It all starts with an overwhelming and chaotic stream of subjective phenomena, which we seek to organize and make communicable. If we call this process "reality-making" or to chime with Cézanne "realisation" then the dominant method in our culture is the scientific objectification, which is an immensely rigorous and powerful tool for control and survival.

So dominant and effective is this objective reality that we tend to forget that it is only one way of coming to terms with the phenomena - a wonderfully effective way, but a way that disregards whole aspects of existence, whole chunks of the phenomena, which are explained away as the "intuitive" and "immaterial" and not "really" there. This leaves us with a world view that is ultimately based on power and control, with consequences for the forms of society that we create.

Art offers alternative "realisations" to that of scientific objectivity and can encourage a more flexible and inclusive (though not arbitrary) "take" on phenomena, looking at the "material" in a different, less manipulative, way and accommodating aspects of the "immaterial" such as ethical and aesthetic intuitions, meaning and value.

This makes of art a similar kind of endeavour to science, or rather it repositions science as one of the arts, but one that has achieved an enormous dominance in our present culture.

This is all more or less what Konrad Fiedler was saying at the time when Cézanne was painting. I don't suppose they knew of one another but these might have been ideas that were in the air.

———

I don´t think that society can exist without objective truth. Society requires a common reality (however fluid it may be at the edges) to enable cooperation and language.

 Objective truth is interpersonal truth. It doesn't have to have any metaphysical implications and is perfectly compatible with epistemological scepticism. It is inherently social - one of society's most significant constructions and one of its most important glues.

 This doesn't make objective truth arbitrary, but it does make its quality (reliability) sensitive to the systems that generate and maintain it.

As a social entity, objective truth requires governance. Wherever it is non-trivial and disputed or is too complex and arcane for general spontaneous agreement there will be some kind of arbitration or the appeal to authority. (How do you know how a dynamo works, what the Colosseum was used for, when the last train left?)

 A lack of such governance in anything but the most basic of societies would be truth by brute force and rhetoric.

Instead of this, we currently have a complex kind of representative technocracy, embodied in institutions such as the law courts, public education, serious journalism and academic journals. As long as we are satisfied that such institutions operate to a reasonably high moral standard, without external agenda, are accountable and transparent in their workings and are open to universal participation, we can safely delegate the governance of objective truth to them.

 This kind of consensual technocratic governance (and with it, the societal glue of objective truth) is seriously weakened by the attacks of external power-interests that denigrate experts, postulate "fake news" and politicise schools and law-courts.

An incipient breakdown can be observed in the current proliferation of would-be truths and (in particular) their massive distribution without any kind of accountability, which threatens to disintegrate society and potentially make way for an absolutist system that can then enforce its own inefficient and self-serving version of truth.

———

Artworks contribute potential form to the original chaos of unformed "inner" and "outer" perception. With form comes awareness.

Society (in the shape of language, tradition, science, convention etc) hoards, standardizes and instrumentalizes form. This is important for unambiguous communication and our survival in the world but it alienates form from raw experience.

At a personal level, we still need vital, unassimilated form for awareness and understanding of our own subjectivity.

I think this explains the elation and gratitude, the "yes!" that art can arouse in us.

———

Susanne Langer emphasises the virtual in art, and insists that some kind of virtuality is the defining feature of every artform.

Virtuality/illusion is a form of projection. It is the illusionistic space of a painting where the observer (or the artist as their own observer) freely projects parts of their experience, lending them form, structure and a degree of communicability.

Figurative art can be a distraction to this process of projection because it offers a second conceptual level for another kind of projection (identification with a figure for example) to take place, leading to confusion if the two levels cannot be brought into harmony.

———

My feeling is that abstract painting has to come to some kind of arrangement with figuration. Rather than fighting it with extreme simplification or mute all-overness, or chaos and incoherence, I think it has to accept a degree of figuration as an inevitable consequence of complexity and visual interest but at the same time ensure that the figuration taken alone for itself is simple and unintrusive.

I think that this is a tendency already present in a humble still-life or an empty, undramatic landscape. Cézanne comes to mind.

The advantage of at least partly figurative painting over pure abstraction is the enormous space-making power that figuration wields.

———

Warum Malerei?

Wir leben in einer Welt überfüllt von Bildern, auf Bildschirmen und Werbe-Plakaten, in Zeitschriften und Büchern.

Diese Bilder, die uns täglich zu hunderten oder gar tausenden begegnen haben eines gemeinsam: ihre Realität besteht nur aus ihrer immateriellen Erscheinung – der dargestellte Inhalt in illusorischem Raum.
Ihre materielle Substanz – der Bildschirm, das Papier – ist eine glatte, homogene, kaum wahrnehmbare Oberfläche, die keinen Bezug zum Image besitzt, und die keinerlei Widerstand leistet, wenn das Auge in den Bildraum eintaucht.

Diese Abspaltung von Materiellem und Immateriellem ist kennzeichnend für die heutige Zeit.
Die fortschreitende Wissenschaft hat uns die Götter aus Sonne, Mond und Sternen, die Geister aus den Bäumen und die Feen aus dem Wald vertrieben. Sie hat unser Wissen und unsere Effektivität, unsere Überlebensfähigkeit enorm gesteigert aber die nunmehr rein materielle Welt von immateriellen Werten und Bedeutungen gesäubert und die Achtung vor unserer Umwelt geschwächt.

