Mind Matrix

In the 1979 essay “Grids,” critic Rosalind Krauss declared the grid the “antinatural” emblem of modernist ambition, exemplified in the schematics of Piet Mondrian’s paintings and the modular lattices and cubes of minimalism. Not only did Krauss find the grid to be anti-natural, she also saw it as anti-social in its “hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.”¹ Possessing a logic peculiarly its own, she determined, the grid needed nothing from the real world. Its “ascetic geometry” could be seen as the ideal means for fulfilling the modernist imperatives of purity and self-sufficiency in the visual arts.² Mondrian’s mature paintings epitomize that optical ideal, embodying the structural framework for a universalizing vision, or “unity imposed on diversity,” as Clement Greenberg put it.³ Seeing in art an antidote for the “disequilibrium” of modern life, Mondrian wrote: “If we cannot free ourselves, we can free our vision.”⁴ But that freedom comes at the cost of vitality, notes Krauss: the logic of the grid is so self-evident that it resists analysis and interpretation. It is what it is: the form in which modern art has finally become literally enmeshed. No longer developing, it can only extend, both spatially and temporally, imposing order on untamed nature and unruly thought processes.