It never is literally true that any form [in a painting] is meaningless and “says nothing.”
Every
form in the world says something. But its message often fails to reach us,
and even
if it does, full understanding is often withheld from us.
Wassily Kandinsky
By Gijsbert
Witkamp*
First
published: 30 October 2016
Roman Jakobson, the famous linguist, asked in
1964: “Why does nonobjective, nonrepresentational, abstract painting or
sculpture still meet with violent attacks, contempts, jeers, blame, bewilderment,
sometimes even prohibition, whereas calls for imitations of external reality
are rare exceptions in the perennial history of music?” (In Phonetica, 1964: 216). This is, according
to Jakobson (ibid., p. 218) because such art in a meaningful sense cannot be
resolved in “ultimate, discrete units, strictly patterned components...” and does
not consistently “exhibit a hierarchical [grammatical] structure.” “It is the
lack of these two properties that disturbs us when watching and inhibits our
perceptive and mnestic abilities.” In other words these works appear
meaningless, do not appeal to perceptive exploration by and memory engagement of the
viewer.
Jakobson, an American immigrant born Russian in
1896, is one of the founders of structural linguistics. He demonstrated that
the sounds of any language can be reduced to a small number of discrete phonetic
elements, called distinctive features; each sound (phoneme) being composed of
one or more of such features. Sounds combine into meaningful units (words and
components of words) and words combine into sentences according to syntactical
rules. Language hence is systematic and structured; and this structure exists
irrespective of the expressions we create with it; it exists independent of the
individual speaker. Language, furthermore, can only be effective as a means of
communication if there is a community of speakers of that language, and such a
community must not only share the language but also understand the context in
which verbal statements are created or to which they apply. You can tell a four
year old English speaking infant that all matter can be reduced to a small
number of elements of which the atom is the smallest quantity but this profound
truth shall not alter the understanding of the material world of the child as
it has no way of comprehending that what it has heard. This, in a nutshell, is
how the dominant human instrument of communication and thought works.
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Photo 1. Willem de Kooning in his studio, one of his abstract works in the background.
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I assume that Jacobson refers to that variety
of abstract art labeled abstract expressionism and related work lacking
figuration, e.g., paintings by Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Jackson Pollock
(1912-1956), Barnett Newman (1905-1970), Mark Rothko (1903-70), Yves Klein
(1928-1962), Franz Kline (1910-1962) or Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967). We may safely
assume that the same disapproving response prevailed at the time as regards
abstract expressionist art having primitive, rudimentary figuration; e.g., work
by Willem de Kooning and members of the Cobra group. This art was the abstract
art en vogue at the time Jacobson’s writing,
made by mature artists of his and the next generation. The common denominator of
these various abstract arts is that the works embody sensation as experienced by the artist; that such
sensation is the subject matter of the art work and the art object its visible
manifestation and concrete embodiment.
In the absence of a shared interpretive code
between the provider of information and its recipient there is no way of
predicting the response by the viewer to the visual stimuli provided by artist;
and clearly in the case of abstract or “non-objective” art there is no shared
code by means of which the work of art could be interpreted. The main abstract
painters, however, in various ways tried to engage the viewer in “contemplative
perception,” the opening up of the mind to the imagery presented to their eyes.
The post WW II abstract artists tended to create very large paintings that, so
to speak, could engulf the viewer with the aim of bringing about profound
perceptual sensation and deep emotion. Many abstract artists, though, were/are
not interested in (the lack of) communication between themselves as information
providers and viewers as receivers; and certainly not if the viewers are the
public at large rather than an artistic in-crowd. They prioritize their own
sensations as “in the act of creation” without asking themselves how a viewer
would arrive at sensations similar to that of the painter. For those the notion
of communication in and by art is irrelevant; it is replaced by the notion of
sensation and self-exploration as an end in itself.
