On Jan 23, 2009, at 11:01 AM, William Conger wrote:
I reject this comment even if it is intended as the voice of the unitiated and not Michael's. Since anything at all, objective or not, can be likened to something else, all experience and "naming" is abstract.
The humorous take on this is a Peanuts strip in which Linus and Charlie Brown are laying on the ground, looking at the clouds, and seeing faces and other things in them. Charlie sees a doggie and a horsie and Linus sees St. Peter taking the coin from the fish's mouth! For the most part, when it comes to verbal and visual art, we humans have a great great bias for immediately grasping the representational and against the abstract. Scat singing and some kinds of concrete poetry come to mind as the small sample of "abstract" language, and of course, "abstract" painting and sculpture is quite widespread.
The sort of abstraction Michael refers to here is ultra-minimalism, a idealized Greenbergian literalness, which failed as soon as it was defined into a bland decorative, and thus heavily sentimentalized, visuality.
I understand your point of "sentimentalized visuality," but that has come about as much by way of the organs of popular culture, which you comment about elsewhere. In this message, I mean, simply, an abstraction that rebuffs the viewer's built-in disposition to perceive a represented subject almost instantaneously. The "image" cannot be resolved, and so he or she is left to look at what you describe next, to wit:
Abstraction is the world of pictorial space, the purposeful fictional realm where sensing of one thing as if another or others is active and not passive. It reinforces the unity of self and other in make-believe symbols.
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