I am obsessed with the definition of abstraction. Mostly in painting but really in all uses of the word, and towards this unhealthy interest I have been thinking about the axiom (?) "everything is abstract." A phrase that has been used with me in discussions of painting, critiques of my work, books and articles I have read etc etc. My first thought was to research who said it, if it was even possible to find out, which it wasn't. An interesting idea that came up in my casual search was the philosophical idea that everything is abstract because our perception of the outside world is imperfect. That we can never have certain knowledge of the external world because our perceptions are internal and from a singular perspective and therefore incomplete, an abstraction of what may potentially externally exist.

From a painting perspective, at least from those like me who write about painting, saying 'everything is abstract' is tantamount to saying 'everything is equal' that there is so much competing for our attention, that scrutinizing, sorting, and considering how that surplus of information affects our vision is neither necessary or important. I recently read The Information by James Gleick and in it he discusses the idea of redundancy in language. That the more predictable a language is ... such as ... the more able you are to recognize and guess the next letter in a word or next word in a phrase, the less information that language carries. The language becomes redundant when it is stable and predictable. To me this is what the idea of 'everything is abstract ' encompasses. A predictable language. Regarding this I must point out that I am not thinking about the act of painting, more about the discourse surrounding painting.

If in the previous construction, the proposal that everything is abstract is couched in the idea of information overload, then the idea becomes de-facto anti-intellectual and the reasons for transforming anything into abstraction become mute. If it starts out abstract, what is the point of painting it abstractly? The act itself becomes an expression of abstract painting, instead of a creative force constructing the context of its own reality, a means of categorizing the language of painting and the intentions of the painter instead of an investigation of looking and seeing into the world. Abstract painting itself is then no longer a search for how the way we see changes as the world around us advances. 'Everything is abstract' becomes a signifier for 'everything is understood.' Which it is demonstrably not.

Everything is Abstract - Assumes that the visual world is understood, that the presentation and re-presentation of the phenomenological requires no interpretation or investigation. It is a fallacy to think that just because the information arrives more quickly, or that it is impossible to stay on top of all the information we invite into our lives, because we can, that this makes it abstract. If that were the case then there really would be no point to any thing being transformed into another medium.

The philosophical idea, that everything we perceive is abstract because all perception is internal preventing complete knowledge of anything external to us. Aligns our perception to abstraction in the traditional sense, an idealization or generalization of everyday forms into Universal Forms. But reality is no longer universal in that way, if it ever was. The post-modern context has parsed everything into its constituent post-structural post-colonial post-studio post-historical context, which transmutes language into a wholly referential system of transitional metaphors and fugitive concepts that change under observation (great for wordplay!). Realities constituent parts are specific, atomized- forms versus non-narrative Platonic Forms. And therefore not abstract in any sense. Not abstract-able, even in combination.

NEW WORK BY
JOSH PODOLL
Opening Reception:
Thursday, September 9th, 6:00 - 9:00pm
Exhibition Dates:
September 9 - October 15, 2010


“We know that language is a corpus of prescriptions and habits common to all writers of a period... It is not so much a stock of materials as a horizon, which implies both a boundary and a perspective.”

