Brice Marden: Muses Drawing 5 (Mnemosyne), 1989-91

The “opening up” of Marden’s opaque surfaces, which began with his designs for the Basel cathedral windows, was further encouraged by a 1984 exhibition of Japanese calligraphy, which inspired Marden to study Chinese calligraphy. In paintings like Glyphs of 1986, the rigid and straight lines of his Window Paintings loosened up to form intricate configurations reminiscent of calligraphic characters: self-contained, frontal glyphs consistent in size and arranged in columns or grids.

But the analogy to calligraphy does not add up. As Yve-Alain Bois has recently argued, Marden’s seemingly calligraphic paintings turn increasingly anti-calligraphic beginning in 1986.¹ Indeed, a more careful look at Glyphs shows that it overturns rather than emulates calligraphy: some of the glyphs are linked, their sizes are not quite consistent enough, and they seem to twist in a space create by the contrast and overlap of white and black. Although clearly inspired by the flat and frontal pattern of calligraphic writing, Marden’s post-1986 work in fact uses calligraphy to create an airy space whose layers breathe and invite our eyes in to wander around. This effect leads Bois to refer to Marden’s work as “alveolar expanses,” as metaphors for lungs. “The lung image requires a good many conditions to emerge. It is not enough for a painting to look like one, it must also pulsate; it is not enough to pulsate, it must also draw you into its tangles; it is not yet enough if it does that, for it must also permit the circulation of air between its discrete elements: it must be woven in space.”²

In Muses Drawing 5 (Mnemosyne), these conditions are fully in place. Any traces of independent glyphs or columns have faded into a vibrating all-over pattern of linkages. Its ramifications of viscous lines and filigree offshoots pulse forward and backward, catching our eye as if to ensnare it and to draw it into the shimmering gray haze in the background. All temporal and spatial logic fails. It is impossible to determine where Marden’s twig pen started across the sheet, and where it ended up. Unable to map this labyrinthine space, we are lost instantly upon entering. “You willingly become short-sighted, satisfied only to arrest your eyes on this or that part of the ever-moving maze,”³ as Bois writes about another work. When we stand up close, this short-sightedness easily turns to blindness; our eyes become overstimulated, tired, strained.