1.      Abstraction?

The nomenclature of contemporary art and the use of terms such as ‘abstraction’ is misleading.  Typically, abstraction/representation is presented as a scale measuring the mimetic qualities of a work of art without any theorisation of qualitative differences.  When I first began to seriously consider the relationship between abstract and representational forms of art, my initial position started from the valid point that the act of making representational art necessarily involves abstraction.  However, I continued by suggesting that it is therefore necessary to consider all art to be abstract.  In other words, I collapsed the terms into each other, suggesting the distinction was meaningless.

More recently I encountered the work of the ‘constructed abstract art’ group which coalesced from around 1948 around Victor Pasmore; a group which Alaistair Grieve refers to in his wonderful study as ‘a neglected avant-garde’.  In terms of art history, the informal ‘constructed abstraction’ group seem to have been eclipsed by the Independent Group and the significance of this groups work in terms of opening up fine art to popular culture.  However, the very fact that the constructed abstraction group had to defend themselves against a really hostile reception meant that they had to rigorously theoretically define themselves and what they were doing.

This theoretical work is really useful.  So, for example, in 1951 the group launched their first exhibition.  Pasmore wrote a piece in ‘Art News and Review’ in the same year defending the work.  He explains that the word abstract was being misused (and this misuse is very common today) to describe any painting which ‘distorts or refines photographic appearance’ (Grieve:239).  Paintings of the ‘visual tradition’, according to Pasmore, ‘are the result, in one way or another, of visual selection and abstraction’.  On the other hand, Pasmore suggests that the abstract work that he is engaged with ‘has nothing whatsoever to do with the process of abstraction which visual painting involves.’  Pasmore goes on to explain that ‘what I have done, therefore, is not a process of abstraction in front of nature, but a process of construction emanating from within’.  (Grieve:239)

Thus, constructed abstract art dispenses with the process of directly abstracting from nature and the external world as perceived through the senses in the immediate creative process.

Most of the work presented on this website would not be considered ‘constructed’ in the sense articulated by members of the post-war group.  For example, the work I’m presenting opens the painting up to a more gesturally ‘expressive’ content than world probably have been formally acceptable in relation to the tightly geometrically composed abstraction they developed and defined as ‘constructed’.  However, paintings immediately preceding my most recent work such as ‘Fracture’ (2020), ‘Centred Left’ (2021), and ‘Meeting Place (2021)’, with their strong compositional foundations in geometry and mathematics, have, I believe, clear associations with the ideas developed by the post war ‘constructed abstraction’ group.  What the ‘constructed abstractionists’ may well have objected to in my work is my willingness to allow patterns to emerge out of geometry, a feature of my paintings which is inspired by Islamic geometry and architecture.

Whether or not its accurate to claim that these paintings have a formal relationship with constructed abstraction, I found that many of the ideas of the group clarified and legitimated my own thoughts regarding the confusions surrounding the terminology used in relation to ‘abstract’ art.  The key insight in this respect, is that what is generally described as ‘representational’ art involves a process of abstraction, whereas constructed abstract art involves a breach with that process of abstraction. 

2.      Art as the Cognition of Life?

A second preoccupation that has engaged my thinking throughout my MFA studies relates to an interest in Voronsky’s contribution to understanding art (Voronsky, 1998).   I should say that I’m not always confident that I’ve accurately elucidated Voronsky’s meanings from his writings.  Firstly, Voronsky’s arguments are grounded in developments in Russian literature in the period immediately proceeding the Russian Revolution and the Civil War (for example, his essay from 1923, arguing that ‘art is a cognition of life’ is subtitled ‘concerning our literary disagreements’, 1998:95).  I have little-to-no knowledge or familiarity with much of this literature and therefore cannot ground the arguments presented in his references.  Secondly, his arguments are deeply polemical.  In this respect I’m helped by the contextualisation of these polemics provided by Trotsky’s writings on art, literature and revolution.  I feel absolutely confident, for example, on general theoretical and political grounds, in expressing solidarity with Voronsky in his defence against attack from the On-Guardists.

One important aspect of these debates related - at least on the surface - to the question of whether it was necessary or desirable to try and build a ‘proletarian culture’.  The attitude taken in relation to this question flowed from differing political positions and understandings of Marxism. Likewise, in the context of Russia in the 1920’s, many practical and political implications flowed from the position one took regarding this question. Voronsky’s position was clear; to quote Trotsky:

‘It is fundamentally wrong to juxtapose bourgeois culture and bourgeois art to proletarian culture and proletarian art.  The later will never exist, since the proletarian regime is temporary and transitional.  The historical meaning and moral greatness of the proletarian revolution lies in the fact that it lays the basis for non-class and the first genuinely human culture’

(Voronsky 1998:437)

With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to perceive in these arguments the dark and ghostly presence of counter-revolution looming up from within. I digress!

Despite the difficulties and ambiguities of meaning, I find Voronsky’s general ideas about art, expressed through his writings, deeply attractive.  Without for a moment suggesting I am a specific example of what Voronsky refers to as ‘the true artist’, (a kind of ideal type); or indeed intimating that my work is in any way successful in these terms; the following strikes me as a powerful expression of arts potential, (even art which appears to be highly subjective in content), to express social relations:[i]

‘The life which surrounds us flows by from day to day in a familiar and accustomed channel.  Even if it is broken, if its strongest dams are destroyed – our consciousness, our feelings invariably and inevitably lag behind in their development; they do not correspond to the new; we are still in the power of what has been before.  Our eye is unable to discern, to make out what is being born amidst the rumble, in the flood, amidst all change, or in the catastrophe.  In this customary array of colours, or in the dizzying whirlwind of life, the true artist, with his artist’s eye, his ear, his “inner being”, grasps what we pass by, what we don’t even notice, and what is imperceptible as yet’

(1998:99)

3.      Abstract Painting: Negating the Negation?

How can abstract art, subjectively emanating from within, be at the same time, as Voronsky suggests, a cognition of life? 

