Beata Geyer: Planar sculpture and the expanded fields of colour

"They are juxtaposed for various and changing visual effects. They are to challenge or to echo each other, to support or oppose one another. The contacts, respectively boundaries, between them many vary from soft to hard touches, may mean pull and push besides clashes, but also embracing, intersecting, penetrating."
Josef Albers from 'The colour in my paintings'. (1964)

In understanding Beata Geyer's construction of identity through the process of accumulation, designation and negotiation we have to consider her understanding of abstract art through the veil of cultural identity, difference and meaning. A difference and understanding very clearly derived from her Polish, European origins and from avant-garde, constructivist artists discussed at length in her Master's thesis, Wladyslaw Strzeminski and Katarzyna Kobro. Strzeminski and Kobro's abstraction was structured on the theories of Unism (1922-36) which "... encompasses the whole spectrum of contemporary artistic experience, engaging with temporal and spatial conditions of the art-making process as well as the cultural social millieu..."¹ Strzeminski defined pictorial investigation as a quest for the 'natural essence' of painting ie absolute flatness² and wrote "Two dimensional, atemporal space is a fiction, as is the one-dimensional space used to measure all dimensions (meter, cubit, etc.) The fact that the meter, the ideal one-dimensional space, does not exist - that we never find ourselves in this space - does not mean that this fiction (if indeed it is one?) is unproductive'.³

Yve-Alain Bois wished to call the work of these two artists 'seminal'⁴ ...'so much do they seem to have directly influenced the art and aesthetics of the '60s." Their work has continued to inspire artists in the decades to come, including the Minimalist artists of the 1960s to whose river of ideas Beata Geyer also dips her paintbrush. Here we begin to see a formal link between Strzeminski and Kobro, abstract art, Constructivism, Minimalism and the work of Beata Geyer.

The miminalist sculptural grids created by Beata Geyer are infused with light and colour, the relational qualities of the varying hues creating an opticality simultaneously of confusion and unity. Geyer's fields of colour consist of singular units of varied and repeated hues, readymade in the context of the use of commercially produced paint; readymades in the context of the always already units repeated, arranged, negotiated, considered and constructed onsite into a 'whole'. The work appears planned, decisive; but in process is full of 'chaos and indecision'⁵. Within these works there exists no 'original'; the works are temporal, re-moveable, changeable; always already there and always already not. The 'original' is collectively the process and installation and therefore an open-ended process.

In the negotiation between space and colour, geometry and the grid, the works literally 'unfold' within the gallery space: floating horizontally along the floor as in Untitled (nephology.100) 2001; or vertically circumnavigating the wooden posts in Artspace in Untitled (nephology.288) 2000. She further abstracts the colour fields by creating a directional disjuncture as in Untitled (nephology.72) 2001, where the colour field glides along the floor, collides with the wall and hastens skyward in true nephological⁶ style. The constructed grids within these works, the field in which the coloured units are played out, with and against each other, become arbitrarily framed by the gallery space.

With the gallery as 'frame' Geyer is presented with the entire space in which to create and install her open-ended systems of self-generating complexity. In this respect her installations are very much site-specific. Her objects of colour abstractions are created not only in relation to the social and political issues of cultural identity, difference and meaning, but like other artists such as Carl Andre the works question the picture plane and its relation to the 'beholder', placed not as Imants Tiller's arrangements of 'painted tiles' - vertically on the wall, but are horizontally grounded, folding into corners, swiftly extending up, wrapping around and along the gallery space. The 'beholder' is obliged to visually follow Geyer's works - the Eye is sent on a trajectory of colour implosions and explosions; and like the coloured lolly on which the child sucks, the viewer enjoys a feast of sweet and sour, hot and cool, with colours as one viewer at Artspace described as desiring to 'eat' - the 'hungry' gaze'!

In Why are you painting those roses red? 1999, the painting unlike the nephology series, is constructed of colour units of diverse shapes and sizes. The pictorial investigation is multi-dimensional with singular units layered on top of another, next to an-other, creating a layered, veiled work where light, space and shadows play with and against each other. The varying colours are repeated in subtle tonal changes creating penetrating complementary and contrasting waves of motion and space. The effect is one of intense movement and performance. The repetition in her work echoes the rhythms in music, or as an "indicator that the 'wild sound' of babbling [of Levi-Strauss' phonemic doubling ie pa-pa], have been made deliberate, intentional and that what they intend is meaning."⁷ Geyer's repetition is not a repetition of absurdity, nor a repetition of compulsion but a repetition of theatre and unity.

In his 1967 essay 'Art and Objecthood', Michael Fried writes about the theatre of minimalism, the need or dependence on the beholder or viewer for the works completeness, as in the work 'depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, it has been waiting for him.'⁸. If Beata Geyer's work is seen within the context of contemporary, 'post-minimalist baroque', then perhaps we can see in her work the 'theatre' of which Fried speaks. A theatre in which the beholder does indeed take part in the completeness of the work: in walking around, looking down upon or up to the field of mesmerising, hallucinatory colour constructions: wall pieces, floor pieces and tower structures. The gaze of the viewer is one of participating in a moment, in completing the construction of the work, taking part in its temporality as in the viewing of a theatrical work.

Deleuze wrote in The Fold, "Perhaps we rediscover in modern abstract art a similar taste for a setting "between" two arts, between painting and sculpture, between sculpture and architecture, that seeks to attain a unity of arts as "performance", and to draw the spectator into this very performance (minimal art is appropriately named following a law of extremum). Folding and unfolding, wrapping and unwrapping are the constraints of this operation, as much now as in the period of the Baroque."⁹

When Donald Judd spoke of 'specific objects' in 1965 he noted that the majority of new work was neither painting nor sculpture¹⁰. Deleuze for instance, considered Carl Andre's planar sculptures..."would not only illustrate the passages of painting and sculpture, or of sculpture and architecture, but also the extensive unity of minimal art, in which form no longer contains a volume but embraces a limitless space in all directions."¹¹ We could apply Judd and Deleuze's analogies to Beata Geyer's works: neither painting nor sculpture but fields of colour repetitions constructed into planar dimensions, claiming limitless space within the gallery frame.

Geyer's constructions are temporal, malleable, created as on-site installations and are dependent in the design and construction upon the spatiality of the gallery, the relationship between the architectural space, the field in which the work occupies and the participation of the viewer. Her works take us on a journey, physically, culturally and philosophically. Geyer's personal journey has now taken her to Los Angeles to take part in an artist residency programme with the 18th Street Arts Complex, thanks to an Australia Council Arts Skills and Development Grant, where she will be constructing another on-site installation. But with new influences, a new 'space' to investigate; a new 'frame' to create within, where will this journey take her work now?

Donna Brett
February 2003

1. Beata Geyer, Constructions, Masters Thesis, 2001 p3
2. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as model, MIT Press, 1993 p127
3. Bois, Painting as model, MIT Press, 1993 p127
4. Bois, Painting as model, MIT Press, 1993 p123
5. Beata Geyer, in conversation with the artist.
6. Nephology is the study of clouds. The greek word Nephos translates as cloud
7. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press 1986, p109
8. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, 1998, Chicago p163
9. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Univ of Minnesota, 1993 p123
10. Stiles, Theories of Contemporary Art, p114
11. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, p160 (notes)