To Infinity... and Beyond!

1. What is the point of mentioning femininity of Agnes Martin's metaphysics, or her identifying with the "masculine tradition of metaphysics in Rothko and Newman?" How does this relate to the idea of infinity? What WERE Agnes Martin's metaphysics?

2. How is repetition exactly related to infinity, as demonstrated by Martin's grids? How does this pertain to art and what was so appealing about it? As a math/science person, it's difficult to think of "infinity" as something other than a numerically mind-boggling concept.

Briony Fer says that repetition in Martin's artworks, such as that on page 451 in CR, give a sense of continuum. And maybe that sense of continuum is what the concept of "infinity" is in art. The regularity of her rectangular grids stretching across seems to imply that the pattern just goes on forever even past the boundaries of the paper. This idea of regularity and repetition seems to be a big change from the gesture paintings that Pollock, and other abstract expressionism ideas which valued randomness and experimentation etc. I don't really know what about Martin's work makes it aesthetic, though, and I don't understand Fer's claim that "the grids are repetitive but never mechanical" (450). What about it makes it NOT mechanical?