 Hi there, thank you so much for coming today. My name is Rebecca, and I'm the director of programs at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. And we provide additional educational programming support to the already fantastic educational programs at the center schedules here. I'm thrilled to be here today to welcome you all to the Sackler Center for Feminist Art for Brian Fair's talk, The Oldness of Abstraction or Can Abstract Art Be New. It's a beautiful day, so I really appreciate you all being inside the museum. For the past seven years, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art has been the permanent home to the dinner party by Judy Chicago and has been a vibrant exhibition programming and education space. As a nexus for feminist art, theory, and activism, the Sackler Center's feminist art and her story galleries display critically acclaimed exhibitions, and its forum is a venue for lectures, dialogue, and a platform of advocacy for women's issues. Crucial to the Sackler Center's mission is this type of public programming related both to the current exhibitions at the museum as well as contemporary and historical feminist political and social issues. Ongoing film screenings, scholarly lectures, artist talks, and performances, panel discussions, and symposia have explored topics ranging from the sex trafficking industry to the relationship between institutions and feminism to the horrors of mass incarceration. And hundreds of hours of these programs can be found on the Sackler Center's new website at our video page, which is at www.brooklynmuseum.org slash e-a-s-c-f-a slash video. This is a really exciting week for the Sackler Center because on Thursday we will be presenting the 2014 Sackler Center First Awards, honoring Anita Hill for speaking truth to power. Professor Hill will be here to accept the award from Elizabeth Sackler and Gloria Steinem, and we're also happy that Sherlaine McCrae, New York City's first lady, will be here to give special remarks. As of last week, we are nearly sold out, so if you're interested in attending, I encourage you to go online and purchase those tickets. Currently, in the Sackler Center, we have Chicago NLA, Judy Chicago's early work, 1963 to 74, and this exhibition is sort of part of a cross-country retrospective of Judy's work on the occasion of her 75th birthday. Here, the exhibition focuses on Chicago's work as it developed in the 60s up until the time she began the dinner party, much of it reflecting the abstract and minimalist tendencies of the 60s. So to flesh out this period and to give wider and different contexts to this work, I'm delighted to have the brilliant Bryony Fair here, discussing abstraction and abstract painting, both then and now. Bryony Fair is an art historian and writer on modern and contemporary art. She has written extensively on contemporary artists, especially the work of Gabrielle Orozco, Ronnie Horn, Ed Rusche, and many others. Fair has written books on abstraction, one titled on abstract art and art after modernism, called the Infinite Line, as well as curated several exhibitions. Her exhibitions include Eva Hesse's studio work, which she co-curated with Barry Rosen and Gabrielle Orozco, Thinking in Circles, both shows originating at the Fruit Market Gallery in Edinburgh. She is a professor of art history at the University College London and recently has been the 2014 Varnado Professor at the Institute of Fine Art here in New York. Please help me welcome her. Thank you very much indeed for that lovely introduction, Rebecca. I'd like to thank particularly Elizabeth Sackler and the Sackler Center for this invitation and also to Jess Wilcox and the Brooklyn Museum. I'm really delighted to be here and to think again about some of these problems of abstraction that have preoccupied me for a long time but in a slightly different context. So, Ad Reinhardt made this cartoon in 1946. A helpless young girl who strayed onto the railway track, a hopeless maiden called Art, is saved by a young hero who leaps from the fence to whisk her from certain death by an oncoming train and the young man who comes to her rescue is of course abstract art. The dangers he saves her from are many flying from the locomotive like kites from banality and prejudice through to corruption, money-grubbing and sin. The ills that is of a thoroughly corrupt culture which for Reinhardt as a committed leftist meant capitalist culture. The cartoon which appeared in Newsweek in 1946 is funny. Combining Reinhardt's deeply pessimistic view of contemporary culture with his optimistic belief in the redemptive power of abstraction. Partly it's comic because it's ironical. Deploying the means of old-fashioned illustration cut from old magazines and collage, that is the opposite of what it espouses abstract art to champion the cause of abstract art. The point though is a serious one. What could be more serious or ethical than saving art from impoverishment and complicity? And Reinhardt had good reason to believe in the potential of abstract painting. The abstract expressionists were coming into their own at this point by the mid-40s and he was an abstract painter associated with that group. This is a painting from 1950 by Ad Reinhardt. You know, he was committed to the radical project that he thought abstract painting was. It's easy