ABSTRACTION AT WAR WITH ITSELF

Briony Fer
Rather than a retreat from life, the first generation of abstract artists believed
art could transform life and become an integral part of it. They thought it was
about space and spatiality, and new realities; about a new kind of world and new
ways of being a subject in the world. At its most radical, despite the name that
has come to describe it, geometric abstraction was never about pure geometry
or pure colour or even the shape of the shapes. At its most conservative,
it became a technocratic vision of fixed, formulaic rules.
From the outset abstraction the form of art that emerged in the 1910s and 20s
in an avalanche of movements given names like Suprematism, Neo-plasticism,
Constructivism, Productivism and so on could go either way. Certainly
abstraction generated a rhetoric of transcendental essences and absolute laws.
But there was also an even more fundamental materialism, never more so than
in the practice as opposed to the theory of abstract art.
But even the most idealist theories, as found in the writings of the artists
themselves, can be read against themselves. Kazimir Malevich, for example,
insisted on the term painterly mass to designate an amount of matter working
in a gravitational field, which is rather different to thinking in terms of fixed
ideal forms. Piet Mondrian, equally vehemently opposed the representation of
objects in the world, imagined form and colour as relational as well as pure
elements. Crucially, both developed a notion of a destructive, or in Malevichs
vocabulary additional, element, which operated to counter the constructive
systems they appeared to have unleashed onto the world.
Abstraction was at war with itself from the start. The antagonism between rulemaking and rule-breaking, between absolutist dogma and the provisional realities
of making art, were most vividly fought out within its constructive variant, by
which I mean that rush to think about the future by means of a lexicon of
geometric shapes of squares, rectangles, circles, triangles and so on. The
conflicts could be between whole groups, between individuals or exist in a single
artists work: for art over design, for design over art, for or against diagonals, for
straight lines against curved lines, for or against primary colour. Grand-scale
theories arguing over what sometimes seem like arcane points.
With hindsight, all the so-called rationalists and functionalists, or technicians
of sight, seem as prey to such exaggeration as any of the modernist dreammongers full of cosmic longing. And of course many artists were both. Art
historys subsequent efforts to compartmentalise different movements and
groups in neat boxes has not done the history of abstraction, geometric or
otherwise, any favours.
It may be that abstraction needs to be saved from itself. Certainly it needs
saving from the clichs attached to it; for instance, that it is merely formalistic
art for arts sake, or conversely, a still dominant assumption that says all
straight lines always and only speak the language of machine production, as if
this is the only way to describe its social dimension as art. Despite being over
one hundred years old, it is surprising, to say the least, that the vocabulary for
discussing abstraction is so limited.

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logic very clear in his story book for children, Story of Two Squares, 1920,
which animated precisely (and literally, it has been called the first abstract
cartoon3) this compulsion to disintegrative logic as the shapes head towards
their own catastrophic crash (fig. 2).

Thinking into the future often required a vast, even cosmic imaginative scale.
Intoxication with new technologies led some artists to embrace the role of
optical specialists of modernity, as Siegfried Giedion described them.1 It led
others to make extraordinary claims for a revolutionary new sensorium of
feeling through the chromatic and structural intensities of modern vision.
We need to look again at what geometric abstraction means, partly, of course,
because we no longer believe in so many of the tenets that underpinned the
utopian visions of the historical avant-gardes in the first place. It does not follow
from the fact that there was always a discrepancy, and disproportion, between
what was claimed and what was achieved, between theory and practice, that
the work is lesser, or that it failed as art. Rather more pressing is what is left
of that project, not least in what it has to say about the ordering and disordering
of experience and the connections between spatial and social relations.
The first abstract artists were producing radically systemic models, paintingsystems, which make sense according to a powerful internal and formal logic,
but have also proven remarkably adaptive and resilient. Malevich and Mondrian
were the earliest and most articulate systemic artists, who even while they
were talking cosmically were thinking structurally and materially, as they tried
to figure out what a new kind of picture, that answered to new conditions,
might look like.
Malevichs Black and White. Suprematist Composition (see plate 1) was made
the same year as his seminal Black Square, in 1915, and was probably shown
alongside it at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 exhibition in
Petrograd that Malevich masterminded in December of that year (fig.1) 2
On first inspection, the black as opposed to a white ground seems out of kilter
with the artists insistence on the white space of infinity which could generate
and proliferate painterly masses, against which they often hover or float as if
in space. Malevich adopted a utopian rhetoric of planets and satellites which
would embed in these works the promise of futurity. But actually Black
and White is as groundless as they are: a painting consisting of two squares,
one larger black one and one smaller one (which is actually a white rectangle),
neither painted over the other, but each coexisting with, and in relation
to, the other.
Malevich himself made his Black Square the original protagonist of his system:
the mythical hero that is the zero of form. This was (and is) a powerful
narrative: a symbol of extreme reduction. And yet, in so far as the system he
set in train was not about creating symbols but was abstract, we might think
of this originary moment rather differently: as inherently polymorphic, where
the square co-existed with the circle, cross, rectangle, triangle, trapezium and
so on. It turns out the square, far from a primordial unity, was always splitting
and doubling and entering into new combinations and morphing into different
shapes to a cross, for example, or a trapezoid a mutational system,
incidentally, much more attuned to what modern geometers call topology.
It is seldom emphasised enough that all of Malevichs shapes are irregular and
approximate rather than accurate. They adapt to the frame in surprising ways.
They are always slightly off. Even the sides of the simplest quadrilateral could
be adjusted rather than run strictly parallel to their vertical or the horizontal
edges. The almost hallucinatory metaphorics of his writing told a rather different
story from the strict reductive logic of the tabula rasa, so often rehearsed as his
sole raison detre. El Lissitzky, who was not only the most prolific disseminator
of Malevichs ideas but also one of his best interpreters, made this counter-

