This picture is part of an ongoing series that builds up a body of work to provide a  supplement  to a forthcoming  online exhibition at Encounters Gallery:

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. 

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I am reading this text on Deleuze and abstraction by Brent Adkins as part of trying to understand how different people conceptualize abstraction. This is normally seen in terms of a removal, a paring away, a purification. It is an abstraction from something.

Deleuze has an idiosyncratic view of the abstract, which compared to that of Clement Greenberg or  Peter Wolin   or Hegel.  Whereas Hegel (and people generally) think of the abstract in opposition to the concrete, Deleuze thinks of the abstract in opposition to the discrete.  Deleuze  views abstract art as being abstract because it  produces sensations  not  representations. Sensations are defined as percepts (new ways of seeing or construing ) and affects (new ways of feeling). 

Affects are associated with intensity (or the tendency towards change) and  not extensivity (or the movement towards stasis). Abstract is one of the ways that Deleuze thinks through intensity. For Deleuze the abstract is true lived experience. Abstract lived experience is linked to the tendency toward change (the concrete) as opposed to the tendency toward stasis (the discrete).

 Deleuze held that the key to change is to challenge the major conception of the canon and its dogmatic image of thought. Artists think in terms of percepts and affects rather than the concepts that philosophers think in. Photographers think in terms of images, line, form and colour to create something new--a becoming: what Nietzsche called the untimely. 

In the art institution the new is structured in terms of  a linear progress as a before and after. The temporal schema is a before abstraction and an after with the before--realism---  seen as  negative and modernist abstraction  seen as a new enlightened era.  However,  it is more accurate to see realism and abstraction as co-existing with different layers of strata  that are full of dramatic breaks, ruptures in these layers; stopping points, rifts, shafts, with their multifarious interactions.  Photography in creating something new can be seen as a bringing together of disparate   elements  or lines that cross cut its history without being confused with it or being stifled by  its conformity.