Schema: World as Diagram
May 11 – August 15, 2023
Curated by Heather Bause Rubinstein and Raphael Rubinstein
Marlborough Gallery 545 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
+ 1 212 541 4900
marlboroughnewyork.com
Associated Galleries
Marlborough Fine Art London 6 Albemarle Street
London W1S 4BY
+ 44 (0) 20 7629 5161
marlboroughgallerylondon.com
Galería Marlborough Madrid
Orfila, 5 28010 Madrid, Spain
+34 91 319 1414
galeriamarlborough.com
What Would Otherwise Remain Unseen
Raphael Rubinstein
“Diagrammatic reasoning is the only really fertile reasoning. If logicians would only embrace this method, we should no longer see attempts to base their science on the fragile foundations of metaphysics or a psychology not based on logical theory; and there would soon be such an advance in logic that every science would feel the benefit of it.”
– Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 4, p. 459.“Still in the published city but not yet overtaken by a new form of despair, I ask the diagram: is it the foretaste of pain it might easily be? Or an emptiness so sudden it leaves the girders whanging in the absence of wind?”
– John Ashbery, Flow Chart,1991
“Diagrams are great because you can put anything in them.”
–Amy Sillman, “Notes on the Diagram”
124 × 92 in. / 315 × 234 cm
There’s something slightly absurd to be writing about diagrams. Why avail yourself of all these words, do battle with the forces of grammar and syntax, agonize about style, instantly restrict yourself to only those readers fluent in the language you happen to be using, oblige your audience to commit so much of their valuable time when you could just as easily—actually much more easily—employ a diagram to convey your point? Diagrams are so much faster to grasp, so much more universal, so much more efficient. Yet, they can never be a substitute for language (written or spoken or sung), rather, they come into play in those moments when language is too slow, too unwieldy, too monocultural. You’re trying to explain to a stranger how to get to the train station and after your sequence of “go two blocks, turn right, walk another three blocks, then turn left, cross the park” seems not to be working, you say, “Let me draw you a map.” Or you are a teacher in a classroom trying to get your students to grasp how the complexities of dynastic succession affected English history and you draw for them a genealogical chart of the Tudors. Or you are an architect tasked with explaining to a client why a building needs to have a column in a particular place, or a software consultant at a multinational organization devoted to nuclear research who needs to pitch your boss a crazy idea you have for connecting researchers scattered around the world so you lay it out in a sketch. Not that diagrams always achieve their aims or are always self-explanatory—when presented with Tim Berner-Lee’s proposal for what would become the World Wide Web, a supervisor at CERN scribbled the comment “vague but exciting” at the top of Berner-Lee’s diagram.
In one form or another, diagrams permeate recorded human history, and, indeed, predate it: during the Neolithic Age, spiral and “cup-and-ring” designs were carved into stones throughout the British Isles, and scientists have dated engravings found on pieces of shell from Trinil, Java, to some 540,000 years ago, well before modern humans evolved. Our main focus here—the diagrammatic in contemporary art, with an emphasis on painting—is considerably more limited, but Schema does include several works that spring directly from ancient traditions: including a group of anonymous Tantric paintings from India, a Jain Cosmological diagram from 19th century Rajasthan, and a symbol-rich 19th century Caucasian rug.
While diagrams have long pervaded the fields of mathematics and architecture, as well as global mystic traditions, and were ubiquitous in the visual culture of medieval Europe, they only achieve an autonomous status in Western art in the early 20th century with works such as Marcel Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages (1914) and his Large Glass (1915–23) and Francis Picabia’s “Mechanomorphic” paintings of 1915–16 such as Voilà la Femme (1915). In his 2005 article “Dada’s Diagrams” art historian David Joselit argues that diagrams should be placed
Marcel Duchamp, Network of Stoppages, 1914, oil and pencil on canvas, 585/8 × 775/8 in. / 148.9 × 197.7 cm © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp
Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
Fig. 2
Rudolf Steiner, Blackboard-drawing from a lecture held in April 11, 1920 in Dornach on Correlations between Microcosmos and Macrocosmos GA 201, Rudolf Steiner Archive, Dornach, Switzerland.
Fig. 3
alongside photomontage and readymades as Dada’s “third major formal invention.”1
If Duchamp and Picabia can be credited with introducing diagrams into Dada and its descendants, they were hardly the only diagrammists at work in the early 20th century. In 1906, Hilma af Klimt, inspired by the teachings of Helena “Madame” Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner and under the orders from the Higher Masters with which she was in spiritual contact, began creating a series of large-scale diagrammatic paintings for a future anthroposophical temple. Six years before af Klint began her “Temple Paintings,” American sociologist and pioneering civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois organized a section of the 1900 Paris Exposition titled Exhibit of American Negroes that included hundreds of photographs and dozens of hand-drawn data-based diagrams created in collaboration with students at Atlanta University. In essence, inventing the infographic, these charts, maps, timelines and texts (in English and French), conveyed the achievements and challenges of AfricanAmericans through colorful and inventive geometric motifs that often seem to anticipate modernist abstraction.
Interestingly, diagrams were central to both Rudolf Steiner and Carl Jung, spiritually-inclined thinkers who had a profound influence on many 20th century artists. It was in 1916, at the same moment that Duchamp and Picabia were refashioning painting into a kind of eroticized industrial design, that Steiner’s colleague Emma Stolle became so concerned that the blackboard drawings Steiner was creating during his lectures were being lost that she started to cover the blackboard surfaces with sheets of black paper, which she replaced at the end of each lecture, eventually assembling an archive of over a thousand diagrams (a process that decades later would help inspire Joseph Beuys to incorporate blackboard drawings into his lectures). That same year Jung, while serving as a Medical Corps Doctor and Commander of a British internment camp in Switzerland, began to draw mandalas in his so-called Red Book, starting with Systema mundi totius (1916). Jung believed that diagrams (especially mandalas) had real potency. As Jungian analyst Michael Whan explains: “Jung saw the mandala as an attempt on nature’s part at ‘self-healing’, springing from an ‘instinctual impulse,’ transforming neurotic fixation and one-sidedness through the healing movement of circumambulation. In this way, the roots of the mandala as a ‘natural symbol’ reach down into the world itself, into the macrocosmic ground.”2 For Jung the decision to make his own mandalas was transformative: “I saw that everything, all the paths I had been following, all the steps I had taken, were leading back to a single point—namely, to the mid-point. It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.”3
In the decades following Dada, diagrams were less evident in
Fig. 4
From The Black Books, 1913-1932: Notebooks of Transformation, Volumes 1 through 7 by C. G. Jung, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Martin Liebscher, et al.
Copyright © 2020 by the Foundation of the Works of C. G. Jung Copyright © 2020 by Sonu Shamdasani. Translation copyright © 2020 by Martin Liebscher, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
modern art, in part, perhaps, because of Dada’s combative stance, compounded by the fact that both Duchamp and Picabia turned in other artistic directions. Also contributing to the shift away from diagrammatic imagery were the often-doctrinaire attitudes of artists who pursued purist forms of abstraction, and the emergence of various figurative movements, some of them allied with strident political ideologies. Nonetheless, when looking back from the early 1960s, Clement Greenberg found that a diagrammatic approach had been pervasive during the interwar years: “Whereas space in depth in the abstract art or near-abstract art of the 1920s and 1930s had been a matter largely of ‘diagram’ and association, in the painterly 1940s and 1950s it could not help becoming once again a matter more of trompe-l’oeil illusion.”4 The most influential art-diagram of the period was not a painting or a drawing but the chart diagramming the development of abstract art that appeared on the dust jacket of the catalogue of the 1936 MoMA exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. As art historian Sandra Zalman points out, when MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. created the diagram, he considered it to be provisional and incomplete, and in no way illustrative of the museum’s program. It was only as the museum took a more formalist approach from the late 1960s into the 1980s that Barr’s diagram began to look like a guide to MoMA’s canonical account of modern art, giving rise to the erroneous notion that, as Zalman observes, the museum “was always invested in charting a linear narrative of modernism for public consumption.”5 It will be a helpful historical correction if Zalman’s research results in a more fair assessment of Barr’s chart, but the way in which his graphic map of modern art has been so often misinterpreted is a reminder that diagrams can be vehicles for unnuanced, over-simplified versions of complex phenomena. More tangled, even to the point of confusion, but also more detailed than Barr’s chart, was the fold-out “Tableau de la Peinture Moderne” included in Les clés de l’Art moderne (1955), a 343-page multiple-author volume in a series titled “les Guides du Monde Moderne” brought out by Editions de la Table Ronde, a French publisher/periodical with right-wing tendencies. On the verso of the fold-out were diagrams devoted to modern sculpture and music. An interesting feature of the “Tableau de la Peinture Moderne” is that the names of the “peintres figuratifs” were printed in green, while the “peintres non figuratifs et abstraits” were set in black ink.
A crucial factor in this embrace of diagrams was their newfound role in musical performances. As art historian Natilee Harren has pointed out, the advent of the musical “event score” by John Cage, as well as a renewed appreciation of Duchamp, inspired artists such as Fluxus pioneer George Brecht to produce “a purely conceptual iteration of the diagram model by placing it in the service of the production of events rather than objects.”6 In the 1950s and 1960s, Cage’s pioneering use of graphic notation was also
Fig. 5taken up by numerous composers, including Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis. In 1969, the Fluxus-connected Something Else Press published a massive compendium of musical scores titled Notations. Edited by Cage and artist Allison Knowles, it features 269 composers, many of whom produced diagrammatic manuscripts that could easily stand alone as visual artworks, for instance, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati’s score for a 1960 piece inspired by Shakespeare’s sonnets and Alexander Calder’s mobiles.
Exactly 30 years after Barr’s diagram came George Maciunas’s Expanded Arts Diagram (1966), an offset lithograph charting the development and exchanges among countless artists, composers, musicians, dancers, choreographers (dance notation, of course, had long been diagrammatic), and assorted performers who constituted the New York avant-garde. In a note, Maciunas explains that because the historical development of Fluxus and the other movements he is charting “are not linear as a chronological commentary would be, but rather planometric, a diagram would describe the development and relationships more efficiently.” The centrality of diagrams for so many of the figures included makes Maciunas’s chart into a metadiagram, a fact of which he was surely aware.
