What Abstraction Tells Us

Long confined to formalist and self-referential imperatives that invited us to see only what a work gives us to see—according to Clement Greenberg, ”the work of art cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself”— abstraction has gradually freed itself from the Greenbergian yolk to recapture its evocative power. On the historical path of this emancipation, it’s important to remember that abstraction did not appear with modernism: abstract motifs were already used to express invisible realities or the sacred in premodern visual cultures, most notably in medieval, ornamental Islamic, Celtic, and African art.

Yet the “recuperation” of abstraction by Western modernism likely played a role in shaping a rather radical and biased definition of abstract art, one that endured over time, as suggested by the following quote by art historian Georges Roque that cites an anthology published in 1995: “While modernism in the visual arts is a very varied movement, there is a case for claiming that it is most fully represented by abstraction. The ethos of abstraction sets visual and aesthetic experience above all else (such as narrative, illusion, or moral effect) and stresses the importance of the individual creative artist and the independence of the artist from society.”¹ 1 - Eric Fernie, Art History and its Methods: A Critical Anthology (London: Phaidon, 1995), 349.

For Georges Roque, it is primarily the equation “abstraction = modernism” that is problematic, since manifestations of abstract art go far beyond the formal dictates of this movement. It’s now widely accepted that, figurative or not, art can be divorced neither from its context, nor from the experience of the artist, nor from that of the recipient. “There is no ‘pure art,’ unconditioned by experience,”² 2 - Meyer Schapiro, ”Nature of Abstract Art,” Total Abstraction 20 (October 2013): 17. as theorist Meyer Schapiro already stated in 1937. Rosalind Krauss reaffirmed this idea 35 years later, underlining that “the experience of a work of art is always in part about the thoughts and feelings that have elicited — or more than that, entailed — the making of the work.”³ 3 - Rosalind Krauss, ”A View of Modernism,” Artforum, September 26, 2023, accessible online. Indeed, if abstract art acquires a certain autonomy when facing the imperative to represent the real, it remains intimately linked to the world around it.

Yet, what about abstraction today? Rather than seeking to justify its pertinence, we’re interested in how it manifests itself a century after Kandinsky. Most obvious perhaps is the disappearance of the aesthetic and disciplinary hierarchies that dominated the modernist era, for abstract art resurrected motifs once attributed to ornamental art, or to traditional techniques such as weaving and embroidery that were excluded from the concept of “pure art.” Which is why, in this issue, we have chosen to turn away from the dogma of Abstraction as an historical genre — from which Black and Indigenous artists have often been excluded — to turn our attention to its diverse plastic, semantic, and political dimensions. For it is the plurality of forms — be they pictorial, three-dimensional, or performative — that give abstract art its evocative power today. We no longer consider abstraction as a practice devoid of a narrative dimension. Whether they are qualified as abstract, non-figurative, or non-objective, these works certainly tell us stories.

This edition sheds light on how artists are exploring this narrativity. By taking a stand against modernism’s (masculine) history, on the one hand; for example, by representing it through the faithful reproduction of works from this era. And by letting the story take place in the interstices of formlessness, on the other. It is abstraction that cloaks these sometimes painful or traumatic stories in various veils, to extract them from an overly revealing reality and to enhance our experience of the work by expanding the possibilities for creating meaning. As Brian T. Leahy underlines, “Abstraction’s unending potential lies precisely in its capacity to insist on our intimacy with the unrecognizable.” Indeed, in an age when image and information overload dominates our lives, it is perhaps in abstraction that we can find refuge. Even though abstracting ourselves from the weight of reality does not mean that we evade it… In this invitation to explore abstractions, we wish to re-establish a dialogue between content and form, between the political and the poetic, by engaging with works that evoke reality differently.

Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft