Zarko Bozinov - Abstract Artist
Minstrel & Doughnut
- acrylic on canvas
- 180 x 180 cm
- 2000
- $3000
Abstract Painting
Tao Ruspoli
While in New York a month ago, I suddenly became fascinated and obsessed with "modern" and "abstract" art (I will discuss the meanings of these terms later). I spent entire days at Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum curiously studying that which is called "art" in our age. However, I knew nothing about this type of art, neither of its history nor its meaning, except that it was interesting visually and important culturally. So my interpretation and subsequent understanding of the works was guided solely by Heideggerfs propositions (roughly stated) that "Art is truth setting itself to work," and that works of art "first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves." In other words, I realized that these strangely beautiful paintings I was looking at must be something more than mere decoration; and that they must be saying something about the nature of our present existence, or at least about the way we understand this existence. Moreover, if Heidegger is correct, these works are actually helping to create this understanding, whatever it may be.
With this in mind, I made some basic observations about what I was looking at. The structure of the Guggenheim and the organization of its paintings made this somewhat easier. The building is designed to give a fluid, chronological tour of abstract painting as it evolved in the twentieth century. (Let us define this abstraction initially, and simply, as the gradual abandonment of recognizable subject matter) I began in a room with paintings by Cezanne, where color began to become fragmented and thus called attention to itself. I then proceeded in an upward spiral to see the following: Picasso and Braquefs cubist paintings where the painted object is broken up into partial views of it, from many differing angles; then there were paintings by Kandinski, who was the first to completely abandon subject matter in favor of pure shapes and colors; then Mondrian, who in a sense did away with shapes in favor of simple vertical and horizontal lines; then there was Rothko whose paintings were formless, lineless patches of color. And as I proceeded upward, I began to see plain white canvases with, maybe, another shade of white painted on top. Finally, there were no more paintings, but "sculptures" of rocks, or of piles of dirt on the ground.
My first instinct involved a simple answer to what was going on: abstract art is not in fact non representational. Instead, it merely reflects a changing attitude about the meaning of representation. In other words, it may be the case that we have stopped concerning ourselves with the outward appearance of things, and the changes in painting have been attempts to reflect these new attitudes. This type of change has been going on throughout western art history. When the Egyptians painted their portraits, with the faces seen in profile, the torso seen frontally, and the legs seen again in profile, it was not the case that they thought human beings actually looked like this, or that they painted like this because they considered it the most accurate rendition of how people looked from an everyday, human perspective. Instead, they were painting (i.e. depicting) what they thought were the most important aspects of human beings. They did not paint in perspective because, to them, perspective was a distortion of reality--something that was unimportant to the essence of the painted object or person (granted, the Egyptians did not know how to paint in perspective, but evidence shows that they were simply not interested in it.) Similarly, in the 20th century artists may have begun to expand their notion of reality beyond that which is merely seen by the eyes. The advent of photography and its ability to easily recreate the world in the way representational art had been doing with great difficuly for hundreds of years may have caused painters to attempt to recreate more subjective internal realities or emotions. For example, Picasso, in his paintings, may have been merely trying to convey what he considered more important in the world: for example, expressions and energies of people in his portraits, and the functions of particular objects in some of his cubist paintings. For this reason, he painted what look like distorted images of people and things. By this reasoning, totally abstract art also tries to represent a certain energy which can be easily seen as more "real" than that which we experience when we merely look at something. For instance, Abstract Expressionism then becomes a representation of emotions that, of course, do not have visual manifestations in the outside world. By this reasoning, every great painter has somehow been able to represent his reality, or at least the aspects of that reality he considers most important. In fact, all the first artists credited with inventing abstract painting, as well as many others who have been part of the abstract movement throughout the 20th century, have refused to admit their art was purely non representational. They were afraid that if this were to happen, painting would turn into meaningless decoration, and therefore stop being "meaningful".
