Empathy for Abstraction

Introductory article in the catalogue Cave Paintings

Bill Jeffries, Writer, Curator, and former Director of SFU Galleries

Bill Jeffries, Curator, Writer, and former Director of SFU Galleries

I shall not conclude that the circle or square on the canvas is, in some hidden sense, a religious symbol, but rather: the capacity of these geometric shapes to serve as metaphors of the divine arises from their living, often momentous, qualities for the sensitive eye.
—Meyer Schapiro (1)

The Vancouver painter James K-M has been creating precisely delineated geometric abstractions since he first showed them, in The October Show, in 1983. He has exhibited continually since then, and even had a previous show at the SFU Gallery in 1984, accompanied by a catalogue with a critical text by David MacWilliam. K-M studied with Jeff Wall at SFU in the 1977–1978 year, and with Ian Wallace at Emily Carr College of Art in 1978–1979. Whether or not K-M’s approach to art has ever wavered internally, the outward manifestations of his thinking—the paintings—have remained constant since their debut.

There are myriad modes of image-making that operate at a “level of abstraction” other than that of everyday human perception. Geometric abstraction has historically been one important way to picture idealized, utopian, or optically dizzying models of pictorial space. What Bloch and Adorno called “the contradictions of utopian longing” applies to all art with utopian aspirations, regardless of its form. As they point out, it is important to remember that many utopian dreams from the past have been realized, so although we may doubt utopian imaginings, it is fruitless to be completely cynical about them. Hard-edge geometric painting exists in a context of societal mood swings, leading some to feel that its value has depreciated since, say, the advent of Op Art. Current global exhibitions would indicate otherwise, and the obsessive evolution of James K-M’s art does as well, while reminding us how fluidly his forms relate to other quasi-idealized geometrics, including minimalist sculpture, modernist architecture, micro- and macrocosmic structures, and the geometries of space.

Geometric art is reputed to have difficulty engaging societal issues. But that view has been countered, for instance, by First Nations’ abstractions symbolically representing histories and myths, as well as by Meyer

Schapiro’s ideas in “On the Humanity of Abstract Painting,” quoted above. Schapiro argues that the social remains even after removing the “heroic, mythical and religious” from art, in the form of the artist’s “feeling for nature and things.” Schapiro contests the dismissal of the abstract by claiming that it “challenges the idea of its inhumanity” by its very existence. The abstract offers a model of order that mirrors the hidden order of nature. And it reminds us that even with twenty-first century multiculturalism, there is enough common human experience that the original modernist claim to provide universal cultural systems can still contribute to the global understanding of non-referential forms of art.

Geometric abstraction is a subset of the project of the flattening of the picture plane in painting, raising the question of why this flattening matters. Is it just that it creates more interesting pictures to look at? What Cézanne did in many of his paintings, especially in the views of L’Estaque, was to undermine geometric and aerial perspective so that we are forced to see things in the distance—such as blue water in the bay— as if they were equidistant to the land masses in the foreground. I propose that Cézanne’s flattening project was directed at reminding us how to look at the world, not how to look at art; it is not the minor exhilaration that we get from looking at a Cézanne landscape that matters, but the much stronger, life-changing neurological charge that we get by looking at three-dimensional landscapes as if they were painted by Cézanne. This is easy to do, day or night, almost in any situation where there is depth to the scene, depth that the brain would expect to be there, to perspectivally order the world in terms of closer and further. Overturn those expectations by flattening, and you should experience a release of neurotransmitter chemicals that will significantly alter your view of many things, not just landscape. It is that modification of the ratio of one neurotransmitter to another that I would propose constitutes the exciting bit in Cézanne’s flattening project and, to the extent that it can be broadly applied, is one way that art can become a “mood-altering drug.”

If the reversal of the expectation of depth while looking at a landscape or cityscape releases neurotransmitters, what happens when the opposite expectation of our brains is disconfirmed? When the mind perceives a seemingly flat object, such as a geometric abstract painting, to have depth to it, will synapses fire? In his paintings, James K-M reverses Cézanne’s procedure by creating complex space out of seeming flatness. We do not have many opportunities to try this experiment in nature; hence the need for exhibitions such as this one. This biochemical and perceptual flourish has also been explored in recent Vancouver art by Neil Campbell, whose wall works create deep space from a simplified matrix of flat elements.

Visual perception, however, is only one aspect of art. Since 1985, content has largely superseded “the visual,” but the world, as we are now being reminded, is so full of content that art’s replication of its stories may not be the obvious strategy for the future. Artists know how to see, and many make work asking us to learn to see anew—to take the time to consider something particular, especially the form of things, their massing, and their light patterns. James K-M’s art asks us to reconsider the relation between ideas and forms and reminds us that we would do well to enter the world of others’ ways of seeing as energetically as we enter the world of others’ ways of thinking—the two are not so different. For each shape in a James K-M painting, if we could substitute the terms “ideal form,” “state of the environment,” or “complexities of perceptual space” (as Roberto Calasso has suggested readers of Kafka do, substituting “Law” for “Castle”), his metaphorical claims for the value of hard-edge abstraction would emerge.

Other cities and other artists have worked to reopen this field over the past few years. Abstract art has made repeated comebacks through the 1980s and 1990s—the Tomma Abts exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in London and the New Museum in New York may be one sign that abstraction still has social resonance. The Tate Gallery media blurb praises Abts’s “rigorous and consistent approach to painting” and reminds us that the “intimate and compelling canvases she builds on enrich the language of abstract painting.” Bridget Riley is shown more now than she has been in twenty-five years. Various Optic Nerve exhibitions have come and gone in the past five years and the show The Birth of the Cool, on California modernism, was permeated with geometric forms that have become part of everyday life. There are no longer protests about Gerhard Richter’s abstract turn. In Vancouver, we are lucky that artists continue to produce in any form for which there is little institutional support. What Donald Judd said about Yves Klein might apply here: “the biggest frog … but in a rather stagnant pond.” That pond was Europe. But when it comes to enthusiasm for the abstract, it might be Vancouver—except for the efforts of artists such as James K-M, Eli Bornowsky, and Neil Campbell, who all do significant abstraction research through their work. If freedom is a major zone in utopia, the freedom to make the geometric relate to the social is one way to have visiting privileges, if not citizenship, in a part of that utopic space.

There are many other ways to explore paintings such as these, including McLuhanesque approaches that situate James K-M’s art within a matrix of mythic, iconic, and acoustic spaces, as proposed by Eric McLuhan in the following essay.

Note:
1Meyer Schapiro, “On the Humanity of Abstract Painting” (1960), reprinted in Mondrian: On the Humanity of Abstract Painting (New York: George Braziller, 1995).