Essay included in the Whitechapel Documents of contemporary art series book “ABSTRACT” edited by Maria Lind, published and printed by Whitechapel in collaboration with MIT university press, 2013.
Here are the quotes and concepts I extracted from this text:
“One of the valuable things about it [abstract art] does more feircly than a lot of other art is to make us thing and read what others think…” p.50
“”But it is also crucially about experience and particulars” p.50
the “gritty particulars of experience” p.51
“soupy generalities” p.51 – I really like this way of describing the monotony and lumpiness of a general statement.
[concept] Abstraction is illusionism, except the visual language being recognised is different. Where illusionism uses forms familiar to the viewer from the direct world around them in a very pictorial way, abstraction uses languages like mark-making and architectural forms, a more reductive environmental language. p58
“outside the common bounds of descriptive language” p.59
“the difficulty of enforcing the ‘abstractness’ of abstraction” p.59
“The absence of resemblance allows the work to embrace a great range of intuitions barely imaginable before the work was done, and only marginally present in the artist’s conscious intention” p.59
“because the overlays and densities begin to create a sense of space or depth that is nowhere cued by perspective but is suggested by the blurring, cloud-like structure, we lose awareness of the scale of the. body as well [as the scale of the painting]” p.59
“We continually wind around something that never becomes any particular thing but itself, that has all of the complexity and energy that only IT has, and that did not exist before” p.60
“This is one of abstraction’s singular qualities, the form of enrichment and alteration of experience that expands our potential for expression and communication.” p.62
“What makes the anxiety even worse is that this is an art that, by its very nature, wilfully and knowingly flirts with absurdity and emptiness, dancing on the knife edge of nonsense, and beckoning us to come along.” p.62
Overall I found this text to have some wonderful insights in it, though I am very sick of reading about the already over celebrated white men of the 50s and 60s.
becks ireland 