Two regimes of abstraction have stared each other down for much of the twentieth century: aesthetic abstraction in its flight from objectivity, from fidelity to a world of objects made available to the senses, and financial abstraction in its own flight from objectivity, from the body and its too-limited capacity to work, from the social and its constraining norms and logics. Aesthetic abstraction and commodity abstraction. It’s not that these regimes haven’t known of each other’s presence—on the contrary, the two are deeply reliant on the each other in their respective articulations. This knowing, however, has taken a peculiarly veiled form. Eve Sedgwick once referred to “the privilege of unknowing”: the ability to forget because not much would change with that forgetting, because some privilege (bodily, financial, often both) allowed the world not to collapse.[1] This barrier has existed, has been imposed, between the two regimes of abstraction precisely so they can feed off of each other without knowing much about each other. Willful, phantasmatic, utopian—that barrier has had many valences. What motivates its persistent imposition is something like desire. On the side of aesthetics, a desire for autonomy, to carve out some space to the side of capitalism to imagine things otherwise. On the side of the commodity, a desire to acquire what it wants, when it wants it, to pilfer in the dark or in the light, by whatever means it deems necessary—means often themselves borrowed from that other, parallel regime of abstraction. While work got done in that space of unknowing, historical forces pushed the two regimes ever nearer—the aesthetic inspiring the financial; the financial infecting and enabling the aesthetic. The privilege of unknowing that stands between them has become harder to sustain, requiring more privilege, or just more unknowing.
The end of the twentieth century has accelerated abstraction’s ascent from ideology to a kind of period logic.[2] There has been no time, during the twentieth century, or before, when abstraction hasn’t been an issue, or when abstraction hasn’t had its issues—with vision, representation, figuration, money, language, culture, economy, power, the laboring body. Each period, and each corresponding locus of abstraction, has its own specificities. The specificity that drives our present airing of the issue of abstraction is the violent, if not sudden, coincidence of aesthetic and financial modes of abstraction. Artworks that take financialization as their subject constitute one historical example of this coincidence: Yve Klein’s “Ritual for the Transfer of a Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” (1965), Ai Wei Wei’s Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo (1995), Santiago Sierra’s 250 Cm Line Tattooed on 6 Paid People (1999), Mendi and Keith Obadike Blackness for Sale (2001), Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003), Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God (2007), or Vermeir and Heiremans’s Art House Index (ongoing). The financialization of the art market, of course, presents another.[3] What becomes of aesthetic ambitions in the crucible of this coincidence? How do bodily, representational, and financial abstraction encounter one another, vie, collaborate, become parasitical in this collision between the aesthetic and the financial? What are abstraction’s current verbs, its modalities of action, of flight?
The four essays that make up this issue move in and around these questions, leaving questions in their wake, different questions and, hopefully, other questions than those that have sustained the conversation about abstraction to date. Steyn Bergs asks the question that has haunted so much art and art criticism during this period: what should art do or be when many of its manifestations simply take on the form of financial abstraction, simply look and act—as does the work of Vermeir and Heiremans who are Bergs’s subject—like instruments of financialization? What should critics do with those works that appear to simply repeat, or worse, reproduce the brutal and arcane logics of financial abstraction? Christa Noel Robbins takes on the work of Cady Noland in order to better articulate just what abstraction refuses today and how those radical refusals might continue to instruct, if not edify, in the wake of radical financialization. Barbara Jaffee describes the genesis of pictorial abstraction in the U.S. in the early twentieth century: a diagrammatic approach to representation that borrows from the developments of Taylorism as a method for organizing functional units. And in the final essay, a conversation between American Artist and Kris Cohen, abstraction is viewed—obliquely, inversely, inveterately—through the resources of Black Studies in order to address the modes of abstraction that have motivated and issued from the invention of the graphic user interface (GUI or “gooey”), now native to all personal computers and computing devices.
We recognize that all of this may appear to sideline definitional and typological questions: What really is abstraction? How is abstraction to be classed in relation to representation, to materiality, to the world as given to the senses? What kind of organizing principle for art is abstraction now? Is bodily or figural abstraction somehow the same operational process as financial abstraction? For that matter, are all contemporary financial instruments operating in and through the same forms of abstraction: home loans, the stock market, blockchain? Does abstraction always entail an escape, a pulling away from as its dictionary definition asserts? Perhaps, but only if we attend to its diverse and multiple points of departure. If, for instance, the personal computer abstracts from the social body, by reducing the laboring body to a short circuit connecting eye and hand, or by sidelining the body altogether in favor of more seemingly self-determined modes of identification, then at what cost, at whose cost, do we accept that monolith “the body”? Or “nature”? Or “representation”? Or “objectivity”? All of those sites where abstraction has seemed to do its most concerted work. Such questions never lack for asking, or for answers. But something nags as something escapes. Maybe the definitional, the typological, is precisely what abstraction most strenuously escapes?
This is no more true for art than for, say, bundles of high-risk home loans, so to say that abstraction escapes, abstraction resists, is now far from a radical statement, or even a statement with a recognizable politics.[4] Maybe it’s a statement of the problem abstraction poses for politics, including the aesthetic kind. All of the articles in this special issue grapple with this impasse: is abstraction now a position to be occupied? Or is there no avoiding it? Is it a kind of movement or current—historical, aleatory, forever driven by capital and commodity—to be tracked, described on the run? If artists once took abstraction as their method and subject, now it claims them as its own: what is a computational algorithm but a way to abstract the body, the self, the very means of self-elaboration into a form that is better adapted to being tracked, rendered informatic, and productive of commodities?
Perhaps this stretches a word too thin. If concepts are never more or less than “provisional generalizations,” then the provisions that sustain them must sometimes become exhausted, outlived.[5] That is a question that must hang over this issue. Our ambition has been not to let it hang there melancholically, but to grasp it experimentally: to see what can be done with it now, what it can (and can’t) describe, how far it takes us into other imaginaries, or just other vocabularies. We, too, wanted to know what abstraction is, but once the question is asked historically rather than definitionally, all answers will be provisional.
We’d like to thank all of our contributors for the work they’ve done to think abstraction on the run, to respond so graciously and creatively to our comments, to bring the issues of this issue to light, and to teach us what they know.
[1] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Privilege of Unknowing,” Genders 1, no. Spring (1988).
[2] On the period logic of abstraction, see for instance: Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (MIT Press, 2015); Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59, no. Winter (1992): 3–7.
[3] Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London and New York: Verso, 1998); Stefan Heidenreich, “Freeportism as Style and Ideology: Post-Internet and Speculative Realism, Part I,” E-Flux, no. 71 (March 2016), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/71/60521/freeportism-as-style-and-ideology-post-internet-and-speculative-realism-part-i/; Heidenreich Heidenreich, “Freeportism as Style and Ideology: Post-Internet and Speculative Realism, Part II,” E-Flux, no. 73 (May 2016), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/73/60471/freeportism-as-style-and-ideology-post-internet-and-speculative-realism-part-ii/.
[4] See Ina Blom, “The Logic of the Trailer: Abstraction, Style and Sociality in Contemporary Art,” in Abstraction, Maria Lind, ed. (Documents of Contemporary Art) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).
[5] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Deconstructing Historiography,” in Deconstruction: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Jonathan D. Culler (London ; New York: Routledge, 2003), 17.
