Sense and Non-Sense
The main problem that the artist encounters at work — the source of all their woes and triumphs — is that materials must be transformed: made to give what they cannot. Appearance is the mask of the true face beneath. To construct an artwork, things must be arranged in such a way that the moment they appear to the viewer radiates with a significance greater than they, in fact, possess. The viewer is made to feel like the subject of a revelation without greater cause than color, line, shape, and texture. These alone are enough to conjure existential enigmas. They provide a body for the immaterial, intertwining spirit and substance, giving semblance to the unseen and unfelt.
The visual qualities of an artwork are not the same as its aesthetic form. The sensual properties of an artwork cannot adjudicate its value, which is bound up in its propensity to mean. And meaning is not sensually grasped but requires the use of concepts descended from history. The artwork is as much an idea as it is a material construction. The pleasure it offers is deferred and diffracted — not immediately given but found through an attentiveness to experience that unfolds the suggestive potential contained in the series of impressions that form the work. The viewer completes the work as a necessary and active participant in its meaning. As a generalized figure in the mind of artists — a member of an anonymous public — the viewer stands in for all of society, a part of the subjective totality. Likewise, the artwork confronts the viewer as a product of culture, an artifact in which the aesthetic imagination of society takes on an objective form. The artwork impresses itself on the viewer with an authority derived from the persistence of art as a social practice throughout history, while at the same time — by virtue of its artificial nature — underscoring that all practices are constructed and subject to change. By arranging its form in accordance with concepts whose meaning and interrelation is grasped intuitively, the artwork ceases to be a purely sensual object and directs experience to the limits of perception, where the dividing line between being and non-being, matter and spirit, is traced so closely that it almost disappears. The artwork demands reflection. It presents as an enigma, both in its making and viewing. The artwork speaks to intuition; it follows reason down paths of cognition seldom explored. Towards the distant territories of the mind where the infinite totality of life is charged in every thought as the immanence of change.
Monstrosities flowering like a flower . . .
Agnes Martin, Drift of Summer, 1965. Acrylic and graphite on linen, 72 x 72 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.