Look With Your Ears, Episode 1: Abstraction

Want to scare someone off the minute they walk into your museum gallery?  Tell them the show is about abstraction.  Now watch them turn heel and run, every time.  What is it about this idea of abstraction, of no fixed narrative, of shapes and spatters and goop with no discernible meaning, that strikes so much fear into the hearts of people who really just want a pleasant day at the museum?  It’s like those three innocuous syllables, abstraction, contain all the trepidation visitors have about not understanding the art, and run counter to everything people expect art to be: a canvas that disappears under its narrative, a beautifully-rendered story of stuff.  Abstraction, on its face, is about none of those things: it’s an experience, not a painting of something.  It’s about the elements of painting itself, not necessarily about what those elements are in the service of representing.  It draws attention to the presence, even the two-dimensionality, of that canvas.  And it makes it feel like it’s our fault for wanting our art to want to tell us a story.  Instead, we’re stuck with this abstract painting that feels like it’s sitting with its arms crossed, all deliberately withholding. 

But abstraction, as we’re about to discover, is just a victim of bad PR.  A quick history lesson: the first abstract paintings, ironically enough, were meant to be the most democratic.  Painted in the nineteen teens by Russian artists on the cusp of revolution, the Suprematists, as they called themselves, were desperate to “free art from the burden of the object,” that is, narrative and social context, in an attempt to break art away from the cloistered museums of the ruling elites and put it in the hands of the largely illiterate Russian populace.  Rural farmers could certainly appreciate shapes and colors, these artists argued, if not biblical and allegorical narratives.  Let’s make art for them.  Of course, this backfired even in its own moment, as idealized depictions of farmers were far more preferable among actual Russian farmers than a puzzling black square floating in space.  And once the avant garde art scene got its hooks in abstract art, the democratic mission fell by the wayside, and the vast majority of viewers – like the people who just got scared away from your exhibition – could only focus on its inaccessibility.

But does the lack of a fixed narrative really mean that there’s nothing inherently to be accessed?  We think we don’t have the tools to understand abstract art, but we do.  They’re already in our art-appreciation arsenal.  We bemoan the lack of narrative until we realize that narrative comes in many flavors, and that the artists themselves came to create these paintings from their own rich experiences, and are now offering them to you.  We don’t realize how earnestly we’re welcomed to project our own personal narratives onto these paintings.  There are stories behind the materials; there are stories we allow the materials to tell.  A figural, narrative painting might tell you a story, or it might draw on your existing knowledge of stories, but when a painting has no fixed narrative, it breaks open to allow our minds to wander freely, to tell the stories that are most meaningful to us.  And what’s more, an abstract artwork requires something of you that a figurative painting might not.  The pleasure of your presence is requested.  Pull up a chair, take a seat, and let the painting become fully itself only with your own participation.  An abstract painting isn’t withholding itself from you; it’s offering a hand and inviting you in.

In this episode, we’re going to unpack this idea, object by object.  Whether you’re standing in the galleries of the Addison Museum, or if you’re listening to this in your car, or as you fold socks, what matters is that we’re going to move together from Agnes Martin to Jackson Pollock to Mark Bradford to Jasper Johns to Donald Judd, all with the aim of exploring of their different takes on this very deceptively simple idea – how we can find meaning in artworks that don’t offer a fixed, discernable narrative – and, moreover, show you how valuable your presence is throughout the experience.

Sometimes what is abstract visually is speaking to something unnamable inside the viewer.  Take, for example, the gentle “Untitled” from 1960 by Agnes Martin.  Martin was a Canadian-American who, in the grand tradition of loner women artists, lived to the ripe old age of 98, and creating almost until her death.  And her work is easy to overlook; you can glance at one briefly and be forgiven for thinking that there’s nothing there, when the paper is in fact covered by monochromatic, quiet, even grids of graphite, like the stitching of a hem.  You don’t even see the markings until you come close, like leaning into someone with a quiet voice.  And yet, once you’re there, you’re mesmerized.  The emptiness, largely attributed to her childhood growing up surrounded by vast Saskatchewan prairies, draws you into the meditative and repetitive quality of the markings, and in spite of yourself, you find yourself being given a screen upon which to both probe and project your own emotional quality of mind.  And these aren’t computerized grids, mind you; they’re deliberately imperfect; the trace of her own hand is unmistakable.  And so, the lines don’t feel constraining.  What you might notice, though, is that your optic nerve becomes so starved for sensation from the creamy paper and smudgy gray pencil markings that you start to see colors and shapes dancing and pulsing behind the grids.  And this, Martin writes, is the sense of joy beneath the surface.  Her work is, in fact, about tapping into these larger emotions – innocence, happiness, the sublime.  Why is it, she asks, that people can expect pure emotion from music, but they demand an explanation from art?  What is it to be human if not to experience a vast range of abstract emotions and feelings that we can never quite put a name to?  And in this way, Martin’s explorations of abstraction, which one can’t help but tie back to her own personal struggles with isolation and mental illness, are about what the specificity of representational painting could never address: the indescribable abstraction of our own feelings, presented in a way that is itself a process.  Her work, those gentle repeated pencil marks, are as much a mantra as a visual experience, repeated incessantly like a sound, like singing Tibetan bowls, alternately emptying and filling her “vacant” and “oceanic” states of mind “with inspiration.”

