (which happens when the upward movement of the graph becomes a downward movement) or vice versa (which happens when the falling graph starts ascending again). As a result of this added layer of live editing by the AHI graph, the chances of watching the same version of the 51-minute video are made essentially negligible, and the viewers’ desires for narrative immersion are further frustrated.

When installed in an exhibition space, MASQUERADE is projected alongside the AHI graph, which makes it possible for viewers to apprehend the connection between the narrative video and the movements of the graph. In the single-channel version, the latter is phenomenally unavailable, leaving viewers puzzled as to the source of MASQUERADE’s constant permutations. Crucially, however, Vermeir and Heiremans are sensitive to how contexts—institutional as well as discursive—co-determine the reception of their work. In their practice, they conceive of their works as conversation pieces in an ongoing process of critical artistic research. The essentially dialogic nature of this research process, in which they involve a number of parties and interlocutors (including, at times, myself), also comes to the fore in the presentation of the work, which the artists do not only, and not even primarily, show in exhibition settings. Rather, they often employ pieces like AHI and MASQUERADE in workshop or symposium contexts, rendering the works as imaginative, speculative, and provocative propositions that form the basis for critical discussions on financialization and art. As such, situational factors mitigate the otherwise overwhelming complexity of a work like MASQUERADE—which, if viewed without proper contextualization, would potentially be as mystificatory as financial capital itself.

Nonetheless, MASQUERADE was meticulously crafted to resist any attempted description in diegetic terms. For this reason, I have chosen here not to try and follow the plot of MASQUERADE itself, and have opted instead to focus on certain fragments of the video that I find particularly rich, and which are instructive because they stand metonymically for the whole of the work. Inevitably, my choice of scenes here is selective, and works in the service of my attempt to think through of some of the implications of what I find to be the main qualities and characteristics of the piece (including its tempo and its discontinuous nature, but also its algorithmic live editing itself), particularly when seen in relation to real abstraction.

All That is Solid

Though first introduced by Georg Simmel, the notion of real abstraction is more commonly associated with Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who grants it a pivotal role in his book Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Here, Sohn-Rethel argues that all abstract thinking, rather than existing autonomously and prior to experience, is the result of certain concrete, material, and historical conditions. More specifically, for him, all ability to think in abstractions stems from the “original” real abstraction of exchange, in which heterogeneous things become commensurable and interchangeable through the mediation of exchange-value, which operates on a principle of purely quantitative, and therefore abstract, differentiation. This principle, for Sohn-Rethel, “has no existence other than in the human mind, but […] does not spring from the mind.”[4] It is important for my purposes here that Sohn-Rethel’s magnum opus has been subject to critical reappraisal in recent years—arguably not so much for its sweeping critique of Western epistemology, but rather for what can be done with the concept of real abstraction. Jason Read has noted that, methodologically, real abstraction allows one to expand the Marxist critique of political economy with a consideration of abstractions “in terms of their concrete material conditions and effects.”[5] These effects, of course, are most acutely felt in instances of crisis, when it will seem to many “as if the mode of abstraction, namely value, has a real material existence of its own independent of the human mind.”[6]

One such instance in recent times was the global economic crisis of 2007-2008, which was instigated by the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. It is certainly against the backdrop of this financial crisis that both Vermeir and Heiremans’ practice and the revaluation of Sohn-Rethel’s work need to be thought.[7] And yet, already before this crisis (in which real estate played such a crucial role) the financial markets for land and housing had become something of a locus classicus in the critical theory and discourse on finance in abstraction. Tellingly, a 1998 essay by Fredric Jameson on land and real estate speculation is titled “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation.”[8] As this title intimates, it is in relation to the supposedly bricks-and-mortar business of real estate that the abstractions of finance—bringing about so many forms of inflation, so many bubbles—are felt to be most unbearably light.

Consider, for instance, how absolutely nothing might happen materially with or to a dwelling seen in its concrete use-value, but at the same time the mortgage to this very same dwelling may serve as a financial asset spliced into bits that are then bundled together with bits of other assets and mobilized through the circuits of financial trading worldwide.[9] This mobilization is made possible by the autonomization of exchange-value (the process of abstraction already described by Marx), and since it might also have very concrete effects in the everyday life of the dwelling’s inhabitants, who may end up losing their house, it is a real abstraction. It becomes clear here how, at bottom, it is the abstraction of the value-form itself—resulting from the split between a commodity’s quantified exchange-value and its always qualitative use-value—that accounts for real estate’s unreal state.

These uncanny effects of real abstraction on real estate are also what Vermeir and Heiremans examine in their work. A good example is the sixth of the forty-five exchanges that together make up MASQUERADE. This exchange, titled “A frontier investment opportunity,” is a mock promotional video of sorts—one that has also been released separately by the artists as a “publicity clip” prior to the completion of MASQUERADE—and unlike other scenes in the video is not filmed by a camera. Rather, it is a digital photographic collage, animated so as to offer a 360-degree view of Vermeir and Heiremans’ house. While at first sight the collage might appear as a rather seamless representation of the interior, upon closer inspection it soon becomes clear that something is off, that the image simply does not add up spatially. One notices that when looking out the windows in this collage, what we get to see is not Schaerbeek, the actual surroundings in which the house is located, but rather different city views from all over the globe cut and pasted into the window frames. Simultaneously, the names of all the cities where the house’s mediated extensions have been exhibited are shown one by one in the left-bottom corner or the screen. As such, this strangely composite image underscores the curious dialectic between localized concretion and abstracted circulation that characterizes the art house’ existence as both a material thing and a commodity, an asset moving through global financial markets. While one deciphers this image, one hears voice-overs in several languages layered on top of each other, and a promotional text scrolls by from left to right: “Behind its façade a house hides a multiplicity of forms / surprising views.” Underneath the city names, there is a digital timer ticking away. This is an image, then, of spatio-temporal simultaneity: the art house has a concrete here and now, but its abstract representations (in images, in exchange-value) are at the same time also elsewhere. Certainly, Vermeir and Heiremans seem to suggest, the art house’s exchange-value is dependent on its physical properties and its geographic embeddedness (its size, its features, the local demand for housing), but it is equally contingent on factors that are much less tangible, such as the intricate web of financial relations that make up the worldwide real estate market. The “frontier investment opportunity” scene is in that sense a concentrated image of the art house as a real abstraction, as something that leads a concrete and material existence on the one hand, and a spectral, ideational, and dematerialized one on the other. And importantly, these two modalities are brought together here through the technique of collage, implying that the concrete and abstract elements of the house cannot be neatly separated from one another while at the same time preserving their difference, emphasizing the heterogeneity and separation of the elements here held together.[10]

It has been noted that the mobilization, in finance, of abstract representations or derivatives severed from their referent is strikingly congruous with the dematerialization of the art object, which wanted to separate the artwork as idea or concept from the art object as its material substrate.[11] In another scene in MASQUERADE, this art historical referent is brought to the fore by a character claiming in an interview that AHI can fulfill her “desire for a complete dematerialization of art.” And indeed it is true that the financialization of art represented by the fictional index proposed in MASQUERADE is something like a “higher” form of art’s dematerialization, rendering everything from paintings to massive COR-TEN steel sculptures free-floating and feather-light due to their inclusion in portfolios readily exchanged on globalized markets. Clearly, however, the analogy is also perverse, since financialization aims at continuous re-commodification rather than a de-commodification of art, while conceptual art—in its inception, at least—was a troublesome attempt to emancipate art from the commodity form. In Lucy Lippard’s words, conceptualism’s dematerialization was an attempted “de-mythologization and de-commodification of art”.[12] If dematerialization in conceptual art was a strategy for artists to emancipate art from the commodity form, financialization is essentially an emancipation of the commodity form. Whereas the former aspired to undermine art objects’ fetish character in an “egalitarian pursuit of publicness,” however limited and problematic, with the latter the market eclipses the public sphere, or any space for political agency whatsoever.[13] Without any apparent irony, finance’s ideologues in MASQUERADE present the liquefaction of art through the index as a way of making access to art more equal, more democratic—echoing the rhetoric of 1960s and 1970s conceptualism that equated dematerialization with de-commodification.