We thus arrive at one of the extremes in modern
art: an individualized art yet presented publicly by established art channels;
an art, moreover, that took centre stage in the Western modern art world during
the fifties and sixties; an art embraced as “progressive” at the time by an
artistic élite of art directors, gallery owners, museum curators, art writers and
collectors yet indeed bewildering or simply unappealing for those not in the
limelight of artistic progress. Such folks, looking at a painting by Jackson Pollock,
Willem de Kooning or Karel Appel indeed could and did exclaim, “to make such a painting
you do not have to be an artist.”
These images, to them, did not demonstrate any
skill appropriate to art; on the contrary some artists caused an outrage by the
very techniques they employed to create their large canvases. Pollock is best known
for his paint dripping and splashing techniques; Yves Klein for painting his
nude mostly female models blue who would press their painted bodies against the
canvas producing some sort of monochrome mono print.
De Kooning, Karel Appel and other members of
the Cobra Group sought a manner of rudimentary figuration (“gestural
abstraction”), not unlike that of a four year old equipped with big brushes and
cans of paint. Most work was rejected because it, from the uninitiated viewer’s
point of view, literally did not make any sense. Lacking a sign function in any
conventional or natural manner, the paintings were not experienced as
meaningful images (as in Pollock, Kline, Barnett or Rothko). Indeed, if one is oblivious
of the exclusive fine art context in
which these artists operated, a Pollock drip painting easily could be taken for
a bill board advertising the very paints he used to drip with, Newman’s huge
geometrical monochrome planes a suitable mural background in a post-modernistic
pizzeria, Appel’s rudimentary figurations a blown up demonstration of creative
activity in a progressive infant nursery and De Kooning’s female series an
example of psychiatric therapy by art.
(I know very well that it is cheap to joke
about abstract art – no matter how expensive that art might be. It just
illustrates how far removed such art is from the art world of the uninitiated
viewer).
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| Photo 2. Jackson Pollock. Number one. 1949, enamel and metal paints on canvas, 259 x 160 cm. |
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Photo 3. Yves Klein at work and some of his productions.
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Photo 4. Willem de Kooning. Woman and bicycle (detail). 1953, Oil paint.
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Ironically the major abstract expressionist
painters, the pioneers and originators, developed specific techniques serving
the visual effects they were after – they knew that, in the absence of any
referential imagery, the attention of the viewer had to be caught by perceptual
qualities of the painted surface.
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Photo 5: Mark Rothko. Black in Deep Red. 1957, 136.5 x 176 cm, oil paint.
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Rothko, for example, developed a sophisticated
painting technique in which colours were applied in multiple thin layers (somewhat
like in conventional oil painting) so as to create a compelling visual sensation,
Yves Klein invented a technique that made his monochrome blues (pure
ultramarine pigment) as blue as blue can be by avoiding its envelopment by a
binder and Pollock’s paint dripping and splashing work is the product of a
deliberate technology that included tools for dripping, a horizontal position
of the canvas and the use of alkyd household paints (because of their liquidity
and perhaps their drying speed). Newman invented the so-called zip, a small
band of colour as a separator (“marker”) placed between the large vertical
monochrome planes of which most of his paintings are composed. All of these artists
had a predilection for large or very large works; works that could and should
fill the entire field of vision, leaving no space for sensation other than that
evoked by the painting under observation. Many viewers, however, did not come
close enough long enough for any such singular sensory/emotive impact to arise.
They responded to the encounter with the work of art by a shrug of the shoulder
and moved on. Incidentally the response could be violent: Newman’s work at
several occasions has been attacked and damaged.
* * *
The upheaval and scandal that loudly announced the birth of post WW II abstract art & associated phenomena to the world at large obscures
the fact that the genesis of fully abstract art occurred at the beginning of the 20th
century, around 1910, almost 40 years before it resurfaced as abstract
expressionism as of the late forties. Abstract expressionism and related styles
or movements became the avant garde art
of the Western modern art world during the fifties and sixties. The first
generation of abstract art, now over hundred years old, had in it all the
elements that turned post WW II abstract art into such a spectacle.
