Awards
2006 Art Journal Award
Mark Cheetham, “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, and Now” (Winter 2005)
Mark Cheetham
Established in 2000, the Art Journal Award is presented to the author of the most distinguished contribution (article, interview, conversation, portfolio, review, or any other text or visual project) published in Art Journal during the preceding calendar year. This year the award goes to Mark Cheetham for his essay “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, and Now,” which appeared in the Winter 2005 issue.
Cheetham is a professor in the Graduate Department of History of Art and the director of the Canadian Studies Program at the University of Toronto. His awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Fellowship. His book, Abstract Art against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the 1960s, was recently published by Cambridge University Press.
The award jury congratulates Cheetham for a contribution that contemporizes and therefore advances the terms in which we understand an icon of modernism. In a discussion centered on Yves Klein’s category-shattering engagements of the monochrome as a theme, Cheetham illuminates its potency and relevance for more contemporary practitioners, such as General Idea and Olafur Eliasson, situated at a significant remove from modernist concerns. In this way, he considerably lightens the monochrome’s historical obligation to speak exclusively to polemical aesthetic debates; now it addresses what he calls the “culture’s uses of color and perception.” Cheetham’s analysis understands the monochrome not as a signature or a clever proof of art’s self-sufficiency, but as a variable response to the problem of desiring continuous vision in a continually shifting world.
In “Matting the Monochrome,” Cheetham examines Klein’s refusal to separate the spiritual from the physical and the artist’s “spongelike penchant for finding inspiration beyond a narrowly artistic context.” Through nuanced readings of the senses behind his phrase “matting the monochrome,” Cheetham argues effectively that Klein’s “martial- and fine-art activities should not be sequestered in our attempt to understand him.” With art-historical and stylistic brilliance, Cheetham cautions us to “be wary of the Hegelian drumbeat that claims Klein’s art overtook his incarnation of judo principles. Artists and art do not need to be seen to progress, especially not from an external interest to a concentration on art.”
Jury: Joanna Roche, California State University, Fullerton, chair; Deborah Willis, New York University; Darby English, University of Chicago; Elizabeth Kotz, University of Minnesota.
