World Art

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‘Free and easy wandering’: Agnes Martin and the

limits of intercultural dialogue

Simon Morley

To cite this article: Simon Morley (2016) ‘Free and easy wandering’: Agnes Martin and the limits of
intercultural dialogue, World Art, 6:2, 247-268, DOI: 10.1080/21500894.2016.1145132

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2016.1145132

Published online: 22 Feb 2016.

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 World Art, 2016
Vol. 6, No. 2, 247–268, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21500894.2016.1145132
Research Article

‘Free and easy wandering’: Agnes Martin and the

limits of intercultural dialogue
Simon Morley*

Dankook University, School of Fine Art, Cheonan, Republic of Korea

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I examine the impact of East Asian ideas on the paintings and writings
of the American artist Agnes Martin (1912–2004), arguing that her
relationship to such ideas was complex and often contradictory – at
least on the level of the discourse she herself erected around her
painting. I argue that while in practice her paintings express a view
of subjectivity that is more familiar and more valued within East
Asian culture, in her theory Martin nevertheless remained bound by
Western dualistic thinking. The difference between the discursive
nature of her writings and the nature of her writings and thinking,
and the modality of her paintings draws attention to a more general
problematic: the relationship between, on the one hand, the
hermeneutic mode of awareness in art, and, on the other hand, the
non-discursive mode of awareness in art practice. I draw attention to
the latter mode, which foregrounds corporeal expansions and
extensions of the borders of the material body. The experience
Martin sought to convey is based on unconscious, holistic intuition
rather than on the conscious, reflexive presentation of information.
But when it came to articulating her intentions linguistically in her
texts, Martin often defaulted to deep-rooted notions coming from her
background culture. This is not surprising, insofar as she was
inevitably bound to a paradigm from which she could not entirely
escape, one in which process and ‘becoming’ were denigrated and
under-theorized.
Keywords: Agnes Martin; contemporary American painting; East
Asian thought; Zen Buddhism; ‘figurality’; François Jullien; concepts
of identity; cognitive metaphor theory

free and easy wandering

Chuang Tzu

In free and easy wandering there is only freshness and adventure. It is really
awareness of perfection within the mind.
Agnes Martin (1998: 71)

*Email: morleysimon@hotmail.com
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 248 Simon Morley

The great image, that is, the image that contains all images (in the manner of
the Tao) and manifests the source of things, is an un-imaged image, but it is
not abstract (it does not refer to the level of essences): it has simply liberated
its character of image from any anecdotal or specific aspect of its content; by
retaining the indistinct, it remains open to plenitude.
François Jullien (2000: 291)

The American painter Agnes Martin (1912–2004) was committed to a

vision of art as the expression of heightened subjectivity. This, in turn,
was intimately linked to her belief in the importance of art as a vehicle
for self-transformation. Martin considered her painting practice to be
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part of a subversive and emancipatory ‘economy’ of the self, and she was
certainly not alone in believing that the transformations she sought
could best be achieved through learning from what can broadly be
defined as ‘East Asian thought’.1
As can be seen from the quotation at the beginning of this essay, on
occasion, Martin directly evokes East Asian thought in her writings. But
when she declares more elusively: ‘These paintings are about freedom
from the cares of this world’ (Martin 1998: 39), she is also implicitly
drawing on the wisdom of a worldview in which detachment from ‘the
cares of the world’ is a primary goal.2
In what follows, I will examine the impact of ‘East Asian’ ideas on
Martin’s painting and writing in relation to the question of subjectivity,
proposing that her relationship to East Asian ideas was complex and
often contradictory – at least on the level of the discourse she erected
around her painting practice.3 Indeed, there is often a disjunction
between what an artist says about their work and what the work actually
does during an encounter, and this is an issue that extends further than
simply the ‘intentional fallacy’.

The journey east

As the philosopher Leonard Angel writes, in the Western view, the word
‘enlightenment’ has two distinct meanings. On the one hand, it refers to
‘a style of thought … in which the central value is the humanist pursuit
of social and individual well-being, justice, and scientific rationalism’
(Angel 1994: 3). In contrast, there is another meaning of ‘enlightenment’,
which is understood to signify a very different notion – a ‘belief in the
possibility of mystical experience’, where ‘the pursuit of mystical awaken-
ing is centrally valued’ (Angel 1994: 3). It was towards the latter con-
ception, which was associated with Eastern culture, that the Western
counterculture interested in intercultural dialogue cleaved.
What especially concerned Martin and her generation was how the
Eastern traditions seemed to embrace the visionary experience of heigh-
tened subjectivity. By advocating self-cultivation as the awareness of an
 World Art 249

embodied rootedness in the flux of nature, rather than as the quest for
oneness with a transcendent ideal or essence, Eastern thought was under-
stood to radically undermine the premises of Western ontology. So the
‘Eastern’ thrust of the Western critique of its own values and beliefs was
directed at the limited horizon of the dominant version of ‘enlightenment’
in the West, a version that was considered responsible for most of the evils
into which the West had fallen. In this worldview, nature was understood
to be something external to the subject – there to be managed through
knowledge. Because of this, the subject was construed as standing
outside what it sees, and to be capable of capturing an eternal moment
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or essence. Emphasis was placed on rational, discursive argument and

