The Distractions of Abstraction

Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I have been stumped today. Not stumped by someone or something I've observed but perhaps by my own thoughtless meanderings. For, you see, I went to an exhibit about modern art today with one of my good friends, my brother, and my headmaster. The Art Museum has an interesting exhibition available and my friend is writing a thesis paper on this sort of art so she found it all very interesting. I, however, took a much more side-winding way to get to an appreciation of this art. 

For those historical artists out there, the major players of this exhibit were Pollock, De Kooning, and many other famous Abstract painters. These are the ones where you see just gobs of paint spread over a canvas and no real line of thought ends up being represented. So, to me, I had no real point of reference when coming to terms with this kind of media form so it invariably led to early headaches for me. 

My resolution was to find what motivated these artists to paint as they did. Primarily, they were a reaction and breaking away from the form and truth of Modernism. Please forgive me if you are confused with the difference between modern art and Modernism. Modernism is more of a political and social mindset that was shaped mainly by Nationalistic views towards government (that unfortunately brought about the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini) and also influenced America by bringing it into the Golden Age of the 50s. Modern art is a trend towards a Postmodern interpretation of truth claims in which they believe there should be none and that art is merely the production of the artist, not one that is bound to a movement or an artistic period. Of course, the hole in this frame of mind is that this belief in it of itself is a claim to a trend or movement (one that resides in it's independence from what they perceive as prior restraint).

My own quibbles in coming to terms with this art is when I'm taking the position of the audience. When analyzing art from the position of the artist, it's easy to come to conclusions about him whether you analzye the brush strokes, his choice of color, or even the fact when you see that he has stopped his work and ceased to add more paint. However, here I am, in an art gallery, trying to analyze this art as it relates to me as an audience. How do you do it? I haven't the foggiest. What I'm left with is my analysis of what the artist represented and what he felt in that moment of painting for the most part. It all makes me feel kind of helpless, artistically wise. 

Perhaps my biggest problem is that feeling of helplessness. If these artists wanted their art to pretain to only their internal feelings, they ought to not have them published, or at least not till after their deaths because so much of what they're doing is for personal catharsis. This whole concept of painting to get emotion out onto a canvas with little to no consideration as to the perceptions of their current audience seems very selfish to me. Half of what makes this genre great is the culture created and now subsequently associated with this art, and I can appreciate that. But when they [the artists] create a society that is devoid of relating to the world and reality around itself, it loses all credibility in my eyes. I don't know, maybe in all of this I've merely shown my ignorance of their artistic style but I can't help but wonder why some people truly attest to these men as great thinkers of their time when they can't even relate all that well to life and the world around themselves.