to forget. It seems to have been forgotten. That sense that abstraction could be the savior of art seems almost inconceivable now. If anything needs saving or even just salvaging, it seems to be that project of abstraction. On the other hand, the threats to art, whatever kind of art you think of, haven't changed that much or have only been exacerbated under the contemporary conditions of late capital of our own neoliberal age. If Reinhardt thought art was threatened by the iniquities of the market, then what of the global scale of the market now when abstract paintings have come to be seen perhaps as the most collectible kind of art as well as the most ornamental, the most decorative, big, flat trinkets impoverished and stripped of content. Reinhardt by the early 50s had begun to paint his red monochromes with their geometric structure and only marginally differentiated color of red on red. The belief in the progressive vanguard position of abstract art in and of itself betrays the historical roots of Reinhardt's position when everything was at stake in arguing for abstraction as against the merely decorative or the simply bourgeois enjoyment of a nice picture. His black monochromes, which he produced from 1960 till his death would be his final proposition of art as art, that is, art to save art, rooted in those leftist debates of the 1930s, but also in those of the historical avant-garde of the 1910s and 20s, that is of the first generation of abstract painters like Mondrian and Maljevic. Here's a classic Mondrian from 1932. So this was a historical, a critical, as well as an aesthetic project, not simply a market-driven idea of collectible art or a latter-day curatorial vision of institutional gallery art. You know, the belief in the transformatory possibilities of abstraction often couched in transcendental and cosmic terms were associated, too, with art's revolutionary potential in the political sense. So the Russian, Maljevic, with all his problematic relationship to it, lived through a real revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Mondrian imagined a utopian future which would ultimately collapse distinctions between art and life. So this kind of geometric vocabulary seems old now. Perhaps it even seems as old now as an early 20th century magazine illustration. As archaic, you know, a failed historical experiment as old as this. So to hang such promises on a red painting or for that matter a blue or a black one seems nowadays as anachronistic, as obsolete, as quaint even as this collage drawing. Which is what I mean by the oldness of abstraction. Not just that it's old and yes, abstract painting is at least 100 years old and has developed its own languages, multiple polymorphic vocabularies over that time, but seems now maybe to struggle to be of now, of the present. Of course, painting is, it seems to be everywhere again. So my argument isn't just about the medium of painting being obsolete. Some of the best, I think, is Amy Silman's sharp reconfigurations of abstract expressionist gestural techniques where she refuses the opposition. She refuses to see abstraction in opposition to figuration. But today I want to focus rather on the legacies of geometric abstraction. Abstraction, if you will, in its most extreme form that yields least and which is arguably modernist painting's most hermetic heart. Apparently relentlessly sealed off from everything outside it. One of the contemporary artists to mobilize its vocabularies is Gabriel Orozco in his paintings, but also in the migration of grids and circles across any number of diverse surfaces, a photograph, for example. As if this lost utopia of modernist abstraction is as much a leftover as anything else. Whereas geometric abstraction once signified newness, now it seems to do precisely the opposite. But this radical inversion of its logic perhaps invites us to think again about abstract art, hermeticism, its sealed offness from the world, which in Reinhart and Agnes Martin as the two extremists of the genre that I want to discuss today, provide us with the material I think in their extreme sense of being sealed off, their extreme sense of the autonomy of painting provide us with the material for a thought experiment. If Reinhart was famously dubbed Pure, Mr. Pure, by Elaine de Kooning in her spoof Pure Paints, a picture in 1957 in Art News, then Agnes Martin would be, you know, Ms. Pure. Reinhart's identity as the butt of Elaine de Kooning's joke had been thinly veiled. You know, he was not named in that article, but he was implied, the high priest of the abstract who eliminated everything, every colour, and made colourless work as he worked in his colourless studio with bare white walls. Melbockner's portrait of Ad Reinhart from 1966, on the other hand, gets at the paradoxical strategy that quietude or quiescence offered Reinhart. You know, Reinhart was famously loquacious as well. But what Bockner's portrait of Reinhart gets at is that paradoxical strategy as the word quiescence merges in this list of synonyms that's drawn from, drawn ready-made from Roger's thesaurus with increasing violence as words like gag or shut up erupt into this list. So quiet contemplation, this is not. It's also a kind of lethal weapon. A legend has it that very shortly after Ad Reinhart's death in 1966, Agnes Martin up and left New York