Marek Barte­lik

Gath­er­ing together a group of inter­na­tion­ally renowned artists¬¬, this exhi­bi­tion explored the rel­e­vance of abstrac­tion in artis­tic works while sug­gest­ing that despite its “lim­ited” or “infi­nite” vocabulary—as well as the cur­rent inter­ests in paint­ing that seem to pre­fer figuration—original works in this mode con­tinue to be made. The show argued that, for a num­ber of con­tem­po­rary artists and view­ers, the appeal of abstrac­tion lies in the fact that it con­veys indi­vid­u­al­ity while allow­ing a com­mon­al­ity of expe­ri­ence defined by shared uni­ver­sal­ity and accessed transcendence.

The exhibition’s cura­tor, Juli­ette Kennedy, (her­self a math­e­mati­cian), con­verged art and math­e­mat­ics and approached aes­thet­ics from a mul­ti­di­rec­tional stand­point. She stressed that her show existed “in the tran­scen­dent, semi-mystical space invented by Mon­drian.” Logic Unleashed: Euro­pean and Amer­i­can Abstrac­tion Now fea­tured works of Bob Bonies, Andreas Brandt, Kathrin Hilten, Wanda Kos­sak, Matti Kujasalo, Elena Lux-Marx, Mar­jatta Palasto, Steven Rand, Fred Sand­back (1943–2003), and Remko Scha in dif­fer­ent medi­ums. The work in the exhi­bi­tion ranged from Kujasalo beau­ti­fully play­ful reduc­tive paint­ings that tackle the prob­lem of “inverted mod­ernism,” to Sandback’s site-specific refine line “draw­ings” in space made of col­ored yarn. It then smoothly tran­si­tioned from Brandt’s opti­cally reg­u­lated works to Rand’s mes­mer­iz­ing “patch­works” of Formica sam­ple chips. What con­nected all the artists in the show was their focus on the for­mal, sys­tem­atic qual­i­ties of their work, rather than their attach­ment to spe­cific, overtly spelled-out polit­i­cal agen­das. Occur­ing in the Dutch artist’s birthplace—which can be viewed as “a semi-mystical space” itself—the exhi­bi­tion pro­vided a fer­tile ground for visu­al­iz­ing var­i­ous ideas about con­tem­po­rary abstrac­tion with­out lim­it­ing them to an exclu­sive pro­gram. In con­junc­tion with the show, a sem­i­nar on aes­thet­ics and math­e­mat­ics was held at the Utrecht University’s Phi­los­o­phy Department.

In an e-mail sent to this author, Kennedy elab­o­rates on the def­i­n­i­tion of tran­scen­dence that lies at the core of her con­cept of abstrac­tion by con­nect­ing it to Husser­lian phe­nom­e­nol­ogy. This phe­nom­e­nol­ogy sug­gests that “the world is con­sti­tuted in the mind.” “This is para­dox­i­cal,” she writes, “because we too are part of the world, and thus equally so con­sti­tuted. But this is the basic pic­ture in phe­nom­e­nol­ogy: a per­son is both an object in the world, that is to say an object among other objects; but at the same time the per­son endows the world with its meaning.”

In her approach to abstrac­tion, Kennedy fol­lows in the foot­steps of the artists who, in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury, defined abstrac­tion in the con­text of moder­nity, while grap­pling with the issue of the indi­vid­ual ver­sus the uni­ver­sal. The early mod­ernists, such as Kaz­imir Male­vich, Piet Mon­drian and Theo von Does­burg, agreed that despite or because of its intel­lec­tual rigor and reduc­tive form, abstrac­tion endows the vis­i­ble with the invis­i­ble. As such, art reveals the tran­scen­den­tal aspect of real­ity, which on an aes­thetic level requires mov­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion beyond nat­u­ral­ism. Ulti­mately, the iconic art cham­pi­oned by Male­vich and Mon­drian became her­metic, yet the think­ing behind it con­tin­ues to evolve.

Our skep­ti­cism toward heroic approaches to the cre­ation of art might spring from the fact that abstract art can be seen as devoid of con­tem­po­rary punc­tum, to use Roland Barthes’s expres­sion. Punc­tum, or an artis­tic “detail” that pricks our eye and “arouses great sym­pa­thy” in the viewer, con­versely “shows no pref­er­ence for moral­ity or good taste.” Need­less to say, most of abstract art projects the qual­ity of “good taste.” How­ever, as Kennedy observes, we are liv­ing in a world in “ter­ri­ble trou­ble, which does not privilege—for a moment—any type of abstract think­ing, even the noble one.” The great impact of cur­rent world events on our lives, (as well as a rather unsta­ble state of con­tem­po­rary art), might, in fact, be respon­si­ble for the phe­nom­e­non of attempt­ing to recon­nect cur­rent artis­tic expres­sions with broader ideas, be it sci­ences or cog­ni­tive philosophies.

