Michael said: > > Not so with "abstract" paintings, which have no > discernible "referent." So the viewer is left with > looking at the canvas, and not beyond or through it, and > what is left is almost entirely the formal properties. Most > people, I daresay, have very limited capacity to > "sentimentalize" abstract paintings (i.e., to > infuse them with sentiment) because they don't know how > to encounter the formal properties of painting as equivalent > in "sentimental" potential to > "realistic" paintings.
I reject this comment even if it is intended as the voice of the unitiated and not Michael's. Since anything at all, objective or not, can be likened to something else, all experience and "naming" is abstract. The sort of abstraction Michael refers to here is ultra-minimalism, a idealized Greenbergian literalness, which failed as soon as it was defined into a bland decorative, and thus heavily sentimentalized, visuality. Abstraction is the world of pictorial space, the purposeful fictional realm where sensing of one thing as if another or others is active and not passive. It reinforces the unity of self and other in make-believe symbols. I have almost no patience for worn out, received, unexamined cliches about so called representational versus abstract art. We're supposed to be smart here, not plaid-jacketed purveyors of superficial popular boob-town sentimental mythology. WC > > > > | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | > Michael Brady > [email protected]
