1.

            It would seem that the history of Minimalism remains unfinished. With its pure geometric forms and uninflected surfaces suggesting an invincible and impermeable armor - mute, refusing the existential yearnings that rose up in 1950s American Abstract Expressionism - American-type Minimalism of the early 1960s stated its case. There was that bullying swagger, the toughness of the painter Frank Stella’s famous repudiation of all that earlier soul-searching and its orchestra of doom, as he said bluntly about his work: “What you see is what you see.”² Or Donald Judd’s signature essay “Specific Objects,” from 1965. Listen: “It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. In the new work the shape, image, color and surface are single and not partial and scattered […] There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material.”³

Or Robert Morris, Judd’s rival and sparring partner in the Minimalist camp, who theorized in his most important essay, “Notes on Sculpture,” published in 1966, that this idea of wholeness wasn’t simply about the form of the object - this empirical thing-in-itself - but also and most crucially about the form of the experience. It is you in the space with this bare, implacable three-dimensional thing, joined in an intense sensory connection in which wholeness makes its bond: you and it, subject and object.⁴

That history is written. Judd, Morris, Stella, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Anne Truitt, and - on the cusp between Minimalism and Conceptualism - Sol LeWitt. But elsewhere, on the other side of an ocean, in the shadow of post-Stalinist Communism’s occluding reach, which made the productions of the New York art world impossible to see, was a figure who is almost like a lost noun now rediscovered in the history of Minimalism’s language. Even more, he is a noun that the American Minimalists had never even heard of, just as he did not know their language when it was first spoken. Yet he, like them, worked strictly with industrial materials, like them chose abstract over figurative forms, like them sought in sculpture the indivisible form and the whole experience, and like them lingered in the garden of reason, of rational geometric shapes. This figure is the artist Václav Cigler.

2.

            Born in 1929 in Vestín, Czechoslovakia, Cigler grew up first in the political vise of Hitler’s trampling of native sovereignty and then in the gravitational field of Moscow’s orbiting satellites. What was the role of the artist as seen through that vast lens of Marx’s “historical materialism” in which the Socialist state was meant to correct the distortions of capitalism? “Artists should express the character of the epoch, rather than pursue ideas or ideals of their own. Once the character of the epoch was determined as Socialist, the content of the artist's art was to be collectivist rather than individualist.”⁵

            And so the young artist Cigler had to decide what he could be, what he could express, and how he could express. Was expression, if he wanted to be individual, possible? He is coming of age as an artist at the same moment as the American Minimalists (Judd was born the year before him, Morris two years after), who step forward on the platform of immense material productivity after the Second World War: the imperium of American industrial might, of goods pouring from the foundry of capitalism’s entrepreneurial zeal, its standard of individual freedom pointed materially forward, its presumption of the very way to be in the world, which is to assume for material goods what was once assumed for spiritual pilgrimage: ascension and glory. To grow up in that Zeitgeist permeates the tissues of being. But to be an individual in the collectivist model? The possibility existed for Cigler to find in the industrial fabrication of useful glass products an entry into private expression. Of course, there had been a Czech avant-garde whose sources lay in the modernism of Europe, of Cubism and Constructivism, of the Bauhaus. All their lessons concerning the priority of the artwork’s structure and of its trajectory toward functional ends are taken up in this Czech history.

            Cigler attends the glass school in Nový Bor from 1948, the year the Communists rise to power in Czechoslovakia. He finishes and moves on in 1951 to the College of Applied Art in Prague, studying glass with Josef Kaplický and graduating in 1957. Kaplický creates an environment that allows for serious inquiry into the expressive possibilities of the glass medium, while positioning the practice so that it remained manageably clear of the curiosity of Communist officials. In 1965, Cigler is asked to establish the Glass in Architecture Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where he sees that an architectural department devoted to glass once again is not a field of production that draws political attention. (This is the year before Minimalism’s first major exhibition, “Primary Structures,” is unveiled at New York’s Jewish Museum and its central artists begin their critical ascent.) He maps a vocabulary of minimal forms, drawing on the modernist, angular expressions of the Dessau Bauhaus and of Constructivism, dedicated to the productivity of the artist as worker; forms so basic, so Platonic - a sphere, a pyramid, a circle, a square, and so forth - that they are beyond recrimination and allow for the free agency of an individual practice to develop. With methodical deliberateness, Cigler begins to underwrite a syntax of forms that parallels the work being done in New York; and yet his art belies a different use of Minimalist means to autobiographically, politically, and aesthetically different ends.