“An Edifice Built by the Gazes of Others”

But as it happens, such democratic access to art, too, has been rendered as productive of exchange-value. “All that looking,” an art auctioneer asserts in MASQUERADE, “sticks to the work and increases its value. To see is already to buy, to look is to labour.” Like many scenes in the video, this moment (which takes place in a segment titled “An edifice built by the gazes of others”) might strike us as rather contrived: the auctioneer in question is played by a real-life auctioneer, somewhat amateurishly performing a fictionalized version of himself. The artificiality of his persona is further underscored by Vermeir and Heiremans’ script, which does very little to imitate the spontaneity of everyday speech and is essentially an assemblage of paraphrases and quotations from critical theory. The formula “to look is to labour,” for instance, is excerpted from Jonathan Beller’s 2006 book The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Here, Beller (in)famously furthered the claim that Marx’s labor theory of value should be elaborated into or complemented by an “attention theory of value,” as advertising in particular had posited human attentiveness as a form of productive labor.[14] Beller’s own main interest is cinema, which he posits as a precursor to techniques for the attraction, quantification, and rendering-productive of attention that we now see on the Internet—with clicks and “eyeball hang time” considered indicators of value.

However, it is clear that the attention economy also applies to—and has always applied to—visual art: “Take, for example, the case of a work of Vincent Van Gogh. The 50 million-dollar fetish character is an index of visual accretion, that is, of alienated sensual labor resultant from the mass mediation of the unique work of art.”[15] Contrary to the Benjaminian account of the withering of aura under conditions of technological reproducibility, then, under the conditions of the attention economy mass mediation and dissemination in fact serve to consolidate and valorize the status of the fetishized original.[16] David Joselit has described how artworks—or at least images of artworks—begin to function like a currency, the circulation of which becomes a means of generating value in and of itself.[17] Crucially, however, in the online attention economy—as opposed to the kind of financial trading discussed in the previous section—it is not so much the fact of circulation itself that is productive of exchange-value. What is commodified here is, indeed, attention itself—with “content” serving only as a kind of bait, more or less regardless of the nature or the qualities of that content.

For attention to become a form of productive labor, it first had to be rendered measurable, “describable in terms of abstract and exchangeable magnitudes.”[18] As such, the operations of the attention economy, like those of financialization, are founded on a fundamental abstraction—in this case the configuration of attention as quantitative rather than qualitative. As Tiziana Terranova has demonstrated, on the Internet this has meant introducing “specific techniques of evaluation and units of measurement (algorithms, clicks, impressions, tags, etc.).”[19] Such techniques of evaluation and units of measurement are incorporated in Vermeir and Heiremans’ work as well. As mentioned in the introductory section, among the determinants of the movement of the AHI graph are, for instance, the number of visitors to Vermeir and Heiremans’ own website. As such, the artists underscore the fact that their work, too, is subject to the logic of the attention economy, and stress their own practice’s immanence to its conditions.

Terranova has also described how, for an economy to arise that ascribed exchange-value to attention, attention first needed to become a scarce resource. With the hypertrophy of information and overabundance of content available online, she asserts, the fact that there exist certain neurophysiological limits to the quantity of information that humans can process, as well as (social) restrictions to time spent on content consumption, serve for the entrepreneurs of so-called “Web 2.0” as a means of reintroducing scarcity to the Internet, making it “a medium to which all the axioms of market economics can once again be applied.”[20] As a consequence, the attention economy also instigates a generalized competition for attention. The cultural expressions and symptoms of this situation are manifold (and all too familiar), but of all these, speed certainly is of particular relevance to the reading of MASQUERADE. According to Jonathan Crary, the attention economy exacerbates a cultural logic of capitalism which has been firmly in place since the advent of modernity, and demands “that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another.”[21] The video’s high-strung editing, mentioned earlier, and the resultant obstruction of immersion for the viewer, reflects this through exaggeration.

Finally, the attention economy does not remain conveniently contained within the online realm. Or rather, it was never entirely absent from the offline realm to begin with: the example of the fetishized Van Gogh painting, as a kind of “analogue” or prototypical manifestation of the logic of the attention economy, is a case in point. As the act of looking becomes increasingly productive of exchange-value, and as exchange-value co-constitutes concrete reality, the attention economy “restructure[s] the way in which we materially (re)produce our existence.”[22] Like with finance, the abstractions of the attention economy are real abstractions, operating in and on the world. An analogue to these operations can be seen in the climbing and falling of the AHI graph, which, as a representation of Vermeir and Heiremans’ house and work seen in quantitative and therefore abstract terms, has an actual impact on the viewing experience of the work itself through the work’s additional layer of live editing.

Mimesis and Mimicry

As the artists’ incorporation of the parameters of the attention economy in their work demonstrates, there is in Vermeir and Heiremans’ work a willingness to side with real abstraction. This willingness can be considered problematic, though not necessarily in the pejorative sense of the word. As mentioned earlier, among the variables that make up Art House Index are quantitative representations of the visibility of the artists’ work and of the mediated extensions of the art house, both online and offline. In a mimetic move, then, the artists willingly effect an abstraction of their own work, presenting it in strictly quantitative terms. This is all the more remarkable given the historical association of art with “the strictly transcendental timelessness of the model of ‘contemplative immersion’,”[23] or, more simply put, what Katherine N. Hayles has called “deep attention.”[24] This association, however, is also ideological, in that these attentive modalities suggest a disinterestedness radically at odds with the subsumptions of art (as well as of its reception) by capital under discussion here. By contrast, Vermeir and Heiremans’ determination to flaunt and even expedite the insertion of their own work in the attention economy is a way of acknowledging these subsumptions, creating a possibility or a basis for an immanent critique.

Their particular mode of presentation contributes to this siding with abstraction too. Graphs like the one we encounter in the presentation of AHI are emphatically abstract delineations of a purely metric movement; one that, nonetheless, purports to point at—to index—something that is happening or moving in the realm of the concrete and material. That the AHI graph was subsequently put to work in the live editing of MASQUERADE makes it even more suitable as an expression of the operativity of real abstraction. Of course, Vermeir and Heiremans’ auto-abstractions ultimately remain speculative thought experiments, more or less internal to their artistic work, as long as the economic and symbolic value tracked—or perhaps generated—by AHI remains unrealized in actual processes of exchange: Vermeir and Heiremans have never “cashed out” by trying to sell their work or otherwise extrapolate actual money from it. The value accrued around their work thus remains purely aspirational.

At their best, Vermeir and Heiremans’ auto-abstractions draw our attention to the properties—and, as will be argued in the next section, the contradictions—of real abstraction. However, as the artists contemplate the creation of an actual market around the index as a next step in the development of their oeuvre, and have in fact produced recent work for a solo exhibition investigating “the possibility of financializing public art collections, museum real estate and symbolic capital,”[25] it becomes necessary to consider the limitations and possible pitfalls of such a siding with real abstraction. As Ana Teixeira Pinto and Anselm Franke point out, the recognition of such mimetic and affirmational strategies as critical gestures has become something of a commonplace in contemporary art ever since Pop Art’s identification with the surface effects of consumerism.[26] Around the same time, the notion of mimesis-as-critique was theoretically developed by Adorno, who wrote in his Aesthetic Theory that art could ignore the expanded reproduction of capitalist relations “only at the price of its own powerlessness,” and therefore would have to amount to a “mimesis of the hardened and the alienated.”[27]

