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[The photographic mark] is understood... as layered:
a depth and a surface forced into some kind of contact.
- Rosalind Krauss on Robert Rauschenberg
Touch is touched back… though executed on this side of the surface, [the mark]
has the uncanny effect of seeming to appear from beneath the surface as well.
- Rosalind Krauss on Jasper Johns
On the surface, Rosalind Krauss' discussion of the Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg retrospectives appears to focus primarily on the respective "splits" she sees in their oeuvres - from the tactile to the optical in Johns, and from the horizontal to the vertical in Rauschenberg - but if we dive a little deeper we can see what lies beneath both their work and Krauss' interpretation of it. The artistic relationship between the two artists and the fact that both retrospectives opened at around the same time sheds some light on her similar (yet divided) readings of their work, combined with the bracketing context of Krauss' art-historical "split" with Greenbergian Modernism. Furthermore, beyond both Krauss' criticism and the work of Johns and Rauschenberg, as John Haber has noted: "New York's split between uptown and downtown cultures is legendary. There they are, elegant and experimental, traditional and glib, serious and shocking. Only half tongue in cheek, I could almost call the two styles modern and postmodern. Robert Rauschenberg's art packs all the momentum of New York City." This comment on the Rauschenberg retrospective can, by extension, incorporate Jasper Johns in its scope, especially in light of the "equivalency" treatment both artists receive in Krauss' essays. It is this split-equivalency that we will look at in this essay.
Although the focus of this essay is not directly on the necessity of the split in Krauss' criticism, it is obvious from the outset that she sees artistic shifts from one field of reference to another as a reflection of her own rejection of Modernism as instituted by Clement Greenberg (itself representative of the split between Modernism and Postmodernism). The fact that Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were the two artists she championed at that point further illuminates her desire to locate a similar split within their work. While this notion of subjective-critical projection in Krauss' criticism is outlined in Hope Mauzerall's "What's the Matter With Matter?" (93) it serves here simply to underscore the relationship between Krauss' work and the art she writes about, as though the two were forced into some kind of contact. With this in mind, we shall discuss the various oppositions, shifts and circulations (as well as their internal contradictions) revealed through her reading of the Johns and Rauschenberg retrospectives.
As our title indicates, we (along with Krauss) are primarily concerned with surface, but not so much its physical attributes as what it points to beyond itself (this transcendence of materiality in the service of something higher is also elaborated by Mauzerall). To explore this idea, let us first work through some elements of her criticism with regards to the work discussed, but also with an eye for what is at stake in her criticism in light of what she says. In her brief discussion of the Jasper Johns retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York late in 1996, she draws a distinction in his work between tactility and opticality, defining the critical moment of the tracing of the artists shadow on the canvas (in the 1985/86 work Four Seasons) as "belong[ing] to vision and not to touch". Krauss claims: "it is with this moment that Johns' whole field of reference changes, as his weaving of allusions to the world of optical experience…becomes the new-found ballast for his anything-but-tactile surfaces" (WT 82). Interestingly, it is in her discussion of this form of the artist's profile - "arriving as it does from a space beyond the surface" (WT 82; emphasis added) - that we see the ambiguity in the work reflected in her interpretation: does the term "beyond" now simply mean in front of? Or does it not also still hint at the space beneath the surface that she asserts previously characterised his work?
"Though executed on this side of the surface", Diver, as the epitome of Johns' tactile works, "has the uncanny effect of seeming to appear from underneath the surface as well" (WT 81). This comment allows us to see the importance Krauss places upon the "transparency" of the surface in Johns' earlier work as opposed to the unyielding surfaces-capable of catching his falling shadow-in his later work (these terms, in Krauss' terminology, could be replaced by the synonyms invisibility and opacity). Through this, we can see the way Krauss initially defines "beyond" as beneath in terms of touch (in the absence of vision), and later, as in-front-of in terms of sight (in the absence of feeling). Up until this point Krauss characterises Johns' (pre-Four Seasons) work simply as "transcription[s] for how surfaces feel" (WT 81) - stripping away the visual until nothing but tactility remains - yet these transcriptions are still necessarily visual: "a way of imaging touch" (WT 81; emphasis added). This ambiguity alerts us to the possibility that Johns' "new-found" opticality was always-already present, and that, as Krauss notes herself, the form of profile in Four Seasons (Johns' shadow) "might seem to be an extension of the diver's imprint" (WT 82; emphasis added).
With this acknowledgement, Johns' subsequently "anything-but-tactile surfaces" -with all their allusions to the world of visual experience-are (re)contaminated by the world of touch, so that the distinction in Johns oeuvre is not as clear cut as Krauss might have us think, and the purely tactile and purely visual are "forced into contact". (The line-in-the-sand between the theoretical camps of Greenberg and Krauss similarly blurs as we consider the changing tides of art-criticism in general). Despite this blurring of her own distinction, Krauss' overwhelming desire to strictly isolate sight and touch in her analysis of Johns' oeuvre is exemplified by her comment on Diver where "the blindness of this dive... is nothing but touch" (WT 80; emphasis added); where the two approaches cannot share the same space (a comment which echoes her larger argument of horizontally-oriented (im)materiality over vertically-oriented opticality, which Mauzerall has noted simply "replace[s] one mode of transcendence with another" (WMM 92)). This shift from the tactile to the visual and the inevitable realisation that it always-already existed in the work reflects (projects) the inherent circularity within both art-criticism and art-production; as evidenced in Krauss' admission that Rauschenberg's turn to the photographic may have been less of a new direction than a return to something that had always-already been there (PI 95), and further, by her eventual reconsideration of her own critical position in general.
