'Schema': Marlborough’s invitation to the viewers to envision the 'World as Diagram'

When spoken language fails to put across an idea in all its layers and nuances, we often find ourselves rummaging for a piece of paper to draw it instead. Visual representations such as venn diagrams, flow charts and histograms have, for long, been used to relay complex principles and concepts through simplified relationships between geometries. But before diagrams evolved enough to map the expanse of earth or assay perplexing scientific theories, they began taking form aeons ago in prehistoric times—making appearances in every early civilisation. Today, despite permeating spheres such as science, mathematics and architecture, their relationship with art is rarely talked about. How did these visual tools trace their way to the arts? How do contemporary artists use this rather pragmatic technique to unearth the complexity of the world?

Delving into this contested category in contemporary art through a carefully curated repository of diagrammatic works, the Directors of Marlborough, an art gallery based in New York, present Schema: World as Diagram. The exhibition is born out of a project proposed by the curators Raphael Rubinstein and Heather Bause Rubinstein in early 2022 and now occupies two floors of the gallery. Bringing together over 50 artists whose works engage in diagrammatic ways of thinking, the show lays an emphasis on work, majorly painting, that refuses to be pigeonholed into binaries of abstraction and figuration. "During the last decade or so, as figurative painting gained immensely in popularity, most discussions of contemporary painting remained grounded in the very tired abstract/figurative binary. It became increasingly clear to us that some of the most compelling art was neither figurative nor abstract but diagrammatic, and that no major exhibition had focused on this,” says Rubinstein.

Diagrams have a rich and long history as intrinsic tools used by human civilisation for every conceivable endeavour. But while diagrammatic designs have made frequent appearances in many artistic traditions around the globe, it was only at the beginning of the 20^th century that they began to trickle into Western art. This infiltration was spearheaded by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Hilma af Klint. Since then, numerous artists have adopted the diagrammatic syntax in their oeuvre—further playing a significant role in conceptual art, theoretically oriented abstraction and spiritual investigation. The artists featured in the exhibition turn towards the diagram for a synthesisation of highly structured and codified visual information, and a solution to the redundant binary. “For many artists, diagrams are the most comprehensive, and concise, way to address the complexity of the world. You can see this, to cite just a few examples, in Mark Lombardi’s drawings of global economic shenanigans, Guillermo Kuitca’s allegorical city plan and house plan paintings, as well as with artists such as Mark Bradford and Julie Mehretu,” the curators explain.

An array of contemporary paintings, consisting of new works by Chris Martin, Yulia Pinkusevich, Amy Sillman, and the collective Hilma’s Ghost are contextualised by historical works by artists such as Forrest Bess and Alfred Jensen. “Our definition of the diagrammatic was continually changing and expanding as we developed Schema, but ultimately we focused on how artists have depicted relations that exist outside of the artwork itself. Thus, we excluded a lot of diagrammatic-looking abstract paintings because they didn't engage with any external signifying systems," shares Rubinstein, shedding light on what qualified as a diagram for the curators. The role of diagrammatic drawing in experimental music and writing is conspicuous in work by poet Renee Gladman and composer Wadada Leo Smith alongside systemic experiments from the 1970s by Jennifer Bartlett, Joseph Beuys, and Charles Gaines.

Addressing a more global history of diagrammatic art, Schema also showcases a dot painting by Jimmy and Angie Tchooga, a group of anonymous tantric paintings, a 19^th century Jain Cosmological Diagram, and a rug from the nomadic cultures of Central Asia. With a predominant focus on painting and drawing, the exhibition space also houses a neon sculpture by Tavares Strachan and a large-scale collage by Thomas Hirschhorn from which the show takes its title. The exhibition presents a unique opportunity for the viewers to experience works by important post-war European artists such as Gianfranco Baruchello, Alan Davie, and Antoni Muntadas, as well as major works by Latin American artists, including León Ferrari, Guillermo Kuitca, and Miguel Angel Ríos.

With 50 artists and over 75 individual works, Schema’s repertoire is bound by a belief on the part of the artists that art is a form of knowledge. "Another way to put this would be to say that diagrammatic art is performative, that it does things instead of just representing them," the curators elaborate further. The carefully curated show that delves into history, nuances and the introspective, successfully presents a subtle critique of the blatant worship of beauty, sometimes at the cost of purpose. Schema calls for a greater appreciation for the continuity of visual thinking across diverse cultures and epochs, and also a fresh perspective on contemporary art that isn’t corralled by reductive binaries.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a fully illustrated book featuring over one hundred plates, as well as a new essay and commentary by Raphael Rubinstein, who examines theoreticians of the diagram from Rudolf Steiner to Gilles Deleuze. An excerpt from Rubinstein’s essay aptly expresses the ethos of the exhibition apropos of the art landscape:

Where does the border between the diagrammatic and the abstract lie? When and how does an apparently abstract painting reveal itself as diagrammatic? These questions are perhaps the central concern of Schema. In some ways, the diagrammatic as an artistic mode resembles Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as a literary genre. For Todorov, the fantastic occurs when in the course of reading a narrative one hesitates about how to interpret a seemingly supernatural event. If the event turns out to have a rational explanation, the tale becomes an example of the uncanny. If, however, the narrative explains it in terms of some supernatural occurrence, then we are in the realm of the marvellous. The fantastic prevails as long as neither one of these options is feasible. The diagrammatic can occupy a similarly undecided space.