A History of Flatness: from Greenberg to Contemporary Digital Media

Title:

A History of Flatness: from Greenberg to Contemporary Digital Media

Author:

Eleanor Oliver

Publication Year/Date: May 2024

Document Version: Fine Art Hons dissertation

License: CC-BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/

DOI: https://doi.org/10.20933/100001303

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A History of Flatness: from Greenberg to Contemporary Digital Media

Eleanor Oliver

A dissertation submitted for the degree of Art & Philosophy BA (Hons)

Under the supervision of Doctor Oisín Keohane and Iain Sturrock

Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design University of Dundee

January 2024

A History of Flatness: from Greenberg to Contemporary Digital Media

Abstract: This paper discusses Clement Greenberg’s theory of the ‘flatness’ of painting and its relevance as an aesthetic framework to contextualise the progression from Modernist painting to the visual culture of the contemporary digital world. This begins with discussion of the distinct flatness of Modernist painting compared to pre- Modernist painting, and elucidates why painting under the influence of Modernism naturally concludes with the movement of Abstract Expressionism. An understanding of Greenbergian flatness is the re-contextualised outside of a Modernist position to assess its vitality as a means to understand the abstraction and two- dimensionality of screens of early New Media Art. Following this, the art of Robert Rauschenberg is examined, particularly his series of solvent transfers of Dante’s Inferno “Canto”. The work of Robert Rauschenberg is of great significance for this area of study as it bridges the movements of Modernist influenced Abstract Expressionism to Post- media practices. My analysis of Rauschenberg makes particular reference to the writings of Ed Krčma and Rosalind Krauss on his work. Drawing from Krauss’ theory of the post- media condition, I discuss the manner in which Greenbergian ‘flatness’ was disavowed due to its commitment to medium- specificity. Ultimately this paper argues that although insistence on medium- specificity of the artwork is no longer relevant in an age of interdisciplinary practices, an understanding of Greenbergian ‘flatness’ can be applied without this focus. In doing so, Greenbergian ‘flatness’ is put in the direct focus of virtual visual register and the spatio-temporal mediations of viewer- screen interfaces.

Acknowledgments:

I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors Oisín Keohane and Iain Sturrock for their aid and advice with this project.

I would also like to give thanks to my collaborators at www.drain.land for their many inspiring conversations on the intersections of art and philosophy which lasted way into the night. I also wish to thank them for their contribution to our website, which has kept and consolidated my faith in the radical potential of the Internet and Free Open Source Software.

Thanks goes to Mathieu Cardosi for all your support and advice. Not only with this dissertation, but throughout my entire undergraduate. It has been invaluable.

Finally, I wish to express my thanks to Jaeden Cargill. As a frequent and trusted collaborator, who has overseen and influenced my work for the past four years. Your teaching me how to code opened a new world of possibilities to me, one from which I have learned and been able to create so much from. Thank you for the endless inspiration you have provided me, I could not have asked for a better collaborator.

This dissertation is dedicated to Ivan Oliver, for his unwavering commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and his encouragement of my education.

Introduction

The way in which one makes sense of the ecosystem of digital media implicates how they understand their condition in an age of increasing digital mediation. This is of concern, as it questions what an ontology of the digital is, or could be. It is not an exaggeration to say that the nature of our being is changing according to new technological parameters. These new parameters are the spatial and temporal extension made possible by communications technology and the portable, seemingly infinite digital archives. The primary focus of this paper will be the aesthetic frameworks and artists which prefigured digital aesthetics, with particular emphasis on the role of abstraction and intermedia practices. My aim is to shed light on the historical continuum of aesthetic features which are ubiquitous in the digital interfaces of everyday life. I will argue that, rather than representing an entirely novel aesthetic phenomenon, the two- dimensionality of screens and virtual windows can be seen a technological extension of a previously unpacked mode of visuality.

Central to this argument is Clement Greenberg’s aesthetic theory of ‘flatness’ which is utilised to trace a history, from the advent of Modernism in the arts to contemporary digital aesthetics. I will argue for an implementation of Greenbergian flatness as a framework that can be used to chronicle several developments in the arts, since Greenberg’s introduction of ‘flatness’ in Modernist Painting. In this lineage, I will argue that Abstract Expressionism, the work of Robert Rauschenberg, and the integration of screens into contemporary art, are all in direct conversation with eachother as they share Greenberg’s condition of ‘flatness’.

1. Surface and Modernist painting: An introduction to “flatness”

In Modernist Painting, Clement Greenberg defines the essence of Modernism as "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself".1 This tendency Greenberg sees

1 Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting", in Modern art and Modernism a critical anthology, ed. by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (Harper and Row: 1982) p.5.

as originating from the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who was the first to systematically critique the nature of critique itself. Modernist critique originates from but is not equivalent to the critique of the Enlightenment. While the Enlightenment produced external critique, Modernism produces an internal critique “through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized”.2 Although the inward critique of Modernism originated within the domain of philosophy, this critique soon began to move into the domain of arts and literature. As Greenberg notes, "a more rational justification had begun to be demanded of every form of social activity."3 Greenberg follows that religion was one of such social activities that fell prey to these demands, and was thus relegated to a diminished role in society because it was unable to justify itself under rationalist critique. According to Greenberg, it seemed that art would also face this treatment; if so, the role of art would be reduced to entertainment, and entertainment (along with religion) would be subsumed into therapy. In order for art to maintain its authority as under Modernist logic, all the arts would have to perform an inward critique. In other words, they must testify to a “unique and proper area of competence”.4 Greenberg takes the staunchly formalist approach that this area of competence would be found within “all that was unique in the nature of its medium”.5 This self-justification that Modernist critique requires resulted in a narrowing effect on the focus of the arts which became almost entirely concerned with their medium specificity. As a result, each specialism was required to justify its own "unique and irreducible"6 value concerning its specific methods and practices (the visual arts had to distinguish their unique and proper area of competence from literature, painting had to distinguish itself from sculpture, and so on.)

