Thursday, June 21, 7 p.m.
In his essay “Strzemiński and Kobro: In Search of Motivation” (1984), Yve-Alain Bois wrote that “modernism in the broad sense of the term was not merely an operation of ontological reduction—Greenberg’s canonical interpretation—but rather a vast enterprise of motivation, of motivation of the arbitrary.” Put another way, modernist work can be understood as a search for origins that are other than what Bois has called the artist’s “personal taste and will,” which as expressions of the artist’s subjectivity entail composition, and composition produces the arbitrary.
In contrast to composition, non-composition is a way of making work that according to Bois looks for an “ordering principle that would not depend on subjective choice” and so forestalls the arbitrary. Non-composition over the course of the twentieth century has taken various forms and has produced many radical works.
Morgan Fisher first started making work in late 1960s, when he made films. From the beginning non-composition has been one of the foundations of his work, and it has continued to be so as he has extended his work to other media.
Bois will offer a brief historical review of different forms of non-composition, then Bois and Fisher will discuss the forms of non-composition that have occurred in Fisher’s work, particularly his work in painting and in relation to architecture.
Yve-Alain Bois
Critic, curator, and historian of art. Specialist in twentieth-century European and American art. Associate Professor (1983–89), then Professor (1989–91), at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. From 1991 to 2005 Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art and from 2002 to 2005 Chair, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. Currently Professor of Art History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Curated and co-curated a number of influential exhibitions, including Piet Mondrian, A Retrospective (1994, The Hague, Washington, New York), L’informe, mode d’emploi (1996, Paris, with Rosalind Krauss), Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry (1999, Fort Worth), and Picasso Harlequin 1917–1937 (2008, Rome). His books include Painting as Model (1990), Formless: A User’s Guide (1997, with Rosalind Krauss), Matisse and Picasso (1998), and Art since 1900 (2004, with Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss). Co-founder and co-director of Macula magazine (1976–79) and the Macula book series (1976–), co-editor of October (1991–), and contributing editor to Artforum. Yve-Alain Bois is currently working on several long-term projects, including a study of Barnett Newman’s paintings, the catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings and sculptures, and the modern history of axonometric projection.
Morgan Fisher (b. Washington, D.C., 1942; lives and works in Los Angeles) studied art history at Harvard from 1960 to 1964 before attending film school in Los Angeles and going into film. In the mid-1970s, Fisher also created several film installations that can be described as works of Expanded Cinema. From the mid-1990s, in a further development, he turned to monochrome painting and installations of monochrome paintings. Institutions that have exhibited Fisher’s filmic oeuvre and his conceptual paintings include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; and most recently Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach.