Squares. Thoughts?

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose. I did not go to art school, but I love art and learning about it and I am especially interested in learning about contemporary and modern art. And so we have a very fun topic for you all today about that.

Betty: Yay. And I'm Betty. I'm also someone who did not go to art school, but I have been working as a gallery guide at an art gallery for the past eight years. And I have also seen lots of interesting modern and contemporary art, and I have grown to actually really love them over the years. So we're going to talk about a specific topic in that today. 

Quinn: So a couple of times in previous episodes of the show, the idea of abstract squares has come up. We talked about Rothko a little bit, whose most famous works were abstract rectangles and bold blocks of color. We've talked about Albers briefly at one point, his, his most famous works were these patterned squares. A couple of other artists, where this has just started to become a little bit of a theme. And we were like, what's with our fascination with squares? So that's what we're talking about today. 

Betty: Yes, exactly. Yeah and I think when I was editing the video for one of our past podcasts, I think it was about museums and yeah, you had mentioned going to see like a room full of Rothkos and you were just like enthralled and like, totally just looking at them. And then your family or, or your friends were like, what the hell? And I have often experienced similar responses from, from other people. Because I think to a lot of people when they just stand in front of like a red square or a white square or whatever, there's really not much going on for them, which is totally understandable. But obviously, you know, there's lots of people who are interested in them and they do end up in museums all the time. So, we do want to kind of explain why we personally are interested in them or find them fascinating. And then hopefully we'll also share a little bit of like art history context in why people in general have found them interesting so that you're not continually confused.

Quinn: Yeah. Well, let's start on the sort of art history side of this. I know that you've learned a bunch about color field and these kind of related topics in the past, so why do people like squares of color, Betty?

Betty: There's obviously a lot of reasons and, uh, I do want to go back to maybe even further back from the color field era, which was around the mid 20th century, 50s or 60s. I want to go like a few decades before that too. I believe it was 1913. So, this artist, this Russian artist, Kasimir Malevitch, he painted this really famous or infamous painting called The Black Square, and it literally is a black square. So it's a, it's on a white canvas. And he didn't paint the whole canvas. He painted the middle section of the canvas a perfect black square. If you look it up, since it's a pretty old painting, it's over a hundred years old, there's like cracks on it. So it looks like a black square with some texture, but I'm pretty sure when he finished painting it, it was smooth. So I can't remember if it was he who called it a this name or this, used this phrase, or if it was critics or both. It was called "the zero point of painting." So essentially, you know, he's kind of distilled painting down to a singular, maybe you can't even call it color, but like shade. And painted it in this very geometric way. And this is pretty revolutionary cause it was 1913 and even though like, abstract-abstraction and stylization in art have been going on for probably, you know, like a hundred years or so, something this simple and this distilled probably hasn't happened before. So yeah, obviously, you know, it was a big thing in the art world. And Malevitch was, he was a part of this movement or he kind of started the movement called Suprematism, which I'm not going to go into explaining cause it's actually probably is going to sound really pretentious. But in any case, I think that I personally find interesting in this painting, even though, you know, it's very modern, uh, it seems to be devoid of anything. There is actually a connection to history in, in this painting. So this is an example of how The Black Square by Malevitch is supposed to be hung. So when he first exhibited back in, I think, like 1915, he insisted that this painting has to be hung up in the--like a corner, like top corner of the room, like up really high. Which is not where you would typically hang a painting, like usually you would hang it at eye level. Like if you go to any modern gallery, paintings are hung like one next to each other with like space in between at eye level. But Malevitch wanted to have his painting hung in that top corner. And so this actually has historic significance. Because apparently in like traditional Russian culture, uh, in like the living room of a house, you would typically put a picture in the top corner of your living room. And that's usually reserved for like a very sacred figure. So whether it's like a relief--a revered religious figure, or... like usually it's religious. Usually it's like, you know, somebody very important in whatever religion it is that you're, you're practicing. Or maybe it's like an ancestor or just like, it's really, it's like a very revered, very important stature. So of course Malevitch has decided that this painting, this black square now deserves that spot. So obviously he doesn't exactly explain like, why The Black Square in particular, and I think that's something that's left to the viewer's interpretation. Like whether you think it's, you know, the world is all doomed and it's all dark and there's nothing, so it's a black square, or maybe he's, you're saying, you know, it's ridiculous that people have your religious figures and stuff that they hold at such high regard. You know, they should be replaced. You know, we don't know exactly what he was saying, but, um, this particular painting and just the way it's hung is pretty revolutionary. And I think it is important to consider its historic context, and you know what that corner represents.

