Concerning the Spiritual in Art

 

Improvisation 27, Garden of Love ll (1912)

Kandinsky's l911 treatise "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," is a classic essay on abstraction. The famous painter draws an analogy with music which by turn sets the stage for a discussion of abstraction in painting and other arts. Prosody can be a linear and seemingly realistic literary form such as in the case of  "Tintern Abbey," but modernist poets like John Ashberry use language in ways that can be difficult to parse. The experience is tantamount to not being able to navigate one's way around a canvas. If the medium is the message, then, in this case, don't mistake the messenger. Going back to plasticity, can it be said that Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)" is the real realism, reflecting neuronal movement of axons and dendrites between synapses to regulate the flow of serotonin while so-called realism is, in effect, a construct, a delusion constructed by the mind, as a way of regulating bodies in space?