analysis, and thought was viewed as being grounded in discrete, clear,
abstract building-blocks – or faith in the ‘certain sufficiency of clear and
distinct ideas’, as Gilles Deleuze (1992: 155), a key contemporary figure
in the ongoing critique of Western thought, wrote, invoking the words of
Descartes. Cognitive value lay in epistemic repeatability and reliability –
in the ability to state ‘specifically how things are staying the same and
how, precisely, they are being altered’, as Barbara Stafford (2001: 159)
puts it. Meanwhile, the unconscious, emotional, intuitive, sensual experi-
ences associated with the body were relegated to the status of the
‘merely’ subjective, and their importance as components of how we come
to understand the world and ourselves suppressed.
Intercultural dialogue with the East was thus part of a much broader
expansion of Western thought – one which understood, in Mark Johnson’s
(2007: 17) words, that in order ‘to figure out where meaning comes from,
we have to look deeply into mostly nonconscious bodily encounters with
the world’.
A central aspect of this countercultural impulse involved a move
towards what Arthur Versluis (2014: 2) terms ‘immediatism’ – that is, ‘a
religious assertion of spontaneous, direct, unmediated spiritual insight
into reality (typically with little or no prior training)’. Versluis emphasizes
that a major source for such ‘immediatism’ was Eastern thought. But, as he
also points out, it also had a significant pre-history in Western culture,
where it stemmed from Neo-Platonism. In the modern period, ‘immediat-
ism’ found especially fertile ground in America, in particular through the
influence of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Versluis 2014: 26–
51). But from the 1940s, such ‘immediatism’ was most closely allied in
Euroamerica with Zen Buddhism.4 Zen was especially important in
expanding Western conceptions of normative consciousness, and was
understood to call for the suspension of analysis, to welcome indetermi-
nacy, and to prioritize non-conceptual knowing. In relation to art practice,
Zen was central to a vision of art that could express direct experience of the
here-and-now, and impacted on the exploration of such important artistic
 250 Simon Morley

themes as emptiness and nothingness, gesturalism and dynamism, serial-

ity, and reflective and meditative practices (Westgeest 1996; Baas 2005).
In the United States, the Japanese philosopher D.T. Suzuki was influen-
tial. Suzuki had a knack for translating culturally obscure concepts and
ideas into a language Westerners could grasp. He emphasized that Zen
was fundamentally illogical, non-cognitive and irrational. ‘The idea of Zen
is to catch life as it flows’, Suzuki wrote in An Introduction to Zen Buddhism,
first published in 1934 (Suzuki 1964: 75). ‘If you have been in the habit of
thinking logically according to the rules of dualism, rid yourself of it’ (88).
For Zen, declared Suzuki (74), is ‘primarily and ultimately a discipline and
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an experience, which is dependent on no explanation’. John Cage (1990)

later wrote of his experience of listening to Suzuki: ‘The taste of Zen for
me comes from the admixture of humor, intransigence, and detachment’.
Other key forces in the United States for the dissemination of Zen and
Daoism were the Beats, who celebrated Zen as a blueprint for liberation
from the ‘prison’ of conventional life, and the writer and teacher Alan
Watts, who sought to blend Zen with Western science and psychology.5
Subsequently, such influences bore fruit in the hippie phenomenon of
the 1960s. As Fritjof Capra (1975: 25) summarized:

The organic, ‘ecological’ world view of the Eastern philosophies is no doubt

one of the main reasons for the immense popularity they have recently
gained in the West, especially among young people. In our Western
culture, which is still dominated by the mechanistic, fragmented view of
the world, an increasing number of people have seen this as the underlying
reason for the widespread dissatisfaction in our society, and many have
turned to Eastern ways of liberation.

For Agnes Martin, an especially formative experience was Suzuki, who

lectured at Columbia University in the 1950s. But, like other Westerners,
she was, in fact, inheriting attitudes and approaches that Euroamericans
have been taking to the East since the eighteenth century in the hope of
constructing representations that, while ostensibly concerned with East
Asia, were actually in pursuit of Western goals and aspirations. Rather
than simply mirroring Western imperialistic imperatives, however, this
interest in intercultural dialogue often constituted what J.J. Clarke
(1997: 9) calls a broad ‘counter-movement, a subversive entelechy, albeit
not a unified or consciously organized one, which in various ways has
often tended to subvert rather than to confirm the discursive structures
of imperial power’. Indeed, if, as Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (2004)
advises, we abandon the imperialistic ‘centre–periphery’ model of cultural
influence, and instead adopt a more complex heuristic, based on fields and
spheres of influence, then we must recognize the extent to which Western
artists such as Martin were actually working with an amalgam of influ-
ences, seeking to bind and blend collective and personal belief systems
 World Art 251

and visual vocabularies from diverse origins. The complexities and contra-
dictions inherent in this creative process are evident when we consider the
contradictions in Martin’s often gnomic writings.

‘Just follow what Plato has to say’

In one of her writings, Martin (1998: 35) declares:
The rose represents nature
But it isn’t the rose
Beauty is unattached, it’s inspiration.
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Here, she seems to be tacitly assuming that behind the particulars of

nature – behind ‘the rose’ – lies an ‘unattached’, hidden, transcendental
and more foundational and essential ‘reality’ called ‘beauty’. Martin
talked often of the ‘idea of perfection’, and saw her paintings as correlated
with this idea. Briony Fer (2005: 191) notes that Martin’s idea of ‘perfec-
tion’ was premised on the belief that memory is ‘more intense than original
experience’. Martin (1998: 19) herself wrote: ‘One must see the Ideal in
one’s own mind. It is like a memory of perfection’. Memory is thus under-
stood to furnish a vision of an ideal that is to be contemplated as if coming
from a changeless and timeless ‘beyond’. For Martin as a discursive
thinker, the desire to strive for a detached and affect-free condition
seems also to imply this need to cleave to a timeless, essential, transcen-
dent ‘good’. In this context, her vision of ‘perfection’ mirrors the bias of
the Western worldview in which she grew up. Humanity is set apart
from nature.
Defining her position as that of a ‘classicist’, Martin (1998: 37) wrote:

Just follow what Plato has to say

Classicists are people that look out with their back to the world
It represents something that isn’t possible in the world
More perfection than is possible in the world.

