Faxing Abstractions
Overview:
Abstract art refers to artworks that do not present recognizable images of the world, but rather emphasize a visual language of line, shape, form, color and texture. Liberated from a mandate to represent what the eye can see, artists have used abstract forms to explore ideas, emotions, universal truths, and subjective states. Since it has afforded so much freedom, the visual language of abstraction has been an enduring preoccupation for artists of the twentieth century.
In the 1910s and 1920s, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and other European artists pursued the purity of abstract forms with utopian fervor and spiritual dedication. After World War II, American artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, pioneered a bold style of Abstract Expressionism, which championed painterly spontaneity and emotional intensity. After them, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Robert Ryman and others replaced the wild brushstrokes and drips of their predecessors with monochromatic and minimal forms. Even when Pop art of the 1960s and Neo-expressionist and Postmodern art of the 1970s and 1980s renewed interest in representation, many artists continued to resist depicting the world in favor of a limited vocabulary of line, shape, form, color, and texture. Today, many of the artists featured in FAX respond to the history of abstraction while also employing new digital tools.
This lesson addresses strategies of abstraction at play in FAX. Wade Guyton creates dynamic abstract forms by surrendering to the imperfections of modern technologies of reproduction. Using the letters of his name as a motif, Josh Smith produces paintings, drawings and collages that use all manner of abstract forms, marks and gestures, sometimes reproducing them using digital means. Johannes Wohnseifer appropriates signs and images (among them famous abstract paintings) only to recast them as new painted logos that critique commercial culture. Each of these artists references the history of modern abstraction while engaging technologies of reproduction in new and suggestive ways.
