There are two ways in which the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art. One is spatial, the other temporal.
In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface. In the overall regularity of its
organization, it is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree.
In the temporal dimension, the grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of the modernist century. By discovering the grid, cubism, de Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich landed in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before.
They landed in the present, and everything else was declared to be the past.
Rosalind E. Krauss, “Grids,” 1979
