My initial response was to ask what kind of abstraction is this, and then to wonder is it a new form of abstraction, or abstraction using different materials? Clement Greenberg discussed abstraction with formalist concerns, and was interested in converting illusionistic space into an optical one. Greenberg thought abstraction was connected to what had gone before and thus wasn’t a major shift in opposition to the representational, but rather on a continuum.
‘the difference was primarily a matter of space rather than the absence of recognizable images, since abstract paintings do not depict the kind of space occupied by our bodies and other things in the world’
(Colpitt p.164)
So could Greenberg accept recognisable space, as long as it was flat? Looking at Tillmans’s abstractions they do depict the same space as our bodies occupy, so maybe then they are aligned more with Theodore Adorno’s theories of social abstraction, who questioned the loss of individuality through mainstream culture
‘the official culture’s pretense of individualism... necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual.’
(Foster p. 19)
I think Tillmans’s abstractions are long shot views and thus give the distance and feel of abstraction, they remain open allowing them to bring something forward, the opportunity and possibility to recognise and access them is available to the viewer.
Bibliography
Colpitt, Frances. Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Foster, Hal. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1985.
Relyea, Lane. "Photography's Everyday Life and the Ends of Abstraction." Wolfgang Tillmans. Ed. Amy Teschner and Kamilah Foreman. Conneticut, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. p. 90 - 141.
Diane, I wonder if Greenberg could accept abstraction in photography full stop? He said that painting was above all about its very remove from the world to which photography was indexically bound—a painting was good to the extent that it dealt exclusively with problems and issues related to its own specific qualities as a flat, bounded surface on which marks were made whereas photography, regardless of subject matter, was still – due to its nature – bound to the world of the “real”.
ReplyDelete