A theory of the figures would serve only to give an image of a theory. But the Fig. as a theory of the image?
Marcel Broodthaers 1
The notion of medium is never exhausted by an exhaustive description of a medium's material cause. A surplus always already escapes any reduction of a medium to its material cause, and it is precisely this surplus, this remainder, that constitutes a medium as such. This surplus subsumes, but is not correlative with, the "differential, self-differing, and thus a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support."2 If reduction of medium to material cause is not proper, the proper sense of medium consists in the constellation of sedimented conventions as problematized in practices extending the medium. While line and support are associated with the conventions of some practices of drawing, refering to Linnea Glatt's works as drawings, or, refering Linnea Glatt's works to the medium, the genre, of drawing does not subsist merely in denoting line and support in the works. This is not a matter of finding what is proper to drawing, of isolating that which is essential in drawing; this is not an exercise in the reductivist, essentialist, purist strategy of modernism on the Greenbergian model:
It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered 'pure', and in its 'purity' find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as its independence. 'Purity' meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.3
Rather, the matter at issue in Glatt's drawings consists in a move outside the conventions associated with the medium of drawing, and indeed outside of the modernist notion of medium as such. Still, one cannot but compare Glatt's Three Worlds At Four Degrees with that quintessential reductivist, essentialist, purist work of early modernism, Rodchenko's monochrome paintings, Chistyi krasnyi tsvet (Pure Red Color), Chistyi zheltyi tsvet (Pure Yellow Color), and Chistyi sinii tsvet (Pure Blue Color).4 Rodchenko's move, given his declaration that:
I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.5
and his subsequent cessation of painting, has come to be regarded as an endgame strategy, sufficiently referenced if not reiterated in subsequent painting to constitute of itself a genre.6 Thus, one way of regarding Glatt's Three Worlds At Four Degrees is to find it as another iteration in the posthistory of Rodchenko's Zugzwang. Yet if Glatt's Three Worlds At Four Degrees is an iteration in that posthistory, it is also a move outside it. Three Worlds At Four Degrees is a drawing, a work equiprimordially extending the denotation of the term drawing and functioning as a figure of drawing. As a figure of drawing, Three Worlds At Four Degrees is a representation of drawing qua genre. Two linked aspects of the facture of these drawings are salient moments in this shift. First, the works employ machine mediated sewing as the means of mark making, displacing the valorization of the hand. Second, sewing as such has historically been vitiated as craft and thereby maginalized.
The proper of drawing, in its two senses of the self-identical and the pure (i.e., excluding as an alterity that which is not essential to the medium), is obviated in these works of Glatt, which engage drawing as self-different and as a practice resistant to a purist, essentialist reduction. This resistance is manifest in the tactility of Glatt's works, both in the support of sized paper and the treatment of the sewn and collaged elements is fundamental in viewer response-compare the uncut thread in Buttoned Four Corners and the and cut thread in Stitched and Unstitched Petals-is given through but exceeds opticality, in tension with the elegance and restraint of the simple linear geometry of the forms deployed in the drawings.
The relation of the work and the viewer's space is thematized in Two Irises, executed directly with brads and thread on the entrance wall as wells as the works on paper in which the transgression of the plane of the support though the gathering of thread-traces into an umbilical plunging into the viewer's space violates the reduction of drawing to opticality in its connection of the virtual space of the drawing and the physical space of the viewer. This occupation of viewer space by an element of the drawing figures the conceptual space of viewer response, the between of viewer and work, in which the regard of the viewer is re-presented by the 'regard' of the work: "la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar."7
As Glatt's works in drawing problematize the notion of medium through differing, so her larger practice as an artist problematizes the notion of a singularity of genre. Encompassing works on paper, sculpture, installation, and site-specific sculpture, Glatt's practice obviates singularity of medium, supplanting an exclusionary engagement with a specific media for an engagement with art in general.8 That engagement encompasses in its broader scope both the individual and personal, and the intersubjectivity of the lifeworld. Here, in these works, the the individual and personal, and the intersubjectivity of the lifeworld are distilled, contracted into a quiet, serial play of form and metaphor.
Linnea Glatt received the Master of Arts from the University of Dallas, and the Bachelor of Arts from Moorhead State University. Glatt's extensive exhibitions include: Essential Space Part 2: Frances Bagley, Linnea Glatt, L. Kaneem Smith, McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas; Co-Existence, University Art Gallery, Texas Christian University; Drawn 2, Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas; Linnea Glatt: Recent Work, Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas; Texas Axis, Arlington Museum of Art; Moorhead Room, CRCA Gallery, The University of Texas at Arlington. Glatt's works are in the collections of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the corporate collections of American Airlines and Frito-Lay. Glatt's practice also includes site specific works mediating the domains of public sculpture and the built environment, including Harrow at Lubben Plaza, Dallas, A Place to Perform, White Rock Lake, Dallas, and in collaboration with artist Michael Singer and the engineering firm of Black and Veatch, Inc., the 27th Avenue Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center, Phoenix, Arizona.