Modernism also influenced the development of a new mode of qualitative assessment for the arts. In comparison, any evaluation of an Old Master painting was highly influenced by the strict hierarchical

2 Ibid., p.5.

3 Ibid., p.5.

4 Ibid., p.6.

5 Ibid., p.6

6 Ibid., p.5.

and academic nature of arts education of the time. The European Academies of the 16th to the 19th century were largely apprentice- master based models, in which professional development was slow and art was understood as a lineage and discipline to be taught and received.7 It is from this system that the classical understanding of mastery as the pinnacle of achievement in the arts is derived from. To use the term mastery acknowledges the challenges and limitations of any medium. These constraints are those that generate the necessary tension in any artistic process to make work that can be considered dynamic or beautiful. Ultimately, mastery suggests the artist’s triumph over the medium, the skilful balancing of the natural excesses and constraints of the given medium that gives way to harmonious artwork. Whereas the Modernist assessment placed just as, if not more materialist emphasis as discussed prior, there was a shift in focus from mastery of/over medium being the pinnacle of artistic achievement, to maintaining the ‘purity’ of each arts’ domain. Such ‘purity’ could be achieved by excluding any quality or effect that was not shared with any other medium. Once "purified" through this process of exclusion, each discipline could assert its validity according to its judgments. Greenberg succinctly concludes the task and trajectory of Modernist painting as follows: “"Purity" meant self- definition, and the enterprise of self- criticism in the arts became one of selfdefinition with a vengeance”. 8 This reflexive criticism lead to a period of art history marked by the constant re- working of the ‘unique and proper area of competence’ of painting. From the midnineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, each new decade and movement brought with it fresh attempts to exclude from painting that which it previously shared with other artistic disciplines, such as three- dimensionality which was shared with sculpture and allegory which was shared with literature. Throughout Modernist Painting, Greenberg’s makes reference to various key painters of the period and outlines their contribution to the project of Modernist painting. From decisive and almost graphic flatness of Edouard Manet, to the Impressionist fixation on the optical over form, to the

7 Albert Biome, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, (New York: Phaidon Publishers Inc, 1971), p.2.

8 . Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, in Modern art and Modernism a critical anthology, ed. by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (Harper and Row: 1982) p.6.

classical concern of framing which was both abstracted, reworked and yet strictly adhered to by Mondrian.

From right to left:

1. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1853, Oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

2. Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, 1903, Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, Lyon.

3. Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930, Kunsthaus Zürich.

The most significant and still relevant contribution to art theory from Modernist Painting is Greenberg’s notion of ‘flatness’ in relation to painting. To Greenberg, flatness was the one quality which painting did not share with any other discipline, and was therefore the defining characteristic of Modernist painting. Although there are certainly other artistic disciplines such as drawing which also utilise a flat surface, this does not make flatness the defining characteristic of drawing. The unique area of competence of drawing is of line and mark- making. Drawing is an incredibly diverse practice and it is therefore this insistence on the line and graphic quality which is the chief concern of the discipline across its many materials, styles, and techniques. The qualities unique to painting, however, are the material characteristics of paint (e.g. transparency, pigment, and texture), which in most cases, necessitate a flat ground for the painter to work on. Greenberg claims that prior to Modernism, these qualities of painting "were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly".9 This view, he contrasts with the manner in which Modernist painters acknowledge and celebrate the flatness of painting. It is important to note that Greenberg maintains no painting is truly flat. The moment at which any material is laid on the canvas renders the surface no longer flat. But the more abstraction is employed, the further painting strays 9 Ibid., p.6.

from three-dimensional representation and the greater the flatness of the painting’s surface is acknowledged.

While it is true that the flatness of Modernist painting is more candid and direct than pre- Modernist painting, I would argue that this does not necessarily suggest a negative or positive assessment of the two- dimensional constraints of the discipline of painting by pre- Modernist painters. Rather than adopting Greenberg’s assertion, it can be seen that the differing approaches to the two-dimensionality of painting from the pre- Modernist and Modernist painters, suggests different processes of revealing the flatness of painting.

A typical Old Master painting will present the viewer first with a striking naturalism, achieved by using paint to demarcate areas of light and shadow which allow an image to appear threedimensional. An awareness of the naturalism of the work is the first stage of the viewers recognition of the artfulness of a painting. The second stage is the marveling that a scene so full of life, depth, and resonance with the natural world - could be achieved on the flat ground of a canvas. This tradition of painting presents an image, after which the reality of the flatness of the painting is revealed on closer inspection. The Old Masters valued processes and techniques that came to be known as "academic painting" (such as working in layers from light to dark to build up a convincing image from the ground of the painting). These techniques were required to create the initial impression of threedimensionality. If there was no impression or illusion of the three- dimensional, there would be no position to “reveal” the actual flatness of painting from. Modernist painting is distinguishable from any period prior precisely because it rejects academic painting and reverses the order of revealing painting’s necessary flatness. With Modernist painting, the awareness of the flatness of the image precedes an awareness of the image itself. Again, to assert itself as self- defining and therefore (in Greenberg's terms) establish its principles for self - criticism, painting had to distinguish itself from sculpture. Consequently, painting had to eschew three-dimensional representation because even the faintest resemblance of a recognisable object that could relate to three- dimensional space would

distract from the necessary two-dimensionality of painting. Hence, Modernist painting naturally arrived at pure abstraction in the form of Abstract Expressionism.

