The pressing problem of art criticism now is to reestablish abstract art's connections with other experience without, of course, abandoning the now general sense of art's autonomy. One way is by the repetition of images, which without preassigned meanings become the record and monument of the artist.

Lawrence Alloway 1

The frame around a picture, by virtue of its symmetry, may be called an external center, whose stability holds the composition together from the outside, just as the middle supports it from the inside. Through this double constraint a kind of pincer movement contains the free flow of life, which is the picture.

Rudolph Arnheim 2

. . . it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality) has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure-although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science-is contradictorily coherent. And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.

Jacques Derrida 3

Laurence Scholder's fifteen prints in this exhibition present the rich complexity of the cycle of life through an economy of means. The simplicity of means obviously but only partly consists in the abstraction entailed by the limitation to black and white, to white lines on a black field, and in a directness of working that is seemingly the absence of artifice (but which is the greatest of artifices). More profoundly, these works entail an imitation of nature not in the sense 4 of re-presenting particular existents but in the sense of ars imatatur naturam in sua operatione: "art imitates nature in her manner of operation." 5 This is to say that the referent of the work consists not in the concrete particularity of any specific entity in nature, but of the processes of `nature naturing', natura naturans. The use of the life cycle of plants as synecdoche for the cyclical activity of nature is a metaphor having its status as archetype in the commonplace of lived experience, ahistorical and ubiquitous,a sublunar correlative of the cyclical progression of the constellations. 6

Three shapes are the principle recurrent motifs in these prints. Small round forms, ranging from circular to elliptical to angular ovoid forms are suggestive of seed or orbicular leaves, 7 or of fruit. 8 A second range of shapes is suggestive of filiform, linear, oblong, spatulate, oblancelate, or obovate leaves: a range extending from thin and proportionately much elongated to thickening in varying degree toward the tip. 9 A third range of forms suggests petiole and simple leaf, with the leaf alternate and elliptic. What is germane is not that a specific plant nor even representative plants of particular species are the referent of the works; rather, abstracted plant forms serve as the formal and metaphoric basis of these works.

These works are etchings, either from copper plates or from photopolymer plates, printed in relief rather than printed as intaglio prints. In relief printing, ink is rolled on the unbitten surface of the plate, rather than wiped into the lower bitten areas with the smooth surface wiped clean as for intaglio printing. Consequently, the drawn linear elements appear in the relief print as white on black, rather than appearing black on white as in etching plates printed intaglio.

Notwithstanding their appearance as an absence of ink, and therefore as the presence of the receiving field of the white paper, the lines in these prints manifest their character as physical entities. Lines in the world are long shapes rather than the one-dimensional ideal entities of Euclidean geometry. As elongated shapes, lines divide figure from ground, evoke the perception of directional forces, and record the direction of movement, and nuances of weight of the inflecting pressure and the character of the point of the drawing instrument by which they are inscribed. The slightest line inscribed within the field of the image influences and articulates the space around it. The line functions as contour of the form rather than as outline; nuances of line quality definea three dimensional volume rather than simply marking the edge of a two dimensional shape. While even a single line would evoke a complex of forces within the field, these works are built up in articulated arrays of lines, each with its concrete particularity of line quality and position within the whole, in tension with all the other lines in the field.

Throughout these works, emphasis of the edges of the field is developed through the tendency to a relative blackness at the edges where relatively small forms accumulate. The general darkness of the edges, along with the diminution of the scale of marks at the edges relative to the larger marks in the center, results in the perceptual effect of distal edges in tension with a proximal center, rendering the literally flat plane of the image anisotropic. In contrast to this reading, the flat plane of the image as inflected by shifts of scale of the motifs and of line weight within the image, and by overlapping which treats the overlapping form either as opaque and thus obscuring the overlapped form, or as transparent and thus allowing the overlapped form to be seen through the overlapping form, thereby creating a spatial ambiguity. The darkening at the edge is a thickening of density within the image field, a walling of the center from the exterior of the image, reiterating the edge terminating the image field. To surround with a wall is to enclose, to mark the without from the within, separating the inside from theboutside, the sacred from the profane. 10 To give emphasis to the edge of the image field is to demarcate the field as a microcosm, the unified field of the closed composition as miniature universe. To emphasize the center to the extent that it is distinguishable from and regarded in tension with the margin framing the center is to embed the center as image within an image. 11 The etching process is particularly conducive to works that are process oriented, open "For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." 12 A protracted working and reworking of an individual plate is not the only way of working, of course. The process no less readily accommodates a more or less spontaneous, simultaneous working on several plates, choosing those which seem promising for further development. To work in this manner entails attending both to the individual work and to the suite of works as an ensemble. The ensemble (for those works which are parts of suites of images: Colony, Shoa, Token) can be regarded either synchronically or diachronically; that is, as representing separate simultaneously existing referents or as representing the same referent at sequentially related moments.

Constellation has small (approximately one half inch diameter) circular forms opaquely overlapping a branching structure suggestive of leaf forms. The circular forms fix the visual level of the picture plane, acting to place the overlapped branching structure at an indeterminate depth in the virtual space of the image.

