In his famous essay, ‘Three American Painters’ from 1965, Michael Fried notes that contemporary modernist painters often work in series, and he speculates as to why this might have become an appealing way of making art.
It provides a “context of mutual elucidation” for the individual paintings constituting the series, he explains. If a viewer sees a number of works “which represent essentially the same approach to the same formal issue”, then it makes the issue much easier to understand. But it also allows you to register the differences, bringing “out the particular expressive intonation of each.”
Frank Stella, installation at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1960
Frank Stella, installation at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1964
Kenneth Noland, installation at Andre Emmerich Gallery, 1967
Philip Fisher draws on this passage in his book Making and Effacing Art, in order to make an observation about the arbitrariness of museum display. Emphasizing that an individual work of art always has the potential to be presented out of context in a modern gallery, he uses Fried’s remark to suggest that for many contemporary artists, it is the series that has become “the basic unit of work.”
“In the precise, dated series the painter rules out the surrounding chaos by supplying the context, the commentary of neighbors, for the no-longer-intelligible single work. He creates whole sections of history at once, not pictures for the whims of history to supply antecedents and descendants for. In viewing such a sequence a striking effect occurs. Once only one picture exists at any instant as a picture, the others are temporarily explication, frame, and criticism. The power of the series lies in the skill with which each picture can exchange roles; now a sensory experience, exhaustively commented on by the rest of the series; a moment from now, part of the explication for one of the other pictures. In the series we reach an authentic clarity of the part, the smallest detail of any structure comes in time to replicate the form of the whole: the series is not art, but a miniature art history.”
This comment is useful in highlighting the extraordinary care that many artists who have produced a life-long series of works have shown in regulating the terms of their reception.
For instance Roman Opalka was exceptionally scrupulous in setting up an “optimum installation” for his paintings, or Details, as he calls them. Not merely satisfied with fashioning his oeuvre into one integrative, serial whole, he supplemented the displayed paintings with sound recordings, and with his photographs.
For instance Roman Opalka was exceptionally scrupulous in setting up an “optimum installation” for his paintings, or Details, as he calls them. Not merely satisfied with fashioning his oeuvre into one integrative, serial whole, he supplemented the displayed paintings with sound recordings, and with his photographs.
From 1994 onwards, he went even further, and began to experiment with modifying the architecture of the exhibition space itself, resulting in what he named Octagons. In his ideal installation, the octagon would be a cellular, freestanding structure that would be erected inside a museum. It would consist of seven walls, with the eighth being the point of entry, and would be used to display seven Details. The space would be lit from above and below, and, in one essay, he stated that in addition to a guard, only seven visitors should be allowed inside the octagon at any one time.
Roman Opalka's Octagon at Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, 2006