Nevertheless, whether the artists themselves admitted it or not, something was drastically different from previous generations of paintings. Even my untrained eye could see this. For this reason, this explanation, although it seemed to hint at an aspect of the truth, did not entirely satisfy me. For although the move toward abstraction evolved gradually, the initial break from illusionist, visual representation happened rather suddenly, in the Europe of the 1880fs. Moreover, the above explanation could not explain the almost linear move toward more and more abstract art, nor could it explain the total absence of paintings at the top of the Guggenheim. I figured there must be some deeper explanation to the fact that for hundreds of years Europeans had been perfecting the art of creating convincing visual representations of things in the outside world; and suddenly, this goal was abandoned.
So I set out to find an explanation, and I made the following observations. First, I noticed that the initial move toward abstraction coincided with Nietzschefs pronouncement of "Godfs death." Heidegger explains this enigmatic statement as a way of saying that "the suprasensory world is without effective power...Metaphysics i.e., for Nietzsche Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an end." I shall not argue here about the metaphysical aspect of pre-modern painting, but rather I would like to discuss the advent of Nitzschean nihilism, i.e. "the devaluing of the highest values," that is the effect of, or the next step to, the death of God, as it is manifested in modern art. This is the first way the coinciding of Nietzschefs pronouncement and the beginning of modern art becomes significant. In other words, with the death of God came, in a sense, the death of painting, as it was understood in previous generations in the west. The move toward abstraction can be understood in this way rather as a move away from previous standards of representation. The ability to represent nature faithfully had become, by the Nineteenth century, a universal criterion for judging paintings. This is most manifest in the predominance of academic painting in this period. Just as Nietzsche found the Christian God limiting and his death liberating, the painters at the end of the Nineteenth century had become dissatisfied with the limited modes of representation available to them. As I already stated, the early modern painters, like Cezanne, did not consciously make the move toward abstraction. Instead, they thought they were expanding the possibilities of representation. Their feelings can well be summed up by Nietzschefs attitude in the following passage: "we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that ethe old god is dead,f as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonition, expectation." In this sense, painting did not die, but was instead brought back to life with the move away from strict visual and tactile representation. As EH Gombrich explains in his Story of Art, when the renaissance first started to make believable representations, "at first all seemed to go well. Scientific perspective, esfumatof, Venetian colors, movement and expression, were added to the artistfs means of representing the world around him; but every generation discovered that there were still epockets of resistancef, strongholds of conventions which made artist apply forms they had learned rather than paint what they really saw. The [late] nineteenth-century rebels proposed to make a clean sweep of all these conventions; one after another was tackled, until the Impressionist proclaimed that their method allowed them to render on the canvas the act of vision with escientific accuracyf." Thus, the metaphysical "God" of painting was the notion that there was one, and only one, way of representing reality, and it was this God that had died.
This "clean sweep of conventions" brings us to yet another significant parallel between Nietzschefs views and the evolution of 20th century art. This comes from Heideggerfs interpretation of the still metaphysical understanding of Being that comes after Nietzschefs pronouncement of Godfs death: that is, the "will to power". Heidegger says that Nietzsche has contributed to what he calls the technological understandig of being, and he did not in fact overcome metaphysics, but he instead replaced a new principle with which one can understand all life. That is, that life is about growth, and all that does not grow has its back turned away from life. Thus, life becomes a "constant overcoming" of styles and beliefs. A similar attitude inflicted modern painting, and the demolition of conventions became a goal in itself. This was most evident in my trek up the spiraling ramp of the Guggenheim. Each artist seemed to be saying, "I have taken the last step in the revaluation of all values," until the canvas itself became too limiting, and we were left with people challenging the notion of "Art" in the most extreme ways. This explains the move toward total abstraction, since innovation, not new modes of representation became the primary goal of many artists. As I mentioned, the "art works" on the top floor consisted in piles of rock, tile floors, dirt, and the like.