Nonetheless, the propensity towards an unmitigated identification of art with capital in recent artistic practice has been subject to critical scrutiny in recent years. For Teixeira Pinto and Franke (who, it should be noted, are writing about post-internet artworks, not practices similar to Vermeir and Heiremans’), the “inability to imagine an outside to financial subsumption can also be construed as a symptom of the overwhelming fear of exclusion that accompanies the increasing precarization of life: a social anxiety masquerading as an aesthetic theory.”[28] Another important contribution has been made by Kerstin Stakemeier, who distinguishes between mimesis and mimicry—her conception of which is based on an essay by Roger Caillois.[29] She writes: “artists no longer primarily engage the structures of contemporary culture in what could be called an act of mimesis…but rather craft their works in acts of mimicry—as somatic reflexes to contemporary culture’s overpowering protocols.” She describes how this mimicry, in which art essentially dissolves in its capitalist environment, “not only sides with the inorganic, reified life under capitalism, but also comes to perceive the subject herself as an essentially inorganic entity.”[30]

In the face of the increasing occupation of all domains of life by capital, the efficacy of strategies of mimesis becomes a real issue of concern—and so does the question of how these strategies are still to be told apart from the brand of mimicry described by Stakemeier. The intervention by the activists in Vermeir and Heiremans’ 2013 performance at the Istanbul Biennial is a succinct testimony to this; precisely in taking Vermeir and Heiremans’ work at face value—naively or not—they raised some fundamental questions concerning what this kind of work does and who it is for. Their intrusion on the performance and their presence in MASQUERADE both serve as a welcome reminder of the persistent political need for antagonism, refusal, dissensus, and other forms of negativity to complement mimetic criticisms, setting them apart from a one-sided and ultimately affirmational complicity or ironization. Admittedly, there is rather little of all of this in Vermeir and Heiremans’ work, and quite a fair share of mimicry—think, for instance, of the glossies and faux-promotional videos that the artists use to draw attention to their work, to “sell” their ideas. Their strategy of siding with the abstractions of finance capital, in particular, is one that could well be construed as an artistic analogue to those strands of accelerationism that propagate an intensification of capital’s abstractions to a supposed point of collapse.[31] As for the artists’ speculations, in their most recent work, around the possibilities of what I am tempted to call a “financialization for the people,” the question certainly should be raised whether such a reappropriation, such a détournement, of the abstractions of finance is really desirable, or if it is financialization itself (and the abstractions that afford it) that were at the very root of the problem all along. Though articulated in a very different context, Audre Lorde’s famous admonition that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” nonetheless seems pertinent to Vermeir and Heiremans’ work around their art house. [32]

Cracks in Real Abstraction

Assessing Vermeir and Heiremans’ work, it is certainly important to remain wary of mimetic critiques’ propensity to co-optation, to be conscious of how easily mimesis might slide into mimicry. Equally, it might be objected that, in formally mimicking their subject matter, their pieces can in some cases also have the effect of dazzling their viewers rather than affecting, informing, or addressing them as political subjects. As was mentioned earlier, this is to a significant extent resolved by how the artists frame and contextualize their work, effectively using their videos and other works as conversation pieces in discussions about topics such as finance, the attention economy, and their real abstractions.[33]

That being said though, the contention in this final section will be that the works in and by themselves, too, allow and at times even press for a more radical reading, challenging viewers to question the workings of real abstraction in a fundamental manner. Although admittedly there is very little in either AHI or MASQUERADE that hints at a non-capitalist (or, for that matter, a less capitalist) horizon, Vermeir and Heiremans’ work continually exposes the contradictions of and fissures in real abstraction in ways that ultimately, and importantly, set the work apart from practices indulging in the fatal strategy of mere affirmation. Though there is no suggestion, with Vermeir and Heiremans, that these contradictions will necessarily lead to an overcoming or sublation of real abstraction, their critique remains highly incisive. It comes to the fore most prominently in the work’s constant equation of financialization with fiction, and in its insistence on disclosing the fault lines, the flaws, and the cracks in the operativity of real abstraction.

In MASQUERADE, there is a sometimes-overwhelming sense that everything is make-believe, a scam. As we have seen, Frank Goodman, the only character in the video assigned a proper name, is a reference to Melville’s conman protagonist. Furthermore, there are sustained proclamations, especially towards the end of the video, that the functioning of finance (and of the market more generally) is dependent on a willing suspension of disbelief comparable to the reading of fiction (“the market participants have to suspend their disbelief and wait”, “fiction creates finance, and finance creates fiction”). Ultimately, this leads to absurdisms and language games that mirror the solipsistic circularity of the self-reproduction of capitalist relations. “We have to trust trust,” we are told, “and have confidence in confidence.”[34] In his aforementioned essay, Jameson too concludes a discussion of the theoretical problems posed by ground rent for the labor theory of value by saying that land’s value, for capitalism, is “something like a structurally necessary fiction.”[35] Certainly, there is no shortage of bankers and financial types making the kinds of demystificatory statements that we hear in MASQUERADE, but still, such statements are a far cry from the everyday (self-) representations of finance capital. Or rather, we should note that finance in fact prefers to shy away from any kind of representation whatsoever, operating in the background as something always already given and therefore exempted from interrogation; it only truly appears in moments of crisis, moments that then have to be cast as the exception rather than the rule.

There are certain religious connotations to all of this talk about belief in the capitalist market, connotations that MASQUERADE does not shun. One scene sees a character walking up a flight of stairs, uttering, in something of a trance, all permutations that become possible when switching up the word order in the sentence “I am doing the work of God.” The same character, dressed in white, is later seen in a video editing booth overlooking the events unfolding in MASQUERADE, as if to underscore his mastery of this financialized microcosm. In a discussion of Pascal’s infamous wager, Angela Mitropoulos has pointed to the religious dimensions of “internalised belief” systems, as well as of the “habitual performance of faith and acts of submission” that are so crucial to the everyday reproduction of existing economic relations.[36] Real abstraction is thus revealed to be grounded in our belief in its basic premises, and its reality produced and perpetuated by our collective acting as if it were real in the first place. To use the well-worn phraseology of social criticism, real abstraction is a “social construction.” However, this also means that it is really constructed, and as such cannot simply be “name-called out of (or into) existence, ridiculed and shamed into yielding up its powers.”[37]

It becomes important, then, to take heed of the many ways in which MASQUERADE, in particular, shows not only the operativity of real abstraction, but also the many flaws and imperfections in that operativity. MASQUERADE’s microcosm is most certainly not some perfectly negentropic simulacrum, some sinister shadow play of abstractions alone. What we see is a world in which residual and obstinate materiality keeps coming back with a vengeance, and in which the irregularities of the real continue to thwart and frustrate abstraction’s control over said world. Ultimately, Vermeir and Heiremans’ aesthetic is an aesthetic of failure—and this failure is the failure of abstraction to fully enclose and master reality. This emphasis on failure is most ostentatiously the case in the ever-present malfunctioning green screens, but also in certain scenes planted vertically into the video’s narrative flow—if indeed there is such a thing as a narrative flow in MASQUERADE. An assistant-like figure compulsively rubbing the screen of an iPad as if to clean it; another character trying to remove tape from a sheet of glass and, much to her annoyance, getting the tape stuck in a tangle with her latex gloves. Although Vermeir and Heiremans’ work shares with much contemporaneous work a certain investment in surfaces and superficiality, these kinds of scenes ultimately serve to complicate the assumption  that “the smooth user-friendly surfaces of the digital world inspire belief in a smoothly user-friendly reality”—an assumption that Kerstin Stakemeier argues is both fabricated and sustained by artistic mimicries of financialized capital.[38] Failure, of course, is also built into the very structure of the work itself, with any downward movement of the AHI yielding to the B-track of the video, which consists mostly of throwaway scenes. Then, on top of the constant interruptions caused by the live-editing of the index, there are the aforementioned interferences and discontinuities in the storyline—even in the A-track of the film—augmented by a high-strung and hyperactive editing style which could be construed as accelerationist, but only if one is willing to entertain the idea of a Brechtian accelerationism.[39]