II.
This didn’t mean that diagrams were seen by all artists and critics in a positive light. During a 1964 radio conversation between Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Bruce Glaser, Stella remarks, “A diagram is not a painting; it’s as simple as that. I can make a painting from a diagram, but can you?” Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has speculated that the remark “might have been partially triggered by an earlier comment that Robert Rosenblum had made when reviewing an exhibition of Stella’s “Black Paintings” in which he had referred to them as ‘diagrams.’”7 If any single event symbolized the ubiquity of diagrams in art of the mid-1960s it would be Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, a 1966 exhibition of photocopies of drawings by some two dozen artists, architects, engineers, and composers (among them Eva Hesse, Alfred Jensen, Donald Judd). Curated by Mel Bochner and displayed in four identical ring binders, these Xeroxed drawings were supplemented by numerous charts and diagrams taken from a range of publications. Bochner also included one of Stockhausen’s graphic scores. Significantly, there was nothing in the binders that resembled traditional drawings, but the project so thoroughly reoriented the definition of drawing that many of these supposedly aesthetically null documents would come to be viewed as art.
Bochner’s friend and collaborator Robert Smithson was among the artists who submitted diagrams to “Working Drawings.”
In June of the same year Smithson published a lengthy article
Fig. 6 George Maciunas, Expanded Arts Diagram, 1966 offset lithograph, sheet: 13 × 413/16 in. / 33 × 12.3 cm © George Maciunas7
Robert Smithson, A Surd View For An Afternoon, 1969 (signed 1970); ink, 21.6 × 27.9 cm. Holt/Smithson Foundation. (From: Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty. True Fictions, False Realities, ed. by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2005, p. 93).
© 2023 Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
in Artforum titled “Entropy and the New Monuments,” in which he linked a number of contemporary artists, mostly sculptors associated with Minimalism. For these artists, he wrote, “‘printedmatter’ plays an entropic role. Maps, charts, advertisements, art books, science books, money, architectural plans, math books, graphs, diagrams, newspapers, comics, booklets and pamphlets from industrial companies are all treated the same. [Donald] Judd has a labyrinthine collection of ‘printed-matter,’ some of which he ‘looks’ at rather than reads. By this means he might take a math equation, and by sight, translate it into a metal progression of structured intervals.” The article concludes with Smithson’s observation that “math is dislocated by the artists in a personal way, so that it becomes ‘Manneristic’ or separated from its original meaning.” He then cites Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the “graph” that, Peirce said, “put before us moving pictures of thought, as well as “Duchamp’s ‘measured’ pieces of fallen threads, Three Standard Stoppages, Judd’s sequential structured surfaces, Valledor’s ‘fourth dimensional’ color vectors, Grosvenor’s hypervolumes in hyperspace, and di Suvero’s demolitions of space-time. These artists face the possibility of other dimensions, with a new kind of sight.” Two years later, in “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites,” Smithson announced a radical new approach to art, one in which the diagram played an important theoretical role: “By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a ‘logical two-dimensional picture.’
A ‘logical picture’ differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two-dimensional analogy or metaphor—A is Z. The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork is a three-dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens). It is by this three-dimensional
Fig.metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it—thus the Non-Site.”8
Peirce’s influence on Smithson can’t be overestimated; artist and philosopher looked to diagrams as indispensable tools. Danish philosopher Frederik Stjernfelt, arguably the foremost contemporary theorist of the diagram, explains why Peirce held such high hopes for “diagrammatic reasoning.” Like algebraic equations (which Peirce saw as a form of diagram) a diagram can be used to “infer other truths.” This means, observes Stjernfelt, that “the manipulation or experimentation with the diagram icon makes possible the retrieval of information from the diagram which was never explicitly put there by the sender.”9 Stjernfelt offers the example of a map. Because there will be information we can deduce from a map that its maker didn’t necessarily take into account—such as the distance between two points of interest—when we hold a map or any diagram in our hands, we hold not a picture of something but a kind of logical machine, a device ready to use.
We might think of the diagram as a kind of performative drawing. Just as performative speech acts like “I do thee wed” or “I bet you it will rain tomorrow” don’t describe and state something but actually do it, so too does a diagram not merely represent or express, but provides a model that potentially gets put into practice as soon as we look at it. Think, for instance, of Buddhist mandalas or the architectural diagram consulted by a builder at a construction site. Although he didn’t employ the term “performative” (which was introduced in this context by A. L. Austin’s 1962 book How To Do Things with Words), Peirce attributed a similar agency to diagrams.
III.
Contributing to the popularity of the diagram in the 1960s was a growing interest in what would later be called “deskilling.” For many artists, the diagram had multiple points of attraction: its technical and impersonal qualities distanced it from the quest for subjectivity that had inspired much abstract painting of the previous decade, its de-emphasis of the artist’s hand served to shift attention toward the conceptual content of the work, and it promised to expand the common ground between art and non-art fields of knowledge and production, an attractive prospect for a decade that nourished dreams of the marriage of art and technology.
For some, however, the diagram carried a dystopian message, one which, according to Buchloh, began with Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages, which “proclaimed from the start that the diagrammatic would not register cosmic or somatic plenitude or spiritual expansion, nor would it promise acts of psychic liberation or trace desire. Above all, the diagram would not propose a universal language transcending all boundaries of nation, state, class, and gender. Quite the opposite, it would primarily serve the purposes
of spatio-temporal quantification, surveillance, and registration. Thus, the diagram added a dissenting voice to the heroic chorus of abstraction, one announcing—eventually aesthetically—the disenchantment of the world and the total subjection of the body and its representations to legal and administrative control.”10
IV.
By the time that Buchloh published this article, the concept of the diagram, as well as actual diagrams, had long been a prominent feature of critical theory and had been embraced by art historians such as Rosalind Krauss, most notably in her 1979 article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” Near the culmination of this influential text, Krauss inserts three increasingly complex diagrams that visualize how sculpture came to be redefined (“expanded”) by a number of artists, among them Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, and Sol LeWitt. In order to explain or, indeed, prove her contention that sculpture has entered a new “postmodern” condition, Krauss employs a diagram known as “a Klein group” in mathematics or as “the Piaget group” among structuralists. The language with which Krauss introduces her diagrams (“By means of this logical expansion a set of binaries is transformed into a quaternary field which both mirrors the original opposition and at the same time opens it”) and the stark clarity of the diagrams themselves impart to the essay an aura of rigor and factual truth.11 Building on the use of diagrams by structuralist thinkers such as anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (whose breakthrough involved recognizing that kinship was an algebraic structure) and linguist Roman Jakobson, the darker side of diagrams had been explored by Michel Foucault, most notably in Discipline and Punish where he used the layout of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison as a model for understanding social systems of
Fig. 8
control. During the 1950s and 1960s, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan began dropping an increasing number of diagrams and graphs into his lectures and articles, a process that accelerated in the 1970s when the influential analyst discovered topology and Borromean rings. Not everyone was as convinced as Lacan that topology offered new insights. British scholar Brian Grosskurth has described how in 1978 during his lectures at the Faculté de Droit in Paris, the elderly Lacan did more drawing than lecturing: “A frail hand would proceed to scribble topological drawings and mathematical symbols, the scraping of chalk on the green board being interrupted only by long gaps of silence and the occasional gnomic utterance.”12
The Borromean rings that fascinated Lacan—in essence a three-dimensional Venn diagram—were by no means limited to the realm of science. In his 1958 book Logic Machines and Diagrams (which Smithson cites in “Entropy and the New Monuments”), Martin Gardner opens a discussion of John Venn’s method by describing “three circles that intersect like the trade-mark of Ballantine’s ale.”13 Two years later, Jasper Johns creates Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), a sculpture depicting two cans of Ballantine’s Ale, each with the intersecting-circle logo. Since Johns, many artists have adapted Venn diagrams.
If diagrams came to distract Lacan toward the end of his life (he died in 1981 at the age of 80), a more productive use was made of them by the writing team of philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, working together and separately. While Deleuze and Guattari use actual diagrams rather sparingly in their books, the term itself is crucial to their writing in which they frequently refer to the diagram as an “abstract machine.” Because it is a “machine,” the Deleuzian/Guattarian diagram is never a representation. As they explain in A Thousand Plateaus, “the diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.”14 Here we can sense the utopian potential they attribute to diagrams, but paradoxically, the artist they link most closely to the diagram as they define it, is arguably the least utopian of all modern painters: Francis Bacon. In his introduction to the English edition of his book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (first published in French in 1981) Deleuze warns readers (and viewers) not to get caught up in the violence depicted in so many of Bacon’s paintings, those “spectacles of horror, crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters.”15 These subjects, Deleuze insists, are “overly facile detours” that even the artist himself is displeased with. What interests Bacon, says the philosopher, is “a violence that is involved only with color and line: the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation.)”
The most difficult aspect of Deleuze’s book on Bacon, a part of which appeared in English as early as 1984 (a full translation was
78 × 58 in. / 198 × 147.5 cm
published in 2005), is that his definition of the diagram in Bacon’s work has apparently little to do with what we commonly think of as a diagram. Based largely on how Bacon described his working process to David Sylvester, Deleuze notes how the artist frequently wipes away or paints over details of the figures on his canvases. For example, part of a head “will be cleared away with a brush, broom, sponge, or rag.” “This,” says Deleuze, “is what Bacon calls a ‘graph’ or a diagram.” In the 1976 French edition of the Sylvester-Bacon interviews, L’Art de l’impossible, entretiens de Francis Bacon avec David Sylvester, the translators Michel Leiris and Michael Peppiat render “graph” as “diagramme.” This is a perfectly reasonable translation, but given Bacon’s unusual use of the term “graph,” it can be confusing. And it will be no surprise to experienced readers of Deleuze and Guattari that what they mean by “diagram” has little to do with the word as it is commonly understood: “Roughly speaking, the law of the diagram, according to Bacon, is this: one starts with a figurative form, a diagram intervenes and scrambles it, and a form of a completely different nature emerges from the diagram.”