Implicit here is the idea that the natural world is of special value
because it is understood to be a storehouse of signs and symbols that
can be recalled in the human mind – ‘recollected in tranquillity’, as Words-
worth famously wrote6 – thereby serving as triggers for memories of the
more ‘real’ dimension of timeless, immaterial and higher truths. As a
result of this confluence of ideas, ‘nature’ is understood to serve as a stimu-
lus for positive emotions, a doorway to a more really ‘real’ located in the
beyond, in a transcendent dimension far removed from the transitoriness
of nature itself. Mind and spirit are construed as independent from the
body, and are put in relation to a higher, invisible reality. ‘Perfection’
becomes something to be found outside and distinct from the body and
from nature.
 252 Simon Morley

To this extent, Martin’s discursively articulated beliefs about what she

believes cannot be said to truly embody the East Asian worldview, which
proposes that a work of art be fundamentally immanent and ‘idea-less’.
This dualism especially played itself out in Martin’s writings through the
expression of an antagonistic relationship between mind and body, spirit
and nature, with the ‘aesthetic’ dimension equated with a rejection of the
body. Martin (1998: 36) declared:

Nature is conquest, possession, eating, sleeping, procreation

It’s not aesthetic. Not the kind of inspiration I’m interested in.
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Her quest for ‘perfection’ is staged as a struggle between opposing

forces – positive and negative. The ‘positive’ forces are associated with
the mind and spirit, the hidden and essential, while the perceptible – the
body, the chaos of nature – is cast as the ‘negative’.
Suspicion of the body and the natural world finds confirmation within
the tradition of North American Protestantism in which Martin grew up.
Indeed, the strong tone of moral piety in Martin’s writings, and her ten-
dency occasionally to adopt the rhetorical form of the sermon and the
parable, also reflect the influence of such a background culture. In Protes-
tantism, a struggle is dramatized between the pathological (evil) emotions
associated with the body, and non-pathological (good) emotions that
characterize the human soul, placing the subject between incompatible
and antagonistic forces. Within Protestant visual culture, one consequence
of this dualism was a tendency towards iconoclasm – the judgment of
images as false, deceptive surface illusions, inherently erring towards the
‘pathological’ and encouraging idolatry.
Martin’s aversion to the figurative image, her strict adherence to a
visual idiom, characterized by the curtailment of traditional perceptual
realism, alongside her evident need also to tentatively encourage a sense
of numinous depth, suggest a cultural background context wherein the
divine is understood to be hidden beyond appearances and idolatry is a
constant temptation. Indeed, during the Reformation, a ban on liturgical
imagery in Protestant countries precipitated within art practice a re-
mapping of the sacred onto the genre of landscape, where artists could
allude to the divine indirectly. Thus, within the tradition of visual piety
from which Martin comes, ‘landscape’ does not so much aim to provoke
the experience of ecstatic oneness that is characteristic of the concept of
the sublime, but rather provides the basis for a more detached vision of ter-
restrial harmony or perfection glimpsed on earth. As such, landscape
becomes a conduit through which to recall God’s purpose more clearly.
Self-effacement is a central theme of Martin’s writings; a recurring
word is ‘humility’. This position is premised on the need to be as detached
as possible from a changing, unpredictable world. ‘The wiggle of a worm as
 World Art 253

important as the assassination of a president’, wrote Martin (1998: 44),

and ‘From Isaiah, about inspiration / Surely the people is grass’ (39). Fem-
inist readings of this self-effacing impulse draw attention to Martin’s status
as a woman artist seeking to forge a self-representation in contrast to male
constructions of artist identity (Pollock 2005; Mansoor 2011). But the kind
of self-effacement she advocates has affinities with the ‘economy’ of the self
advocated in American Protestant culture as a counterpart to ‘Papist’ self-
abandonment. As David Morgan (1999: 66) notes, an important distinction
was established between ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’. The affects of the
former were deemed dangerous because they involved the making of a
‘visceral bridge between self and other’, and through the power of
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‘empathy’ an intimate identification was created with someone or some-

thing that was dangerous because it could lead to a loss of a secure aware-
ness of difference – of the integrity of the devout worshipper. ‘Sympathy’
was thus considered a preferable emotion, as it involved only a detached
discernment of a likeness or analogy, a harmony or agreement. ‘Sympathy’,
in other words, ensured ‘a projection away from personal interest in a self-
eclipsing gaze upon the effulgence of deity’ (Morgan 1999: 77), thus
permitting understanding and emotional correspondence, while also pre-
serving difference and self-integrity. Martin’s concern with self-effacement
can therefore be understood as being premised on the desire to establish a
degree of ‘sympathetic’ detachment, achieving a ‘self-eclipsing gaze’, than
on achieving ‘empathetic’ fusion with otherness.