Quinn: Two reactions to that. One: extreme emo kid energy, to say I painted a black square and I'm going to put it in a place that represents religious figures because basically, no matter what interpretation you have of that, it is to some degree—whether like positive or negatively—nihilistic. So it definitely sounds like very emo kid of him. But also when you first sent me this picture, my first reaction to it is it looks like a TV hung up in a corner. Because it's a black square with like a white outline and it's up in this weird corner. Also wouldn't normally put a TV up like that, but just because of how this painting actually looks, my first reaction was, "oh, that looks like a TV," which is obviously not the intention when it was first created, but is a very interesting commentary that has now come into being, because if you look at that and your first thought is, "oh, that's a TV," I feel like that adds just another layer to the whole nihilistic aspect of that. And now it's a commentary on screen use and all these things. 

Betty: Yeah, exactly. So it's, it's a painting that actually like continues to have significance throughout time. Yeah. It's over a hundred years later and we can still make like contemporary connections or influences, or, yeah, or contemporary references to it. And it is, I think, just as relevant back, you know, in 1915 as it is to today. So, kind of skipping over maybe like 40, 50 years, into, yeah, the mid-20th century. So this is what we mentioned earlier. The color field movement, and this one—so this movement, a lot of historians do attribute it back to, uh, one artist back in the 1950s. Her name is Helen Frankenthaler. Painters have been painting in, you know, different ways for a really long time. And so in the 1950s there was Jackson Pollock, where he was just like taking paint and a brush and like splattering it all over the floor. But what is still the case up until this time is that it's still a canvas very often stretched on an easel, although Jackson Pollock, not so much, but everybody else very much stretched on that easel with a paintbrush. And people are painting whether they're doing like black squares or you know, very realistic portrait. Helen Frankenthaler decided screw all that. So she bought-bought these bolts of a canvas, like huge ones, and she just kinda cut them into squares, usually, and laid them out on the floor. And then she just took paint and put them in buckets and started just pouring them all over the floor. And then she would lift up the canvas and then kind of swerve them around or tilt it in various ways to let the paint wash over the canvas and then just kind of make whatever patterns it ends up making. So she was probably one of the first painters to literally abandon the paintbrush. And like, she just let the paint drip and pour and free flow... I mean, in a way—so some people probably think she just did a randomly, but according to her and according to people who knew her, like she was actually quite deliberate with how she made the paint move and stuff like that. So it wasn't technically random, but it certainly looks like it when you look at one of her works. So in terms of, you know, why I find these types of paintings fascinating, uh, in the color field era, so it's works like hers. And then she later inspired a lot of other artists like Morris Louis and, um, Kenneth Noland who would do similar things like pouring paint on a paint canvas and then just letting them swirl around. So, yeah, these paintings, I just, I find interesting because it's, it's painted in such a different way. And in a way, it's much more difficult to control, you know, where the paint is going to flow when you just pour it on and then using a paintbrush. And they still ended up with such beautiful and controlled looking artworks in the end. I think in this case, I'm not really looking at, you know, a painting of a scene or a portrait and how nice the artist rendered their look. I'm, I'm also just looking at the beautiful patterns that are being made by, by the paint.

Quinn: Yes. See, I'm looking at these right now and I like them. My brain goes, yes, good. I can also totally see where the inspiration comes from, and I can see how this is an early form of the kinds of things that we're talking about in color field and how it's all very abstract, but you can see where things are suggesting representation of real things. And some of them are more abstract than others. Some of them you're like, oh, these really are just colors. And some of them are more representational, but I find it interesting how this has a more naturalist feel to it. It's—there aren't really harsh lines in it. It's still, it still has more natural like flow that exists in other types of art, instead of being constructed into more like, firm lines. The color interplay of it is beautiful, and I can see the way that this was inspirational to lots of other artists that came after her. 

Betty: Yeah, for sure. And I'm, I'm actually, I just definitely just found like, I think probably my favorite painting of hers. I'm just sending it to you now, and again, I can't really describe like why I love it so much. It's very similar to a lot of her other works, but you know, looking at this painting, it looks like it could be like mountains or like a, yeah, like a mountain range or something of nature. But, um, an important thing about color field painters, and probably Helen Frankenthaler felt this way as well, is that they were very much against representation. They were... their position was that they wanted to explore like the medium itself, the paint, the color, the lines, the shapes. They were not interested in, oh, this looks like a mountain, or this looks like a can of soup, or this looks like a chair. If you see something in it, sure. Whatever. But they wanted to talk about like, you know, color theory and how... like they are okay with maybe like emotional interpretations, like how it makes you feel. But they wanted to get away from, you know, realistic or naturalistic representations. And, you know, the reason for this is kind of varied, you know, one is, you know, maybe they're just tired of all kinds of representation—representational art. But another theory is that this type of, this art movement kind of came about after World War II. So after two devastating World Wars, and probably most people are just tired of like the world, like kind of going back to your earlier assessment of like total emo kid that's basically, that was basically like—everybody in the 1950s were just like, Oh my God, like, everything sucks. And everybody's dying, kind of like right now. So yeah, that's kinda like the backstory to it. I mean, it is interesting that like color field painters, they were so against historic styles or representation. But here I am like the most interesting—or one of the most interesting things I find about it is, you know, their historic context and how they relate to other movements in our history. So I'm sure they don't like me very much.