3.

The object is round, its circular edge curved and its bottom flat, as if it were a ball compressed and pushed down into the earth. But the first impression is of a shining thing. You walk toward it and its outline sings light. Or invert the letters: it signs light. It projects the visual fact of light, light in itself, light, as I said, shining. It shows to the eye a shell reflecting all the lumens in its atmosphere that it pulls toward itself, into itself. Cigler calls it Optic Panorama (2009). The retina reads this surface as hardness and brightness. The object that the eye takes in is not a figure. It is not a recognizable representation of anything at all, other than an essential geometric form. It would seem to have no other purpose than to report on the existences and transformations of light and sight themselves.

This is the protocol for “reading” a Cigler. You have first noted its shape in space, and now you follow an itinerary, a retinal tour of this Cigler thing, because next you stare into the almost impossible clarity of the object and find the world and yourself compressed, distorted, remade inside it. The lights above you burn with the sharpness of stars. You have fallen through the “outside” of space into the “inside” now visualized. Light effuses the outline of the object, which appears to melt away into the air around it. You are both outside and inside, and the refractions of light that project from Optic Panorama only increase this retinal appearance of the glass’s animation and indefiniteness because, of course, what is seen inside the glass is always changing as the eye and body move. The space around the object becomes soft space, by which I mean that your body, the body of the viewer, enters into a sensory relation, a temporary bond, with this effusion, this pulverizing of the outline of the object in the emanations of light that seem to dissolve its skin. The effect of this soft space on the body is the slightest sensation of floating, which in turn gives the work an equal sense of lesser gravity. The index of such sensations is not the obdurate reality offered by Judd’s classic Minimalist definition of the object, whose unity is seen indelibly and unbreakably all at once and whose material is solid. Instead, Cigler’s index is tied to the cognitive space of a mobile interiority, the indefinite space of pictorial illusion - so entirely anathema to the radical refusal of American-type Minimalism to be anything other than the brute articulation of its own factual being.

4.

            And yet to speak of the brute fact of the object is also to say this: the more solid and plain an object becomes, the more it approaches complete abstraction and the prestige allotted to pure idea. The unitary quality, the quality of singleness that Judd and Morris advertised as important to their work, decreed that the true labor of making the object was not in the hand, but in the mind, although Judd did laud the well-made thing. It could be said that, in the tradition of Duchamp (despite Judd’s dismissal of Duchamp’s value to him), Minimalism sought no less than the French master the value of materiality as a way to reorient the viewer. Duchamp’s readymades simply abstracted everyday, functional objects by inserting them into a context in which they became defunctionalized pictures of themselves. He made them inert. They had to be jump-started again as something else, fitted with new engines fueled by a different kind of meaning and judgment. The Minimalists took up this objectness, this sense of the inert thing-in-itself that needed to be set back into motion by the disoriented and reoriented viewer, and so the material of the thing took on its own prominence, its own sense of the eyes that would be laid on it, searching for purpose, searching for meaning. Judd said simply, “I am very interested in the materials as materials, for themselves, for the quality they have, and retaining that quality, not losing it.”⁶ But implicit in his statement was that the material object, or rather the materiality of the object, was the idea, and the purer the materiality, the purer the idea.

It is interesting, then, to note that the material Cigler chose from the start was the ideal material to propose both the pure thing and the pure idea - and one never taken up simply for itself by the American Minimalists, though Morris used mirrors, Flavin used neon, and the West Coast artist Larry Bell used glass cubes. Optical glass is a truly industrial material, a material never used before Cigler’s decision within the field of art production. Its manufacture is arduous, exacting, immensely time consuming, and extraordinarily costly - far more exacting and costly than the production of conventional glass. (See page TK for a description of the process.) Yet the value of the highest significance within the context of Cigler’s artistic practice and its Minimalist ramifications is the very nature of its materiality, its rarefied value; it is entirely dependent on its purity in order to be the most precise and perfect carrier of light, and therefore the perfect machine of sight. It is completely inert, and yet always already active as its being is called up by the eye for which it is a lens and a magnifier. It is an enhancer not only of its own materiality, its physical thingness, but also of its vivid usefulness, its telos, in literally bringing to light the thingness of seeing.

