I am the social: Blake Stimson on the line of Edward Krasinski - Critical Essay

ArtForum, Nov, 2003 by Blake Stimson

The art-historical genealogy of Krasinski's line is easy to trace. There is the industrial allusion and the geometrical abstraction of Constructivism, for example, particularly as developed in 1920s Poland by Henryk Stazewski. (Krasinski moved in with his friend Stazewski in the early 1970s and continued to live in the same Warsaw apartment after Stazewski's death in 1988; he commemorated the relationship in a 1989 installation.) And there is the site-specificity and audience interactivity of happenings, especially as practiced in '60s Poland by Tadeusz Kantor (Krasinski participated in several of Kantor's works, including his Panoramic Sea Happening of 1967). Perhaps the most obvious connection is with Daniel Buren, whose own high-Conceptualist, career-long repetition of a precise, self-regulated stripe pattern closely mirrors Krasifiski's own unchanging application of the taped blue line (Krasinski had a number of professional involvements with Buren from 1970 on). "I do not know whether it is art," states Krasinski, for example, sharing a taste for ubiquitous and ultramundane form with Buren. "But for sure it is Scotch blue, width 19 mm, length unknown." More interesting, however, than the monotony of manufactured pattern Krasinski shares with Buren's stripes is the monochromy he has in common with the endless blue of Yves Klein. Krasinski's lasting engagement with blue--a color that has stayed with him as he moved through a variety of materials for making a line--was, as one essayist has put it enigmatically but correctly enough, his way of "experiencing Klein."

Klein's blue--IKB, or International Klein Blue, as he branded it in 1957 (and officially patented it in 1960)--was freighted with a grandiose aesthetic ambition, one completely separate from whatever shape, texture, or form it assumed. In a way it was this separation that allowed Klein his outsize reach. Unlike red or yellow, say, or green or orange or white, Klein insisted, blue was dimensionless: It was not the color of objects in space like such lesser hues but instead the color of space itself: "BLUE, a Blue in itself, disengaged from all functional justification" is how Pierre Restany described it in 1957, "this full void, this nothing which encloses the Everything Possible." Indeed, in an earlier founding gesture, Klein presumed to sign the sky (the closest thing he could find to space as such, it seems fair to assume, or that which encloses the Everything Possible), later declaring it his "first and biggest monochrome" and complaining loudly about some disrespectful "holes" that had been punctured in its dimensionlessness: "The birds must disappear!" he commanded.

Here, with Klein's godlike decrees in mind, we can begin to make sense of the aesthetic charge of Krasinski's line and understand why it, or, really, any example od Conceptual art, might strike its viewers as "powerful" or "uncontrollable" or "elegiac" or "emotional." Krash5ski gives it away when he adopts a tone not unlike Klein's and says without qualification, "I can reach everywhere," or when he compares his blue line, "length unknown," to the territorial marking of a wolf. Like Klein's all-encompassing sky or Buren's ubiquitous stripe pattern or Douglas Huebler's Conceptualist classic "Variable Piece # 70 (In Process) Global," 1971-97, which sought to photograph "everyone alive," Krasinski's line takes on the aim to subsume world to ego and ego to world. That these various accomplishments range from banal to ridiculous to fantastic matters little: Regardless of their sincerity, the promise that the modest conceptual exercise will expand in scale to incorporate the world as a whole is the aesthetic experience on offer. It is a kind of megalomania, for sure, but even so, aesthetic experience is wrought from the concept against its will, and the frustration of Conceptual art, its struggling against the limits of the concept in the name of the concept, is vented or at least deferred.