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Malevich created complex morphologies which embodied social and subjective

states of being-in-the-world, of precarious subjects and unstable spaces in the
process of dissolution. While he seems to have abandoned the direction
implied in Black and White, he did so in favour of liquid states, incorporating
drop shapes or dissolving edges, and vertiginous aerial viewpoints in which
forms shattered and dispersed into planets and satellites. A teaching poster
Malevich made later in the 1920s (fig. 3) demonstrates in a photographic
montage the same stages of development that elsewhere he described in
aesthetic terms that isolated the formal device, tracked from Cubism to
Futurism to Suprematism. Far from being opposites of one another, it is as if
the almost cinematic montage condenses world-viewpoints that mirror the
internal structuring of painting, as if one is simply a version of the other, in
other words another version of itself.

fig.1
Kazimir Malevich
The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings
0.10, Petrograd, 19 December 191519
January 1916

fig.2
El Lissitzky
Story of Two Squares, 1920

fig.3
Kazimir Malevich
Analytical Chart, 1924 27

This expansion to construct an environment founded in the new forms of art did
not simply point to the exhaustion of painting. Instead, the constant and
fluctuating set of pressures at the borders of art showed how good twodimensional art forms, especially painting, were at building a model of utopia.
Their value was in making radically experimental constructs, not just because
they were the most practicable (though that was also often the case in times of
extreme conflict and hardship), but because fictions are the mainstay of art.
Fiction is not detrimental but fundamental to making abstract worlds.
Paintings environments were plural and did not necessarily yet exist. As much
as architecture, pressure was energetically directed against other proliferating
technologies, especially new media. Rather than a means to entrench the
autonomy of painting, Lszl Moholy-Nagy interpreted Malevichs dissolution
of colour and form in his white paintings as proto-cinematic screens: surfaces
of shimmering light.4 That is to say it became an extension of mass media like
photography and film. There is a split between Malevichs interest in pure mass
or matter, caught in a poetic maelstrom of thought and sensation, and MoholyNagys interest in his dissolution of colour in terms of magical luminous screens
couched in the more rationalist language of the Bauhaus.
In creating a painting-system that was susceptible to modernity in all its
technological variants, Malevich exemplifies a more general tendency.
A systemic method lent itself to self-generation and proved to be very mobile.
After all, one could see this division of painting into its own constituent parts
on one hand and film on the other as simply another instance of the splitting
that had begun at abstract arts inception, when geometric shape was already
fracturing, morphing and mutating. The consequence of seeing the radical
impurity of the originary project is that it allows us to conceive of diverse
(rather than monolithic) forms of social abstraction rather than representations
of the social world.
Although the first generation of geometric abstract artists were painters,
abstraction was not exclusive or medium-specific to painting, as US high
modernist critics like Clement Greenberg would later rigidly codify. On the
contrary, the resilience of abstraction lay in its remarkable ability to adapt,
transfer and translate. In some ways it was precisely this overly open field that
the more didactic champions of modernist painting wanted to claw abstraction

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back from. Even in the case of Mondrian, early abstractions most formidable
exponent within a high modernist paradigm, this was a feat of selective exclusion.
The hard distinctions drawn between media often couched in a heightened
language of anxiety and prohibition felt urgent because abstraction was
already immersed in a techno-imaginary future that collapsed the boundaries
between media and so deeply involved in the expansion of art into environment.

her handcraft techniques, but also made paintings. The artisanal and the
industrial co-exist in a range of production processes, which are variously
archaicising and modernising, or sometimes both. As for decoration, their work
showed how it could be embedded in the modern rather than a threat to it.
It does not follow from this that painting collapsed (as we know, frequent
announcements heralding paintings death have always tended to be premature).
Instead, as its borders became unsettled, painting was enlivened and animated
and abstractions extreme self-absorption in its own procedures was played
out particularly vividly, especially in its initial stages. As it happens, the things
we call pictures have proven very effective at showing how self-generating
systems work; a relatively tight and specialised geometric vocabulary can end
up managing to bring home an almost infinite potential to make different
versions of itself.

