Same goes for poetry

Modern Art by Craig Damrauer

Squares

The other night in my Art Appreciation class, we compared De Stijl painter Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue with Dada artist Jean Arp's Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, with class members choosing sides for a bit of a debate on the merits of the two works.




I went with the Arp, for a number of reasons. On a first-impressions, visceral, visual level, I find the Mondrian off-putting, while the Arp is soothing, calming. It just occured to me that there's something quilt-like about the Arp, although I didn't notice that during the class. We did, however, discuss how the Mondrian looks like a shower curtain, or basically any other home accessory sold by IKEA, which I guess sort of complicates its reception for a contemporary audience. The Mondrian style has been so thoroughly co-opted and replicated by designers, particularly since the 1980s, that it's difficult to conceive of it as new or challenging.

Other facets of the Arp that our side approved of are its organicness, its warmth, its balance, its muted colours, its naturalism. And of course the humour and irony of the title in contrast with those qualities. The composition of the painting has nothing to do with chance, and chance has nothing to do with law.

We determined that the Mondrian represents reason and logic, while the Arp represents emotion and intuition. From there, it's not too much of a leap to assert that the Mondrian has patriarchal overtones, making the Arp a de facto matriarchal image. That's a troublingly essentialist conclusion, but it tied into thoughts I've had over the past week since a conversation at my book club about the end of patriarchy's usefulness to the world and the urgent need for a revisioning of all our institutions in some matriarchal form. Now when I look at the Mondrian, all I can see are the failures and horrors of the age of reason and its limping demise. How's that for overloading a simple image?