and spent two years travelling in Canada and New Mexico, finally settling down in Cuba near Taos. This isn't exactly true. She had a breakdown and lost her loft, but it's basically true as far as it reflects a certain affinity, I think, between these two artists, between Ad Reinhart and Agnes Martin, and maybe it reflects a certain truth as well in the violence of that break, that break from New York as well for Agnes Martin. And when, after several years, she returned to making art, she...one of the first things she did was a set of prints called On a Clear Day in 1972. This is one of the prints influenced by the screen prints Ad Reinhart had made shortly before he died. Both of the generation of abstract expressionist artists, both Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhart, are very hard to pigeonhole in a school or a group, but they shared many things, including an interest in Eastern mysticism and in arts, as they saw it, purity. Who else would act out Reinhart's notion of art as art? Let's call it art's myth of its own purity better than Martin, or in her early grids, this one from 1960, in a more extreme form. Both Reinhart and Martin rejected the gestural abstraction of the most ambitious artists of their own generation, preferring this pared-down aesthetic, a systemic approach to the structure of painting, which corresponded in both, I think, to a sense of a structure of feeling. Both were taken up, kind of championed by that minimalist generation of the 1960s who saw in the work a kinship to their own, you know, a minimal pared-down aesthetic, kind of wrongly in many ways, given the utopian and even meditative model of painting that both Ad Reinhart and Agnes Martin believed in. In Martin's case, in particular, it's this, and I want to call it her kind of fierce interiority that I want to think about. The most important hurdle for us to think about today, it seems to me, or the biggest problem of abstraction for us seems to be, you know, thinking about abstractions inside. It's inner life, you know, it's insistence on itself as a self-generating system, which only for many people nowadays seems to confirm its own irrelevance to larger social and political questions. And I think there's no escaping this aspect, this inwardness, this inside-ness. That is a really key aspect of the project of abstraction that I'm thinking about here, as it unraveled in the second half of the last century and founded actually, you know, founded because of it. Agnes Martin herself put it very clearly, very succinctly, unashamedly. She made painting, she said, with her back to the world. Both literally, of course, close up at the canvas, laboriously, slowly making a painting like this one. And you know, who now would, I wonder, would want to claim for art this turning away from the world? I don't, certainly not to urge art to be to retreat from our contemporary realities, but I would like to think about how this had come, and how this could have come to seem a viable way of making art matter, and why it might matter still. This is Agnes Martin in her New York studio in 1960 when she had a studio on Coente's slip, and the gallerist, Betty Parsons, had persuaded her to move from New Mexico where she had been working to New York, and Ad Ryan Hart, of course, was also a Betty Parsons artist. So Agnes Martin had moved from making paintings like this one of the landscape of New Mexico around Taos, like this one from the late 1940s, to paintings which figured the fragmented parts of a body to making abstract paintings with simple rectangles or triangles or circles. When she began to make her first grids from 1959-60, she evacuated those perceivable shapes in favour of the axial points of an underlying but invisible grid, as if it's ghost or double, making paintings indifferently to the world then, but I'd want to insist in the very fact that they're made, palpably made, necessarily of it. So in what way indifferent to the world and in what way of it seems an important question to me. Especially, as I said, in the light of current ideas about what it means for art to be socially and politically engaged with the world. The kind of painting I'm talking about today seems not just like the antithesis of that, but it's nemesis. There are two exhibitions on show in the museum today which show two radical alternatives to it for sure. Arguably precipitated by the very failure of precisely this brand of hermetic abstraction. And yet these paintings, I'm thinking of the Civil Rights exhibition and the Judy Chicago show there. So I'm thinking about today a very different trajectory within the history of abstraction because I think these paintings are still so compelling, not least because they are so extreme. There's very little minimal or rational about them. So I think in that extremity, we can perhaps begin to think differently about them. Reinhardt made the case that he was making the last paintings. His black monochromes, which he began to paint in 1960, were painted with ever so slightly differentiated tones of black by adding green or red or blue to the black. And whilst at first they seem all over black, simply black monochromes, those differences slowly emerge in time. I hope that shows what you don't get, I think, is the way that you adjust and that they change as you adjust to these paintings