The Grid as a Checkpoint of Modernity - Margarita Tupitsyn

http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/grid-checkpoint-modernity

I seem to have stumbled upon a concept that I was unaware of.  From exploring the concepts around textiles (from Greek meaning to weave) and the grid like structure of warp and weft, I found that the grid itself is a hugely significant motif in contemporary art. 

"In Western art history the grid has been positioned as an emblem of modernism. In Russia, however, early constructivist artists saw the grid as both a formal and ideological device. After a period dominated by socialist realism, the grid was re-adopted in the 1960s and 1970s by some dissident modernist and conceptualist artists. This essay argues that the grid can still be an effective device in radical art practices as long as it is not perceived as an escapist structure that does not address the topics of today.In her seminal essay ‘Grids’, the art historian Rosalind Krauss claimed that ‘the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art’.

 ‘By “discovering” the grid’, Krauss continues, ‘cubism, de Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich … landed in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before. Which is to say, they landed in the present, and everything else was declared to be the past’."