THE ART OF ABSTRACTION (and why your 5-year-old could not have done that*) (2018)
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“The aim of painting is not to reflect history, because this can be found in books. We have a higher conception. Through it, the artist expresses his inner vision."
Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
Variously called nonfigurative art, nonrepresentational art and nonobjective art but more commonly identified as abstract art or abstract expressionism, there are few defining characteristics shared by all forms of abstract art namely the departure from presenting reality as it is and the absence of recognizable forms. The two basic variations of abstract art are the geometric and the organic/lyrical. The first refers to an approach that emphasizes geometric shapes in basic colors while the second refers to an approach that employ strokes of paints in spontaneous and ‘expressive’ ways. Abstract art can be ‘busy’ or ‘quiet’ in terms of what is presented on canvas depending on an artist’s temperament or outlook.
● SO, WHAT IS THE ‘PROBLEM’ WITH THIS ABSTRACT ART?
The chief complaint when viewing an abstract piece of work is that it makes no sense as there are no clear recognizable forms or images that viewers can make out. Secondly, the narrative aspect is almost or completely missing. What the viewers see are just patches, strokes and messy daubs of colours or elementary shapes that do not depict a human form, a scenery, an event or story. As humans, it is natural for us to try to make sense of what we are seeing so that we could formulate appropriate responses or take actions befitting the situation or context. It is unsurprising that many are lost for words or struggle to offer intelligent takes on otherwise unintelligible scrawls, scribbles, strokes and strange forms present before them. Reading the title of the work helps…sometimes. Abstract art relies more on the viewer’s own subjective interpretation or projections to arrive at an understanding that usually differs from that of the artist.
● IF ABSTRACT ART IS NONSENSE, WHY WAS IT EVEN INVENTED AND PRACTICED IN THE FIRST PLACE?
The story of abstraction in art begins with the birth of ‘Modern’ art in the 1900s which saw parallel artistic developments in France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Scandinavian countries moving away from purely representational/figurative art. From 1400 to 1800, Western art, in the service of the royal, religious and mercantile classes, were dominated by Renaissance-inspired academic theories of idealized painting and high art executed in the Grand Manner. Aside from the commissioned paintings of still life, landscapes and portraiture, popular subject matters were predominantly re-enactments or re presentations of characters or scenes from past religious or historical events, legends and mythologies. It was not until the late 18th and early 19th century that Romanticism, a European phenomenon in art, architecture, literature and music, shifted the focus from conventional and patron-centred themes to the artist’s own emotions and intuitions, elevating the personal and the subjective. They developed their own theoretical basis (the word ‘Sublime’ comes to mind) and glorified the artistic ‘genius’, a non-conformist individualist who creates his own original works ‘from nothing’. The political aspects, already present in Neo Classicism from which the Romantics both borrowed and rejected, were pushed further in Social Realism where its most famous advocate, Gutave Courbert (1819-1877) informed by the anarchism of Joseph Pierre Proudhon (1809-1865), openly celebrated the common labourers and ordinary people engaged in real life daily activities as opposed to the artificiality and artifices in popular and academic art.
The social, cultural and political upheavals coupled with technological advancements and scientific breakthroughs a few centuries earlier in Europe had not only resulted in greater personal liberties, social rights and higher standards of living, it also came with its negative side effects as well. The impact on the environment were the widespread degradation and uncontrolled pollution while on personal levels, the breakdown of traditions and loosening of familial bonds. Alienation and estrangement grew from the rapid changes and increasing commercialization of city life as well as the widening gap between the haves and have-nots.
The quotidian and the vicissitudes of modern life became core subject matters for European artists.
In 1839, when practical photography was made commercially availability to the public, it became one of the chief causes that precipitated the break from representational art because it challenged and devalued the artist’s skill in reproducing reality. Beginning with the Impressionists who sought to capture the effects of light on modern life (immediacy and movement) with their freely brushed colours in short broken strokes of unmixed paints, usually direct from tubes, it led to unprecedented experiments in paint application, choices of subject matter, distortion of forms for expressive effects while using unnatural and arbitrary colours to present emotions or states of mind by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) and Henri Matisse. These avant garde artists are known to us today as the Post Impressionists.