The main founding fathers of abstract art were
Russian, Malevich and Kandinsky, and their abstract art came into being during dramatic
circumstances: WW I (1914-1918) and the communist revolution in what was to
become the Soviet Union.
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Photo 6. Kazimir Malevich.
Black Square. 1915, 80 x 80 cm, oil paint.
The surface crackle is caused by poor
storage, possibly in combination with usage of an oil paint having high oil
content.
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The year 1915, over a
century ago, has been heralded by some as the year of the birth of abstract art
by a painting made in that year titled “Black Square” by Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935,
a Russian of Polish descent). Malevich painted several Black Squares; the oldest apparently dates from 1913. Black Square simply is a square painted
black on a white background and the title of the painting unequivocally is the
name of the thing painted. Black Square,
unlike all fully abstract paintings has
a corresponding object in the non-imaginary material world: black squares do
exist as objects (as well as in the non-material world of concepts). But surely
that was not what Malevich had in mind: his suprematist
paintings were conceived as revolutionary, non-objective creation. He did,
remarkably, describe suprematism as the new realism in painting. Malevich said:
"By 'Suprematism' I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in
creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world
are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling."
By being non-objective (i.e., not
representational of real life scenes or material objects) art was now set free.
Malevich was first to paint a black square and present the painting as art. He
also painted the Red Square (like the
Black Square in several variants) and
White on White – a white square on a
white ground – and other paintings in similar, most elementary fashion: so
elementary that the viewer is forced to confront the issue of significant form.
What, in my view, is revolutionary in this art is not the abstraction attributed
to it – you may as well say that Black
Square is a case of minimalist realism – but the reduction of pictorial space
to its simplest modality: that of two monochrome planes. The white background serves as delineation of
the black square, emphasizing that the black square is the subject of the
painting; a painting which achieved
in the most elementary and radical manner its sign function. These minimalist paintings, going back to the
remarks by Jakobson cited above, certainly do engage memory functions, have
discrete components, can be followed or understood - but not necessarily as art
at the time because art in those days
was figurative or a play on figuration (as in cubism). These works, in their
extreme simplicity, defy the application of conventional aesthetic criteria
because there is so little to apply them to. Some sort of post-modernism avant la lettre. Indeed, translated into
present artistic reality, it might be said that Malevich was the first artist
to ask the question “What is Art” by purely pictorial means.
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was also born in
Russia. He was slightly older than Malevich and a co-pioneer of abstract art.
Kandinsky started out a career in law, but in 1897, 34 years old, moved to
Munich, Germany, to study art. Soon thereafter he established himself as an original
and influential artist. He travelled extensively and spent one year in Paris
(1906-7) where he was greatly influenced by the colourful work of les Fauves. The true artists, stated
Kandinsky, “…consciously or subconsciously, in an entirely original form,
embody the expression of their inner life…” (Richard Stratton, 1977: vii). This
was in 1911 when Kandinsky with others formed the artists group Der Blaue Reiter – the same year in
which his Über das Geistige in der Kunst was published. The English translation of
this influential book occurred in 1914 under the title The Art of Spiritual Harmony; its Dover edition of 1977 has the
preface by Stratton referred to above and is titled Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Kandinsky stayed in Germany till 1914 when he returned to Russia where he
participated in the artistic revolution that took place there simultaneously
with the social revolution. He went back to Germany in 1922 when artistic
freedom had made way for communist petty bourgeois artistic doctrine; the
soviet bureaucrats under Stalin in fact were prime examples of what it meant to
be narrow minded or simply ignorant when it came to art. Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus where he taught until its
closure by the Nazi regime. He moved to France in 1933 where he lived and
worked till his death in 1944.
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Photo 7. Wassily Kandinsky. Composition VII. 1913, oil on canvas,
200 x 300 cm.
|
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Photo 8. Wassily Kandinsky. Composition VIII. 1923, oil on canvas,
140 x 201 cm.
