"Grids"

In an essay written in 1979, art historian Rosalind Krauss argues that the grid is the underlying structure of modernist visual arts. She begins:

"In the early part of this century there began to appear, first in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition in the visual arts ever since. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse. As such, the grid has done its job with striking efficiency. The barrier it has lowered between the arts of vision and those of language has been almost totally successful in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech. The arts, of course, have paid dearly for this success, because the fortress they constructed on the foundation of the grid has increasingly become a ghetto."

Krauss goes on to argue that the grid announces the "modernity of modern art" in two ways: the spatial and the temporal. About the spatial she says: "the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal." In the flatness of the grid, she asserts, the dimensions and objects of the real are "crowded out" and replaced by the "lateral spread of a single surface."

On first viewing Maciej Wisniewski's ScanLink, I was instantly struck by the grid of sliders. Presumably a mapping of the space of the Internet, we move about using the sliders much like turnstilesÑas Wisniewski has already suggested (see http://www.stadiumweb.com/turnstile). Wisniewski's cartography helps us, the users (at once the makers of the maps and, thereby, the makers of the space itself in this virtual world), to understand the difference between "virtual" and "real" or "physical" space.

This difference between web and "real" space, it has been claimed, punctures the clean autonomous space of modernist visual arts„the space emblemized by the grid, according to Krauss. When confronted with Wisniewski's grid, I am forced to ask if this is actually so. What is the relationship of the discourse of "web art" to the discourse of modernist visual arts? Has the web, like the space of painting before it, constructed a fortress unto itself? Modern painting's claims to the "antireal," "antinatural" no-space of the flat canvas seems somehow echoed in new media artists' and critics' discussions of "virtuality." The extended discussion on "newness" seems reminiscent of the rhetoric of the formalist version of modernismÑthe version of modernism Krauss critiques. Perhaps even more ironically, "new media's" claims to newness and "post-modernity" rest in an assertion that its "infinite space" is somehow more authentically "infinite" and "antinatural"„in short (and paradoxically) more real (in a virtual way, of course). These thoughts lead me to conclude (for the moment) that web art such as Wisniewski's represents a state of hyper- as opposed to post-modernity.