The modest abstractures below were made whilst walking along the coastal rocks west of Dep's Beach with Maya on a  late  afternoon  poodlewalk.They are  part of a series  (the blog posts are now a notebook) as the photos  do not typically reward attention as particulars, but rather as members of a group or a series of  photographic abstractions.

I am struggling to find material on this form of abstraction understood as imagery that has been ‘abstracted’ from nature. In the visual arts abstraction is understood in modernist terms--which presupposed the specificity of the arts ( painting,  sculpture etc) and their purity. Abstraction in modernism is the divergence from representation, figuration and narrative.  Whilst abstraction in painting stood for a  purely autonomous, autotelic art and a universally legible language, photographic abstraction is usually seen as decoration -- a splash of colour and cheap profundity for the boardroom or bedroom. 

That much is well known. The difficulty I'm encountering is going beyond this 20th century art history to rethink photographic abstraction in the 21st century. The puzzle is: what is abstraction’s contemporary artistic meaning and significance beyond rejecting realism and the parochialism of the figure/ground distinction or returning to  or rescuing abstraction from its obsolesence, as the   familiar, wholesome, and spiritually nourishing in reaction to the Global Financial Crisis. 

This abstract series assumes a kind of continuity with the avant-gardist and modernist near-abstractions whilst  recognising  the failure of both the avant-garde's utopian visions and the failed promise of modernist abstraction. The latter's  origins in spirituality  led to the “secular cul-de-sacs” of industrial design and terminated in the pixelated color of electronic entertainment. 

This  abstract series  also maintains contact with  the artistic tradition of representational painting and photographs, whilst negating  the  contemporaneous conditions of ‘spectacularized’ entertainment,  specifically those formed by the predominance of industrialized digital imagery (in advertisements  such as tourism and popular arts).

What then are  the positive aspect of this negation? What  do form and colour refer to? What meanings do the abstractions from nature refer to? What is the relationship between form and historical meaning? 

These abstractions posses a materiality loaded with meanings in  a world were meta-narratives are no longer significant,  and the axiological criteria (the principles that determine what is good, what is bad, and how good or bad something is) lack value.

The photographic abstractions involve an artistic contradiction ---the simultaneous resuscitation of abstraction as subject matter and the  acknowledgment of abstraction's irretrievable loss).  These photographic abstractions are a difference in sameness, or, better said, they reveal a different sameness, a repetition that does not repeat the earlier myths about  individuality and personal expression. 

Can we anchor these abstractions in history--ie., situate them in the wider historical context  of Australia's repression of and haunting by its past?