Kandinsky, as shown above, practiced different
strands of abstract art, the wild expressionist type and the cool formal
variety. He, like Malevich, also painted in styles that incorporated figuration
and references to the material world. Kandinsky thought art a spiritual thing,
a way to get in touch with the higher, metaphysical world; the mission of the
artist was to create “lofty emotions beyond the reach of words” (1977: 2). The
artist should be a spiritual leader bringing light into the darkness of the human
soul, he should be motivated by an inner need to make art and not by material
gain or success. He thought that art in its purest form should be
non-objective (i.e., have no objective referent or denotatum) – such art could
convey its inner meaning without distracting associations with the material,
outer world. Kandinsky compared abstract art to music which like abstract art does
not express or have an object; yet is capable of capturing one’s emotions and
connects the soul to the sublime. You can, if you want, imagine the work of
photo 8, as a musical composition in visual form and colour: indeed the
painting almost looks like a musical score now presented in a spatial rather
than a temporal relationship. We see here an interesting counterpart to
Jacobson’s statement, of an art “designed like music”, but it is doubtful whether
the association of Composition VIII with
a musical composition would be made without knowing that Kandinsky deliberately
did so. The painting of photo 7 appears “as if a story,” but a story of which
the signifiers, the perceptual aspect of the sign, have been blurred to make
way for pure sensation and emotion. When Kandinsky, in 1911, stated that
abstract art was the highest (i.e., purest) form of art by its dissociation
with the outer material world, he had not yet made the step to full
abstraction. Kandinsky, however, already was concerned about the ability of the
viewer to experience (abstract) art as he had experienced it in painting: that
is calling forth the same feelings and emotions. He was aware that art could
not fulfill its social function of
spiritual progress and guidance if its viewers had no affinity with it. Concerning the Spiritual in Art contains
a chapter titled “The Language of Form and Colour” (1977: 27 – 45). In it he
attempts “provisionally” as he himself prudently says to describe properties of
form and colour in terms of sensation, feeling tone, pictorial effect and
expression of the “inner need” that is so important to him. The overriding
objection here is that these notions lack universality; they are time and
culture bound and, in this case, inevitably, also are personal interpretations.
The formal structure of the paintings, unlike
in language, arises out of its subject matter; is motivated, as the
semioticians say, and its grammar to the extent that we can speak of one is individually
designed rather than communally shared by a distinct community of speakers. Art
writers, historians, critics and educators do, however, to some extent create a
“community of viewers,” thus making these early abstract works more
intelligible today as they were when first presented: history charged these
works with meaning and significance that they did not have at the time of their
creation save for their makers and close associates.
Malevich, and Kandinsky to some extent,
initiated an intellectual formal abstract art strain that was continued in the
Western art world. Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944), a Dutch artist working in New
York, made abstract paintings based on a few basic forms (squares, rectangles,
border lines) in a few colours applied flat, as monochromes.
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Photo 9. Piet Mondriaan. Red,
Yellow and Blue. 1930, 46 x 46 cm, oil paint.
|
Remarkably, several decades
later, Barnett Newman (1905-1970, an American immigrant of Jewish-Polish
decent) used the same basic colours as Mondriaan (and Kandinsky and Rochenko
did before Mondriaan) to make a
series of Very Large Works composed of adjacent monochrome geometric planes;
with the series Who is afraid of Red,
Yellow and Blue being one of the most famous. Barnett, like, Malevich
sought an art of the sublime. He wrote: “I hope that my painting has the impact
of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his
separateness, of his individuality.”
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| Photo 10. Barnett Newman. Who is Afraid of
Red, Yellow and Blue. One of a series of four large canvasses made during 1966-1970 |
There are other strains (“styles”) of abstract expressionist
art, less rigid than the formalism in the Malevich vein and less amorphous as
abstract expressionism in its extreme variants. Of these the work of the
American Franz Kline and the originally Latvian Rothko needs to be mentioned.
