Musing in Front of Paintings
In defense of abstract art
Strolling through the Clyfford Still museum in Denver with a friend, we reached a problematic. The museum is organized in a semi-structured manner in chronological order of the Still’s work, from the more impressionistic 1930s to the abstract 40s and 50s.
Entering into the 1940s period, we happened upon a massive orange painting, much larger than ourselves. We stood there for a moment and my friend said, ‘I don’t get these works. What is the artist trying to do? Can’t a kindergartener do this? When does he know he’s finished with the painting?’
These are not the words of an avant-garde corner of art museums and cafes. This is the general attitude towards abstract expressionism and abstract art in general. I do, however, think it is misguided. I’d like to make a case for abstract art —
Questioning and being questioned
To ask new and more interesting questions is how one enriches one’s life. Even more, as Walter Davis argues in Inwardness and Existence, keeping one’s very being open as a question is the project of an engaged, existential subjectivity.
This is not by necessity, it is a position one can take up or not take up; taking one’s subjectivity to task is a project and a choice and a way of being/becoming. On the contrary, so much are we educated into strict ways of being with acceptable and unacceptable notions that keeping questions open is against our ‘nature’ (contra Carl Rogers).
We tend to close things off, draw conclusions, and prohibit further probing. This is why narrative so often appeals to us: it offers a clear structure, with beginning, middle, and ending. How terrible would Moby Dick be if Melville was still producing pages for it? Closure — this is a need and demand of most of us.
Most art is closed. Or, rather, most art encourages closure. Manet and Cassatt, as wonderful as they are, do not encourage an open question of life. They depict forms in impressionistic style to argue for a certain viewpoint. The viewer is relatively certain of the objects within the frame. If this can be said of impressionists, even more can be said of the painters of the Renaissance, classicism, and romanticism.
Much can be said of the work of these masters. Take Napoleon Crossing the Alps from Jacques-Louis David: the use of paint to create vital, yet still paintings; the depiction of movement and power; the capacity to express Zeitgeist through paint; the realism of landscape; the attention to detail; and so on.
But David does not leave much up to the imagination. Understanding the history of his work and his style can tell you most of what you need to know about what makes it so interesting. His paintings tell us a story with a context and a protagonist. It even has a setting. What the painting asks of us is objective: how can movement and stability be expressed at once? Why does David choose this contradiction to embody the legendary conqueror?
David is clearly striving towards the beautiful, and the coherent, and the orderly, in his paintings. He knew he was done with Napoleon Crossing the Alps because there was nothing more to be added to this picture that could in any way contribute to its meaning. Our gaze and his intention meet at the same place.
Our demand(s)
But sometimes, the most interesting questions begin at the level of frustration. This is not so evident in David or Monet or Van Gogh (in descending order). It was, however, painfully evident while standing in front of the giant Still painting at the museum.
Every question is thrown back at the speaker, at the looker. The painting resists a closed interpretation; it resists clear narrative or coherence; it resists the artist’s intent; it resists. This is the essence of abstract art. It can be seen in the literary projects of Beckett and the later Joyce, or the music of Reik or Colin Stetson.
I encourage my readers to go to their museum nearby and find some art that looks like the one above, Rothko’s “Blue Over Red”, painted in ’53. Just stand in front of it — make sure you are the only one — and see what happens. Stare at it, devour it with your eyes, don’t think too much. Wait and see what comes up.
I’ve found that usually the mind responds first with statements: ‘It’s orange’; ‘It’s large’; ‘My feet hurt’; ‘I want to move on’…. This is followed by questions: ‘What was his intent?’; ‘Why orange?’; ‘Could anyone do this?’…. Finally, bodily sensations.
Looking at a Still or Rothko online or in a book is lifeless and wrong. Why do we think they painted such immense pieces if not to be encountered by the flesh?
When we ask a question of the painting, we are met, undoubtedly and consistently, with nothing — no thing; silence. It is not like asking a question of David, who provides us with the answer(s) to our inquiries.
In Lacanian terms, David’s paintings are operating at the level of demand. We demand something of it, and our wish is granted. Our curiosity is satiated, and the question is now closed, solved. Like a Sherlock book, there is meaning in this endeavor of asking questions. Demand originates, more or less, in childhood:
Dad, where do we go when we die?
Heaven, dear.
The ceaseless questioning of the child is almost always closed at some point. This is not , strictly speaking, bad. This is the foundation for a functional society. We all must know where we fit in among others. Ryan Engley, on the podcast Why Theory?, pointed something out that drives right to the heart of the nature of demand: some anxiety was alleviated during the pandemic when grocery stores started to place arrows on the ground to direct traffic and inform us where to stand. Our placement, among others, is no longer a question.
You know where you stand in relation to David; you are aware of the world he is depicting — and, further, that you are not historically a part of it, but are an inheritor of it. You know what questions to ask because they were predetermined — as are the answers.
But confronted with a solid color four times the size of you is rather disconcerting. Where do you start? What do you ask? Everything is now open.
Ricoeur identifies two modes of interpretation [1]: That which creates meaning by synthesizing and bringing things together; and that which divests something of meaning, interrogating, critiquing, and leaving open. While looking at the work of Still in that museum, my friend and I were left in the realm of the latter form of interpretation. In psychoanalytic terms, at the level of desire and metonymy: one question slipping to the next and to the next, never finding a proper resting place or closure.
Abstract art: dissatisfaction and curiosity
The work of artists like De Kooning and, even more, of Rothko and Still, are immensely frustrating. Born in the 50’s in New York City, the movement of abstract expressionism, as it was later called, sought to cultivate spaces of freedom and spontaneity. But the history, and the theory, is not so important as it is to neo-classicists or impressionists or realists, etc.
It’s not as important because these things are operating on the first kind of interpretation Ricoeur identifies: meaning-making, i.e., closing. Monet’s work means something because it is already set against a backdrop of meaning: impressionism, late 19th-century France, urban life, cafes and haute société, and so on. But what do we make of this:
Does it even matter that I am not attaching a name, year, or museum to it?
The only thing left to do is ask questions, and Still knew that. That’s why he went back and formally erased all the names he had given any of his paintings, even his earlier, more linear and coherent works.
Can a kindergartener paint this? Why is it in a museum? How did the artist know he was done with it? Would I have stopped in the same place? What does it mean?
Those questions should be sustained, and they should keep getting asked. And this is the worth of abstract art. [3]
Notes
[1] P. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965).
[2] To not get flamed by the citation police: Clifford Still, “PH-174” (1960).
[3] I deliberately avoided discussing monetary worth of pieces of art. Does a Still painting selling for millions of USD change the reflexive nature of his work? That’s perhaps more of a question for art historians, and I’ll leave it to them to answer for now. But, as Wilde’s Lord Darlington says, a cynic is the person who knows the market price for everything and the value of nothing.
