Abstractism Manifesto
Abstractism Manifesto.
by Adedapo Adeniyi.
Abstractism as a term is an amalgamation of a series of concepts, namely surrealism, solipsism, psychedelia, psychology and what our idea of reality is coming together to form a genre applicable to art and as a field of study in philosophy and psychology.
In this manifesto, which is the first I’ve ever written on any subject matter, I’ll attempt to dissect abstractism, sharing the little I’ve pondered and learnt about it that you may have an idea about what it is. Treat this as the first edition of the manifesto as the more I learn and come to terms with, the more I’ll write on it.
We’ll start with the beginning, I’ve always been fascinated with abstracts, in art and general terms, defined as existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence, or denoting art that doesn’t attempt to represent external reality but uses shapes, colors and textures to achieve its effect. Both of these definitions have to deal with form, the difference being that one is defined as something that exists but is formless, and the other is using form to portray its inexistence.
The contrast between formlessness and the expression of a certain inexistence through form has constantly haunted me, that an idea that has no life could be given one through its portrayal, that if certain nonsenses stay in your mind forever, they are nothing, but the moment you make them into an image, or a poem, or a film, they exist not only to you, but to the world as well.
With the consistency of having a disturbed mind, for years the numerous thoughts and ideas of my perception of reality have stayed with me in my solace, formless except in my subconscious, but now as I attempt to give it sentience, to make it its own being, to make it into art, and tell stories with it, it has become organic and has given itself form.
Surrealism, Solipsism, Psychedelia, Psychology and Reality.
These 5 elements I will break down then bring together in cohesiveness to further explain them in relation to abstractism.
Surrealism : The art of dreams, a concept that chooses to base itself around the world of visions we’re shown in our sleep, pioneered by Andre Breton and Salvador Dali, the surrealist movement came to life in the early 1900s and became a portal for artists to visit their subconscious and bring back their visions to portray as art, to give it form. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud dedicated a large amount of his work to studying, understanding and dissecting the dreamscape. Filmmakers like Luis Bunuel and David Lynch have heavily utilized surrealism as a cinematic progression, choosing to abandon realism and instead chase the itch that draws them further into the dreamscape.
Spiraling around the absurd world of dreams, no person can say they fully understand dreams yet, a series of theories have been raised over the years, is it our mind playing magic tricks?, is it some spiritual message sent to us from God?, is it visions from our past life or alternate realities?.
We may never know, but there will always be the fascination in the uncanny nature of dreams, knowing there’s something you’ll never understand makes it particularly intriguing, the way it’s detached from our idea of a reality, the immersive nature and eeriness of it, the way that in some sense you’re aware that you’re dreaming but completely let yourself drown in it.
I see abstractism as an extension of this, the unreal nature of dreams coupled up with what our idea of dreams is, are we the formless beings that in our pursuit of form manufactured dreams?, from the beginning, I never hoped to answer questions but to raise even more, I fear that the day we stop asking questions, the day curiosity dies is the day we lose ourselves. With surrealism as the subject matter, the plots will spiral out of control into an otherworldy dissociation from what is the dreamscape and what the waking life is, and even if what you perceive as a dream is really your reality.
Solipsism : This is a philosophical concept that your mind is god and nothing is known to exist except it, everything is a projection of your psyche.
This theory progresses to state that your self is the only thing guaranteed to exist and the entire universe around revolves around you and only exists because you made it so. Fascinatingly, this topic branches out into a million other theories and questions but we will confine ourselves to the dynamics that could help further understand abstractism.
In films like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, we see a character who progressively becomes more of a god as his theater play continues growing into a grand scale until he reaches absolute power, even with his crisis and personal flaws, but then subjects himself to becoming a mere actor, compelled to follow orders from a superior being in a world of his own creation.