Finally, and crucially, these moments of failure, disruption, and breakdown are not presented by Vermeir and Heiremans as antithetical or inimical to their mimesis of real abstraction. Rather, they are shown to be fully integral and immanent to it—and this, to me, seems to be precisely where the work diverges from how capital’s real abstraction is usually conceived. It is precisely, in other words, where its mimeticism becomes critical. One scene in MASQUERADE illustrates this point particularly well. About half an hour into the video, we see three women circling around a maquette of Vermeir and Heiremans’ art house, eyeing the miniature in an almost predatory fashion. They appear to be dressed as judges, and one of them is lecturing the others about the necessity of completely embracing the idea of art as a financial asset and of accepting the market as “the ultimate arbiter of worth, both economic and symbolic.” After her short soliloquy, the three come to a halt. They continue to gaze at the model for a brief while, until at a certain moment the woman who was speaking can no longer resist touching it. It is at that moment that the art house collapses, that the whole edifice comes crashing down, and the camera quickly cuts away. As we know, “the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him.”[40]

This is a metaphor of crisis if ever there was one, and though Vermeir and Heiremans use this metaphor to make real abstraction appear, they also refuse to ascribe it any special significance. Their work contains no hints about contradiction leading to its own overcoming—that historical materialist shibboleth—and neither does it suggest any particular consequences or outcomes, for better or worse, of crisis. Instead, crisis is cast as part and parcel of real abstraction, as its everyday truth rather than as its exception. If only for this, Vermeir and Heiremans’ work is thoroughly counterhegemonic in its mimesis of finance and of real abstraction. As always, such a statement opens onto an entire set of new, and much larger, questions. One may ask where exactly the counterhegemonic gets us, with cultural production so clearly such a weak and limited force vis-à-vis real abstraction, and with anti-capitalist critique and demystification so obviously powerless about the fact that, without exception, all who will get to see the work will be dependent on capital for the reproduction of their daily existence—regardless of whether they believe its fictions or not. Surely, these are issues that art can and should press us to think about, but that cannot be resolved through art, or through thinking, alone.

 

Steyn Bergs is an art critic and a researcher. Currently, he is conducting his PhD research on the commodification of digital artworks at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. From 2016 to 2018, together with Rosa te Velde, he was co-editor-in-chief of Kunstlicht, a journal for visual art, visual culture, and architecture. His writing has appeared in various magazines and journals.

 

[1]           Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “Public Relations,” Artforum, May 22, 2013, https://www.artforum.com/diary/kaelen-wilson-goldie-on-public-capital-in-istanbul-41191. The biennial took place some months after the beginning of the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, and was widely perceived as having toned down on some of its political statements in response to the climate of political unrest in the city. This sparked critique not only from local protesters, but also from (international) press. Vermeir and Heiremans’ performance took place at the Marmara hotel in Taksim, which was the epicenter of the political protests in Istanbul.

[2]           In 2016 the project was represented on a billboard within the framework of the Bucharest Biennial, again in a form of make-belief promotion for the index itself (extension #30).

[3]           Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (London: Penguin Press, 1991).

[4]           Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978), 57.

[5]           Jason Read, “Abstract Materialism: Sohn-Rethel and the Task of a Materialist Philosophy Today,” Unemployed Negativity Blog, April 13, 2014, http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2014/04/abstract-materialism-sohn-rethel-and.html.

[6]           Sami Khatib, “‘Sensuous Supra-Sensuous’: The Aesthetics of Real Abstraction,” in Aesthetic Marx, ed. Samir Gandesha and Johan Hartle (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 50. Khatib’s emphasis on “as if” is in the original, establishing a clear link with Vermeir and Heiremans’s presentation of real abstraction as fictional, discussed at the end of this essay.

[7]           For a good account of this crisis, see the chapter on finance in Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2014).

[8]           Fredric Jameson, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism, and Land Speculation,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998).

[9]           This practice, too, is described in more detail in the aforementioned chapter by Saskia Sassen.

[10]          Thus, in what may appear as an ultimate squaring of the circle, it is precisely due to the aforementioned autonomization of exchange-value that the abstractions of the value-form become increasingly intermingled with sensuous reality. In the words of Sami Khatib: “Value relations […] have material effects precisely because they have “cut” themselves loose from the binary distinction of both the sensuous and super-sensuous, empirical and intellectual.” Khatib, “Real Abstraction,” 55.

[11]          The original articulation of the “dematerialization of art” thesis is: John Chandler and Lucy Lippard, “The Dematerialization of Art,” in: Lucy Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1971). Perhaps the most explicit articulation of the isomorphism between conceptual art and financialization comes from McKenzie Wark, who has written that “the ‘dematerialization of art’ was homologous with this transformation of capitalism into something else, something even more abstracted. Conceptual art is a side effect of the rise of conceptual business.” McKenzie Wark, “Designs for the New World,” e-flux journal 58 (2014): 3,  http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8988222.pdf.

[12]          Lucy Lippard, Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972… (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), xiv.

[13]          Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003), 56.

[14]          Beller writes: “At the moment, in principle at least, that is, in accord with the principles of late capitalism, to look is to labor. This is not to say that all looking is necessarily productive for capital, but looking first was posited as productive by capital early in the twentieth century, and currently is being presupposed as such.” Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 2006), 2.

[15]          Beller, Cinematic Mode, 23. It is worth noting that this is entirely in accordance with Diedrich Diederichsen’s later attempt at normalizing the commodification of artworks within the orthodox Marxist labour theory of value, though Beller and the entire discourse on the attention economy are never explicitly mentioned by Diederichsen. Diedrich Diederichsen, On (Surplus) Value in Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008), 32.

[16]          This is not a particularly new observation. Rosalind Krauss has written of “the ever-present reality of the copy as the underlying condition of the original.” Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 162. An excellent account of the mutual dependencies of original and copy can be found in the introductory chapter to: Erika Balsom, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

[17]          David Joselit, After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 3.

[18]          Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 147.

[19]          Tiziana Terranova, “Attention, Economy and the Brain,” Culture Machine 13 (2012): 4, https://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/465/484.

[20]          Terranova, “Attention,” 2.

[21]          Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 29-30.

[22]               Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 10.

[23]               Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 176.

[24]               Katherine N. Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Models,” Profession (2007): 195-198.

[25]          “Vermeir & Heiremans: A Modest Proposal (In a Black Box),” Pump House Gallery, accessed January 15, 2019, https://pumphousegallery.org.uk/programme/a-modest-proposal-in-a-black-box.

[26]          Anselm Franke and Ana Teixeira Pinto, “Post-Political, Post-Critical, Post-Internet: Why Can’t Leftists Be More Like Fascists?,” open! Platform for Art, Cultre & the Public Domain, September 8, 2016, https://www.onlineopen.org/post-political-post-critical-post-internet.

[27]          Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 30.

[28]          Franke and Teixeira Pinto, “Post-Political.”

[29]          The essay’s epigraph reads: “Beware: Whoever pretends to be a ghost will eventually turn into one.” Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” in The Edge of Surrealism: The Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 91.

[30]          Kerstin Stakemeier, “Exchangeables: Aesthetics against Art” Texte zur Kunst 98 (2015): 126.

[31]               Though a thorough discussion of accelerationism is beyond the scope of this text, relevant critiques include Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Winchester: zero books, 2014). and Alexander Galloway, “Brometheanism,” culture and communication, June 16, 2017, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/brometheanism.

[32]          Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007).

[33]               Furthermore, Vermeir and Heiremans often play devil’s advocate in and with their work, which in no respect offers a transparent perspective on their own personal politics. In a recent conversation with the artists, they were highly skeptical of much of the enthusiasm with which their propositions for re-appropriating financialization are often met. They noted how easily many let go of their criticisms and concerns about financialization as soon as they entertain the idea of employing financial instruments for the “common good”, i.e. themselves, rather than for the existing elite.

[34]          On capitalist reproduction as circular and repetitive movement, see Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (London: Verso, 2011), 62-63.

[35]          Jameson, “Brick and Balloon”, 184.

[36]          Angela Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia (Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2012), 41. Essentially, Blaise Pascal’s wager holds that a rational person can bet that God either exists or does not. If they presume the former option to be the case, this involves only a comparatively limited loss (of earthly pleasures, affordances), whereas with the latter option there is a possibility for both unlimited losses (eternal suffering in hell), thus making belief in God by far the safer bet. Pascal thus applied an early form of probability theory (which would come to be crucial to finance) to religious matters. There is also a connection here with an earlier work by Vermeir and Heiremans, A Wager for the Afterlife, from 2012.