2. New Dimensions: Spatial relations at the close of Modernist painting.

Six years prior to Modernist Painting, Greenberg’s American Type Painting was published. This essay remains a foundational text of art criticism for Abstract Expressionism, especially the New York School. Here, Greenberg lays the foundation for a reading of Abstract Expressionism as the ultimate expression of Modernist painting. Greenberg does so by providing a formalist critique of the movement, which was in direct response to fellow art critic Harold Rosenberg’s existentialist evaluation of the movement. Although Greenberg and Rosenberg were both early champions of the emerging abstract painters of the 1940’s and 50’s, they had very different ideas of the origins and motivations of the movement. Rosenberg’s focus was on the expressiveness of the genre, of the process of creation and the dynamic interaction between artist, paint, and surface.10 In the 1952 essay The American Action Painters, Rosenberg states,

“The New American Painting is not "pure art," since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic. The apples weren't brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and colour. They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting.”11

Here, a clear dialogue can be read between Rosenberg’s emphasis on Abstract Expressionism as the 10 Sandler, Irving, “Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg: Convergences and Differences”, in “Action/Abstraction : Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976”, ed. by, Kleeblatt, Norman, L., (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p.224-225, <https://archive.org/details/actionabstractio0000unseq9e3/page/124/mode/2up> [accessed: 17/01/24]

11 Harold, Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters", Reading Abstract Expressionism, ed. by Richard Pipes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300185720-026, p.191.

framing of the action of painting, and Greenberg’s contrasting opinion of the “purity” of Modernist painting. A ‘purity’ which required excluding everything but the most necessary characteristics of painting, such as space and colour.

Rosenberg’s theory of Abstract Expressionism was practice-based, holding the opinion that the techniques of abstract painting were a result of the individual artist’s subjective expression. In this context, it becomes apparent that the motivations behind Modernist Painting by Greenberg were that of providing a more objective and decidedly formalist interpretation to the field of art criticism at the time. Though rarely referenced explicitly in the short text, it is clear that the latest developments of contemporary painting, especially Abstract Expressionism, were central to Greenberg’s analysis.

Returning to Greenberg’s assertion that Modernist paintings are ones which, the viewer “can only travel through with the eye”,12 Greenberg exemplifies this with the work of Piet Mondrain, whose grid paintings demonstrate the new relationship to the surface of painting under Modernism. Greenberg states that the abstracted planes of a Mondrian “still suggest a kind of illusion of a kind of third dimension”.13 The third dimension which Greenberg refers to, is the imaginative aspect of whatever is looked into or upon at the surface of painting. Greenberg claims that Modernist painting has a “strictly pictorial, strictly optical third dimension”, as opposed to (an illusion of) a spatial third dimension “into which one could imagine walking”.14 This notion of the painter constructing an apparent third dimension for the viewer to travel into acknowledges an essential component of the image, that being the distance opened through the act of viewing. The image must have a threshold between itself and audience so that it may be viewed, which lies in its ability to relate, signify, or transcend, representation. Without this threshold, the image would cease to be pictorial and would be subsumed into the world of objects or phenomena. Prior to Abstract Expressionism the threshold of

12 Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting", in Modern art and Modernism a critical anthology, ed. by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (Harper and Row: 1982) p.10.

13 Ibid., p.10.

14 Ibid., p.10.

painting was something that could be entered (either optically or spatially) because paintings alluded to another space or scene through subtle or direct representation of the natural world. However the movement of Abstract Expressionism disrupted this tendency by eschewing representation. Representational paintings transcend the material of paint into recognizable forms, scenes, or objects. In painting that is non-representational, paint as material is immanent. When paint is present as a material in of itself, it is no longer used to signify or relate to anything other than its material status, pigment on surface. This frank application of paint intensifies the viewer’s awareness of the flatness of painting. As previously noted, Modernist painting tends to feature a more graphic and twodimensional application of paint, which brings the flatness of the painting to attention before a symbolic reading of the work occurs. Abstract Expressionism takes this a step further, since the image is read first on material terms (e.g. what are constitutive materials of this piece and what qualities do they possess?). Only after this, can Abstract Expressionist paintings be symbolically interpreted, as the only elements to draw this interpretation from are the fundamental qualities of painting; light, colour, line, composition, etc. It can therefore be argued that unlike pre-Modernist or Modernist painting, Abstract Expressionism has no ‘imaginative dimension’ that can be ‘looked into’ per se. Abstract Expressionist paintings can only be looked upon because no logical scene can open from or recede into, a surface that is non-representational. In representational paintings, recognisable forms are built up from a ground; they therefore contains layers which have a sense of vertical dimensionality. The Abstract Expressionists however, created works that seemed to originate from and lead to nowhere. There is no movement into or out of a logical scene, they opted instead to use paint to frame a nexus and its contingent trace of movement. Paint as material was no longer laid on a ‘ground’ - paint as material now acted on a screen: a flat, directionless sensorium of raw visual pleasure.

3. In and out of the frame

Greenberg’s writing on Abstraction as the culmination of Modernist art focused largely on painting, which is understandable given that the time at which he was writing the American art scene

was dominated by painters. As previously discussed, a Greenbergian analysis views Abstract

Expressionism as the ultimate expression of Modernist painting, since pure abstraction is the ultimate expression of the flatness of painting. However, to step outside this Modernist framework and set aside the need for medium specificity, how might Greenberg’s concept of flatness be utilised in a contemporary context? To discuss Greenberg’s flatness only in the context of Modernist painting is to restrict a vital aesthetic framework to just one art historical moment. In an age in which almost all media is (or can be) captured and rendered for display on a two- dimensional screen, all media is subject to analysis under the chief concerns of Greenbergian flatness; namely issues of, dimensionality, representation, and abstraction, in the arts. In this context, it is especially relevant to rescue a theory of flatness from a Post-Modern disavowal of Clement Greenberg. As, while the strict formalism and insistence of medium-specificity in Modernist Painting feels obsolete when the interdisciplinary artists of the mid-twentieth-century have now been firmly established into the canon, this by no means suggests that ‘flatness’ is an irrelevant aesthetic framework.

