From this low-fi blog in a minor photographic key a proposed online abstraction exhibition at Encounters Gallery has emerged that explores the contemporary nature of abstraction as opposed to the art historical one that sees abstraction as an modernist style of the 20th century. It is seen as outmoded--a pure” form or aesthetic form(s) that transcends historical and social influence that ran out of steam in the 1970s. Abstraction is locked into an historical dead end.
This art historical account still remains the dominant interpretation of (painterly) abstraction and so it appears to be very odd to speak of abstraction and politics, abstraction and culture, abstraction and gender or abstraction and race.
What has emerged from the blog is a proposed online abstraction exhibition at Encounters Gallery.This exhibition on abstraction photography includes some of my photos as well as possibly those of two colleagues, namely Beverley Southcott and Adam Dutkiewicz. We have exhibited together before, and Adam and I have published a book with Moon Arrow Press on abstract photography in 2016.
The basic idea behind this abstraction blog is to explore the contemporary nature of abstraction. The reason behind this is that we live in a capitalist society with a culture of the social forms of abstraction--eg., the commodity, money, finance, the abstract individual, abstract rights, mathematics, space, time, state, market, freedom, scientific laws, nature. Nature as represented by modern science is soundless, scentless, colourless.
The Marxist tradition depicts capitalism in modernity as a culture of abstraction and as a society whose culture is driven in multiple and unexpected ways, by actual abstractions. It holds that abstraction is produced by the fundamental social nexus of capitalist society--eg., the commodity as a social form of exchange value with its regime of generalized equivalence---that actually frame and govern our social existence. A real abstraction is also a relation, or even a thing, which then becomes a thought.
Abstractions are intrinsic to our social existence and they actually frame and govern our social existence. There are a myriad of ways in which our social life itself is practically abstract. This suggests that we cannot think without abstractions, and that there are modes of abstraction. This opens up the possibilities of exploring these modes and revising our dominant mode of abstraction.
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