However, I realized that there was yet another way of seeing this progression that may be equally valid, and not quite so pessimistic. The works of art may have been moving away from representation for the sake of moving away from representation, but they were moving toward something else: a calling attention to the plastic qualities of their medium--paint. In other words, whereas previous painterfs goals seemed to be pointing to the things they were representing, be they landscapes, still lifes or people, the modern painting called attention to itself as a "thing". In the words of art critic Clement Greenberg, "the picture has now become an entity belonging to the same order of space as our bodies; it is no longer the vehicle of an imagined equivalent of that order." In other words, with the gradual abandonment of representation as its primary aim, painting went from being a copy of something already existing to a construction of something entirely new. In Gombrichfs words, "the modern artist wants to create things. The stress is on create and on things (Italics his) He wants to feel that he has made something which had no existence before. Not just a copy of a real object, however skillful, not just a piece of decoration, however clever, but something more relevant and lasting than either..."
It is with this in mind, and not with constant innovation, that many modern artists approached their work. The most perfect example of this is Paul Klee, who thought the way his paintings should be viewed was analogous to the way one views a leaf. From a distance, it looks like nothing special, but when one picks it up, one finds within the leaf itself, an incredible internal structure.. This type of beauty is neither the result of pointing to something else, nor is it to be understood as symbolic. The first abstract painters, especially Kandinski, thought colors could symbolize emotions, and that it was in this way that their paintings acquired meanings. But this too was abandoned by artists like Klee, who thought the form of the painting itself was enough to warrant attention and appreciation.
Critics like Greenberg, who were most sympathetic to modern art, admired this approach, but for its own sake. The so-called Formalists thought the essence of painting was its flatness and its use of color and form. Therefore, the best paintings should not distract the viewer from these qualities with representation. Greenberg liked the fact that abstract painting called attention to itself because he believed this was the only way to appreciate the painterly aspect of the painting. But why should we be concerned with painting as painting, on not as a means of depicting the outside world? After all, the pre-modern painter could easily have argued that the "essence" or function of painting lies in its ability to represent, just as the function of language is to communicate. The paint, just as words in a sentence, should be "used up" to fulfill their purpose. To address these issues I again turned to Heidegger and his thoughts on "Things".
So before returning to the subject of painting, let us analyze his ideas on this subject. Heidegger brings up the notion of things in response to his feelings about shrinking of "distances in time and space." Technology, he says, has brought the most distant events into our living rooms with the aid of devices like television. However, this homogeneity of time and space, argues Heidegger, does not bring anything nearer to us. Instead, we live in a world where everything is equally near, and therefore equally far. This, in turn causes a lack of engagement with our world. Why should we be engaged with our world? And what do things have to do with it?
In Heideggerfs words, things gather the fourfold: earth and sky, mortals and divinities, this gathering makes us aware of our receptivity, and this awareness causes a renewed engagement with the world, and therefore a renewed nearness. In order to understand Heideggerfs concept of the fourfold, and how it relates to things, we must first examine his concept of dwelling. In Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Heidegger states that "Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth." Although dwelling seems to be a fundamental characteristic of existence, Heidegger later says that there exists today a "plight of dwelling." In other words, it must be the case that some ways of dwelling, or existing, are better than others.
Heidegger traces the meaning of dwelling to Gothic, where it meant "to be at peace." The word peace is found to mean "free," and to be free is meant to "spare." Therefore, "to dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving." Hence, we have the first connection between dwelling and things: in order to dwell properly, each thing has to be preserved in its nature. If Greenberg is correct in saying that the nature of painting is the paint itself, then the self-reflexive aspect of modern painting is the first step toward preserving things in their nature. Heidegger says that "things [paintings] themselves secure the fourfold [Ifll explain what that means in a minute, but for now just understand that thatfs what things are supposed to do.] only when they themselves as things [as paintings] are let be in their presencing."Moreover, if Heidegger is correct in his idea that art reflects an understanding of Being, this aspect of painting is saying something about the way we encounter things in general in the world.