The result, Deleuze argues, is a nonrepresentational and nonnarrative painting. Every significant painter, he believes, has their own diagram. For Bacon it is a “set of traits and color patches, of lines and zones.” For Van Gogh, the “straight and curved hatch marks that raise and lower the ground, twist the trees, make the sky palpitate.” With artists such as Pollock and Morris Louis, “the diagram merges with the totality of the painting; the entire painting is diagrammatic.” The result, Deleuze says, is “a catastrophe-painting and a diagrampainting at one and the same time.” Distinct from the earlier abstractions of Mondrian and Kandinsky, this catastrophe-painting/ diagram-painting finds fuller realization, says Deleuze, in the work of Robert Ryman, Martin Barré, and Christian Bonnefoi.
It was also in 1981, the year that Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon appeared, that American scholar W.J.T. Mitchell pointed out how useful, indeed necessary, the concept of the diagram was to literary studies: “If we cannot get at form except through the mediation of things like diagrams, do we not then need something like a diagrammatology, a systematic study of the way that relationships among elements are represented and interpreted by graphic constructions?”16 The enthusiasm for diagrams swept through other fields as well. Although diagrams already played a crucial function in architecture, in the 1980s and 1990s the emphasis that Foucault and Deleuze placed on them gave the diagrammatic a newly prominent role. When architect Peter Eisenman published Diagram Diaries, a book surveying his entire career, Anthony Vidler suggested that Eisenman had “recast his entire career as that of a ‘diagram architect.’”17
At first, Mitchell’s point that “form” in a literary work remains invisible unless it is diagrammed might seem like little more than
Fig. 9 Francis Bacon, Sphinx – Portrait of Muriel Belcher, 1979 oil and dry transfer lettering on canvas © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS, London/ARS, NY/Artimage 2023.an argument in favor of a new interpretive tool for scholars, but there is a perspective from which it aligns perfectly with all those mystics for whom the diagram was the only way to make visible the invisible spiritual realm. Unlike figuration and representational art in general, the diagram isn’t concerned with appearances, it doesn’t depend upon them. On the contrary, it has the ability to allow us to see what our eyes never can see. It is no accident that Duchamp turned to the diagram in his flight from “retinal art.”
Taking another approach, literary scholar Johanna Drucker argues that “poems are, by their nature, structure, and expression, diagrammatic works par excellence. They are literary works whose meaning depends upon the spatialized relations embodied in their texts and whose spatial relations are rendered meaningful by their graphical expression. Rather than considering [Mallarmé’s] Un Coup de Des to be an anomaly in the history of poetic work, I would suggest that its diagrammatic features demonstrate that it is exemplary, showing explicitly what is usually left implicit in discussions of poetic works—that a poem is a spatial work whose operation is diagrammatic.”18
V.
The next turn to the diagram in contemporary art began in the early 1980s, just as the French edition of Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon was appearing and W.J.T. Mitchell was calling for the founding of a new field of diagrammatology. One could also cite the first publication in 1982 of Edward Tufte’s widely read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Several things distinguished the 1980s from the previous diagrammatic moments of Dada and the early
Fig. 10
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Diagram of an Ankle (1982), © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Yale University Art Gallery Charles B. Benenson, B.A. 1933, Collection
1960s, including a serious foundational engagement with the writings of French poststructuralist philosophers, in particular Foucault, Deleuze, and Baudrillard, and a growing recognition that digital technology was transforming society in unprecedented ways. These two factors were not unrelated: the openness of artists to French theory was partly driven by a need to better understand the digital revolution. Also different was the extent and duration of this turn—we are still very much within it. Since 1980, the diagrammatic has steadily expanded its reach, its usefulness, its power—it has become viral. Arguably, it was Peter Halley who first announced this new diagrammatic era. In a brief 1983 statement about his work, he observed that the geometric quality of his paintings had nothing to do with geometric art of the past, or with the idealism of Plato, Descartes, and Mies van der Rohe. It was actually a critique of the identification of geometry and idealism. “I have tried to employ the codes of Minimalism, Color Field painting, and Constructivism to reveal the sociological basis of their origins. Informed by Foucault, I see in the square a prison; behind the mythologies of contemporary society, a veiled network of cells and conduits.”19 In a text published two years later with the prophetic title “On Line,” Halley offered a condensed history of how abstraction led to an increasingly diagrammatic environment: “In the 1920s, the idea of linear abstraction was at its height. Linearity was still a goal, an ideal that could only be fully expressed in a work of art, whether painting, sculpture, or architecture. But today the closure of the linear universe has long since been achieved. Linearity has now abandoned abstraction and taken on the mantle of the diagrammatic. Today, linearity backtracks and seeks to appropriate for itself the trappings of the old reality of specificity. This is the impetus behind the diagrammatic representation of video games and computer graphics, airport signs, and the Smile-have-a-nice-day symbol of the ’70s.”20
VI.
It wasn’t only artists involved with so-called conceptual painting who were drawn to diagrammatic imagery. Indeed, it could be argued that the most diagrammatic painter of the 1980s was not Peter Halley but Jean-Michel Basquiat. Look, for instance, at one of Basquiat’s early major paintings, the diptych Diagram of an Ankle (1982). Like many other images in Basquiat’s oeuvre, it borrows imagery from Grey’s Anatomy, including, in this case, the detail that supplies the title. But nearly every image, especially on the left panel, is diagrammatic. Some are easily identifiable, like the many small body parts with captions written near them or the phalanxes of numbered slippers (at least I think that’s what they are), while other motifs (arrows, loose grids, rough circles, a triangle filled with circles, a pair of nested squares) don’t immediately convey any information. And yet, perhaps because they are surrounded by more obviously
Fig. 11
diagrammatic elements, they seem informative and referential. As always with Basquiat, the painting is stitched to the world around it in myriad ways; it was an essential part of Basquiat’s genius that he invented a distinctive sign system (incorporating letters, words, numbers, geometric shapes, linear marks, and figures, usually skeletal) that allowed him to turn his paintings and drawings into works that are at once intensely visual and profoundly discursive.
In 1990, after acquiring his first laptop computer, German painter Albert Oehlen began using basic software to compose grayscale linear abstractions that suggested schematics of chaotic electronic circuitry or digital maps. He titled the series, which continued intermittently until 2008, “Computer Paintings.” As the 1990s progressed, more and more painters such as Matthew Ritchie and Toba Khedoori adopted a diagrammatic approach. It was not only artists who had diagrams on their minds. In 1991, John Ashbery published Flow Chart, an intentionally meandering 200-page poem that evokes diagrams in its opening lines, just as towards the end of Ashbery’s earlier long poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” the poet opposes the “waking dream” of life to “the diagram still sketched on the wind” that materializes before him.21
Toward the end of the 1990s, Julie Mehretu introduced an array of diagrammatic architectural motifs into her work. Describing the development of her multi-layered, increasingly chaotic work in 2002, Mehretu said: “The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work, I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to
Fig. 12
Julie Mehretu, Empirical Construction (Istanbul), 2004, acrylic and ink on canvas
120 × 180 in. / 304.8 × 457.2 cm
© Julie Mehretu
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
Photo: Erma Estwick
create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history.” In contrast to the “intangible no-place” of Mehretu’s paintings, the work of Mark Bradford, who emerged in the early 2000s, is explicitly anchored in specific places, in particular the Black neighborhood in South Los Angeles where he was born. While Mehretu often favors crisp CAD-like imagery, the geography in Bradford’s paintings is partially buried underneath layers of collage and décollage, within hand-worked surfaces as distressed as the streets and lives the artist seeks to reflect. Bradford also can be specific about time, confronting subjects such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Where does the border between the diagrammatic and the abstract lie? When and how does an apparently abstract painting reveal itself as diagrammatic? These questions are perhaps the central concern of Schema. In some ways the diagrammatic as an artistic mode resembles Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as a literary genre. For Todorov, the fantastic occurs when in the course of reading a narrative one hesitates about how to interpret a seemingly supernatural event. If the event turns out to have a rational explanation, the tale becomes an example of the uncanny. If, however, the narrative explains it in terms of some supernatural occurrence, then we are in the realm of the marvelous. The fantastic prevails as long as neither one of these options is feasible. The diagrammatic can occupy a similarly undecided space.
VII.
For so many of the artists in this exhibition, diagrams offer an alternative to the binary that has defined—some might say plagued— modern art for over a century: figuration/abstraction.22 From the early 1980s on, more and more artists discovered the advantages of working diagrammatically. For some, diagrams made it possible to explicitly engage the world outside the painting without having to take on the weighty traditions of figuration, and art history in general. For others, they provided a visual vocabulary that could better accommodate the rapidly expanding world of digital information. Many artists found freedom in the diagram’s neutrality, its distance from debates about style. Some relished its ability to subvert the belief that any non-figurative art was somehow apolitical and elitist, and some recognized that diagrams gave them access to an unlimited image archive. Some simply liked to work in linear formats, and there were some who saw particular diagrams as possessing some kind of magical, mystical power. The diagram also offered, and still offers, the capacity to render visible what is invisible. Contrary to how we commonly think of visual art—as primarily a representation of the visible world, or, in the case of nonobjective art, as a visual representation of itself—it may be that the greater task of art, the greater experience it has to offer us, is the representation of what is not visible.
1 David Joselit, “Dada’s Diagrams,” in The Dada Seminars, eds. Leah Dickerman and Matthew Witkovsky (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 234.
2 Michael Whan, “How to Square the Medicine Wheel: Jung’s Use of the Mandala as a Schema of the Psyche,” in Drawing the Soul: Schemas and Models in Psychoanalysis, ed. Bernard Burgoyne (London: Karnac, 2003), 96.
3 Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 196.
4 Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism” (lecture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, October 29, 1961). This is the lecture where Greenberg coins the phrase “homeless representation.”
5 Sandra Zalman, “Unpacking the MoMA Myth: Modernism Under Revision,” Modernism/Modernity 29, no. 2 (2022): 299.
6 Natilee Harren, “The Diagram Dematerialized, from Marcel Duchamp to John Cage to George Brecht,” Athanor 26 (2008): 100.
7 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Painting as Diagram: Five Notes of Frank Stella’s Early Paintings: 1958-1959,” October 143 (Winter 2013): 127.
8 Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites,” in The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 364.
