Abstract Art vs Real Life

This blog is about real or imaged disparities between abstract art vs real life. Abstract art entails the freedom of creating a visual language of form, colour and line to create compositions independent of the “real” world. But the suspicion remains that it is a safe way to create artwork that won’t alienate anyone by saying anything about the “real” world.

Some suggest that the preference of the establishment for abstract art, rather than representational art, sprang from the uproar associated with  a mural done by Diego Rivera.  A program called The Rockefellers on PBS describes Rivera’s confrontation with the American oligarchy and its implications for freedom of visual expression.

Rivera was an artist with strong political convictions that were not satisfied by abstract art. Drawn by the social movements unleashed by the Mexican Revolution, Rivera returned to his homeland in 1921 where he developed a unique style that combined the influences of European art and Mexico’s distinctive pre-Columbian iconography. In his populist murals, he used vibrant colors and simple scenes to illustrate his Marxist ideals and the plight of the working class throughout Mexican history. In 1922 his revolutionary convictions led him to join the Communist Party.

In 1932 Rivera travelled to the US where the culmination of the trip was to be a large mural as the centerpiece of the most talked about architectural project in the country —- the new Rockefeller Center.  While still in process, a furor erupted over a portrait of Vladimir Lenin included in the mural. The mural was removed, hammered off the walls and all evidence of it destroyed. 

Another example of how realist art threatened the establishment was the Tim Robbins film The Cradle Will Rock (1999). It is a true story of politics and art in the 1930s USA, centered around a leftist musical drama and attempts to stop its production. It includes a dramatization of the confrontation between Rivera and New York’s elites set in the context of a general repression of the arts during the mid-1930’s using anti-communism as a rationale. The film suggested that this was the turning point in the history of modern art in which the political, media, financial & industrial ruling classes decided to actively promote  abstraction as a politically neutral, non-threatening art form.  Abstract art is safe art in that no contentious political issues are raised such that anyone could notice.

Not that hot debates haven’t raged over abstract art.  The was a big kerfuffle in Canada in the 1990’s when the National Gallery paid $1.8 million dollars for Barnett Newman’s 1967 abstract painting, Voice of Fire, with a red stripe and two blue stripes. (The image shown below was downloaded for purposes of critical commentary on the artistic school or tradition to which the artist is associated, by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.)

But this is the kind of issue that politicians love – where the public attacks some small vulnerable minority like artists, rather than questioning the governing party’s self-serving policies.  Though it is fun to witness the play of forms, colours, lines & ideas in abstract art, how can this be justified in a politically apathetic culture in need of consciousness-raising?  This, of course, drags forth the whole question of the meaning and purpose of art.

For many years I worked on the Running Man theme, described in an earlier blog, as a vehicle for investigating political and philosophical issues, using a representational image that was abstracted so as to be widely applicable. The figures were expressly designed to raise questions about our economy, society and culture.

When Running Man had run his course, I experimented with the purely visual universality of abstract painting while remaining wary of the pitfalls of decorative art. Below are a few examples of works from a series called Ephemera. These were studies for future sculptures in sheet acrylic and were depicted as though constructed from highly coloured transparent sheets of two-dimensional plastic.

Later works imagined creating these forms in three dimensions in the more durable medium of concrete. I did a number of drawings and paintings to develop a vocabulary of sculptural forms and the resulting sculptures experimented with concrete pigments to create a painterly surface. The drawings, in oil pastels on paper, were done during the Okanagan Thompson International Sculpture Symposium where I created a steel & resin public artwork called Running Man . This piece and other works on this theme are described in another blog. I was living in a cabin beside an organic orchard just outside Kelowna BC and when not working on my commission, I cranked up Glenn Gould‘s Goldberg Variations and played with oil pastels & coloured paper.  The results were an adventure in line & colour.

I was guided by an inner sense of direction and excitement in the work, using an unrestricted palette and exuberant scribbles, eschewing precision and favouring expression.

When exhibiting these drawings and the later paintings that grew out of them, I described them as exploring the relationship between mind and body; time and space; physical and spiritual. The actual motivation behind these drawings and paintings was play as opposed to consciously working toward the expression of  some profound meaning. These descriptions came because of the need to provide a rationale for artworks in the real world. But really I was just having fun. These drawings were used as a basis for a series of oil paintings called 2D/3D.