- Barthes, Writing Degree Zero


Josh Podoll’s paintings at Romer Young Gallery shouldn’t work. A tangle of influences expressed in individual marks, gestures not in the expressionist sense (although some strokes reference that) but in the sense of possibilities for the painted mark. Mr. Podoll uses contemporary paintings historicized lexicon to direct our gaze forward versus the typical use of prop that reiterates historical triumph.
Listing the references embedded on Mr. Podoll’s four untitled paintings won’t do justice to what is happening on the surfaces. Which is probably the best review I can write. You do have to see the work, which is no small feat in painting these days. But here we go, Albers-esque color squares, Joan Mitchell loaded brush strokes, graffito marks from Cy Twombly, David Reed’s transparent almost photographic swipes, impasto a la Jonathan Lasker or Willem De Kooning, Terry Winters systematic mappish linework, all delivered in high key color. Which sounds overwhelming but crucial to their interaction are some geometric sections with a soft pixelated blur and angular lo-res edges that work as areas of calm if op art references can calm. These sections emphasize that each paintings surface is not entirely filled with marks. What’s left is glossy white negative space that counter balances the op-art areas. A transition which inverts the surface from a figure/ground relationship to an ungrounded gravity-less space. As marks that traditionally reference a vertical plastic analog world this inversion refreshes the space and the marks leaving them in a suspended state which opens them to having their history without demarcating how we as viewers should interact with it. This attempt at letting us off the art historical hook is hugely ambitious and largely successful.
These paintings don’t work on the level of post- meta- self-referential anything. They aren’t trafficking in the painterly virtuosity of a Nicole Eisenmen or Dana Schutz, which is not to say that they aren’t well painted, they are. They do take the idea of color and mark as objects, evidence, signifiers of rhetorical subjectivity and turn and turn it all into data, opening the act of painting up once again, to an objective view of the way we see the world versus a subjective view of how we see ourselves in the world. The marks and paintings become abstract machines playing with each other in an unexpectedly fresh way. The generosity and calm thoughtfulness that is obvious in these paintings diffuses any expectations that might be tethered to such explicit references.
The idea of abstraction in painting contains this indelible pastiche (or parody?!) of radicality and avant-garde-ism. An exhausting, improbable proposition that denies any forward motion in the reading of it’s own language or style as impossible or more damning unnecessary. Leaving us with the realization when we see organized shows of abstract painting, what we are looking at is paintings past, (not so) cleverly rearranged. This proposes an ever present and conservative historicization so familiar that it obscures a primary historical function of painting “as the “engine” of change, because without change there can be no history.”* Mr. Podoll's work, so compellingly made and generously displayed, shows that painting can consume its own history without having to be timid and incremental.


*Miller, Partha. "Questions of Style." ArtForum. Sept. 2010: 254. Print.

Link to Romer Young website

Sean McFarland Untitled Landscapes (California)

On a single wall of Adobe Books Backroom Gallery is an irregular grid of tiny brightly colored images. As modest as the Backroom space is it could easily have overwhelmed these bits and flecks of information. Instead the curator of these tiny photographs found a way to position them, both physically and conceptually to emphasize what I believe is the radical and refreshing proposition of the artist. A proposition that uses the size of the photographs to estrange the viewer from the commonly accepted notion of landscape as natural sublime, avatar of western cultural ideals of freedom, rugged individualism, and Manifest Destiny.
Sean McFarland’s perversion of these ideals by presenting miniature landscapes initially made me laugh uncomfortably. Then I got annoyed that the title of the show gave so much away, Untitled Landscapes (California) too succinctly resolves the issue of what you are looking at too soon. I imagined standing there, without knowing the title focusing on the individual pieces, teasing out the small signifiers; the architectonics of a horizon line, the tonal shift between earth and sky, a surface that suggested painting, a lens flare that suggested photography, and the unmistakable hues of a sunrise or sunset. Then realizing that a disorientation of the landscape is what was being presented. My eyes, so used to seeing large format landscape photography and ticking off a list of commonly accepted references would have been washed clean. I would have discovered what amounts to fragments of landscape broken down to suggests that those references can be familiar and un-acceptable.

The history of landscape in art is harnessed to the unknown sublime, but Untitled Landscapes (California) makes it explicit that our notion of landscape doesn’t have to be yolked to a ubiquitous American Mythology. Paul Virillo, in his book, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, states “There was less to know in preceding centuries, and you'll notice that, paradoxically, knowledge then aimed at certainty and totality. The more knowledge grew the greater the unknown grew, we might conclude; or rather the more information flashes by the more we are aware of its incomplete fragmentary nature."* With his wax laden fun sized morsels of classic American landscape Mr. McFarland takes on the unknown sublime, shows it to be truly known, fragments it, flashes it past us, refreshing it in the process. Then offers it to us once again as something new unknown and sublime.