5.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the great French phenomenologist whose work profoundly influenced Morris, wrote about the “thing,” meaning any object that our bodies encounter: “The thing is inseparable from a person perceiving it, and can never be actually in itself because its articulations are those of our very existence, and because it stands at the other end of our gaze or at the terminus of a sensory exploration which invests it with humanity […] The very significance of the thing is built up before our eyes, a significance which no verbal analysis can exhaust, and which merges with the exhibiting of the thing in its self-evidence.”⁷

When we think about the special class of things that we call artworks, Merleau-Ponty’s words point us toward what the body apprehends and what the mind learns when they enter the field of knowing that any artwork hopes to create. It is the function of the artwork to make visible its difference from other things in terms of its content, its significance, and its meaning, and so our spatial intelligence is always engaged in a way toward new meaning. We move through the space around the work, away and back, receiving it with our eyes and our other senses, with that feeling of almost ineffable pressure between the thing and ourselves. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the way that we build up our understanding of the thing out of our understanding of ourselves, and elsewhere he talks of the “world’s vast memory,” which roots us to a comprehension of what things tell us, including these things called art. And yet the paradox of the Minimalist thing, including Cigler’s objects, is that while the body may feel it and sense it in space, the recognition of this plain, almost featureless thing, which is not a daily object like a house or any other object we are familiar with through use, creates an experience that is torn between its physical reality and its abstract appearance, which stands before us, shining, with volume, weight and thingness. The strangeness of this object creates a sense of discomfort, of disorientation, and in so doing, it makes us pay attention, because we are not certain how to be with this thing, how it relates on the deepest level to our own being and to the world.

What am I to make, then, of Cigler’s Block With Circle Segments (2008)? Of course, it is easy to say that it is a different Minimalism, opposed to Judd’s creed of the unitary form. In fact, it uses the syntax and appearance of the Minimalist surface - the smoothness, the industrial material, the geometric - and then denies the unitary form, the object created as a whole rather than as an assemblage of parts. Perhaps it is an exception to Cigler’s canon and a bad example to take up. But I do so to speak of the phenomenological experience of Minimalism - an experience that I think is taken farther by Cigler, because the materiality of glass, and particularly of optical glass, exploits the specific element of light. Not a supplemental experience, but an intrinsic one. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “constituting mind,” and writes  of “the natural unity of the perceiving subject.”⁸ He develops the notion of the viewer’s perceptual intelligence, which creates an indivisible field from space and the objects in it so that there is coherence and understanding, and I would say that what allows this coherence to take form is light.

Light is the material that allows us to create an intelligent understanding of space. Light legislates the order of seeing. Light, legislate, and intelligence all share the Indo-European root leg, which is associated with a sense of brightness, with the visual quality of shining. Legibility, which means to make something out, to recognize it, to perceive it, shares this root, too. As does logos, the Greek term for a word, discourse or thought, and which joins words, speech, and reason with brightness, with the quality of illumination that makes words and discourse visible to our understanding. And so Block With Circle Segments is an exemplar of that multiplier of light and of what is seen: its fragmented circle unfolds before us and presents, in an orderly, reasoned rotation, the visual and physical experience of the object and the body temporarily unified through sight. The unity is not in the object per se, but in the act of perception that the artist highlights - the act of seeing that is so fully engaged by this object whose sole purpose is to make us conscious of perception. Light is both the signifier of what it makes legible and of itself. As we look into Cigler’s Block, the scene is repeated in variation, as an internal serial motif. As Merleau-Ponty writes, a thing is “internally taken up by us, reconstituted and experienced by us in so far as it is bound up with a world.”⁹

