Margaret Roberts, TEST3 plywood, shoe polish, locations, in Fracas1&2, Articulate January 2021

TEST3 remakes Wladyslaw Strzeminski’s 1926 painting Architectural Composition #1 (pictured left) by opening it along the line dividing its 2 shapes, leaving one visible and propped against walls of Articulate's building, the other dissolved into the likeness against which it is leaning.

The first TEST was made by Jacek Przybyszewski during the 2020 Paris lockdown using the window and interior of Pam Aitken’s Factory 49 Paris, prompting TEST2, which used the rafters, floor and interior of Articulate’s building in Sydney later in 2020. This prompted TEST3 as the third remake of the painting in this way. As well as being the third, it is also composed of three of the visible shapes, using two different sizes. Each shape leans against a different wall of the building, to emphasise the work's generalised relationship with buildings—though the positioning of each shape in TEST3 was determined by what looked right in each particular spot selected.

Each work is also a variation of each other, and extends its parent-painting’s challenge to painting’s convention of spatial autonomy that is shown in its potential for division.

Spatial autonomy was challenged by Strzeminski then, and was continued by later artists. However, it seems to me to be more of an artist's interest than being super popular with art historians. One good exception is Anne Rorimer's discusson of Blinky Palermo's late 1960s work:

After 1965 Palermo removed the restrictions of two-dimensionality, in some cases, or of rectilinearity, in others, as conditions for his painting. In this way form is freed from a dependence on a background and comes to have an existence in and of itself. The process of transformation is understood from works of 1965. Still totally two-dimensional, the Objects nonetheless circumvent the traditional picture format. With their long and narrow proportions and, in each case, their slightly irregular shape, they represent a transition from painting into object. (Anne Rorimer, BLINKY PALERMO: OBJECTS, “STOFFBILDER,” WALL PAINTINGS Artforum Nov 1978 Vol 17 No 3)

Being 'freed from a dependance on a background' does not necessarily mean the deletion of any background. It is also an acknowedgement of the 'background' of the conventional painting/artwork itself—ie the place in which the artwork is located—so that it may be more precise to say that the 'form' in a painting is freed from its conventonal separation from place. Many artists and writers are grateful to Blinky, in my case because he modified the formal conventions available for us to work with so that it is easier for other people to see that our artwork can interact wth an actual live place, not just the painted space of a form's (or image's) background. This is a big step towards communicating the recognition and value of place, something I have written about elsewhere, including in notesPOLYGON.html and notesPLACE.html.