Abstract Art (pt. 6)

But can the human mind comprehend "random"?  Michael Shermer, author and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, has written an article on what he calls "patternicity"—the brain's ability to connect sequences and find order in random phenomena.  Commonly referred to as pareidolia or apophenia, this condition of the mind finds patterns and systems within otherwise chaotic environments or situations.  In the post-WWI world which we are studying, notions regarding this study within neuroscience were characterized under the invention of the psychological inkblot test by Hermann Rorschach in 1921.  This staple of modern psychology is one with which we are all familiar on an anecdotal sense.  A white card, stained randomly on one side with spilled ink and then folded to create a symmetrical image, is presented to a viewer who then expresses what he or she believes to see within the stain upon first glance.  In Kandinsky's day, this test was used for diagnosis of mental illness, but it has since grown to operate within much broader functions to apply to personality tests and other psychological studies.  It demonstrates the ability of the mind to find meaning within abstraction and see structure in anarchy.  Shermer's article on patternicity, published in Scientific American in 2008, pushes the concept to argue that our minds constantly do this and that in fact "our brains are belief engines."  Supporting evidence for Shermer's article comes from the 2008 study conducted by Harvard University professor Kevin R. Foster and Hanna Kokko of the University of Helsinki (Finland) and published in the leading research journal of the Royal Society's Biological Sciences field.  Although both the article and the peer reviewed study examine the operations of "patternicity" within the context of Evolutionary Theory (and consequently remain within the category of pseudoscience), the thought is relevant to our look at Abstract Art.

Remember back to Michelangelo's fresco of The Creation of Adam, where God stretches his arm down from Heaven to touch Adam's hand; and there is a space between their two index fingers.  They do not make contact, but our mind's eye fills in the gap; it connects the dots, so to speak, even though they are left open.  People describe the work as "Adam touching God," when in fact the opposite is true.  They are not touching, and given the historical context of Renaissance Humanism we can see that the work's entire point is to show that this disconnectedness is Adam's fault.  But what is it about our perception that we find in images things that aren't really there?  This comes back to haunt us here and now with Kandinsky's artwork.  Do you see anything in these paintings?  Isn't this just a completely random combination of colors and shapes on a canvas which contains no implicit meaning or message?  If it is truly random, then what are the implications for art?  Is art something random?  Up to this point, we have looked at a whole history of Western art and have no doubt found a fair amount of inherent significance in the study.  I have humbly sought to explicate several important works of art and communicate something of their meaning and importance within the field of art history.  But supposing we come now to a painting that has no latent meaning, an invention which can't be explained through artistic terms or any terms?  In the context of art's historical sequence, paintings like these of Kandinsky come as total backlashes against not just the previous generation but against the structure of art on a whole.  Like the Dada movement in the early 1920s, this style of painting is attempting to deconstruct art theory.  It gives us an opportunity to look closer inside the medium and inspect the elements we've seen up to this point for establishing a definition, or at least a clear understanding, of art.

The surprising thing about music which we learn when we study music theory is that it is very mathematical.  Jazz, however consistent with other musical forms, is arguably the least mathematical of genres because it deconstructs the structured order of compositions.  (Don't get me wrong: jazz—at least the jazz developing around this time, the post-WWI Modern period—retains much dependence on formula; but it, probably more than any other style of music, pulls away from that).  So, is art mathematical?  What is structured in art that needs to be disassembled?  I'm not just talking about craft or the making of art.  Does the body of Western artwork which we have studied up to now contain some overarching formula for construction, like the Ancient Egyptian grid system that dominated hieroglyphic art styles during the Middle Kingdom?  Do we see mathematics in Géricault's Raft of the Medusa or geometry in Murillo's Return of the Prodigal Son?  A 2010 article from The Guardian, quoting chairman of the Italian national committee for cultural heritage Silvano Vinceti, expressed the views held by some experts that the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci's famous masterpiece, contains hidden symbols of numbers and letters within the scene and even in the figure's own facial features.  What do such findings indicate—that art is truly mathematical in formula, or that it is merely our own minds looking for patterns and structures within a flat surface of randomized shapes and colors?

Abstract Art (pt. 5)

Floating around out here in abstract territory, I suppose anything goes.  What do you think of these little guys?  I think they look like little animals—I don't know, like plankton or something.  Again, the artist gives no clue to subject matter (and indeed, there is none in this painting, titled Sky Blue).  Kandinsky has instead painted unintelligible shapes in a strange variety of bright colors.  Totally random.

Abstract Art (pt. 4)

The culminating end product of this deconstruction of art in the early 20^th century was Non-Objective Art, a style that uses color, line, texture, and unrecognizable shapes and forms.  These works are totally abstract and contain no apparent references to reality.  When we arrive at Kandinsky, artists refuse even to title their works, in order to stay true to the idea of pure abstraction.  This painting is his Composition III.

