CALL FOR ARTISTS: Spring 2024 Exhibition

“This is an attempt,” wrote modern artist and author John D. Graham, “to define questions of art exhaustively.”

Graham’s System & Dialectics of Art, published in 1937, was a little book with an outsize impact on 20th-century American art. Out of conversations in bars and studios across Greenwich Village with artists like Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, Graham produced 129 questions about art — what it was trying to do, who it was for, the place it had in society — that made up the body of System & Dialectics. It ranged from the hard-hitting doozies (“What is beauty?”) to the oddly specific (“What is the part of the horse in art?”) to the quaintly outdated (“Why is modern art not acceptable to many people?”)

While Graham provided answers to his own queries in the original text, Madron Gallery’s Spring 2024 show, “System & Dialectics of Art,” seeks to find out what those responses might look like for artists working today. For that, we need you.

We’ve narrowed Graham’s 129 questions down to our top 20 — the ones we found to be the most compelling, that still hold resonance. In turn, we’re looking for 20 artists whose work provides some kind of answer to each of these questions. It doesn’t have to be obvious or straightforward; in fact, we encourage you to think in ways that might be surprising or oblique.

Take a look at the questions we chose below. If you think your art might pair well with one or more of them, drop us a line at info@madrongallery.com with the subject line System & Dialectics of Art. We can’t wait to hear from you.

What is the origin of a work of art?

What part does nature play in art?

What is the relationship of art to morality?

What is the relationship of art to society?

What is the value of strange, enigmatic and absurd in art?

What is magic in art?

What is the relationship of art and science?

What place has humor in art?

What is the relationship of art to direct action?

What is the part of love and sex in art?

Is painting a two-dimensional or a three-dimensional proposition?

What is tactile value?

What is method?

What is the sense of color?

What is the relationship of art to technique?

What is perspective?

What is the place of symmetry in relationship to art?

What is the difference between representative and abstract art?

What is space?

What is the language of form?