Art, abstract

« without any optical interference, the figures have become enigmatic new realities inhabiting an equally unnaturalspace.

This contrasts with the effect in Analytic Cubism of normal objects seen through a radically fractured lens.Another of the many currents of schematic abstraction is generally known as lyrical or expressionist and isrepresented by various works of Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee and others.

Objects and space are dematerializedby blurred and calligraphically naive transforms of the Cubist schemata just cited, and by a dispersal of emphasisover the entire picture plane.

Colour is typically dramatic or evocative.

4 Nonfigurative or nonobjective abstraction Preliminary steps towards nonfigurative abstraction are discernible in forms of schematizing abstraction, notably in the works of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, but it seems best to define the categoryindependently of this lineage and of the implication of a higher aspiration that may cling to it.

(For the same reason'pure' is best avoided, as is 'impure' for schematizing abstraction.) The key concept is that of a design whichconveys no implication of actual (physical or 'tactile') space, though it is optional how strictly one applies thiscriterion.

In no case are figure-ground distinctions excluded, any more than they are in abstract decorative designs.It is enough that depth cues be too faint, too fragmentary, too flagrantly inconsistent, or too dispersed for theimage as a whole to convey the sense of any conceivable three-dimensional space.

'Figures' in the weak sense arewoven or soaked into the ground, or fused to its surface like letters on a page; or the ground may press so closelyupon the figures or switch relations with them so extensively that the continuity, uniformity and ubiquity necessaryto accommodate physical contents is implicitly denied.

The depth relations suggested by the parts of the designtaken in isolation thereby collapse into mere appearances, though they remain vital to the aesthetic effect.

Thisaccords with the description by Greenberg and Fried of the pictorial space in nonfigurative abstractions as nottactile, but optical, indeterminate, or virtual - in a sense doubly illusionistic.

Kendall Walton ( 1990 ) proposed an alternative explanation of the figurative-nonfigurative distinction.

On this view a nonfigurative Suprematistcomposition by Malevich represents the coloured patches that are part of the design itself fictionally standing inthree-dimensional relations to each other.

Were the design figurative, the patches would represent fictive three-dimensional forms, for example, ordinary physical objects, as standing in comparable relations.

Whatever the properanalysis, it seems plain that the appeal of most nonfigurative abstractions depends significantly on the viewer'ssusceptibility to spatial and more specifically pictorial ways of seeing.

Under normal (if not always optimal) viewingconditions Mondrian's grids evoke lattices, windows, partitions or street patterns as if, or almost as if, 'seen' in thesense proper to representations.

Similarly Helen Frankenthaler's works often evoke cloud and landscape forms.

Eventhe Arthur Danto 'push-pull' tensions in works by Hans Hofmann and the titanic dimensions of Franz Kline's motifscapitalize on the involuntary exertion of the perceptual energies typically brought to bear on ordinary spatialpresentations.

The mystery felt to inhere in the more potent nonfigurative abstractions derives largely from theprofusion of such subliminal underground connections, which trigger responses even when viewers are discouragedfrom making a literally representational reading.

Possibly even the appeal of Ellsworth Kelly's hard-edged colour-blocks and Agnes Martin's misty stripes devolves in part from the challenge they pose to the space-obsessed visualsystem.

Closely related to the preceding is the dialectic of image and support stressed by formalist analysts such asGreenberg and Fried.

For instance, recognizing that traditional art often seeks to make the support 'disappear' infavour of the illusory image (whereas in the ordinary, nonpictorial experience of a surface the percipient seeks toresolve perceptual flux and obtain a firm grasp of the objective reality) abstract artists have often sought toreverse priorities or play with tensions.

Thus drips and slashing brushstrokes are intended to bring the surface tothe fore, leaving only fleeting suggestions of images; and colour is poured directly on to unsized, unprimed canvasto bond image to fabric and evade the normal dichotomy of drawn edge and coloured area.

Likewise solid 'op art'designs dissolve into fluctuating afterimages or visual squirm in the viewer's perceptual field, even when oneattempts to see the surface merely as surface.

Formalists regard the exploration of such paradoxes and inversionsas a prime aim of nonfigurative abstraction.

Others place greater weight upon the externally referential intellectualand expressive content which supposedly becomes available through the unsettling of normal perceptualexpectations.

5 Intellectual and expressive values in abstract art Writers such as Arthur Danto ( 1981 ) have demonstrated how much of a worldview may be teased out of seemingly inarticulate art.

Thus the brushstrokepaintings of De Kooning or their effigies in Lichtenstein are shown to have, in context, a wondrous depth ofimplication.

Arguably the effect results from otherwise inexpressive elements acquiring magnified significance givenan initial limitation to minimal means, a long tradition of thought and feeling conveyed by figurative means, and theconviction that authenticity demands zero excess, in the 'less is more' tradition.

Where these conditions are metthe sparest of patterns can express Zen simplicity, as in the late works of Ad Reinhardt; and Eva Hesse's crumpledcylinders, ragged sheets of plastic and wires wrapped in lumps can balance finely between a buoyant absurdity andpathos.

Construed in this way, the game of viewing art can become one of sensitizing oneself to the merest or mostidiosyncratic of signifiers.

From its inception the literature of abstraction has made much of abstract works of artconveying, reflecting, exploring, questioning or commenting upon scientific, semantical, aesthetic, or metaphysicalconcepts and theories.

Abstract compositions are said to be creative responses to atomic or other physicaltheories, mathematical relationships, musical forms, laws of perception and other cognitive processes, unconsciouspsychological structures, conceptual or categorial truths, or to ideas and issues relating to art itself.

Artists are saidto engage in research in these domains.

Difficulties arise, however, whenever works are presumed to do more thanallude in an unspecific way to such referents and projects.

To date, the specific content supposedly conveyed orthe specific question posed has rarely been divulged.

Mondrian, for example, repeatedly declares that art revealsand expresses 'laws of pure plastics' but he never enlightens us as to what these laws are or how we are to derivethem from works of art.

Nor do propounders of such interpretations ever raise the crucial question of whether awork misconceives or misrepresents its referent.

Such reticence obviously casts a shadow over the credibility ofthese claims.

Also, when explicit reference to intellectual content is implied by title, as it is in GeorgesVantongerloo's paintings of the 1920s and 1930s (for example, Composition 15 derived from the equation Y = ax+bx+18 , 1930), doubts arise as to what aesthetic sustenance the viewer can derive from the connectionbetween design and content.

Similarly, Josef Alber's Homage to the Square series is tied to his research into colour-. »