Disfiguring Abstraction

Abstract

ion is already present from the first recorded history of art, on the Paleolithic cave walls of France and Spain. Marks in space. Perhaps protolanguage, perhaps protoart, no doubt something outside of the categories we now understand. Abstraction and patterning—visual marks unmoored from utility or representation—is a recurring impulse in the history of inscription whether we frame it as the unconscious or primitive. Abstraction at one cathected historical point echoes those other moments of abstraction or taps into abstraction as a dark pool, possibly a geyser, just under the surface of visual skin or appearance. Abstraction is not a race, as in who got there first; but the race line scars its putative invention. Abstraction, that is, is not invented but rediscovered, if not to say reinvented, over and again. Those reinventions are themselves signposts in the history of art. What was the most radical development in the visual art of the futurist moment? The invention (let’s say rediscovery) of the “pure products” of abstraction? The ready-mades? The collective actions of the Russian futurists? The move of the Russian futurians out of the museum and realm of high art and into decorative arts, costumes, micropress books? The kineticism of Italian futurism? The blank and monochromatic “non” paintings? The intertwining of abstraction and figuration in Klein-bottle-like or Möbius conundrums? Or the oscillation between these elements? Is it the 3. Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, 1986) is a crucial model for my speculations here as is Holland Cotter’s critical writing of the last decade and more in the New York Times. See also W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and Language,” Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1995). 4. Benjamin takes up this idea, for the final time, in “On the Concept of History” (1940), trans. Harry Zohn, Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Marcus Bullock et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1996–2003), 4:392–93. C H A R L E S B E R N S T E I N is the author of Recalculating (2013), Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (2011), and All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (2010). He is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. More information at epc.buffalo.edu Critical Inquiry / Spring 2013 487