Take Aways:

Grid emerged first in France, then Russia and Holland.
Emblematic of the Modernist tradition.
‘The grid announced, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.’ P9
It has lowered a barrier between the arts of vision and those of language. Walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality. A fortress
This has meant fewer voices in support, appreciation or analysis of the contemporary plastic arts.
The grid has been sustained even though it is impervious to change.
Mondrian - grid resists development, creates yet more grids.
Grids function to declare modernity of Modern art: spatial and temporal.
Spatial: flattened, geometricized, ordered. An aesthetic decree. ‘The Grid declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autoletic. A ubiquitous form in 20th century art but having never appeared before. The grid was the present and everything before it was the past.
Have to look back to grids of perspective in 15/16th centuries. Perspective was demonstrating the way of reality. P10 But perspective and reality working together. The grid opposing that relationship. The grid does not map the room, the space etc but only the surface of the painting itself.
Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing pigment or canvas but Being or Mind or Spirit. They are not interested in anything that happens below on the concrete.
Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) is among the most significant American artists of the twentieth century. His paintings encourage the viewer's active engagement in the act of looking at and experiencing “art as art.” As he declared, “Art is art. Everything else is everything else."
Nietzsche “We wished to awaken the feeling of man’s sovereignty by showing his divine birth: this path is now forbidden, since a monkey stands at the entrance.“ The rift of the sacred and the secular.
Art had become a secular form of belief. (Paraphrased)
The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion or fiction). The work of Reinhardt or Agnes Martin would be instances of this power.
The grid is so ‘stridently modern’ to look at. Leaves no vestiges of the 19th century to hide.
The success of the grid refers to three things at once (see footnote in the essay). Quantitive success. Qualitative success. Ideological success - the grid is able to emblematise the Modern.
Myth of the grid, the narrative of the grid which has no narrative. Structuralist mode of analysis, rearrange sequential features to form spatial organisation. The Reason the structuralists do this is that they wish to understand the function of myths; the function is the cultural attempt to deal with contradiction.
Lévi-Strauss - French anthropologist. Structuralism. With his belief in structuralism, Levi-Strauss asserted that the human mind classifies things through binary opposition, the contrasts between two opposite things. It is this binary opposition that leads cultures to think in terms of good and bad. Mythemes.
The grid is not a story but it is a structure. A contradiction between the values of science and spiritualism.
The repression of the grid.
Literature of Physiological optics: split into two parts. One - analysis of light and its physical properties. Second - the physiology of the perceiving mechanism. One we may measure but we experience the second.
Colour is always involved in interaction - one colour reading into and affecting its neighbour. Complementary colours. We as human perceivers - there is a gulf between real colour and seen colour.
The grid as an emblem of the infrastructure of vision
Symbolism (opposed to any traffic between science and art) - the grid appears in symbolist art in the form of windows. Interest in windows dates back to 19th century art and romanticism.
The window is simultaneously transparent and opaque. As a transparent vehicle the window is that which admits light - or spirit - into the initial darkness of the room. But if glass transmits, it also reflects. And so the window is experienced by the symbolist as a mirror as well. The window, the bars the grid, the focus. The matrix.
‘I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that behind every 20th century grid there lies - like a trauma that must be repressed - a symbolist window parading in the guise of a treatise on optics.
Logically speaking the grid extends in all directions to infinity. Any boundaries are imposed upon it by a given painting and are ‘arbitrary’.
“A mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric.” P18
The grid works its way outward, a world beyond the frame. This is the centrifugal reading.
The centripetal reading works from the outer limits inward. It is the mapping of the space inside the frame into itself. It is a mode of repetition.
Mondrian’s work is perfect example of this dispute between centrifugal and centripetal. His work can appear as both.
Explorations of the perceptual field - Agnes Martin, Larry Poon’s use of the grid.
Phonic interactions - Patrick Ireland (Brian O’Doherty - inside the white cube).
Man made sign system - Jasper John’s. Photographic intergers, Warhol, Chuck Close. Meditation of architectural space - Louise Nevelson. Architectural space - the lattice. Frank Lloyd Wright, de Stijl.
See Alfred Jensen’s paintings
Frank Stella
The grid as schizophrenic - Mondrian, Albert’s, Kelly, LeWitt - think about the grid in both centri ways at once.

Grids - Rosalind Krauss, 1979