These subconscious emotional states ripple across the movement of Abstract Expressionism, which Martin considered herself a part of, but what she asks of your mind, Jackson Pollock, perhaps the most well-known Abstract Expressionist, asks of your body.  It’s hard not to find yourself swaying in front of a Pollock painting like “Phosphorescence” from 1958, and, though somewhat smaller than his famously wall-sized canvases, still filled to bursting with rhythmic, spastic drips of paint.  White lines shoot across the canvas, creating what curator Frances V. O’Connor describes as “a metallic veil,” cloaking the surface in grid as dynamically irregular as Agnes Martin’s is organized and calm.  Yet, for all their materiality, for as luscious as these thick gobs of paint are, there is just as much happening beneath the surface.  Pollock, like Martin, was famously influenced by larger existential philosophies that attempted to demystify our unique yet collective understanding of ourselves, but where Martin delved into eastern Taoism, Pollock explored Jungian psychoanalysis, particularly during a troubled period in 1938 when he was trying to get a handle on his alcoholism.  Jung’s espousal of the integration of opposites – conscious and unconscious, order and disorder – resulted in Pollock’s almost obsessive fascination with the unconscious itself, its impossible yet deeply human dialectic, and how such intense subjectivity could be objectively represented on a canvas.  And this is where his body enters the picture – quite literally in fact, as Pollock would lay the canvas on the floor and enter it from all sides, famously grinding cigarette butts and various bits of detritus from his studio floor into the paint with his shoes.  What we see in a Pollock painting is the movement of his own body, of his own physicality, entering the space, tracing the drip back to the action that flung it.  The psychic energy that we’re left with is the result of physical energy.  You don’t get this kind of thrown drip without the action of an arm throwing it.  And the abstract part of this physical expressiveness is the cornerstone of how free it feels.  There is, of course, nothing figural being represented, only pure emotion, pure physicality and free association, liberated from the constraints of narrative and its pesky fixed meanings.  There’s nothing to unpack or recognize, only beautifully organized chaotic colorful nest like spun sugar, where foreground and background seamlessly alternate, where visual hierarchy is collapsed.  This Jungian juxtaposition of control and utter lack of control result in a canvas that has no intention of being read, only given over to, in exchange for an extra involuntary little bounce in your step.

Of course, when you give yourself over to an abstract artwork, you largely fill in the narrative holes – it’s just how our lizard brains work.  Even as we meditate on and lose ourselves in the lack of fixed narratives, we find ourselves creating associations the longer we stare, like seeing objects in clouds, or in Rorschach tests.  And like those inkblots, we can learn something meaningful about ourselves, and, if we care to, something really meaningful about the artists themselves.  It’s not an accident that we find ourselves invested in Agnes Martin’s schizophrenia, or in Jackson Pollock’s alcoholism.  We want to understand the minds that could attempt to release themselves from narrative, and, by association, ours.  But there are also artists who revel in our brains’ need to find narrative threads in non-narrative forms.  The artist Mark Bradford can create a canvas that, on its surface, look a lot like a Pollock – thick, crisscrossed lines, ground-in bric-a-brac, richly textured and enormously visually complex, yet oddly and pleasingly organized in its chaos. But unlike Pollock, Bradford’s work isn’t as interested in our physical or even metaphysical response, but our social response.  The objects that comprise the texture are meaningful to Bradford, they contain a “built-in history,” scavenged from every crook and cranny of his South Central LA neighborhood, and include bits of billboards, ads, foil, string, even end-papers from beauty shops, which he then manipulates into these painterly and topographical canvases, a guided map that tells the story of his urban community.  And it’s this mixed-media approach that makes his work particularly compelling, because we never know what we’re going to find the closer we get to this incredible visual terrain.  His own scavenger hunts around his city become ours inside his work, and the more we find, the richer the narratives become.  “For me, it’s always a detail,” he writes, “a detail that points to a larger thing.”  These details, small utilitarian bits of life being lived, especially lives in communities that tend to not get the attention of a typical art market, are not only honored in Bradford’s work but elevated: this work, “Crossing the Threshold,” is taken from a title of a book Bradford read on the Sistine Chapel and the apparent coded meaning it contains.  Whether or not those meanings exist, the idea that these discarded crumbs of lived experience can have the opportunity to transcend their value and cross the threshold into both a reference to the highest peaks of the art world and such a potent spiritual significance, speak to the breadth of multitudes an abstract painting can contain.

