Abstraction and Culture
Published in Tema Celeste, Milan, n. 35 (April/June 1992): 45-48.
Surprisingly, most of the current discussion of abstraction continues to focus on the idea of abstraction as a stylistic device or invention, borne out of artists’ formal concerns; it treats abstraction as a phenomenon whose history can still be traced as a series of stylistic changes within the language of Modernist art itself. Further, abstraction continues to be seen as a superior language of emotional expression, in which the “free” play of “pure” color, form, and gesture enable artist and viewer to commune on an emotive or spiritual “plane” beyond the narrative and representational.
Somehow, it must be said that to limit our understanding of the meaning of abstraction (or anything else) to an incantatory recital of its own formal history is a denial – a denial of the myriad connections between culture and other histories and between the artist and the world.
In thinking about this most rarefied of visual languages, it seems we intellectually retreat into the cloister of high culture; we deny that abstraction is a reflection of larger historical and cultural forces. We deny that the phenomenon of abstraction only gains meaning to the extent to which it does reflect larger forces and is embedded with their history.
In fact, as early as the 1930s, Meyer Schapiro made this perspective clear with remarkable precision. “Abstraction,” he wrote, “reflected the economic mechanization of consciousness” in our culture, our submission “to some external purpose” that was “indifferent to the individual.” But after Schapiro came Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg, whose efforts relocated abstraction in a tightly-locked garden of Kantian design where cultural power has been all too content to keep it for all these years.
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Part of this problem is that we have lost sight of abstraction’s relationship to the historical events themselves. Most importantly, there are essential distinctions to be made between prewar and postwar abstraction. To some extent, our contemporary vision of prewar abstraction as utopian, inventive, and experimental may well be true. But as Barnett Newman wrote about the postwar period:
You must realize that…we felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce World War, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of paintings that we were doing –flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello. At the same time we could not move into the situation of a pure world of unorganized shapes and forms, or color relations, a world of sensation. And I would say that for some of us, this was our moral crisis in relation to what to paint. So that we actually began, so to speak, from scratch, as if painting were not only dead but had never existed.
The moral and historical crisis to which Newman refers is essential to our understanding of what constitutes abstraction today. This crisis was as consuming to a European artist like Joseph Beuys as it was to the American Newman. We can see the prewar era as a time of historical innocence during which abstract art played out technological and cultural imperatives that governed it with seemingly unselfconscious spontaneity. In the postwar era, a reexamination of this utopian exuberance and historical innocence became imperative.
Similarly, with the War, the spiritualist yearnings and sensate hermeticism of previous abstraction came to an end. Postwar abstraction was to be dominated by one overriding response to culture: spirituality and phenomenology were supplanted by alienation as the guiding impetus behind abstraction.
An analogy can be made to Julian Jaynes’s imaginative argument in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes argued that the mode of thought that we call consciousness arose in Greece around 1000 B.C. as a result of cataclysmic volcanic activity that disrupted social patterns in the ancient Mediterranean world. Similarly, the cataclysm of World War II and invention of the Bomb at war’s end can be credited with shocking abstraction into a new arena of consciousness. (Regrettably, the materialism and anti-intellectualism that largely held sway in the 1980s has done much to erode this postwar self-consciousness and ethical imperative.)
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But how is abstraction related to larger social forces and intellectual trends in our century? In fact, abstraction in art is simply one manifestation of a universal impetus towards the concept of abstraction that has dominated twentieth-century thought. In every area of intellectual endeavor, the twentieth century has seen the idea of abstraction replace empiricism, the guiding ideology of nineteenth-century thought and culture.
Abstraction is based on the idea of the organization of discrete, specific incidents into more generalized, repeatable patterns. In the visual arts, this has led to the idea that specific visual incidents can be represented by generalized forms, which eventually free themselves from their actual phenomenological source. Abstraction in the visual arts is also based on the idea that the interrelationship between parts in a work of art is more important than their individual symbolic identity. As we will see, this emphasis on linguistic relationships is echoed in other areas of twentieth-century thought as well.
It is important to remember that the visual principles of abstraction are not confined to high-art practice, but rather extend to all aspects of our visual culture. Abstraction appears no less in commonplace popular forms than it does in the works of Kandinsky, O’Keeffe, or Kelly. Thus, if one thinks of the ubiquitous codified signs that direct travelers to baggage, toilets, or tobacco shops in the contemporary multi-lingual airport, one observes that these representations of the male or female body, a piece of luggage, or a cigarette, also employ a highly abstract language of generalized shapes that are completely removed from specific representation.
Similarly, a comparison between mid-twentieth-century comic strips like Peanuts or Felix the Cat and nineteenth-century political caricature reveals that while the nineteenth-century caricaturist exaggerated the specific empirically-observed traits of his subject (a large nose, blotchy skin, etc.), Charlie Brown or Felix are abstract representations or codified gestalts of a little boy or cat, providing only diagrammatic visual patterns. This impulse to cartoon abstraction is essential to our entire visual culture. It has advanced so far in recent years that even in the movies, which still purport to film specific events, the actual human characters have begun to mimic the codified abstract world of their cartoon cousins. (Back to the Future, Batman, and Total Recall are good examples of this phenomenon.)