[37]          Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), xvi.

[38]          Stakemeier, “Exchangeables”, 124.

[39]          Rather than aligning MASQUERADE with, say, the accelerationism of the latest blockbuster by Michael Bay, the constant switching of the viewers’ attention from one thing to another in the video amounts to something strongly reminiscent of the Brechtian alienation effect or V-effekt. Like in Brecht’s epic theatre, the interferences and discontinuities in Vermeir and Heiremans’ work serve the purpose of sowing, rather than suspending, disbelief. For the importance of disruption in Brecht’s drama, see: Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1998), 3, 13, and particularly 18.

[40]          Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (London: Penguin Press, 1990), 168.

If one accepts the idea of abstraction as the telos of the modernist visual arts, then American art of the early twentieth century can only be understood as derivative of the European avant-garde. This has always struck me as an odd piece of conventional art historical wisdom, particularly given Marcel Duchamp’s famously back-handed compliment to his new American friends in 1917 (offered in protest of the rejection, from an ostensibly unjuried exhibition, of the porcelain urinal he called “Fountain” and entered under a pseudonym): “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.” The quip is both devastating and insightful. As pure products of industrial ingenuity and material efficiency, America’s plumbing and bridges were, for a European artist like Duchamp, exemplary modernist forms. So why weren’t America’s artists equally ingenious? I think the answer is deceptively simple: they were. At least that seems to be the case if one focuses on their processes rather than their products.

Many American artists of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries received their fine arts training in schools that styled themselves on the pragmatic model of mechanics institutes and technical schools (art “institutes” as the more successful ones described themselves) where, in the pursuit of a useful, public role for the arts in daily life, they learned to deploy a surprising range of formulaic shortcuts to representation.[1] Although the result—a diagrammatic abstraction underlying otherwise figurative art—was a structural feature of the work of many of Duchamp’s New York colleagues and contemporaries, this aspect of American art would not surface fully enough to be recognized until its appearance in the abstract work of expressionist painter Jackson Pollock in the 1940s. Hailed as one of America’s first modernist artists, Pollock and his innovative technique of drips and pours may also be viewed as the culmination of a diagrammatic tradition with roots in nineteenth-century American craft traditions and educational reform. Recognizing the importance of diagrammatic techniques and strategies to American artists on both sides of the abstraction-figuration divide may help to shift the terms of this polarizing debate.

The question of how best to train young artists acquired its urgency in the United States at the same moment that the emphasis in American factories was on increasing industrial output through the rationalization of the processes of production. Taylorism, the system of time management originated in the late-nineteenth century in the United States by Frederick Winslow Taylor and publicized in his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, encouraged the idea that there was a “science” for the efficient implementation of every job. As a result, many Americans came to believe fixed laws or principles of craft existed that, once stabilized, not only would facilitate the production of art but raise it to a higher level. When expansion of the industrial and commercial art fields brought increased enrollments in the 1890s, academic schools such as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago also turned to abbreviated forms of training.[2] The mechanics of picture-making triumphed over the disciplinary rigors of figure study—at first for those pursuing the emerging design professions where speed of execution was a virtue (illustration and advertising), but ultimately for all students. At the same time, national debate over what was (or what should be) an authentic American art began to coalesce around the primacy of “decoration,” a civic-minded art that contributed to larger, public ensembles (as in a mural that is an integrated part of an architectural program).[3] Driven by this imperative to provide artists with practical tips and short-cuts to more efficient picture-making, many so-called “academic” art schools were, by the turn of the twentieth century, teaching through abstract, reductive principles.

The use of highly technical systems was based, like American techniques of mass production, on a belief in the interchangeability of art’s parts. This suited the aspirations of a country struggling to reconcile dual commitments to democracy and industrial capitalism. Two powerful (if somewhat antithetical) cultural tendencies were converging in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first was the largely practical interdependence of art and industry established in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. The second was far-reaching in the utopianism of its rhetoric: progressive reformers, reacting to the excesses of capitalist competition, began to focus on art as an arena of social improvement. For these reformers, working to inculcate an elite aesthetic in a mass audience whom they hoped might, as a result, come to better appreciate the application of high art principles to everyday products, the pedagogical diagram was a vehicle for popularizing and diffusing aesthetic ideals. The “diagrammatics” of my title, then, represents the complementary relationship that develops over the first half of the twentieth century between the production of art and its reception—between artists using diagrammatic exemplars and recipes to generate pictures with efficiency and popularizers intent on validating the results for the public by pointing out the underlying (abstract) idealism.

This essay will trace the visual motif of the pedagogical diagram from one of its earliest incarnations in a design manual published by educator Arthur Wesley Dow in 1899 (and admired by Georgia O’Keeffe and others in the circle of modernists associated with the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz), through the emergence of a highly technical variant promoted by illustrator Jay Hambidge in the immediate aftermath of the First World War (adopted with enthusiasm by the realist George Bellows and his friends), to the elaborate metaphysics of spatial design first articulated by Thomas Hart Benton in 1926, part of the artist’s embrace of both abstraction and figuration in his own work. Of course, when the hidden logic of the diagram burst vividly into view in the late 1940s work of Benton’s best-known student, the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, the jig was more than just up. The jig was no longer even recognizable: Pollock’s poured technique would be championed instead as an isolated, original innovation. In conclusion, therefore, I will try to restore to Pollock this aspect of his ambiguous sociability—the links between his breakthrough achievement and the quest for efficiency in design that characterized American art education in the first half of the twentieth-century. 

Arthur Dow’s Elastic Advice

Among those taking early advantage of new standards of professionalism in education in the form of a mass-produced primer for design was the progressive educator and champion of an Anglo-Asian aesthetic fusion, Arthur Wesley Dow. A professor at Pratt Institute (a school of design and applied arts in New York’s Brooklyn borough) and later Columbia University Teachers College, Dow’s wildly successful book on design, titled Composition, was first published in 1899. Dow was hugely influential at the turn of the twentieth century, his program at Columbia carrying his ideas across the United States as his students became leaders in the new field of art education. The rhetoric of Dow’s Composition touched both professional design schools (where a bit of artistic idealism was a welcomed change), and also arts academies. For the latter, Dow’s approach represented an answer to repeated complaints of their inability to provide students with “useful” training: it was a long-standing concern among those arguing for more public and democratic forms of art that the academies taught students how but not what to do. Courses in pictorial arrangement, or composition were promoted as the solution to this problem.[4]

Although he chose the elevated term “composition” over the more prosaic “design” as the title of his book, Dow made clear he intended his pedagogy to level hierarchies: “Composition,” he wrote, “is made the basis of all work in drawing, painting, designing, and modeling—of house decoration and industrial arts—of normal courses and of art training for children.”[5] For Dow, decoration wasn’t something “added on,” it was inseparable from expression: he focused on originality and personal choice, encouraging students to explore the “line-idea” of a landscape view by first reducing the visual elements to a few “essential” lines and then varying their relationship according to the dictates of at least three different proportional schemes [figure 1]. This wonderfully elastic advice was aimed not at accuracy of representation, but towards a better understanding of what was pleasing in the arrangement of shapes—the shapes enclosed by the main lines of a subject. The art of composition resided then, for Dow, in a two-dimensional pattern, but not a rigid one. Dow’s line-idea was a pattern determined by the originality of the artist’s choice of an appropriate frame. He embraced design, in other words, as the living, organic force that made representation possible.

Figure 1. Arthur Wesley Dow. “Principles of Composition III” from the book Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (1899). Reprint Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1916, 25.