Some words became charged with negative connotations, not least decoration,
as abstract art fought to distinguish itself from everything that was not art but
used similar forms and motifs. Many of the founding myths of modernist
abstraction, like the taboo on merely superficial decorative pattern or the
design rule that form follows function, provided necessary fictions to enable
new ways of conceiving the world structurally until, that is, those rules
became doxa themselves.
A photograph of the inside of Mondrians last studio on East 59th Street in New
York (fig. 4), an image that would seem to encapsulate perfectly abstractions
hermeticism, sealed off from the social world, provokes in this context a
different way of thinking about abstractions many formulations. In fact, rather
than pure or conversely decorative, words like lived, provisional, temporary,
moveable, seem more apt to describe a method based less on a pre-given rules
and more on rules of thumb. Cut out bits of cardboard, painted and pinned to
the wall, look more like bricolage than universal principals.

fig.4
Harry Holtzman
Mondrians New York Studio,
still from Harry Holtzman film, 1944

The fact that innovative forms of pattern-making were always at the very heart
of the modernist project does not make it wrong or irrelevant. Rather, it goes
some way to explaining why the simplified pattern recognition pioneered by
the modernist avant-gardes has been so exhaustively tapped in branding, in
fashion, in interior and product design as well as advertising and other mass
media, including in digital formatting. It has always lived its life in these nonart realms, and shows no sign of ceasing to do so.

This mutual antagonism between give and resist animates geometric

abstraction and enables it to do its work as art, as well as raising questions
about how it can do so under contemporary conditions. It is not to be passive
or compliant, but rather to make it possible to reflect on arts relation to other
forms of labour; how, in short, arts insides relate to what is outside. In the
process all those properties that were conventionally seen as intrinsic to
painting and internal to art are made extrinsic and contingent upon arts
outside: the world it inhabits.

With hindsight, all the impurities that began as taboos and prohibitions became
abstractions most generative and sustainable aspects. Whereas attempts to
universalise the system, to fix it in law and refuse its contradictions, tended
towards its impoverishment. An arch-purist like the technocratic Max Bill
ended up producing far less complex and ultimately less provocatively systemic
work than an artist like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, who used structural elements
even in her early Dada work.

I want to say that this becomes increasingly clear as the history of social
abstraction unfolds into the present day, but there is a but. For sure, it becomes
more plausible that a relation between a smaller white quadrilateral and a
larger black one was an exercise in thinking about paintings unstable relational
character, including its unstable relation to the world. But still, it also becomes
far less clear how abstraction proceeded, begging the question of how that
vocabulary of geometric form, once vivid, could continue to be so for later
generations, let alone today?

Taeuber-Arp and Hans Arp would resign from the Abstraction-Creation group
in 1931 precisely because it was too doctrinaire; which was symptomatic of the
increasing programmatisation of the project of abstraction in the late 1920s
and 30s. The point was not that it became, as many have suggested, too
aesthetic and too formal, but that it was too busy laying down the law. Its
porosity the fact that the lexicon could be wildly aberrant, that it could
translate into embroidery as much as into a scheme for the interior of the bar
of LAubette (fig. 5) had always been regarded as dangerous by some, but in
many ways this flexibility was its great strength.
Like Anni Alberss weaving, embroidery seemed to be exempt from modern
production methods and the technophilia of a modern machine aesthetic.
Instead, the mechanics of the hand, occupied in repetitive activities, were
rooted in (un-modern) craft. Both women had been trained in textiles and were
able to work with a variety of technologies: Albers never abandoned the
handloom but also designed for mass production; Tauber equally maintained

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But of course this is also the problem. One might want to wish it away, but the
problem of arts self-absorption still presses: the hermeticism that is so often
thought to show art turning its back to the world and retreating into purely
formal aesthetic concerns. I say hermetic, but of course my point is that no
aesthetic system can be completely hermetically sealed: art cannot be airtight.
In the end it always lets the world in; to varying degrees but at some point it
always gives. However, the very fact of its self-sameness that makes it appear
to have a logic (however fictional), creates some degree of resistance to the
world it exists in.

