Agnes to Andy, 40 Thoughts on The Grid
Foreword: I decided to write this list as both a piece of art criticism, and an archive of images. Each time the word “grid” occurs, it is paired with a hyperlink to an image to illustrate that line. Each line notes one of myriad occurrences of the grid structure throughout human history.
- Agnes Martin said that when she painted her first grid, she was thinking of “the innocence of trees.” In her paintings, the grid appears to be mantric, representative of infinity.
2. The grid appears in both ancient and contemporary city plans. Its simple, repetitive organization lends clarity, organization, and containment to the mess of city life.
3. Thomas Jefferson divided the Lousiana Territory into a 1 mile square grid. For this reason, an aerial view of much of this land reveals abrupt square transitions.
4. Interested in both the structure of trees, and in modern city planning, De Stijl artists and architects saw the grid as a vehicle to ideal harmony.
5. To Enlightenment planner, the equal space the grid provided to a city’s inhabitants represented democracy, and its understandable structure symbolized a clear-minded, rational state.
6. The grid can be used to divide a subject into smaller, manageable pieces for drawing.
7. Some artists have used the grid as a pointillist structure. It’s precision allows even loose brushstrokes to come to near photographic accuracy.
7. The same type of “bit-mapped” images appear on pixelated screens, which use a nearly invisible grid of red, green, and blue light to display an infinite amount of images.
8. The grid is also often used as an armature for composition. Ancient Egyptian artists, for instance, would use string dipped in red dye to create gridded surfaces for drawing.
9. Contemporary designers often use a “mosaic” or grid to unity varied content. This idea was developed by early pop artists to celebrate the variety of popular culture.
10. Andy Warhol, like Agnes Martin, used the grid to emphasize sameness rather than difference. Both artists, embodying radically different visions of Zen, created works that have the quality of a list that insists on the same item repeatedly.
11. Agnes Martin said that she was thinking of “the innocence of trees” when she drew her first grid, but forests are not gridded.
12. Forests can be planted in a grid, but this is usually done to simplify mass production, as with Christmas tree farms, olive fields, and timber forests. These gridded forests have an eerie, empty feeling.
13. Agriculture is also one of the only places where animals are organized into a grid. These grids feel suffocating and full.
14. Well, unless you count cubicles…
14. Food is typically shipped and displayed in grids, such as boxes of chocolates, cafeteria trays, and the bento-box.
15. The grocery store aisle subtly uses the grid to show products in all directions, referencing infinity and suggesting mass-produced plenty.
16. Windows are often divided into grids for structural and stylistic purposes, compartmentalizing the scene viewed through the glass.
17. The grid in comic and film strips compartmentalizes the passage of time.
18. Artists have even used the grid to piece fragments from different scenes together in order to show time progression within a single image.
19. Oppositely, walls of monitors, like security consoles, use the grid to view a single timeline throughout multiple spaces.
20. The network of television screens across the U.S. inverts this, spreading the same image and timeline through many spaces, and relates again to mass production.
20. In the contemporary city, the grid is everywhere: efficient, standardized, and relentless, but it most often be compromised to fit the city’s unique topography. However, this grid can still lend the city a standardized and anonymous character.
21. The scale and use of the grid is also important. Ildefonso Cerda’s “superblock” system in Barcelona eliminates congestion and contains enough space to create small environments within the blocks, including courtyards, parks, and other green spaces.
22. The English town of Milton Keynes also employs a spacious grid to separate walkways and cars. Here the grid is able to work with the lyrical qualities of the land it organizes.
23. Superstudio — a group of Italian “anti-architects” — proposed that people move away from architecture and instead live and interact through a fully gridded digital “monument.”
24. The internet has in some ways realized this vision of the grid, monument of fully interconnected information. Though, you might say that since it is made up of branching networks, the structure is more like that of a tree.
25. Many computer games are “tile-based “ or built on isometric grids. These are also known as “tile-based” games. This structure provides an aerial perspective which allows a player to think of many moving parts at once.
26. Many board games use a finite space of gridded tiles to limit the number of moves a player can make and set up parameters.
27. The grid underlies mathematical tiling problems, which can be used for logic puzzles as well as design and pattern production.
29. Quilts and textiles are often patterned with a grid, but in a way that radically departs from a machined grid, reincorporating human irregularity.
30. A similar feeling can happen in music that is structured with intrinsic human rhythm, rather than a metronome (a distant relative to the grid which divides time into regular units.)
31. Or cities which contain square dwellings, but were built without the exacting grid of the urban planner, like Marrakech or Tungkwan.
32. Rosalind Krauss has theorized that the rise of the grid in 20th century aesthetics came at a time when scientific theory was beginning to usurp the authority of religious doctrine.
33. Other periods of scientific development have happened alongsidethe emergence of the grid. 15th century Italian paintings, for instance, often have a careful perspective grid underlying the buildings.
34. In a perspective drawing, the grid is infinitely scaled and stacked to create a realistic illusion of 3D space.
35. In true perspective, the grid-lines are slightly curved to match the surface of the eye, creating a fish-eye perspective that we barely perceive.
36. A similarly shaped grid occurs in the latitudinal and longitudinal lines navigators project onto the surface of the earth, infinitely scalable, and therefore infinitely accurate.
37. In 1943 Mondrian painted Broadway Boogie Woogie, an idealized grid painting that was based on the city plan of Manhattan, a romantic vision of a squalid city with a high crime rate.
38. Mondrian’s first grids began to take form in his paintings of trees.
39. Andy Warhol’s grids have subtle imperfections that separate them from the mass produced goods they portray.
40. Warhol didn’t do many paintings of trees, but he did love to draw Christmas Trees, which, believe it or not, are planted in a grid.
My archive of other all the grids in this essay, as well as many, many others can be found here.