In “Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art” Kate Mondloch provides an account of the move towards what she terms as “screen reliant”15 installation practices in contemporary art in the wake of Modernist painting. Mondloch opens the text with reference Michael Fried’s (who was a protégé of Greenberg)16 critique of minimalism as a genre of visual art which “undermined both the medium specificity and the presumed instantaneousness of reception foundational to Greenbergian/Friedian account of modernism”17. Mondloch continues that the emphasis Minimalism placed on spectatorship and happenings gave rise to a new mode for artists. Before “Installation Art” had become a defined category, a new generation of artists were working within an “expanded field of art and media

15 Kate Mondloch, “Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art”, From: Electronic Mediations, Volume 30, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p.2.

16 Julia Modes, Rosalind Krauss. The Streak of Defiance., Journal of Art Historiography, Special Issue (2023), p. 2, <https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=3345b4bf-8edf-4cf8-8cdeb5cec0a617d3%40redis> [accessed: 17/01/24].

17 Ibid., p.1.

practices”18 that blurred the boundaries between sculpture, cinema, performance, and time-based art.

The new hybrid practices of such artists emerged not just out of desire to experiment with new media techniques, but also, as Mondloch notes:

“artists were newly concerned with the viewer-screen interface itself: the multifarious physical and conceptual points at which the observing subject meets media object. Media objects and their viewing regimes were literally and figuratively put on display in these sculptural and experiential works of art.”. 19

This understanding, of a “viewer-screen interface”20 as the point(s) at which “observing subject meets media object”21 is central to art of the late twentieth- century and in-fact this phenomenon can be expanded beyond screen-reliant art. Prior to the proliferation of screens in the gallery and beyond, artists were using various techniques of appropriation, deconstruction, and re-contextualisation to call to attention the viewer’s relationship with and position to, new media systems. During the post- war period of 1945 onwards (largely in the global north-west), televisual broadcast was added to the preexisting mass media systems of print, film, and radio. Although originally met with apprehension, the post- war economic growth of this period in the United States provided the ideal conditions for mass consumption of television broadcast in the late 1940’s, with Business Week declaring 1948 as the ‘Television Year’.22 It is out of this context, that a generation of artists working in the US from the late 1950’s to 1970’s began to incorporate media objects (such as television sets and radio receivers) and also, processes of media transmission into their sculptural or installation practices, which were often

18 Ibid., p.1.

19 Ibid., p.2.

20 Ibid., p.2

21 Ibid., p.2

22 Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet, 3rd edition (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2010), p.212.

performative or interactive in nature. 23 This is why, in Mondloch’s study of the role of screens in contemporary art, she uses the term ““screen-reliant” as opposed to “screen-based””24 in order to convey “that screen is a performative category”25. This is important to define in a contemporary art context since, as Mondloch notes ‘screen’ is an ambiguous term. ‘Screen’ has many and varied uses, from architectural features from partitions and screendoors, to surfaces which display media (whether it is projected onto as in cinema or appears from as in television, computer, or other digital screens), to its use as a verb as in to shield or separate. 26 All these terms likely originate from the Proto-IndoEuropean root ‘sker’, meaning to ‘ cut’ , which evolved into to ‘ shield’ in many fourteenth century European languages and came to be understood as to ‘conceal from view’ by the seventeenth century. This lends some vital insight into the rich and varied associations that come with the term ‘screen’ in its common uses, perhaps most notably, the historical development from a defensive notion of screen as a barrier, to screen as an object which gives access, as in the screens of modern technology which render data into visual information. The use of screens in the expanded field of installation/sculpture is performative rather than materialist in nature as it is this operation of opening/closing visual information and concealing/revealing underlying technology to an audience that is the chief concern of the practice.

To re-affirm, there is an underlying aesthetic framework which has governed the entire historical trajectory discussed in this paper so far; from the canon of Modernist painting and its conclusion in abstract painting, to the new and intermedia practices of contemporary art, and even towards the aesthetics of everyday life which is increasingly mediated by digital technologies and accessed through screens – that is, the relationship of abstraction to Greenbergian flatness. In order to discuss

23 Kate Mondloch, “Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art”, From: Electronic Mediations, Volume 30, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p.2.

24 Ibid., p.2.

25 Ibid., p.2.

26 Merriam-Webster, Screen, (2024), <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/screen> [accessed 13/01/24].

this lineage, it is necessary to look towards art of the generation discussed by Greenberg in Modernist Painting, which follows the ideals of Abstract Expressionism, but abandons the Modernist trajectory and which lays the ground for the trend of post-modern and interdisciplinary media practices. For this reason, this paper will look towards the work of Robert Rauschenberg, an artist who was largely not concerned with any representation of a three-dimensional world. Instead, Rauschenberg opts to work in a series of two- dimensional planes, treating all his work, regardless of medium, as collages.