To further illustrate this circularity (through making the shift to Rauschenberg by returning to Johns) we can point out the similarity between Rauschenberg's White Paintings as "screens on which to trap the shadows of passersby" (PI 97) and that decisive moment in which Krauss locates the split in Johns' oeuvre: when his falling shadow is traced onto the surface of the canvas in Four Seasons. It is on this surface that we can see the obvious visual connection to the "mirrorlike photographic surface" of Rauschenberg's silkscreens (PI 95)-a surface that operates like a "photosensitised" field on which to register the trace of anything appearing in front of it-themselves originating from the underlying project of the earlier White Paintings. Considering this, Krauss' description of surface depth in Johns' Skin and Diver (as emblematic of his tactile works) as like "a body touching itself, pressing itself against itself as in a mirror" (WT 81) - appearing in opposition to the "mirrorlike surface" we see in Four Seasons - further complicates the decisive split she seems to so adamantly desire/require, by once more "forcing contact", this time via her equation of the tactile and the optical through the metaphor of the mirror.
In the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1997, Krauss similarly locates a shift, or "opposition", in Rauschenberg's oeuvre. While this assumes many forms throughout her essay, the fundamental notion is the shift from the horizontality of the Combines and flatbeds to the verticality of the silkscreens and photography (reflecting the shift in Johns' work from the tactile to the optical, and thus complicating Krauss' conception of the informe where the movement is in the opposite direction; although Johns' and Rauschenberg's work resists classification - as Krauss' inability to support her own distinctions shows - in the way the informe does, in their mutual application of the consistent, mirrorlike photographic surface, they deny the operation of the informe's "desublimatory act of aggression" (Formless: A User's Guide 13)). While Krauss never makes it quite as explicit (or as simplified) as this, her comments on the centrality of Rauschenberg's Random Order are characteristic (for Krauss, this work functions as a manifesto for his "new direction", like Johns' Four Seasons): "the photographic mark is not just an imprint falling onto the emulsion of the light-sensitive surface from the space in front of the camera, but…seems to be welling up from within the camera itself" (PI 112). While the importance of this statement is in its equivalence to her description of Johns' Diver, it is interesting to note that in this (later) comment, Krauss has avoided the ambiguity of the word "beyond" by clearly stating "in-front-of". We now have the optical-definition of "beyond" in the service of what Krauss comes to identify as "mental".
To explore this new triangulation (or was it always-already there?) we must first introduce Leo Steinberg's characterisation of Rauschenberg's Combines as a "horizontal, receptor surface" that evidence a "turning away from the optical toward the mental" (PI 106; emphasis added). Krauss agrees: "I myself tried to develop the particular dimension of the mental space suggested by the Combines, namely memory" (PI 107), but she then contradicts her position by stating "the mental spaces of dream, of memory, and of the imagination are...upright" (PI 106; emphasis added). She complicates the matter further by claiming that the framing and veiling in Rauschenberg's Dante illustrations also seem to "organise an image of the mental, or of thought, meditation or reflection" (PI 106; emphasis added). Steinberg believes (and Krauss concurs) that this framing and veiling restores the "diaphanic" and therefore returns to the window model of the picture plane and thus the vertical/optical - in opposition to the Combines' "flatbed picture plane" and its connection to the horizontal/mental - and yet Krauss paradoxically asserts framing and veiling are vertical and mental, not optical.
To elaborate on this paradox for a moment, we can see that, through her own admission, "whether stored within the imaginary spaces of our dreams, fantasies, or memories, or observed in the external world, images are vertically oriented, with heads at the top, feet at the bottom" (PI 42). To mention Johns' Diver at this point enters us into a complex argument around the true orientation of that work (see The Crisis of the Easel Picture 179), that nevertheless leaves us within a complicated situation: what defines the orientation of a work? Its production? Its reception? (Or in the complex notion of artistic intention irrespective of both?) Her argument for Pollock's horizontality is thus thrust into question, as her defence of Diver shows; despite claiming Diver's "plunging body is rendered vertiginous precisely because it is precipitating itself into a watery medium that is itself horizontal and toward which the body must project a downward fall", she then undermines her position by stating "the work ultimately relocates itself within the terms of the easel picture, or vertical medium" (CEP 179; emphasis added). The implications of this statement are manifold: not only does it make Diver's inversion or orientation (along with the significance of Pollock's process) irrelevant once it has been "sublimated" in the gallery space, it questions how Krauss' desublimated concept of art can exist at all.
