Sometime in the 1990s, I invited Frank Stella to participate in a symposium at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, where Donald Judd had installed his own work along with that of a few of his contemporaries. Stella replied that he had no interest in visiting Marfa because Judd, though a colleague and collector of his work during the 1960s, had been “too mean” to him. I might be mistaken, but I recall that these were the precise words, “too mean.” I got the impression that the meanness had to do with Judd’s regard for the way that Stella’s art evolved through the 1970s and 1980s. Judd’s works feature volume, whether as a structure resting on a horizontal floor or ground plane, or attached to a vertical wall. He foreclosed any association with either anthropomorphic statuary or pictorial relief by abruptly projecting his works from their support surfaces—no bases, no mediating framing—forcing the existing space to accommodate the independent volumes, rather than the other way around. A passage from a Judd interview of 1987 explains why he rejected Stella’s practice: “Frank … transforms painting into bas-relief, which is still an old-fashioned approach.… If painting has a totality, and it likely does, it resides in flatness…. As for three-dimensional work, it should be three-dimensional. In other words, you take the two categories and you push them as far as possible. Which leaves Frank in the middle of nowhere.”
But here, nowhere, is where Stella may well have wanted to be. His early high reliefs, such as the “Indian Birds” series of 1978–1979, brought with them their own wall, so to speak, a grid-like matrix from which the more flamboyant elements projected as a series of structured planes, usually three, one in front of another. Aggressive curvilinear shapes, luminous high-pitched colors, and a generous dose of glitter effectively disguise the integrated logic of these constructions. The “Indian Birds” left the preexisting wall, not the artist, “in the middle of nowhere.” Over the years, Stella worked in three dimensions with wood, metals, and molded or computer-printed plastics; as he once joked, he configured his materials neither in two nor in three dimensions but in 2.7. Fractional dimensions are a Stella innovation.
Stella increasingly conceived his compositions as objects freely floating in space, each therefore requiring an anchor in gravitational reality. I’m reminded of the way that Willem de Kooning created sculptures in hand-held clay, manipulating forms destined to be cast in bronze. He appreciated the malleability, even the fluidity, of traditional clay. Only when cast and consequently rigidified did his flowing forms settle into an orientation to a ground plane. On his part, Stella worked with elements of casting but also treated pieces of scrap metal as if they were clay in the hand. In his art, how a construction will stand becomes a consideration secondary to the degree of visual interest that can be wrung out of a set of ad hoc relations; he typically created such relations intuitively as he joined one element to another. The ideal motif for Stella, a connoisseur of cigars, may have been the smoke ring, for the form of a smoke ring continually reverts to formlessness. A smoke ring anchors only in air; and in this respect, it lacks specific coordinates. It is nowhere. By recreating the flow of smoke in an elasto-plastic material (a custom acrylic designated as eSLA RPT), Stella gave vapor a tangible surface, but a mobile one. His “smoke” interacts with his other surfaces, diverse elements in volumetric space that are too restlessly active to enclose the volume they would otherwise define. In perception, despite their actual heaviness, Stella’s various forms float along with the “smoke.” They seem to transform themselves as an observer views them.
Stella’s compositions can be perceived three-dimensionally or two-dimensionally; it doesn’t matter, for they are without specific dimensional identity. They have as many dimensions and aspects as a viewer has the capacity to untangle and the inclination to decipher; their unmanageable multiplicity forces empirical observation to become quixotically imaginative. Simple acts of observation, like the kind that can be committed to memory, seem inadequate to the perception of Stella’s art. Try drawing one of his compositions from memory—or even from life—it won’t come easily, if only because you can’t work logically from the bottom up or the top down, and the instances of interpenetration are hard to trace from any single standpoint. By the time you secure in mind the far side of a form, you’re likely to have lost the near side. Add a number of planes that are themselves mirrors, as in the series “Mirrored Boxes” (shown this past spring at Yares Art), and it becomes clear that Stella’s “sculptures,” if they are indeed sculptures, refuse to settle into their own fixed images. In this respect, they cannot be photographed, for any fixity or stillness misrepresents them.
A work with mirroring surfaces, such as Untitled (FS2023.081) of 2023, reflects aspects of itself, a condition that multiplies the number of perspectives that the same work generates, not to mention the introduction of the virtual image of the observer, which comes and goes according to the observer’s coincidental presence. With a quirkiness characteristic of Stella, many of the mirrored elements retain their protective backing, like store-bought appliances never removed from their packaging; and some have the backing removed in part, as if the material were playing hide-and-seek with its viewer, generating a mirror reflection here but not there. Some of Stella’s negative spaces (shapes cut from the sheet metal) reappear as positive elements in the same construction. All in all, the “Mirrored Boxes” generate multiple perspectives alluding to multiple dimensions. Even the one flat composition shown at Yares—Printed Screen I (2022), inkjet on vinyl mesh—has a distinct image on each of its two sides, as if to acknowledge that any free-standing surface must be double-faced. Similarly, the curving planes within many of Stella’s constructions are likely to bear one color on one face and another color on an opposing face, on the other side of a tenuously configured edge. His application of color fragments the view of a form that might otherwise be perceived as materially unified. Stella’s works seem to resist their own structural integrity; they defy being located. They are either nowhere or everywhere.