Georgia O’Keeffe is perhaps the most celebrated American painter to have generated a modernist vernacular based on these principles. Introduced to Dow’s diagrammatics as a student of Alon Bement at the University of Virginia in 1912, O’Keeffe was fresh from study with Arthur Dow himself at Teachers College when she executed the series of charcoal drawings—including Drawing XIII—that would bring her to the attention of the photographer and impresario of American modernism, Alfred Stieglitz in January 1916 [figure 2]. In the series, O’Keeffe takes Dow’s line-idea to its logical extreme; in Drawing XIII a sinewy arabesque (a motif deeply imprinted in social memory via Art Nouveau) and a jagged flash (or decorative frill?) are bound together by four hoop-like mounds to create the conceptual equivalent of a natural scene. Her bold gesture links Dow’s elastic advice to its historical precedent in the embedded schemata of medieval art, as well as in American craft traditions of patterning and piecework.

Figure 2. Georgia O’Keeffe, Drawing XIII, 1915. Charcoal on Paper, 24 3/8 x 18 ½ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1950 (50.236.2). Image © 2019 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, NY.

Although a measured and designed approach to abstraction is something of an exception in a career otherwise devoted to lyrical interpretations of identifiable sites and subjects, O’Keeffe’s early experiments exploit the potential Dow had observed for artists to harness their decorative motifs to a vision of nationalist expression. In 1914, the year O’Keeffe enrolled at Teachers College, Dow focused his courses on the “primitive” and linear art of indigenous Americans. Native American art, he wrote, “has a peculiar character—a combination of straight line with restrained curve—a squareness, a round-corneredness, so to speak, giving a sensation of strength combined with easy motion.”[6] Accordingly, when he painted his Enchanted Mesa, a well-known formation located near the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico in 1913, Dow created a cloisonné-like effect by reducing the mesa’s profile to a basic geometry. Neither circle nor square, this blunt angle and curve combination reflected his commitment to the evolution of a new, national style, a project clearly shared by O’Keeffe and the artists Stieglitz championed.  

 

Jay Hambidge’s Whirling Squares

Figure 3. Jay Hambidge. Illustration from Dynamic Symmetry: The Greek Vase. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1920, 135.

For the illustrator Jay Hambidge, intuitive approaches to composition were misguided, at best. Instead, Hambidge insisted, there was a scientific basis to design, known and used in classical antiquity, and rediscovered by him. Hambidge’s Dynamic Symmetry deployed the mathematical theory of proportion known variously as the Logarithmic Spiral, the Golden Section, or the Fibonacci Series, the laws of which, he claimed, were distilled by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks from their observations of the organic growth of shells and the sequence of leaf distribution in plants [figure 3].[7] Symmetry, according to Hambidge, has two aspects: static and dynamic. The first results from the use of regular geometric figures such as squares or equilateral triangles and their subdivisions as the foundation of design. This can be seen in the “decadent” Gothic, Byzantine, Coptic, Celtic, Roman, Assyrian, Persian, Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese traditions (or Dow, though he remains unmentioned by Hambidge). Dynamic symmetry, by contrast, is generated through the repeated (rhythmic, in Hambidge’s terms) application of square root ratios—a process Hambidge referred to as “whirling squares.” The advantage of the dynamic approach is that it provided the artist or designer with an infinite (or at least, incrementally different) number of “patterns” on which to build an embellishment.

The appeal of Dynamic Symmetry was precisely this promise of variety within certitude. Hambidge’s apparently scientific template all but guaranteed the user a harmonious arrangement, even in the case of a complex or multi-figured subject. Dynamic Symmetry meant that representational artworks could be both modern (up-to-the-minute), and ideal (conforming to a timeless standard of beauty). No wonder, then, that it had strong appeal for the realist painters and illustrators we know today as the Ashcan School. Painter George Bellows and his friends were perhaps the first to embrace Hambidge’s theories, which they encountered in informal discourse at the Salmagundi Club in New York around 1915. Bellows’s mentor Robert Henri, who would use Hambidge’s theories as the basis of his own later teaching, even wrote and circulated an unpublished treatise on Dynamic Symmetry that outlined the geometric system for his students in the interim before the appearance of Hambidge’s first book.[8]

Though no doubt the most prominent, Bellows and Henri were by no means the only advocates of Dynamic Symmetry. Beginning in 1916 or 1917, Hambidge gave several lectures at the offices of his Century Magazine employer George Whittle that further stimulated the interest in his doctrines. In a series of lectures on Dynamic Symmetry given in New York during the winter of 1921, Hambidge demonstrated how his system might usefully be applied to furniture design, architectural decoration, page layout, and last, but not least, to the composition of paintings. In response, the British illustrator Maxwell Armfield noted in the magazine International Studio that “Mr. Hambidge’s discovery comes at an opportune moment when the more thoughtful artists are searching for something more stable than mere personal likes and dislikes, upon which to base their practice.”[9] Hambidge’s Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by Artists, a slim volume and the basis of posthumous editions including the 1932 Practical Applications of Dynamic Symmetry, was an homage to those artists who had adopted practices based on Hambidge’s system (the book paired illustrations of paintings and drawings by a variety of artists with detailed descriptions of the methods and formulae used in their construction).[10]

Ultimately, Bellows would describe the study of Dynamic Symmetry as more valuable for artists than the study of anatomy, and his advocacy played an important role in its diffusion. Writing in 1921 in The American Art Student, a nationally-circulated journal, Bellows observed that Dynamic Symmetry “might be called the ‘law of the constructive armature of living things’ and consequently the law of the constructive armature of a work of art, as the artist is trying to give life to space.”[11] He also likened the role of Dynamic Symmetry in composition to his experience of hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski:

At the same time my ears were enjoying the strains of great music, my eyes were enjoying the movements and inspired gesture of its great conductor. Every movement of his hands, every changing expression of his face invoked by the music fitted perfectly into the interpretation of the selection played: he was literally a fine bit of Greek sculpture in motion.

Yet the results achieved with Dynamic Symmetry were rarely as poetic as Bellows’s description would suggest, and many point to his adoption of the method as the start of a long period of academicism in his later work.[12] The stilted quality that derives from an abstract scaffolding built of triangles drawn at right angle to diagonal lines crossing at the picture’s center is a feature of the group portrait, Elinor, Jean, and Anna, 1920—as confirmed by Bellows’s preparatory sketch [figure 4].

Figure 4. George Wesley Bellows. Elinor, Jean and Anna; and Old Lady in Black, circa 1920. Study for painting, pen and black ink over graphite on tracing paper. Sheet: 12 5/16 x 18 13/16 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Seth K. Sweetser Fund (31.917). Photograph © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Large-scale mural paintings produced in the 1920s also reflect the “efficiency” associated with Dynamic Symmetry, particularly those designed as modernistic decorations for the public spaces of capitalism, including movie theaters, retail stores, hotels, and restaurants. Although an important precursor to the mural programs of the New Deal (which are themselves closely linked with the emergence of abstract expressionism), these commercial paintings are rarely discussed as part of a continuous history in American art.[13] This is a missed opportunity, to say the least, in light of the importance of the decorative mural in discourse around American art and education in the early twentieth-century. A formulaic method of pictorial construction such as Dynamic Symmetry was particularly useful in the production of murals and, in most cases, remained a hidden feature. Not so with modernist John W. Norton’s “Gathering the News, Printing the News, Transporting the News,” an enormous project created for the concourse of the art deco Chicago Daily News complex completed in 1929 [figure 5]. The 180-foot mural wears its dynamic symmetry proudly on its surface, as the very emblem of mechanistic modernity. 

Figure 5. John Warner Norton. Gathering the News, Printing the News, Transporting the News, 1929, mural for the concourse of the Chicago Daily News Building, 1928-1929. Holabird & Root, architects. Photograph: Historic Architecture and Landscape Image Collection, Ryerson & Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital File #31005.