An artist battling an existential crisis, subconsciously becoming more aware of the world around him as it becomes more malleable, his idea of what’s real gradually falls apart to reveal that the world is in fact whatever he wills it to be. Usually unconscious to the changes around, a person will give in to the absurd nature of life, instead of seeing the amount of power, coincidences start to line up, the constant déjà vu, delusions start to feel less like so, you start to see yourself as more of the ordinary man, from a rather cosmic level, you are no longer in the universe, it is now in you.
Although a fascinating theory, I do not wholly believe in solipsism, it is something I’ve chosen to ruminate, that a film or a book could choose to focus on a character and watch him ascend and become a god, from the perspective of his psyche, a man does not simply become god, all of reality has to change, and surely it changes gradually as self awareness seeps in. As absolute power isn’t reached immediately, it will in itself become a story of the evolution of self, of the conscious being, as time, space and reality become these abstract forms that the character bends to his will.
Psychedelia : The art of, or the study of psychedelic drugs.
The art of the cerebral from an external substance, as opposed to the other theories which stemmed directly from the mind, this is an induced process.
Usually triggered by taking psychedelics such as lsd or dmt or mescaline, a person will find himself in a psychedelic trip, where all form has been distorted and you are subjected to watch time, space and reality blend into colors and sounds to give an otherworldy experience of images.
Psychologist Timothy Leary devoted his whole life to studying and understanding psychedelics, his book, The Pscyhedelic Experience, is a manual on how to take psychedelic drugs, and how they result in the emancipation of self, leading to heightened awareness and a connection to the universe, that psychedelics were the key to transcendence and would result in making an ordinary man a cosmic figure through his experiences with the drug and everything it would show and teach him.
I’d consider filmmakers like Gapar Noe and Terry Gilliam geniuses in the art of making psychedelic films, Enter The Void uses psychedelia to show death and an idea of what the after life is, Climax is a psychedelic film from an external perspective showing the inducing hysteria and horror of it and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas uses psychedelics to heighten a writer’s spiral and progressive detachment from reality.
And Philip K. Dick is probably the only writer who can articulate the effect of drugs on the psyche as well as he did in his book, A Scanner Darkly, a futurist story about a group of druggies who live together, he details their trips and their descent into insanity so well that the rotoscoped film adaptation of it by Richard Linklater is the closest we’ll come to visualizing everything that happened in that book without actually taking a drug and still feel like we just had a trip.
Drugs as a window into the formless subconscious to give it the appearance of performance art, to further tap into the soul as a religious medium, to subject a character to a psychedelic journey towards awareness, to find form, or accept the lack of it, to find meaning, or accept the absence of it, to sentence yourself to the dissolve, to shatter into formlessness and then put yourself back together as a new being of your own creation.
Psychology : Defined as the scientific study of the mind and behavior, of conscious and unconscious phenomena, of feelings and thoughts. Psychology concerns itself with the art of the psyche.
Perception and cognition, the awareness of the external world as projected to you by your mind, disregarding the conscious, we will delve into the unconscious and how it can break into the conscious. As a schizophrenic, the line between what’s real and what isn’t is rather blurred, I have developed an altered perception of the external world as my senses are invaded by sensations supposedly stemming from the unconscious, from the unknown, a superimposition of worlds, dreaming awake, haziness and dissociation are rather familiar feelings now.
In a sense this has helped further embrace theories of absurdism and existentialism, the conflict that a life without meaning is fascinating still, and that a life without meaning can be given one, the malleability of existence. We will consider hallucinations from a different light, instead of being taken as results of a faultiness in the brain, these images being fed to my eyes, we’ll instead recognize them as breaches from an alternate reality, or memories from a forgotten life, or visions of a possible future, glitches in the matrix, this adds more intrigue to just labeling them hallucinations, even though that is what they are, or rather, that is what the general public acknowledges them to be.
A 500 page book with the word ‘fuck’ being repeated over and over again shouldn’t be taken as pseudo-intellectual or pretentious, it could merely be an accurate depiction of Obsessive and Compulsive Behavior, or a silent theater play that drags on too long shouldn’t be called self indulgent, it is merely depicting the melancholy of depression, this is of course entirely subjective to the vision of the writer or director.
