Abstraction

[bedouin]

On the other hand, Xenakis or Nakamura also communicate their own reality

What do you mean by "communicating a reality"?

For me everyone who makes music (painting, poetry, etc) communicate a reality. their circumstances, lifestyle, mood, what's happening around them, or what have you. consciously or not it doesn't matter in this discussion. How faithfully they communicate that reality determines the degree of abstraction.

"Love me do" is problematic in and of it being a Beatles song.

maybe, bad example, but I could have picked any tune.
joni mitchell "amelia", is a melancholic/introspective song of the late 70s. you don't need to know the lyrics to figure that out. in fact you don't even need to speak english. the delivery reflects that.

[bryan]

"Abstract" is a problem. It's basically three different things to me...


in art - non-representational, not figurative

everyday speech - an idea (gestalt) rather than a specific thing or circumstance

in science - a short summary (the idea) of the results within a scientific paper


But it gets worse... in music I personally consider the least abstract material to be the stuff that does not need to rely on an interpretation of sound for anything other than the materiality of sound itself. No need for placing it within a context other than what a piece creates for itself. At its simplest there is one sound and another and how they fit together in time. It is a very specific circumstance and a thing, not a gesture or idea. In that way it is not "abstract" in the least. So this is a problem (for me) because the MOST abstract music is also the least abstract. Phooey.

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

On the other hand, Xenakis or Nakamura also communicate their own reality

What do you mean by "communicating a reality"?

For me everyone who makes music (painting, poetry, etc) communicate a reality. their circumstances, lifestyle, mood, what's happening around them, or what have you. consciously or not it doesn't matter in this discussion. How faithfully they communicate that reality determines the degree of abstraction.

How would you determin this level of "faithfulness"? I think said criterium (faithfully communicating a reality) is a dead end in determening a level of abstraction here, it has more to do with authenticity and the likes.

I think we all agree that generally music doesn't represent stuff in the same way as visual art does. The fact that music (all music, be it Rihanna or Sachiko M) conveys (represents) emotional states is something else entirely. I don't believe differences in those emotional statuses are really helpful in determining abstraction, since the emotive reactions of the listeners may be completely different to the same piece of music, and are not always tied to (and may vary greatly from) the (various) intentions of the musician. That's why I believe abstraction is best defined in terms of structural properties of the work itself, not in terms of what the artist tries to communicate or how the listeners react to this communication, since those things are highly subjective and hence lead to a lot of confusion - the presence or absence of a melody or a rhythm (patterns) is something much more objective & workable.

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

Okay, I'll try a summary of my pov towards abstraction in visual arts, which might shed some light on music as well.


In visual 2D-ish art, the term abstract imo is commonly used to point towards paintings that do not represent objects and/or physical realities in the world. When ideas are expressed using symbols/metaphores (the lamb of god, a heart, a weeping willow, etc.) it's also non-abstract, since these symbols/metaphors are in itself physical realities (weeping willows do exist).

Of course this is a level of degree: Monet is less abstract than Picasso's Les Desmoiselle d'Avignon, both are still figurative, and both are less abstract than a Rothko painting, which is a straight out abstract painting (although it might represent feelings or convey emotions, but that's imo never relevant to the notion of abstraction - see my previous post).

The degree of abstraction depends on the realism of the painting, and so this is different than in music, since, imo, the level of abstraction in visual arts depends on this link (the realism of the visual representation) with the physical world, and not so much on structural properties in the work itself.

Yet this doesn't mean that structural properties of the work are not a factor in some cases. They are important when a painting is not figurative: take a regular Pollock, which is clearly more abstract than a Mondrian... yes, because of the more easy recognizable patterns (a structural property of the work itself) - in this latter case of comparing Pollock and Mondrian, chaos is a determining factor: the more chaos, the less easy patterns. (Of course Pollock's paintings might represent "paint", or "color", but that's not really a realistic figurative depiction of objects etc in the world, see the end of the paragraph starting with Duchamp a few lines down.)
This (the comparison of 2 abstract, non-figurative, paintings) is more or less the same mechanism as in music, since, de facto, music mostly doesn't try to depict things (mind you, not idea's or emotions) in a real way, so one has to look at the structural properties of the work instead.

In sculpting, I guess realism is the most important factor as well (Michelangelo's David is less abstract than Giacometti which is less abstract than Picasso's El Toro).

Since Duchamp, things probably got a bit more complicated because the notion of representation itself inflated: his snowshovel might represent other snowshovels, or tools in general, or it might not represent anything but itself, or it might represent a reflection on the nature of Art. The distinction abstract/not-abstract doesn't even seem relevant in cases like that: I'd use a term like "conceptual" art. Donald Judd is probably even more muddier: his works might just represent a certain shape, or the sculptural object itself, yet I wouldn't call it figurative in the traditional sense, since they don't really express a concrete reality, but, and here's the crux: a more or less abstract idea. (Another possible interpretation of Judd's works is that they just are and not represent anything at all.)

The reasons for this inflation of representation probably have to do with the invention of photography: the history of painting (and sculpture as well) is more or less the story of perfecting the ways of representing reality in more and more realistic ways (from the birth of perspective up until realism/naturalism), but when photography was invented, this kinda became superfluous, and art became more and more self-aware, moving away from the desired realism (via the impressionists to the cubists to straight out abstract stuff like Mondriaan, and eventually the expressionists and their offspring).
Of course, even later, abstract and/or conceptual artists used elements of figurative painting and realism, mixed forms, and the likes (I wouldn't call Lichtenstein's inflated comic book snippets abstract, nor figurative paintings of Polke - but again they both are more abstract than a photorealistic Richter) and it all became one merry-old-postmodern-mess.


Maybe it would be interesting to talk about abstraction in literature/poetry as well, that might shed some more light on it as well - my first hunch would be that abstraction in literature has to do with the absence of clear and coherent meaning.


I hope I managed to articulate my thoughts more or less clearly, Abstraction's a really tough subject indeed, lots of ins and outs, lots of semantic confusion because the term is applied in a lot of different contexts and, as this thread illustrates, on top of that it's used in different ways by different persons.

Strange we didn't have a thread on it more early.