Tom Benton’s Mechanics

Figure 6. Thomas Hart Benton. Illustrations from “The Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting,” redrawn from Benton’s pencil sketches by Lloyd Goodrich, published in The Arts, 1926-27. © 2019T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

When the realist painter Thomas Hart Benton published his theory of composition in 1926-1927, he labeled the effort a “Mechanics of Form Organization.” As was typical of the genre, Benton’s essays featured a number of schematic illustrations intended to demonstrate “fundamental mechanical” design principles and to analyze the compositions of certain old master paintings [figure 6]. At the same time, his text outlined the major tenets of a conceptual, diagrammatic structure that the artist was by then employing to secure the formal coherence of his own figurative subjects.[14] However, Benton’s mechanics had little to do with older notions of surface arrangement as articulated by Dow or Hambidge. They were grounded instead in notions of social production and embodied experience: a belief that the body was the engine of design. In their foray into the all-important case of deep space, for example—what was, for Benton, the expressive apotheosis of painting[15]—Benton’s diagrams do more than provide a generative framework for idealized forms of beauty (as with Dow’s two-dimensionally oriented line-idea or Hambidge’s flexible triangles); Benton’s diagrams connect composition with the representation of specific psychological or expressive effects.

Benton argued that all compositional organization is based on a shared experience of embodied movement: “In the ‘feel’ of our own bodies,” he wrote, “in the sight of the bodies of others, in the bodies of animals, in the shapes of growing and moving things, in the forces of nature and in the engines of man, the rhythmic principle of movement and counter-movement is made manifest. But in our own bodies it can be isolated and understood. This mechanical principle which we share with all life can be abstracted and used in constructing and analyzing things which also in their way have life and reality.” The illusion of depth, according to Benton, whether it appeals to the visual sense (through such devices as the overlapping of flat planes) or to the tactile (through perspectival projections of cubic forms), is always a function of analogy—always, in his word, inferred.[16] Human anatomy, Benton insisted, is the basis of that analogy: the characteristic action of muscular movement, with its succession of rippling bulges and recessions organized around a fixed center of bone, for example, is “responsible for much fine compositional work [figure 7].”[17]

Figure 7. Thomas Hart Benton. Page from “The Mechanics of Form Organization, Part IV,” The Arts (February l927): 95, text by Benton, illustration redrawn by Lloyd Goodrich from Benton’s pencil sketch. © 2019 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Historians today recognize in Benton’s work a modernism of complex genealogy.[18] In forging his characteristic style between 1919 and 1928, for example, Benton managed to confirm his modernity by discovering its affinity with a vision of the American past. In his search for an art that would be of his own time and place, Benton reinvented the language of industrialization as an organic “turmoil of rhythmic sequences” pressed into service of the depiction of a rapidly disappearing rural America. In 1928 Benton defended the style of his ambitious new series of representational paintings, The American Historical Epic, as one that embodied his desire to combine the “extensive experience one has of the real world” with the abstract patterns and designs that were his “modern inheritance” [figure 8].[19] Such a technique, Benton explained, allowed him to “handle the modern world” in a style of representational dynamism.[20] In other words, Benton’s doubling of the diagrammatic structure of his pictures—his simultaneous tracking of both surface and depth—meant the representation of bodies in space could also secure the abstract, or two-dimensional integrity of his design.

Figure 8. Installation view of American Historical Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood at Peabody Essex Museum, 2015. © 2019 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo © 2019 Peabody Essex Museum. Photography by Allison White.

No one learned this lesson better than Benton’s student Jackson Pollock.  But to demonstrate that convincingly will require an analogy, which will, fittingly in this case, take the form of a diagram. It will also require a bit of a digression.

Jackson Pollock’s Motion Studies

Time had trumped motion in the work of efficiency expert Frederick Taylor, for whom it had been sufficient simply to observe and to analyze the processes of production. Breaking tasks down into their constitutive parts and assigning each an ideal time for its execution, Taylor made no prescriptions as to how (that is, by what motions) a worker was to satisfy the increased demands of a new schedule (he simply dismissed anything less than ideal performance as “soldiering”—his term for intentional malingering or laziness). But concerned Taylorites moved in the 1920s to redress the absence of direct demonstration in their founder’s system. For Taylor, who understood human efficiency as analogous with that of a machine, it was enough to link the analysis of work with ideal timings. The problem for Taylor’s followers and rivals, notably the married couple, contracting engineer Frank B. Gilbreth and psychologist Lillian M. Gilbreth, was that the determination of the most efficient motion remained subject to interpretation—it was more a matter of art than of science.

The Gilbreths devoted themselves to the study of motion—literally to the quest to find each task’s perfect execution—by concentrating their attention on talented individuals and the specific tasks at which they excelled. Marshaling the technology of the chronocyclograph to record ideal motion as exactly as possible, the Gilbreths later “fixed” the results of their photographic motion studies in the form of three-dimensional wire models which carefully calibrated movement against axes representing time and space [figure 9]. In theory, these models could be studied by other workers (in this example, the model illustrates successive attempts to perform a specialized task by a retired, though once expert, worker).[21] This codification of what was once individual ingenuity and initiative triumphed in the 1920s over Taylor’s less obviously hierarchical or exacting methods. Spontaneity in labor, once expressive of an individual worker’s particular talents or expertise, became a codifiable commodity, intended, in studies like those of the Gilbreths, to serve as the paradoxical model for successive generations of mannered performance.

Figure 9. Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth. “Movement Translated into Wire Models,” ca. 1912, from Applied Motion Study: A Collection of Papers on the Efficient Method to Industrial Preparedness. New York, Sturgis and Watson, 1917.

Because they graph similar kinds of information, it is possible to use the image of human motion visualized by the Gilbreths as an aid to reading a painting like Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 [figure 10]. The painted trace of Pollock’s gestures, like the wire of a Gilbreth model, marks the flattening of time and space across a perspectival grid (a literal grid in the Gilbreth model, an implied one in the case of Pollock’s conventionally rectangular canvas). Moreover, the art and theory of composition, having been remade through a succession of diagrammatic schemes (including Benton’s) into the labor of the artist, makes Pollock’s painting, like a Gilbreth wire model, the site of a phenomenological dislocation of the body of the artist (as worker) by the eye of the beholder. What Pollock gleaned from Benton’s mechanics was an aestheticization of his mentor’s industrial age obsession with perfect movement; a way of conceiving the relationship between the schematic representation of the gesture or pose of the human figure in action and the representation of his own embodied gesture.[22] Yet what we recognize now in the Pollock, courtesy of the Gilbreths, is an allegory of the loss of embodied experience. That successive generations would transform Pollock’s gesture into mannerism was perhaps inevitable.

Figure 10. Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950. Enamel on canvas, 105 x 207 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, George A. Hearn Fund, 1957 (57.92). © 2019 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The diagrammatic underpinnings of American art are revealed without irony in the technique of art historical diagramming—the marking of an image with a few bold lines in order to suggest certain “truths” about its internal structure, which was once as common to the teaching of art and to its appreciation in the United States as diagramming a sentence was to a grammar school education. But Pollock’s paintings, in becoming diagrams themselves, perversely resist explanation—or rather, they become “explanation” writ large. In a telling inversion, the introduction to the fourth edition of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, the perennially popular survey of art’s global history, opens with a vivid example: linked, in a single, breathtaking conceptual leap, are two works widely separated in time and space—one a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, Raphael’s School of Athens, the other a contemporary work, Jackson Pollock’s Number 29 of 1950:

It is [a] function of the artist to guide our eyes as we look at a painting, to bring order into what otherwise might be chaos. This order we speak of as the composition, or design, of a painting. Sometimes this order is immediately apparent and we ‘read’ the picture easily; in other instances we may have to search out the order if we are to understand the artist’s message.[23]

The conviction that the rhythmic gestures of Raphael’s figures and the enigmatic arcs of Pollock’s pourings share a special affinity is reinforced visually, in no uncertain terms. The Raphael, captioned “A diagrammatic rendering of rhythmical relationships which are one of the unifying factors in the composition of the School of Athens,” boasts an extraordinary overlay—a heavy, black line that loops and swells in dramatic fashion as it makes its way across the painting’s horizontal axis [figure 11]. Although the eloquence of the visual analogy is such that the truth of the comparison surely appeared unassailable at the time, today this unintentionally hilarious attempt to transmute uninhibited gesticulation into an art appreciation lesson is more likely to provoke questions concerning the circumstances of the appropriation (as does the context of the edition’s publication in 1959, the year that the New York School of painting made its triumphal European tour courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art).