9 Frederik Stjernfelt, “Schematic Aspects of an Aesthetics of Diagrams,” in The Temptation of the Diagram, ed. Matthew Ritchie (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017), 130-139.
10 Buchloh, 2013, 118.
11 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 37. Sam Durant’s drawing Quaternary Field/Associative Diagram (1998) repurposes one of the diagrams in Krauss’s text by substituting Krauss’s terms with the names of rock stars (Kurt Cobain, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones) and concepts he sees as emblematic of the period Krauss was writing about: “pop star” “entropy” and “scatological structures.” Writing about the drawing in Artforum five years later, David Joselit argued that “this is much more than clever parody. Durant is seriously, and I would say successfully, attempting to map the "expanded field" appropriate to our own time.” January 2003 Krauss herself showed her appreciation of Durant’s maneuver when, in 2011, she met a journalist while wearing a tee-shirt with Durant’s diagram printed on it.
12 Brian Grosskurth, “Drawing on Lacan,” Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 2 (1994): 138.
13 Martin Gardner, Logic Machines and Diagrams (New York: McGrawHill, 1958), 39.
14 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 141.
15 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xxix.
16 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Diagrammatology,” Critical Inquiry (1981): 622–623.
17 Anthony Vidler, “Diagrams of Utopia,” in The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond, eds. Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigely (New York and Cambridge: The Drawing Center and MIT Press), 83.
18 Johanna Drucker, “Stéphane Mallarmé's Un Coup de Des and the Poem and/as Book as Diagram,” Disrupting the Humanities: Towards Posthumanities 7, no. 16 (2016), 2.
19 Peter Halley, “Statement (1983),” in Collected Essays 1981–1987 (Zurich: Bruno Bischofberger, 1988), 25.
20 Peter Halley, “On Line,” in Collected Essays 1981–1987 (Zurich: Bruno Bischofberger, 1988), 156.
21 It seems entirely appropriate that it was Trevor Winkfield, a lover and painter of diagrams, who designed the cover of Flow Chart, and in fact was the person who encouraged Ashbery to begin the poem.
22 Diagrams are not the only “Third Way.” In the 1970s, Robert Zakanitch and other members of the Pattern & Decoration movement, found a similar freedom by making ornament the foundation of their work. As Zakanitch recently explained: “Up to that point in the history of Art we as artist had had only two choices of subject matter: Representational and then in the 20th Century, Abstraction. I for years was looking for a 3rd (which made me feel as if I was looking for a new, never before seen, color). Then, surprisingly, hiding at the very root of my P&D ideas was the discovery of this new third subject matter which ironically was rediscovered in the wonders of Ornamentation, a primal and exquisite subject matter that is always now somewhere at the core of my paintings.” Robert Zakanitch, A Letter from Zakanitch: Revisiting P&D, 2018.
Self-Portrait (2007) by Minjeong An is a translation of the artist’s body—inside and out—into a technical drawing. With meticulous attention to detail, Minjeong An measures and catalogues not only her prominent features and internal organs, but also the marks, however tiny, that life has left on her body, from a vaccination scar to moles and burns from kitchen accidents, as well as more temporary features like red marks from wearing knee-high stockings. At a scale large enough to read the countless notations, this digital print is a reminder that the human body is a glorious and gloriously complex machine; she has created a Vitruvian Woman for the 21st Century.
A protegé of Duchamp’s who later befriended Deleuze, Shusaku Arakawa, perhaps not surprisingly, placed the diagram at the center of his work, both in his early solo work and the decades of collaborative projects he pursued with his partner Madeline Gins. “My paintings are diagrams of my philosophy,” he declared in 1964. The title of his 1964 one-person show at Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles was Dieagrams Exhibition. (The pun anticipated his and Gins’s later works about defying mortality.) Arakawa’s 1964–65 work (which Virginia Dwan showed at her New York gallery in 1965) was still mostly without the stenciled texts that would become a trademark of his work. Instead, he relied on non-textual means (geometry, marks, handprints) to explore diagrammatic scenarios, which could sometimes be extremely detailed. Jean-François Lyotard was another French thinker to whom Arakawa was close. In one of his texts on Arakawa, Lyotard, taking note of the artist’s experience of war and politics in the Japan of his youth, speculated: “Arakawa comes to New York having gone through a lot of war and a little Dada, as Duchamp comes to New York to free his thought from the terror reigning in Europe. They both see that it won't do to respond to terror with ironic counter-terror. ‘lronicism’ is not irony, rather humor. They do not set up a war machine against the war machine, but peacefully take the war machine apart and then put it together again with its pieces deranged but working. They don't work by producing effects in things, enchaining and controlling reality, by imposing mastery on mind as if that were its primary goal. They work by inspiring the mind with the question: What's happening there?”1
In a recent article Lucy Ives has posited a Rousselian influence on Arakawa and Madeline Gins, arguing that “Reversible Destiny, the architectural collaboration Arakawa and Gins began in the 1970s, is, despite Arakawa’s closeness with Duchamp, ultimately more Rousselian in spirit.”2
Shusaku Arakawa, untitled, 1965
acrylic, marker, colored pencil, and graphite on paper
283/8 × 201/2 in. / 72.1 × 52.1 cm
© 2023 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission.
Positive Negative Series I
Around 1970, Jennifer Bartlett noticed how there seemed to be a lot of conceptual artists using graph paper. Like them, Bartlett was attracted to the grid, but she wanted a support more substantial than paper. Her solution—an innovation that would set the stage for her encyclopedic painting installation Rhapsody (1975–76)— was to silkscreen grids onto baked enamel steel plates and paint onto the resulting hard surfaces. In Positive Negative Series I / Series X [pp. 30–31] she performs quasimusical variations using pixel-like modular marks, developing the visual language that would allow her to diagram an entire world in Rhapsody.
In Italy and, for a short time, in New York, Gianfranco Baruchello was making paintings on plexiglass and filling shadow boxes with Duchampian-inspired scenarios (he likened them to fables) that were both arcane and cartoon-like. His connection to the emerging discourse of diagrammatic thought is made clear by his 1974 work Jacques Lacan International-Interpersonal Airport and the presence on the back cover of the catalogue for his 1975 exhibition at Galleria Schwartz in Milan of quotations from Foucault and Guattari. The scope of Baruchello’s œuvre, which is still barely known in the United States, also includes numerous films and books and the Agricola Cornelia, a working farm/art project in the Roman countryside. When asked to describe his paintings, he once told his frequent collaborator Henry Martin, “What I’m involved with is a discourse that planes through a dozen different spaces all at once and with a hundred different subjects in twenty different dimensions and all happening all at once, and I float in it in a way that keeps me from having it all drive me mad.”3
Forrest Bess, Untitled (No. 18), 1952 oil on canvas
Among the many artists influenced by the ideas of Carl Jung was the Texas painter Forrest Bess, who corresponded with the famed psychoanalyst in the early 1950s seeking advice about his attempts to make himself into a hermaphrodite through surgery. As curator Clare Elliott has noted, what distinguished Bess’s response to Jungian ideas from Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Rothko was Bess’s lack of interest in automatism. For Bess, the symbols he painted already existed—he could see them in his imagination. “Thus,” writes Elliott, “conformity to the vision took precedence over the aesthetic concerns of composition, but also mandated a carefully crafted, if idiosyncratic, technique rather than spontaneous ‘painterly’ gestures.”4 As Bess explained in his last letter to Jung: “My work for the past 20 years has been in copying the ideograms as they emerge from the unconscious. My exhibitions somehow re-stimulate the viewer. To me the ideogram, when integrated has the ability to bring back into consciousness events with all senses—some that lay back in time, possibly many, many years before consciousness.”5 Although Jung discouraged Bess from pursuing his experiments in self-surgery, and, one imagines, was displeased that someone was using his theories as a guide to self-mutilation rather than as a means of psychic healing, it’s hard to ignore that Bess’s belief in the power of his “ideograms” was not so different from Jung’s faith in mandalas.
Joseph Beuys 1921 – 1986
In a 1993 article about Joseph Beuys, philosopher/ art-critic Arthur Danto remarks of the artist’s drawings [pp. 36–39] that “they give the sense of having been done with whatever was at hand on whatever surface offered itself, made in order to emphasize a point, like a diagram dashed off on an envelope.” This leads Danto to lament that the drawings, which, like the “Blackboards,” are inseparable from Beuys’s mission as teacher and activist, have been subjected to “apparatus of connoisseurship.” And yet, he notes, “each of them cries out against being treated as a drawing in the conventional, narrow sense of the term.”6 One implication of Danto’s argument is that to treat one of Beuys’s dashed-off sketches or blackboards that the artist once used to communicate some aspect of his utopian social program is like designating some non-art object as a Duchampian readymade, that is, to rob it of its original function and status and reduce it to a mere work of art. The zone between art and non-art, between functionality and connoisseurship, is precisely where the diagram flourishes.
