High Formalism: The aerial view and the colour field

Laura Kurgan’s Monochrome Landscapes (2004), first exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, consists of four oblong Cibachrome prints derived from digital files sourced from the commercial Ikonos and QuickBird satellites. The prints are ostensibly flat, depthless fields of white, green, blue, and yellow, yet the captions provided explain that the sites represented are related to contested military, industrial, and cartographic practices. In Kurgan’s account of Monochrome Landscapes she explains that it is in dialogue with another work from the Whitney by abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly. This article pursues the relationship between formalist abstraction and satellite imaging in order to demonstrate how formalist strategies aimed at producing an immediate retinal response are bound up with contemporary uses of digital information and the truth claims such information can be made to substantiate.