080039 SE Theories of Abstraction (2021W)

After a good hundred years, abstract (non-objective, non-representational, non-mimetic, non-figurative or even concrete) art has become a cultural habit. However, the refusal of a legible (figurative, pictorial) representation, which is replaced neither by mere ornament nor by symbolic signs, represents a fundamental break in the history of visual art.Established methods of interpreting art are deprived of their basis: the (re)recognizability of an object shown by or in a picture. Abstract art has no 'natural subject' (Panofsky). In order to legitimize such strangeness, a variety of theoretical justifications have been formulated. Especially artists of the first half of the century have tried to make plausible that abstract art is a different (and 'higher') realism than the traditional one, which took the world accessible to perception and natural consciousness as its subject and standard. A theoretically as well as pictorially decisive moment is the interpretation of perspective, which limits the perception of human subjects to one point of view and with which Cubism - after signs of dissolution since the 19th century - definitely broke.
The seminar focuses on artists' texts of the first half of the century that understood this break with perspective 'epistemologically' (referring to the possibilities of human subjects to access reality) and 'ontologically' (referring to the constitution of the real and the position of the human subject in it) as a breakthrough towards the representation of a transperspectival experience and reality. In art criticism, on the other hand, a skeptical-formalist reading has been established that understands abstract, non-mimetic (a-perspectival) art as primarily self-reflexive, exposing its own materiality, its means, the conditions of the medium (e.g., orthogonal limitation, flatness, the use of pigment and certain tools and procedures of its application). In the sixties this 'formalist' reading became dominant and since then has also significantly determined the artistic development itself (thus various varieties of 'concrete painting'). In contrast, the philosophically sophisticated self-interpretations of the artists of the first avant-garde are often dismissed, especially in critical art history, as hypertrophic and conventional metaphysics, as an escape into an otherworldly (Platonic, esoteric) backworld.
We will perform close readings of important texts (among others from the extensive theoretical work of Mondrian and Malevičs) and get to know some of the sources of the understanding of abstraction as a 'New Realism': the energetic and dynamistic conception of nature of the 19th century (from Helmholtz to Nietzsche), the media-analytical conception of painting and implicit epistemology of Neo-Impressionism, the philosophy of Henri Bergson. It should become clear that the 'New Realism' implies a radical critique of the finite ('perspectival') consciousness, but that it does not delimit this consciousness to an otherworldly world - to ideal or rational structures underlying the visible world, to the often invoked 'absolute' - but confronts it with a dynamic abyss from which it, together with its objects, only emerges in the course of subject formation or individuation.
The seminar will take its time to get to know and think through the connections outlined here. The analysis of individual paintings and of developments of works will play an important role. The goal is to relativize the still established formalistic reduction of abstraction to an art that is only interested in the pictorial signifier.