Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow
T. S. Eliot 1
At the center of Raphael's School of Athens, Plato and Aristotle look toward each other, Plato's right arm and hand with extended index finger pointing upward, Aristotle's right arm extended forward, fingers spread, palm downward. Between Plato and Aristotle, epitomized by their respective gestures, is the contention between the Idea-in Plato's sense, and Eliot's-and concrete, particular entities, between Idealism and Empiricism, between the noumenal and the phenomenal. It is an analogue of the contention inherent in artworks between the form and content of the work and the materiality of its manifestation in concrete particularity. In the process of the facture of the work, in the most prosaic terms, it is the gap between intention2 and actualization, between ought and is. The gap between ought and is underwrote one of the ways Modernism exercised criticality: enabling the artwork to epitomize the gap between the ought and the is of the lifeworld. That rhetoric is now to be regarded in its historicity, something of a particular past, along with the emancipatory projects for which the works of Modernism were correlative metaphors.3
Notwithstanding all of the history adumbrated above, indeed from all of that history, some things perdure. For all of its once purported dematerialization,4 the artwork qua object yet entails materiality. For all the barbarism that has transpired, some of the virtues of antiquarianism yet obtain in viewer response.5 Among these virtues beauty, seemingly long unremarked outside the discursive field of philosophical aesthetics if not repressed in the facture of, and viewer response to artworks, has returned as a desideratum of artworks, perhaps returning with a vengeance.6 Winter's works suggest that a return of presence, a deprecated if not repressed term in postmodern discourse, may not be far behind. Winter's works elicit the antiquarian virtues of savoring and contemplation.
Joan Winter's sculpture and prints occupy a particular historical position. With affinities to antecedent Minimal and Constructivist works,7 Winter's oeuvre is nevertheless distinct from these precedents. Occupying an historical position after Modernism, and after the Postmodern critique of Modernism, the work at once transmits and mediates its antecedents. As Hans-Georg Gadamer urges, "participating in an event of tradition, [is] a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated."8 Proximately, Winter's works are informed by Japanese architecture, and the architecture and writing of Louis Kahn, particularly manifest in the attentiveness of her articulation of relations between form in the natural and built environments.
Frequently in Winter's works, as in Live Center, and in Stepping Stone, that articulation of form entails a reductivist, essentialist move. That is not to say that this move is reductivist and essentialist in the sense of Greenbergian formalism,9 entailing a reduction to that which is posited as putatively essential to a given medium, but rather that it is a reduction to what is essential to entities in the natural and built environments, the lived experience of which lies behind the facture of the work. As such, though the form is manifested in the concrete particularity of a material, its manifestation evokes the form as Idea, in something like Plato's sense. Still, the manifestation is-as it must be-in the concrete particularity of a specific material, with all that materiality entails. Materials are obdurate, with their intrinsic properties conducive to or resistant to particularities of form. Thus, the engagement of the properties of materials in their use is in itself integral to the development of the work, and obtains in the employment of both sculpture and printmaking in the oeuvre. Apart from the advantages each medium has through its materiality to Winter's practice, that practice takes place with the historicity of a shift in the enterprise from the specific to the generic, from this or that medium to art as such.10 Thus, as Rosalind Krauss has urged:
within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium . . . but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium . . . might be used.11
Yet the capabilities of specific media do matter. A medium does not consist simply in its materials and their manner of use, but of the conventions and practices it enables. Printmaking, and casting in sculpture, enables working in multiples, in modules, in series, in the sequential development of works, in variants, in suites of related works. These possibilities are evident in Winter's works.
The all-over organization of the surface of many of Winter's prints deploys what Yve-Alain Bois terms the noncompositional strategy11 in several of its aspects: collapse of the distinction of image and field with an attendant isotropy, monochrome, and repetition. This is especially evident in the prints, where the monochrome-or near-monochrome- color, along with a relatively consistent, all-over marking and visual texture results in an isotropic space: thus White Light/Evening, Silence XI, Silence XII, Silence XV, Arris, Untitled (Red Pepper), Untitled (Saffron), Untitled (Sudere). To be sure, the spatial isotropy is not absolute, but mediated by the differentiation of the surface, perhaps more evident in the six prints from the Marfa series. So also the differentiation within the modular components, and their deployment, to articulate the space of the sculpture.
If the differentiation of surfaces and volumes is subtle, then the quietness and silence of the works is the more compelling to savoring and contemplation.
We are especially grateful for the generosity of Architectural Lighting Associates and the several anonymous private collectors for loaning works for this exhibition, and to Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas.
Joan Winter received the Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University, and the Bachelor of Arts from Texas Tech University. Recent exhibitions include Holly Johnson Gallery, 2006; Holly Johnson Gallery, 2005; Space and Time, Robot Art Gallery, San Antonio; New Prints: Etchings, International Print Center, New York, 2004; Silence and Light, 416 West Gallery, Denison, Texas; McKinney Avenue Contemporary; Dallas Center for Contemporary Art; Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, California, 2003; Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, 2000; Depart Return, Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University; Six Degrees of Separation, 500X Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 1998; The Assemblage, Dallas, Texas, 1997; Texas Visual Arts Association, 1996; Dutch Phillips & Co. Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 1995; Jansen Perez Gallery, San Antonio, Texas, 1994; Eighth Annual Mini Print International, Binghamton, New York (traveled internationally through December, 1995). Joan Winter is represented by the Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas.
What had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general, but also in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself. By doing this each art would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of this area all the more secure.See also Greenberg's "Towards a Newer Laokoön," Partisan Review (July-August 1940); reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. I Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O'Brien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Cf. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. [1766] Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)..