ABSTRACT
Whereas Jo Baer’s paintings of the sixties have most frequently been discussed in relation to her interest in optical science, this chapter takes as its point of departure Baer’s reading of Samuel Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable, which she has credited with their inspiration. Like Beckett’s novel, which thematizes a post-Cartesian model of destabilized subjectivity, Baer’s paintings create an elusive aesthetic encounter that denies the apperceptive self its moorings. The chapter discusses her paintings vis-à-vis the two painterly conventions with which they seemingly conform, the Albertian window and the modernist deductive structure, both of which are predicated on a metaphysic of viewer self-presence that Baer’s work subverts. The chapter then considers the gender implications of her refusal of the modernist paradigm. Whereas champions of modernist painting coded its optical address as masculine through a rhetoric of heroic genius and control, Baer’s enigmatic color frustrated the modernist hegemony by asserting an embodied aesthetic experience that resisted facile gender coding. The chapter concludes with a close reading of Baer’s 1967 Artforum letter to the editor, which stands as the most comprehensive rebuttal to the period’s “death of painting” critiques by one of its painters. The letter effectively severed her ties with Minimalist artists, with whom she had previously felt a strong sense of kinship, foreshadowing her disavowal of her own Minimalist idiom and abandonment of the New York art world in 1975.
