MICHAEL CORRIS: In the service of a souped-up formalist view of Modernism.

MICHAEL CORRIS: In the service of a souped-up formalist view of Modernism, Rosalind Krauss lately enlisted Algirdas Julien Greimas' semiotic square to reanimate that greatest in number conventional, reductive, and central modalization of Modernism's development: the relationship between "figure" and "ground" The basic conceit at work here is that the seasons "figure" and "ground"--canceled, mirrored, and restated within the logic of Greimas' square--will bear significant conceptual comes But the very cancellation of the denominations of this dichotomy reinforces their power, resuscitating the figure/ground moot point as the dominant model of 20th-century painting. When this analytic exercise is applied to specific, canonical Modernist works, the appearance of particular archetypes of painting practice is explained chiefly on reference to the move from figuration to abstraction. Indeed, the whole history of Modernist painting is describeed in terms of the emerging see the verb development, exhaustion, and reinvention of the modalities of figure and ground

ROBERT NICKAS: With the semiotic approach we're talking about premeditation, and where there is prior intent, the crime is more serious. The sign of analysis you describe might be what T J Clark had in mind when he remarked, "The semiologists are frozen in the triumph of their prearranged seconds of vision." For me, the figure/ground question is best visualized literally: as a corpse laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

MC: Clark's complaint glance ats that the pictorial orders described through the terms "monochrome," "grid," "allover," and "mise-en-abime" are ideological no matter in what way scientifically derived. And this penetration is leveled in the conviction that the theory giving rise to those metes is universalizing, abstract, and antihistorical--that we miss the most numerous decisive and critical moments of contemporary painting when discussion is framed exclusively in formal terms

RN: If the paintings are framed for crimes they not ever committed....

MC: While Greimas' semiotic square can generate about interesting results, they depend principally, as Fredric Jameson points public on the perspicacious selection of the initial bounds What is lacking in the semiotician's account of painting is the possibility that there might be a painting--a monochrome on Olivier Mosset, for example--that isn't a monochrome in any conventional mind That is to say, a painting in which the opposition between figuration and abstraction has been neutralized, a kind of trompe l'oeil monochrome, a painting of a "monochrome." by dint of the same token, the meaning of a painting at Michael Stubbs, who applies paint with cake decorating tools, might not necessarily be fielded in its "gridness" alone if it be not that also, for example, in the associations of this decorative technology.

RN: It's united thing to make a painting with cake decorating tools and quite another to use a Bunsen burner as Yve Klein did in his "Fire" paintings, or an ice pick, in the case of Lucio Fontana.

MC: I agree that it would be a mistake to dehistoricize artists in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as Fontana and Klein by means of conflating their work with that of contemporary artists who also happen to ordeal and torture the surface of painting. Thomas McEvilley has pointed revealed that Klein's "Fire Paintings" exhibit "a sex-and-death thrill, a Promethean aggression." And Fontana has referr to his "holes" as a different dimension: "I make a opening in the canvas in order to leave behind me the olden pictorial formulae ... I escape symbolically, nevertheless also materially, from the prison of the flat surface." to this time while there is a conspicuous lack of this sort of beautiful and absurd metaphysical rhetoric where the artists at hand are relate toed there is nevertheless a shared ne to "escape from the prison of the flat surface." Of course, today, artists are no longer interested in taking sides in the abstraction/figuration debate. For them it is completely outmod by the agency of making works that invite readings as pictures of paintings rather than as paintings, they effectively cancel the debate. And it is our contention that the exuberant articulation of the surface of the "picture" is the typical means of achieving this.

RN: Imi Knoebel wielded a power saw to make his new "Battle" series, and if the painting still had any rights, Steven Parrino's mistretched monochromes would probably have the artist charged with assault and battery. flat some works made with paint alone, like as Rudolf Stingel's or Steve Di Benedetto's, contemplate as if they were produc with toxic waste. When we await for an antidote to these signs of violence in the paintings of a Lily van der Stokker, we still have to admit that something is being "killed"--if sole with kindness. As one of her works has it: like Goodness Kissy Kissy.

So maybe we're still talking about painting and its antagonists.

MC: The mechanics of this fresh order of painted objects are many times brutish, excessive, and suggestive of "incompetence."

RN: Like Dan Walsh's works, which have been described as "cartoons of painting."