Culture and difference

In more general terms, Martin’s austere philosophy of life as expressed
in her writings also invites close comparison with the Classical Western
tradition that can be broadly described as ‘Stoic’.7 Martin’s emphasis on
the smallness and insignificance of human life when considered in
relation to the vastness of the cosmos, like her ‘apathetic’ vision of the
equal value of all things, seems to be giving voice to a very Stoic-like
amor fati.
But while Stoicism seems close to Buddhist or Daoist ideals of detach-
ment, it is actually fundamentally different. The ultimate goal for the Stoic
is to seek to live in harmony with the underlying rational order that nature
obscures, and self-cultivation involves making a distinction between
pathological and non-pathological affects. The Stoic is obliged to block
the former and to encourage the latter; this also involved setting oneself
apart from nature, and from the communal ties of society. In Stoicism,
detachment is achieved through ‘extirpation’, while in Daoism and Bud-
dhism, by contrast, it comes through ‘resilience’, writes David Wong.
Daoism and Buddhism do not imply ‘a denial of feelings for others but a
keen awareness of them, an acceptance of them, and a placement of
 254 Simon Morley

them in a larger perspective of the interdependence of all things’ (Wong

2006: 218).
François Jullien argues that it is necessary to recognize two fundamen-
tally different recursive orientations – what he terms a ‘Chinese’ cultural
bias towards ‘immanence’ and a ‘Greek’ bias towards ‘transcendence’.8 In
the Chinese worldview, the subject realizes both itself and its relationship
with others and the world within the unity of ch’i – variously translated as
‘breath-resonance’, ‘vibration of vitality’, ‘vital energy’, or ‘spirit-reson-
ance’. Jullien (1999: 92) writes: ‘Not only my own being, as I experience
it intuitively, but the entire landscape that surrounds me as well, is con-
tinuously flooded by this subterranean circulating energy’. As a result,
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thought itself was understood to be internal to metamorphic transitoriness

(Jullien 1999: 217). Ch’i signifies that everything is open to the invisible
‘breath’ or flow of life, and as a consequence, everything is radically imper-
manent. The existence of a thing or a person within this perspective was as
much determined by what they are not as by what they are – simply a phase
within a continual process of transformation driven by ch’i.
The presence of ch’i impinges on the subject through awareness of an
undifferentiated source that can be alluded to through words such as ‘emp-
tiness’, ‘void’, ‘blankness’ or ‘non-being’, and so the founding text of Taoism
employs metaphors like ‘guest’ and ‘uncarved block’, ‘thawing ice’ and
‘vacant valley’ to capture the condition towards which the tao leads. In
order to evoke the radical impermanence at the heart of ch’i, meditation
on the elusive and indeterminate was central. At the level of the phenom-
enal world, ‘empty’ is understood to be the prior condition for everything
concrete and ‘full’, and in nature, analogues to this condition are such
phenomena as water, clouds, mists and smoke, which to a high degree
manifest traits of impermanence. According to Jullien (2000: 293), the
Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu

expresses reality in relation to presence-absence, in terms of full, the indis-

tinct, and the evanescent. Instead of making its objects more present, a com-
parison might efface it and make it ungraspable; in suspending the
characterizing function of discourse, it checks the risk of ontological
signification.

In East Asian thought, a sense of void was understood to permeate con-

sciousness; but it is through such nothingness that the subject can find full
realization. As Keiji Nishitani (1990: 190–91) puts it:

In the locus of emptiness, beyond the human standpoint, a world of ‘depen-

dent origination’ is opened up in which everything is related to everything
else. Seen in this light, there is nothing in the world that arises from ‘self-
power’ and yet all ‘self-powered’ workings arise from the world. Existence
at each instant … the humanization in which the self becomes human –
 World Art 255

all these can be said to arise ceaselessly as new accommodations from a locus
of emptiness that absolutely negates the human standpoint.9

In the West, by contrast, a basic distinction is made between the full-

ness of ‘being’ and the nihility of ‘non-being’, and in this context, as the phi-
losopher Ueda Shizuteru (2011: 23) writes:

[N]othingness is understood as non-being, that is as the negation of being,

and in this sense is based on being. Even when negativity is actively or
even ardently grasped, in the end it is grasped as a self-negation of being
that serves to elevate being itself. By contrast (mu) nothingness is not only
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non-being (hi-u), as the negation of being (u), but also contains a sense
that goes beyond this, and this ‘additional sense’ is brought to life when
the originariness of nothingness is existentially realized and thoughtfully
cultivated.

Practice
A particularly striking aspect of Martin’s paintings is how they directly
engage sensory-motor faculties, and in particular, the kinaesthetic sense
– or movement as it relates to vision. Martin shifted from the visual dimen-
sion to incorporate the kinaesthetic, thus ensuring that the motor system of
the body is operative and attuned. She consciously incorporated different
and mobile viewing positions into the total meaning of her work; and
brought on by such movement, a peculiarly emphatic metamorphosis
occurs within the affective responses to her work.10
When viewing Martin’s paintings, the contrast of figure against ground,
which normally establishes coherent and stable contours and boundaries,
is rendered contingent. At about 20 feet, a typical painting by Martin looks
like a flat, lightly coloured square hanging vertically on the wall (Figure 1).
In her work from the 1960s, such as The Field (1965; Figure 2), this rec-
tangle seems almost monochrome, while in her later works, such as
Untitled #3 (1974; Figure 3), we discern vertical bands of subtly differen-
tiated colour. In this viewing stage, Martin’s work functions as a whole – a
unified, symmetrical, total and harmonious field. The square canvas is a
‘figure’ against the ‘ground’ of the wall; and in the case of The Field,
there is also a square ‘figure’ set within the ‘ground’ of the canvas itself.
This produces a clear gestalt, a relatively uncomplicated experience of a
simple geometric container within the surrounding and unnoticed visual
field.
At a distance of about 15–18 feet, however, something new happens.
The planarity of the square gives way to chromatic fluidity, to vibration
or pulse. Subtle modulated variations can be noted in the brushwork of
oil – and, in her later work, acrylic – paint. In these later works, the differ-
entiated bands of colour also become more pronounced. The square canvas
 256 Simon Morley
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Figure 1. Installation view of Agnes Martin, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfa-

len, Düsseldorf, 7 November 2015–6 March 2016.