Sean McFarland
Untitled Landscapes (California)
Exhibition dates: August 20 - September 19, 2010.
**Opening Reception: Saturday, August 21, 7-9pm

*Virilio, Paul, and Jonathan Crary. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2009. 55. Print.

Abstraction should, within it's fundamental structure, respond both to the current
speed of information as dictated and directed by digital technology as well as to the
change this technology has wrought on the experiential. However, the discourse that
painting remains involved with is traced back to Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic
Form which confines painting to a system of Westernized perspective and applies a
closed Kantian logic to it's thematic structure. A system and structure that has a fast
hold even now.

One of two things needs to happen to abstraction, either a definition must be stipulated or the word itself must be consigned to the pyre of history. Greater minds than mine have tried to formulate a definition and failed, spending more words on it than I care too here. Abstraction has come to mean nothing and represent everything, everything is not abstract. Basing a practice on this idea is just intellectually lazy. Rendering something unrecognizable, or making a formal adjustment in, for example, perspective, does not equal abstraction. The removal or obfuscation of information to generate subject matter is as passé a method as the use of subjective expression. If any two things should be put out of their misery in abstraction it is negation and the use of subjective expression. Abstraction did yeoman's work at Mid-Century, opening new avenues, intellectually and formally for painting, but the critical relevance it wielded has been drained by timid reconsiderations of the style but not the spirit. In painted abstraction, the way the world is seen, and the way the world can be depicted should be built with or built on, not pushed around like a cold meal at the end of dinner.

In The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Paul Virillio states that "There was less to know
in preceding centuries, and you'll notice that, paradoxically, knowledge then aimed at
certainty and totality. The more knowledge grew the greater the unknown grew, we
might conclude; or rather the more information flashes by the more we are aware of its
incomplete fragmentary nature." The speed of culture cannot render information
incomplete and fragmentary it is only our physical inability to apprehend information in
it's totality that causes this apparent lack. Speed then, in the delivery and concurrent
dissembling of information renders the state of altered consciousness that Virilio
describes as picnolepsy, "the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or
rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps,
glitches and speed bumps lacing through and defining [consciousness]."
I have some issue with Mr. Virillio's claim about the quantity of knowledge present in
preceding centuries, but my issue here is not with that idea, it is located in the idea of
certainty and totality. The addition of invented information created by a picnoleptic loss
is antithetical to abstraction by definition, which relies on negation, antipathy towards
narrative or figurative content and/or references to a collective unconscious. A
picnoleptic loss of information is not a negation of information but a forced aperture in
consciousness that places doubt in between "objective reality" and our ability to depict
it.

Has the visual world ever been authentically new? Can the eye repackage the sensate
within a familiar hierarchical framework and still arrive at an Kierkegaardian newness?
Our predominant sense is vision, housed in the blunt instrument of our bodies, it is an
imprecise tool, inaccurately gathering incomplete information. This impotence is mind
boggling precisely because we take for granted that what we see, is. If this was ever the case it no longer is. "We live in an age less of “mechanical automatism” than of the informational or cognitive abilities and deficiencies."1 And it is this mechanical
reproduction that has presented us with the new possibilities of a digitally augmented vision. Vision that is rent and reassembled by the speed of information with gaps, glitches and apertures thus opened creating a fecund not knowing, which is belayed by conscious rote inventions of our overwhelmed brains.

Our culture is unarguably a visual one, presenting ideas in images, colors, forms, and text as shorthand for more complex verbal communication. This restless breaking down of communication into ever more simple and digestible parts feeds the veracity of Virillio's construction. The more information is broken into it's constituent bits the less those bits equal Truth or even knowledge, complicating the resolution of a complete image of any thing. Every additional breakdown slightly changes the information that constitutes any knowledge allowing for the creation of complex and impure mixes.
Mixes that exceed phenomenology, by presenting form not as a simplified totality but as a stuttering compulsive outgrowth of the specific and not-known just at the edge of visual apprehension.

