Rosalind Krauss Grids

If you look around, you notice grids are used everywhere in day-to-day life. For example, the keyboard on your laptop, the pixelated squares on your TV screen, and the apps on your IPhone all consist of grids. In the article Grids, Rosalind Krauss discusses the significance of grids in artwork, specifically in modern art. Krauss describes grids as the “modernity of modern art” and examines the impact behind the grid’s centrifugal and centripetal existence. There are two ways in which Krauss explains the grid’s function as the modernity of modern art—spatial and temporal. In the spatial sense, the grid declares the space of art to be independent and having a purpose within itself. The grid, being flattened, geometricized, and ordered, is the exact opposite of what nature should look like. The coordinates of the grid and its complete flatness are means of eliminating reality by replacing them with the single spread of a flat, 2-D surface. In the temporal sense, the grid is an emblem of modernity by simply being omnipresent in the art of our century, while appearing nowhere else in the art of the past. Thus, the grid represents the present and everything else that came …show more content…
Centrifugal means moving outward from the center. The grid, logically speaking, extends in every direction, thus implying a sense of infinity beyond the canvas. Similar to the close-cropping method used in Impressionism artwork, grid painting only shows a fragment of the whole as it directs outwards from the center. Thus, the grid compels us to acknowledge a world outside the frame. As opposed to centrifugal, centripetal is defined as directing towards the center. According to Krauss, the centripetal lines of a grid are a “re-presentation of everything that separates the work of art from the world” (Krauss, 19-20). The centripetal grid confines the boundaries of the world into the interior of a single