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On Time and Grids
"In suggesting that the success [1] of the grid is somehow connected to its structure as myth, I may of course be accused of stretching a point beyond the limits of common sense, since myths are stories, and like all narratives they unravel through time, whereas grids are not only spatial to start with, they are visual structures that explicitly reject a narrative or sequential reading of any kind. But the notion of myth I am using here depends on a structuralist mode of analysis by which the sequential features of a story are rearranged to form a spatial organization [2].
[1] Success here refers to three things at once: a sheerly quantitative success, involving the number of artists in this century who have used grids; a qualitative success through which the grid has become the medium for some of the greatest works of modernism; and an ideological success, in that the grid is able-- in a work of whatever quality-- to emblematize the Modern.
[2] See Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, New York, 1963, particularly 'The Structural Analysis of Myth.' "
(The above remarks by Krauss were, apparently, originally published in "Grids," October (Summer 1979), 9: 50-64. See also The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), pp. 8-22.)
"In suggesting that the success [1] of the grid is somehow connected to its structure as myth, I may of course be accused of stretching a point beyond the limits of common sense, since myths are stories, and like all narratives they unravel through time, whereas grids are not only spatial to start with, they are visual structures that explicitly reject a narrative or sequential reading of any kind. But the notion of myth I am using here depends on a structuralist mode of analysis by which the sequential features of a story are rearranged to form a spatial organization [2].
[1] Success here refers to three things at once: a sheerly quantitative success, involving the number of artists in this century who have used grids; a qualitative success through which the grid has become the medium for some of the greatest works of modernism; and an ideological success, in that the grid is able-- in a work of whatever quality-- to emblematize the Modern.
[2] See Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, New York, 1963, particularly 'The Structural Analysis of Myth.' "
(The above remarks by Krauss were, apparently, originally published in "Grids," October (Summer 1979), 9: 50-64. See also The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), pp. 8-22.)