Having said that my primary objective was play, as opposed to consciously working toward the expression of  some profound meaning, any artwork exists on a number of different planes and no one plane describes its totality. While playing with colours, lines and forms is a critical ingredient of painting, a painter is at the same time looking for harmony, balance, and rationality in the work. The work has to work and in order to do so, the painter has to set up criteria, even if those could not be verbalized. This in turn requires that the painter has internalized those qualities – not necessarily in relation to the “real” world, but in relation to the work. It could be said that the daily pursuit of the elusive goal of expressing ideas visually provides direction to artists in the same way that a religious discipline or philosophical framework provides structure and meaning to others.

This is not a far-fetched analogy because the creation of visual art demands in-the-moment presence that is otherwise sought in meditation and other disciplines associated with religious practice. The act of drawing & painting can produce a level of awareness that is not dissimilar to the results of meditation or prayer. The joy many painters experience comes from overriding the over-busy mind and being present in the moment.  And to be in the moment, in the zone, all other worries, problems, desires and ambitions have to be put aside to listen to the artwork speak (or not) and be tuned into what needs to be done next in order to bring it to life.

The act of creation is not always joyful and uplifting. In most cases, the thing imagined and the actual result are unrelated. For instance Cross Purpose #1 was re-painted as Cross Purpose #2 to move away from the work as a painting and make it more of  a sculpture study. It went throught several more iterations before it finally came to rest.

There is a tension between painting to produce a painting and painting as a study for something else.  Sculpture has to exist in 3 dimensions – to withstand gravity and all the slings & arrows that sculpture is heir to, so a sculpture study has to make sense as though it existed in the real world. The freedom to allow surfaces to appear & disappear without explanation, as can be done in painting, is lost.

In the Fall of 2002, I began creating abstract sculptures in concrete based on the vocabulary of forms developed through these drawings & paintings.  If pressed to explain the series, I would say it was an experiment in combining feminine and masculine energies, hard and soft lines, curves and angles, balance and imbalance, lightness and weight.  To wax even more wordy, I would say they explore paradoxical states of being, the resolution of differences and the melding of opposites.

Below are a few examples:

Conundrum, is one of the few sculptures for which I documented the process. The following images show the piece in progress.

First an armature was carved out of found scrap high density polystyrene using a hot wire and saws.  More about hot wire cutting is discussed in an earlier blog and more in another earlier blog. What isn’t shown is the next stage where this polystyrene armature was entirely covered with expandable wire mesh (stucco wire) which provides a surface for the concrete to grab onto. Also not shown was the rebar that was attached with this wire to strengthen the top arch.

Then the concrete was added as shown below.

The concrete used is a mix of 1:3 cement/ sand with liquid added to make it just wet enough to stick.  The water is a 1:3 glue/water mixture to add strength.  Later I added fibers for more strength. With the gravity-defying surfaces that need to be covered in a sculpture (ie overhangs etc.) the concrete can’t be heavy.  It is hand applied, built up in layers, with each layer kept moist to allow the next layer to adhere.  I would mix small amounts of concrete at a time (maybe 4-5 litres max) so that the concrete wouldn’t dry out but would last for 3-4 hours of work.  It’s slow, careful work, not like pouring a pad all in one go.

The last few layers of concrete incorporated iron oxide pigments, as shown in the final image.  Apparently this pigment is not good for you, so I wear thicker gloves for this portion of the work.  Normally, I wear thin latex gloves to have maximum manual control.

I intensely pigmented small amounts of concrete then added them somewhat randomly to create a marbled effect.  I really enjoyed the serendipitous patterns that were created – like painting with concrete in 3D. The inspiration for this approach were ancient stones in the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan peninsula.  They effects of time on the stones had created beautiful patterns and colours.

I haven’t returned to purely abstract forms since 2005.  After that I created abstracted representational forms as discussed in other blogs.  But the pull of simply working with pure form, colour  & line is always there and I feel the pull of working with pure abstraction and no recognizable images. The debate in my head continues however, the main points of which are outlined in the next blog about art and changing times.

Many decades that have gone by since abstract paintings were le dernier cri and there were public outcries over their purchase by public galleries. From the current perspective, they seem elegant and somehow naive in the face of the radical change in attitude of the arts establishment that came after. They were not the bold critiques of social injustice of Diego Rivera, but they worked toward redefining beauty, because the pursuit of beauty had not yet become anathema. The idealism of the moderns, as expressed in the abstract works of the period, now seems to have sprung from a time that was more positive, innocent and hopeful than the present day.

There were many who suspected that elites with the money to buy art or decide what would be bought, preferred abstract art because it supplanted any movement toward social realism or other artistic critiques. But one can’t help but wonder if the irony and anti-idealism that has replaced it is even more preferable to those same elites.