David Raskin 07

Carl Andre
Zinc-Lead Plain
(detail), 1969

Artistic

Atheism
 09

The language of less is no language

at all. Language is a linchpin of
the delusion that art is ripe for trans-
lation. Less is the position that
art escapes definition, that its
energy forces a change. Like the
wind, less blows.1

Take Josef Albers’s Study for

Homage to the Square: Pale Autumn
(1963), a twenty-four-by-twenty-
four-inch painting. Mats of flax
and buff, and a goldenrod that
spreads to the edges, frame a
pale blond square. The nine-by-
nine-inch square is off-center and
bisects the canvas with its top, a
placement that results in bands
that are one inch wide below, two
and one-half inches on the sides,
and four inches above. Each cir-
cumjacent strip alternates as shape
or border, as forward or behind,
and patterns quickly proliferate.
The staggered, shifting organization
gives the image a type of asymmet-
rical symmetry. What might have
seemed simple soon becomes
unhinged. Uncertainty grows, and
the painting exceeds our grasp.

Pale Autumn is direct in a way that

language never is. It is experience,
and it stands closer to “woof”
than to “wolf.” Albers’s title is non-
sensical, and a hint, since the art
never becomes a story. Instead,
it continues to reward long after
any narrative would have reached a
conclusion. The painting adds
to reality. It does not picture it.2
Josef Albers Raphael
Study for (Raffaello Sanzio)
Art such as Albers’s is nothing more Homage to the Madonna del Granduca
John McCracken than materials in combination. Square: (Madonna of the
Untitled, 1967 And though such direct art dates Pale Autumn, 1963 Grandduke), 1506
Artistic Atheism
back nearly a century to Russian
Constructivism, many people
prefer an even older type of art, one
that is representational. But it
seems to me that when art is an
image of something, any picture will
do. What difference would it make
if we were looking at Raphael’s
Mary (see page 09) or Leonardo’s?
This art is indirect as the various
forms of “Mary” are infinitely
substitutable. All convert patterns
of gold, blue, and peach into virtual
encounters with the divine.
It is human nature to seek meaning
through art. As a character in
Pattern Recognition by novelist
William Gibson ventures more
broadly, before adding a twist,
“Homo Sapiens are about pattern
recognition. Both a gift and a trap.”3
Gibson set his tale in the near
future when corporations are even
more skillful than now at creat-
ing desires. Marketing campaigns
imprint on each and every great
blankness and supply individuals
with personalities that they think
are theirs.4 Products provide a
psychological profile.
As much fiction as science, pattern
recognition leads to the classic
attribution error of believing that a
situation is a disposition. Just be-
cause Raphael leaves me breathless,
it does not follow that I am passion-
ate. “Mary” is a trap, a context that
tells most of us how to behave. Her
images create a feedback loop that
is comfortable, since they reflect
what we already know. In contrast,
flax, buff, and goldenrod are a gift,
nonsense that disrupts the circuit
of meaning. “Woof” is startling.
Consider John McCracken’s Untitled
(1967, see page 08), a ninety-six-
inch length of green fiberglass and
resin over wood that is polished to a
sheen and propped against the wall.
The color is variable, as the surface
absorbs and reflects ambient condi-
tions, including viewers, spot lights,
and interior architecture. Dense
yet radiant, it creates a real sense of
place within the room. Like a pulsar,
its electromagnetism makes us
react, not because we take pleasure
in the celestial body but because
the alien space is something differ-
ent. Untitled distorts reference
points, and we seek new ones.
Less moves people from one
circumstance to another. Its aes-
thetics are emergent rather than
transcendent.5 In the words of
another of Gibson’s characters,
What we think of as “mind” is only
a sort of jumped-up gland, piggy-
backing on the reptilian brainstem
and the older, mammalian mind, but
our culture tricks us into recognizing
it as all of consciousness. The
mammalian spreads continent-wide
10 11
Cover for Pattern Carl Andre
Recognition (2003) Zinc-Lead Plain,
by William Gibson 1969
beneath it, mute and muscular,
attending its ancient agenda. And
makes us buy things.6
In a secular universe, this evolu-
tionary program is what we call
reality, and it is composed from
physics and fantasy.7
Reality and experience are one
and the same, partial and partisan.
Conservatives hope to see these
restricted, while progressives argue
that no scale is too large. A small
universe accedes to what is already
known while an expansive one
opens the door for something un-
foreseen. The choice is ultimately
genetic because what is at stake
with aesthetics is whether