Albert Borgmann, in his book on Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, differentiates a thing from a device, or commodity. The device, as opposed to a thing, he says, performs its task without reference to the way it does so. An absence of knowledge about the means to a certain end, argues Borgmann, causes the aforementioned "lack of engagement" with onefs world. The modern painting, in its self reflexivity, calls attention to the process by which it was made (i.e. by applying paint to the canvas), and in this way is more of a thing than a commodity.
Once again, the function of things is to gather the fourfold: earth and sky, divinity and mortals. The first way people can gather the fourfold through things, says Heidegger, is by cultivating and nurturing that which grows and constructing specially that which does not. This makes us aware of the means by which a thing does what it does, and this, in turn, connects us with the first of the fourfold, the earth. The earth is that which things comes out of. It is in this sense that cultivating a thing (as opposed to manipulating it to fit our needs, as we do with devices) brings us closer to the earth. The process of creating an abstract painting, according to many modern artists, emphasizes this idea of cultivation, or "techne". "To the Greeks techne means neither art nor handicraft but rather: to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way. The Greeks conceive of techne, producing, in terms of letting appear."
As Gombrich pointed out earlier, representational painting had become a craft, a way of manipulating certain forms which were known to produce certain illusory effects. On the other hand, abstract painting focuses much more on "letting things appear." Gombrich says, "I believe it is this intense feeling for the uniqueness of a thing made by the magic of human hands that the sculptor Henry Moore wanted us to have in front of his creations. Moore did not start by looking at his model. He started by looking at his stone. He wanted to emakef something out of it. Not by smashing it to bits, but by feeling his way, and by trying to find out what the stone ewanted.f" When the painter or sculptor looks at his model first, he then has to manipulate the medium in such a way to conform as exactly as possible to what he wants to represent. Instead, an artist like Moore abandons strict representation, and in turn reluinquishes absolute control over his medium, thus allows the medium itself (the thing in itself) to guide him. Similarly, when Klee sought to create the "internal structures" of his paintings, he said he had no idea what the painting would look like in the end. Instead, his process involved a constant awareness and receptivity to the demands of the picture so far. It was the painting which dictated his actions as much as his will! Klee actually went even farther in this position and argued that it was nature that was creating throught the artist.
It is this receptivity to allowing things to show up as they do that Heidegger calls the "sky". "Godfs appearance through the sky consists in a disclosing that lets us see what conceals itself..." This awareness and gathering of earth and sky, which forces us to be receptive, in turn makes us grateful. We are not grateful to someone or something in particular, for it is not a particular thing which gives us the gift of things. Just as it is not a particular thing which guides the evolution of a work of art. In other words, although the thing is a gift, it is not the giver of the gift. We are not only grateful for the thing in itself, but we also have cause to be grateful to the occasion of the thing thinging and to the gathering function of this occasion. We can think of the "occasion" as the process of painting the painting, and this process is made more overtly manifest to the viewer of the modern painting than it is to the viewer of the representational painting, where the process is as hidden as possible, for it is in our ability to ignore the paint as paint that we are able to see the illusion in a representational painting. This nonspecific receiver of our gratefulness Heidegger terms the "divinities" (We may have to distinguish between the painter and the viewer, for it is probably the painter who is more grateful for his ability to create without exerting his will. Although a sensitive viewer should be able to sense this).
This brings us to the final element of the fourfold: mortals. When things are thinging, we are engaged in practices that reflect our mortality, or the temporal nature of our existence (remember, Heidegger said that it was distances in space and time that were disappearing). This comes out in the fact that the modern painting shows up not as some eternal preservation of something that would otherwise have been lost in time (the Egyptian word for sculptor was "he who keeps alive"!) but as an object among others. Again, the modern work of art shows up as a thing, and the viewer is made to be constantly aware of the thinglyness of the painting.
"By a primal oneness the four--earth and sky, divinities and mortals--belong together in one...this fourfold preserving is the simple nature, the presencing of dwelling." And, since the best way to gather the fourfold seems to be by letting things thing, "dwelling itself is always a staying with things." Things, by allowing us to be receivers of each element of the fourfold, and by bringing each of these elements into one, allow us to dwell most perfectly. And the trends in painting of this century may be trying to point this out to us.
