Exercise 2.3 Utter Flatness

“Flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art” Greenberg, 1960 (quoted from the UVC manual)

“The eye…is more directly compelled to treat the whole of the surface as a single undifferentiated field of interest, and this in turn, compels us to feel and judge the picture more immediately in terms of its overall unity” Greenberg, 1961 (in Chipp 1968 p581)

“It seems to be law of modernism- thus one that applies to almost all art that remains truly alive in our time- that the conventions not essential to the viability of a medium be discarded as soon as they are recognized” Greenberg, 1961, (in Lymberopoulou ed. p320)

That’s a lot of Greenberg. But finding these quotes and putting them together has helped me get to grips with the idea of flatness in modern art. It seems that stripping everything non-essential away to leave an essence of something is what is going on here. In another “stream of conscious” type exercise, (I seem to do that a lot) I went through the images collected on my phone from visits to Tate Modern and from books, and uploaded all the ones that seem “flat”. Here is a selection of them, and I’m going to see if I can work out why I thought they had “flatness”.

McGurn’s site-specific “Sleepless” exhibition at Tate Britain comprised figurative canvases from which the work spills out onto the walls, floor and ceiling. In her work, she uses “a collected archive of found imagery to create figurative installations which express notions of sexuality, ecstasy, loss and consciousness” to explore the experience of living in an urban environment (Tate.org.uk). The flatness here is in the use of line and areas of quickly and loosely applied colour, and the effect is of the unique kind of “white noise” that comes from living in a city, with so much going on all at once. In this instance the experience is presented as a kind of palimpsest with the over-laid drawings- the all-encompassing urban chatter is kind of the opposite of everything unessential being stripped away, rather it is all piled in together in one big melting-pot to make one big homogenised, flattened “whole”.

Jean Hélion (1904-1987) was a French artist “whose abstract work of the 1930s established him as a leading modernist” (www.tate.org). His early work is full of flat colour and bold outlines, but over time you can see that the forms become more volumetric and dimensional with more depth and use of graduated tone. “Abstract Composition” (1934) is flat, although you can see the beginnings of representational volume appearing with the use of tone, but the overall effect is of areas of solid colour, a bit like a collage of pieces of tissue. A year later, with “Ile de France”, the tone has become more dominant: there are still solid blocks of colour but the effect is one of layers, with the volumentric figures as the last layer. The solid block of blue has grounded the composition, effectively locking it all into place. Layers of flatness, a bit like a lino-print, and you have the feeling that you could reach out and lift those volumetric shapes out: a feeling that is absent from the earlier 1934 painting.

I simply have included The Rabbit, as an example of how the subject matter has been reduced right down, to the essence of “rabbit”. In my stream-of-conscious it probably isn’t really an example of utter flatness, but you can trace a path from this painting back to the representational forms of Hélion. It is a volumetric representation of a rabbit: the gradation of tone makes it seem as if it is coming at us from out of the field of clover; but it is the shapes presented that make us think “rabbit”, the long ears and face, not the monotone treatment of form. The image has been given a certain amount of flatness with that treatment of light: the rabbit seems to be burrowing into the light source and it has removed its features completely. Its as if the image has been given its flatness from over-exposure. Indeed, Loock says (2007, p 82) “Light appears to emanate from the rabbit itself, a radiance which in a sense drains its own form”.

I chose “Ten Minute Transmission”, instinctively I think, for the shadows it casts on the wall, not for the piece itself. These shadows cannot have been accidental or if they were, what a great effect! The title, according to the Gallery blurb next to the piece, refers to the period of time in which the International Space Station can be contacted via radio as it passes overhead. I love the contrast between the “solid” (it isn’t really solid though, its made of wire) suspended piece, and the there-not-there flatly ephemeral shadow it casts. The flat shadow suggests the periods between the times when the “solid” ISS reveals itself.

As I have said, these examples aren’t indicative of “utter flatness”, but they all USE flatness in some way and exploit its nature: reducing things down to their essence, the flatness of bright light, of areas of blocks of colour, of translucency, shadows, white noise. I wonder if the rather oblique instructions for this exercise were supposed to lead us to examples by Ad Reinhardt, or Mark Rothko, or Malevich’s “Black Square” (1913) because his comments about it echo Greenberg’s:

He made his intention clear; he wanted to completely abandon depicting reality and instead invent a new world of shapes and forms. In his 1927 book The Non-Objective World, he wrote: ‘In the year 1913, trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took refuge in the form of the square.’ (tate.org.uk)

If, however, we are supposed to pinpoint ways in which artists could utilize this notion of flatness “to free art from the dead weight of the real world” then I think my examples are valid. It is the “freedom” that seems important; freedom to cast off all the un-necessary stuff, to boil subject matter down to its essence, its absolute, if you like.

The actual instructions for this exercise read: “What kind of things might one put on a gallery wall that could pass for an abstract or figurative paint (sic) but also reveal themselves to be everyday objects?”

Do you think I’ve over-egged the pudding a bit?

Possibly. But for me, fed up as I had become with producing “pretty pictures” through the medium of lino-cut, this is rapidly becoming an utterly fascinating ramble through the landscape of Visual Culture, so I feel exonerated. I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to say here. Household objects? Okay, here goes:

1. an area on a gallery wall of emulsion paint.
2. a sheet, tea-towel, scrap of fabric.
3. A shadow cast by the same Dyson Vacuum cleaner mentioned earlier in the course.
4. If sound counts as “flatness”, then the noise of ten suspended vacuum cleaners all switched on at once. Or maybe Martin Creed’s 39 metronones at the Tate (entitled “Work no. 112”), all set to clack at slightly different time intervals, but with the exact same “clack” noise.
5. A projector, projecting a blank square of white light.

Bibliography

Chipp, HB (1968) Theories of Modern Art University of California Press, Los Angeles

Loock et al (2011) Luc Tuymans Phaidon London

Lymberopoulou, A et al (eds) (2012) Art and Visual Culture: a reader Tate Publishing, London

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/france-lise-mcgurn accessed 18 October 2019

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jean-helion-1264 accessed 18 October 2019

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T07921 (Jean Helion’s “Abstract Composition” 1934) accessed 18 October 2019

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kazimir-malevich-1561/five-ways-look-malevichs-black-square accessed 18 October 2019