Reversing the relation between the overlapped and overlapping forms in Constellation, Locus has the larger leaf forms in front of the small forms, which in Locus are elongated U- shapes. The edges are dark with small outwardly oriented leaf forms; the central area has larger, more active forms, drawn with a heavier, coarser line.

Colony I has an approximately even distribution of nearly circular forms, with the central area having a few larger white forms, a field sown with seeds with nascent growth. Colony II has densely distributed nearly circular forms from the center to the edges, with the central section of larger, ovoid-circular forms and labial leaf forms oriented in loose radial symmetry from the center. Colony III has a center of relatively large overlapping but transparent calligraphic lines erupting eccentrically, surrounded by small open U-shaped forms more sparsely distributed along the edges. The sweep of the lines in the central area, along with their heavier line quality, give a sense of vigorous, even florid, growth. Colony IV has the areas along the edges black, the small U-shaped forms incompletely ovoid, vestigial, which with their reduced line weight renders them spatially recessive. Strong, interpenetrating white lines with four black negative spaces diverge upwards from the lower left center section. In Colony V, small round forms reappear at the edges, but the line quality is rougher, more jagged; strong white central linear elements recur. In Colony III - V, the heavier line weight of the white lines in the central area, along with their relatively greater scope and sweep, produce a concentrated luminosity in the centeral area in contrast to the increasing blackness of the marginal zone. Regarded sequentially, the Colony suite suggests a temporal progression of development from nascent to active growth, to florid overgrowth, to decay, to revivified growth amid decay. Regarded simultaneously as an ensemble, the Colony suite suggests the several stages of growth as temporally equiprimordial..

Shoal I has small circular forms evenly distributed at the edges, with larger bent labial forms emerging from the center. Shoal II has long, vertically oriented labial forms and bent labial forms amid nine small circular forms. Shoal III has the bent labial forms more angular, larger, generally opaque to obscure the smaller distal forms when overlapping them, and with a heavier, more jagged line quality in the large forms. In Shoal IV, the center is prominent with a clustering of white lines, producing a sense of luminosity as an emergent quality, similar to the effect of luminosity occurring in Colony III - V. In Shoal IV , the black bent labial forms recede, with small elongated inverted U-shaped forms rendered with lighter, more delicate lines. Shoal V has the black bent leaf forms prominent and processive against the smaller scaled elongated vertical inverted U-shaped forms.

The central leaf forms in the Token suite assume a greater sense of positive figure against a ground comprised of the smaller and more linear leaf forms. In Token I, the edges of the image field are a sharply terminated black, while in Token II, III the edges dissolve into the white of the paper, terminated by an implied line, more evident because of the absence of the embossing of a plate mark into the paper surface.

Scholder's prints, rigorous and elegant as a mathematical proof, visually and conceptually rich, use abstracted vegetative forms as metaphor for coming to be and passing away in the cycle of nature. Black and white, as exemplary "significations of pure difference," 13 enact in their opposition the dialectic of being and not being, which is the realm of becoming, 14 which is where we find ourselves in nature, and in each of our selves. "To wish to paint the operations of the dialectic is no small ambition." 15BR>

1. Lawrence Alloway, " Systemic Painting," introductory essay in the exhibition catalogue Systemic Painting (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1966); reprinted in ed. Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 35-36. Return
2. Rudolf Arnheim, The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 73. Return
3. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 279. Author's emphasis. Return
4. By a 'naive sense of imitation' I refer to the notion that an image is 'good' insofar as it resembles its referent. More broadly, the notion of imitation has not been prominent in the philosophy of art since the late eighteenth century, though it is held commonly enough by the general public. For an interesting treatment of the fortunes of the notion of `imitation', see Richard McKeon, "Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity," Modern Philology, 1936; reprinted in ed. R. S. Crane, Critics and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 117-145. Return
5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, I. 117, 1. Return
6. Inter alia, see Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, tr. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954) [Original publication as Le Mythe de l' éternel retour: archétypes et répétition (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1949.], Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechand, Hamlet's Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time (Boston: Godine, 1977). Return
7. Orbicular or reniform leaves are respectively round or rounded with a flattening of curvature on one side; e.g., as the leaves of Moneywort, Lysimachia nummularia, a very low growing groundcover also known as Creeping jenny, and found in damp, shady areas. Return
8. In the polysemic ambiguity of reading the round shapes as seed or as leaves or as fruit, one might advert to the respective role of seed and fruit in Hegel's dialectic as tropes of beginning and culmination. While seed has the fruit within it as potentiality, the fruit as actuality and teleological culmination has the seed within it, analogous to the operation of the dialectic having its arche and telos within itself, continuing in an unending cycle (granting that, for Hegel, the process has its culmination in philosophy as nature knowing itself, and indeed in Hegel's philosophy as attainment of absolute knowledge). Return
9. E. g., grasses typically have linear leaves, while the Texas mountain laurel, Sophora secundiflora, has oblancelate leaves. Return
10. See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, tr. Willard Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959). Return
11. For the notion of the embedded image, see Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, "Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin 73:2 (June 1991), 20. Return
12. T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," l. 48. Return
13. Rosalind Krauss, "Reading Jackson Pollock, Abstractly," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1983), 238. Return
14. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, tr. William Wallace as Hegel's Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1873, 1975) 86 - 88. Return
15. Krauss, ibid., 237. Return