so that from a simple black monochrome the cruciform shape emerges. But in that way, these are paintings like Agnes Martin's that unfold in time, whose medium is time. The paint is merely the vehicle for that kind of, could you call it a temporal thickness, that time is something almost palpable and thick. This series in oil on paper from 1960 show, I hope, the slow acclimatisation and adjustments to the subtlest shades of black. They seem like acts of negation. They may seem iconoclastic, but they are also, in a sense, pure icons. They slow you down, force you to adjust to them that make art a place in culture where you're asked not to be religious, but reflective. This kind of reflective, speculative space in the culture is hard one. You know, never complete always in process. It's about plowing back a space for art rather than it be pre-given. In Agnes Martin's case, the myth of her as a recluse adds to this sense that her art is also reclusive in retreat from the world rather than of it. And yet, to me, it's the work's introversion that's interesting and powerful. Reinhardt, the iconoclast, talked about making last paintings. He had a sense of history, whilst Martin, if she did, it was of a quite different order, a more introverted order like a room of her own to cite Virginia Woolf or like an internal visual monologue. And perhaps more of an extreme case than Reinhardt, if only because he would make his last paintings for six years until his death in 1966. But Martin, Martin would carry on making hers for over 40 years, 40 years. And that whilst none is the same as another and there are certainly shifts in the work, as well as hiatuses, you get that sense that Agnes Martin wanted to avoid radical change. In fact, avoid change. That she avoided newness in favour of continuing with the same. That she preferred no change. And it was only through avoiding the new, if you like, of keeping to the same format that she could maximise the kinds of subtle, subtle differences that interested her. Or rather, you know, clearly there are changes, the moves from the earlier grids to these horizontal bands and no two paintings for sure, however close they are, no two paintings are ever the same. It's perhaps for this reason that aside from Mondrian, Agnes Martin is a kind of limit case for thinking about the problem of the hermetic, the self-same, even solipsistic exploration of this kind of systemic model of abstraction. Producing simple, seemingly endless variations on a set of parallel horizontal bands in her later work in the palest, most dilute colour bands of acrylic on a white Gesso base. So painting is so many different versions of itself. This is where she both continues Reinhardt's project that replays again and again the coming into being of painting and reconfigures it. Rather than a melancholic reiteration of the death of painting, this is, I think, a regeneration of painting. The utopian imaginary in Martin is symptomatic, also of a kind of melancholy, but it's the melancholic conviction of the impossibility of that utopian. As Reinhardt's paintings change in perception over time, so as many commentators have noted, De Martin's, you know, stick with them and the differences, this self-differing impulse takeover and amplify. And the medium that she works with is not so much painting itself, I think, as light, pictorial light, the kind of light that's not that of landscape painting but of abstract painting. They're highly sensitive, these paintings, to external conditions. So for all that talk of hermeticism and self-differentiation, they are, in some ways, highly sensitive to their outside, the external conditions, the lighting, the place that you see the work in. The surfaces are receptor surfaces in an important sense. They're entirely contingent on environmental conditions in that way. Of course, so far the same could be said of Reinhardt's use of black. You know, as the black picks up the light, the icon, you know, the cruciform shape of overlapping rectangles appears. It comes, as I've said, into being in an imminent process. On the other hand, Martin's reveal nothing of the sort. They refuse iconic shape. They refuse an iconic shape like a cross. There's no image in even that primordial or prototypical sense of a first image. Agnes Martin seemed to remain purely indexical. That is, sensitized to an outside. At least in the sense of being sensitized to our perceptual field as we view them, as we adjust to the light of us, they adjust to us. And that's important, I think. It means that everything that's considered intrinsic to them is also extrinsic. That painting's inner life, if you will, becomes its outer life. There's no way in the end to keep the world out of art. And so far as Martin's paintings continually re-enact this state of affairs, they make themselves again each time that, although they might seem to belong to an old model of abstraction, they're also remarkably mobile and adaptable in this way. And the fiction of Martin's painting, which is starkly contrasted to Reinhardt, is that she continually makes painting as new. That she manages to in some way suggest to us that painting is continually being made as new. And this isn't simply because she uses the colours of dawn, the palest reds and yellows and blues and occasionally greens, but colour itself seems to be