now seems to be a kind of loose and expanding container for vague, inde-
terminate, virtual space, and this generates the visual sensation of nebu-
lous illumination and depth. The optics of this stage involve the viewer

Figure 2. Agnes Martin, The Field, 1965, graphite and oil on canvas, 188 × 188 cm,
E.ON Art Collection. Copyright VG Bild-kunst, Bonn, 2015.
 World Art 257
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Figure 3. Agnes Martin, Untitled #3, 1974, acrylic, graphite and plaster on canvas,
183 × 183 cm, Des Moines Art Center, 1992. Purchased with funds from the Coffin
Fine Arts Trust and part donation of Arnold and Mildred Glimcher; Nathan Emory
Coffin. Photo: Bill Jacobson, courtesy Pace Gallery, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2015.

in a more elusive kind of seeing. There is low visual contrast and differen-
tiation, and discrete boundaries soften or cede to an undifferentiated con-
tinuum. We feel open and absorbed into an ambient field, or that we are
encountering a semi-transparent membrane. It is also in this stage that
the imagination is most engaged, memories are stirred, and the metapho-
rical potential of painting is maximally deployed. We can make analogies
with nature, analogies with nature, with effects generated by aqueous or
gaseous phenomena such as mists, fogs, clouds, the ocean, and so on.
Martin draws her visual sources for this experience of openness and inse-
cure containment from memories of environments within which the
subject feels located in medias res, or at the margins, periphery, or
extreme limits. For example, one of the prime environmental sources for
such an expanded concept of self is the sight of the ocean or of some
such wide-open unbounded region, or the sky itself.11
But this situation soon collapses as we continue on our journey towards a
close encounter with the surfaces of Martin’s paintings. In works from the
1960s and early 1970s, the viewer perceives a grid-like structure on top of
the delicately painted surface, while in later works, a sequence of unequally
spaced but parallel horizontal lines marks the boundaries between the
coloured horizontal stripes. Martin produced these lines by running a graph-
ite pencil along a straight edge; and because they traverse textured canvas, the
 258 Simon Morley

traces are uneven and slightly wobbly. It is a very tentative structure, but a
structure nevertheless. Furthermore, the repetitiveness of the grid or horizon-
tal or vertical lines, and the persistent straightness of these lines, suggest con-
centrated and rhythmic effort, or focused action over time, thus serving as an
indexical sign of the absent body of the artist. We return to a kind of figure/
ground segregation – this time internal – with the lines standing out from
the ground. However, because they are so tentative, and because they are
part of a grid-like continuum, they never attain fully secure figure status,
and instead remain provisional, even when viewed close up.
Kinaesthetic interaction foregrounds sensitivity to environmental con-
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ditions. In this sense, Martin’s paintings are more like open events in
time than closed objects in space, and they make a bridge between painting
as it is conventionally construed and the more relational, ‘open’, unframed
formats that began to dominate art in the 1960s, and today are a familiar
artistic strategy.12 Martin’s paintings are concerned with momentum,
orientation and contingency as much as with colour, tonality, texture,
line, volume, and figure/ground segregations. This is also why they take
serial form: she was less concerned with producing aesthetic affects
through the contemplation of visual effects than with substantiating a
binding experience through ritualized repetition.13

Metaphors of the expanded self

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999: 267–89) discuss how conscious-
ness is universally conceptualized through a fundamental root schema
based on subject/self binarism. We routinely perceive ourselves as divided
into a subject and one or more selves. As Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 269,
italics in original) write, ‘The subject is that aspect of a person that is the
experiencing consciousness and the locus of reason, will, and judgment,
which, by its nature, exists only in the present’. The self, in contrast, is
that part of a person not picked out by the subject, and this includes the
body, social roles, memories and past states, and actions in the world
(269). This self, which is addressed by the subject in the third person, is
then conceptualized metaphorically in broadly three ways: as a person, as
an object (such as a container), and as a location, that is, the self is
figured as a contained or bounded space that is recognizable and familiar,
or as something on the ground and responding to the force of gravity.
In relation to the ‘container’ metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson (274) write:

People typically feel in control in their normal surroundings and less in

control in strange places. This is the experiential basis for another primary
metaphor central to our inner life. The control of Subject over Self is concep-
tualized as being in a normal location.
 World Art 259

