06 July 2012
One question that has arisen over the past few years and one that artists must begin addressing is the term abstraction. It has been my experience that the application of the term, to a variety of differing works of art, has created a great deal of confusion in relationship to its use as a principle of description, application, assessment and evaluation. Without a firm grasp of the term abstraction it can become difficult to understand what it is that artists are trying to say, what a pieces means within the context of visual language.
The nature and structure of visual language, the ability to understand, the capacity to read the work can be as daunting a task as trying to understand any type of foreign language. If aspects of the languages lexicon, the languages grammar are misunderstood or misinterpreted then the transfer of the content-text from the artist to the audience is rendered nearly impossible. As an example the idiom of color, which is an element of composition can be seen as a grammatical aspect of a painting which may lead to the question, “why is that tree blue?” The answer lies within the contextual relationship between the abstraction of interpretation of the tree and the more subjective application of the color blue. This question of meaning, in visual language, continues that inquiry addressing the translation” from conceptual language into the interpretative realm of visual perception.
Within a human cultural context the production of works of fine art have been continuing investigations into the essence and nature of constructed compositions as individual entities that are neither reliant nor dependent upon a one to one reproduction of the subject matter referred to in the work of art. These representations are not descriptions of the thing that has happened, a copy, but rather a depiction of a kind of thing that might happen, an interpretation, never intending that the interpretation should be seen as something other than a work of art.
Presented in this context it is the process of choosing specific images, colors, values and patterns of organization for the individual composition that becomes the artist’s principle creative concern, the artist’s visual language. To identify this principle of choice within their work, the compositional manipulation of the elements, such as color are used with values to underscore the distinction between the models, and the interpreted images referring to those models, stressing the fact that they are constructed forms, pigment on canvas, or perhaps drawn, graphite on paper.
The results of this procedure are compositions expressed in terms of the essential nature of works of fine art wherein the elements are used to achieve the principles of composition, unifying form to content.
If one is to be able to understand the meaning, the content-text, of a work of visual art the first thing that must be understood is that the works of art are not, nor have they ever been, intended to be confused with the subject depicted in that work of art. In works of art the artist does not want the observer to think that they are looking at the presentation of actual things existing in temporal time and space, but rather that these are interpretations, abstractions of the subject, the model. Therefore, one requirement in coming to understand the meaning of a work of art is to understand the concept of abstraction.
Abstraction(s) always make reference(s) to something other than itself. By definition abstraction is the reduction of a thing to its essential nature or essence, therefore, abstraction is always referential. Anyone that has written a major paper or prepared for this sort of discussion has, in all likely hood, been asked to submit an abstract of the paper identifying the central issues of the discussion. The abstract is not the whole of the text of the paper but a summary of the topics to be offered in the paper. In the visual arts this abstraction is often associated with the contextual relationship between representational shapes, values and colors in association with the other compositional elements and principles.
Abstraction, in the visual arts, is a process of editing, reduction and refinement in which the subject of the piece is presented in a representational form through a manipulation of the medium so the observer is remained of the subject, although the nature of the subject is reduced to the essence of its interpreted nature. Because all works of representational art are interpretations of the subject and not the subjects themselves, all works of representational art are varying types and levels of abstraction.
It has been my observation that difficulty arises when Abstraction is used as a synonym for Non-Objectivism. Non-Objectivism, is a theory and means of application in which there is no allusion to anything outside of the piece itself, it is not referential but an actuality in-and-of -itself. In such a work there are colors, values, textures, etc. however, these compositional elements and principles make reference only to themselves. They are not referential, nor reductions of anything; there are material used in presentation of the material and as such are entities unto themselves and not abstractions.
Although it is possible to impose representational shapes onto the colors and value patterns presented in non-objective pieces , the practitioners' of non-objectivism have written that if a viewer can find a representational image (shape) in their work then they have failed to achieve what they were striving for in their compositions.
Wassily Kandinsky, was of course the progenitor Non-Objective painter. In such works as Composition VII he established the rejection of representational form(s) as intrinsic to painting and established a different set of reference point for assessment and evaluation.
I am in no way trying to establish a hierarchical ordering between representational-abstraction and non-objective works of art. They are, however, very different theories of construction and presentation. These are two separate typological taxonomies and any attempt to use the criterion of one in the evaluations of the other is a fool’s arrant.
If we establish a distinguish between abstraction as referential, as a process of reducing something to its fundamental nature and essence, rather than non-referential, relating to nothing outside of itself, non-objectivism, then all of the questions about the construction, the structure of a work of art as representational-abstraction are based on the choices made in the presentation of the content-text of the work. Then the next question we must ask relates to the term illusion and my claim that works of art not illusions—the state or condition of being deceived, but are rather instances of disambiguation.
