An Aesthetics of Dispersal: Succession and Seriality

Philosopher and critic Arthur C. Danto once reflected upon the different ways in which works of art might exist “in ordered sets” – an outline, in other words, of what we might call an aesthetics of succession. For indeed succession, in which works are considered to form a series, implies a more complex experience than the viewing of a single painting (or in our particular case, drawing) precisely because, as Danto wrote, “the fact that each is part of the series must enter somehow as part of the experience of each.” The generative principle underlying the set is a crucial determinant of that experience, and Danto provided us with three possible classifications, three aesthetic modes of succession: the first he termed the sequence, in which the set was defined by a narrative structure, each element telling part of a complete story; the second was the suite, in which the set illustrates a text or a theme exterior to the work itself; the last was called the series proper, which is characterized by its very openness, its lack of narrative closure. For Danto, the guarantee of the unity of the series lies nowhere else than in the artist him- or herself, the unity of this set somehow an existential mirror for the unity of the modern creative subject.

These classifications prove a useful guide for navigating our way through the various “ordered sets” of drawings selected from the collection of Werner H. Kramarsky. Pressed to identify a narrative sequence in this array of non-objective work, we might nevertheless point to Jill Baroff’s Wax/Wane Series (1995) as embodying a certain sequential logic: each of the fourteen drawings in the two portfolios comprises one moment of an extended natural drama. Rhythms and intensities vary according to the density of inked lines and the nature of the rice paper overlay; their logic perhaps defies linear progression, but adheres to some apparent necessity – remove one and the sequence would be incomplete. Ellsworth Kelly’s eleven-part Mallarmé Suite (1991) provides us with a clear exemplar of Danto’s second category, the set whose completeness is determined by a text lying outside itself that it illustrates. We might imagine these collages as accompaniments to the work of the late nineteenth-century French symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé; and if they are not exactly literal illustrations of the latter’s verse, they do seem to propose a visual equivalent to his sense of poetry as “the expression…, reduced to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of aspects of existence.” (And through Mallarmé, we see Kelly paying homage to his great model, Henri Matisse, particularly the latter’s découpages or paper cut-out works; it is probably no coincidence that in 1932 Matisse had designed and illustrated his own first suite – a special edition of the Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé.)