I feel as though I’m a child coming home to his parents well after dark while writing and posting this. Apologies for the absence. This summer my mind has been consumed by mediocre semi-abstracted meditations on being flung headlong into adulthood as well as the actuality that time is inescapable. It’s been dull & excruciating, to say the absolute least. They cut down a tree next to my childhood home. The local playground changed irreparably. My sixteen year-old dog died. There’s more, but this isn’t about that. (There will be a zine about that1.) (Maybe.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about abstract art lately; the fact that art has arguably always been about preserving a moment. Handprints and light refractions. My coworker and I were talking about terrible teachers recently, and he said that a professor of his gave him a lower grade on a paper due to his own personal ideas of abstract art and its value. He argued that a lot of abstract art was “bullshit” (obviously not the wording used in his paper) and did so in a way which earned him a B+ and the professor essentially telling him “I’d give you a better grade, but you disagree with the general consensus.” While I don’t see abstract art as bullshit2, I do see the point my coworker was making and the fact that his professor was unwilling to concede that an argument was well-made simply because he disagreed with it as such.
A professor of mine referred to the practice of abstraction as ‘materiality’ rather than ‘abstract art.’ Pieces which focus upon materiality depict a process in a similar way to how pieces focused on realism depict an image. Each piece results in the evocation of a certain feeling within the viewer. I find that art is, to the artist, often about changing (perverting) the ‘normal’ way of seeing. When one is forced to see the world as shape and form and take in the individual aspects of each facet of an image before any attempt is made to represent it, they learn to see a moment in time as art itself worth preserving: That is why we have the camera, and that is what drives us to utilize the invention.
One of my last assignments before the summer began was to read and respond to critic Douglas Crimp’s writing on his own show, Pictures. The writing detailed an “aesthetic phenomenon” rather than the show itself. According to Crimp, “picture, in its verb form, can refer to a mental process as well as the production of an aesthetic object.”3
Personally, I see “picturing” as the natural extension of archiving. Crimp’s work details ‘photography’ which blurs the lines between photo and film, stop motion and live action. The theatrical aspect of these works, particularly Jack Goldstein’s (most notably The Jump), of which Crimp stated “In each of Goldstein's films, performances, photographs, and phonograph records, a psychologized temporality is instituted: foreboding, pre-monition, suspicion, anxiety. The psychological resonance of this work is not that of the subject matter of his pictures, however, but of the way those pictures are presented, staged; that is, it is a function of their structure.” The word staged in particular brings to mind the theatrical method of art which is, to put it quite simply, a series of moments.
The materials of theater and those of fine art are, quite different in presentation. That being said, I don’t want to talk about where to draw the line between performance art and theater (if there even is one) because that isn’t what interests me at this current junction. What interests me is art as an expression of a single moment.
One of the first art history lessons which stuck itself to my brain and never left was the following: the invention of the photograph changed everything. Photography erased the need for realism, opening the doors for methods of materiality (abstraction) which have complicated and then subsequently sublimated themselves in order to achieve a goal sought by many painters in the era before the photographed image. Artistic practices have settled into a sort of entropy in the most scientific sense, and the confusion surrounding defining art in the modern and contemporary eras can be seen as a signal of an approaching metaphorical equilibrium. That is to say the preservation of a moment in its entirety is, once again, the main goal of most artworks.
Anyway, a lot of people have said a lot of things much better than I can. Instead of trying and failing to get some half-baked point across, I’m going to recommend the following (free) texts: An Archival Impulse & Pictures.
So far the zine is mainly about car crashes as a metaphor for having sex as a trans person. Vroom vroom?
My concern is the fact that a lot of people pretend to enjoy abstract art. If that wasn’t the case then I wouldn’t have to stare at Mondrian socks every time I walk into a museum gift shop. Nothing against Mondrian, but I feel as though the value of materiality/abstraction comes from the fact that it came from a human, and is subsequently imperfect. His utopian later works are interesting to me because it is so clear that a human painted them with human goals. Socks and pins with simplified designs for the sake of easy printing destroy the actuality of the work.
Were this a different meditation, I would absolutely get deeper into the phrase “aesthetic object.”