Prof. Lange
ARTH: Contemporary World Art
October 14, 2015
Reading Journal 2 In the essay Grids from The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths by Rosalind Krauss, she focuses on grids and how they represent modernity of modern art. Krauss talks about how there are two ways that grid art is modern art. The first is because it is spatial, meaning its flatness is what makes the work of art unnatural and completely acts separately from the realm of art. The second is because it is temporal, meaning being something new and different that no other past type of art has done ever before. Based on this essay, I think Krauss is trying to make the argument that grid art is still art despite how different it may be from other forms of art of the past. …show more content…
She says that they are not interested in the “concrete” but rather on the “universal.” Many painters before this modernist movement focused on depicting actual things like landscapes or objects. However, grid artists were more focused on not painting anything at all just lines and colors. Even though grids don’t really represent anything, painters believed that they were spiritual and connected with the universe. After talking about the spiritual, Krauss goes on to talk about science and how that affected grids. She goes back in time to the nineteenth century when grids were not yet being made but, physiological optics were. These optics were illustrated with grids, hence why painters became so interested in them. She states that, “by its very abstraction, the grid conveyed one of the basic laws of knowledge--the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the ‘real’