Painting search for it's essential parts in abstraction, subsequently anything is
possible, but instead of a fertile becoming painting too embarked on a furtive self-
conservation that is has yet to shed. At a time when the playing field has expand and
our understanding of experiential phenomenon has essentially changed, discourse has
been unchallenged in sweeping painting into established categories. This assumes the
past, as it should, but unfortunately lionizes it and locates any attempt to push further
not in the idea that "[we] are free to do something new. Rather, it is that it is impossible
to do the old anymore."2

1. Rajchman, John. Terry Winters; Graphic Primatives. New York: Matthew Marks
Gallery, 1999. 8. Print.
2. Groĭs, Boris. Art Power. The MIT Press, 2008. 27. Print.

"This brings us to the realization that formalist art and criticism accepts as a definition of art one that exists solely on morphological grounds. While a vast quantity of similar looking objects or images (or visually related objects or images) may seem to be related (or connected) because of a similarity of visual/experiential “readings,” one cannot claim from this an artistic or conceptual relationship." (Kosuth, Art After Philosophy) Quoting Kosuth opens the claim that paint on canvas is no longer viable, makes me feel as if I have lost faith and am about to be excommunicated from the Holy Romantic Empire. But this is not the sixties and painting is and always will be an idea that becomes a machine that makes art (LeWitt) Kosuth's quote's contemporary relevance is located in paintings ability to contain the ideas of the past and paradoxically break with them at the same time. I have never had a serious discussion with anyone about paintings possibilities or where painting could go from here without being made to feel either foolish or pretentious. Paintings lack of response to the speed of information in our visual culture as a tool to understand the changes in vision has lead to a delimitation of painting knowledge that assumes the past and, presumably is part of what gives rise to this awkwardness in our discourse with one another. Painting presents vision as a readymade collection of ideas that are handled uncritically based on their effective employment in the past; if they worked then they will work now and at least the works will be recognizable as art through the redeployment of these prepared ideas.

But as Søren Keirkegaard pointed out - especially in his Philosophiche Brocken - being new is by no means the same as being different. Keirkegaard even rigorously opposes the notion of the new to the notion of difference, his main point being that a certain diference is recognized as such only because we have the capability to recognize this difference as differnce. So no difference can ever be new- because if it were really new it could not be recognized as difference. To recognize means, always, to remember.²

In The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Paul Virillio states that "There was less to know in preceding centuries, and you'll notice that, paradoxically, knowledge then aimed at certainty and totality. The more knowledge grew the greater the unknown grew, we might conclude; or rather the more information flashes by the more we are aware of its incomplete fragmentary nature."³ The speed of culture cannot render information incomplete and fragmentary it is only our inability to apprehend information in it's totality that causes this appearance of lack. Speed then renders the state of altered consciousness that Virilio has presented as "picnolepsy".⁴ This inability to apprehend volumes of information and the inventions that bridge these gaps externalizes an unfamiliar and de-centering state. The addition of invented information is antithetical to abstraction by definition, which relies on negation and the obfuscation of reduction. A picnoleptic loss of information is obviously not a negation but a forced aperture in consciousness allowing for the creation of complex and impure mixes of ramifying information. Mixes that exceed phenomenology, by presenting form not as a simplified totality but as a stuttering compulsive outgrowth of detail.

citations

² Groïs, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 28, 2008. Print.

³ Virilio, Paul, and Jonathan Crary.The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2009. 55. Print.

⁴ the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches and speed bumps lacing through and defining it.- Virilio, Paul, and JonathanCrary. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2009. Print.

On p.23 of "Kant After Duchamp" in the footnote, De Duve writes about a split btwn Lukacs and Adorno causing the former to take the side of realism and the latter to side with the avant-garde. Which led me to think, is that my issue where my cognitive dissonance arises? That the abstract in art, painting, scultpture, video whatever no longer signifies the avant-garde (potentially because that construction is no longer tennable) but the processes related to the act of abstraction continue to be acted upon by critics as well as artists as if it still is/does signify something radical or revolutionary?
Is it the same problem of conservatism and lack of vision related to a what's next after modern, post-modern, contemporary?
Is it a case of semantics or syntax?