The ongoing survival of the long project of geometric abstraction, which is not
only an after-life of earlier historical moments, hinges on it not being a
universal language that transcends time and place, but on the contrary entirely
unfixed and contingent. It depends on, and is animated by, its capacity to be
sensitized5 or susceptible to the conditions under which it exists. This only
reinforces the imperative to think about geometry not of the absolute but of
absolute contingency, depending on geographies as well as histories.

fig.5
Interior of Caf LAubette, Strasbourg, 192627

It was certainly premature for the abstract painters and critics of the second
major wave abstraction, in New York in the 1940s, to think that the relevance
of geometric abstraction had been dispatched to history. Of their number,
it was left to Ad Reinhardt to insist on Malevichs legacy in the major series
of black monochromes that he made from 1960, from which very gradually

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the iconic shape of a cruciform emerged in the process of apperception.

But they were also its swansong, dubbing them the most extreme, the most
abstract, and the last or ultimate paintings that could be painted.6
Few have been as articulate about the contradictory yet generative historical
possibilities of abstraction as the Brazilian critic Ronaldo Brito. He wrote that
the crucial significance of the Neo-Concretist movement in Brazil in the late
1950s was that it was the first time that abstraction stopped believing in its
own mythologies the transcendental, the cosmic, the absolute and so on
and tested itself out in the social field.7 It is as if Malevichs white-on-white
paintings had been perforated with heads of a collective mass of people in
Lygia Papes Divisor (1968) as it moves and undulates through the streets.
From the very outset geometric abstraction demonstrated that its most basic
impulse was not to unify but to divide and multiply: this is its fundamental
polymorphism. At the same time, the production of these self-same and selfdiffering versions of itself co-existed with an embeddedness in social life that
was absolutely fundamental to it. As an extremely malleable and elastic system,
geometric abstraction has relied not on harmonic equilibrium so much as
antagonism to survive, as if art has to argue with itself in order to make itself
plausibly of the world.
When in the 1960s a generation of younger artists again invoked that geometric
vocabulary, it was as a means to shift the ground from the terms of spatiality to
the temporal life of the body. Blinky Palermo rendered geometric shapes as
three-dimensional solids (see plate 91), covering an irregular found plank of
wood with blue tape and twisting its angle to the wall to mimic a viewers
bodily movement. Andr Cadere would take his coloured poles and carry them
around with him, depositing them in other peoples exhibitions on a temporary
basis. It is most unlikely Eva Hesse was actually thinking of Malevichs Black
Square, but it haunts a work like Untitled (1966, see plate 116) as an almost
Proustian involuntary memory.
Abstractions apparent introversion, then, its supposedly purely internal formal
elements now turned outward and spread out across past, present and future.
Everything that had been understood as intrinsic became also extrinsic,
attached to the world and of the world, not least the world of bodily experience.
The key points in its history, or those which I want to claim have most relevance
now, are those moments when artists have taken the mythical purity of abstraction and abjected it, casting it down from its mythical and mystical heights.

1
Siegfried Giedion describing such modern
painters as Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky,
Moholy-Nagy, Klee, Arp and Mir in
Universalism and the Enlargement of
Our Outlook, reproduced in Gyorgy Kepes,
The New Landscape in Art and Science,
Paul Theobold & Co., Chicago, 1956, p.92.
2
Though it does not appear in the famous
photograph of two walls, Andrei Nakov
convincingly makes the case, in Andrei Nakov,
Black and White: A Suprematist Composition
of 1915 by Kazimir Malevich, Steidl Verlag,
Gottingen, 2010 p.XX.
3
Ibid., p.70.
4
Lszl Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision,
Dover Publications, New York, 1975, pp.8687.
5
The term sensitized was first used in the
context of geometric abstraction by Walter
Correiro in relation to Brazilian Concretism;
for a discussion of this term see Sergio
Martins, Constructing an Avantgarde:
Art in Brazil 19491979, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 2013, p.XX.
6
See Ad Reinhardt, The Black-Square Painting
Shows 1963, 1964, 1965 in Art-as-Art:
The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed.
Barbara Rose, University of California Press,
Oakland, 1991, p.84.
7
Ronaldo Brito, Neoconcretism: Apex and
Rupture of the Brazilian Constructivist Project,
Cosac and Naify Edicoes, So Paulo,
1999, p.83.

This is not simply to reverse old modernist notions of autonomy so much as to

try to understand how geometric abstraction dramatises that unstable border
between the inside and the outside of art particularly keenly. Other kinds of art
do it too: these are painting-systems among many painting-systems, including
figurative ones. But the very fact that abstraction forces us to face the problem,
that is, of how in order to be of the world, art has to cut itself off from the
world, makes it compelling. Given its long history and expansive global reach,
it is not surprising that geometric abstraction has become so multifaceted,
compounding the idea of a continuous seamless lineage or a monolithic body
of work. In the process of its development uneven, dispersed and interrupted
though that is its own history has become part of what abstraction has had
to work with and build upon; countless possible pasts that have accrued to it,
and in turn fuel its possible futures.

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