Besides the challenges posed by photography, the exposure to non-western cultures and their arts (African, Polynesian, Micronesian, Iberian, the Orient and Native American) through trade and colonization help defined the look and feel of modern art. Mysticism of the eastern and western variety also appealed to the anti-science outlook of these bohemian and avant garde artists. In place of the impossibly well-proportionate marble-like figures and perfectly chiseled features adapted from classical Greek art that became known and admired by the world through the Romans and their Renaissance representing the triumph of logic and reason, modern artists celebrated the primitive and the primordial with their stylized tribal mask images and crude figures as metaphor for humanity’s true instincts and impulses undomesticated by ‘civilization’. From the oriental visual arts, chiefly Japanese paintings and prints called Ukiyo-e, western artists began the process of ejecting the trompe-l’oeil illusionism in western painting (made possible with the use of perspectives and chiaroscuro) by progressively collapsing the foreground and the background, with the images in the paintings formed by using only dark outlines and flat colours. The resulting ‘flatness’ of the painting plane were one of the key features of modern art. Maurice Denis (1870-1943) a member of the post-impressionist group Les Nabis, contributed to the theoretical foundations of Fauvism, Cubism and abstract art with his theories emphasizing the flatness of picture planes and the artist’s own will and power as the source of art.
“When we discovered Cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering Cubism.
We only wanted to express what was in us.”
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Between 1900 and 1911, art groups such as Le Fauve (France), Die Brucke and Die Blaue Reiter (Germany) continued the move away from representational art based on post-impressionist and expressionist tendencies. However, it was with Cubism, developed between 1907 and 1911, jointly attributed to Pablo Picasso and George Braque (1882-1963) that the idea of abstraction without reference to reality was seen possible. Influenced earlier by the works of Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin, the Cubists sought to depict the intellectual idea or form of an object, together with its relationship to its surroundings.
This is done by first analyzing an object, then breaking it apart and reassemble it back in an ‘abstracted’ form while presenting multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Unlike previous approaches to paintings where the subject matters were painted in the studios with posing models and carefully placed props, and later with the Impressionists where painting took place out in the open air to capture on the spot the subject matter in real time, the cubist presented multiple viewpoints of an object from different time and angles allowing the past to flow into the present and the present to merge into the future. They believe this allows a subject to be presented in greater context. Cubism revolutionized European painting and sculpture and were later widely adopted by the rest of the world. Art groups influenced by Cubism included Italy’s Futurists (c.1909-14), French Orphisme (c.1910-13), English Vorticists (c.1913-19), Russian Rayonists (c.1912-15) and Constructivists (c.1914-25) Dutch design group De Stijl (1917-31) and in America, Synchronism (c.1913-18) and Precisionism (1920s).
“To those that are not accustomed to it, the inner beauty appears as ugliness because humanity in general inclines to the outer and knows nothing of the inner.”
Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
Between 1910 and 1913, Munich based Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky who was also a member of Die Blaue Reiter, Paris based artists Czech painter Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957) and Frenchman Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) were acknowledged as pioneers of abstract art when they progressively purged their canvases of recognizable forms based on reality. A recent discovery also claimed that Swedish artist and mystic Hilma Af Klint (1862-1944) had arrived at pure abstraction before the others by at least a decade earlier. Among the generation of pioneers were the Russians Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) the founder of Suprematism (famous for his Suprematist Composition: White on White painting) which emphasize the supremacy of pure artistic feelings and the absolute of non-objectivity through pure basic geometric forms on white backgrounds while his contemporary and rival Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) championed the practice of art for social purposes and solving modern problems through a ‘constructivist’ approach. Named ‘Constructivism’, it was initially welcomed by communist Russia in their process of building a new and modern socialist utopia after the Russian revolution of 1917.