Thus, a familiar position or location means being in control of the self,

and conversely, not being in a familiar location means loss of self-control.
Being located in a container and being on the ground mean that the subject
is in control of the self, while not being contained, or being off the ground,
signals loss of such control.
Losing a sense of ‘structure’, boundary, containment, or of being in an
abnormal and unfamiliar environment or location, can have potentially
rapturous emotional consequences. Such boundary-free consciousness
implies that the self is open, and is expanding in order to connect with
all other beings. Edward Slingerland (2003: 28) notes that ‘Generally,
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control of the object Self by the Subject is desirable, but even in English
we sometimes speak of noncontrol of the self in a positive sense’. The
word ‘ecstasy’, for example, is used in English to communicate the experi-
ence of an extreme instance of pleasurable loss of control. The word comes
from the Greek ekstasis, meaning ‘standing outside oneself’. It derives
from ek- ‘out’ + histanai ‘to place’, and thus depends on a core spatial or
locational metaphor.
But as Sigmund Freud made clear, the subject with which we overwhel-
mingly identify – the ‘ego’ – is the result of the conceptualization of the self
as ‘a structured fantasy of consciousness or a kind of primal fantasy of
being as structured’, as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit (1993: 40) put it.
They continue (138–9):

The fantasy is of course grounded in our perception of distinct form,

although this perception is then structured as an agency of the self that
both repeats the phenomenon of pure demarcations in the world and par-
tially censors all perceptual stimuli that cannot be placed within a represen-
tational structure. What Freud called the ego is the individuating
containment of the world, the result – to move to another sense of
‘contain’ – of a disciplinary strategy.

But Western cultural assumptions regarding the constitution of the

subject have made it difficult to conceive of freedom from this illusory
ego as opening the way towards the experience of emancipatory illumina-
tion. Instead, it has predominantly been understood as leading merely to a
rational insight. In Western thought the ‘ego-shattering’ experience is
understood to lie beyond the limits of ‘being’.
In Asian thought, however, the idea of an ego-based, contained, or
grounded self was equated with delusion and with inevitable suffering,
and so the self was deemed something to struggle against. As a result of
this alternative emphasis, metaphors of the self do not constellate so defi-
nitively around images of bounded containment and firm location. As Jane
Geaney (2012: 28) writes:
 260 Simon Morley

The body does not consist of walls that are discontinuous between the human
subject and other things in the world or with a core-self that is contained
within it. … It is not a preexisting state or a common embodiment. … The
flux is potentially chaotic, but reliable knowledge is possible through attune-
ment to one’s surroundings, which amounts to perfecting the senses. Attune-
ment is the way to sense shifting flowing boundaries and thereby achieve
more reliable knowledge.

Slingerland (2003: 31) tells us that in traditional Chinese thought, high

value was placed on the experience of unselfconsciousness, where ‘the
ordinary case of metaphorically “possessing” the self is conceived of as a
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restriction or burden, and the elimination of possession understood as a

release’. Such release permits the subject ‘to move through the world and
human society in a manner that is completely spontaneous and yet still
fully in harmony with the normative order of the natural and human
world’ (3). Thus the most admired state in East Asian thought was charac-
terized by a lack of exertion and unselfconsciousness. Thus, writes Slinger-
land (28), ‘This is the sense in which we are to understand the basic
metaphor of wu-wei: literally meaning “no doing/effort/exertion”, it
refers metaphorically to a state in which action is occurring even though
the Subject is no longer exerting force’.
Eastern thought therefore posits an immanent and holistic construal of
the subject’s relationship to ‘nothingness’, and this leads to the under-
standing (as an intrinsic part of normative consciousness) of a more
porous and fluid relationship of the self to its spatial and psychic environ-
ment. By adopting a position of non-duality grounded in an awareness of
void, a liminal consciousness is celebrated in which subject and object
become co-dependent and complementary, folded into one another. ‘In
the field of sunyata [void or blankness]’, Norman Bryson (1988: 106)
writes, ‘the centralised subject falls apart; its boundary dissolves, together
with the consoling boundary of the object’. But such loss of boundaries
does not necessarily endanger an anxiously de-centred subject. On the con-
trary, it permits its emergence as into an expanded field, one in which there
is the possibility of partial release from virtual confinement within prevail-
ing epistemological and ontological structures.
Martin’s paintings can be understood to correspond isomorphically
(Arnheim 1969) to the performing of the transition from a self conceptual-
ized as structured in terms of a contained ‘figure’ marked out from an
amorphous ‘ground’, to the self understood as existing within an expanded
and seemingly limitless boundary. Clear and distinct structure is softened
and open to suspension through animated engagement. Her paintings thus
work as analogies for the self as both distinct from, but also immersed
within, an abundant, immeasurable environment, one within which the
self is also contained. Martin signals the fact that at times we sense that
we are co-extensive with a limitless location, but at other times are
 World Art 261

contained and structured by that location. As a result, in encountering one

of Martin’s paintings as the visual performance of the ‘figural’, rather than
as an occasion for the intelligible reading of discursive code, we become
more cognizant of existing in the midst of things, where nothing is perma-
nently contained or bounded. Martin presents us with the self as per-
meable container.

‘Pale paintings, composed of the rare brush stroke opening

onto vast, empty spaces’
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Jullien (2004) draws attention to the pervasiveness in East Asian thought