Joseph Beuys, Untitled (Freiheit-Demokratie-Sozialismus), 1972 pencil on paper
81/4 × 111/2 in. / 21 × 29.5 cm
© 2023 Estate of Joseph Beuys / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Courtesy of Galerie Klüser, Munich
Joseph Beuys, Untitled, 1972
pencil on paper
81/4 × 115/8 in. / 21 × 29.8 cm
© 2023 Estate of Joseph Beuys / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Courtesy of Galerie Klüser, Munich
Joseph Beuys, Gespräch mit Hagen, 1972 pencil on paper
115/8 × 83/8 in. / 29.8 × 21.3 cm
© 2023 Estate of Joseph Beuys / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Courtesy of Galerie Klüser, Munich
Joseph Beuys, Gespräch mit Hagen, 1972 pencil on paper
111/2 × 81/4 in. / 29.5 × 21 cm
© 2023 Estate of Joseph Beuys / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Courtesy of Galerie Klüser, Munich
Philadelphia artist Thomas Chimes was indebted to Duchamp not only for the Frenchman’s art but also for his attitude. As Kelsey Halliday Johnson has noted, “Duchamp was a hero to Chimes, who eschewed the art world of New York after hearing about Duchamp’s comments delivered at a 1961 lecture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art announcing ‘The great artist of tomorrow will go underground.’”7 During his own “underground” decades, Chimes became deeply involved with diagramming. His paintings of the early 1960s are brimming with Jungian symbols, which in his “Metal Box” works of the late 60s are replaced by schematic, highly eroticized imagery. (In a posthumous inventory of Chimes’s personal library, Jung accounts for more titles—12—more than any other author, even the artist’s beloved Alfred Jarry. Interestingly, Chimes also owned a copy of Architectonic Thought-Forms: Gedankenexperimente in Zombie Aesthetics: A Survey of the Visionary Art of Paul Laffoley.) Toward the end of his life, Chimes was making small, nearly allwhite paintings on wood panels [pp. 41–43]. Embedded into the surfaces are human heads, geometric shapes (mostly concentric circles), and tiny writing (in French, Greek, and English) taken mostly from Jarry’s books and the history of alchemy. Writing about these paintings, Halliday Johnson has described how Chimes’s “notebooks reveal an internal system of numeric sequences, where specific letters based on their order were selected and then arranged on the canvas according to the Golden Points of the Fibonacci spiral.”8
b. 1974
In 2008, Mike Cloud used a tripartite Venn diagram for an oil painting titled (M)ildly toxic, (F)ast drying speed, (B)rittle film. Against a white ground partly covered with silver foil, Cloud fills in the intersecting circles with nested lines. Impastoed, and distinctly hand-drawn, they suggest colored yarn. Underneath and above the vibrantly colored circles, the artist has roughly written into white paint the names of all the colors used in the painting, arranged, one assumes according to the properties named in the title. As is typical of Cloud’s work, the painting is self-reflexive and tautological in the manner of 1960s Conceptual artists, but, as is also characteristic of his work, it exudes a raw materiality and a simplicity of means, as well as a refusal of conventional skill, that overlap with the visionary and the provisional.
Janet Cohen
b. 1960
For Janet Cohen, it is data more than cartography or architecture that feeds her diagrammatic work. Her “Estimating Pitch Location” (1991–1996) [pp. 46–47] takes the form of hundreds of drawings made while watching televised baseball games. The drawings, which look like an impossibly condensed “draw-by-numbers” template, began soon after Cohen received her MFA: the artist wanted to document a mundane activity but also find a way of mark-making that was systematic and non-random. In a statement about her drawings Cohen has written: “How to explain these drawings? Begin by looking. Ask yourself what you see. The drawings should explain themselves…My work has always been concerned with mapping, documenting, and explaining what, where and when things happen, and how individual events are connected.”
Mike Cloud
Janet Cohen, Estimating Space: 5-25-07 N.Y. Mets at Florida, 9th Inning, 2007 pencil on paper
Guy de Cointet folded texts and performance into his work, and subjected his texts to operations that distanced them from the everyday use of language. The viewer of a work by de Cointet is invited to decode the scrambled texts, taking hints from the titles of the works and the visual form they take, in essence following the path of an invisible diagram that reminds us how we are immersed within the network of language. A major inspiration for de Cointet was Raymond Roussel, the eccentric French writer whose poems, novels and plays depended on self-invented procedures that remained secret and hidden. In 1976, de Cointet directed a performance at the Theatre Recamier in Paris in which text panels (de Cointet called them “visual enigmas”) [pp. 48–51] presented riddles that were “solved” by actors reciting passages from Roussel’s writing.
Guy de Cointet, Tuvol (Sophie Rummel), 1974 oil on canvas
Whether via Jung’s writings or through knowledge of Buddhist art, mandalas have attracted countless painters. For wide-ranging artists like Scottish painter Alan Davie, mandalas are one among numerous symbols borrowed from a multitude of religions and cultures, as in his 1992 painting Formula for the Constitution of the Liberated Spirit. The phrase “psycho diagram” that Davie inscribes at the bottom of this painting might suggest a touch of self-mockery, but in fact the artist believed that what he was doing was “fundamentally the same as artists of remote times—the same as artists in tribal society—engaged in a shamanistic conjuring up of visions which will link us metaphorically with mysterious and spiritual forces normally beyond our apprehension.”9
Visionary land artist and sculptor Agnes Denes uses graph paper for her “philosophical drawings,” technical looking diagrams that often conceal playful satires of the human quest for knowledge. (The Human Argument proports to contain all possible questions and arguments in a single pyramidal drawing.) Although best-known for land works such as Wheatfield, Denes places drawing at the center of her practice. In 2015, she told an interviewer: “When you attempt to make time visible, logic visible, mathematics visible, how do you do it? I created this new art form of making it visible. That was the whole basis to it. So I had drawings that were the first time that mathematics was put into visual form. I had a drawing of half a million numbers. It took me one and a half years to do. So that’s how I made the invisible visible. And then I have a drawing of the thinking process. Theoretical crystallography. Visualizing invisible structures.”10
Repositioning painting as a vehicle of critique, one that would come to be increasingly autobiographical, David Diao has since the 1980s engaged the history of modern art and the role of the diagram with specificity and directness. Studios Updated presents the floorplans of nine spaces where the artist worked and lived from 1964 to when the painting was made. As one might do on an architectural plan, Diao provides a note about scale (“1 inch = 10 feet”) as well as the addresses and years, but rather than being a cold schematic, the hardedge and text painting charts the intertwining of a life and a career against the backdrop of New York real estate. In several paintings from 1989–1990, Diao targets Alfred H. Barr’s 1936 flow chart. In one, he renders the diagram as if it were sketched onto a green chalkboard, replacing the static narrative of the printed chart with a more provisional version. Because diagrams can convey an implicit sense of authority and truth-claiming they almost invite subversion. But Diao also found in the diagram an alternative to formalism and vagueness. In 1991 he observed: “Much recent abstract painting remains enmeshed in an infinite regress of formal self-definition. To avoid the aridness that this entails, I have imported into my work specific facts: names and dates. Often the paintings have the look of blackboards, charts and diagrams. In the sense of being ‘merely’ charts and diagrams, some would see it as a humbling tack for painting. For me it’s possibly an enabling one. By addressing narrower but more to-the-point subject matter, I mean to escape universalist claims often made for abstract painting.”
Lydia Dona, States of infiltration into the Real, the Lack, the Symbolic, and the Semiotic, 1993 oil, acrylic, and sign paint on canvas 58 × 84 in. / 147.3 × 213.4 cm
Influenced like other artists of her generation by Foucault and Deleuze, Lydia Dona sought from the mid-1980s on to diagrammatize abstraction. Drawing on the codes of past modernist movements (Dada, Abstract Expressionism, and Color Field painting) and the realms of various technologies, Dona fills her paintings with fragments of machine diagrams lifted from car manuals, medical devices and stray bits of infrastructure. The results oscillate between scenarios of disaster and passages of painterly lyricism. Like many other “diagrammatic” artists, Dona has been deeply marked by Duchamp’s Large Glass with its rejection of conventional pictorial space and its substitution of human figures with mechanomorphic imagery.
Léon Ferrari
1920 – 2023
In 1976, fearful of Argentina’s newly installed military dictatorship, Léon Ferrari fled with his family to Brazil. It was there in 1980 that he began his “Heliografías,” [pp. 60–61] large prints created with reproduction process frequently used for architectural blueprints. Using precut Letraset symbols, he created labyrinthine building plans such as Bairro (Neighborhood) and thronging crowds of identical figures. Conceived as numbered and signed editions, the “Heliografías” were folded up and sent through the postal service to individuals, thus becoming part of the vibrant LatinAmerican Mail Art movement. When Ferrari returned to this modular work in the 2000s, he decided to forgo numbers and simply designate each print as “x/∞,” an approach that echoed the theme of the series: how social and political conformity lead to a loss of individuality.
León Ferrari, Bairro X/∞, 1980/2008
diazotype
427/8 × 94 in. / 109 × 239 cm
© The Estate of Léon Ferrari Courtesy of Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, Houston and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Photo: Jeff McLane
Charles Gaines, Incomplete Text: Set 4, "C" Green Letters, 1978
mixed media on paper, 3 sheets
each: 22 × 17 in. / 55.9 × 43.2 cm
overall: 27 × 571/2 in. / 68.6 × 146.1 cm
© Charles Gaines Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
Working in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Charles Gaines was attracted to a systemic approach, in part because he was dissatisfied with the definition of art as the product of one subjectivity (the artist’s) destined to be received by another subjectivity (the viewer’s). He also increasingly distrusted what he perceived as a Eurocentric model. As he told an interviewer in 2020: “In the West, people take for granted a binary between rational thought and intuitive thought. Subjectivity operates in the realm of intuition, and doesn’t exist in the realm of logic. Which is wrong! The whole idea isn’t true.” His discovery of Buddhist Tantric diagrams helped him to see how generative systems and words or numbers or images could feed each other. At the same time he was reflecting on his experience as an African-American artist: “The white art world was marginalizing artists of color who were trying to carve out an independent space and aesthetic. My particular relation to that situation led me to begin working with numbers and systems.” In the late 1970s he began a series of drawings titled “Incomplete Texts” [pp. 62–63] that involved methodically removing letters from a found text, transposing them into a grid and, on a third sheet, creating a poem with the extracted letters. The resulting triptychs, and Gaines’s subsequent works with photographs of trees, dismantle given systems of representation and reassemble them according to new models.
