This blog is mostly a series of abstractions made along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, that emerge from my daily walking along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast and bushland.These daily walks mostly take the form of poodlewalks. However, some abstractions are made from outside the Fleurieu Peninsula.
This approach to photography builds on the Abstract Photography: Re-evaluating Visual Poetics in Australian Modernism and Contemporary Practice book, which was published by Moon Arrow Press in 2017 and supplement the Abstraction: Different Interpretations exhibition at Encounters Gallery. Both text and exhibition adopted an art historical approach to photographic abstraction, rather than a visual studies approach. In doing so, however, it linked art history to aesthetics or philosophy.
The re view that discipline of art history is properly called “art history,” not “art theory” or “art criticism”--ie.. the rejection of philosophy is a conservative view premised on inherited ways of thinking and conventions, namely: the artist as genius, connoisseurship, the catalogue raisonné and an evolutionary historicism. This was deemed to be the disciplinary center of the history of art.
However, philosophy matters. Consider the modernist idea of medium, given that photography is considered to be a well-established artistic medium with its background history, theory and practice, technologies, conventions, innovations, traditions of debating the value of images and canons.
The photos in the blog are contemporary photography in the minimal sense that ‘contemporary’ art has been taken on as the generic name for the post-postmodern art that began to emerge in the 1990s. Contemporary art stands on the ruins of beauty, embraces the de-centring of modernism, is distinctly post-conceptual, and is an expanding field. In the 1980s and ‘90s post-modernism led to the eclipse of the idea of the medium (the form in which the artist presented the work was not important and what counted instead was what the artist said through it). Contemporary photography now confronts photography’s obsolescence (an outmoded technological form) in the face of digital imagery. Photography's established form as an artistic medium can no longer be taken for granted.
Consequently the approach to abstraction rejects reductionist accounts, like Greenberg’s in which painting, threatened with absorption by the mass culture and entertainment industries, retreated (or advanced, depending on your point of view) to the “essence” of painting as such, flatness and the composition of flat surface, an insistence on art’s purity and autonomy as a way of resisting such absorption or colonization by other, especially narrative, art forms. Medium for Greenberg is simply the physical materials and techniques of a particular category of art, and that the history of any artistic medium is driven by the necessity to discover the underlying truth or essence of that medium. In the case of painting, famously, it was ‘flatness and the delimitation of flatness
In his "The Case for Abstract Art" essay in Collected Essays and Criticism (Vol. 4) Greenberg treats the move to abstraction as an antidote against hyper-self-interested, materialistic, anti-contemplative mass society (this is what the art means (even while he insists it functions as an example of something that “does not have to mean”. The problem here is that once this truth or essence is discovered, there is seemingly nothing left for a particular medium to do. Having stripped away all superfluous conventions to reduce itself to the defining bedrock of its physical flatness’, painting was no longer aesthetically convincing.
Greenberg treats the autonomy of art so purely, ie., reduces abstraction to “the flatness and materiality of painterly expression. He doesn't address the obvious Hegelian question: what does it mean (why does it matter) that such self-authorizing painterly norms (flatness and frame) so exclusively lay claim on the aesthetic imagination? (Greenberg,“Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol.1).
The question that lies on the table is: why does abstraction in photography matter to us today? What does it mean for us today after the demise of modernism and the passing of postmodernism?