Friday, August 30, 2019

Is Classic Abstraction the New Realism?

"Autumn Rhythm" (Number 30) by Jackson Pollock (1950), The Met
Is classic abstraction the new realism? One always assumes that a realistic view of the world is one filled with recognizable figures and it’s hard to digest the fact that ideas running through the mind are made up of preconceptions. You don’t have to be a neurologist to understand that sight is not necessarily restored in a blind individual once a particular ophthalmological advance or discovery allows for the repair of a congenital condition. Vision is a complex process and if one introduces solipsism or extreme subjectivity into the equation, there's no real way of confirming if one man’s red is another’s yellow or a rose is a rose or certainly. Isn't for instance vanishing perspective a kind of mind game? Who's to say that the abstractionists weren’t inadvertently unmasking a reality that had been under wraps—if it's impossible to actually agree that one person is seeing the same thing as the other? There are many issues here, but the chief ones boil down to the questions of A) what's reality? and B) what's perception? Abstractionists might be deemed Tiresias-like seers gifted with the ability to see beyond the surface images in which reality is wrapped. Perception is always a crap shoot in which an objectivist view of the outside world, what so-called “realists” strive for, is actually no more certain than the agreed upon value of some newly issued cryptocurrency.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.