One of the many achievements of the 2004 exhibition, ‘A Minimal Future? Art As Object, 1958-1968’ in Los Angeles, was to give some prominence to John Chamberlain’s ‘Rock and Roller’ paintings from the mid 1960’s. Named after performers of the time from the Beach Boys to the Shangri-Las, Chamberlain made over fifty of them between 1963 and 1965. Small, flat and contemplative, they are the antithesis of the monumental welded sculptures made by assembling and spray-painting twisted and dented automobile panels for which Chamberlain is much more well known. Built up of as many as a hundred layers of transparent colour, the paintings use the medium of sprayed lacquer too, but applied to flat square panels of masonite or formica to form variations on a square grid pattern, with a simplicity of form that is in direct contrast to the richness, subtlety and depth of their colour.

Several aspects of these paintings are significant to my response to Richard Caldicott’s latest work, and all have to do with repetition and its capacity to generate difference: their repeated grid structure; their serial production, and their manipulation of multiple transparent layers to create translucent blocks of colour. “What would life be like if there was no repetition?” asked the 19th century philosopher Kierkegaard, and subsequently the productive relationship of repetition and difference has itself repeatedly occurred as an important field of exploration for many practices rooted in modernity and modernism. That it continues to offer rich potential is evidenced in the endlessly subtle play of repetition and difference in Caldicott’s work.

In writing previously about Caldicott, I have emphasised his work’s relationship with architectural and musical structures deriving from the values of modernism as much as its connection with painting. My reading of the Untitled Constructions of 2003, first shown in 2004, for instance was primarily through architectural references. This stems in part from my insistence on the status of his works as ‘objects’ rather than ‘pictures’. This gives them a direct relationship to other objects in the world, and a concomitant connection to the utopian aspirations and social values of modernism as a model for life rather than merely to the formal and self-referential aesthetic ‘style’ of modern art. Such points of reference, both for the artist in making the work and for an audience in engaging with it, remain in my view profoundly significant. Caldicott’s current preoccupation with the sound world of contemporary musicians and sound artists using digital technologies to extend this tradition like Taylor Deupree, Richard Chartier (who speaks of decisive forms slowly shifting and evolving), Alva Noto/Carsten Nicolai (who describes looping transformations within the space of precise structures) and Steve Roden (who aims for a rigidity that still leaves space for intuitive decisions) is evidence for this. The emphasis in such work on combining repetition with minute change and layering subtle new intersections into patterns of stillness and subtle movement can clearly be seen as central to Caldicott’s concerns.

In looking at his latest work though, particularly from the perspective of its exploitation of the potential of repetition, it is difficult not to refer to aspects of modern art, and specifically painting, more strongly than to these other aspects of cultural production. Much, contemporary painting increasingly itself looks back to aspects of the formalism and geometrical rigour of its modernist antecedents; in the work of Jens Wolf, Tomma Abts, Katja Strunz and Terry Haggerty for example and their obvious debt to artists like Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Blinky Palermo, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and others of their generation.

Repetition is important both within the work itself and in the work’s repeating echo of the tradition of repetition in art making. “If a thing is worth doing once, it’s worth doing over and over again, exploring it, probing it…”, observed Mark Rothko. And Jasper Johns’ frequently quoted instructions to himself: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it”, can now be seen as an immediate precursor to the ubiquitous presence and most explicit manifestation of repetition as a strategy for art making in the late-modernist moment of Minimalism in the 1960’s. “One thing after another”, was Donald Judd’s deceptively simple take on the work and working processes of this period; and Carl Andre built a substantial career on his belief, repeating Rothko’s words almost exactly, that, “if a thing is worth doing once, it’s worth doing again and again”. Yet more evidence of the centrality of strategies of repetition in this period might be found in Robert Morris’s “continuous project altered daily”, and Mel Bochner’s use of the phrase, “the serial attitude”.

Though not necessarily in Bochner’s sense, Caldicott is an archetypal adopter of a ‘serial attitude’. All of his works, those represented here and all their predecessors, have been made in series: successively evolving works linked by common and repeated elements and collectively identified by some kind of overall categorisation and series title. Primarily, as here, the central characteristic of each of these series is of geometric elements serially transformed through a kind of ‘slippage’ inherent in their sophisticated and progressive regrouping, rearrangement or reorganisation; and the sequential unfolding of sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic changes in their chromatic range and the intervals between them. (Incidentally, such terminology suggests why musical analogies come so readily to mind: the infinite variety of melodic and rhythmic invention that the best jazz musicians can extract from the multiple repetition of a defined chord sequence, for example. )

The nature of the viewer’s encounter with serial art works like these adds another dimension to the inter-relationship of the individual components of this kind of sequential production through the experience of seeing them, even if only peripherally, ‘all-at-once’ in the simultaneous context of their installation in a gallery space. This experience might be seen to mirror the relationship between the elements within each separate work in the overall relationship between the individual works in a series.