Both artists tried, in a sense, to restore or simulate the “sign-function” of
their art by creating intriguing, evocative forms and surfaces.
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Photo 11. Franz Kline. Untitled. 1955,
painting.
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Kline (1910-1962) painted mostly in black on
white, creating forms that are reminiscent of Japanese characters, Zen style if
you like, or, as in the above reproduction, forms suggestive of real life
scenes. In this painting you can “read” a human figure with arms stretched out
forward. Rothko’s paintings by their variegated surfaces seek to rouse the
interest of the viewer by perceptual means (for example see photo 5). Again,
and unlike the singularity of Malevich’s Black
Square, meanings are read into it differently by different folks; or even
differently by the same viewer at different times or occasions. So perhaps the
merit of art such as Rothko’s simply is that of “intriguing form,” leaving it
to the viewer’s mind to expand “intriguing form” to “meaningful form” in a
personal interpretation; or perhaps, simply to take the sensory sensation in “as
if music.”
Today, more than five decades after the
publication by Jacobson, there has been extensive exposure to the abstract art
he refers to; and the responses (bewilderment &c.) as they existed at the
time when these nonrepresentational works were first put on show in leading
galleries have ceased to exist. These works, and in particular those of the
leaders and pioneers of these styles, in time did not only assume significance
in an art historical sense but also acquired certain sorts of meaning; they are
now, at least for those exposed to them not lost in a void but included in
memory and have become irreversibly an element of the modern art discourse.
One manner, and perhaps the only one, by means
of which these apparently “meaningless” art works may acquire sense in the
viewer’s mind, is by seeing them as part of a series; as a member of what in semiotics
is call a syntagm. In phonic language a syntagm is an orderly sequence, e.g.,
as in the meaningful elements that constitute a sentence. In visual
communication the significant elements of a “visual statement” (e.g., a
painting) have a spatial rather than a time-sequential relation; but if you
present art works in a slide show you create a sequence of events in time, each
painting having a provisional sign function. It’s worth a try and easy to do.
Google Rothko up – he himself had noted the importance of seeing his work not
in isolation but as a series. Within a few minutes you start to grasp some of
his manner of working: you become aware of his style, the similarity or redundancy in his abstract oeuvre, its
patterning: the beginning of some sort of understanding. It may not do much for
you in terms of arriving at the pictorial semantics or meaning as Rothko intended but you get at least
a glimpse of the underlying sense of his work. Same for Pollock. His work at
first glance and in isolation seems to be dominated by random blots and drops
and splashes of paint. Seeing a number of these in sequence makes you realize
that the apparently random application of paint actually is guided, usually by
a skeleton like frame in white line or other colour; rendering perhaps some
credence to Pollock saying that “his paintings are a statement.”
Statements, in order to be intelligible, must
be properly structured in the medium of their construction and the statement
must be about something. And that is of course the tricky part: What IS Pollock
trying to say? Or is he just trying to invoke sensation and emotion, perhaps of
the sublime kind (as in Kandinsky, Malevich, or Barnett), or of deep human
emotions as in Rothko?
You may ask whether an informed art audience
today equipped with art historical hindsight succeeds in making sense out of
abstract art as individual art works (other than as momento mori of art
movements far removed from the present avant
garde). Today these monumental abstract works are a testimony of one of the
extreme possibilities in art: that of an image-presence without any reference
to objects in our external material reality; except to themselves as a
class of objects. As stated above, the producers of these works assigned
“meaning” to them in particular as embodiment of emotional sensation; however
these remained personal experiences rather than common responses.