4. On Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg emerged as an artist during the height of Abstract Expressionism. This influence surrounded him from the beginning of his career, having attended the now famous Black Mountain College under the tutelage of Joseph Albers. The experimental Black Mountain College, whose alumni include some of the most prominent avant- garde artists and writers living and working in 1950’s America such as; Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Franz Kline, and Cy Twombly.27 Coming from the Bauhaus school, Albers had developed a strong commitment to abstraction and formalism from his education. This ethos was one he endeavoured to pass down to his students through his design course at Black Mountain which he referred to as “painting as a language of its own”.28 In 1952, Rauschenberg first presented the ‘White Paintings’ at a Black Mountain event organised by Cage (now known as Theater Piece No.1) which is generally regarded as the first “happening”29, a practice that would later have a stronghold in the art world in movements such as conceptualism and minimalism. The ‘White Paintings’ are a series of canvases in which standard wall paint was applied uniformly with a roller. Although some of his peers thought the paintings were made in jest,

27 Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, Black Mountain College: A Brief Introduction,<https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/history/> [accessed: 14/01/2024].

28 Mary Lyn, Kotz, Rauschenberg: Art and Life, (New York : Harry N. Abrams, 2004), p.66, <https://archive.org/details/rauschenbergartl00unse/page/98/mode/2upp> [accessed: 17/01/24]

29 Ibid., p.76.

clearly as norms. By being exhibited and made explicit they are tested for the indispensability. This testing is by no means finished, and the fact that it becomes more searching as it proceeds accounts for radical simplifications, as well as radical complications, in which the very latest abstract art abounds”31.

Greenberg continues,

“The essential norms or conventions of painting are also the limiting conditions with which a marked up surface must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limiting conditions can be pushed back indefinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object”32

The manner in which Rauschenberg eliminated the variables of texture, value, and colour of paint serves to emphasise the indispensability of both the flat surface and of light, to painting. Yet, even when the conditions of flatness are met to their extreme, and with the austere minimalism of the works, the ‘White Paintings’ cannot escape their condition of having an image. Even with Rauschenberg’s attempts to create a totally smooth surface which hosts an entirely flat value painting, the work nevertheless opens outward as an image. The ultimate receptivity of these paintings is in their extreme abstraction. The absence of the usual painterly characteristics allows the works to host the shape of their surroundings in the form of shadows cast (as was evidenced in Theater Piece No.1, with projection and performance enveloping and being subsumed into the surface of the paintings). As shadows are produced and shift across the exhibition space the paintings act as a reverse projection –taking, not giving, light, to birth a shifting image on a screen.

The years following graduating Black Mountain were a turbulent but deeply influential time for Rauschenberg. After learning his wife and fellow artist had filed for divorce, Rauschenberg left the

31 Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting", in Modern art and Modernism a critical anthology, ed. by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (Harper and Row: 1982) p.8.

32 Ibid., p.8.

country to travel and work with Cy Twombly. When they returned and re-entered the Art world, Rauschenberg found himself and his work was not taken seriously by many of the New York School, nor by the critics and curators that followed them.33 While Rauschenberg desired recognition and legitimacy, he was not willing to entirely assimilate into the movement of Abstract Expressionism – in this period Rauschenberg committed to a lifelong practice of challenging the boundaries and conventions of contemporary art. And so, when the time came that Rauschenberg felt the need to prove himself as a serious artist, he turned not to a change of material practices, but a change of conceptual content.

In 1958 Rauschenberg commenced work on a project to produce thirty-four illustrations for the thirtyfour Canto’s of Dante’s Inferno The Inferno served as more than just inspiration for Rauschenberg; the project was very much a close study of the medieval epic, for which he worked attentively from John Ciardi’s translation.34 Rauschenberg embarked on this project partly as a means to continue his newly developed practice which he termed “‘Combine Drawings’. A technique which is of my own invention and naming which is involved with the use of watercolour, pencil, and photographic transfers”.35 The photo transfers were achieved by saturating a ground with lighter fluid, onto which a newspaper clipping would be pressed face down.36 The lighter fluid having loosened the ink from the newsprint, Rauschenberg would then etch the back of the clipping with a ballpoint or similar tool which would imprint the ink onto its new surface – leaving behind a hatched and hazy impression of the original image.

33 Mary Lyn, Kotz, Rauschenberg: Art and Life, (New York : Harry N. Abrams, 2004), pp.78-79 and p.90, <https://archive.org/details/rauschenbergartl00unse/page/98/mode/2upp> [accessed: 17/01/24].

34 Ed Krčma, Rauschenberg / Dante: Drawing a Modern Inferno, (London: Yale University Press, 2017), p.12.

35 Ibid., p.19.

36 Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1965), p.223, <https://archive.org/details/bridebachelorshe0000tomk/page/208/mode/2up> [accessed: 17/01/24].

Canto

the

V: Circle Two, The Carnal, from

series Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, 1958, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Canto series resist easy classification. Sometimes referred to as drawings, paintings, or collages, the works sit between the movements of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and can even be read as early examples of the yet to emerge field of New Media Art. With Abstract Expressionism, the Canto series shares its necessary condition of flatness. Each work in this series is predominantly solvent transfer and water-based paint on paper. The supporting material of paper is always left untouched in areas which has two main purposes. The first being that untouched paper creates negative space which is a key compositional tool, especially for collage. Negative space gives the works a sense of balance, flow, and harmony – this is the necessary opposite of the symbolically charged and pictorially dense series of transfers. A painting with a definitive fore, mid, and background can be read as a scene; however, collages have a lyrical quality that require an almost poetic reading in which the passages of negative space serve the same function as a line break, providing rhythm and space for contemplation. Abstract daubs and fields of watercolour bind the work together, demarcating loose panels and passages by which the images are framed or sometimes obscured. Furthermore, by incorporating negative space as a key element, paper is celebrated as a constituent medium of the work instead of mere surface. In addition, water soluble materials are applied in such a manner that they always maintain their transparency, which allows the materiality of the paper to remain present throughout the work. This presence of the supporting material in the final work brings the twodimensionality to the forefront, the flatness of the work is not just necessary, but explicit.