coming into being. And that's the force of paleness in Agnes Martin's work, the colour that she dilutes to such an extent that it seems to almost disappear. And yet she can refer to it. For example, this is not a good example, but in one of the pictures that I've showed you before, she would refer to that as a blue painting or a red painting, even though it's the most dilute, the most diluted form of blue that you could possibly imagine. There's been a certain critical consensus to see Martin and Reinhardt as classicists. In the word pure, I can see, we can all see how the word pure would seem to move in that direction. But the fact that especially Martin has become canonic and to stand for the exceptional status of abstraction in some way has been seen to support that. And yet it seems to me to be very far from true. For a start, she has become canonic, I guess, of a high modernist moment, but she's never quite of it, partly because she is its most extreme exponent. Just as Reinhardt has been recognised within that modernist tradition, but not as one of its most major players, not like Rothko, for example. Something in the work of both of them kind of holds it back that doesn't quite belong to that high modernist phase, or both does and doesn't. This is an example of her red painting. And most of all, I think it's not true that she's a classicist because of the cumulative effect of her work, which is to suggest a kind of compulsive proliferation. Titles like Happy Holiday, yes, I'm afraid that is the title of this work, Happy Holiday, or Gratitude, which is the previous one that I showed you, the green one. Do nothing but betray, I think, a certain kind of struggle for calm rather than calm itself, where perceptual agitation is always, you know, just about kept in check. Rather, I think, you know, Martin and Reinhardt, too, can be placed within what we might think of as an ecstatic tradition, much more William Blake than Plato, that making the visual field malleable and elastic in the way they do seemingly, to make that out of so little, simply exaggerates, you know, makes the experience of these paintings disproportionate. I wouldn't call that mystical, but I think it belongs in some ways to that ecstatic tradition, which we might think of in terms of Blake. Likewise, the newness of them, the way they emerge into the field of vision, like a vision, replicating not the surface of painting, but the act of seeing. In this respect, her late paintings like this one never stop being as new, or bringing that fiction of newness into being. I don't think that's quite the same mythology of the new so familiar a part of avant-garde rhetoric of making art change in the light of new conditions in order to be adequate to those conditions, but reveals the, you know, the artifice of the as new. She reveals the artifice of the as new, but she also reveals the possibility of possibility that the new represents. It's to make painting continually belong to some kind of prototypical state, continually at that tipping point of making, on the point of making another version of itself, a model of self-generation that's continually making, remaking itself in front of us. So, what does it mean to think in this context about Martin's late, late paintings? She reaches a grand old age, well into her 90s, and she's producing, all of a sudden, the work like this in the early 2000s. So, all of a sudden, it seems, the work stops not changing and seems to change fairly radically these two triangular black shapes, the tip of each a small yellow triangle is one of a group of late, late paintings when she reintroduces these geometric shapes that she'd so clearly abandoned in 1960. The ground of this is familiar though, you know, there's the same loose wash on white gesso and it's symmetrical with these two triangles, you know, the same precision of those two triangles meeting halfway across and there's the same pencil line drawing, a pencil line drawn across the canvas exactly halfway up, but then there's a second one which seemingly maybe seems to reassert a kind of landscape format that she spent a lifetime, at least the main part of her life, you know, refusing. So does that break the system or does that extend it? This is a drawing from 1960 which returns in that late, late painting what, 44 years later, doubled. So does that make painting less hermetic or are these even mountains? Are these shapes even, you know, resonant of that same, well, that earlier pictorial prehistory, you know, those mountains around Taos that she'd painted in the late 40s? Well, it's clear that she reintroduces shapes and the shapes are black and her, you know, her use of black has been sporadic but consistent throughout her career and black blocks out the visual field and the shape seemed to deny that dissolution in light that we most associate. I tried to suggest in Martin's later painting. But this isn't just a matter of abstract painting but of what it is to be with or in or even lost in a picture. And I think perhaps the artist today who seems not necessarily the closest to Agnes Martin's model of painting but to raise interesting questions in relation to it is Ronnie Horn. This is part of a series called Bird by Ronnie Horn, two photographs of a stuffed bird from the back replicating our position in front of the image to stuffed birds