The abstract arts, in its formalistic (Malevich,
Mondriaan, Newman, Reinhardt), organic (Rothko, Kline) and expressionistic
variants (Kandinsky, Pollock, Kline, Rothko, De Kooning, Cobra Group) have
continued to exist long after they were presented at the time as the frontier
of artistic innovation. Notably post WW II abstract expressionism appealed to
many painters often a generation following the pioneers, not only in the
Western art world but all over the globe. Many of these followers simply were
epigones, imitators attempting to ride on the success of the innovative
masters, others strived for their own variety or style with integrity. You may
ask how come an art style that received so little public appreciation continued
to exist long after its innovative impact had died out and was taken over by
other, equally fashionable trends or movements.
The answer I believe is twofold. First, Western
modern art as of the beginning of the previous century puts a premium on
innovation and originality – of any kind. Originality at times seems to be an
objective by itself. That accounts for the importance given art historically to
the pioneers/genuine innovators in the wider Western art world. It also
accounts for the senseless extravaganza that turned post WO II art into
controversy and disrepute. Kandinsky, prophetically, wrote over 100 years ago
(1977: 8):
In the search for method the artist still goes further. Art becomes so specialized as to be comprehensible only to artists, and they complain bitterly of public indifference to their work. For since the artist in such times [i.e. materialistic, lacking spirituality] has no need to say much, but only to be notorious for some small originality and consequently [is] lauded by a small group of patrons and connoisseurs (which incidentally is also a very profitable business for him), there arise a crowd of gifted and skillful painters, so easy does the conquest of art appear. In each artistic circle are thousands of such artists, of whom the majority seek only for some new technical manner, and who produce millions of works of art without enthusiasm, with cold hearts and souls asleep.
No need to say that “this wild hunt for
notoriety,” as Kandinsky calls it, continues today and demonstrates an amazing
lack of direction by artists and art institutions alike.
Second, the importance of original art has
taken on a specific form by the economics of (modern) art. The work of the few
artists that made it to the limelight of the art scene and whose work has been
accepted and promoted by its major actors and institutions, the prestigious galleries,
museums, writers, critics, have for decades become collector’s items of great
value – we are talking about tens of millions of dollars for a single
painting. The producers of these paintings have become legendary figures and
their works, now enshrined in a mythology invented by gallery owners, curators
and art writers, have become an investment and a substantial one at that. Indeed these paintings can be compared to company shares whose value is determined by the stock exchange. It is
of great importance to those owning these works – private collectors,
galleries, large companies and art museums - that the monetary value of the art
they acquired is guaranteed and the merit of these works is not disputed.
* * *
Concluding Remarks
1. Several abstract artists emphasize the
importance abstract art may have as self-exploration or discovery for the
artist. Sure, naturally the creation of each work of art involves exploration
be it into one’s self or in any case in the limitless world of the imagination.
It is, however, presumptuous to assume that what is important for the artist (as
personal sensation, as experience, as psycho-therapy, as psychological trip) is
equally important to the viewer or the society at large and it simply is wrong
to assume that a viewer even when part of the same art world shall have
experiences in viewing similar to those of the creating artist.
2. All abstract artists insist on the primacy
of emotion and feeling in the experience in making their art. And these feeling
and emotions are the essence of their art. In the absence of “objective
representation or association” the origin of these emotions and feeling are
embedded in the very art work itself. When abstract art came into being,
roughly during 1910-15, this was innovative indeed; an original contribution by
the pioneering artists to the
development of art – and, again according to Kandinsky, that is the lasting
element of “the inner need” that should drive the true artist. Today, having
gone through this phase, the limitations of abstract art stand out more clearly
and these limitations are immanent in its very non-representativeness – or,
more precisely, its lack of figurative association (“mnestic appeal"). Today we
simply look at abstract art as one of the many modalities in which art can be
made; but I think few would hold on to its privileged “pure” position as
envisaged by Malevich and Kandinsky. The freedom the artist has gained is one
of choice, from hyper-realism, narrative, conceptual to abstract or any other manner
of art he or she might think of. More important than style is that art is
genuine, driven by the “inner need” of the artist honestly striving to make
imagery that makes sense not only to the artist but to the viewers as well.