Quinn: Well, that's the thing about these paintings is they so require you to find your own meaning in them, and you can find your meaning in them through an in-person aesthetic experience, or you can find meaning through them through the history of them, and through an understanding of where the artist was coming from. And so, you know, maybe sometimes they would prefer you didn't do that, but they can't stop us from using Google, so... And what you were talking about earlier, where you were mentioning how this painting... That you said that it was your favorite, kind of evokes the idea of a mountain. I wanted to pull that out specifically because a lot of these kinds of paintings rely on our brain being able to interpret meaning out of things that don't necessarily actually represent the world. And so sometimes that's more direct where like that had the lines that you would imagine for a mountain range and it had like the basic color scheme of that. And so it is slightly representational of what that is, but, and then you abstract that to its fullest. And at the end you're like looking at a circle or a square. And still our brains are trying so hard to find meaning in that and to find a pattern of something that we can relate to in the real world. And I think that's part of the reason why sometimes these works of art are really frustrating. Because sometimes you can't, and that can be like, well, then what the heck am I even looking at? Is this supposed to represent something or is it supposed to just confuse me? And sometimes they really are just trying to confuse you. 

Betty: Yeah. Why don't you talk about some of the artists that you... whose work that you find interesting, like Albers or Rothko, as you mentioned previously.

Quinn: Yeah. Honestly, that's a pretty good transition into Rothko. So this is an artist who did a lot of different types of art over the—his lifetime and his career, but he's most famous for the work that he did at the end of his life. And he really resisted a, like, easy name for what these could be called. But basically these are giant canvases that have very particular color palettes where it might be a giant red canvas with a different shade of red rectangle drawn in the middle of it. Or it might be a giant orange canvas with strips of different colors running across it. Um, very abstract, not representing anything in reality. This is after coming after a full career of getting more and more abstract and less representational. And at this point, he was very influenced by Nietzsche. He was going all in on sort of the idea of a spiritual experience of art. And so he had stopped naming his paintings, or they were just named like a number or the colors that were represented rather than any kind of suggestion of what it actually was or might be. He didn't want them to be framed. He has a quote about how he wants people to get within 18 inches of the paintings, so they can like experience them viscerally, which I thought was very interesting. He pretty much refused to explain what any of them were... because he wanted people to have a deliberately spiritual experience. He used the word spiritual to describe them. And I find that fascinating because lots of people like would see these paintings and say, this isn't an experience for me. It just isn't. And there's no moral judgment in that. Like you're not less good at art because you don't have an emotional response to Rothko. But for my brain, I do, I do like, find them fascinating. And I do like looking at them and I do like seeing the depth of color and the ways that it works. Cause basically how we painted these paintings is it's many, many layers of paint. So it's, from a distance, it looks like it might just all be one color or it's just like a background color and then slashes of paint. But it would actually was many, many, many thin layers of color that were layered on top of each other over time to give the color so much depth, especially when you get closer. And so I find them very moving and I'm not sure I can even explain why. It's just like something in my brain really connects with that level of abstraction and that level of questioning. I found that, especially in the last couple of years, I've been much less interested in going to art museums that primarily have art from earlier eras where they're more representational and even though they're--these artists are obviously still displaying a huge amount of technical skill. It's pretty straight forward. Like here is a portrait of a person. Or like here is a depiction of a biblical event, like these kinds of things where obviously they're still beautiful pieces of art, but I would much rather go to a contemporary art museum where everything is very strange and confusing and I have to kind of figure things out and to ask questions and interpret things how my brain wants to interpret them. And... I don't know if that's an unpopular opinion? I know... obviously modern and contemporary art museums are also like very successful, so I'm not, I don't think I'm like special in that regard. But I do think that sometimes it just is like whether your brain clicks with it or not.

