agnes martin

I was prepared to be a bit underwhelmed with this exhibit at the Tate Modern

It's easy to spend ages poring over the wonderful book of her works,
I dipped into a lot this year researching. The middle pages seemingly stuffed with forgotten leaves from the artists journal. Yellow and grey lined notes covered in a loopy handwriting, extracts from Martin's lecture notes to art grads.

The book is full of prints of striking yet subtly coloured square format canvases Martin is renowned for. Slightly sickly pink reminiscent of my attempts at skin tones in painting. More evocative midnight blue squares but all covered with some controlled repetitive elements, that regardless of colour, feel reassuring and attractive despite a misleading simplicity.

The exhibition was a walk through 5 rooms. Each with at most, 2 works per wall. They were hung high and stand out more for the white space around them.
It's only seeing their real scale that made their precision and repetition more impressive. 
Patience impresses me more than skill. Maybe the two go hand in hand.
If skill comes with practice, then Martin's patience came with practice too.
Art history pigeonholes retrospectively, and these pieces as has been widely noted stood out in stark contrast to more, muscular emotive works of Pollock et al. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Martin was close with Sol le Witt, another fan of the repeated.
I'd long tried to imagine these works being painted in a location that to me would be more associated with bright passionate colours and contrast. Taos and New Mexico, stir up all sorts of contrived romantic and spiritual associations. The great expanses, the rock colour, the heat, the desolation of a desert landscape. The aloneness, and that's where Agnes chose to move to from New York, isolated and alone to sit, wait for the voices/creativity to speak to her.
I didn't realise beforehand that Martin was schizophrenic, or gay. Irrelevant details perhaps. Nowadays where sexuality is mostly in western worlds, apart from areas in the US, a lesser noteworthy part of someones lives, albeit still a titillating bit of info (Grayson Perry springs to mind) these parts of her life seemed to add an extra melancholy to the way I approached these works. They are not boldly referencing either parts of her or the world. I can't imagine choosing to isolate myself so extremely, so I wonder if she felt compelled to, better as a result and the works were the route and by-product to harnessing a bit of calm with respect to her psychotic episodes. I've seen the work of psychotic people first hand, born the brunt of furious rages and illogical rants and threats. None of them would have been capable of sitting still long enough to do what Martin has. Or had the humility to attribute the works to something other.
Martin was interested in Zen and had contact with the discipline relating to Suzuki that was responsible largely for a number of important art figures in being exposed to eastern ideology. The mad hedonism and psychedelics of the 60s were still way off.
 The most out there element of Martin's works seemed to be almost cultish use of triangular symbols in her works. Geometric, basic.
These felt jarring next to the rest of the grids and lines.
The works in gold leaf somehow indulgently uplifting. Canvas after canvas in white with lines, a corridor of 20 slightly differing grid patterns from lines, bafflingly simple and intriguing.
This was the first exhibition I have come out of actually not feeling exhausted with a slight tension headache from trying to work out something, often whether I like something or not. 
This to me is the key and genius of Martin's work, it's created in a meditative fashion. We only get to see the ones she considered successful, so even the zen master of dots and lines, had some ego and critical standards. It's as if that calm she was searching was drawn in, etched and left to be released from the canvas overtime. We can all tune into the calm, there's almost laughingly nothing to understand or be dramatically impressed by other than the simplicity of an idea and action working. I started off thinking it would be like the emperors' new clothes. And in a way it was, for the wrong reasons. Sometimes stripping things back so much there's nothing left, or clothed in pretense, you can see more clearly and it makes you smile without a hint of cynical knowing.