What makes Iona's writing about his Archestructures especially useful is what he has to say about the specifics of his working process, which I find extremely interesting and helpful. I've always characterised my research on the sensory 'anti-logic' of what I call 'negative syntax' as just a beginning, because there is still a great deal not known or well understood about the various ways it can operate in the production of specific works of art. What Iona tells us about his own strategies in getting the results he wants represents, as far as I am concerned, a meaningful advance in that direction, because the secifics of how he goes about working are part of the 'quasi-logical' process that most interests me as a theoretician. I say 'quasi-logical' because only a part of that 'locic' can actually be expressed in words - much of it can be expressed only through the art work itself
As far as design principles ars concerned, I think Rosalind Kraus was dead wrong when she attempted to associate either the cubism of Picasso and Braque or Mondrian's mature work with the 'logic' of an underlying grid. No such grid is there. And I see no such grid in Iona's Archestructures either. One can find it in Gris - and you can find it in a small numbner of relatively early Mondrian paintings, but he very quickly went beyond that idea. Cubism and Mondrian deal with rectilinear relations for sure, but without an underlying grid or any other underlying geometric principle, which is what makes the 'anti-logic' of their work so innovative and challenging.
Just as Mondrian was attempting to get beyond certain limitations in his 'Boogie-Woogie' paintings I see Iona also moving beyond similar limitations in exploring curvilinear relations, potentially far more complex than rectilinear relations. I find a similarly challenging approach to the negative structure of curvilinear space in many of Stella's later reliefs and sculptures, which for me are, as are the Archestructures, imbued with the spirit of cubism. When Iona goes beyond the self-imposed limitations of Mondrian and the cubists to explore the 'negative' potentials of elegantly worked and warped curvilinear space, I find his efforts not only extremely compelling, but also full of promise for the developement of an art that can take us beyond the self-conscious, self-obsorbed cynicism of postmodernism and its depressing protégé, concept art.
Victor Grauer.