But what is it that is taken up? Cigler’s objects do not rest on the idea of presenting a thing that displaces space, a thing in relation to which the body must accommodate itself and in so doing become more aware of itself. No, by so fully employing the effects of light as an intrinsic element of the object, the physical impact of the work is broadened, instrumentalizing more of space. Space becomes, in the words of the anthropologist Marc Augé, “a collectivity of identity and relations.”¹⁰It is transformed into a many-faceted field of human meaning, just as Cigler has said, “I organize space, define and open it; for me a person is both form and content, everything is human to me.”¹¹ And as Michel Serres writes, “My body lives in as many spaces as the society, the group, or the collectivity have formed: the Euclidean house, the street and its network, the open and closed garden, the church or the enclosed spaces of the sacred, the school and its spatial varieties containing fixed points, and the complex ensemble of flow-charts, those of language, of the factory, of the family, of the political party, and so forth. Consequently, my body is not plunged into one space but into the intersection or the junctions of this multiplicity.”¹²

To understand Cigler’s practice, then, is to see that it has these three rules of usage: First, it is about the pure experience (which is primarily visual) of the object as it is encountered in the light. Second, it is a cognitive procedure, processing the data through a system of rationality, with significations drawn from our memories and the vast memory of the world that develop our understanding of the object. Third, this understanding is fit within a web of meanings, a contextual structure by which the experience enters into our individual (subjective) and general (consensual and therefore deemed objective) knowledge. And fourth, because there is in fact a fourth term, this item of private and collective knowledge activates a different kind of experience than the phenomenological, and this is the social experience of the work.

6.

So many of the terms I’ve used - presence, materiality, space, pulverizing the edge - are the terms employed by the artists and critics of the 1960s to describe and defend Minimalism. Their arguments bit into the new work’s declarations of its autonomy as a thing-in-itself that is whole and self-sufficient, denying history and claiming complete freedom. Judd stated that “shapes and materials shouldn’t be altered by their context.”¹³ But what this sense of aesthetic isolationism did, for all of its focus on the object and its phenomenological effects, was to deny what Serres points to - the density of social space around the object. The Americans, in the ease of a booming capitalist economy in which the art object could be anything at all without political impact or censure, essentially embraced this logic of the artwork as luxury good, despite the heated philosophical arguments. It remained an aesthetic argument, largely ignoring or forgetting the object’s political aspect. And so what the artists and critics failed to pay sufficient attention to was the meaning of space beyond its aesthetic function: its experience as a social space in which the administrative functions of power take place.

But Cigler had no such luxury. He was at work in the 1960s in a Communist country. Yes, there was the moment of the “Prague Spring,” the moment in which the ethos of historical materialism’s suppression of the self in the name of the state shudders and breaks. In April 1968, Alexander Dubček, Czechoslovakia’s leader in that brief season of liberalization, even proclaims: “Socialism cannot mean only liberation of the working people from the domination of exploiting class relations, but must make more provisions for a fuller life of the personality than any bourgeois democracy.”¹⁴ But that is a moment quickly crushed.

Now look at a Cigler - at one of his Spheres (2010) or, say, his Column II (2009) - works that hold the same principles of thought and effect that shaped his thinking during the Communist period. The sphere glows, it seems, from within its structure. Its light emphasizes that sense of completeness, of the thing-in-itself. It is essential and universal, formal, self-sufficient, given to the rich simplicity of its physical impact on the viewer’s perception, of the eye that makes its bond with the object and creates a unified field. Or the column that rises, each of its three facets as we walk around them shooting out shards of the spectrum, refracting, and reflecting Merleau-Ponty’s words, “In perception we do not think the object and do not think ourselves thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body.”¹⁵

But now recognize the circumstances of time and place in which the idea of these objects originates, and it is clear that they are forms meant to engage not only phenomenology, but also politics.  If phenomenology wants to make us pay attention to the way the body experiences and understands space, Cigler wanted his viewers to understand as well the way we live in social space as a polis, a community; the way we live under the pressure of our particular social space. And so his meaning-filled objects live in this social space, too. Indeed, this social space gives these objects, these works of art, a good deal of their meaning. He didn’t want to ignore context, as Judd could afford to do. His minimal forms, with their smooth, abstracted surfaces, offered something alongside their sheer visual pleasure. In essence, what he proposed in his work as it was first imagined during the Communist regime was a revolt against a repressive government’s subjugation of the knowledge of the self. His art proposed that citizens were not there to serve the ideology of the mass but to suggest the primacy of the individual.

