Sofia Greaves
Julie Mehretu is considered to be among the foremost artists of her generation, and is currently on show at Kettle’s Yard. This article is a semi-indulgence, because at first glance the exhibition may not seem to have much to do with classics at all. I want to explore how, or whether, we might interpret these apparently ‘unclassical’ artworks as classicists. What follows are simply my observations, in relation to both my research and broader themes in our study of the classical world.
Our frustration with modern art often lies in our inability to find an obvious exercise of skill. This is because a large component of our enjoyment when standing before an artwork depends upon us exercising our own skill in viewing it. As Michael Baxandall describes, we want conformity between the discrimination demanded by a painting, and the skill of discrimination we possess. [1] Mehretu’s exhibition appears something of a challenge at first, because the works are incomprehensible.
She exhibits a series of monoprints and drawings of a uniform size, in a grid across four walls. The experience of walking into this space is both hostile and spiritual. Hostile, because these drawings use a language which appears exclusive. There are marks and sequences which we seek to interpret using our training in representative conventions – arrows for example, but nothing which to our eye approaches ‘visual syntax’.
It is absolutely fine to think them illegible. Illegibility allows these drawings to take on a universal and spiritual character. This is the theory behind the early twentieth-century avant-garde, which is no great leap given Mehretu’s clear engagement with abstraction. Let us take, for the purpose of comparison, Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky. There is something of Kandinsky in Mehretu’s work.
Kandinsky was inspired by the orthodox icon to paint ‘beyond the visible.’ His aim was to place the viewer in a contemplative state, and he took a neoplatonic stance, rendering art autonomous from reality. The mystical nature of the icon totally absorbed the viewer; as he wrote in his Reminiscences, ‘for many years I have sought the possibility of letting the viewer ‘stroll’ within the picture, forcing him to become absorbed in the picture, forgetful of himself.’[2] Seeing a Kandinsky was meant to be like attending church.[3]
The Russian painter Kazimir Malevich also created a new language with form and colour, and called it ‘Suprematism’. These paintings intended not to stand for anything. Therefore, the ‘Black Square’, which has achieved a modern icon status of its own, was radical because unlike Soviet realism it aimed to express nothing of the context in which it was made. In the exhibition of 1915, the Black Square hung in the place traditionally occupied by a Russian icon.
In a way similar to Kandinsky and Malevich, Mehretu’s abstraction pushes her works towards the spiritual and iconic. It is about the effect. This approach is encouraged by the display context. They are viewed in a White Cube, supposedly a contemplative space devoid of historical reference. As Brian O’Doherty put it, in the white cube, ‘The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light…The art is free, as the saying used to go, 'to take on its own life.’ The art work is beyond time; ‘untouched by time and its vicissitudes’, it is eternal.[4]
So if the installation is both abstract, and in a neutral space, why does it look classical? Are the drawings in any way classic…? Do they have any ‘classicism’?
First, the White Cube is definitely not neutral. No matter how modernist it may appear, it recalls a classic space: a modern temple. It draws upon our preconception that the classical = pure, ideal.
But arguably, the drawings take an anti-classical stance. Let us compare the Futurists (surprise). Generally, Futurist art expresses illogicality, rejection, physical discomfort, excessive noise, and boredom.[5] Mehretu, according to White Cube (the gallery which represents her), ‘creates new narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies with a frenetic mark making’, which sounds both like Futurism, and academic research. Mehretu’s work, like Futurism, ‘conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place and a collapse of art historical references’. This is true of her working process. Prints like these are quite literally formed through compression; as the Slade lectures are currently exploring, they crush the three dimensional into one layer. And, Mehretu’s anarchic language does shriek of ‘parole in libertà’. The Futurists saw the destruction of conventional syntactical arrangement as an evolution in language. Eliminating superfluous grammatical units would find new meaning outside tradition.
Nevertheless, Futurism needed something to reject in order to define itself. The relationship between the avant-garde and the classics was one of push and pull. It required the classical tradition to be there. We could say the same of Mehretu’s drawings. The graffiti is, by association, a form of anarchical script which appears to deface white marble panels. The room begins to look like fifty acts of damnatio memoriae. These works look political or anarchic because, like Futurism, they appear to distort things we’ve seen before. I have been to the exhibition twice, once with a medic and once with a classicist. As the classicist said, ‘Picasso wanted you to see a vagina.’
But most likely, we are predisposed to find the classical.
As the famed critic of modernity Charles Baudelaire stated, painting proceeds from memory, and we see what we are equipped to see. Gino Severini, an artist who considered himself at different points both a Futurist, and a classical painter, similarly argued that ‘Memory, therefore, will act in the work of art as an element of artistic intensification.’ He says, ‘Today in this epoch of dynamism and simultaneity, one cannot separate any event or object from the memories.’[6] For the medic, these drawings are biological warfare: cellular microscopic specimens in a Wunderkammer built into the walls. For me, they are cityscapes. Mehretu’s work derives in part from the city, and these prints communicate the simultaneity of urban experience. Here, we see created a giant grid city like the panels of a bizarre Forma Urbis.
So there are two opposing forces at work. Either, we see these works as eternal, outside the tangible world, and contemplate them with neutrality as Malevich and Kandinsky would have wanted. Or, we use our own ideas, and our prior framework: the classical world. We should balance both, because abstraction is not necessarily anti-classical. Mehretu’s exhibition allows us to reflect on how, as classicists, we may approach a tradition which is, to say something generic, framed, fragmented, mystical, illegible, et cetera. The most rewarding experience is interdisciplinary: when you go with someone who has a different framework to yours.
Julie Mehretu Drawings and Monotypes is on show at Kettle’s Yard 22nd January 2019 to 24th March 2019.
Works cited
[1] M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972.
[2] W. Kandinsky, 'Reminiscences/Three Pictures', in K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Vol.I, London 1982. 368–9
[3] W. Kandinsky, ‘Art today is more alive than ever’, in K.C. Lindsay and P. Vergo eds., 765-771.
[4] Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. The ideology of the Gallery Space. Santa Monica, The Lapis Press, 1976.
[5] O’Doherty, 74-6.
[6] Gino Severini, “Plastic Analogies of Dynamism: Futurist Manifesto,” October 1913.