I find it interesting that we refer to the ‘corpus’ or ‘body of work’ when referring to an artist’s oeuvre.  The body also provides a useful metaphor or analogy for the kind of abstraction involved in my most recent painting practice.  The body is scarred, formed, deformed and reformed through experience; it carries the memory of experience physically, materially, psychologically into the present and projects it into the future.  The body cannot be separated from experience.  It is literally ‘the embodiment’ of experience.  Is it not possible to consider process painting in similar terms, painting as the embodiment of experience?  The painting carries the experience of the process of its creation, its construction, in every layer of line, mark, trace and glaze, accessible through the exploration of its surface.

Considering the artist’s work, what are the origins of the artist’s subjectivity?  Subjectivity does not simply arise, phoenix like from the flames; a form from a formless void.  Subjectivity is dialectically related to objective experience.

Is it not the case, in the last analysis, that social being determines consciousness?[ii]   What appears at first sight to be a totally subjective negation of reality and nature (the act of turning inward) turns out, in the process of painting, to be a negation of that negation; a re-embodiment of experience in the materiality of the painting. Therefore, it is consistent to equate abstraction in visual art with Voronsky’s appeal for an art which is a cognition of life and a synthesis of experience.[iii]

Summation

The meaning and aesthetic value of abstract art is bound up with its capacity to express, or be made - created - worked out - of the dialectical relationship between subjective self and social experience, and this is something I’d like to think about more deeply moving forward. 

The practice led methodology I’ll use in order to do so will build on the work I did recording the creative process involved in painting ‘Hans Hofmann’[iv] and ‘Building Unity’[v] (see journal entries linked to in the endnote below to access those notes).  This involves recording in detail how seemingly disconnected thoughts, ideas, material processes and experimentations coalesce together in the creation of a work of art.

Postscript

As an artist I primarily do my thinking through the process of painting.  Paintings are animated with multiple layers of meaning sourced from life.  These meanings are wrapped up in the subjectivity, the conscious and unconscious intentions of the artist, the circumstances that formed the context for the creation of the work and the context of its reception by the audience, including the experience that the audience brings to moments of engagement and its aftermath.  Many of the multitude of ‘meanings’ invested in paintings, like the material paintings themselves, are ultimately lost, forgotten about, washed out to sea by the tides of time.  The historical awareness of this cavernous but inevitable loss is one of the reasons why I believe many of us find the scattered remains of prehistoric art to be so awesome.  To stand in front of parietal art or to hold a prehistoric bola in our hand is the closest we can ever get to looking our ancient ancestors in the eye and accessing their minds (Lorblanchet, M. Bahn, P).  However, if we are not careful - if we do not pull the emergency break - before long, very little really meaningful will remain; and that is not inevitable.

[i] In his tribute to John Molyneux, Joseph Choonara suggests that although John was apparently unimpressed with Voronsky’s arguments, Voronsky does seem to offer some support for some of the ideas that John developed in relation to art.  Whilst I don’t uncritically accept all of John’s formulations, I certainly agree with Joseph that there is resonance between many of John’s ideas and Voronsky.  Here we have a case in point.  John’s belief in the significance of arts capacity to give expression to social relations is very clearly articulated by Voronsky.  However, John was formidable in defence of his own theoretical positions in relation to art. If John expressed himself as unimpressed by Voronsky, I certainly wouldn’t want to suggest a meeting of minds where none existed. I would like to say, however, that I always found John’s contributions and writings on art enormously stimulating. I always eagerly anticipated any new publication, essay or article on art by John as an event worth waiting for.

http://isj.org.uk/john-molyneux-1948-2022/

[ii] In the following journal post I consider how language mediates the process of creating subjectivity by reference to the work of Vygotsky.  This is embedded within a discussion relating to the conceptual work of Mary Kelly; Specifically, the Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi and Post-Partum Document.

https://spaces.oca.ac.uk/paulgrist/2023/02/13/in-the-beginning-was-the/

[iii] The word ‘synthesis’ requires reconsideration and accuracy.  Sullivan and Gluckstein suggest in their discussion of Hegel’s dialectics that;

‘A synthesis is a combination of components.  However, this is not the outcome of a Hegelian dialectic.  The outcome is not simply a combination of what has gone before.  For Hegel, and also for Marx, the dialectic produces something that is new in some strong sense’ (2020:64)

[iv] https://spaces.oca.ac.uk/paulgrist/2023/03/19/experimentations-on-a-work-in-progress/

[v] https://spaces.oca.ac.uk/paulgrist/2023/03/11/bringing-works-on-paper-onto-canvas/

Bibliography

Lorblanchet, M. Bahn, P (2017) The First Artists, In Search of the World’s Oldest Art. London: Thames & Hudson

Grieve, A (2005) Constructed Abstract Art in England, A Neglected Avant-Garde.  London: Yale University

Molyneux, J. (2020) The Dialectics of Art. Chicago: Haymarket

Sullivan, T. Gluckstein, D. (2020) Hegel and Revolution. London: Bookmarks Publications Ltd

Voronsky, A. K. (1998) Art as the Cognition of Life, Mehring Books