To Abstract Or Not To Abstract

Matt says: This is the subject of the book I am almost finished reading for the Nice Talk book circle, A Fable of Art by Dore Ashton, which is about the effect that the short story Le Chef D'oeuvre Inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece) by Honore de Balzac had on the careers of Cezanne, Rilke, Picasso and Schoenberg. (The reason I'm only almost finished is because I don't know enough about Rilke or Schoenberg thus necessitating a bit of research that I haven't gotten around to yet.) Balzac, taking the cutting-edge art theories of his day to their logical extreme, suggests that pure abstraction is both a dead-end and a trap as exemplified by the tragic story of Frenhofer, the fictional master painter at the end of his career. Balzac's is the first mention in Western art of pure abstraction. I say Western art because Chinese literati painters were indulging in the scroll painting equivalent of abstract expressionism in the 1750's, 200 years before Jackson Pollock made his big "discovery". What Jackson Pollock and the Chinese "splashers of ink" did have in common though is that they routinely got drunk in order to be at the top of their form. In 2000 I worked on a series of ink drawings that required splatters and I can attest to the ease with which it is done when drunk (along with the accompanying freedom of form in the splatters themselves) as compared to the difficulty (and uptightness of the product) when sober.

As far as the basic argument is concerned, whether abstraction is a dead-end or not sort of depends on the artistic climate at the time since the art world seems to operate like a pendulum; loose and fun and free is preeminant for a while, followed by a period of rigid and uptight and serious and then back again. In the last few years there have been a number of claims that abstraction was back. These have all seemed like so many vain attempts to reinstate abstraction as the "official" style (its reign ended in the late seventies) and have generally amounted to nothing. Currently, just about everything seems to coexist simultaneously with various media, styles and techniques taking turns being touted as the "next big thing". Basically one can follow the bandwagon or follow one's heart but, either way, you're going to find yourself in fashion one moment and out the next. This is why Picasso always told younger artists who came seeking his advice that they should make sure their work straddled two completely contradictory styles.

Then again, one has to remember that all hand made art is an abstraction, even if you make your paintings or drawings resemble as closely as possible some photographic source. It could be argued that photographs are also abstractions that just happen to resemble more closely what reality looks like. There are whole subtle areas of experience that are absent from photographs; smell, sound, three-dimensionality, the fact that the sun never stops moving, etc., etc. Film begins to include some of those things but still embodies unreality given that sound can be added later, the sequence can be altered through montage to seem "more real", elements can be manipulated digitally, and on and on. But, odds are, if you were to tell a regular non-artistic person that photographs and film are abstractions they will likely look at you like you're completely nuts. At this point, photography, film and particularly video have come to represent reality to the extent that they've become surrogates for reality.