in fact that she found in a classroom in Iceland. Iceland is Ronnie Horn's island and she always felt that she could be lost in. She's a kind of islander artist, I guess, an American artist who went to Iceland to get lost in and an artist who also to me dramatizes this problem of interiority as Martin did. A problem that I don't think is the exclusive concern of women artists and writers think of proofs but in many ways has been dramatized within the tradition of how women artists have managed to make work. Ronnie Horn's, these are two more of the Bird series and Ronnie Horn's pigment drawings, these thick congealed pools of pigment like geological specimens on a page, they're cut up and reconstituted like so many strata. There's an intricacy to the cutting up and the putting back together. Ronnie Horn's pigment drawings like this one are a very precarious made thing, not so unlike Agnes Martin's work and I guess Ronnie Horn also dramatizes the way interiority is also a way of articulating the question of whether or not it's still possible to be lost in a picture. Is it still possible to be lost in the artwork? The fact that there are a two not one, a double image rather than a single one suggests the impossibility of a singular monolithic secure sense of self that the artwork gives us access to. If there is a subject it's always split and fragmentary. Rather than a question of access to an authentic self the problem I think is recast, turned away from being a way to access the self of the artist as much as it's turned away from the face of what we think reality looks like. These photographs, this drawing are as artificial as anything. The photographs are just as artificial as any abstract painting, as fictional as art can be. And to return to Martin's work, another late painting these images are made to be unyielding. We see backs if you like, not fronts. The pictures don't satisfy us by looking back at us. Perhaps the art we need is not necessarily the art we think we want. The new in art, in the sense of what cuts against the grain of what we think we know is always going to be, I think, where we least expect to find it. Reinhardt's pedagogic impulse in his cartoons which was in some ways part of an enlightenment project to educate, to believe that people could be encouraged and helped to understand modern art was not meant to explain it away but to equip viewers with some tools, the tools of curiosity rather than the vocabulary of art talk to make art fit. And Reinhardt's point is surely still well made now. So if we no longer believe in abstract art's purity that art should or even could be autonomous entirely sealed off from the world if we see that its most hermetic forms were in fact always very far from ideal but contradictory, even compulsive then we should pause and take stock, I think before we dismiss the legacies of geometric abstraction as irrelevant to the demands of our own image culture. After all, abstract paintings of this kind the very fact that they seem so out of kilter with the absurd acceleration of our own image culture under the sign of digitization still have that power to create a space of thought and reflectiveness, even because it's even because they are so embedded in their diverse and plural histories that we can see the possibility of what they might become. Thank you. I'm very happy to take questions if anybody has any points or... I think the answer is probably kind of yes and no, no and yes in that Robert Smithson in his show called Ten at the Duane Gallery in LA he exhibited both Reinhardt and Agnes Martin with the minimalist and so they definitely saw in this minimal emptied out kind of painting the forebears of their own minimal aesthetic and you can see why. I guess what I was trying to point out by suggesting that Smithson and others kind of read it wrongly was because Reinhardt and Martin were so clearly in many ways of their generation they were of that older generation of abstract expressionist artists Agnes Martin is 40 when she comes to New York and starts painting those grids and so there's a sense in which their sensibility is I think founded in a notion of the expressive in a way that the minimalist sensibility isn't even though what they both come to do with that founding sense of the expressive is to kind of deny it or to make it problematic so I think you could say that the minimalists saw in them something really significant and that in that way they kind of got it right because there is something slightly out of kilter of both Reinhardt and Agnes Martin with this kind of high modernist way of thinking you know Clement Greenberg did not champion either of these artists you know for a reason so in the sense that the minimalists were trying to chart a very different kind of trajectory you know so I think it's really interesting that these were artists that the minimalists were really interested in so was Barnett Newman who of course you know that they kind of remade Newman in their own image they kind of, Judd comes along and almost paints Barnett Newman in kind of a standardized cadmium red light when of course you know Newman is not painting in that way Newman's making colour not using ready-made colour you know this kind of thing so I think it's a really you know the 1960s is this kind of primal scene isn't it of contemporary art