Wassily Kandinsky's earliest artworks follow Post-Impressionist styles, with clear references to reality and actual subject matter.  He could paint realistically but eventually chose not to for specific, philosophical reasons.  Coming through art school, the painter sought new ways to show the world around him and express inner feelings through images not tied to tangible objects.  Art, in his mind, should not be merely an illustration of objects as they appear in nature.  He followed the theory that all nature can be simplified by geometry, and he believed that a painting should be a duplicate of some inner emotion (Expressionism).  But it's left completely to abstracts.  Kandinsky's paintings are very cerebral in that he doesn't give any clues as to what we are observing.  This is literally a canvas of lines and shapes, colors on an otherwise blank, white surface, much of which, by the way, has been left blank and white.  They appear structured and in some kind of order (most of his paintings, for instance, feature a blue circle, red square, and yellow triangle), but that order is indiscernible to us, the viewer.  Here we enter into a world not necessarily of imagination or style but of pure abstraction; the point of the painting is to exist outside of reality.  What meaning can come out of such a work?  That, too, is left open and undefined.  The artist is trying to create a work that extends beyond itself through non-reality, but how about you?  What do you think; is this art?  Have we broken off into something else?

Abstract Art (pt. 3)

The Abstract Art movement can be seen as a continuation of the idealistic progression in art theory developing at this time; it can also be seen as a product of the times.  In the aftermath of World War I, as I mentioned earlier, many poets and writers fled to Paris for safe haven against a world which they thought was falling apart at the seams (in their eyes, especially America).  In 1919, William Butler Yeats wrote one of the great, definitive lines of Modernism in his poem, "The Second Coming": "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."  This was to say that eventually world systems break down, deteriorate, and die; and Yeats was right.  Modernism is about this deconstruction and collapse of the old ideals (of faith, connection to nature, nobility of existence, relation to one another—of all the traditional strongholds of goodness and innocence).  I state this as the case specifically within the art world at this time.  (As a footnote, this is a blog about art history; when I mention history, it's to be related back to art.  I make no statements about church history, national or racial history, or any other kind of history but that which is happening within the art world—just so we're clear).  The Modern Age in art saw many innovations that broke down the foundational customs of preceding generations.  For one thing, the music world saw a total revolution in the advent of the Jazz Age.  The kind of chaotic melodies produced in jazz music perhaps make for a good comparison between the old, structured order of the Victorian world and this new world of Modern ideological pseudo-anarchy.

Abstract Art (pt. 2)

Klee let his imagination run free in this innovative style of hyper-expressionism.  Working on scraps of burlap, paper, glass, linen, and other materials, he created a collage of works that, each and every one, expanded the notions of what art could accomplish.  He created almost nine thousand paintings and drawings based solely on his own imagination and wit.  As with this wholly abstract work, Ancient Sound, the artist brought philosophy and artistic theory into his works on an unprecedented level.

All that is really here are squares of color, applied paint on a canvas apparently not even trying to embody subject matter either impressionistically or realistically.  The title suggests that this is something "ancient."  A fundamental construction as simplistic as this marks this painting as a staple work of Primitivism.  Art (at least, the kind we are looking at) is, in its most fundamental definition, colors and shapes.  Going back to these most basic elements of art—deconstructing the painting to its simplest, most primal elements—is not merely a venture of Expressionism, it's a philosophical endeavor.  The ultimate metacritical move for art in the Modern Era was its progression to self-analysis and art about art.  All formalities break down, and we enter into a world of abstracts in order to experiment with the techniques and applications of various art forms.  This is Abstract Art.

Abstract Art (pt. 1)

In the stream of Primitivism, Paul Klee was an artist who used simple approaches to convey artistic expression.  He created "primitive art" that incorporated only the most basic symbolism and use of form to communicate broad, ambiguous ideas.  The freedom of the artist's imagination extends here even to a world that doesn't always make sense to the painter as well as to the viewer.  He is known to have "appropriated" the works of children—he actually copied kids' work to infuse a greater sense of simplistic sincerity.  As the Enlightenment philosophers thought that native tribes of "savage" people possessed an inherent nobility and honesty, so artists like Klee found a greater connection to humanity through simple forms, such as this oil and watercolor painting by the artist, entitled Fish Magic.

The story goes that Klee visited the aquarium of Naples and watched the fish there in the huge tanks dart, turn, and glide gracefully by.  Fascinated by these colorful animals, the artist took his brush and slowly began to make lines and shapes to a canvas with no definite idea in mind except to capture the instinctive feelings of his reaction to the sight.  In Fish Magic, we are presented with a magical world of total fantasy and surrealism.  Nothing looks real, no perspective gives the painting any semblance to real life, and the subjects all vary so strangely that their placement next to each other stretches our understanding of the scene beyond the limits of what reality can permit.  Consequently, the subject of Fish Magic becomes a thing nonsensical or not understandable—the subject is abstract.  Klee spent hours studying shells and butterfly wings and implemented these organic designs from nature in his work; but this is a scene clearly not found anywhere in nature.  We can discern fish floating in an undefined, black space, and there are also flowers, potted plants, a stopwatch, and, by all appearances, even people as well, among other things.  What are they all doing in this scene?  What's going on?  The ideals of Primitivism discredit those questions and say that those things don't matter; what matters is the natural relation of our mind's eye to the visual stimulus of the painting.  As I stated that not all Expressionism denoted self-expression, a painting like Klee's can be read as a direct appeal to the viewer's responsive, vicarious expression through visual interaction with the piece.  Since the subject is so incomprehensible, it is free of any constricting interpretive criteria for appreciation.  This is pure imagination, and imagination does not always make sense to person imagining as much as it does not always make sense to others.  Typical of the metacritical approach to art taken by the Modernists, many European artists around this time took the stance on their paintings to purposefully leave meaning out of their works as a way to construct a more genuinely expressive painting truer to the abstracts of cognitive and emotional consciousness and unconsciousness within the spectrum of the human experience.