our descendants perish or thrive.
The challenge for all works of art is
to help people live better, even
for impersonal ones such as Carl
Andre’s Zinc-Lead Plain (1969).
Not representational, it is thirty-six
thin metal squares arranged on
the floor in a checkerboard pattern.
When we stand next to this direct
work of art, the familiar tartan criss-
cross dominates our visual field, but
Artistic Atheism
Caspar David Leonardo da Vinci
Friedrich The Vitruvian Man,
Wanderer Above circa 1492
the Sea of Fog,
circa 1817
when we stand on it, the atmosphere
is largely tactile. Zinc feels lighter
than lead underfoot. By constructing
a space characterized by conflict-
ing optical and haptic sensations,
Zinc-Lead Plain compels us to seek
reconciliation (which is also the
disorienting work of its homophonic
title). Its scale is vast, since the art
is about nothing yet causes us to
fend for ourselves. Root hog or die.8
I ask a lot of less because it provides
an opportunity to live directly, if
only for an instant. It lets us forget
who we are and simply breathe. But
most art critics and historians abhor
a vacuum. They have long rushed
in to fill the void of inchoate experi-
ence with something, anything—
and it has become a truism that this
type of art is about “the body.” It is
sad to say, but it seems to me that
when we have little to go on, most of
us look first toward ourselves.
These “body” proponents propose
that human flesh and blood are
the first principle of meaning and
value. Where once stood God,
they now claim we find ourselves.
It is our hearts that create time
and space with every beat. Such
thinking works by acknowledging
a law of nature, such as gravity,
but asserting that this energy has
no bearing independent of how
it imprints on us. Since the body
struggles with this and other forces
at every instant, it is in these
relations that the distinctions cen-
tral to human existence proliferate
like cracks in the ice.
The distinguished scholar David
Summers claimed this ontology
in his attempt at a history of all art,
writing,
The “anthropomorphism” of the con-
ditions and values of real space
provides the irreducible basis for the
meanings given to the world in which
we must find ourselves in any cultural
circumstances, and for our self-
understanding through that world.9
Because the body provides the
medium that all meaningful relation-
ships stain, Aztec carvings, Assyrian
guardian figures, Chinese decora-
tive screens, the Great Mosque
at Cordoba (987), Michelangelo’s
Sistine Chapel paintings (1512),
and Monet’s Impression, Sunrise
(1872) can all be understood as
magnificent variations on a univer-
sal condition, rather than as
steps in a long march from savagery
to enlightenment. In this way of
thinking, art is a condition of
social existence, since it gives our
genes their lifestyle.
12
Claude Monet Ro
Rob
Robeert
rtt Mo
M rri
rriis
is
Impression, Sunrise, Po
Por
o tal
a , 196
al 964
64
6 4
1872
Robert Morris’s art seems tailor-
made for body claims, though
Summers did not address it directly.
Morris’s Portal (1964) is a white
post-and-lintel arch the size of a
standard four-by-eight-foot sheet of
plywood, but twelve inches thick;
it circumscribes the dimensions
of a standard doorway, frame and
all. The relationship between the
barrier and the passage repeats the
door motif and creates a comedy
of errors, since we anticipate domes-
tic scale but experience a different
sort. A body argument would claim
that the surprising displacement
triggers a series of questions about
private desires, institutional pre-
sumptions, and public life. These
questions are translations and turn
what should be a silent movement
into a noisy interrogation.
I believe, instead, that this mis-
match between expectations and
sensations is a direct experience
not yet caught by language.
Think of it as jet lag. An “overnight”
flight from Chicago to Amsterdam
lands at 8 a.m. (rather than
1 a.m.) at a cost of seven lost hours.
Where are they? Time has disap-
peared back into nonsense, a dull
ache behind tired eyes.
Jo Baer
Untitled, 1967
Artistic Atheism
Direct experience occurs when
physics overcomes fantasy. It defies
the habits that shape people to
social norms and briefly leaves us
without any place. We mindlessly
wallow in patterns not recognized
but simply felt and must wait for the
change that lets us handle the in-
put. “The future is there,” Gibson’s
protagonist, Cayce, explains,
looking back at us. Trying to make
sense of the fiction we will have
become. And from where they
are, the past behind us will look
nothing at all like the past
we imagine behind us now. 10
Change is what it means to thrive.
In developing her ideas, Cayce
could certainly have had Jo Baer’s
spare paintings in mind, since
they might be said to merge fiction
and physics. One untitled horizon-
tal diptych from 1967 (see pages