However, it was the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872 -1944) who like the other abstract art pioneers, were initially inspired by cubism, pushed abstraction to its logical conclusion with his famous paintings composed of vertical and horizontal grids and basic colour purged of all traces of representations. Mondrian had declared that he would abolish all forms with references to external appearances and present art as the aesthetically pure in e.g. abstract form, as the mind originally conceived it. The two visible forms of pure abstraction, fluid or lyrical and geometric or hard edge had emerged before the second world war. Its pioneers had consciously rejected centuries of representational/figurative art canon to present explicitly the emotive, conceptual and even the spiritual stripped of its physical embodiment and figurative intermediaries. This breakthrough however was not well received at all even among avant garde circles with Picasso in a conversation in 1935 dismissively said that “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all appearance of reality; there is no longer any danger, because the idea of the object left an indelible mark”1
After the great devastation of World War I where old empires crumbled, borderlines redrawn and new nations came into existence, fascistic forms of nationalistic and totalitarian ideologies emerged. It saw the resurgence of representational art as a useful propaganda tool in the service of the party and state. Modern artists whose personal and ideological outlooks that do not correspond or challenged those held by the fascists, nationalists and socialists were branded as unpatriotic, treacherous or subversive and their works denounced as corrupting, alien and degenerate. Practitioners of modern art (along with the Jews, jazz music and the Negro) were seen as the most degenerate. In his speech at the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition (Entartung Kunst) in 1937 which showcased pieces haphazardly grouped together from some 16 000 works (post-impressionist, symbolist, expressionist, abstract etc.) seized by the National Socialists (Nazi) from German art museums, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) triumphantly proclaimed that "works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the German people".2 At the same time, traditional figurative paintings in the neo classical style were presented under the banner of ‘The Great German Art Exhibition’. Figurative art was the chosen ‘German’ art form to represent the National Socialist state. While in Italy, the Futurists had the dubious honour of being the first (and only) avant garde group to enthusiastically embraced the fascism of Benito Mussolini (1922-1943). However, in the 1930s, a rival group Novecento Italiano which championed the revival of classical painting style from the great periods of Italian art in the past (between 1400 and 1500) became the official art of fascist Italy. By following the examples of Nazi Germany, modern art was condemned and suppressed because it was deemed ‘degenerate’. In the late 1930s, Socialist Russia under Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) had also began replacing the role of the Constructivists (with their cubist-futurist approach) with traditional representational art that glorified communist values and the aims of the party. Dismissing modern art as bourgeoisie decadence, Socialist Realism (not Social Realism) was the only form of art permitted to be practiced and promoted. It went on to become the official art of many communist countries (China, Vietnam, North Korea, Laos, Communist bloc of Eastern Europe, parts of Africa and South America etc).
Though the Second World War officially ended in 1945 with greater devastation and loss of lives, another kind of low-level conflict was about to begin, the Cold War between communists and capitalists’ countries. Preoccupied with the issues of existentialism, a new breed of abstract artists emerged with their highly gestural, textural and raw works. Their visceral, emotive and almost cathartic outpourings on canvas was the opposite of the more composed, measured and even cerebral approach to abstraction a few decades earlier. Though dissimilar in their methods and objectives, this new breed of abstract artists continued the age-old rage against official and popular art promoted by the establishment and celebrated in the mainstream.
“Art is the path to being spiritual”
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)
‘I don't paint nature. I am nature’
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)
Between the late 1940s and mid-50s, there was L’art Informel in Europe with Tachisme and CoBrA (Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam) being visible forces of the new abstraction while across the Atlantic ocean to the United States, Jackson Pollock with his ‘Action Painting’, became the leading figure of a group of abstract artists based in New York later popularly called the Abstract Expressionists. The United States, especially New York became the new art capital of the world after many modern artists left Europe for America to escape the war and persecution.
The Japanese Gutai group of artists were only recently acknowledged for their abstract painting and avant garde experiments in post war Japan. Beginning in the 1960s, other forms of geometric looking abstraction emerged, including Op art, post painterly abstraction and colour field painting. Abstract art was quickly displaced by other more contemporary and accessible art forms namely Pop Art, Photo Realism and conceptual art which utilizes nontraditional art approaches such as installation, performance art and happenings that had its origins in Dada (an anti-art and anti-war movement that emerged after WWI) and the Surrealists (an art movement which explores the subconscious and the irrational) in the 1920s in Europe. Today, abstract art is part of the repertoire of art styles available to contemporary artists.
