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Frank Srdla:Oltropol/11, 1971,mi:\cc.l m.:c.fuuns nn ,ar,llwu,l, 92 h1 105"' h1 I ion< hcs.Samml ngDu.,eJJorl , l'horo J ck All '>rella arrwork C: Arri 'r- Ri htSC)corrv ( A RS ),t'\ew YMk .

ANARCHY AND

OBJECTHOOD A full-scale Franli. Stella retrospective in Gernl tny argues for the non-Minimalist tendencies-frotn narrative to illusionis1n-in even his earliest worli.s.

By Marli. Prince

CURRENTLYON VIEW "Frank Stella The Ret rospec t" c Work< 1958 2012: at KunstmU\CUm

W nlfshurg,Germam, 'iept. 9, 2012-Jan. 20,20 1 1 .

l\IAR" PRI:--CF ,.. an arn .. r and wntcr li1ingin Bcrlon . Stc

Contributor- pa c.

TJ IE CLOSER ONE COMES to Frank Stella's s tripepaintings from the late 1950s and early '60s, th e more theyconfound their immediate gra phi c profile. Paradoxically,given t h e resolute abstraction of their idiom, these paintingsemerge from the onset of the television age, which they bothcrit ique and exploit by reflecting a distinction between thebrief 5watch of attention that the burgeoning mass media was seeking from its nascent viewers and a more protractedperception that might be its forsaken alternative. Stella'sstripes reveal a complexity of painterly detail that belies these ductively simple design premises to which they initiallyappear to conform.

In the first years of his career, Stella methodically etabout designing compositional templates only to erode theirauthority in his execution of the paintings. AbstractExpre ss ionist scale was condensed into a structural totality, a

s traight flush registering with ruthless efficiency on a retinadistracted by the postmodern era's competing artificial stimuli.

From the stripes of Morro Castle (1958), a very early examp le from the "Black Paintings "ser ies (1958-60), to thoseof Tuxedo junctio11 (1960), one of the last, Stel l a tautened his com posi tion from a relatively loose linear serialism, st ill

sugges ting a questing subjectivity, to a ri gorou s geometr icdesign that tersely maintained a contrast between g l oss b l ack st r ipes (their width determined by the size of hi s brushes)and the fine gaps of pa le matte canvas sepa ratin g them. lv!orro Castle is composed of a stack of two half squares of concentric str ipe s, centered within a wide rectangular canvas .Unstriped black margins to the left and right intim ate afigure/ground relationship which Stella would reject as theseries progressed. The stripes are woolly-edged and tend tobend slightly, so the half-squares appear to lean.

In contrast ro J\1orro Castle's irregularities, all of Tux

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A1rrt> c,,,,,,, 1'158, ineArr, New York

1-12 DECD!Bim 2012 , \ .\RCIIY ART IN MIERlCA 143

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If Stella's 1960 s worli i s warily cognizant of painting' spotential for operating as a graphic sign, his painted reliefsof the '80s do everything to atomize such legibility.

Previous spread,view of Stcll.1'sretro spec tive J lt he Kun sr musc urn Wolfsl> urg,showing {lef t tori,::ht), Btnr comr il sal< , 1987:

Isfahan, 1969; Tbr Gr,lnd Arm.,da(IRS, No.6. 1XJ, 1989; >nd

D.widgrodrck Kru,zewski

.

Lo cr;orco UIIZtt

p11um, 1987,painted etchedmagnc iumalum inu m and mixed medium,, 105 by 84lo by 64\t, inc h,s.SammlungFroehli ch ,Stuttgart.Phot o lllarek Ktu\zew sk i .

1-1 6 DEC8 1 B HI 2012 ANARCUY & OBJECT IJ OOD

(Dea r as Salt, 1987), from the uCones and Pillars" series (l )84-87), a group of dynamically juxtaposed aluminum l'(n es and cylinders have been striped so that their individual forms submit to an overall composition of vivid colorregis ter s. The stripe module from 25 years earlier has beentrans formed from a basic element of geometr i c construcno n into a device which confounds the visual autonomy of the forms it decorates and levels them inLO a nickeringptc torial unity. There is a circus air about the object-festive, celebratory, bra shly proc l aiming its own toppling : hs urdity. Tts planar complexity conveys a conviction that, ive n sufficient formal diversity, an abstract painting need 10t be referential or metaphorical ro generate narrative,nd to breach the potential solipsism of abstract painterly .u:ture.This kind of narrative docs not involve a critical

agenda or ideological statement which can be detached atwill from the object that representit-in the manner of so much conremporary uconceptual" painting-or even that ,,f mere accretive process occurring over time, as in Stella'sea rly l\1inimal stripe paintings. It is a specific embodimentof a se ries of conflations, conflicts and juxtapositions whic hco mprehend a complex cultural context while integrallyres iding in the formal elements through which they arcrealized. The viewer's eye must work to forge th ese elements into a pictorial order (a fusion that the illusionisticspace of traditiona l painting will have already partiallyachieved for the viewer through its two-dimensionality).

In his 1980s work, Stella's confidence in his abi lity toreplace metaphor with the pictor ial dynamism of abstractpainterly structure makes one questi on the apparent metaphorica l dimension of his earliest work. But look again at

Morro Castle in light of Bene come if sale, and the ea rly painring's metaphorical assumption of urban dynamics-the geometric cut and thrust of city streets, for example appear sco mpromised by the unbalanced architecture of its composition. It realizes a dichotomy between two distinct forms of narrative: the image - sign composed of modular repetition,and the relational structure of particular, unrepeatahle f o rms,with the latter prevailing.

1l1orro Castle can be interpreted as a cartoonish deflationof the grand verticality of a Barnett Newman 7ip painting.

Whereas J cwman's verticals stood as archetypal pictorialmetaphors for autonomous human subjectivity-the verticalband, sandwiched between broad fields of co lor, reflecting the viewer's physical and psychological autonomy pressed inupon by gravity and the pressures of mora l responsibilityStella's stripes bypass the metaphors they might ndumbrate,and defau lt to a pictorial embodiment of the bas i c sub jectivity of painterly a ppl i cation. 1l1e gesturalism of de Koonin g's

version of Abstract Expressionism i channeled into thestraitjacket of a stripe, allowing the lean of its traje ctoryand the overspill of its edges to generate n narrative whi chelaborates itself in contradistinction to that of the formal modularity of the painting's compositional template, and itsurbanist/modernist implications.

In Stella's recent art, new technology 's capacity forgranting meta l and plastics the fluidity of paint has takenhis re liefs as close to the three dimension s of scu l pture asthey have yet come, although these wall - mounted tangle sof cast materials-their surfaces only sporadically qualified with spray paint - always retain an attenuated lin k to the wall as their support, as their s patial dynamics remain invested in the pictorial illusionism of p

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