and we have all these different tendencies working off against each other but also these different generations sort of jostling against each other too and I think it's quite interesting that Reinhardt and Martin come into their own in the 60s when they're really very mature artists you know they're not the young ones by any means but that's in a way their moment and I think they can really identify with Reinhardt because he's such an oddball Mel Botner sometimes tells this story that he and Smithson met Reinhardt on the street you're in the middle of the street in Manhattan and Reinhardt is very kind of talkative and sort of saying the problem with you guys is that you can't choose between Malevich and Duchamp and they just kind of shrug and say you know why would we want to you know kind of why there is a huge difference between those generations and for Reinhardt you did have to choose between Malevich and Duchamp and they chose Malevich and nobody really chooses Malevich anymore you know they really and so it's that kind of trajectory that I think is you know kind of interesting to think about because they are especially Reinhardt is a very articulate artist of a crisis even if the work that he produces doesn't depict a social political aesthetic crisis he articulates it brilliantly and that crisis is not so unlike our own so I think in a way that's why he as well as the fact that here's an artist who makes cartoons, makes abstract paintings makes photographs as shown in the recent Zwerna show you know I think it's not just because he's a I don't think he's at all a kind of postmodern type of artist who works with these eclectic media but you know he articulates something it's my pleasure, thank you sorry how do you mean? yeah hmm hmm hmm I've been working with there's going to be a big Agnes Martin retrospective coming up and been working with the curators on Agnes Martin thinking about it this is their knowledge not mine but I asked that question as well and apparently she really liked the you know the metal frames that are not really frames but the metal and they seem quite dated they're very much of that time they were the frames she liked and sometimes when they're on the 12 by 12s they seem a little bit sort of in your face as these silver sides but that was what she wanted and obviously on the bigger ones they do work actually and once you know they're her choice of frame they seem to work even better those are sides of the new those are very clear and legible sides yeah yeah absolutely absolutely but not I think do you mean that in I mean I don't think it's the new in the way that somebody like Jared or even in some of the Julie Chicago work in the galleries that are looking for the the kind of fetish surfaces of our culture I think in some ways she felt that was reasonably neutral those aluminium frames but yes I suppose with time they have come to seem very much of that moment but when you one of the things that I've also learnt recently about her way of dealing with the edge is that you'll notice that there's not just the frame but the lines stop like a quarter of an inch short of the framing edge always yeah it looks as if they fade to their edges but it's an optical illusion I mean I've always thought they slightly fade there's an optical illusion that goes on there and there's a film that somebody a brilliant filmmaker called Mary Lance made that she called with my back to the world and you see her Martin making these late paintings and you know it's quite simple in one way the effect is not is that she's putting masking tape down the side and she's drawing that ruler to that edge and the masking tape is half on half off so you know that is and she always does it so it's very different from you know the Mondrian idea that you want to either you know Mondrian either goes to the edge or he keeps it just short so you know there's in Agnes Martin you know there's quite a simple technical reason for it she's also which is interesting I think and it becomes very interesting when you look at her working in that film she always changes she always paints these bands vertically so from top to bottom and then rotates and there are a few with vertical bands but they're mainly horizontal and horizontal and that's why you get this it's not so clear in that one in Happy Holiday but this one obviously is clearer there's often a kind of gravitational pull or it's almost like kind of rivers of this pale dilute color kind of being coming across and you know you can almost tell the direction that she painted it they must be on the stretcher they're in the film they're on the I mean she's very old when this Mary Lance takes four or five years to make this film and you know she's in her 90s already I think so you know it's not to be taken necessarily as typical of her procedure throughout but certainly that thing about coming leaving that space between the pencil drawn line and then of course the color doesn't stop there it goes right to the edge it's an incredibly subtle effect but it is a very, very powerful one and that's her way of I guess drawing attention to the incident at the edge, the framing edge and I suppose that way of using the aluminium frames these quite unobtrusive ones in that they don't have any expansive width so just to make that clear to make that clear okay thank you