There are, as Deleuze has identified in a philosophical context, not one but many registers of repetition. The more or less subtle variations within the repetitions of rectilinear, grid-structured or otherwise geometrically organised abstract paintings are often significantly dependent upon differences of surface. But in the unattenuated surface of a photographic print, no such textural variation is possible. And photography is in and of itself a serial, multiple process, so a further register or dimension of the repetition that is particular to Caldicott’s work is inherent in this, its means of production. Another layer of complexity is added of course when the photographic printing process is a digital one: the pixel-by-pixel matrix of one/zero, on/off that determines it is fundamentally and exclusively repetitive. Barnett Newman always insisted that ‘what the artists makes’ is colour. Denied the subtleties of surface open to painters (even ones whose surfaces are as expansively flat as Newman’s), Caldicott’s endless search for the possibilities of infinite difference within prescribed structural repetitions can rely only on precisely that ‘making’ of colour, together with the constant manipulation of the structural pattern that contains it.

In considering these procedural limitations on Caldicott’s process for exploring variation, colour and geometric structure, the first can be seen to be primarily informed by the interaction of the artist’s aesthetic judgement with a particular technological process (the manipulation of light through photography and its printing processes); the second by the interaction of that same judgement with a particular manual process (the largely intuitive manipulation and assemblage of the material blocks of colour that are photographed). There is a performative aspect to these strategies that embodies yet another register of repetition. Construction, deconstruction and reconstruction; overlaying, separation and adjustment; shifting, fixing and revision: all of these repetitive actions are endlessly multiplied in the constant generation of serial difference and of difference within series. Together they figure a constructive process of repetition as performance in the act of making the work. In this way an index of human agency and physical action remains present in work that might otherwise be doubly disembodied by its structural formality and the distancing effect of its technical (re)production.

Repetition, in a culture of privileging the ‘original’, might be thought to be an unpromising route to generating the new. But, “rather than constraining difference, repetition allows for maximum difference, exacerbating, even, the multiplication of variables”. Caldicott’s work is the epitome of such a creative strategy. It is simultaneously stringent and flexible, because it is based on an insistently structural approach in which endlessly nuanced and differentiated forms achieve their visual complexity precisely because of their serially consistent geometric organisation. His precarious negotiations of repetition and difference, continuity and discontinuity, regularity and irregularity, precision and imprecision, accent and interval, are precisely articulated through series made up of the constant repetition of structural procedures within which the all-over surface is made up of these essential discontinuities and endless difference. Indeed, he creates a visually seductive and engaging world animated and invigorated by the recognition of a potential for the marginal difference to be the biggest difference.


Curated by Ann Goldstein, presented at The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 14 March - 2 August 2004, and fully documented in a catalogue published jointly with MIT Press, 2004.

Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition (1843), reprinted in Fear and Trembling / Repetition, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1983 (p.132).

See Derek Horton, Seeing Through Modernism: Transparency, Absence, Construction, in Richard Caldicott, London, Hamiltons, 2004 (pp.1-3), (and online at www.richardcaldicott.co.uk)

Cited in James Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993 (p.329).

Jasper Johns, Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews (ed. Kirk Varnedoe), New York, MoMA, 1996.

Donald Judd, Specific Objects: The Complete Writings 1959-75, Halifax/New York, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design/NYU, 1975 (p.184).

Cited in David Bourdon/Barbara Rose, Carl Andre Sculpture 1959-1977, Austin, Texas, Laguna Gloria Art Museum, 1978 (p.41).

‘Continuous Project Altered Daily’ is both a Robert Morris work of 1969 and the title of his collected writings from this period, published by MIT Press in 1994.

Mel Bochner, The Serial Attitude, in Artforum, vol.6 no.4, December 1967.

The arresting, 27-chorus tenor saxophone solo by Paul Gonsalves’ in the middle of Duke Ellington’s performance of ‘Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue’ at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival is but one legendary example. John Coltrane’s lengthy and magisterial solo improvisations based on the unpromisingly banal structure of show tunes like “My Favourite Things” are another.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (1968), London, Athlone Press, 1994.

I have described Caldicott’s working process in some detail in Derek Horton, 2004, op cit, p.2.

I am indebted to Briony Fer’s insight into the significance for Blinky Palermo’s paintings (themselves another good example of the serial regrouping, rearranging and colour modulation of regular geometric elements) not of his study of modernist abstraction but of the fact that Palermo was a student in Joseph Beuys’ performance studio at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie and his understanding of Beuys’ own persistent making of paintings and drawings as part of a performative context. (See Briony Fer, The Infinite Line, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2004.

Although Rosalind Krauss acutely challenged any such assumption in her The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1985.

Briony Fer uses this phrase in her account of the work of Agnes Martin (in Briony Fer, The Infinite Line, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2004. p.56) and it can be applied very aptly to Caldicott.

< back