In conclusion, the art of this century manifests a struggle going on in our culture between a world that is headed deeper into technology (as the "constant overcoming" of styles suggests) and the possibility of living in a group of worlds where things are allowed to thing (as the individual works suggest). There is an interesting contradiction going on, insofar as the world of painting has been moving from style to style, from one "ism" to the next, in the manner of innovation for its own sake, and in the manner of a linear metaphysical Historical culture (Ifll say what this means in the next paragraph). However, each of the styles has in common this self-reflexivity which seems to be indicating the importance of encountering things as things. Similarly, the shift from style to style seems willful (in the sense of willful movement forward), whereas the individual works emphasize a lack of willfulness and a sensitivity to the demands of the medium. In this vein, the rocks at the top of the Guggenheim can either be seen as just another indication that anything can count as art as long as it has progressed in innovation, or they can be seen as the ultimate pointer to seeing things in their ownness, as things.
Gombrich says that, "it is true that the Western world owes a great deal to the ambition of artists to surpass each other. Without this ambition there would have been no eStory of Art.f" This is what Heidegger means when he says that we live in a metaphysical, Historical culture, one where history can be traced linearly, from one dominating Understanding of Being (and its respective movements in art) to another. Contrarily, in a world where significance is given by things thinging, there is no such History, for there is no unified understanding of Being (one other hint that the west is moving in this direction is the fact that many twentieth century artists turned to cultures outside the west for primary stylistic inspiration. Whereas the progression of western art up to modern times can be traced back to art of the ancient Greeks, for the first time modern artists turned to the style of "primitive" cultures whose work "is not bound by history," and therefore began to diesengage themselves from our tradition) The artists in such a culture would not concern themselves with overcoming the last style but would focus solely on "techne". And this could again include representational art, for once we have learned to see the thinglyess of a painting, and once the artist has learned to relinquish absolute control respond to his medium as well as to his subject, the representational/non-representational distinction will no longer be necessary. It can already be argued that the distinction between representational and abstract art now seems meaningless, because. "in certain essential ways all art is abstract; and equally, all art is representational, in that it represents something--if only an intention." Even if one is interested only in the purely formal qualities of a painting, in its use of color and shape, there is no reason why one cannot find those qualities in a representational painting.
Fortunately, this shift in attitude seems to be well under way, for we seem to be growing tired of innovation: Moreover, this type of innovation and non conformism has turned into a contradiction, for we have reached a time when it is conventional to be unconventional! However, it must be stressed that the break from representation, which required this breaking with deeply established rules, was entirely necessary in bringing about a way of seeing paintings in their thinglyness. And if what distinguishes modern culture from previous epochs is a shift from metaphysics to things thinging, then it is only natural that the art of this period would reflect that. But when Gombrich writes about art today (in post-modern times, if you like), he says it is no longer appropriate to even speak of a "new style". Instead he talks about an "altered mood." And it is this altered mood, which I think is one of things thinging, which is truly liberating in a way that constant innovation is not, for art is being judged by criteria other than how original it is. Ifll close with this prediction made by Clement Greenberg (in 1954!), who was probably representational artfs most fierce attacker:
"Shall we continue to regret the three-dimensional illusion in painting? Perhaps not... The connoisseurs of the future may be more sensitive than we to the imaginative dimensions and overtones of the literal, and find in the concreteness of color and shape relations more "human interest" than in the extra-pictorial references of old-time illusionist art. They may also interpret the latter in ways quite different from ours. They may consider the illusion of depth and volume to have been aesthetically valuable primarily because it enabled and encouraged the artist to organize such infinite subtleties of light and dark, of translucence and transparence, onto effectively pictorial entities. They may say that nature was worth imitating because it offered, above all, a wealth of colors and shapes, and of intricacies of color and shape...Actually, my own hope is that a less qualified acceptance of the importance of sheerly abstract or formal factors in pictorial art will open the way to a clearer understanding of the value of illustration as such..."
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