The resultant collages become a picture of the American media landscape of the time. Rauschenberg was greatly concerned with mass media and popular culture. While the individual Canto’s would often contain political referential content, Rauschenberg also sourced his materials from Sports Illustrated and Life magazine. Through general interest magazines, Rauschenberg was able to engage with and deconstruct the icons produced to construct and maintain a national identity amidst the instability of the Cold War. This is the relationship of the Canto series to Pop Art. However, Rauschenberg's approach to Pop Art did not follow the stylistic convention of the time. While his later

work with silkscreen printing would take on this quality, the Canto series and his early image transfer work contained none of the slick plasticity so familiar to the genre. For example, Lichtenstein’s and Warhol’s work which emulated the accumulation, reproducibility and artifice of mass media of postwar America.

From left to right:

1. Roy Lichtenstein, Modern Art Poster 1, 1967, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.

2. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe I Love Your Kiss Forever Forever (double page headpiece, pages 112 and 113) from 1¢ Life 1964.

Rauschenberg's response to this media environment in the Canto series is much more sensitive. By physically lifting images from newsprint with solvent, Rauschenberg creates an ephemeral suspension, once sturdy, high-contrast images on newsprint evoke silvery old photographs with hazed edges when pressed through solvent. The techniques Rauschenberg utilises in Canto highlight the fragility of media and its ability to be manipulated, degraded, and re-appropriated as the clippings are in these works. The same year that Rauschenberg began working on the Canto series, Wolf Vostell produced “TV-Dé-coll/age, no. 1”, a mixed media sculpture in which several televisions producing static, sat

behind a canvas which had been torn open to reveal them.37

From left to right:

1. Wolf Vostell, TV-Décoll/age no. 1, 1958 – 1963, photographed by Dieter Daniels.

2. Robert Rauschenberg, Canto I: The Dark Wood of Error, from the series Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, 1958, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Although Rauschenberg does not feature television sets themselves, much of the photographic transfers were video stills that were broadcast through the medium of television. This places Vostell and Rauschenberg amongst the very first artists to work with the relatively new media object, making the two early practitioners of New Media Art. Rauschenberg’s influence on the aesthetic conventions of New Media Art will be discussed further at a later point in this paper.

By his own admission, Rauschenberg’s came to Dante’s Inferno in search of a “vehicle” to generate more combined drawings.38 However, this particular choice of text was a tactical move, by engaging

37 MoMA, “Wolf Vostell. TV Dé -collage, no.1. 1958-59”, (2023), <https://www.moma.org/collection/works/284439?artistid=6191&page=1&sovreferrer=artist> [accessed: 17/01/24].

38 Ibid., p.224.

with classic literature he hoped he might legitimise not just the work at hand, but also, his reputation as an artist, and his interest in the imagery of contemporary American life. As Ed Krčma notes in his study of the Canto series, “Rauschenberg / Dante: Drawing a Modern Inferno”, when applied to a text so central to the canon of western literature as Dante’s Inferno, the visual language Rauschenberg produced from the daily residues of mass media “created a clash of opposing registers and worlds: canonical authority and popular culture, ancient and modern, Christian and secular, structural order and improvised contingency”39 These ‘opposing worlds’, create a strong sense of Rauschenberg’s Canto’s serving as a comparative study of Dante’s reflections on the societal ills of medieval Europe, and Rauschenberg’s observation of the culture and politics of mid-twentieth century America. 40 Krčma’s observation that Rauschenberg’s contemporary reflections “becomes the net through which Dante’s poetry will fall” gives insight to the thoughtful meta-textuality at play within Rauschenberg’s illustrations. Just as Rauschenberg reached to a classical text in order to discuss the cultural and political conditions of his time, so too did Dante, who throughout the Inferno “continually brings emblems of the classical tradition into contact with Christian metaphysics and the ugly realities of his fallen contemporary world”.41 To borrow Krčma’s terminology, the ‘net’ with which Rauschenberg captures the Inferno is his innovative use of framing. Instead of using collage as a technique to rearticulate a logical scene out of de-contextualised fragments, Rauschenberg’s newspaper transfers are discreet entities which operate within a network of others to create non- linear allegory. It is in Rauschenberg’s relationship to framing and surface in the Canto series that his influence from, and movement beyond, the conventions of Abstract Expressionism can be seen. The Canto series follows the trajectory of Abstract Expressionism from Modernist painting in the re- configuration of the imaginative dimension of painting. As with Abstract Expressionist paintings, the Canto series has no imaginative dimension which can be looked into (as one could with paintings from previous

39 Ed Krčma, Rauschenberg / Dante: Drawing a Modern Inferno, (London: Yale University Press, 2017), p.34.

40 Ibid., pp.13-14.

41 Ibid., p.13

movements of Modernist painting in which recognisable forms were represented in a scene with its own internal logic) but rather an imaginative dimension which can only be looked upon (due to their absolute flatness). While the Canto series does contain recognisable forms in the inclusion of photographic transfers, the works still adhere to a Greenbergian notion of flatness in the manner in which they acknowledge the flatness of their surface. Rauschenberg’s grid-like compositions which frequently feature rectangular divisions that lightly separate one series of transfers and paint from the other call to mind the separate yet interacting panels of a medieval altarpiece and also the divided rectangular compositions of the newspapers the transfers came from. This decisive framing is, in part, a result of the limiting conditions of newspaper transfers which dictates that the resultant work will echo the form of the source material. It is this resemblance of work to source that reminds the viewer of the utter flatness of photo-transfer collage as a discipline. The qualities and characteristics that image loses and gains in its transfer from newsprint to Rauschenberg’s paper is reminiscent of a contemporary example of this aesthetic phenomenon, the transmission and reproduction of media on two- dimensional screens.