of a metaphor drawn from the sense of taste. He notes that in much paint-
ing produced within the Chinese tradition, there is a special quality often
referred to by the word dan, which he translates as the French word
fadeur, rendered as ‘blandness’ in the English translation of his book.
Dan refers to a mental state that does not seek to make distinctions and
so encourages detachment. By translating dan thus, Jullien emphasizes
that within the Western worldview, such a state, with connotations of dull-
ness, insipidity and monotony has a negative value. But within East Asian
thought, on the contrary, it is much prized. He writes that ‘Like emptiness,
tranquility, indifference, insentience, or non-action’, dan is what ‘charac-
terizes the basis of reality’, showing that it ‘projects no meaning beyond
itself, and nothing else lends it variety or attraction’ (Jullien 2004: 45).
He quotes the words of the Taoist sage Zhuangzi: ‘Let your heart move
freely in blandness-detachment [dan] and unite your breath with non-
differentiation [mo]. If you cleave to the spontaneous movement of
things without permitting yourself to entertain individual preferences,
the whole world will be at peace’ (44). The space of dan, writes Jullien
(33), is one in which ‘we remain in the realm of perceived experience,
even if it situates us at the very limit of perception, where it becomes
most tenuous’.
‘The bland is concrete, even if it is discreet: hence the ability to evoke it
in landscape’, Jullien writes (33), and so dan manifested itself best in ‘pale
paintings, composed of the rare brush stroke opening onto vast, empty
spaces (of sky and of water), where nothing forces itself on the gaze and
everything is equal and seems on the verge of disappearing’ (133–4). Jul-
lien’s description of Chinese landscape painting also brings to mind
Martin’s work, and in this context, dan can perhaps be considered a
close discursive cognate to her ideal of ‘perfection’.

Discourse and ‘figure’

Unlike her paintings, however, Martin’s texts remain tied to beliefs linking
self-negation or self-purgation to a transcendent dimension, one where the
 262 Simon Morley

guarantee of self-integrity lies in the articulated belief in a relationship to

essential oneness. Such implicit Platonism, fused with the influence of
‘East Asian’ thought, has a precedent in how ‘Oriental’ religion was
framed within the Christian worldview by the nineteenth-century trans-
cendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle (Versluis 1993; Ver-
sluis 2014: 26–51). But making the kinds of distinctions between essence
and appearance we find in Martin’s verbalizations of her intentions, and
also in transcendentalism, depends on a root concept that is alien to
Eastern thought, which prioritizes holistic immanence over any kind of
transcendence of the phenomenal world, and positions the ‘ideal’ or ‘per-
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fection’ within the state of becoming, or within process, with the subject
posited as existing in the midst of things.
An encounter with Martin’s paintings, on the other hand, challenges the
tacit assumptions found in her texts. They are a novel blend of diverse cul-
tural inputs, and more successfully break free from the constraints of a
familiar worldview. Such sensitivity to environment and the temporal is
an index of flexibility – of the capacity to tolerate contingency, variability,
novelty and uncertainty. Martin’s paintings enact an ongoing cycle that
involves establishing boundaries and then tentatively relinquishing them,
and this is understood as the expression of ontological plenitude. No
‘essence’ is made accessible, and there is merely a sense of process or meta-
morphosis. Martin’s paintings therefore suggest that any quest for timeless
‘perfection’ will always be stymied by the transformations generated by
physical movements, but that by ‘attuning’ to these transformations we
can come closer to a sense of immanent ‘perfection’. The fact that Martin
chose to articulate this elusive subjective dimension in visual and kinaes-
thetic form emphasizes that it is, ipso facto, something that cannot be cap-
tured in discourse: it is non- or pre-cognitive, and involves the
performative, formative and creative.

Pathologies
Martin’s decision to live in the isolation of New Mexico with her ‘back’
firmly to nature speaks of a desire to be quarantined from the unruly
emotions provoked by social interactions, and this was certainly at the
price of risking emotional and aesthetic ‘autism’. The personal background
to her life choices has become increasingly public knowledge since Martin’s
death (Princenthal 2015). She was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic as
a child, and throughout her life wrestled with mental illness, although as
Nancy Princenthal informs us in her biography of the artist, fortuitously,
Martin was not severely impaired. In this context, a more fraught reading
of Martin’s paintings suggests itself. Schizophrenia, as the psychiatrist Iain
McGilchrist (2010: 223) observes, involves excessive self-consciousness –
‘the dragging into the centre of awareness of what should remain outside of
 World Art 263

it’. In other words, it is an obsessive extending of the self’s sense of location

and containment beyond the normal limits. Another aspect of schizo-
phrenia is loss of global attention. Instead, local attention dominates,
and there is an inability to see the whole (McGilchrist 2010: 43–4).
Martin’s paintings are then to be seen as betraying evidence of ‘on-going
strife’ between serenity and something more ‘obsessive, tense, and
unsteady’ (Rogers 2009: 96).
Martin had intense subjective experience of the dangers inherent in
overly structured self-awareness, and simulated her experience in her
paintings as part of a larger process. For example, viewing her gridded sur-
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faces close up leads to a loss of global attention. But this returns once we
move back and away, and is therefore relativized. An encounter with her
paintings suggests an attempt to work though excessive localization
through exploring an expanded self that is comfortable and at ease
within a flux-like reality – of ‘neither being nor nothingness’, in Ueda’s
terms. Through her decision to live as a semi-recluse, and through her
ritualized art practice, Martin succeeded in finding ways to live with her
‘demons’. Seen in the light of her psychological illness as a form of thera-
peutic self-disciplining, her painting practice becomes the site for the
working through of the extremes she was obliged to confront as part and
parcel of her illness.

