Thoughts In an Art Gallery...

"Abstraction" opens up the prospect of an art that, following in the footsteps of pure philosophical inquiry, perhaps symphonic music, and certain expressions of spirituality, finds in geometry not only the new vernacular of the era of industry but also the secret language of the psyche or of our world, or rather, the psyche as the world; an art that is "abstract" inasmuch as it has withdrawn from the realm of appearances stands in the pursuit of something anticipating the noumenal.
At an exhibition of Russian art was Kasimir Malevich's unmistakable, iconic 'Black Square", that perfect and immutable monolith, that palate-cleansing cipher which admits nothing but its own abstract purity. But as one comes closer, one discovers actual variation. This is not the mathematical gesture of flawlessness that is expected that most people assume. This is messy, blotchy, rather painterly with rough-hewn edges yet remains black and just as bleak as anything without an unfolding future. It is death on display.
What is abstraction? A utopian realm of pure form; a universality of expression, of emotion, of thought; the hue of an infinity; a glimpse into the spiritual structure of nature itself; the culmination of thousands of years of human aesthetics...
A fear of life; of death; the loss of empathy...an escape from nature, a form of ecocide through willful ignorance; the incestuous victory of the single-minded logic freak...the fatal flaw of Western civilization.
The evolution of western aesthetics is one of a creeping abstraction; a turning away from the natural world.
Modernism gave birth to abstraction in a fit of dread, a paroxysm of fear born in the unpredictable dead of night, in the threatening wilderness, in the aftershock of a world war. The Futurists, the Constructivists, the Bauhaus, all of them were ruled by the tantalizing image of standing victorious over the corpses of trees, the sterile mountains, and a sun becoming dimmer, To tame an insane and corrupt world, they had to perfect it with logic. To tame art, they made stringent rules to follow.
This mind-set still rules over us. It doesn't need to be . Design doesn't need to be terrified, precious, idealized or sanitized. It can be visceral, messy, chaotic, anarchic...We can move on from the modernist impulses to always conform.Conformity is anti-human at its core....