dayboat journal: ART: Semantic Categories of Form for Abstract Painting

Thursday, May 23, 2013

ART: Semantic Categories of Form for Abstract Painting

...from Pepe Karmel, Artnews, April 2013

I found this useful for interpreting shapes and forms I view in abstract painting, yielding some meanings. Karmel's idea is that abstraction is derived from figurative images, a familiar idea, but it's the classification that's intriguing me.

He also states that abstraction is "how we think of the future", challenging the stereotype of romantic dystopias and asserting that global transformational events are improving the lives of everyone, the rising tide for all our vessels. He discusses Peter Halley's idea that early abstraction celebrated utopian socialism, which failed post-war, and became a symbol of alienation. Current abstraction creates "...visual allegories of social change that carry us beyond the old capitalism-socialism divide."

Here are his categories. I have looked up most of the artists he references under each category and find I mostly don't agree with him in the case of the painters.

1. COSMOLOGIES

Marcel Duchamp, Network of Stoppages

Alexander Calder, Untitled, 1937

Jackson Pollock, The Big Dipper, 1947

Chris Martin, Untitled, 2005

Guillermo Kuitca - Pepe Karmel might put this artwork and the Duchamp above in his SIGNS category, but I think it has to do with distance,time, and space that cosmological imagery infers.

2. LANDSCAPE
These are the artworks I love, because of their beauty of surface, and the transcendent meanings that are so easily available.

Mary Heilmann, Capistrano, 1994

Mary Heilmann, False Sense of Well-Being

Thomas Nozkowski

Audra Weaser, Poet's Crossing

Pat Steir, Waterfall

3. ANATOMY/BIOMORPHISM - I recognize this category but I responded to the examples so tepidly I shall leave it for another day.

4. FABRICS - sourced by globalism, the Pattern and Decoration Movement, and psychological needs for repetition, horror vacuii response, celebratory cultural/ethnic identity, with Geometric/biomorphic forms.