Agnes Martin – Transcultural Translations

The work of Agnes Martin has frequently been associated with East Asian philosophies. Particularly highlighting the oeuvre of this US artist, Mona Schieren presents comprehensive research on the influence of Asianist aesthetics in post-1945 American art. More than just historical analysis, her study opens an entirely new perspective on Martin’s appropriation of Asianisms by focusing on transcultural translation and redefining Martin’s work beyond Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. This offers new viewpoints on the aesthetic, philosophical, and visual relationships in American postwar art and takes a nuanced approach that moves beyond generalized notions of “Zen” in the US art world. Schieren’s exploration of the intentional and specific uses of Asianist aesthetics profoundly contributes to insights in international art histories and cultural translations.

Mona Schieren (Dr.) lehrt Transkulturelle Kunstwissenschaften an der Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Ihre Forschung fokussiert transkulturelle Aushandlungsprozesse in visueller Kultur und Kunstgeschichte.

Mona Schieren’s demystifying analysis disentangles what is usually glossed merely as Zen in the work of Agnes Martin, and recovers its specific adherence to and differences from what Zen Buddhism became in the US art world: a specifically instrumentalized doctrine as responsive to the contemporaneous conditions of the American art world as it was to anything resembling Asian thought. Zen’s facility for incorporating cultural translations met Martin’s particularly needy harvest of an alternative to self-expression, and the resulting works now epitomize that classically postwar oxymoron: North American Zen.

Suzanne Hudson, Professor of Art History and Fine Arts, University of Southern California:

Mona Schieren argues for a dynamic concept of cultural transmission that seeks to describe Agnes Martin’s process of mediation and to function beyond it as an interpretive method. In this way, Agnes Martin: Transcultural Translations proves both an essential monograph on the artist and a model for how to recover the specificity of a broader period engagement with Asia – something still conspicuously rare in scholarship of American modernism.