Clearly, these same principles govern non-visual areas of culture, as well. As Jean Baudrillard has stated it, the model, that is to say the abstract model, takes precedence over the specific in all areas of contemporary life. Thus, in the academic world, the psychologist, the economist, or the sociologist seek to establish the existence of generalized patterns of behavior that then act as a lens through which to view specific incidents. The aberrant individual must be classified as psychopathic, sociopathic, or borderline. The economy (itself an abstraction) must be categorized as in growth or recession and its output must be measurable.
Much of the pioneering work in recognizing the impact of these notions of systematization and categorization, it should be remembered, was done by Michel Foucault. His examination of the systemization of medicine and mental disorder are crucial studies. As a simple and poignant example, one remembers that in his later work on sexuality, Foucault pointed out that even the phenomenon of the classification of sexuality (into hetero- and homosexuality, normalcy and deviance) is itself a modern phenomenon.
In the same way, modern physics and biology are also governed by a highly codified concept of the combination and breakdown of neutral abstract units (be they subatomic particles or strands of DNA). This emphasis on the linguistic structure of matter, wherein the behavior of matter can be seen as obeying grammatological laws based on the recombination of abstract elements, has its exact equivalent in the workings of abstraction in the visual arts.
The phenomenon of abstraction is reflected in technology no less than in intellectual production. Marxian thought has posited that ideology is the key to understanding consciousness; however, as technology has assumed a more and more autonomous role in affecting social structure, it seems essential that it be examined as a power to be reckoned with, a power that is equal in importance to ideology. A number of social theorists have pursued this tack, including Mumford, Giedion, Ellul, and Debord. In addition, there is today a good deal of social history being written that recognizes the effect of technological change on culture. One might mention Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s book, Enchanted Night, which is a history of artificial illumination in the nineteenth century, or Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, which examines the effects of technological change in travel and communications on the arts in the Cubist era.
In this century, technology has itself become more abstract, and it has transformed the world we live in into an abstract environment. Technology has essentially separated itself, step by step, from any relationship to what is commonly thought of as nature: the horse is replaced by the mechanical automobile, the candle by the electric light, etc. Technology has steadily become more and more autonomous, as muscle is replaced by steam, then by electricity, then by nuclear power. When we come into contact with automobiles, electric lights, air conditioning, and telephones, we enter a world in which we are no longer tied to the natural forces that these devices replace. We enter a world where technology becomes autonomous from nature, and our environment itself becomes abstract, both visually and physically.
In addition, the rapid changes made in travel and communications in this century have pushed us exponentially into a world that no longer depends on “real” or “natural” time or space. We take it for granted that we can speak with someone halfway around the world or that it takes just a few hours to travel thousands of miles. Such disjunctions in space and time have also created a world that is both highly malleable and free from natural referents.
If we examine the daily life of a middle class person in the United States or Europe, we get a picture of an existence of extraordinary hermeticism. People live in sealed houses or condos in highly controlled landscapes. They travel in the sealed environment of the automobile along the abstract pathway of the highway to equally artificial office parks and shopping malls. When one speaks of abstract art, it is essential to remember that it is only a reflection of a physical environment that has also become essentially abstract.
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Whenever Andy Warhol spoke about death, or sex, or any other troubling emotional situation, he would say, “it’s so abstract.” While the history of postwar abstraction reflects these intellectual and technological changes, abstract art has by no means constituted simply their chronicling or representation. Rather, postwar abstraction is characterized by a certain emotional refusal brought out by alienation. If postwar abstraction chronicles anything, it is the emotional blankness, emptiness, and numbness of an abstract world where social relations have become as untethered as technology has.
In her important work on suburbia, The Moral Order of a Suburb, M.P. Baumgartner has written that we live in a world of “moral minimalism” and of “weak bonds,” where people would rather leave a situation than face social confrontation, where families change houses so that each member can have his or her own separate room and avoid contact with one another. At the same time, we live in a world where the brutal yet unreal effects of commodification have intensified rather than lessened, where status is determined by one’s ability to attract dollars, and abstract economic changes can instantly shatter the imagined security of the individual.
Thus, abstraction really has nothing to do with aesthetic concerns, nor can it be formally characterized by the use of specific shapes, techniques, or configurations. A Car Crash by Warhol, a Joke by Prince, or a Filler by Vaisman – all reflect the same empty anguish that characterized the work of Rothko and de Kooning, that continued in the stoic hermeticism of early Stella or Ryman, or in paintings like No by Johns, and in the seriocomic meditations of Nauman or Smithson. Abstract art is simply the reality of the abstract world.