M206

Agnes Martin

Art as Occupation 

The work for which Agnes Martin is best known consists of drawings and paintings of straight lines on a plain ground.  Many of these are grids rather like graph paper, or horizontal lines. The grids and lines are often placed on the ground in such a way that a plain border contains them, which at times is quite wide.  Sometimes the lines are confined within a shape, such as an oval or a triangle; and occasionally the pattern bleeds right to the edge of the work, as though limitless.

The work has often been described as minimalist due to its spare and geometric appearance.  But Agnes Martin has described herself as an expressionist, because she intended her work to cause an affective response in the viewer. [i] What strikes me most is the calmness of the work, and an awareness of the time consuming labour that is visually present.  Each individual work, and the body of the work as a whole, breathes the presence of time spent.  Critics write about the feeling of looking through or beyond her work, as though to something ‘transcendental’, but I read this feeling of ‘looking through’ as a realisation of her temporal presence; her posture, hands, and concentration; an image of time spent, slowly and carefully drawing lines.  Somehow this temporal evidence creates an overwhelming feeling of her presence, in absence.

In addition to her visual art, Agnes Marten spent considerable time writing, and in a piece called ‘The Untroubled Mind’ attempted to explain her intentions, methods and philosophy.  The style is poetic and takes a spiritual tone reminiscent of Eastern philosophies.

She wrote of a sense of detachment, ‘a retired ego’ and an avoidance of ‘hunger’.   The work does not signify something else - it is only itself, and it specifically does not refer to the artist's mentality, to symbolic meanings, or to nature, in spite of titles such as ‘Leaf’ or ‘Dark River’ with which her corpus is littered. The work is not about the world, and she has described her work as classical because it is anti nature.  Jacquelynn Baas writes in Smile of The Buddha  [ii] that many titles refer to Buddhist proverbs, which could explain the apparently representational titles such as ‘Cow’, ‘Milk River’ and ‘Grass’ as abstract concepts concerning the cycle of life and the interrelationship of worldly things.  Critics tend to use religious terminology to explain their own responses, talking about ‘religious utterance’ and ‘heavenly light’, but Agnes Martin did not believe that an artist can influence the way that a viewer will interpret the work, only that viewers will find what they need. [iii]

Of her method, Agnes says, - ‘Not thinking, planning, scheming is a discipline.  Not caring or striving is a discipline.’  ‘If you live by inspiration then you do what comes to you.’  Her goal was ‘annihilation of the existence of forms as entities.’  She has also spoken of joy, happiness, the sublime and consolation - ‘the responses of happiness and joy are our first concern.’[iv]

The frequent references to Buddhism in connection with Agnes Martin refer to philosophical rather than religious beliefs.  To have sought religion in the Western sense would have meant striving for a goal or accepting a structured system, whereas her writings overflow with phrases indicating an ‘emptying out’ and ‘letting go’.  It is equally possible to view her work from the perspective of occupation, which is not inconsistent with Buddhist philosophy, promoting attention to ordinary day-to-day activities and the pursuance of a healthy frame of mind.  To quote a Zen saying, ‘Before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water.  After enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water’; identical words, but a changed attitude to the performance of those tasks.  Her writing and drawings indicate the desire that her whole life would be lived in a sense of harmony, and during her work she perhaps sought a mind-space similar to meditation through immersive process.  She was not illustrating meditation but rather performing it. 

Agnes Martin appears to have achieved a psychological homeostasis, creating happiness and self fulfilment on some quiet level of contentment, illustrating a successful performance of Freud's Pleasure Principle or Maslow’s self-actualisation, through the process of ‘occupation’.