Ashton, Dore
Abstracting Thoughts from Abstraction

Thomas Ruff Substrat - 19 - II, 2001

Sailors plying the Mediterranean in the medieval period developed a polyglot language known as the lingua franca. Others might have found their exchange unintelligible, but they understood each other. So it is with abstraction in the visual arts. Abstraction became a viable language in the 20th century for those who were concerned with it. Rubén Darío thought that modernismo was a tower of Babel in which everyone understood each other. But only artists were concerned with modernismo really, and only artists sought to define through works the nature of abstraction. To talk abstractly about abstraction is like talking about the weather: sheer temporizing. Most artists that I have known quite simply assume abstraction means abstracting from.

The genealogy of abstraction stretches back to the ancients, of course, but it was during the 19th century that the visual artists initiated their own inquiries using the diction of the period. It was Delacroix who taught Baudelaire to stand back from a painting in order to perceive its “musicality” divorced from its subject-matter. Baudelaire understood this “musicality” to be a form of abstraction, and almost, but not quite, said so. He talked about “hieroglyphs”, and, in a later comment, declared that form was something apart: “Form is not made up of molecules.” Later in the century Matisse’s teacher, Gustave Moreau, after having noticed Delacroix’s and Baudelaire’s allusions to the “arabesque” –that is, the abstract nature of true painting- wrote in his journal:

“Art is dead when, in the composition, the reasonable combination of mind and good sense come to replace in the artist the almost purely plastic imaginative conception –in a word, the Love of the Arabesque.”

Shortly after, Gauguin flatly stated: “Art is an abstraction”.

Peter Keetman BMW Wing, 1956

In the minds of many of the early modernist painters there were degrees of abstraction. Matisse thought he was abstracting the very essence of what he saw, and had not forgotten Moreau’s lesson. In his 1908 Notes of a Painter, he echoes Delacroix and Moreau when he says: “A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it on the beholder even before he can identify the subject matter.” And when he spoke about his illustrations for Mallarmé, he said he tried to preserve “my arabesque.” The same year he published his notes, another book appeared by the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer, with the stunning title, Abstraction and Empathy. The title alone gained its young author international attention and countless translations and re-prints.

Abundant new theories from scientists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries fed into the burgeoning preoccupation with abstraction. Helmholtz’s color theories tempered the discourse of painters, and his writings on sound had a deep impact on musicians. Edgard Varèse always said it was Helmholtz’s experiments with tuning forks with their microtones that inspired him, and he thought of his works as figures in space: “I want to make beautiful parabolas.” The painted abstractions stemming from Cubism were often discussed in terms of non-Euclidean geometry (although the painters themselves usually rejected a mathematical base in explanations of their striving.) It is significant that Kandinsky, often credited with painting the first abstraction, swerved from the conventional path, according to his own account, when he discovered the “disintegration of the atom” that, he said, struck him with an impact “comparable to that of the end of the world.” For him, who inaugurated a wholly subjective strain of abstraction, “the mighty arches of science lay shattered before me.” It was another Russian, however, whose ecstatic vision led him to envision “a world without objects”, a world of pure space, a supernal world that for him would amount to a world of “pure feeling.” Malevich sailed into the realm of purity –an idea that is surely an abstraction- without looking back. Other Russians, including Rodchenko, whose photographs from heights and depths introduced new perspectives, literally, shared in this wild adventure in which the driving ideal was purity. They envisioned new spaces that they knew would engender new forms –forms that no longer depended, as Baudelaire had said, only on molecules. (The new adventure of aviation during the early years of modernism fuelled these extravagant dreams.)

Naturally, the visual art called photography was deeply affected by the thoughts of many experimental artists who had begun their flight into aesthetic freedom as painters. In general, the history of photographic aesthetics is identical with the history of modern art, with its various approaches (its “many mansions”, as deKooning once said about Rothko’s work). One could easily transpose various thoughts about the painter into thoughts about the photographer-as-artist. A thought, for example, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s:

“The painter, whatever he is, while he is painting practices a magical theory of vision…It makes no difference if he does not paint from ‘nature’, he paints, in any case, because he has seen, because the world has at least once emblazoned in him the ciphers of the visible…”

Jason Salavon Every Playboy Centerfold, 1970s (normalized), 2002

In practical terms, a slight modification is required here. When we look through the lens of a camera, we are always looking at something. The photographer more than the painter is always abstracting from, and yet, he abstracts ciphers of the visible that he has at least once experienced in the phenomenal world. Even if the photographer tells himself he is merely recording reality, he, like Malevich, Rodchenko and Lissitsky, is rooted in the modern world that had experienced, at least spiritually, the disintegration of phenomenal thingness.

No one explored the myriad paths to abstraction in photography with more exuberance than Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, whose contribution to the history of abstraction in photography is still not sufficiently honored. Moholy’s mind was spacious. The two areas he thought deeply about were the nature of space and the role of light –both fundamental in photographic theory. When the Bauhaus published his essay, The New Vision in 1928, it became a seminal text for the analysis of photographic arts. His discussion of space included a list of more than fifty kinds of space, ranging from crystalline and isotropic to n-dimensional. Much later, after he had instituted a new Bauhaus in Chicago, Moholy wrote Abstract of an Artist, in 1944, in which he spoke of his painting with light –that is, his “photograms”- as crucial to his life’s work:

“My photographic experiments, especially the photograms, helped to convince me that even the complete mechanization of techniques may not constitute a menace to its essential creativeness. Compared to the process of creation, problems of execution are important only so far as the technique adopted –whether manual or mechanical- must be mastered.”

Moholy’s spirit at the New Bauhaus was surely helpful to the American photographer, Aaron Siskind, who startled viewers with his “abstract” photographs of walls, graffiti, stones and defaced billboards, during the 1950s. Siskind’s apprenticeship as a documentary photographer made him realize that “special meaning was not in the pictures but in the subject.” Later he declared, “I regard the photograph as a new object to be contemplated for its own sake.” His evolution was in many ways the same as the painters with whom he was associated (he, from the social realism of Depression photography to abstraction, and they from the social realism of the Depression in painting, to abstraction). It is of some interest that Siskind did a series of abstract photographs in homage to Franz Kline, a painter whose works were constantly misread, to his great irritation, as metaphors for urban structures. For him, as for Siskind, creating an image has to be, as Siskind said, “for its own meaning and its own beauty.”

One of the most acute commentators on the arts of film and still photography is Rudolph Arnheim, who from his youth in the 1920s to the present has studied perception as it is modified by the camera eye. He noticed that the experimental arts of the 20th century were primed by an obsession with space. “The new explicit attention to space relates throughout directly to the displacement of art toward abstraction.” Space for the modern artist became an “arena of forces by which things interact.” Arnheim sees the development of photography as comparable to any other visual art, since it shares the “age-old problem of how to represent a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface.” In an essay written around 1992, Arnheim offers a liberal interpretation of the meaning offered by contemporary photographers. He talks of “that optical compression so easily achieved by the lens” as a means toward a complete redefinition of spatial relations.

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