It is to this questions, illusion or disambiguation, in a work of art that I will direct the next part of this blog.
The nature and structure of visual language, the ability to understand, the capacity to read the work can be as daunting a task as trying to understand any type of foreign language. If aspects of the languages lexicon, the languages grammar are misunderstood or misinterpreted then the transfer of the content-text from the artist to the audience is rendered nearly impossible. As an example the idiom of color, which is an element of composition can be seen as a grammatical aspect of a painting which may lead to the question, “why is that tree blue?” The answer lies within the contextual relationship between the abstraction of interpretation of the tree and the more subjective application of the color blue. This question of meaning, in visual language, continues that inquiry addressing the translation” from conceptual language into the interpretative realm of visual perception.
Within a human cultural context the production of works of fine art have been continuing investigations into the essence and nature of constructed compositions as individual entities that are neither reliant nor dependent upon a one to one reproduction of the subject matter referred to in the work of art. These representations are not descriptions of the thing that has happened, a copy, but rather a depiction of a kind of thing that might happen, an interpretation, never intending that the interpretation should be seen as something other than a work of art.
Presented in this context it is the process of choosing specific images, colors, values and patterns of organization for the individual composition that becomes the artist’s principle creative concern, the artist’s visual language. To identify this principle of choice within their work, the compositional manipulation of the elements, such as color are used with values to underscore the distinction between the models, and the interpreted images referring to those models, stressing the fact that they are constructed forms, pigment on canvas, or perhaps drawn, graphite on paper.
The results of this procedure are compositions expressed in terms of the essential nature of works of fine art wherein the elements are used to achieve the principles of composition, unifying form to content.
If one is to be able to understand the meaning, the content-text, of a work of visual art the first thing that must be understood is that the works of art are not, nor have they ever been, intended to be confused with the subject depicted in that work of art. In works of art the artist does not want the observer to think that they are looking at the presentation of actual things existing in temporal time and space, but rather that these are interpretations, abstractions of the subject, the model. Therefore, one requirement in coming to understand the meaning of a work of art is to understand the concept of abstraction.
Abstraction(s) always make reference(s) to something other than itself. By definition abstraction is the reduction of a thing to its essential nature or essence, therefore, abstraction is always referential. Anyone that has written a major paper or prepared for this sort of discussion has, in all likely hood, been asked to submit an abstract of the paper identifying the central issues of the discussion. The abstract is not the whole of the text of the paper but a summary of the topics to be offered in the paper. In the visual arts this abstraction is often associated with the contextual relationship between representational shapes, values and colors in association with the other compositional elements and principles.
Abstraction, in the visual arts, is a process of editing, reduction and refinement in which the subject of the piece is presented in a representational form through a manipulation of the medium so the observer is remained of the subject, although the nature of the subject is reduced to the essence of its interpreted nature. Because all works of representational art are interpretations of the subject and not the subjects themselves, all works of representational art are varying types and levels of abstraction.
It has been my observation that difficulty arises when Abstraction is used as a synonym for Non-Objectivism. Non-Objectivism, is a theory and means of application in which there is no allusion to anything outside of the piece itself, it is not referential but an actuality in-and-of -itself. In such a work there are colors, values, textures, etc. however, these compositional elements and principles make reference only to themselves. They are not referential, nor reductions of anything; there are material used in presentation of the material and as such are entities unto themselves and not abstractions.
Although it is possible to impose representational shapes onto the colors and value patterns presented in non-objective pieces , the practitioners' of non-objectivism have written that if a viewer can find a representational image (shape) in their work then they have failed to achieve what they were striving for in their compositions.
Wassily Kandinsky, was of course the progenitor Non-Objective painter. In such works as Composition VII he established the rejection of representational form(s) as intrinsic to painting and established a different set of reference point for assessment and evaluation.
I am in no way trying to establish a hierarchical ordering between representational-abstraction and non-objective works of art. They are, however, very different theories of construction and presentation. These are two separate typological taxonomies and any attempt to use the criterion of one in the evaluations of the other is a fool’s arrant.
If we establish a distinguish between abstraction as referential, as a process of reducing something to its fundamental nature and essence, rather than non-referential, relating to nothing outside of itself, non-objectivism, then all of the questions about the construction, the structure of a work of art as representational-abstraction are based on the choices made in the presentation of the content-text of the work. Then the next question we must ask relates to the term illusion and my claim that works of art not illusions—the state or condition of being deceived, but are rather instances of disambiguation.
It is to this questions, illusion or disambiguation, in a work of art that I will direct the next part of this blog.
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