Evolving Thinking around the Meaning of Abstract Art
Abstract expressionism, as a movement, has gone from being avant garde to contemporary — not so much, I suspect, from an increase in the general comprehension of its precepts, but in the increasing ability of technology to democratize, and reproduce reality…
Put simply: Why bother reproducing the eminently reproducible?
Environment is indispensable in interpreting the factors behind choices in art — but does that mean anything? Must meaning be deduced from anything and everything? Let’s journey together through a small selection of “meanings” and see if they help.
In Hitsuzendō
“Creativity is not the product of consciousness but rather the ‘phenomenon of life itself.’” “Creation must arise from mu-shin, the state of “no-mind,” in which thought, emotions, and expectations do not matter. Skillful Zen calligraphy is not the product of intense “practice;” rather, it is best achieved as the product of the “no-mind” state, a high level of spirituality, and a heart free of disturbances.”
See: #Asemic, #Enso, #Zen
In Secession
Reaction to academic presuppositions about the value of relationships in artistic conventions birthed a freer visual body that allowed for the interpretation of “feelings” in colour, shape, and form, pressaging the surrealists, the action painters, and the return to academic execution with a new perspective on what themes could be appropriate.
See: Art Nouveau, Dada, Blaue Reiter
In Dogon
“…Art often stems from the themes of religious symbolism, functionalism and utilitarianism, and many pieces of art are created for spiritual rather than purely creative purposes. Many African cultures emphasize the importance of ancestors as intermediaries between the living, the gods, and the supreme creator, and art is seen as a way to contact these spirits of ancestors.”
See: Cubism, Surrealism, “Primitivism”
Does environment (Culture, Geography, Language, Religion, Weather) play a role in how abstraction is defined or differentiated from representational art in the local culture, and is that different when compared among global cultures?
My Opinion
Having grown up a child of a round planet and constantly moving, I have experienced life in walled-off Berlin, foggy Vienna, quaint Alpine villages, myriad boxy American cities, chaotic Asian population centers, Brazilian cities of haves and have-nots, and between them all stretches of nature, of desert, sea, and forest.
What is the built environment then? Is it a refuge against fear, an ordering of chaos, or some new chaos that humans perceive in a way at variance with some deeper truth? With the proliferation of built environments, what does it mean to have one unbuilt? Is it accidental, or purposeful that spaces are free of mankind’s handiwork?
Each environment adds a notion to my personal proclivity to create the kind of chaos I can then add order to, something derivative of geography, or perhaps transit planning, or perhaps molecular structures? I often pose the philosophical question–why would a thing need to represent a thing, if by avoiding representing one thing, its own beauty in form should be recognized? Is my experience different in any way from that of someone born to the locale? Is my experience in Shanghai different than the one in São Paulo? Are the similarities incidental, or are we sharing a need and an expression of the same interaction with our existence when we build, decorate, and entertain?
Effect on My Artwork
I crave tension. Seeking “truth” through experimentation in shapes, angles, colours.
Trial.
Error.
…the narrative that develops visually through the “indelibility” of contact between pen and paper. I divide my time between as many places as I can afford to inhabit, but often find myself at home along the path between.
Environment is key to feeling, and I seek to create a sense of more than one environment, not only to examine what juxtaposition would look like visually, but also to create a “musical” dialogue for the eyes that avoids stagnancy and counterpoints the inherent dynamism possible in a static image.
I ask you, the beholder, to suspend preconceptions but not to reject your personal reactions.
Thicker, darker fields — lines of brutal strength; layers and after layers of water-based colour, the very powder of the pigment cloying the light, drawing in the eye to a dimensional work that, while abstract, resembles a thing.
But the resemblance is the difficulty, for, the attempt to resemble anything wasn’t intentional, but the by-product of the eye and the mind wishing to organize what they see into recognizable and categorical forms — shortcuts or registers in the semiotic language of the modern human. And exactly this is the problem — for who determines what is “there?” The artist, the viewer, or the critic? What “is” is as much a function of accident as the similar condition of having meant to convey a message and being misinterpreted.
Can anyone empathise with the feeling of being misunderstood? Is that simplistic view the very element of dynamism that keeps abstraction functioning as an artistic movement?
For me, in my art, I find that sometimes the empty spaces carry as much impact as those that have been ‘afflicted’ by my creative impulse — the ability to leave a space alone is as much a form of interaction as to manipulate it.
Check out my work on zigzagzilla.com
The reliance on form, position, and implied shape isn’t design as such, but the employment of design to dictate a feeling. It is in the line, where machination of density, colour, or direction can be used to suggest a meaning. Without defining anything, a concept can be elucidated in point — the mere act of setting one colour on another colour through any agency of the hand becomes an artifice, and by extension of the human spirit, communication.