14 and 15) has nearly the same
dimensions as Morris’s Portal and
makes a similar claim on actual
space. Baer strategically painted the
centers white, mimicking raw canvas,
and carefully colored the edges
with wide black and narrow brick-
red stripes. An optical illusion
called a Mach band, a perceived
but not pigmented gradient, occurs
at the intersection of the hues.
The materials vibrate, whether paint,
canvas, or wall, and our sense of
indeterminacy is actual. The loss
of place kick-starts the genetic
striving toward certainty.
Art with less is productive, since it
is partly outside of culture. It works
both with and against what
Summers called the “conditional
basis of human activities.”11 It
creates potential because it is only
transitional. There is no meaning
in this art, just sensations that
free perceptions from the conven-
tions that bind them. Like a big
bang, less sets people in motion,
creating something new.
The position I have been devel-
oping, that art can be a force of
change rather than a form of repeti-
tion, follows from the premise that
art makes a good place to debate
metaphysics. As far as I am con-
cerned, the value of art depends on
its consequences. A clever work
is little more than a pleasing turn
of phrase, a decorative tool that
reinforces complacency. A creative
work of art is instead one that
breaks down prevailing conditions,
a pebble in our shoe that changes
how we walk.12 It fashions an
adaptive urgency, a kind of natural
selection at the level of human
ecology. If the purpose of art is to
help ensure the survival of our
genetic material, or, to paraphrase
Summers, to shape the possi-
bilities afforded by the world, then
it is direct experience that lets
reality evolve.13
Another creative example of less
is a work by Alan Sonfist that
could easily have been included
in Summers’s global art history.
It is a display of oblong chunks
of dirt and rock that differ in size,
shape, and color. The dots and
dashes are arranged in neat
rows and suggest some sort of
16 17
primitive language now lost to time.
But because we miss the message
from the past, the sequence exists
only as color given texture, volume,
and weight. It is a sensually
integrative experience rather than
a conceptually divisionary one,
and the art remains unformed, like
clay not yet given human contours.
If we were to read the wall text—
although my standard advice is,
“do not”—we would learn that Sonfist
called this presentation Earth
Monument to Chicago (1965–77),
which also makes it a materialist
prehistory of a Midwestern civi-
lization. It is a core sample of the
geology that supports a great city—
and what lies beneath are, suc-
cessively: a sand, gravel, and clay
mixture; very stiff gray clay silt;
fine sand with gray clay; gravel
with gray clay; dense gray clay silt;
hard pan; green shale; sandstone;
and dolomite with pyrite. “I try to
recognize a pattern before anyone
else does,” Cayce, a trend hunter,
says, referring to human existence
in more capitalistic terms. “I point
a commodifier at it. It gets produc-
tized.”14 Sonfist’s monument is
matter still free.
The fallacy that art is about some-
thing is based on the Judeo-
Christian assumption that experi-
ence needs interpretation, that
art is more Talmud than Torah. With
God dead, art has no choice but
to fail that time-tested question:
“What is the point?” Rather than
hiding this silence, less takes it
for a given and treats our biological Alan Sonfist
drives instead. It is a gift to be Earth Monument to
independent of marketing, since Chicago, 1965–77
Artistic Atheism
that is a moment when the scale
of human existences is momentarily
unbounded.
Less did not die with the passing of
generations, and younger artists
continue to develop its values.
Their challenge is to invent moments
in which an idiom can feel day
as fresh. With nothing replacing
superstition, real space remains
open and emergent.
Leonor Antunes, Carol Bove, Jason
Dodge, Gedi Sibony, and Oscar
Tuazon are five artists whose work
feeds back distortion rather than
harmony. Their works create an
actual here-and-now rather than an
imagined there-and-then; these
artists allow a present that contin-
ues to shift and evolve. Cayce again:
“It’s about a group behavior pattern
around a particular class of object.”
The art itself is atheistic and
builds a place where people must
ask each other questions.
All five artists construct idiosyn-
cratic moments from familiar
materials, including lumber, lamps,
leather, and peacock feathers.
Theirs are decentered practices,
since the works never suggest final
answers but instead make tentative
proposals about the way life works.
It would be hard to develop any
grand claims from Dodge’s satellite
dish or Sibony’s scrap wallboard.
Their attitude is casual—almost but
not quite careless. If a piece has
a precious passage or two, the
