A decade of squares
Some reflections on repetition and stillness
I once worked at an art gallery that represented an artist named Manuel Espinosa (1912-2006). Espinosa was part of the Argentine avant-garde and a founding member of the art collective Asociación de Arte Concreto-Invención, though his career was much broader than his time with that group. In the 1960s and 1970s, he made paintings and drawings dedicated to squares and circles. A decade of squares, a decade of circles: he was particularly interested in how the repetition of these seemingly simple shapes could be endlessly interesting as a visual proposition.
Espinosa was working out the practical implications of an idea made popular across the continent by Swiss architect Max Bill, whose inclusion in the 1951 São Paulo Biennial marked the beginning of his wide influence among Latin American artists of various avant-garde movements, especially in Brazil and Argentina. Bill believed that the act of creating variations upon a theme was important: repetition, he thought, was a method for fully, precisely, and systematically understanding a particular form.
It is maybe not surprising that Espinosa also held a deep and expert interest in music. For many years (if I remember correctly), he had his own radio program in Buenos Aires. He would title many of his works in homage to composers (and writers). He was fascinated by Erik Satie’s work, and its rupture with previous formal structures in music. I imagine that music also offered a different way of entering into rhythmic patterns, using structure and its rules as a thing from which to break.
Rhythmic re-utterance, re-making, the utter re-ness of his work in the 1960s and 1970s is where Espinosa’s visual experimentation found its depth. Art critic Marta Traba found a “glowing intensity” in Espinosa’s complex compositions, all made from endless configurations and overlappings of squares and circles with varying opacities. His works from this time are both satisfying and absolutely boring: Espinosa knew that transcendence could come from tedium.
If we associate this geometric repetition with abstraction at mid-century, we might also want to consider other forms of intentional stasis, from other places, as a conceptual corollary. In East Asian Art, for example, Jain sculptural traditions were marked by centuries of repetition, which coincide with their makers’ spiritual beliefs. Generations of Western scholars dismissed the work because they perceived it as resistant to progress, transformation, and change (funny how that works). But in Jain world-making, repetition is an important aspect for understanding the world. Visual sameness over centuries was not only an aesthetic decision, but a spiritual one. Jain images repeat forms over and over again, and even the landscapes within Jain cosmology are understood as a series of repeated forms, symmetrically arranged. Sculptures of religious figures are made almost always in the same seated posture, with the same insistence upon simplicity and balance.
In this spiritual tradition, wisdom comes from meditation and austerity, only possible through withdrawal from the comforts of daily life and home. Seated meditation—the posture which many Jain sculptures take—is the site from which wisdom eventually comes. Interestingly, a secondary sculptural posture of standing—kayotsarga or “body abandonment”—is a pose that reflects the Jain belief in nonviolence to all living creatures. John Guy writes, “To maintain complete immobility was to ensure no harm to any creature, however small.” The standing posture, he adds, is not only challenging, but physically exacting. Such stillness requires precision, persistence, and focus. I love how this stillness signaled a kind of gentle care-taking of other creatures.
Repetition and stasis at this scale pushes against the ways our culture in the U.S. centers newness, innovation, and endless productivity. To make something over and over, re-working the same form with care and intention over hundreds of years (a form that reveres stillness!) is an insistently contrary decision. Even to paint squares for ten years is quite a reactionary measure! These gestures require us to believe in the value of stasis, to think that we might learn something from stillness, and to understand that repeating something over and over again has a bearing not only on our aesthetic decisions, but also on our spiritual and physical experiences of the world.
I am aware that I am describing stasis and repetition as we come close to the second anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic’s arrival in the United States, and that these recent years have—for many of us—provoked a period of stillness about which we may have many varying (perhaps unresolved) feelings. My own experience of the pandemic has been in very remote places, geographically distant from my communities and far from any art institutions at which I might have found solace in the visual objects that are so central to my life and work. As with any extreme circumstance, I can find both tremendous losses and small victories in these years: at the very least, I have had the quietness to think through many of my previous ways of being in the world. My days are marked by their similarity and solitude. I remain at the same level of social engagement that I had in June of 2020: I rarely see more than one person in a day, and often several days will pass before I venture out from home, driving the forty miles to a nearby town for groceries. Every day has a similar rhythm to it, with small variations.
I read a meme somewhere recently that suggested that the stillness of the pandemic was the first time that the U.S. had slowed its daily pace enough so that many of us could pause and acknowledge unresolved grief—both from our own pasts, and from our collective history. This rang true to me, somehow: i.e. I think our constant movement is also tied to our national investment in progress as a refusal of grief. If everything is new and shiny—look at how many billionaires are building spaceships this year!—then there’s no time for sitting still with the dark corners and unresolved pasts which inform who we are as a people.
Which is to say: what would happen if you made the same thing over and over again, even for just a week? What would happen if you went into your studio every day and sat very still? In what ways do you allow yourself repetition and/or quiet non-productive time in your creative practice? What does that process offer you?
This week, I had an essay published in a publication that a friend has started in Vienna. The publication is about travel, and my essay is thinking about ways of connecting to a place, particularly in years of stillness. I have posted the text to my website and, as I was doing so, I realized it’s the first essay that’s come out since 2019. I’ve quite literally been on pause for these two years, at least in terms of my public-facing self as a writer and curator. That pause is coming to an end, or at least transforming into something else in these next few weeks. But before I jump back into familiar rhythms, I want to center this solitude, this quietness, and these days of sameness. They’ve taught me so much.
Yours,
Laura
Last week, the Vienna-based publication Agency released its inaugural edition. A project created by artists Andrés Ramírez Gaviria, Elisabeth Kihlström, and Yuki Higashino, the first edition centers the theme of travel and includes writing by Julien Bismuth, Mladen Bizumic, Moyra Davey, Gregor Eldarb, Lorna Bauer, and Johan Osterholm. My essay Incidents of Moving House in Pandemic Times can be found there, and I’ve also placed the text on my website, for readers who asked about it. You can find it, here.
Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions, lumpy pots and wild gardens. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions as an independent curator working between the U.S. and Central America. In 2021, she was named an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been recognized with an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Alongside her consulting practice for artists and writers, she teaches a process, practice, and professional strategies class for artists at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.