Renee Gladman b. 1971
Renee Gladman has been publishing poetry and prose since the mid-1990s, but in 2006 she began making drawings, and the medium of drawing has assumed so large (but by no means exclusive) a role in her creative life that on her website she now identifies herself as a “writer of drawings.” Working frequently on black paper (which evokes Rudolf Steiner’s “Blackboard Drawings” of the early 20th century), Gladman builds her drawings, which she refers to as charts and scores, out of dazzling swathes of oil pastel and gouache that are joined by lines of asemic writing, mathematical symbols and diagrammatic lines and shapes that can evoke architectural plans, fragments of city planning and astronomical charts. Reviewing her recent exhibition of drawings at Artists Space, Louis Bury observed that her work “functions as both practice and theory, drawing and writing, concrete marks on paper related, obliquely, to the abstract movement of thought. Whatever you want to call them, those marks are small gestures with large implications, dynamic mixtures of intent and accident that, as they accumulate, leave behind impressions of a person creating imaginative grammars for the actual world.”11
The improvised, cumulative compositions of Joanne Greenbaum expand over the canvas like a web woven by a somewhat distracted spider. Informed by modernist abstraction, Greenbaum at a certain point welcomed apparently nonabstract elements into her work such as sequences of numbers, stacks of geometric shapes rendered as three-dimensional structures, intricate layered compositions that might be preliminary sketches for some mad feat of engineering. These “fictional scaffolds,” as the artist calls them, refuse to resolve into anything clearly recognizable, but they also resist being pushed into the realm of pure abstraction. “I don’t think of my paintings as ‘maplike’ at all,” Greenbaum told Art in America in 2014, “but a lot of people do. I think of the canvases as more of a still-life space: a table, a structure, shelving, a stairway. The paintings become a record of their own making. I like the idea of stepping back and letting the information seep into my brain.”12
90 × 80 in. / 228.6 × 203.2 cm
It would be a mistake to insist that any explicit figurative elements render a work nondiagrammatic. Lane Hagood’s painting Eyeball Rug is at once figurative and diagrammatic. Wanting to achieve the effect of visual overload in a forthcoming solo exhibition, Hagood had been studying the rugs of Central Asia when a visit to his ophthalmologist gave him a different perspective, and sent him back to anatomical diagrams in the Time-Life reference books he had obsessed over as a child. A lifelong sufferer from type 1 diabetes, Hagood is supposed to get an annual eye exam. After his ophthalmologist scolded him for having missed several years of exams and reminded him that diabetes was the number one cause of blindness in the United States, the artist couldn’t stop thinking about eyes. As Hagood recounted in a recent email: “I became super anxious about losing my vision, and all I could think of was how much I'd miss being able to read, to paint, and to experience the world with that sense. I looked through my anatomical book dedicated to the eye, and decided to make an Eyeball Rug painting. In some ways, it is the most personal, psychological painting I've made.”
For many years, Jane Hammond imposed a constraint on her paintings by relying only on a set of 276 found images. Separated from their sources, these images, most of which have a vintage feel to them, become enigmatic and often unidentifiable. Fascinated by scientific oddities, magic tricks and board games (among much else), Hammond frequently turns to diagrammatic imagery. She has also experimented with paintings that function as rebuses. As one tries to imagine a world in which her weird collections would make sense, one can feel a little like Michel Foucault discovering the list of animals from Borges’s apocryphal Chinese encyclopedia that had the effect of “breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things.” Hammond also shares with several other artists in Schema (Shusaku Arakawa, Gianfranco Baruchello, Thomas Chimes, Guy de Cointet, and Trevor Winkfield) a passion for the writings of Raymond Roussel, who was of course a prime inspiration for Duchamp’s Large Glass and also, as it happens, the subject of Foucault’s first book.
Jane Hammond, Untitled (157, 22, 49, 239, 106, 172, 156, 101, 243, 269, 96, 10, 137), 1991–92
oil on canvas
76 × 70 in. / 193 × 177.8 cm
© Jane Hammond
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie LeLong & Co., New York
As the long-neglected work and ideas of Hilma af Klint have become better known, her impact on contemporary art has grown apace. Among those who have embraced af Klint’s vision are Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder who as the collective Hilma’s Ghost have designed an “abstract” deck of Tarot cards and made collaborative paintings, drawings and prints as a way of extending af Klint’s spiritual vision into the 21st century. Beyond reinterpreting af Klint’s legacy through artworks featuring complex geometric compositions, the duo also conducts, in their own words, “experimental pedagogy, transcultural dialogue, and collectivity through the lens of feminism and spirituality to build community and reckon with patriarchal art histories that have excluded women, trans, and nonbinary practitioners.”
Hilma’s Ghost (Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray)
Shake off your chains! You are attracted to the dark side, but channel The Devil to push you to greater heights. If you seek clarity, cut the etheric cords with anything that is not serving you in this moment. A golden passage lies on the other side of your self-doubt. Raise your sword up and retreat from the palace of illusion., 2023 acrylic and flashe on canvas 72 × 84 in. / 182.9 × 213.3 cm
Hilma’s Ghost (Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray)
Thomas Hirschorn b. 1957
In the 1980s, Paris-based Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn adopted the term “Non-Lieux” (Non-Sites) for his early outdoor works, but he didn’t follow Robert Smithson’s practice of linking two sites. Instead, his various projects, which he categorizes as Kiosks, Altars, or Monuments, are self-contained. Often created around a historic figure (artist, philosopher, writer), these temporary installations made with ephemeral materials also diverge from Smithson in their emphasis on accessibility. Working within urban (usually workingclass) neighborhoods, as well as in galleries and museums, Hirschhorn always emphasizes community. Among these projects is Monument to Deleuze (Avignon, 2000), which included a figurative sculpture of the philosopher, an altar and a library. His 2016 collage Schema: Art and Public Space is a manifesto in the form of a diagram, using text, drawing and photographs to argue in favor of his radical approach to public art. The making of “Schemas” and “Maps” as he calls them, is a fundamental part of Hirschhorn’s practice, which can be seen as a successor to the “social sculpture” pursued by Joseph Beuys.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Schema: Art and Public Space, 2016–22 cardboard, paper, prints, ballpoint pen, felt pen, plastic film, and tape 471/4 × 783/4 in. / 120 × 200 cm
Diagrams assumed a central role in current art around 1960 with the emergence of Fluxus, Conceptual art, and Minimalism. Slightly ahead of the curve (to use a diagrammatic expression) was Alfred Jensen who, in 1957, at the suggestion of his friend Mark Rothko, began basing his paintings on color-theory diagrams he had been making. “I got rid of my expressionist paintings entirely and became a diagram painter— that’s the way it happened. I developed my study into a style. I considered these researches as studies. I had unconsciously done my style for ten years without using it,” he later recalled.13 But, as the late Peter Schjeldahl so rightly pointed out, “Jensen did not ‘paint diagrams.’ Rather, he made diagrams with paint.”14 The painter Chris Martin puts it another way: “Jensen’s paintings are not illustrations of ‘mystical’ ideas. He does not simply copy diagrams, the way in 1955 Jasper Johns ‘copied’ the American flag. Nor is Jensen interested in the flatness or simple geometric properties of his paintings for their own sake, the way Frank Stella celebrated flatness and dumb design in his Black Paintings of 1959… Jensen is actually figuring out his ideas in the process of diagramming them. He is capturing the essence of all these fantastic ideas, and his crude geometry of mapping is a transparent means to an end, never a formalist dead end.”15
Alfred Jensen, Square XXI Growth, 1968 oil on linen
701/2 × 701/2 in. / 179.1 × 179.1 cm
© Estate of Alfred Jensen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Alfred Jensen, Beginning with Proportion 9 the count of the great year of 144 years of 260 days, c. 1965 oil and ink on paper board
30 × 20 in. / 76.2 × 50.8 cm
© Estate of Alfred Jensen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
In one of the many connections between artists included in Schema, Charles Gaines’s “Incomplete Texts” [pp. 62–63] helped inspire a 2015 performance at the Whitney Museum by Christine Sun Kim. Collaborating with Taeyoon Choi, Kim orchestrated an event on one of the museum’s terraces in which audience members performed simple actions that were intended to correspond to the visual and linguistic systems in Gaines’s text works. In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Kim began a series of drawings [pp. 80–81] based on the simple diagrams used to teach music students about the relative value of different notes. Instead of musical notes, Kim transposed ideas and feelings and experiences onto these pyramidal structures. In Idea Pyramid, for instance, she charts the progress of her having a new idea (whole note), which is then stated (two half notes), which then affects her mood (4 quarter notes) and, finally, is “posted” (eight 16th notes), not in the sense of “posted online” but in the sense of the idea having been fully realized. In other drawings and installations, which combine anger, humor and keen analysis, Kim addresses the consequences of being Deaf (she prefers to capitalize the word) and the cultural and political complexities of her disability.
For Karla Knight, the late 1980s was when, as the artist puts it, her “aesthetic gradually became less romantic and biomorphic, and more diagrammatic and geometric.” Since then, Knight has built up a lexicon of diagrams and a self-invented alphabet comprehensive and strange enough to make her paintings seem like artefacts from an unknown ancient civilization, or even an extraterrestrial one. Her inscrutable compositions could almost be the alien counterparts to the famous diagrammatic plaque carried into outer space on NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft.
Karla Knight, Pilot, 2021 flashe, acrylic marker, pencil, and embroidery on cotton 731/2 × 49 in. / 186.7 × 124.5 cm Karla Knight b. 1958
In 1987 and 1988 Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca turned away from painting figures on vast theater stages (work strongly influenced by Francis Bacon) for diagrammatic imagery based on apartment floor plans, road maps and, later, theater seating charts, cemetery maps, and city plans. At first this transformation looks like a classic modernist divestment of figuration and illusionistic space in favor of abstraction and flatness, but Kuitca’s diagrammatic imagery is too full of precise signification, of schematic representation, to qualify as abstract, even though it is no longer figurative. Gran corona de espinas belongs to a series of paintings based on a diagram the artist found in a home repair and design manual. Through the series, Kuitca refashions a simple house plan with different imagery, rendering the diagram into metaphor. Here, he designates the floorplan with a “crown of thorns,” transposing a Christian symbol that is a feature of so many Old Master paintings into a domestic, utilitarian context. The effect is at once threatening and comic.
Paul Laffoley 1935 – 2015Paul Laffoley spent most of his working life as an artist in relative isolation, operating out of a small office space in Boston that he called the Boston Visionary Cell, but if his studio was small, his ambition was epic. In paintings such as Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth [p. 87 ] and Dimensionality: The Manifestation of Fate [p. 86] Laffoley proposed deeply considered and incredibly detailed models of reality at every scale. His paintings do everything possible to convey their content to the viewer, using charts, writing, symbols, and compositional strategies that balance the informational and the mystic. In an early statement, Laffoley was explicit about the purpose of his art: “The subject matter is apparently separate messages which when brought together form a sequential and culminate organization of the information, which at the visionary point of the world (the end of time) will reveal the master plan of the universe.” Borrowing from Buddhist mandalas, scientific charts, Christian iconography, William Blake, comics, sci-fi movies, and psychedelic posters, Laffoley doesn’t use diagrammatic language to simplify his visionary information, but to render it as complete and mesmerizing as possible.