Conclusion
Contemplating Martin’s paintings foregrounds the fact that much impor-
tant knowledge is transmitted in non-discursive ways. Yet in seeking to
interpret not only work like Martin’s, but art more generally, there is
often a problem in articulating how making and thinking, crafting and
knowing, are connected, and in adequately accounting for how raw
things are transformed into stable and ordered forms through the imagin-
ation mixed with bodily actions. We need to find ways to address what
Mark Johnson (2007: 234) calls ‘embodied, immanent meaning’. But
within the Western worldview, interpretation usually takes place in a
way that ‘aligns meaning with the cognitive and thus dismisses quality,
feeling, and emotion from any account of meaning’ (Johnson 2007: 216,
italics in original). Unlike a written text or a piece of music, the meaning
of a visual artwork is inextricably bound up with the medium in which it
is made. As Johnson writes (234), in visual art, ‘it is images, patterns, qual-
ities, colours, and perceptual rhythms that are the principal bearer of
meaning’. Sensory-motor, and non- or pre-cognitive, dimensions are an
intrinsic part of how a painting means. Any artwork is composed of the
discursive and figural14 – that is, born of the relationship between code
and performance. This, in turn, invites two kinds of response: the
 264 Simon Morley

hermeneutic or interpretative on the one hand, and the ‘mantic’ or revel-

atory and receptive, on the other.15
Agnes Martin was concerned to communicate feelings, which as
Johnson (2007: 218) writes, ‘cannot give rise to knowledge’. In order to
succeed, and in large part thanks to her exposure to ‘Eastern’ ideas,
Martin was emboldened to pursue the ‘mantic’ mode, which foregrounds
the corporeal expansions and extensions of the borders of the material
body. This performative dimension inevitably resists incorporation into
discursive forms. Thus the modalities of the experiences Martin sought
to communicate explain why she was primarily compelled to create
visual works, and not, say, poems, music … or art theory.
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Notes
1. By ‘East Asia’ I mean principally China, Japan, and Korea – diverse cultures
linked by the underlying religious, philosophical, and social forces of
Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism – just as ‘Euroamerican’ and
‘Western’ refer to diverse cultures linked by the underlying religious, philoso-
phical, and social forces of the Classical heritage and Christianity.
2. Perhaps the most insightful study of Martin’s debt to East Asian thought is
Thomas McEvilley’s essay ‘Grey Geese Descending: The Art of Agnes
Martin’ (1993). See also Chave (1993).
3. A retrospective toured throughout 2015 and 2017 at Tate Modern (3 June – 11
October 2015), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (7 Novem-
ber 2015 – 6 March 2016), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (April – Sep-
tember 2016), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (October
2016 – January 2017). Several new studies and a biography of Martin have
appeared, including the catalogue to the touring exhibition, with essays by
Tiffany Bell and Briony Fer. I have quoted Martin from the 1998 edition of
her writings. A newer collection of her writing can be found in Glimcher
(2012).
4. Zen is the Japanese transliteration of the name for the indigenous school of
Chinese chan Buddhism, meaning ‘meditation’, which blended Mahayana
Buddhism with Daoism, and evolved from the sixth century CE. As the
impact on the West of this form of Buddhism came largely via Japan, ‘Zen’
has become the recognized term.
5. Especially influential was Watts’ ‘Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen’ (1960).
6. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800).
7. I follow Martha Nussbaum (1996) in describing ‘Stoicism’ as techniques
evolved in Hellenistic culture and subsequently pervading the Western world-
view, seeking ways to radically reduce the influence of the passions over
human life.
8. Jullien’s analysis of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Greek’ culture is contentious. In particular,
he has been criticized for positing a degree of absolute difference that risks
ignoring anthropological universals. I hope my approach suggests that I
 World Art 265

assume the existence of just such an ahistorical foundation. For the most sus-
tained critique of Jullien, see Billeter (2006).
9. Nishitani and Ueda are members of the Kyoto School of philosophy, which is
significant in that it moved the East–West dialogue in the opposite direction,
seeking to absorb Western ideas into Eastern philosophical and religious
traditions.
10. The most insightful discussion of this process is to be found in Krauss (1993).
Krauss draws on Kasha Linville’s phenomenological description of encounter-
ing a painting by Martin, published in the June 1971 Artforum. But Krauss’
model is limited by dependence on a structural reading of painting, which
she matches with an equally limiting psychoanalytic approach. Krauss steers
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away from asking the most important questions about an encounter with
the work of Martin: how is it expressive, and of what?
11. Martin was born in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, but grew up in Vancouver.
After studying on the West Coast, she moved to New Mexico in the early 1950s,
eventually dying in Taos. In between, she lived for a decade in New York City,
leaving definitively in 1967 when she settled in New Mexico. The bare bones of
biography reveal that the artist began life in the wide-open spaces of the prai-
ries and chose to end them in the wide-open spaces of the desert. The defining
characteristics, then, of the kind of landscape with which Martin felt familiar
and at ease are: relative homogeneity and lack of diversity, pronounced hori-
zontality, openness of access, diffuseness of atmosphere, vastness of vista, and
absence of strong colour contrast.
12. I draw here on the distinction made by Nicholas Tresilian (2011).
13. For seriality in Martin’s and other artists’ work in the 1960s, see Fer (2004).
14. I use the term ‘figurality’ as it is employed by Norman Bryson in order to
describe those elements of a painting that are not reducible to discursive
code – such as brushstrokes, colour, texture, and other formal elements and
principles; see chapter 1 in Bryson (1981). A more psychoanalytically
charged version of the distinction can be found in Jean-François Lyotard’s
Discourse/Figure (2011).
15. The term ‘mantic’ – literally, ‘of or relating to divination or prophecy’ – is used
here in the sense suggested by Barbara Stafford (2011: 11), as a way of addres-
sing a kind of art that ‘does not re-represent what already exists; it presents
what is coming into being before the eyes’. A ‘mantic’ semiotic model priori-
tizes not intellectual interpretative readings but affective receiving and
revealing.

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