3. The
introduction of abstract art indeed liberated the visual arts from its bond of
representing something outside or beyond itself; it opened up the road to pure pictorial
freedom – at a price. Art, as an autonomous domain of human activity, an
activity defining its functionality first and foremost in and by itself, almost
inevitably is for the happy, or perhaps not so happy, few; for an in-crowd but
no longer for the larger population. This in itself is nothing new, innovative
art generally is appreciated at first by an informed élite after which it
either dies out or broader circulated. What is new I think are the extravagant
happenings and presentations in galleries and museums “in the name of art” when
these events have no artistic merit and more aptly are labeled “the hunt for
notoriety,” Yves Klein’s female blues falling in the category, and the same
applied for a lot of pseudo abstract or conceptual art.
4. There is, in art writing, a confusing usage
of the terms/concept form and content; mostly expressed as form versus content. In this usage “form” is
that what we see and is objectified in the art work, “content” is that what the
art work is about. Form, so to speak, equals perception and content equals
ideas, meaning and “subject matter.” The question is whether this dichotomy
holds in art – as it does in language (language)
where form is the signifier and content or meaning the signified part of the linguistic
sign; the two components being inextricably combined into one. (Visual art in
this sense, is more like speech: the
way words are spoken adds another
layer of meaning concurrent with its verbal semantics). I don't want to go
into an obscure discussion of what “content” might mean when it comes to art but I
do want to say that in art “form” (meaning the manner in which an image is
formed, be that image purely abstract, imaginary, symbolic of a concept or
associated to material objects or scenes) always by itself constitutes an
aspect of content, a component of meaning. That is what is meant by the
autonomy of image formation. It is the internal visual logic that provides an
element of sense to abstract art – even if other associative mechanisms that render
meaning to art appear to be absent, subdued, ambiguous or dormant.
5. The idea that the artist provides a blue
print of what the viewer is to feel/experience/interpret as meaning is
abandoned, or at least is put between brackets, and is replaced by conceiving the art work open minded as a mental
space in which the signifying (of whatever kind) is done by the viewer. The
principle of “intuitive aesthetic recreation,” as Panofsky calls it (1983
: 38), can be left to the art
historian whose job it is to understand the art work as the artist intended and
to reconstruct how it was perceived at the time in the art world where it was
made and presented.
6. All
art in order to be appropriately experienced must turn on in the viewer what I
call the artistic mind set. The term is broader as related concepts like “the aesthetic attitude” or the intuitive aesthetic reconstruction of Panofsky
mentioned above. This is a specific mind set, different from ordinary pragmatic
application of our mental and motor faculties; in many ways this kind of mental
activity is similar to sitting down on top of a hill to take in with an open
mind the sight of the land around it. The artistic mind set in art hinges on
the visual experience, most directly visual perception itself, which by
association or reflection may engage/trigger off/turn on intellectual,
emotional, sensory or memory activity in the viewer; all of this in a highly
complex and intricate manner; partly conscious partially along sub-conscious
associative pathways of the human mind. A condition, for this to happen, is
that the right button is switched on. Such switching on is facilitated by
presenting the art work in a suitable environment (as an art exhibition), by
the obvious presentation of the art work as art (as by framing it), or by
information presented before or during the viewing session. But more
fundamentally: what the viewer sees must appeal, intrigue, or entice him or
her. A major concern of the artist is to “turn on the viewer” and as described
above, the major abstract artists attempted the same. The development of the artistic mind set, including a sense of the
aesthetic, in my understanding, is the universal mission and functionality of
art.