The abstract nature of mental illness, that several specialists for hundreds of years have tried to understand but still haven’t fully grasped, the mystery of the psychosis, that the brain, a part of the body designed to give form, to process information, to communicate can be affected to instead translate form into the formless, and a person’s entire life is changed. The intrigue that a person could become another completely given the nature of his altered brain, that altered memories, that delusion, trauma, the absence of awareness could change a person’s life entirely, that the mind determines what you see, feel, hear, smell, all that a small change in any of those functions could affect the normal perception of what the self is.
The series of things we’ll never fully comprehend about the psyche is what makes it so beautiful, and that if directly translated into art, it transports you into the mind of the character, you are no longer just an observer, you live through them, seeing the world as they see it, hearing it as they hear it, all of their emotions, delusions, experiences, dissociations, you are them, you are the form because you have subjected to the immersion.
Reality: That which is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is imaginary.
At least that’s what the standard definition is, no, we’ll define reality in subjective terms, that it is in fact different for every specific being, that reality is whatever a person wills it to be accordingly.
The projection of intent, that people see the present world as progressing into a possible utopia or regressing back in time, that the perception of the outside world varies distinctly in accordance to self, that we in fact see whatever we want to as being real. To accept that reality is in a series of ways similar to religion, that reality is in actuality its own religion, that the moment we start to believe, it becomes real to us.
Abstractism exists on a rather structured anti-realist theory, to portray a fragmented reality, a progressive awareness of a self actualized reality, and the questioning of everything a person perceives to be true, to break out of the construct and the confines of the material world, into the formless, into the abstract.
The projection of a premeditated form to the perceivable world, constructs you have control over, extending, growing, engulfing everything that was and becoming everything that is.
Nothing is real except that which we will it to be. To progress from the actualization of self, “I think therefore I am”, to the terraformation, “I think therefore everything else is”.
Think of it like a musical progression, a song progresses and progresses until it gets to the crescendo, but instead of continuing to progress until the audience has an understanding of the song, or instead of it having a proper ending, it ends at the crescendo, leaving the listeners to wonder what might have been, or if the crescendo was the ending, of even if it was just the beginning, but you see, at some point, they might even label some other part of the song as the crescendo so as to perceive the song as having a proper ending, with almost every listener having a different perception as to accepting what the song’s structure is. This will most likely be the case when abstractism is applied sonically or visually, even with the dissection of reality, or the growth towards the crescendo, leaving the audience to further ruminate on it, dissect it, give it subjectively their own form.
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And there we have the dissections of the theories that came together to form abstractism.
To change that which is formless to a state of form, and to dissect that which has form until it reaches a state of formlessness. Through dreams, drugs, psychosis, and other reality cracking concepts. Abstractism exists as a reality of fiction in fiction, to pull back the layers of the known universe into the unknown, from dreams, hallucinations into the waking life, and from the waking like into art, and from art grows the questioning of everything, then back into the subconscious where it projects itself as a dream or a trip, and so the loop continues.
Through maximally utilizing every known factor to fully connect the audience and the reader, having it be visually and sonically provoking enough to immerse them completely, the words must be rather enchanting, nothing is lost, everything must shapeshift according to the progression, that through all this, it resonates with them even more and appeals to the arthouse medium through its presentation, execution and the poetry of the visuals and the words.
Some other concepts I thought might be interesting to explore were science fiction, horror, melancholia, absurdism and Africanfuturism as mediums to experiment with abstractism.
All genres I love very much and have studied over time as they, in a sense, dictate our perception of the world, and also our progression. Science fiction choosing to tackle the idea of utopias and dystopias, a series of ‘what ifs’, a study on technology, the vast universe, and even multiverses, robots, aliens and monsters, the possibilities are endless. To understand and fully grasp the idea of horror, we must start with fear, which is to me an emotion almost as strong as love, we as humans need fear to survive, fear of the unknown, fear of the known, fear of self.