He added one to the other: the political to the visual; context to the cult of the object as an autonomous thing; metaphor to mere being. These enlargements of American-type Minimalism’s intentions and meanings, contradicting its refusal of metaphor and context and symbolism, could only grow from the specificity of very different political soil. That both forms of pleasure, the visual and the social, may be drawn out of Cigler’s work like an alchemical stone, is what gives his objects their totemic quality, their effluence of power as an effect of light emitted from a rational shape. This shape is a signifier of social order as well as an eternal form - reason and light joined in a metaphor of the individual’s autonomy alongside the object’s autonomy. This was an equation with freedom that had no true political power to change society, yet it holds us allegorically as a poetic narrative, as a proclamation of individuality projected into social space.

What the light does and what the light represents are fused in Cigler’s production, and this fusion has not changed, though political circumstances have. When I look at this sphere and at the way the light seems to rise out of it and its surface shimmers and bleeds into the air that appears to absorb its color in a fine mist, then I think that what Cigler has done is shift our sense of self in that moment of intense attention, just as he shifted for himself the will of the state and Marx’s historical materialism in order to express his own will as an artist and individual, in order to create his own state of historical immaterialism.

7.

That is the road taken, isn’t it? From the pure physical sensation to the sense that each of us and all of our sensations and thoughts and understandings aggregate so that our individual experiences pool and form the group that fills the social space, and we call this group society, government, the desire of consensus, the will of the state. But after the recognition of this in Cigler’s art - this strategy to reduce his forms to a condition of abstraction that is illegible to the eyes of the state, as if this extreme reduction symbolized the tabula rasa of political will and the potential of individual sovereignty - then there is another step in this symbolic order. This step moves definitively beyond both the physical quality of the work and its social agency, and ultimately beyond the core principles of classic Minimalism.

For Cigler, glass as material is finally a way through materiality. For him, glass is a way not merely toward the specificity of the object, but also, paradoxically, toward its evocation of the materially non-specific, which is also to say toward the politically non-specific, toward the assertion of the individual who is politically unbound. This work of course has its substantial physical presence; a presence that is completed by the viewer’s own body and perceptions, without which the work cannot be understood and appreciated. At the same time, the work lives in the ideological space of society, in which the art object is intended both as commentary and catalyst - a generator for liberalizing thought. The artwork as a discursive act within an unspoken political discourse reflects not only political disenfranchisement but also the re-enfranchisement of the individual as a politically engaged citizen freed from the weight of government repression. The next movement in this narrative of the individual is freedom from the physical and the social: a path toward the immaterial.

However metaphorical this reading may be, this sense of multiplicity, of the self and the state and the material world in utopian transition, is borne out by what anyone sees as they walk around a light-filled piece by Cigler. Every one of Cigler’s pieces remains destabilized, based on the endlessly shifting variables of time, space, and quantity: the number of people moving around the work, filtering the volume of light; the height and angle from which we perceive the work; how much we walk around it; how long we spend looking; and, of course, the level of our concentration.

The luminous quality of the glass in perpetual movement and in a state of perpetual internal destabilization is the key to the narrative trajectory of Cigler’s art: from the private self bound phenomenologically by the senses and the collective bound by political will to a radically fluid state of freedom. Perhaps one sign of this is water. Since the early 1960s, Cigler has invented works for the landscape - without knowing about “Land Art” and artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Richard Long, much as he did not originally know the work of the Minimalists. The natural environment and the human mark on it are one of his central concerns, and the works into which he incorporates water are a trace of this. Water, like light, carries a symbolic load for him. A symbol is an object of exchange, and water, with its fluidity, with its portage of light moving and bending in its currents, shares so much with glass as an index. In Spring #1 (2008), with its well of water and a mirror submerged at an angle so we see ourselves through the water, an equivalence is stated between nature’s form and the body, both of them parts of the same matrix of organic life. And in Rippled Surface (2008), with its sonic pulse continually moving the water, our own figures peering down through that surface to find reflections of ourselves are joined with the water as signs of flux, of gathering and dissolution and gathering again: a materialism in constant discourse with immaterialism, like music’s call and response.