Paul Laffoley, Dimensionality: The Manifestation of Fate, 1992 oil, acrylic, ink, and lettering on canvas 981/2 × 491/2 in. / 250.2 × 125.7 cm
Paul Laffoley, Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth, 1990 serigraph in colored inks, with corrections by the artist in colored pencils, Coventry acid-free rag, ed. of 75 32 × 32 in. / 81.3 × 81.3 cm
Before he enrolled in art school, Barry Le Va, who in the late 1960s became known for his scatter floor sculptures, was an architecture student. In a 1997 interview he mentions this fact, explaining that he was trained to draw and to perceive space “as floor plans and diagrams.” He began to think “diagrammatically, using templates, because their form is derived from the perspective of looking down.” What Le Va goes on to say beautifully describes how an artist is able to diagram things in their mind: “When I started taking a situation from the floor and put it on the wall as well, I looked at it metaphorically, as things that are in your head. It’s as if you’re lying down in bed and you close your eyes and try to visualize that room you were just in: that was there, this was here, this was there. And then at the same time as you’re visualizing, you remember the process of somebody writing down an abbreviation which becomes an abstract language in itself. Let’s say a medical language. Maybe there’s a part of the piece that resembles the initials “S.P.Q.” “S.P.Q.” means something to the people who understand those abbreviations. But most people are outside of that language. In the piece it’s objective, but it’s become something abstract, possibly an unrelated intrusion. Thoughts intrude upon other thoughts…So after a while I started automatically seeing things in that manner. Now, when I walk into a room, I can see that chair in relationship with another chair, those groups of people, how many chairs they’re using. As I see it, I’m transforming it in my head. It’s as if I were looking down on the situation. It’s mapped out in a different way.”16
Barry Le Va, Untitled, 1983 ink and spray paint on paper 23 × 35 in. / 58.4 × 88.9 cm
© The Estate of Barry Le Va Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery
1951 – 2000
In 1994, Mark Lombardi, who had walked away from a promising career as a curator to become an artist, began making drawings he called “Narrative Structures.” Each one presents a network of lines and notations that map connections among governments, businesses and individuals involved in international financial scandals and crimes. Exquisitely composed in bifurcating linear structures that are stylistically distinctive, Lombardi’s maps of sinister global conspiracies also possess realworld implications consequential enough to attract the interest of the F.B.I. in the wake of the September 11th attacks. As sheer form even without names and dates they convey the insidiously interrelated systems that sustain wealth and power.
Mark Lombardi, Neil Bush, Silverado, MDC, Walters & Good, c. 1979–90, 2nd Version, 1996 graphite on paper
221/4 × 30 in. / 56.5 × 76.2 cm
Mark Lombardi, Hot Money—
The Political Dimension, 2nd Version, 1997
pencil on paper
241/4 × 481/4 in. / 61.6 × 122.6 cm
The paintings of Chris Martin draw equally on mystical traditions, popular culture (especially music) and art history. Martin’s years as an art therapist during the height of the AIDS epidemic also marked him, as did the work of Alfred Jensen and Forrest Bess. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries Martin is able to suspend judgment about his work and trust his intuition and unconscious imagination. As he recently told an interviewer: “When I was young I learned a lot about Jungian archetypal psychology—I was interested in the idea that art could access certain archetypes and emotional states that would bring healing—first for the artist and then for the culture because you were providing people a mirror that could help people accept themselves and feel the truth of things…That’s also what I took from Beuys—that he made his work to heal himself and then he offered it up to society to suggest a possibility of healing and connection.”17
Chris Martin, Untitled, 2022 acrylic on canvas 97 × 88 in. / 246.4 × 223.5 cm
The paintings of retinal ecstasy that Stephen Mueller made in the last decades of his life are chiefly in dialogue with Tantric mandalas. A devotee of the books of Ajit Mookerjee, an expert on Tantric art, Mueller saw the imagery in his paintings as more than just formal shapes. As he told an interviewer in 2001: “I got really interested in Tantra because of the notion that these abstract paintings had a specifically spiritual use—and that a symbol or shape could have power. You know, one thing led to another; years later I’ve come up with a shape of some sort and I like to think it has a function.”18
Matt Mullican is a partisan of the unconscious imagination and of Jungian thought. For an exhibition in 2016 he cut out every image from a copy of Jung’s encyclopedic last book, Man and His Symbols, and collaged them onto 535 separate pages which were displayed across 16 tables. Mullican’s own work over the last half century has also aspired to encyclopedic scale, slowly assembling a lexicon of symbols that, from some angles, suggest a satire of official signage but from other perspectives can look like an attempt to codify the human psyche.
Loren Munk’s paintings [pp. 100–101], whether they are mapping the dense history of the New York art world or visualizing complex theories (like his Attempt at Diagramming Kantian Aesthetics, 2016) have something in common with Mark Lombardi’s drawings tracking global networks of political power. It’s perhaps no surprise that both artists emerged from the Williamsburg art scene, but the artist with whom Munk has the most affinities may be Alfred Jensen. What links Jensen and Munk is not just their passion for the diagrammatic but also their rejection of easy esthetic solutions. Their paintings confront viewers with an overload of information and feature strident, unconventional color combinations and no-nonsense paint handling that stresses blunt materiality. Perhaps most importantly, Munk and Jensen are both painters whose work must be accepted on its own terms: you can’t simply bracket out the content or pretend to ignore the intricate systems and the world views it implies. They paint with an inescapable sense of mission (and plenty of impasto).
Matt Mullican b. 1951 Loren Munk b. 1951
Antoni Muntadas, Projects/Proposals, 1971–1980 set of 18 serigraph prints from 18 originals 733/8 × 1391/2 in. / 186.4 × 354.3 cm
Beginning in the early 1970s, Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas has brought a critical eye to the media landscape through projects that involve engagement from collaborators and viewers alike. Documenting the artist’s first decade of conceptual works, his Projects/Proposals [pp. 102–103] includes diagrams and collages produced at all stages of his projects. Some of these sketches were drawn for Fernando Vijande, the legendary Madrid art dealer. Only rediscovered after Vijande’s death, these sketches vividly convey the vast scope and concrete specificity of Muntadas’s thinking.
Paul Pagk b. 1962There is clearly a diagrammatic quality to the linear abstract paintings of Paul Pagk, but it’s hard to identify what it is they diagram. We could describe the paintings as diagrams of themselves, but that would be to class them as tautological, which they are not. Pagk allows too many echoes of the world beyond the edge of the canvas, to many evocations from the breadth of human history for these compositions to be seen as pure abstractions. His embrace of perspective also contributes to the “thingness” of his imagery, yet each time we come close to a moment of recognition, of identification, his paintings reassert their pictorial ambiguity.
Paul Pagk, Untitled, 2022
oil on linen
40 × 40 in. / 101.6 × 101.6 cm
© Paul Pagk
Dystopian messages abound in Yulia Pinkusevich’s “Isorithm” series, which began with her discovery of a Cold War-era declassified military manual that gave instructions on how to map the impact of nuclear bomb airbursts, and the resulting fatalities. Pinkusevich, who was born in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov when it was still part of the Soviet Union, was struck by the elegance of the isarithmic maps in the manual and the grim scenarios they depicted. Often used in meteorology, isarithmic or contour maps allow cartographers to translate statistics into map form. In her diagrammatic painting Triple Isorithm: February 24, 2022, Pinkusevich has responded to the current political situation (the date in the title of marks the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). Diagrams also figure in Sentiment of an Invisible Omniscience, a sculpture that emits a small electric shock when touched and is based on the kind of panopticon prison described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. In such works, Pinkusevich appropriates the technology of war and surveillance in order to educate and to warn.
In 1994, Robert Storr organized an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art titled Mapping. In his catalogue essay, Storr offered an explanation for the popularity of mapping among contemporary artists that situates cartographic-based work as simultaneously abstract and representational: “For though a painter or sculptor may also enjoy that feeling of universal mastery, the particular opportunities maps provide visual artists— and their special appeal to modern sensibilities—result from their being the ultimate pictorial coincidence of exacting representation and total abstraction.”19 Among the 30 artists in the show was Miguel Angel Ríos, who, with a scale and materiality that owed much to post-minimalism, treated large-scale reproductions of colonial-era maps of the Americas to cuts and pleating that symbolized the indigenous cultures destroyed by European settlement and exploitation. Maps are often folded for convenience of storage and travel but in Rios’s hands folding becomes a critical act, and a metaphor for the survival of indigenous traditions in post-Conquest Latin America.
In Pleats and Borders #2, Ríos expands his scope to the entire world, flattened out Mercator-style yet given dimensionality by cutting and pleating. Atop this artfully compromised canvas support, the artist has unleashed a storm of navigational lines that further fracture the map. Strangely missing are any national borders, but the artist implies their presence by marking zones of conflict with red dots splattered across the raw canvas like drops of blood.
It was while making a daily subway commute in the 1990s that Leslie Roberts began experimenting by filling her graph-paper datebook with numbers and words. At first, this process was a way to escape her compositional habits, but soon it became the basis of her work in which she collects vast amounts of random information from her surroundings in order to create diagrammatic paintings using variable and visually dazzling grids and meticulous textual annotations. The artist accepts that some viewers will choose to read the panels while others “experience them primarily optically.” Ultimately, Roberts hopes that “the works as a whole, with their regimented tangles of notation and paint, have a visual presence requiring no glossary.”
Although initially appearing to be densely patterned abstract compositions assembled from countless textile fragments (many from her own cut-up paintings), the sewn paintings of Heather Bause Rubinstein reflect her study of the topography of ancient cities and the different ways that cultivated lands have been divided throughout history. She has also been deeply influenced by the visual traditions found among the nomadic peoples of Central Asia whose textiles are frequently encoded with “evil eye” symbols meant to ward off dangerous spirits. Into these structures, which utilize thread as a drawing medium and incorporate fabrics sourced from thrift stores and the fashion industry, the artist injects symbols of a disruptive nature inspired by the hurricanes she experienced growing up near the Gulf Coast and acknowledging the growing threat of weather disasters brought on by climate change.
