Grids and Systems

This is another long-term ongoing project - or more accurately an ongoing theme.

Although the influential art critic Rosalind Krauss famously accused the use of the grid in art as 'walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality', there is actually nothing wrong with this if visuality in art is preferred to narrative. The grid is a useful starting point for anyone who prefers the description or analysis of spatial relationships to - for instance - the telling of stories.

And then 'systems' is just the setting up of an intervention on the grid framework, something like 'move one pace to the left' or 'rotate 10 degrees' or some such 'rule' and letting that work its way through to create a sort of interference pattern. My introduction to this idea was through listening to the music of the composer Steve Reich who used slightly out-of-phase recording-tape loops to produce something new and unexpected.