Figure 11. Figure 0-22 in Sumner McK. Crosby, et al, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages.  New York, Harcourt Brace, 1959, 23.

Yet the textual hiccup (“the composition, or design”) reveals that something more than the aggrandizement of abstract expressionism was at stake. In that still fluid moment, it was possible to imagine several alternatives for the writing of the history of modern art. Was Abstract Expressionism the next logical lockstep in a relentless march towards abstraction that had begun in Europe? Or was it the latest (perhaps nostalgic) iteration of an aesthetic of efficiency, admired grudgingly by Duchamp, and grounded in American industrialism? To believe the former, as the authors in 1959 clearly did, meant that world war had failed to rupture the promise of progress in the twentieth century (an illusion impossible to maintain today); to argue the latter, as I have, requires us to actively rethink the implications of the advent of abstract art, perhaps even in its European context.

Diagrams are highly intentional representations. They pointedly explain, unabashedly instruct. They are in every sense the opposite of the indeterminate, ambiguous form of representation we know as modernist abstraction. Jacques Bertin, writing the first comprehensive Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps in 1967, polarized the practices of abstract painting and the graphic techniques of scientific representation, claiming that the former resist precise explication because of the inherent ambiguities of symbolic language while the latter operate immune to misinterpretation—their elements defined explicitly beforehand.[24] Where the art-historical diagram and its predicate, a diagrammatic art, lie on the continuum between art and science is unclear. An early antecedent, the comparative method of formal analysis introduced into the discipline by late-nineteenth century Swiss-German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (the juxtaposition of images emphasizing stylistic difference), may lay claim to having been a kind of science of art—one that worked towards elimination of the subjective uncertainties of interpretation. But the symbiosis I’m calling diagrammatics reveals an inherent contradiction: the gap between what is supposed to be represented—that is, the self-evident legibility of visual language—and what is represented unwittingly—that is, the lack of any such transparency, the presence of which would, of course, render any diagram merely redundant.

 

Barbara Jaffee is a historian of modern and American art and design and associate professor emerita at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb.  Her research and writing focuses on unconventional narratives of the origins and development of modernism in the United States and can be found in various publications, including Art Journal, Design Issues, and Panorama, the online journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.  Barbara has received grants and awards including from the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies.  She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in visual arts practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before completing a Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Chicago in 1999.  

[1] According to Nancy Austin, even schools founded specifically to train students for trade and manufacture in actual practice also combined fine arts with their design curricula. Nancy Austin, “Educating American Designers for Industry, 1853-1903,” pp187-206 in Georgia Brady Barnhill, Diana Korzenik, and Caroline F. Sloat, eds., The Cultivation of Artists in Nineteenth-Century America (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1997). Early “art and design” schools that continue in prominence include the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY (founded in 1859 and known informally in its early years as the Cooper Institute), the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA (founded in 1876 as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Applied Art), the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (founded in 1877), the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH (founded in 1882 as the Western Reserve School of Design for Women), and the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY (founded in 1887).

[2]. See my essay, “Before the New Bauhaus: From Industrial Drawing to Art and Design Education in Chicago,” Design Issues 25:1 (Winter 2005): 41-62.

[3]. For example, the muralist Will H. Low’s impassioned cry, “The Decorator Works for the World!” in “National Expression in American Art,” The International Monthly, A Magazine of Contemporary Thought 3:2 (March 1901): 231-251.

[4]. See W. H. Low, “The Education of the Artist, Here and Now,” Scribner’s Magazine 25 (June 1899): 766-767.

[5]. Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition, A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers, Ninth Edition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1916), 5.

[6]. Arthur Wesley Dow, “Designs from Primitive American Motifs,” Teachers College Record (New York: Columbia University, 1915), 32.

[7]. Jay Hambidge, Dynamic Symmetry: The Greek Vase (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920) and The Parthenon and Other Greek Temples: Their Dynamic Symmetry, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924).

[8]. Described by William Innes Homer and Violet Organ in Robert Henri and his Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 189-194.

[9]. Maxwell Armfield and his wife, the writer Constance Smedley, lived and worked in the United States between 1915 and 1922. Together, they ran the department of stage design at University of California Berkeley beginning in 1918. See Armfield’s “Dynamic Symmetry and its Practical Value Today,” International Studio 74 (November, 1921).

[10]. Jay Hambidge, Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by Artists (New York: Brentano’s, 1923) and Practical Applications of Dynamic Symmetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932).

[11]. George Bellows, “What Dynamic Symmetry Means to Me,” The American Art Student 3 (June, 1921): 5-7.

[12]. These qualitative differences have been explored in many studies of Bellows’s work, including Robert Haywood, “George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s: Boxing, Violence, and Male Identity,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 2:2 (Spring 1988): 2-15.

[13]. The exception is Francis V. O’Connor, whose The Mural in America: Wall Painting in the United States from Prehistory to the Present, 2010 remains unpublished (formerly available on O’Connor’s website, muralinamerica.com).

[14]. Thomas Hart Benton, “The Mechanics of Form Organization,” Parts I-V. In The Arts, November, 1926: 285-289; December, 1926: 340-342; January, 1927: 43-44; February, 1927: 95-96; March, 1927: 145-148.

[15]. Benton notes that in composition two forms of diagrammatic representation are necessary: one that follows superficial rhythmic relationships and another that translates these patterns into their cubic equivalents.

[16]. In this context, Benton mentions the psychological effects of color—crucial to the organization of form in painting, but as a means rather than an end. Benton, 1927, 44.

[17]. Benton, 1927, 95.

[18]. Denounced by the artist Stuart Davis as fascist in 1935 and pronounced philistine by the art historian Meyer Schapiro in 1938, Benton long was considered representative of an antimodernist tendency in American art. See Meyer Schapiro, “Populist Realism,” Partisan Review 4 (January 1938). The reconsideration began with Francis V. O’Connor’s 1967 essay, “The Genesis of Jackson Pollock: 1912-1943,” Artforum 5 (May 1967): 16-23. It now includes Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1974), Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and James M. Dennis, Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry (Madison, WI: University of WI Press, 1998).

[19]. See Lee Simonson’s criticism in Creative Art 3 (October 1928): 28-32 and Benton’s defense, “My American Epic in Paint,” in Creative Art 3 (December 1928): 31-36.

[20]. Ibid.

[21]. Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth, Applied Motion Study: A Collection of Papers on the Efficient Method to Industrial Preparedness (New York: Sturgis and Watson, Co., 1917). While it is difficult to imagine their demonstrations worked well in actual practice, the Gilbreths achieved minor celebrity on the basis of personal efficiency—documented in the classic memoir of their parents (and 1950 movie of the same title), Cheaper By the Dozen (New York: Crowell, 1948), authored by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey.

[22]. Francis V. O’Connor first made the point about the impact on Pollock of Benton’s art theory in the May 1967 essay cited above (cf n18). The March 1979 issue of Arts included an extended analysis by Stephen Polcari of both Benton’s essays and their role in the development of Pollock’s style, accompanied by a note penned by Mark Roskill, crediting the initial insight to Robert Goldwater (according to Roskill, Goldwater had referred to the Benton diagrams in unpublished lectures many years before). Rosalind Krauss revived Benton’s diagrams in 1993, as a visual aid to her argument about the unconscious anxieties at the core of Pollock’s painted performances. Most recently, Pepe Karmel has argued in the catalogue produced by the New York Museum of Modern Art, in conjunction with their Pollock retrospective, that Pollock transformed the graphic flatness of Benton’s diagrams into an optical flatness through an obsessive layering. See Stephen Polcari, “Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton,” Arts Magazine 53 (March 1979): 120-124. Mark Roskill, “Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton, and Cubism: A Note,” Arts Magazine 53 (March 1979): 144. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” pp87-137 in Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998).

[23]. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, Sumner McK. Crosby, et al, eds. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1959), 23.

[24]. Jacques Bertin, Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).