According to the cursory categorizing that too often passes as art history, Julian Schnabel is seen as part of the Neo-Expressionist “return to figuration.” While it’s true that many of his paintings in the early 1980s (and since) feature human figures, from the very beginning of his career he has intermittently introduced linear motifs into his work. In an essay for Schnabel’s 1986 traveling European survey exhibition, Thomas McEvilley noted that “before 1975 Schnabel’s work involved elementary diagrammatic symbols of various kinds,” nor did they disappear after that date.20 One such “diagrammatic symbol” occupies the righthand side of Shoeshine (for Vittorio de Sica) from 1976 in the form of a stack of elliptical shapes that are linked/penetrated by sets of roughly drawn arcing white lines. Too regularly structured to be taken as abstract but too schematically quirky to read as any kind of figure, the shapes obviously carry some kind of specific content. Inspired by a spiral prison staircase recurring in de Sica’s grim neorealist drama, this clunky ladder dangles a chance of freedom from the large bricks walling off the rest of the painting.
In her engaging text “Notes on the Diagram” artist Amy Sillman describes her own discovery of the diagram’s dark side: “At first I was in this love affair with diagrams. Weren’t they wonderfully inclusive models of multiplicity, contradiction, and change? Weren’t they democratic? That was before I read Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s sobering essay on Eva Hesse.”21 For Sillman, whose paintings refuse to abide by the abstract/ figurative binary, diagrams are also a vehicle of humor. In 2014 at the Paris gallery Campoli Presti, her paintings were accompanied by a mural drawn in charcoal in which she drew on cliched psychoanalytical terms to label a lexicon of shapes typical of her work. As YveAlain Bois explains in an essay on Sillman, “One gets the sense that we are being told to match words and shapes (by way of the diagram) so that we will eventually understand that painting does not function this way, and that the conception of meaning that such an act of nomination entails (this black rectangle is the ‘absent father,’ etc.) is profoundly asinine.”22
Amy Sillman, Machine, 2023 acrylic and oil on linen
49 × 51 in. / 124.5 × 129.5 cm
Conspicuously missing from Notations, an extensive 1969 anthology of innovative musical scores assembled by John Cage and Alison Knowles, are any contributions from jazz musicians, many of whom have long experimented with graphic scores, in particular Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith and other composer-musicians associated with the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a tradition carried on by younger figures such as saxophonist-composer Matana Roberts. One aim of AACM was to explore the relations between improvised and scored music, which Smith addresses in illustrated scores that largely reject traditional notation in favor of symbolic visual compositions that offer musicians both instruction and freedom. Smith names his notation system “Ankhrasmation” (from “Ankh,” the Egyptian symbol for life, “Ras,” the Ethiopian word for leader, and “Ma”, a universal term for mother). While it’s easy to approach Smith’s scores as visual art, he warns against thinking of them only as art. As he told an interviewer in 2016, “Yes they are images, yes we can consider them art, but their ultimate purpose is to be shared. The score can share with me and the ensemble, on this occasion or any other occasion, vast possibilities for its usage.”23
Writer Rosellen Brown has compared Gael Stack's use of everyday materials in her paintings and drawings to “the passing instants in a Frank O'Hara or a Ted Berrigan poem.”24 It's true that Stack, who happens to be an avid reader of modern poetry, continually drops artifacts from her daily life into her work, especially into her drawings, but she does so with a gravity and mysteriousness that is very different from O'Hara's and Berrigan's seemingly casual celebrations of their lives as New York poets. She seems closer in spirit to the renegade Surrealist Antonin Artaud, who believed that his drawings, assemblies of discontinuous representations often scored through with a controlled violence, had a kind of magic power, like primitive fetishes. Stack’s work can evoke the layered, transparent realm of digital media with see-through drawings and rows of code-like text that she inscribes over darkly glowing grounds. She defines painting as a space that can receive infinite amounts of transient information.
Gael Stack, Untitled, 1996 oil on paper
Tavares Strachan, Us, We, Them (White, Gray, Black), 2015 white, gray, black neon 60 × 96 in. / 152.4 × 243.8 cm
Tavares Strachan’s Us, We, Them (White, Gray, Black) translates the simplest type of Venn diagram (two intersecting circles) into a neon wall sculpture. The light of “Us” is white, that of “Them” black, with “We” rendered in gray. In another neon work, Strachan, who was born in the Bahamas, employs overlapping circles of aquamarine (Us) and yellow (Them) and (the main colors of the Bahamian flag green) and green (We). Less specific than the Bahamian version, Us, We, Them (White, Gray, Black) can be plausibly read as a comment on race and identity, but it also is open enough to invite viewers to ponder the implications of the three everyday words of the title.
Jimmy and Angie Tchooga
A modern adaptation of ancient beliefs can be seen in a recent painting by Jimmy and Angie Tchooga that is rooted in the concept of the Dreaming or Dreamtime, rough translations of alcheringa, an Aranda word referring to the creation myths of Australian indigenous culture. The Tchoogas live and work in Balgo, a remote community in Western Australia that has been a center for artists since the 1980s when members of the Papunya Tula movement moved from Papunya to Balgo. At once spiritual and cartographic, Aboriginal dot paintings employ an established lexicon of schematic symbols, some of which refer to topographic features. But alcheringa paintings depict time as well as space. As Erin Manning points out, “the itineraries of the Dreaming must be seen not as a plane that can be adequately captured on a two-dimensional surface, but as functioning in many dimensions at once.”25
The paintings that Dannielle Tegeder makes on her own are equally diagrammatic as what she produces as part of the collective Hilma’s Ghost, but in contrast to the calm, symmetrical Klintian compositions of H.G., Tegeder’s own canvases are full of nervous circuitry that evokes midcentury abstraction, in particular the work of Irene Rice Pereira. In part, Tegeder’s style reflects her early exposure to mechanical drawings and architectural plans. As she told an interviewer in 2016, “this came out of my childhood growing up with steamfitters. I learned how to make mechanical drawings and design steam fitting plants. That obviously involved literal flat space.”26
By the mid-1960s, diagrams were everywhere, from the “mechanical drawings” that Eva Hesse made in Germany during her breakthrough year of 1965 to the highly finished “circuitry paintings” of Swedish painter Ulla Wiggen to Sol LeWitt’s instructional drawings for the execution of his wall drawings to Bernar Venet’s paintings based on scientific drawings and mathematical equations. In pursuit of a zero-degree of art, Venet methodically stripped down his work until around 1966 he embraced numbers, charts and diagrams. For Venet, the purpose of copying mathematical equations onto canvas or exhibiting photo-enlargements of stockexchange data was not the appropriation of non-art material. What interested him was what he called the “monosemic” properties of mathematical symbols, diagrams and stock charts. “In a figurative or abstract painting or text,” he wrote in 1975, “each signifying unit can point to several signifieds, whereas in a graph or mathematical text, each signifier corresponds to a single signified.”27 His hope was to build an evolving artistic practice that had nothing to do with expression or even with aesthetics.
Bernar Venet, Vitesse d'un point matériel se déplaçant au voisinage du point double sur le bord d'une fenêtre de Viviani, 2022 acrylic on canvas diameter: 753/4 in. / 192.5 cm
Ouattara Watts, Untitled, 2023 mixed media on canvas
30 × 40 in. / 76.2 × 101.6 cm
© Ouattara Watts
Courtesy of the artist and Karma, New York
The paintings of Ouattara Watts rely on a mélange of symbols, from ideograms to scientific diagrams and mathematical formulas. Watts, who was born in Côte d’Ivoire, also brings motifs from African art into his paintings, where the constellations of elements float freely in a Miróesque expansiveness. In a review of Watts’s recent work, critic Andrew Paul Woolbright writes: “Part lexicon, part ledger, Watts’s work also shows a reoccurring interest in numerology, in charts, in arrangements of numbers that avoid algebra, and instead count towards something we cannot know, imparting us with a cosmic vertigo, a God’s eye view of different cultural meanings. But then there’s the accordion effect of shuttling between macro and microscales, and Watts’s interest in situating the local experience within the cosmic.”28
Despite periods of being homeless in New York City and ongoing struggles with mental health issues, Melvin Way has been producing artistically distinctive drawings for several decades. Typically, they are quite small and made with different colored ballpoint pen on found pieces of paper. Letting nothing go to waste, Way squeezes mathematical equations, chemical formulas, intricate diagrams, and multi-lingual quotations onto every last millimeter of his irregular supports. Treating them as talismanic, the artist carries his drawings with him, often in a pocket over his heart, for days, weeks or even years, working on them when inspiration strikes.
Ouattara Watts b. 1957 Melvin Way b. 1954
Melvin Way, C6H806, 2018 ink on paper
The improbable scenarios that Trevor Winkfield assembles out of body parts, pieces of fruit, fragments of art deco ornaments, abstract geometry and stray bits and pieces of a flat, brightly colored world display a visual ingenuity that is half-Georges Braque and half-Rube Goldberg. Impressed as a child in postwar England by medieval heraldry and Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, which he made a pilgrimage to at the age of 14, Winkfield is among the half-dozen artists in Schema who have found inspiration in the books and procedures of French writer Raymond Roussel. It was through translating Roussel’s posthumous tell-all How I Wrote Certain of My Books that Winkfield, who had given up art for writing, found a new way to paint. “But,” as he recalled to Roussel scholar Mark Ford, “the deeper I went into the books, paradoxically the more impenetrable they became: the matter-of-fact manner in which the complicated machinery was described could not disguise the notion that another dimension existed behind the apparent text. In retrospect, this led to the layering of my paintings, so that what one sees is not necessarily what one gets.”29
Trevor Winkfield, Signals, 2013 acrylic on linen
Jains believe the universe is divided in three worlds: the heavens, the middle world, and the hells. This painting has concentric circles of various colors representing different gardens, continents, mountains, and oceans. The Sanskrit captions describe each geographical feature such as names of places, rivers, mountains, and seas along with their dimensions, measured in yojnas, a unit of measurement used in ancient India, Thailand, and Myanmar. Jains think that the universe is non-created and eternal and that its different worlds are interconnected. Understanding and meditating on the complex structure of the Jain universe is essential to promote spiritual awakening.
Jain Cosmological Diagram, n.d. pigment on paper