One of his most ambitious, unrealized projects was a piece simply titled Fountain, with apparently no ironic reference to Duchamp’s famous urinal of the same name. Cigler proposed his work for the First International Water Sculpture Competition, which was part of the Louisiana World Exposition in 1984. An elaborate array of pathways across water, with a fountain system that created sprays of rainbows, the plan took first place among proposals by more than four hundred artists, including leading Western artists such as Robert Morris, Jean Tigueley, and Anne and Patrick Poirier. The viewers’ experience of the water was one of transformation: of the water as a body and then of the water dematerialized, turned into a luxuriant spray of colors. Complications with the Czechoslovak committee overseeing the project ultimately made it impossible to accept the exposition’s invitation. What was lost was not only the viewers’ pleasure but the artist’s chance to become known in the West. Yet Fountain’s essential principle of taking the substance of water and producing a spectacle of its conversion into light and air once again underlined his commitment to an art with an unearthly ambition.

It isn’t the idea of material-in-itself at the center of the Minimalist polemic that matters to Cigler, but finally getting through matter to symbolically claim a transcendent model. While American-type Minimalism emphasized its draining away of the sublime, and even - in Judd’s case - the triumph of empirical fact over human subjectivity, Cigler’s Minimalist art emphasizes its humanist metaphysics, its ultimate subjectivity, which desires a universal sympathy toward individual being, whose roots lie in his private need for a post-political consciousness. Altogether grandly, Cigler says: “New art will effect man in his entirety […] The entire space of his conscious […] subconscious […] supra-conscious states and relationships. The new art will be an event of these states and relationships.”¹⁶ If the substance of the body is symbolized by the material aspect of his objects, then their dematerialization through the agency of light proposes the dematerialization of the body as well. The narrative of the work alters Minimalism’s course from empirical absoluteness, from the lawful binding of meanings, to the transcendent model embodied in illumination rising from the glass and its metaphor of earthly release.

8.

            But let me quickly add: Cigler does not want one experience of the work instead of another. He wants all the phenomenological potency of the viewer’s body as it moves around his objects, sensing and reading what the light and the glass do. And then he wants us to move through this cognitive knowing to another knowing. He wants us to comprehend the metaphorical lode of the light and the water. He says, “An object is an object only in the sense of its symbol and code.”¹⁷ He isn’t disputing the power of the object-type thing of American Minimalism, but layering it further, broadening its economy of meaning. This hybrid of the sensual and the conceptual, of an idealized teleological loop of pure materiality and a wellspring of interpretative content, is Cigler’s unique offering. And while Judd made the astonishing remark, “I’m totally uninterested in European art and I think it’s over with,”¹⁸ Cigler’s sensibility rises out of his European lineage. While the styles of the Bauhaus and of Russian Constructivism are in his blood, he leans away from their use-oriented art, from their intentions to serve the material ambitions of industry or the state. Instead, his sensibility inclines toward the transcendent principles of Kazimir Malevich’s art of Suprematism, which preceded and then opposed Constructivism. It is not American Minimalism’s autonomy from other things in the world, but autonomy from the thingness of the world that Cigler’s work finally means to suggest.

            The light emanating from a Cigler, like a spectral flag of unbound matter, is the logical extension, even the summa, of Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), in which the Russian artist imagined white as the void beyond personal feeling, beyond practical utility; in which daily life is surpassed by the spiritual optimism of an infinitude that cares nothing for the latitude and longitude of things, of the state, or of all social constrictions, which he summarized in the phrase “the history of manners.”¹⁹ White on White is a precedent for Cigler’s type of metaphysical Minimalism, and this lineage of ethereal yearning moves forward in time to Brancusi’s Endless Column (1918) and Bird in Space (1928) - or even to his Newborn (1920), which echoes in Cigler’s spheres and half-spheres - and on to Barnett Newman’s Abstract Expressionist painting Onement, I (1948). Of course, Cigler’s own columns, which I’ve discussed earlier, pay clear homage to these works: each of them evoking an aspired weightlessness, sloughing off matter like expired skin, paring themselves down to an essential sleekness, an essential humanism, and rising.²⁰

