Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art

"Agnes Martin, another early Minimalist, had been creating art for decades before she stumbled onto her mature style, which is what gets labelled as Minimalist: these six-foot square canvases covered in pencil line grids, or single stripes of paint . Her life story is really fascinating. She was born in rural Canada, and kind of bounced around the west coast, New Mexico, Seattle, in her early life before settling in New York. She had this really intense ambition to be a great artist. She was always learning from different people, always challenging herself to rethink her work in the most extreme way possible. In New York, she fell in with this group of abstract expressionists who were adopting found materials and making more casual, intimate, mundane work. They lived on Coenties Slip, in Manhattan, which doesn’t exist anymore as a neighbourhood. She was always trying to reinvent herself and find a way of living in the world. In New York, she kind of becomes the den mother of this community of artists at Coenties Slip. But she also isolates herself, because she has these issues with schizophrenia and other mental health problems. Sometimes she ends up catatonic in her loft for days on end. Eventually she finds some success in New York, and starts to show in galleries there, but decides that New York is just too much for her. She can’t live here. She can’t succeed in doing her work, so she just totally bails. She takes the money from a Guggenheim grant, and buys a van, and just starts traveling around the United States. Kind of without direction, without purpose, going on hikes, not making art. She doesn’t make art for seven years. She chooses to live in her own way. This is not the move of an artist who is still searching for success, who is not selling for tons of money. She’s just pursuing, literally, what the voices in her head are telling her to do, and telling her to make. After this long journey, she settles again in New Mexico, and comes back to art-making, but in the simplest, most abstract way possible. The first series of screen prints just bear a grid, in different densities. From then on she has found her way of being in the world, and found what works for her. She settles in New Mexico, builds homes and studios for herself, lives out of a trailer van for a long time, sometimes travels a little bit, sometimes has visitors or home, but otherwise she’s just making this really intense work in isolation, focusing on the bare minimum of means—so just these grids and brushstrokes and stripes. She has this really great connection between minimalism and spirituality, because she was always searching for the ineffable. She connected her paintings to the Zen idea of a universal spirit, and she titled quite a few of the early works after plants or natural phenomena like the ocean. So you see her seeking out the sense of peace that she knows exists, but that she can never quite reach. And in Martin’s Writings you can you can see as she grasps for this thing that does not exist. The words really strain toward this spiritual plane of existence, and that is a rare quality in any artist’s writing. I find that really compelling. Yeah. There’s this great Agnes Martin quote, in her writing. Here: I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from perfect—completely removed in fact—even as we ourselves are. In her work, and in her writing, she’s moving toward this this ineffable plan. She’s grasping toward the universal spirituality that she knows exists, but that she cannot find except in a few moments. I think minimalism is always drawing toward that impossible goal. The perfect match between form and content, or ends in means. But it’s never quite getting there. There was a long debate over the title of my book, between me and my agent and my publisher. I didn’t want to use ‘minimalism’ in the title, because minimalism is a specific thing. Or, formally, Minimalism is an art movement that happened in the 1960s. It’s a discrete thing. But what I wanted to talk about was this desire for this perfect absence, or the impossible perfection. So that was why we titled it ‘The Longing for Less,’ because this longing is always pulling at you, but there is no object at the end. You’re never going to reach the goal or succeed, yet humanity always has this tendency to be drawn toward absence."