And so now bring this idea back to earth.  A painting can contain textured pieces parts, shapes, and symbols that, left to their own devices, are just that: materials, shapes, and symbols.  A book left on the shelf is just paper and ink and glue.  We need to read it to pull any meaning from it.  And this is exactly what Jasper Johns is saying when he takes recognizable images like circles within circles that we – just like Revolutionary-era Russian farmers – should all be able to recognize, and points out, in his “Sculpmetal Target” from 1958, that it only becomes a target, and everything a target implies, because we’ve interpreted it as such.  Now, what do I mean by this?  Well, if we look at this and think about target practice, about weaponry, about the danger of standing too close, then we are tapping into the fact that, once again, we are a critical part of the art-viewing experience.  Johns delights in taking images that carry significant cultural weight, things that, in his words, “the mind already knows,” like the American flag, letters, numbers, and here, a target, and introducing those minds to, indeed, what they already know.  We know what the stars and stripes mean to us, and we also know that these objective shapes can mean wholly subjective things – that flag might mean something very different to the person standing in the gallery next to you – and at the same time, Johns is also just paring these cultural symbols back down to their visual essentials, that is, stars, and stripes.  Or here, circles within circles.  After all, what does it take for an abstract shape to become a symbol?  Us.

Of course, sometimes the value of abstraction is to release your mind from thinking about anything other than the presence of the thing, well, in your presence.  It’s always fun to consider the meditative lines or energic flicks of Abstract Expressionism when compared to the work of a Minimalist like Donald Judd, who, we should note, flatly disavowed the label.  “What,” he asked, “is minimal about my work?”  And if you stand in front of the fabricated stacked steel of “To Susan Buckwalter” from 1965, you’ll see that it’s comprised of metal boxes and a Harley-Davidson hi-fi blue tube, structured with a pre-determined system so as to circumvent any artistic spontaneity – and which he adamantly refused to call sculpture, given that it wasn’t actually, you know, sculpted.  This work is, in fact, one of his earliest forays into the work that would come to define his style, as confident, clear, and strong as 1960s manhood itself.  It doesn’t feel minimal, as in diminutive.  Instead, it feels objective, and undeniable.  Which, ironically, was Minimalism’s point.  The movement arose largely as a response to the emotional subjectivity of Abstract Expressionism, with the goal of reinstating the object as the plain and simple and incontrovertible thing that it was.  And oh, to be as calmly self-possessed and sure-footed as a Donald Judd artwork.  These freestanding or mounted “specific objects,” as he labeled them, are the height of the most effortless kind of cool; they don’t need to represent anything.  Unlike Pollock, they don’t need to tap into your subconscious or release your inner joy.  But like Pollock, they’re free from compositional hierarchy; no box is any more artistically poignant than another.  They stand unequivocally on their own.  They’re made of industrial materials, fabricated offsite, that hold no meaning on their own.  And because they don’t do anything, don’t mean anything, they expose the essence of the space they inhabit.  Which is a space that you inhabit as well.  And here, again, we as the viewers are invited into the realm of the artwork.  In the same way that avant garde theater at the time broke down the fourth wall, Judd’s objects are content to share your space so unremarkably that there’s no more space for emotional analysis with them as with your nightstand.  They simply, unapologetically, exist.  And it’s a trip to invite art into our space like this, to recognize that we share the same air.  It’s not where we usually think art is supposed to live, given how high-minded it so often is, how evocative, how transcendent from the every day.  To allow an artwork its simple, confidence presence as we move around it is to allow that maybe there’s a little more art than we think there is in our normal life, and a little more of us in it, if maybe we just acknowledged it.

So have I convinced you to stick around? I hope so. Because abstraction needs you.It needs your complexity and your curiosity. It needs all the wonderful stories you tell yourself in your head. So stay. Take a seat. Uncross your arms, and take the offered hand, and prepare to be amazed at the stories you can unearth when you’re welcomed into these open, unrealized, and unchartered spaces, when you offer it the pleasure of your presence.