Writing on the Wall: Brice Marden’s Chinese Work and Modernism = 書寫牆面－布萊斯•馬登的中國作品與現代主義

Brice Marden (b. 1938) began his career in the late 1960s as a "Minimalist" painter, but he soon reacted against the Western post-modernist idea of "the death of painting" and turned to Chinese calligraphy to revitalize the idea of the picture plane mounted on the wall as the most distinctive element of painterly art, an idea referring to the allover flat, non-illusionist pictorial surface which is epitomized by Jackson Pollock's mural-sized paintings (1947-1951) according to the formalist art criticism of Clement Greenberg (1 909-1994), influential in discourses and practice of American art from the 1940s until it is discredited by the late 1960s. Having journeyed from Western classical and modem art through the wall supposedly separating Eastern art, Marden was inspired by Chinese poetry and dancers depicted on the walls of the Tang period and garden rocks of Suzhou. He reinvented the modernist wall metaphor in the sense of pictorial depth and created a vision of material and spiritual transaction between East and West through rediscovery of art history. Vis-a-vis the modernist and postmodernist dogmas in regard to painting, Marden let the world in again by bringing together different pictorial cultures into the indisputable space of the picture plane.