Rosalind Krauss’s Grids

In Rosalind Krauss’s Grids, Krauss first used the "Grids" as the object of interpretation to test the effectiveness of structuralism. In the article "Grids," she started with the success of the grid in the late art history of. The grids fulfill its duties in two ways to declare the modernity of modern art: one is space, and the other is time. In the spatial sense, the grid declares the autonomy of the art field, which is flat, geometric, and orderly, against nature, imitation, and reality. In the planarity produced by the grid coordinates, it is a meant for expelling the real space and replacing it with a lateral extension of a single surface. In the time dimension, the form of the grid is everywhere in the modern art of the 20th century. Artistic schools such as Cubism and Style School and artists such as Mondrian and Malevich have become their beneficiaries. Then, Krauss pointed out that the success of the grid is maintained in its mythological structure. The traditional view is that myth is a story that unfolds in time, but according to Levi-Strauss' anthropological theory, the myth is decomposed into various opposites and connected myths through the analysis of the longitudinal analysis. At the same time, spatialization suppresses the story itself and then explores multiple variants of a myth. Thus, Krauss identified the isomorphism of the grids and the myth—against the linear narrative that was developed in time series. As a structure, the grids accommodate the differences in art: light and darkness, flow and stagnation, separation of the perception barrier from the real world.

The grids, appears as two structures of centrifugation and centripetal on the screen—the former refers to the operation of the grids, and the artwork is represented as a small part cut from a huge fabric, forced us to recognize a world beyond the work; the latter refers to the lattice distinguishing the action from the world around it. It is an intrinsic effect of the boundaries of the external world on the interior of the work. Taking Mondrian's abstract paintings as an example, some diamond-shaped grids seem to forcibly cut off the vision we use to look at the “outside the window,” while the black lines in other paintings make it the outer edge of the grid and the physical outside of the work. The separation of the edges forces us to believe that the space inside the grid completely encompasses the interior of the entire workspace. Krauss reminds us that, contrary to the general understanding, Mondrian's mature work juxtaposes both centrifugation and centripetal structures. We gradually discovered that one of the most modern facts about lattices is that they have the ability to serve as examples or models for anti-development, anti-narrative, and anti-history. Furthermore, it is impossible for us to identify the careers of decades after his mature work with the “history of development.”

Krauss called the analysis model "etiology." Mondrian's grids paintings need to be explored in a way that explores the cause rather than history. We can't see anything in one of his works. Only by putting together a series of works can we understand the meaning of being an independent and unified overall structure. Mondrian's art became an ideal object of the structuralist approach because: first, it was a closed corpus, not just the total production of the work, but also it is said that the number of painting elements he uses is limited. Secondly, all his works are easily classified into series. The two methodological steps first adopted in the analysis of structuralism are to define the corpus of objects, which can be simplified from this definition. Restore a common set of rules, and restore the taxonomic composition of the series from the corpus. In other words, the structuralist approach emphasizes the formal elements through the differences to obtain the meaning of the entire formal system. Mondrian's works are in perfect harmony with the theory of structuralism. The works have a certain kind of "dynamic balance," which does not have to be attributed to the formal accuracy of merely resorting to visuals, but also breaks the use of "forms combined with content." into interpreting the barriers of the abstraction in the works.

For Krauss, the extended space of postmodernism implies two characteristics: the artistic practice of a single artist and the medium of creation. But Krauss believes that art criticism, still constrained by modernist thoughts, is deeply suspicious of such artistic attempts and calls it a compromise. In the field of postmodernism, in Krauss's view, artists use any medium, such as photography, books, wall lines, mirrors or sculptures to create art, so the art practice of postmodernism is not the definition of this particular medium, it is related to more like a series of cultural terms. Krauss's thinking about postmodernism, although based on post-formalism criticism, is like an artist's expansion of the sculptural field, and she is open to a cultural structure by resorting to post-formalism criticism. Behind the evolution of Krauss's thoughts, it is intrinsically linked to her reliance on philosophical thinking. She used linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, phenomenology and used the thoughts to engage in dialogue with the artworks, which made Krauss's art criticism philosophical.