● ABSTRACT ART IN MALAYSIA: THE BEGINNING OF A MODERN MALAYSIAN ART FORM.
Tendencies toward abstraction were already discernible in the works of those back from their studies abroad. However, it was the following artists, namely Syed Ahmad Jamal (1929-2011) Abdul Latiff Mohidin, Yeoh Jin Leng, Ibrahim Hussein (1936-2009), Jolly Koh and Cheong Lai Tong who had already been working under various post-impressionist and expressionist styles before embracing the abstractionist idiom that were recognized as the proper pioneers of abstract art in the country. Their joint exhibition together with Anthony Lau (1933-2016) in 1967 called GRUP at Samat Gallery in the AIA building located at Jalan Lebuh Ampang, KL formally solidified their reputation as the country’s leading abstract artists. However, it also received criticism from the more conservative art practitioners who felt that the approach through abstraction were ‘alien’ and unsuitable to the local cultural milieu. It was National Art Laureate Syed Ahmad Jamal who defended and gave a number of reasons why abstract art or to use his term abstract expressionism, was the logical and appropriate artistic direction to be pursued by the artists of the Merdeka generation. Syed Ahmad Jamal believed that since we did not inherit a tradition of western art making from our former colonizer (there were no art training institutions under British rule) unlike our neighbours where the Dutch (Indonesia), Spanish (The Philippines), French (Vietnam) and even Thailand, which was never under colonial yoke, had founded art academies in the early 19th century to provide formal training in western art making techniques and ideas, Malaysian artists were free to pursue art forms that were not burdened by the weight of such a ‘tradition’.3 To Syed Ahmad Jamal’s generation who were the initiators, the participants and witnesses of Merdeka, independence meant more than just physical liberation from colonial bondage, it also meant freedom at the individual level, the spirit unshackled to chart new and unexplored ways of being and becoming. As artists of a new found, modern nation, how best would they capture the spirit of the times? The answer was the modern art of abstraction. Abstract art truly represented an unprecedented break from the hold of centuries-old representational/ figurative art fundamentals that saw and presented reality from spatial-temporal-sensorial viewpoint. They were also aware that to return and work in the traditional arts of their respective cultures which emphasized collective identity and traditional outlooks would leave no room for modern and autonomous individuals to express the personal and particular in their own singular way. The embracing of ‘modern’ art especially the abstract idiom (more than a century after its inception in Europe) by our artists had been justified as a ‘natural’ development from the loose atmospheric watercolor painting styles already practiced by many early local painters. Stylistically, the flow, rhythm and the stylized forms of Islamic-Malay and Chinese calligraphy and art were incorporated by some of these artists into their works while the subject matters, whether inspired by nature, people and places or expressing an ideal or the spiritual in abstracted forms, were very much informed by an outlook shaped and coloured by local realities.
● CAN FIGURATIVE/ REPRESENTATIONAL ART CAPTURE AND EXPRESS THE IDEAS, EMOTIONS AND SENSATIONS ASSOCIATED WITH FREEDOM, LOVE, REBELLION AND THE SPIRITUAL IN A MOST SPONTANEOUS, INTUITIVE AND DIRECT WAY (LIKE MUSIC)?
The chief reason behind this exhibition is to reintroduce this dynamic and personal form of artistic expression to new generation of audiences. 60 years after its debut in this country, abstract/ nonfigurative art and its practitioners remain a minority in an art scene still overwhelmingly dominated by image makers. Abstract art is not a style or skill that can be taught or acquired, rather one arrives individually at abstraction as a way to break free from the skill-based training in representational/ figurative art and its outlook we’ve received could not convey or express the inner aspects of our personality which makes us human. Abstraction is an act of stripping away layers upon layers of ballast dressing up an idea in accordance to a set of dated ideals that were systematically imposed or promoted as a superior way of looking, understanding and reproducing the external world over other less objective modes of perception and appreciation.
In a world obsessed with appearances and trapped by the Image, abstract art is the expression and celebration of one’s individuality.