Stella created art in a fluctuating world of caprice and fantasy. If de Kooning worked on a surface of water—his excessively slippery, watery medium—Stella, with comparable fluidity, was working on a “surface” of air. He told an interviewer that his “forms float out to you in space.” The multiple protruding points of his various sculptures in the form of a star—as well as their sometimes bulbous, reflective surfaces—cause these “stars” to appear straining to be released from being tethered to a ground plane. Many of Stella’s recent works, with either smoke-ring elements or a collection of fragmentary spirals, give the same impression of desiring to be excused from obeying the law of gravity. Hence, the many real-world devices that Stella and his studio produced in order to stabilize and display his works in their shadow existence as gravity-bound “real” objects. In the coordinated exhibitions of recent work at Jeffrey Deitch and Yares Art (sadly among the last shows organized while Stella was living), we encounter forms anchored by columnar poles with radiating struts, forms suspended from or skewered by horizontal rods, and forms set on sturdy tables of varying design, many outfitted with casters. These anchors, concessions to pragmatic demands, have their own whimsical quality as neutral supports for conceptually insupportable constructions, allowing each of Stella’s creations to retain its ambiguity in spatial dimensions and directional coordinates. In the case of Untitled (FS2023.085) (2023)—a “Mirrored Box” at Yares—the nominally stabilizing horizontal plane at the bottom of the boxlike structure has shapes cut from it, rendering it anything but neutral and base-like. It’s left to the caster wheels below to serve as the true foundation, endowed (appropriately enough) with mobility. At Deitch, as I walked around K.40 Large Version (2014), looming overhead, I imagined that the work was beginning to rotate; and gaining momentum, it threatened to roll away on its casters, energized by the taut spring of its spiraling geometry.
In his many interviews, Stella resisted elaborate verbal description of what he was doing as well as shooing away allusions to the ultimate cultural value of his work. His art was truly exploratory, lacking a theory to guide it, for theories ultimately become confining. A work was acceptable to Stella if it didn’t repeat what he or anyone else had already done. He expected his art to keep him busy, and to be intriguing and gratifying to see, even by those new to modern aesthetic practice. At his core was his desire to continue working. He referred to his configurations of forms, whether relatively flat or fully three-dimensional, as objects created to be seen, projected for eye and mind as if they were simple pictures, though they were not. If much of Stella’s post-1960s art resembles relief because it occupies relatively shallow space in relation to its overall measure, this is relief as never before created. The nonsensical notion of 2.7 dimensions begins to make sense for want of a better concept.
At Deitch, the three large-scale works from the “Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick” series (2014) suggest the movement of a top that spins rapidly yet unsteadily. We don’t turn to Stella’s art for rhythmic regularity. To get in the mood for the compacted movement and energy of these works, we might review the films of Loie Fuller performing her “Serpentine Dance.” She derived from pliant fabric what Stella derived from a beach hat with spiral cuts for ventilation (source of some of the forms that resemble slices of brightly hued fruit—generated by cuts that move through three dimensions rather than along a plane). Comparably large works from the “Atlantic Salmon Rivers” series (2021–23), also at Deitch, were suspended and steadied by rods extended between posts. Smaller versions from this series were shown at Yares. Their curvilinear character and application of color contrasted with the crisp angularity of the monochromatic “Mirrored Boxes,” so that the show at Yares exhibited at least two of Stella’s many aesthetic personalities. Untitled (FS2023.077) of 2023 was something of an outlier because it appeared to have an extremely active front and a relatively passive backside, with more of a definitive orientation than was typical of these recent works. It included a large computer-printed “smoke ring” as well as some painted elements that recalled the “Indian Birds” and many other works of the intervening decades. Like its companions at Yares and at Deitch as well, Untitled (FS2023.077) resists lying still long enough for analytical contemplation. Evaluating it demands—simultaneously—finding new standards of evaluation.
The invention of a new medium or the radical extension of an existing one rarely occurs in the history of art, but it does happen. In the nineteenth century, photography, for the technologically minded, constituted an entirely new representational medium. For those trained in the fine arts and somewhat skeptical, photography was more of a radical extension of the long tradition of drawing—drawing with the peculiar feature of wresting the pencil from the draftsman’s hand. When I consider cases of such forceful innovation, my art-historical instincts lead me to relate Stella to two of his near contemporaries, Jack Whitten and—though each might have resented the comparison—Donald Judd. In our recent past, Whitten invented a new way of constructing a painting; with his units of acrylic “tesserae,” he built or “made” a painting rather than brushing or “painting” a painting. I suppose that one might regard Whitten’s manner of work in two dimensions as properly very low relief, something of a three-dimensional mode. Nevertheless, it was for him a way of painting that remained “painting”—painting thoroughly reconceived, so that light constituted the image from multiple perspectives in multiple dimensions. At the same time, Judd, by radically refiguring the orientation of volumetric forms to their surfaces of support, invented a new way of constructing a sculpture; in his terms, this was “three-dimensional work,” not “sculpture.”
And what did Stella do? He invented the medium from nowhere, the medium that cannot be named. I’m tempted to assert (no time to argue the case) that all three artists, given their methods, reinvented painting through sculpture and sculpture through painting. In this respect, Stella, the nowhere man who never claimed possession of a specific medium, did as much or more than anyone else to extend the traditional media into unknown dimensional territory. In their different ways, Whitten, Judd, and Stella rendered much of the aesthetic unknown known. All this may be too theoretical a notion for the spirit of Stella to bear, but the rest of us can bear with it. Don’t, however, allow such conceptualization to stabilize your sense of Stella’s art. Thinking about it is hardly the same as seeing it.