overall effect is against decoration.
Less in the hands of this genera-
tion keeps experience direct, but
18
also makes it neutral. It is no longer
such a threat to overcome.
But art should be dangerous and
stand at odds with expectations.
Only from that disruptive position
can it help shape a better future.
Reality responds to biological
imperatives, and direct experience
changes mind and body. Atheistic
art, an art of less, amplifies human
drives toward success by
creating new patterns of belief,
both then and now.
David Raskin
David Raskin is Professor and Chair of
the Department of Art History, Theory, and
Criticism at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. He has written widely on
contemporary art and is the author of Donald
Judd (London and New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010) and Richard Serra
(London: Phaidon Press, forthcoming
in 2012).
Carol Bove
Untitled, 2008
1 On “delusion,” see Richard Dawkins, The
God Delusion (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2006). Surveying and critiqu-
ing arguments in favor of religion, God, faith,
etc., Dawkins nonetheless concedes: “If this
book works as I intend, religious readers who
open it will be atheists when they put it down.
What presumptuous optimism!” Dawkins, 5.
2 On “experience,” see John Dewey, Art as
Experience (1934; New York: Capricorn Books,
1958). Dewey placed art on a continuum with
everyday objects, and, among other contribu-
tions, made the still-insightful distinction
between “experience” and “an experience.” He
wrote: “Things happen, but they are neither
definitely included nor decisively excluded;
we drift. We yield according to external pres-
sure, or evade and compromise. There are
beginnings and cessations, but no genuine ini-
tiations and concludings. One thing replaces
another, but does not absorb it and carry it on.
There is experience, but so slack and discur-
sive that it is not an experience.” Dewey, 40.
3 William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
(New York: Berkeley Books, 2003). Gibson is
best known for his science fiction, including
the short story “Burning Chrome,” which
apparently contains the first use of the term
“cyberspace” in print, and the bestseller
Neuromancer, which introduced the pos-
sibilities of the internet to a broad audience.
Gibson, 23. (Thanks to David Getsy
and Mark Cheetham for suggesting I read
Gibson’s work on patterns.)
4 GREAT BLANKNESS (www.greatblank-
ness.com) is a project by Paul Zelevansky.
5 On “emergent,” see Steven Johnson,
Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains,
cities and software (London: Allen Lane, The
Penguin Press, 2001). Reviewing varieties of
civilizations and biological structures, Johnson
argued that no center, anchor, or author is
necessary for the creation of complexity:
“What features do all these systems share? …
In the simplest terms, they solve problems
by drawing on masses of relatively stupid
elements, rather than a single, intelligent ‘ex-
ecutive’ branch. They are bottom-up systems,
not top-down.” Johnson, 18. (Thanks to David
Getsy for pointing me toward this volume.)
19
6 Gibson, 71.
7 On “physics and fantasy,” see Thomas
Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–
450. Against materialist reductions, Nagel
argued that mental phenomena, while physi-
cal, have no choice but to have a subjective
character: “After all, what would be left of
what it is like to be a bat if one removed the
viewpoint of the bat?” Nagel, 443.
8 “Root hog or die” is an idiom for self-
reliance and dates to the American colonial
period, if not earlier. Its best-known appear-
ance is in Davy Crockett’s autobiography,
although Donald Judd used a variant in a
1964 interview. See David Crockett, The Life
of David Crockett: The Original Humorist and
Irrepressible Backwoodsman (New York: A.
L. Burt Company, Publishers, 1902), 85, and
Donald Judd, quoted in Bruce Glaser, “Ques-
tions to Stella and Judd” (1964 interview,
1966 publication), in Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1968), 157.
9 David Summers, Real Space: World Art
History and the Rise of Western Modernism
(London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003), 38.
Summers’s sweeping study explains ways
in which art shapes our world and offers a
means to assess art across cultures while
remaining respectful to chronological and
geographical realities.
10 Gibson, 59.
11 Summers, 37.
12 Josh Mannis used the simile of “losing
a shoe” in an artist’s statement to describe
his videos: performers wear costumes that
mix disco and horror film fashions and
repeat dance-like movements that mutate
to an accompanying musical score (www.
joshmannis.com).
13 Summers, 53–54.
14 Gibson, 88.
I am thankful for feedback on this essay from
Jodi Cressman, David Getsy, and Adrian Kohn.