7. All art worthy of its name, be it a simple
sketch or a large elaborate composition, embodies a concept – or a combination
of concepts. These concepts are manifested in formal aspects as perceived or
perceptible: that is the arrangement of visual elements. These concepts can be
of many different kinds – be it the “realistically representation” of a
material object or event; a free rendering of such event or object to create a
specific mood or feeling; the recombination of naturalistic form in fantastic,
imaginary realities; giving form to feeling and emotion without associative
clues to “objective reality;” by isolating, selecting and combining actual
objects and presenting them as an artistic composition; by symbolizing certain
forms to stand for specific emotions, concepts or states; by focusing of the perceptual
intricacies of the work of art as a subject by itself; or by stressing
underlying messages conveyed to the viewer; by the demonstration of exceptional
technique – and so on.
8. Kandinsky rightly says that what I call here
conceptualisation in art is informed by the personality of the artist, the
environment (time/place) where he/she works and by the general development of
the arts – what today we call the artistic discourse. In Kandinsky all three
elements are an aspect of the inner need that drives the true artist; of these
three he attributed most importance to the third: the original, genuine and
therefore lasting contribution by an artist to the art of the world of which he/she
is part.
9. Combining conceptualization in art and ways
to do so (items 8 & 9 above) constitutes The Artistic Space – a virtual reality that constitutes one of the
essential domains of human life, a domain that combines in it visual creation,
perception and presentation with and about feeling, emotionality and symbolization; and
in doing so presents us with one of the instruments to make sense about our
world and ourselves. This visual domain, being non-verbal, compliments that
other great domain of our mental and practical life that is dominated by
language; the space of science, philosophy, thought and practices inextricably tied
up with verbal communication
10. The last line of the Conclusion in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1977:
57) reads: “We have before us the age of conscious creation, and this new
spirit in painting is going hand in hand with the spirit of thought towards an
epoch of great spiritual leaders.” I’m not so sure we have had many of these
great spiritual leaders in art since Kandinsky wrote this over one hundred years ago.
It appears that the notion of artists being spiritual leaders had little appeal
to the great artists of the 20th century – though Kandinsky himself
no doubt was one. His understanding of art as “conscious creation,” especially of
the complex art he called a composition, surely was not heeded by many artist
working in the abstract and expressionist abstract manner – many of them
thought conscious contemplation and reflection to interfere with the
spontaneity of “expression” they were after. Action painters, including
Jackson Pollock, had to design their concept “on-the-go,” so to speak, before
the paint dried up. Much of this work suffers from conceptual poverty,
including work that derived its initial merit from its fresh looks. Now many of
such looks are not so fresh anymore, the work has aged, what was a bright white
once now is a pale yellow, and often such material decay has been accelerated
by a total abuse or ignorance of art materials. There is an eternal truth that
says that the good artist must also be an artisan in his craft – without skill
there is no art (Gregory Bateson, (1973:117).
Note
* The author is an artist and cultural anthropologist
working in Zambia. He is the founding director of the Choma Museum and Crafts
Centre and organized several exhibitions about art in Zambia. He publishes on
The Net; i.e., Art in Zambia Blog, the Z-factor Art Site, Z-texts
on line and www.academia.edu.
References
Bateson,
Gregory. Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art. In: Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 1973.
Granada Publishing Ltd, Paladin book.
Jakobson, Roman.
1964. On Visual and Auditory Signs. In: Semiotica 11, p. 216-220.
Kandinsky, Wassily.
1977 (reprint of 1914 English original). Concerning
the Spiritual in Art. New York, Dover Publications Inc.
Panowsky, Erwin. 1983. Meaning in the Visual Arts. Peregrine book.
Stratton, Richard. Preface to the Dover Edition. In: Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1977. New York Dover Publication.
Stratton, Richard. Preface to the Dover Edition. In: Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1977. New York Dover Publication.
I have consulted the Wikipedia entries on Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondriaan, Willem de Kooning, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Kline. The Museum of Modern Art at New York (MOMA) published on YouTube video’s demonstrating the painting techniques of most abstract painters mentioned in this text. Google images provided the material for all the visual illustrations – if you want to see more just do the regular searching and you’ll be presented an entire library of abstract imagery.