Betty: I mean, obviously that's not a unpopular opinion for me, but, you know, maybe among people who don't like going to contemporary art museums. But I do think it is yeah, it is a very subjective thing. And I will agree with you that it's hard to even verbally describe why one finds it so fascinating. I do have to say, I personally... while I like some Rothko works, I don't think I feel the same way about him as you do, or many people who, you know, like his work. Like I probably--I have actually seen his work. I think it was, the National Gallery has like a room of his work. And I was like, okay, like, great. But I didn't spend more than 20 seconds in there. And same with a lot of his other works. Like I'm just like, yeah, okay, whatever. But I have a similar feeling of what you describe with works by, uh, Barnett Newman, who basically is another guy who has these huge, huge, like humongous, like 20 feet by 30 feet paintings, of squares. And usually they have stripes on them and they're—like probably you can relate them to Rothko, except the lines are much sharper. They have much more crisp edges. And I could stare at these paintings for like hours and I can't really explain why. Like, except for the fact that like they do make me feel very, like emotional and, yeah, like I, I get a sense of actually I think Barnett Newman—this is the word that he uses, which is a sense of sublime. And again, like it's, it's very difficult to explain. But I think that's what these artists were getting at. They, they wanted you to, like they don't actually care if you're like, "oh, look at that person's color on a portrait that's so fluffy." They want you to go like, whoa. So but, but again, like I said earlier, I think it's very subjective. Like, I'm--I get this feeling from Barnet Newman, whereas other people are like, I don't get it. It's just red, a red square with, or red rectangle with some lines on it. And then, but the same person could go off to a Rothko and go like, oh my God. So I dunno. Like our brains are complicated and there's like stimuli that certain types of visual medium triggers and others don't. And we all have a lot of different neurons in our brain.

Quinn: Yeah. And another version of this is with the Albers paintings. So Josef Albers did these, this huge collection of paintings, like thousands of them, that—they're squares. And they're, they're pretty small. They're smaller in size, and all of them are squares with other squares inside of them in different colors. And rather—he's not trying to give the audience a spiritual experience. He wasn't trying to make us question, like our relationship with art, and like all these things. No, it was a color study. Literally what these were for was for people who wanted to study art or teach art, or just experience art better to, to have a better view of color. And so they were created in such a way, like there are so many of these things and they're all over the place. Look under your chair, there's probably one there. And, and the colors of each one were chosen in a way so you can see like, what makes a color look brighter or darker? Like how does being next to certain colors change a color, like it was all about seeing things in relation to each other and... they were layered in these like smaller and smaller squares in such a way so that you can see like, how does this gray square on top of a yellow square, like what effect does that create? Does it give it three dimensionality or not? And you'll rarely see these displayed like just one at a time. Like they often will be several of them together because they really exist in conversation with each other. And so I find that interesting as well is that I feel like this is—Albers is almost like the most essentially distilled form of this where there, there's some artists that are interested in the sublime and they're interested in a spiritual experience, and that's really interesting. And then sometimes it really is just about the colors and it's just about seeing the colors and seeing how they interact with each other on a physical level rather than a spiritual one. And I think that's fascinating as well. 

Betty: Yeah. Well, I think this kind of goes back to the idea that a lot of color field painters and/or abstract artists at this time were just like totally interested in the distilled medium of painting. It's totally like what you said, like how different colors interact with each other when layered on top of each other and just the shapes. Like the elements of art itself is what they were interested in studying. Like it's basically come to a point where, um, it's not about this color representing the color on someone's dress or the color on someone's skin. It's about literally just this color and that's what they want to you to focus on. And yeah, like you said, some were not even interested in like emotional references. It's really just the actual thing that you're looking at. And I think for a lot of people that's difficult cause like you said, we—our human brain, we tend to want to associate something to it. We're desperately looking for patterns. So I do think, you know, it's, it's a helpful exercise for people or kids or people in general when they're going to an art museum—not right now, since they're mostly closed, but when you get a chance to, um, to like start thinking about things in these elemental ways rather than trying to come up with some sort of like a cohesive idea that it's trying to reference. 

Quinn: Yeah. And if you spend time looking at a painting like this or any kind of abstract painting, and then you're like, "nope, I still hate this." Then you know, more power to you, go find the art that you do like. But I hope that this conversation is at least interesting in terms of some historical context of why the heck people are even doing this and why this has been something that people have been doing and developing over the last hundred years and will continue to abstract even further and further. And I'm sure it will eventually hit a point where even I'm like, no, guys, I got to tap out. This is too far, but I'm very interested to see where we go along the way.

Betty: Yeah. That kind of wraps it up for why, you know, we personally find squares really interesting. I mean, a lot of it, you know, it is really about a personal experience, but I think what, like I can say summarizing from this conversation is kind of go out and find your own squares. Like it is very subjective and you might look at the ones that we showed you and go like, this doesn't really do anything for me, but I feel like every person has a type of square or maybe something done by a particular artist that can really move them and you just have to go out and find it.

Quinn: Very well said. That's going to be all from us today. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Pictorial. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @PictorialPod. And if you have a topic that you'd like to hear us talk about, there is a form in the description that you can submit those ideas to. You can find me on Twitter or Instagram @aspiringrobotfm.

Betty: And you can find me on Twitter and Instagram @articulationsV. And I am also on YouTube as Articulations. And speaking of YouTube, we also upload these podcasts onto YouTube, where we will put pictures of what we are speaking about right there on the screen as you're watching, so feel free to check that out if you haven't already.

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!