In this sense, Rauschenberg’s move from Abstract painting (such as the ‘White Painting’s’, and subsequent similar works, the ‘Black Painting’s’ which were exhibited shortly after graduating Black Mountain College42) towards more hybrid practices such as the ‘combine drawings’ of the Canto series exemplifies that Rauschenberg, whether fully aware of this or not, is an artist in whose work the shifting influence from Modernism insistence of media specificity to an attitude which could be described as post- media, can be observed. Ultimately, the Canto series marks a shift in sensibility towards material and medium for Rauschenberg. This new sensibility was one of the material process echoing the conceptual aspect of the project. As the lighter fluid loosens the chemical bonds of the ink to newsprint and is used to re-establish the printed image on a new surface, so too does the process of collage loosen the ties of the image to its original context.

42 Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1965), p.209, <https://archive.org/details/bridebachelorshe0000tomk/page/208/mode/2up? view=theater> [accessed: 17/01/24]

5. Post and New Media:

Although it is impossible to assign a specific moment at which Modernism fell out of favor in the world of art criticism the writing of theorist and critic Rosalind Krauss was of great significance during this transitory period. This has notable implications for the area of study of Greenbergian flatness in contemporary contexts because the shift away from Modernist thought in art criticism circles at the time produced new criticisms of Greenberg which has affected the reception of his work to this day. Having discovered Greenberg’s writing during her undergraduate degree, much of Krauss’ early work bears the influence of a distinctly Greenbergian formalism43. By 1970 Krauss began to disavow many of Greenberg’s teachings44. What had become clear after having witnessed an explosion of new inter-disciplinary forms of art emerge throughout the 1960’s 70’s was that adherence to a strict Modernist doctrine of art criticism was illogical and unproductive in this context. One of Krauss’ most significant reformulations of Greenberg comes from her post-medium writings. In “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition”, Krauss introduces her concept of “technical support” of an artwork which challenges and develops upon Clement Greenberg’s notion of “medium specificity”.45 ‘Technical support’ is used to reject previous conception of medium within art criticism, which reduced the medium of the artwork to merely the material conventions of the given discipline. Krauss’ critique of ‘medium specificity’ in the context of what Krauss considered the ‘post-medium’ condition of art very necessary distinction to make at the time of writing. “Two Moments in the Post-Medium Condition” was published in 2006. This text follows several of Krauss’ key works on art in the post - medium age

43 Julia Modes, Rosalind Krauss. The Streak of Defiance., Journal of Art Historiography, Special Issue (2023), pp.1-2, <https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=3345b4bf-8edf-4cf8-8cdeb5cec0a617d3%40redis> [accessed: 17/01/24]

44 Ibid., p.3.

45 Rosalind E., Krauss, Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition, October, vol. 116 (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006), <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40368424> [accessed 17/01/24] pp.1-2.

throughout her career, beginning with ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’ (1979) and ‘Reinventing the Medium’ (1999). Over this period, Krauss discusses the ways in which the relationship between artist and medium had changed from Modern to Contemporary art. From this position, Krauss formulates a Postmodern critique of the distinctly Modernist, Greenbergian school of thought which she emerged from. 46 ‘Technical support’ is central to this post- modern critique of medium specificity, as “technical support” acknowledges the indeterminacy of material support in contemporary art. Such is the case as when a discipline utilises several technological processes and materials to execute and present the final artwork, it is difficult to identify a singular and verifiable material support of the discipline.47 Krauss uses the example of film: in which the celluloid that holds photographic stills, the device which projects these stills, and the screen which hosts this projection, could all be considered the material support of film. However the artist could not produce what is commonly understood to be a “film” using just one of the materials/equipment previously mentioned. The celluloid, projector, and screen (not to mention the many other materials and processes required to produce a film), are the interdependent and constituent mediums of film.48 Therefore the emphasis that Krauss places on the technical support demonstrates that the support of film as a discipline, is not material, but technological. The distinction of technical versus material support emerges in a specific art historical context. Krauss also remarks that technical support is used as the term also recognizes the “recent obsolescence”49 of traditional practices and the separation of disciplines such as painting, sculpture, and photography. In her text The Perpetual Inventory, Krauss provides a demonstration of the

46 Rex, Butler, Rosalind Krauss: Between Modernism and Post-Medium., Journal of Art Historiography, no. 23, https://doi.org/10.48352/uobxjah.00003399 (University of Birmingham, 2020), p.2.

47 Rosalind E., Krauss, Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition, October, vol. 116 (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006), <https://www.jstor.org/stable/40368424> [accessed 17/01/24] pp.2-3.

48 Ibid., p.3.

49 Ibid., p.2.

‘technical support’ at work within the context of Rauschenberg’s Canto series which sheds light on the particular post - media condition of the works.

“But whatever the specific symbolic associations released may be, their interconnections could not pass from one part of the drawing to another without another dimension. That aspect is the technical one, in which rubbing, veiling, and liquidity not only open vignettes of space within the surface of the pages but, by reaffirming that surface, convert it into the vehicle that allows one such space to flow into another.”50

Here Krauss demonstrates that Rauschenberg’s rubbed transfers, which call to mind an almost mechanical ‘scanning’ of the image, and the fields of aqueous paint which unite them, although they would often be considered the ‘material’ characteristics of the work, are actually the technical support. This is so because the works bridge many disciplines such as drawing, painting, and collage and so it is not the material conventions of the work which unites the work, but the technical dimensions set up through material processes, as Krauss puts it this technique creates, “a unified stroke as the medium of all the images in the series”. 51 What is also affirmed by Krauss in this statement is that the referential fragments of the collages are dependent on the compositional network of the pieces in order to communicate discursively with one another.