The sub­lime aspect of abstract art can hardly be under­stood in abstract. It is a his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non, which locates its roots in the writ­ings of the Greek poet Cas­sius Long­i­nus. Kennedy’s com­plex weav­ing of the mean­ing of abstrac­tion par­al­lels the rea­son­ing of con­tem­po­rary thinkers, such as Jean François Lyotard, Fredric Jame­son and Alain Badiou. Return­ing to Edmond Burke’s Enquiry into the Ori­gin of Our Ideas of the Sub­lime and Beau­ti­ful (1757), Jame­son dis­tin­guishes between imma­nence and tran­scen­dence and con­nects them to the con­cepts of beauty and the sub­lime. He views the for­mer as “a self-sufficient expe­ri­ence of small scale objects, the small plea­sures of the cre­ation,” and the lat­ter as “the plea­sures of fear that it involves, the aes­thetic appro­pri­a­tion of ‘pain.’” In the sub­lime, expe­ri­enced objects are “pre­texts” for the intu­ition to con­front a “sheer unfig­urable force”— only to be stunned by the real­iza­tion that the intu­ition “finds no fig­ure for that awe­some power in and of itself.” One might argue that art in gen­eral might be a “pre­text” for deal­ing with “pain” in one form or another, whether it is beau­ti­ful of sub­lime, or both. What is per­haps more impor­tant is that the mean­ing of art strongly resides in the con­scious­ness of the artist which is a vital com­po­nent of the expe­ri­en­tial rela­tion­ship between free­dom of expres­sion and its exter­nal con­di­tion­ing. By invit­ing both Euro­pean and Amer­i­can artists, Kennedy suc­ceeded in blur­ring the bound­aries between the beau­ti­ful and the sub­lime, (a sub­lime expe­ri­ence in itself), and by doing so, pro­duced a dis­e­qui­lib­rium. In our con­tem­po­rary con­text, this dis­e­qui­lib­rium offers a nec­es­sary com­po­nent for express­ing com­plex­i­ties of the “geom­e­try” of our experience.

In the con­text of con­nec­tions between aes­thet­ics and math­e­mat­ics that the sym­po­sium in Utrecht addressed, Alain Badiau’s writ­ings appear to be par­tic­u­larly illu­mi­nat­ing in terms regard­ing how these con­nec­tions relate to con­tem­po­rary abstrac­tion. Badiau argues that math­e­mat­ics and art are part of the same equa­tion because they are rooted in our belief in the neces­sity of sys­tem­atic think­ing. Inter­view­ing Badiou, Lau­ren Sed­of­sky voiced con­cerns about the dan­ger of the return to order: “The return to sys­tem­atic phi­los­o­phy today might seem archaic, if not impos­si­ble. How do you explain your con­vic­tion not only that the sys­tem­atic think­ing that runs through the his­tory of phi­los­o­phy from Plato to Hei­deg­ger is still pos­si­ble, but also that this archi­tec­ture serves some pur­pose?” The French philoso­pher answered: “if by ‘sys­tem’ you mean, first, that phi­los­o­phy is con­ceived as an argu­men­ta­tive dis­ci­pline with a require­ment of coher­ence, and sec­ond, that phi­los­o­phy never takes the form of a sin­gu­lar body of knowl­edge but, to use my own vocab­u­lary, exists con­di­tion­ally with respect to a com­plex set of truths, then it is the very essence of phi­los­o­phy to be sys­tem­atic.” Stress­ing the impor­tance of phi­los­o­phy in the eval­u­a­tion of time, Badiau sees it as cru­cial for com­pre­hend­ing “that this time, our time, has value.” Thus, the French philoso­pher con­nects ontol­ogy to math­e­mat­ics. “If we take ‘ontol­ogy,’ as we must, lit­er­ally or ety­mo­log­i­cally,” he rea­sons, “that is, as what can be said about being qua being, then we ought to say that it’s math­e­mat­ics. Math­e­mat­ics sec­u­lar­izes infin­ity in the clear­est way, by for­mal­iz­ing it. The the­sis that math­e­mat­ics is ontol­ogy has the double-negative virtue of dis­con­nect­ing phi­los­o­phy from the ques­tion of being and free­ing it from the theme of fini­tude. That’s why it rep­re­sents a pow­er­ful break.”

Badiou avoids bridg­ing phi­los­o­phy directly with aes­thet­ics, but one might argue that the ques­tion of how to endow our time with value remains cen­tral to our con­cerns about the rela­tion­ship between con­tem­po­rary art and life. How is one to deal with the fini­tude of such con­cepts as “it has been already done” and “the work of art as a com­mod­ity”? “What to do after an orgy?” Jean Bau­drillard asked describ­ing the post­mod­ern con­di­tion. And how to make art in the time of war?

Con­tem­po­rary artists may not phi­los­o­phize about the ques­tions posed above and they usu­ally don’t study math­e­mat­ics, but that does not mean that they don’t think about these con­cerns. This exhi­bi­tion sug­gested that our think­ing might be best expressed in much the same way that artists visu­al­ize sys­tems, endow­ing art with an inner struc­ture that derives power from “the double-negative virtue of dis­con­nect­ing” it “from the ques­tion of being and free­ing art from the theme of fini­tude.” Let’s recall that the Eng­lish word “sub­lime” derives from the Latin “sub­limes” which means “look­ing up from under the lin­tel.” For abstract artists, the ques­tion remains: how does one cre­ate a rea­son­able and sound “scaf­fold­ing” that con­nects the sky to the earth, while at the same time con­sid­er­ing whether or not to touch the ground.