Melancholia, a representation of a deep sadness, agony, pain, stemming from the self, laying itself to rest in our souls and minds and hearts, a certain engulfing emptiness, pulling us farther under until there’s nothing left of us but a hollow vessel, it will make us into zombies. Absurdism is the theory that states that nothing makes any sense, everything is meaningless but that we can give it our own meaning, everything becoming whatever we will it to be.
Africanfuturism, a term coined by Nnedi Okorafor, a Nigerian fiction writer, in contrast to Afrofuturism, which is illustrated by Black African Americans in the diaspora, Nnedi chooses to use the term Africanfuturism because this is deepy rooted in Africa, it is full of culture and heritage, it bends the idea of what technology is by incorporating a uniqueness stemming out of the question, “What would a laser gun look like or feel like or act like if it was made in Africa”, everything is organic, the computers, the vehicles, everything feels sincere to the souls of the people, and even elements of fantasy are evident, these universes created by Africanfuturist writers, Nnedi, Tomi Adeyemi and Tade Thompson, to name a few, in their various works of fiction have shown that world building resonates with the readers and gives them access to the possibilities of a futurist Africa.
To be appreciated by the BSAM (Black Speculative Arts Movement),as genres such as Afro Surrealism, which in itself became its own genre, being built upon by directors such as Jordan Peele and Donald Glover, heralding a new generation of absurdist art from the perspective of the black man, to change our perception of the external world, and challenge convention, with stories not confined to race, but as free in itself as the expression of self.
Of course there will be films I will make, and books I will write that will purely exist as abstractist, but to experiment with the form of these other genres, sci-fi, horror, melancholia, in relation to abstractism, to build around it and in a sense, rid it of its form, that would be especially thrilling.
Abstractism exists as an expression of certain vagueness, it is non linear, it is open to the audiences, that they do as they may with it, to provoke confusion, and understanding, the questioning of the art and the self, simultaneously, to give what is perceived to be formless form, and to take that which is formless and mould into something of tangible form.
Abstractism exists outside of time, space and reality, able to sway around them however it wants to. Christopher Nolan, being a director who throughout his career made films that toyed with the idea of what time is, Japanese director, Satoshi Kon, managed to bridge the gap between what’s real and what isn’t with his mind boggling anime films.
Artists who were able to master the art of depicting fear are H.P Lovecraft, Stephen King and John Carpenter, among many others, building an ominous and eerie aura around their work, surrounding the characters in the fear they have subjected them to.
Absurdism in film has always had an eerie unfamiliar feel to it, because of how the directors chose to portray the world in which these characters live, a disturbia, it feels like an alternate earth, stories from beyond, or from the future, whatever it might be, and translating them into cinema. With directors like Yorgos Lanthimos choosing to portray disturbia as rather ambient and clean, other directors such as Harmony Korine and Lars Von Trier have chosen the grittier approach, while Darren Aronofsky portrays his idea of disturbia through the perspective of the main character, as we live through their perception of the outside world.
The beauty of melancholia in relation to abstractism being that the subconscious is at the time the most alive part of the self as everything else has subjected itself to gradual death because of the overwhelm of emotion and gradual descent into a cold nothingness, thus is becomes more and more expressed with the self being completely oblivious to it at first, but progressively realism starts to slip away, along with the self, until all that’s left is a completely different being that has in a sense transcended past the melancholy into a bridge of the real and the abstract.
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Abstractism in itself being a large bowl of a mix of all these theories and genres and concepts, projected to a rather exaggerated level of expression. To portray the evolution of self through cinema and literature, the translation to form, the translation to the formless. Existing on pre idealized concepts, projected into self actualization, the ascension to a cosmic level, to universal awareness, through the psyche, through emotions, through the soul.
On that note I have come to the conclusion, with the hope that some originality seeps into my words, that this will one day not just be treated as a manifesto to guide an artist to making an abstractist body of work, but as a study on the psychology of self, the philosophy of the universe and the realization of self and reality as a whole.