At the time of writing, it had become evident to Krauss that contemporary art was an interdisciplinary practice which valued hybridity and reflexive attitudes towards the material conventions of modernism. The reformulations of Modernist art theory which Krauss produced throughout her career strongly influenced the field of New Media studies as it sought to theorise material and conceptual understanding of digital technologies, and in the case of art theorists, their integration into art practices.

50 Rosalind, E., Krauss, Perpetual Inventory, October, vol. 88 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p.19, https://doi.org/10.2307/779226.

51 Ibid., p.19

One such scholar who engages with Krauss’ theory of the post- medium to unpack the digital condition is Mark B. N. Hansen. Throughout “New Philosophy for New Media”, Hansen aims to develop an aesthetic theory of of New Media in relation to a phenomenological account embodiment. Hansen sets out to address and expand “an aesthetics of contemporary media embodiment”52 which Hansen saw as of upmost relevance to digital studies, “Because digitization allows specifically, to modify the image in ways that disjoin it from any fixed technical frame – the digital calls on us to invest the body as that “place” where the self-differing of media gets concretized.”.53 Hansen continues that this insistence on embodied new media theory is one that cannot wait for the obsolescence of these digital mediums, but that an embodied perspective must be integrated into contemporary media theory as and when it develops in order to understand the collective digital condition. 54 This position demonstrates a particular technological anxiety of the times, that being how individuals can make sense of a media context which has become increasingly fragmented and disembodied. Life mediated through digital technologies such as smartphones and computers is a condition so familiar to many in the global North- West, but this familiarity has not done away with a certain uncanny or surreal affect such a mediation produces. This is so, I argue because human activity with and without (mediated or unmediated by) are increasingly blurring into one another. The realm of the ‘digital’ and the nondigital, or henceforth, ‘material’, are areas that work, commerce, culture, and politics etc. appear to seamlessly move in and out of. Since actions in the material realm transfer into digital realm and vice versa, it can no longer be thought that the ‘digital’ is merely an internal simulation subordinate to a supposedly ‘real’ outside world. Everything considered part of the digital realm (the networks of hardware, software, and user interface) has been built from raw materials. The digital is entirely of this world, and therefore cannot be opposed or closed to it. To echo Hansen, it can be argued that the main area of difference between the digital and non- digital experience is spatio-temporal. The ability

52 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (The MIT Press: London, 2004), p.30.

53 Ibid., p.30.

54 Ibid., p.30.

to be virtually present through digital technologies has extended spatiotemporal access to the world, although it remains to be seen whether this produces more seamless or fragmented spatial and temporal experiences. The spatial and temporal conditions individuals appear and act under, have been granted in accordance with binary, computational logic and therefore do not accord with a phenomenological understanding. This is the point at which it can be fruitful to return to an arthistorical perspective, as this sentiment is incredibly reminiscent of this papers previous discussion of the progression from spatial, to purely optical, imaginative dimension of painting that characterises the development of Modernist painting. This is no coincidence, such a development occurred in painting due to the increasing implementation of abstraction within painting. Digital media too, is subject to processes of abstraction as information is abstracted into binary code which is then rerepresented as pixels on a screen. Furthermore, the multi-dimensional network of the Internet is abstracted at the point of interface, at which point it is represented as a flat two- dimensional plane, which like the Abstract Expressionist paintings discussed in Chapter 2, in their flatness, seem to originate from, and lead to, nowhere.

Conclusion

In order to write of the contemporary relevance of Greenberg’s ‘flatness’, it has been necessary to spend considerable time on the conditions of Abstract Expressionism and aesthetic trends that this movement produced. This has been conducted, in hopes that it demonstrates that the aesthetics of digital technologies need not provoke a pessimistic reaction that deems their virtuality as something that is necessarily alienating. Popular usage of the term ‘virtual’ has become synonymous with electronic or digital technologies. However, as Anne Friedberg stresses in “The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft”, “The virtual is a substitute – “acting without agency of matter” – an immaterial proxy for the material.”.55

55 Anne, Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p.8.

Friedberg also maintains that while the term simulacrum is used to denote “where the image has no referent in the real”,56 “Virtual refers to the register of representation itself – but representation that can be either simulacral or directly mimetic”.57 Friedberg states this to adress that the virtual is not a new aesthetic category that, “There is a long prehistory to the “virtual” image: mirrors, paintings, images produced by the camera obscura, photographs, and moving picture film all produced mediated representations in the “virtual” register”.58 Thus for Friedberg, when the term virtual is not solely associated with digital technologies, virtual can be understood as an ontological status independent from its medium. In this sense, the aesthetics of a virtual register have been pre-figured by artists well prior to the development of New Media Art. Engagement with reproduction of the image and the spatial and temporal dynamics inherit with the reproduction of image within art itself, is already well established within the canon of art history. Thus, the framework of Greenbergian ‘flatness’ contextualises aesthetics of contemporary digital media as continuation of the influence of abstraction throughout Modern and Contemporary visual culture.

The reoccurring reference to screens throughout this paper serves the purpose of providing a common apparatus with which to think through. As previously noted, ‘screen’ can refer different objects or processes, all with their own association. However what remains present in its many common understandings is. The screen gives and denies access, conceals and reveals its own technology, transmits or absorbs projections, is literally flat and also by design must allude to or refer to depth. The screen is encountered when looking towards Abstract Expressionism, as in the viewers total absorption in navigation of complex layers of a Rothko. The screen as is encountered in terms of access in performative medium of viewer-screen interface present in New Media practices. Finally and most centrally to this paper, the screen is in encountered in the de-contextualisation of media objects

56 Ibid., p.8.

57 Ibid., p.8

58 Ibid., p.11

into flattened intersecting frames of Robert Rauschenberg’s Canto series.

Word count: 7647

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