ABSTRACT
The grid, as the paradigm of the myth of the avant-garde and its canonization as absolute rupture, would find its stringent articulation in geometric abstract art. The mythic power of the grid resides in its ability to repress the axis of ideation; the myth of modernism casts the grid into the role of its master-mytheme, as the paradigm of a spirituality it is made to disavow. The grid is an image of an 'ambition', a visual structure bespeaking a desire: to ward off literature, narrative, discourse. "Grids" addresses the issue of the hybrid imagetext and can become an emblem of modern art only through the force of the myth modernism has created concerning its own essence. Since Torres-Garcia's writing testifies to a comparable desire to return to a primordial purity, his aesthetic theory is really an anti-aesthetic doctrine. Constructive Universalism allows the artwork only to be read as already conceptualized under the auspices of his neoclassical, symbolic framework.
