Working Space (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) [Paperback]

Frank Stella is one of contemporary art's most challenging and compelling figures. This series of lectures presents his view as to how nonrepresentational art has gone astray by focusing on an excessively cold northern tradition, following it from Mondrian up through the color-field painters. He looks now instead to a warmer mediterranean strain that he traces up through Reubens and Picasso, as his own solution to the possible deadness and flatness of so called "abstract painting". A clear and thoughtful example of how a contemporary painter turns his take on art history into praxis.

Frank Stella's 'Working Space' is the publication of a series of Charles Eliot Norton lectures given in 1983-4. By this time of course, Stella's heyday was long gone- the 1960s, when Michael Fried and his acolytes could fuss over whether the latest Stella could "compel conviction." Similarly, Stella's time a young rebel was also firmly in the past. In 1960, Robert Goldwater chaired a panel on modern art, where Stella claimed that he "would welcome mechanical means to paint his pictures," a comment which provoked Goldwater into saying , "that man isn't an artist, he's a juvenile delinquent." Well, 20-odd years later, here's Stella as an establishment figure- a more mature (and undoubtedly more wealthy!) artist thinking a little bit more soberly about his place in the artistic tradition. In the last chapter, Stella admits, "To do what I was able to do, and what I am able to do now, I walk on roads built by others."

Chief among Stella's concerns here is the problem of abstract painting's seeming exhaustion by the 1970s- the well of inspiration running dry after the promises of High Modernism. What Stella proposes is that abstract painting needed to create some "working space," that is create something more than just a telescoped illusionism which merely shows us the foremost plane of a conventional picture. In order to illustrate his point, he goes back to Caravaggio, who he heralds as painting a more complete, holistic sense of space; that is a pictorial space which the viewer feels physically part of, rather than being on the outside looking in, as in Albertian perspective. We feel that we could easily cross the threshold into the fictive space of Caravaggio's paintings, and that equally, his figures could just as easily enter our physical space. But Stella notes tellingly, "I believe that Caravaggio meant painting to grow outside of itself." This is fascinating, because Stella here seems to be praising a kind of theatricality in the Italian's work, the very term which his friend Michael Fried would use to defend painting such as Stella's against Minimalism in 1967. (However, I have it on good authority that this is a misreading of Fried's notion of theatricality, so maybe Stella is not so contradictory here).

Indeed, this is the real issue for Stella. For painting's problem by the 1980s was not so much one of whether painting should be done this way or that way, but rather a problem of whether it could be carried on at all, especially given that painting seemed to contain within itself the seeds of other practices, something more "literal" or "theatrical." (This is true of Stella's own paintings from the 60s, which is what makes his observation of Caravaggio so revealing.)

Its always interesting to hear artists talk about other artists, and its these contradictions which make Stella worth reading. He makes some quite eccentric claims in these lectures, singing the praises of Picasso's 1920s figuration, where he seems to concede that abstraction has never found an adequate substitute for the human figure- this, from an artist who once said he was happy to see "humanist" values go down the pan! (Actually that was Donald Judd, but it was an interview with him and Stella). The last chapter in particular, where Stella discusses a very clumsy 17th century painting by Paulus Potter in relation to his own work struck me as the oddest claim of all, but then, that's the value of listening to an artist himself- with a different "take" on things compared to a critic or historian. These lectures are eloquently written too-Stella has obviously paid attention to the writings of his friend Michael Fried, and its paid off. (Maybe he got some help with them, who knows...) Its also beautifully illustrated, with Old Masters juxtaposed with Modernists such as Stella himself.

I trudged through this book up until Stella made one point so poignant and concise that I felt absolutely no need to continue reading it. Stella makes a case for "The Religious Experience." The moment when a work of art becomes an indelible part of the literal space of the viewer, that moment when a viewer is so convinced of the reality and gravity of the pictorial space (or flatness)of a work that they accept it as truth and not just imagery. Stella's is a case for the connection of art to audience, and can be applied not only to pictorial space but also to the content of a work of art. A stance taken by other artists in other texts as diverse as Ben Shahn's "The Shape of Content" and David Hickey's "Invisible Dragon." And its still a battle worth fighting. Stella's fame came so early in his career and rooted in such a fragile idea, almost a gimmick, based on pictorial flatness that maybe he didn't stop to think about what he was doing at the time. Don't get me wrong he was thinking about something (an artist's fist ball up into fighting projectiles if you say they didn't put any thought into something). But if you've seen any relatively recent work by Stella you're probably want to say, "Whoah, is this the same guy I was forced to learn about in Art History class?" The answer of course is: No, its not the same guy. This book can help show you why. And for me, Stella has become a great example of an artist willing to treat his art as something more than a mere money making visual gimmick, but as a medium through which to explore and expound on topics that are a little hard to talk about with everybody without having them roll their eyes at you.