Auch im sozialen Bereich schreitet diese Spaltung voran. Das menschliche Selbstverständnis von vereinten Körper und Seele wird von der Neurowissenschaft und den Verfechtern der künstlichen Intelligenz in Frage gestellt. Die neo-liberalen Tendenzen in der Wirtschafts-Ordnung reduzieren die Menschen auf ihre materielle Arbeitskraft.
Dafür gibt es die Verehrung von den abgespaltenen, immateriellen Erscheinungsbildern von Prominenten und die Pflege von immateriellen Beziehungen in den sozialen Medien.

In der Malerei verbinden sich das Materielle und das Immaterielle. Im Gegensatz zu den endlos reproduzierbaren, rein immateriellen Bildern auf Fotos und Bildschirmen hat ein Gemälde eine wahrnehmbare Oberfläche, die die geistigen und körperlichen Spuren seiner Entstehung als materielles Objekt trägt.
Ein Gemälde ist somit gleichzeitig Image und Objekt, und als solches ist es auch eine Instanz. Ganz abgesehen von etwaige dekorativen, psychologischen, symbolischen oder gar status-verleihenden und geld-vermehrenden Funktionen, das Gemälde steht als eine Verknüpfung zwischen der Überlebenswichtigen materiellen und der wert- und bedeutungsgebenden immateriellen Welt.

Das ist zwar keine einmalige Leistung. Die Menschen, die wir lieben, oder die Orte und Dinge, die wir als irgendwie besonders oder magisch schätzen schaffen diese Verbindung auch.
Aber es ist trotzdem eine Überlegung wert, ob man mit der immateriellen Abbildung eines noch so großartigen Kunstwerkes auf einem Poster oder doch lieber mit einem echten, die Welten verbindenden und an die Ganzheit erinnernden Gemälde an der Wand leben will.

———

I'm pretty sure that Hofmann's "In the Wake of the Hurricane" 1960 would have been painted without any conventional attention to figuration.

Yet the space discovered in the course of Hofmann's organisation of colour and form is (for me anyway) a landscape space. It's not an arbitrary addition or a lazy solution - it's the space that the painting required in order to succeed as a painting.

The literal content all looks very abstract to me but the landscape spatiality creates figurative associations: the large orange and white area on the lower right becomes a kind of arid plain, while the tongue of green on the lower left becomes a tree-covered hill. Two thirds up is a kind of horizon and above this the dramatic storm clouds are pulling away. Hofmann presumably saw this too and gave the work a corresponding title. But there's no way he set out with this as his "subject".

And in spite of all these figurative associations, it is still possible to enjoy the work as a purely abstract and spatially coherent arrangement of painted marks on canvas.

One might call this "transparent" figuration.

Hofmann's "The Prey" 1956 on the other hand is entirely figurative, as it seems (to me) that the whole import of the painting is contained in its figurative associations.

———

The crucial difference between the objective and the subjective lies in the incorrigibility for third-persons of first-person statements about “inward matters” / ”states of mind”.
This leads straight to Wittgenstein´s private language argument and the realisation that such statements are a “kind of cry” or something akin to poetry compared to statements of objective fact, whose claims must bow to social institutions such as peer review, repeatability, eye-witness accounts, documentary evidence, trial by jury etc. etc.

In accepting this incorrigibility, we are also accepting that the bearer of these “inward matters” is not an object. There is something about them that cannot be known in an objective or scientific sense and therefore cannot be predicted or instrumentalised.

And from this we can derive the substance of what we call human rights, which in most cases are concerned with protection against instrumentalisation or treatment as a “mere object”.

In this way, subjectivity is immensely important to our concept of what it is to be human.
I think the current problems surrounding objective truth are not caused by an excessive flowering of subjectivity (which would essentially be a flowering of the arts) but by the ongoing erosion of institutions which police and guarantee objectivity – law courts, serious journalism, academic institutions etc.
On the contrary, one could argue that subjectivity is under serious threat from scientific reductionism and its claims for artificial intelligence and the perfectibility of neuroscience.

———

Howard Hodgkin at the National Portrait Gallery, London

———

One of the reasons that abstract painting might be at something of a dead end is its denial of all the little figurative elements it either deliberately uses or else can’t avoid as a collateral in creating virtual space.

Those little „doorway“ diagonals in John Hoyland‘s 60s work; the implied linear perspective of Albers` nested squares; aerial perspective redefined as the spatiality of colour; even the spatially-ordering use of convex vs. concave shapes - all of these, and a host of others, are borrowed from our experience of things in the world. And all of them drag a figurative interpretation along with them.

 I think that because of this, there has grown up an arbitrary set of „acceptable“ tropes which then count as abstract: geometry, parallel planes, atmospheric space, hard edges, all-overness, extreme simplification, flatness etc.

But these tropes are intensely limiting and maybe already exhausted. In this sense, abstract painting has become academic.

And the way out, for me, would be to accept that the spatiality of even the most abstract painting works largely by reason of its figurative borrowings.
These borrowings might be easier to overlook in some of the tropes currently designated as abstract but as soon as any kind of spatial complexity is required, abstract purity is no longer an option.

———