To draw some further comparisons between Johns and Rauschenberg, we need look no further than Krauss' initial discussion of Rauschenberg's belief in the integrity of the picture plane. While admonishing Brian O'Doherty (who initially made the assertion) for his "counterintuitiveness", Krauss eventually returns to the integrity of the picture plane as something that never really left Rauschenberg's practice. Attributing the experience of the impenetrability and literalness of the two-dimensional surface (as opposed to the picture plane's "transcendental two-step") to Rauschenberg's Combines, she then paradoxically serves up Random Order as a summation of Rauschenberg's "new conception of the pictorial itself" (95). Rauschenberg's own analogical explanation - whereby "a dirty or foggy window makes what is outside appear to be projected onto the window plane" (PI 97) - echoes the one Krauss gives to characterise both Johns' distinctly non-visual work and Rauschenberg's distinctly non-material work; and of course, makes the connection (return) to her initial discussion of the integrity of the picture plane ("deep versus flat - all the while performing the magic trick of turning the one into the other" (PI 88)). This mirrors Krauss' use of "Lyotard's discussions of the mutation of one thing into its opposite" (Adler 117), and surface becomes the focal point once more: does it capture what lies before it, or reveal what lies beneath it? Or both at the same time?
Krauss' answer to the "oscillating space of painting in which inside and outside, virtual and actual, depth and surface are bound and parted only to be bound and parted again" (PI 113) is the allegorical condition that she likens to Freud's "Mystic Writing-Pad". It is this oscillation that pervades her interpretations, and explains the constant blurring and recycling of her conclusions; for example, the informe's desublimatory act of aggression that she (contradictorily, considering her argument for the decisive split in Johns and Rauschenberg) associates with "a mode of vision that is 'merely an extension of the tactile senses'" (qtd. in Adler 117), Even her larger prioritising of the horizontal cannot escape the trace of the vertical, just as any artwork cannot escape the bind of opticality that is the fate of the easel picture. Like Haber's New York City, there may be a divide, but it is invisible in the larger picture, and while we can argue for its existence it is essentially irrelevant. This is not to say however, that Krauss' readings of Johns and Rauschenberg are irrelevant, rather that while she sees splits between the two artists and within each of their oeuvres, the closer she looks the harder it is to see any distinction at all, and she just ends up blurring the edges and returning to where we started.
This is never more evident than in the connection she draws between the "parallel strokes" of Rauschenberg's rubbing and veiling (that function to "open vignettes of space within the surface of the pages") and Johns' drawing technique ("of using parallel hatching to open up pockets of shallow space"), which she evokes as an example of the "associative readings and slippage" (PI 104) inherent in allegory. This comment reveals a series of circulatory equivalences: between Rauschenberg's mental space and Johns' optical one (and their inevitable overlap); between the visual similarity of Rauschenberg's rubbing onto the surface via solvent transfer and the effect of appearing from underneath the surface via frottage; between Johns' optical device of crosshatching and its direct equivalence to the Diver's outstretched fingers (as imprint or index); and between both their relationships to surface which finds an eloquent articulation in a description of the distinctly different (or are they?) Combines that are abundant with "the sense that the wildly diverse elements 'dumped' onto their surface were nonetheless physically embedded within it" (PI 107). That this sense, for Krauss, produces a peculiar homogeneity among the varied elements reflects the way in which the varied elements falling within the scope of her criticism receive a similar split-equivalence.
To return to Krauss' use of the allegorical condition to explain both painting and photography, we can see the futility of seeking any truly transparent access to reality, and the elusiveness of any opaque mark as an index of its existence. (To illustrate this point, let us look at Johns' Corpse and Mirror: is the image on the right emerging from beneath the surface-as-transparent, or is it an imprint from in front of the surface-as-opaque?). In the ambiguity (and equivalence) of these two spaces, we are left only with the point of contact where the two meet. As Krauss concludes: "it is precisely the message of uncertainty, of slippage, of unreadability and fragmentation that allegory not only conveys but also, in a necessary act of redoubling, itself becomes" (PI 116). What we are left with is surface alone - surface as the point of contact in the split - and the realisation that surface now points to nothing beyond itself: there is no depth beneath the canvas, nor space in front of it, and nothing higher to which it must remain subservient, there is only surface itself. And does this not (essentially, circularly) return us to our Greenbergian roots and the allegorical condition of art-criticism?
List of Works Consulted:
Adler, Daniel. "Down and Dirty: Art History as Desublimation." Rev. of Formless: A
User's Guide, by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. Art Journal. 57.2 (1998): 114-118.
Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind Krauss. Formless: A User's Guide. New York: Zone, 1997.
Haber, John. "The Shock of the Old: Robert Rauschenberg." Haber Arts. http://www.haberarts.com/rschberg.htm
Krauss, Rosalind. "The Crisis of the Easel Picture." Jackson Pollock: New Approaches. Eds. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel. New York: MoMA, 1999. 155-179.
---------. "Perpetual Inventory." October. 88 (Spring 1999):86-116.
---------. "Whole in Two." Artforum International. 35.1 (1996): 78-85,125.
Mauzerall, Hope. "What's the Matter with Matter? Problems in the Criticism of
Greenberg, Fried and Krauss." Art Criticism. 13.1 (1998): 81-96.
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