            It may be that this idea of the thing-in-itself was meant in American Minimalism to speak in its purposefully narrow way about a principle of essential and indestructible truth. Yet this art of willful inwardness, particularly in Judd’s case, saw no reconciliation of art and life. Its philosophical proposition of hermeticism refused this. Perhaps Malevich’s idealization is simply the opposite pole, unwilling to accept the earth. This tension between Malevich and Judd is where Cigler’s art sits. Here is his Jacob’s Ladder (1997), an allegory of struggle, reconciliation, and promise pulling between earth and Malevich’s “endless emptiness,” his “creative points of the universe.” Here is the ballast of Marx’s historical materialism in its manifestation as the state riding herd over individual expression, now thrown aside and pulled upward: an ascendance of the individual voice. The light rises on the rungs of the ladder, a metaphysical shine climbing up and through phenomenological richness to propose its own sovereignty of being. The space between man’s intelligence, with all of its social density, is confronted with the potentiality of a purer knowing blown forward and backward in the biblical story on angels’ wings. And also blown in the current of the angels’ wings is all the debris, all the thingness of human history piled in its wake, as Walter Benjamin once wrote of another angel.²¹ So freedom from matter must reflect all the weight of matter, of time and the thingness of things, that it sheds. Cigler knows that is the artist’s task: to drag the world through the garden of reason until it dissolves into the metaphysics of space and light.

Notes

Steven Henry Madoff is an award-winning art critic and art historian. He has written for The New York Times, Time magazine, Artforum and many other publications. and is the former Executive Editor of ARTnews magazine. He is a Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art. His most recently published book, issued by MIT Prs, is Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century).

1. Malevich quoted in Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (New York: Abrahms, 1994), p. 90.

2. Bruce Glaser, “Questions for Stella and Judd,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 148-164.

3. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Donald Judd: The Complete Writings, 1959-1975 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005), p. 187.

4. For an excellent summary of this dichotomy between Judd’s and Morris’s approaches, see James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 166.

5. Jan Michl, “Institutional Framework Around Successful Art Forms in Communist Czechoslovakia” (Budapest: Open Society Institute, March 1999), note 119, p. 44, online document: http://janmichl.com/eng.framework-czechoslovakia.pdf.

6. David Raskin, “Specific Opposition: Judd's Art and Politics,” Art History, vol. 24, no. 5, November 2001, p. 686.

7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Thing and the Natural World,” Phenomenology and Perception in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwin (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 139.

8. Merleau-Ponty, “Sense Experience,” Basic Writings, p. 132.

9. Merleau-Ponty, “The Thing and the Natural World,” Basic Writings, p. 144.

10. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso Books, 1995), p. 51.

11. Various writings given to me by Václav Cigler in Prague, February 2010.

12. Michel Serres, “Language & Space: From Oedipus to Zola,” Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 44-45.

13. Raskin, p. 686.

14. Paul Ello, Czechoslovakia's blueprint for "freedom": "Unity, socialism & humanity"; Dubcek's statements, the original and official documents leading to the conflict of August 1968 (Washington: Acropolis Books, 1968) , p. 120.

15. Merleau-Ponty, “Sense Experience,” Basic Writings, p. 132.

16. Various writings given to me by Václav Cigler in Prague, February 2010.

17. Various writings given to me by Václav Cigler in Prague, February 2010.

18. Glaser, “Questions for Stella and Judd,” pp. 148-164.

19. Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2003) p. 100.

20. Of course, there are many other precedents of artists who inscribed a premise of transcendence in their practices, from Hilma af Klint to Wassily Kandinsky and the Czech modernist František Kupka (both of whom held an interest in Theosophy), and on to Mark Rothko, a favorite of Cigler, who noted the transcendent but eschewed attempts to relate any form of direct spirituality to his work. Although I am not ascribing any specific spirituality to Cigler, it is interesting to consider this historical tendency. For a study of the historical strain of transcendence and the spiritual in abstraction, see for example The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, ed. Maurice Tuchman (New York: Abbeville Press, 1999). It is just as interesting to think about Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and his notions of the beautiful and the sublime in this regard.

21. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), P. 257.