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Visual Art & Digital Photography: Part 3:
Art, Memory And Subjective Truth
Is figurative art/photography limited while abstract art/photography is not?

For the last 100 years a debate has been raging in art: some artists wanted to create objective pieces of work that communicate a universal truth -- artists such as Piet Mondrian and Naum Gabo and those in an art movement known as the Constructivism. These artists saw work that relied on figures or forms from the real world as being limited.

This point of view is very much with us today as in the work of minimalist photographers -- see the Flickr group for examples. These artists feel that memory and the associations that we attach to things in the real world will somehow be too subjective and thus contain and restrict what a viewer can gain from a work of art.

Mondrian argued that, "true non-figurative art gives universal truth, whereas figurative art can give only a subjective truth."
(Angela Vierling-Claassen, math.harvard.edu/~angelavc/models/art_research.html)

Nature...inspires me...but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things…

...horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm ... can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.
Piet Mondrian, 1914

This is similar to another long debate: classical vs. romantic. These two styles and approaches to art and life have continued back and forth for centuries -- and will never be resolved. In western orchestral music, for example, the style of music switches from one to another about every hundred years.

Following the idea of communicating truth, but from a different perspective, were artists like Hans Arp and Paul Klee who wanted to depict the essence of life, to make visible the unseen forces that were at play. And while these works were frequently abstract they often felt lifelike.

And then there were the abstract painters, like Wassily Kandinsky, who felt that they could communicate a spiritual reality better with abstraction using the pure forces of abstract shapes and colors without being tied down to reality -- and yet which echoed aspects of the real world.

And in addition there were the abstract expressionists, especially those called action painters, such as Jackson Pollock, who wanted to create "a pictorial surface that gave the impression of an energy field..." (The Museum of Modern Art: The History and the Collection, 1984.) This field while extremely abstract also felt human, almost like looking at the tracks of a person's movements laid out on a canvas.

But the abstract expressionist had their own take on art and truth. They were committed to a truth that was grounded in reality, that felt real, that included the mud and roughness of actual living. And they specifically rejected a truth that was merely an abstract construction. As Barnett Newman stated abstract expressionism stood in sharp contrast to this other vision of a pure abstract truth, "In the other we have a pure world of esoteric mathematical truth, a fantasy in symbolic logic." He preferred the real world of modern physics as described by Einstein.

And of course, there was plenty of figurative art -- albeit quite modern -- such as the work of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Willem de Kooning as well as work from the Cubist and Italian Futurist art movements.

But there was also a middle ground: the painter Nicolas de Stael began as an abstract painter and moved into figurative art. I believe he was trying to find that delicate balance between the things in the real world and an abstract reality.

What all of these movements had it common was a clear break with the past. And each felt that it had a special pathway to the truth. Another thing they had in common was the sense that the world was quite different from what we grasped with our senses.

However, I believe that none of them was right or wrong, but rather each had a piece of the puzzle. I like what each had to offer, what each discovered, and what each created. I don't think that liking art has to be either/or; I don't believe that I need to side with one ism vs. another ism.

And frankly, I hope this debate never ends. I think it is a useful one for art and for appreciators of art. Art can be a doorway into an unseen world, a spiritual way to perceive the world and a way to gain some perspective on our day to day existence.

Yet, if I had to choose an artist and an approach that I feel closest to now as an artist, it would be de Stael. This should be no surprise as I am taking photographs of real things in the real world and then abstracting them, but abstracting them using the forces of the things themselves, such as the blur of a musician as he plays.

Unfortunately I cannot show you de Stael's work as it is protected by copyright. However, you can view one of his most famous paintings by clicking on the following link -- it is both an exquisite abstract painting and also a seascape, entitled: de Staël, Nicolas: Figure by the Sea, 1952. Other paintings of his are available at this site as well.

As an artist and an experimental digital photographer, I have to make a choice even though I have worked at creating a wide range of imagery which included abstract paintings. Yet as a photographer I am wedded to real things in the real world, but each of these has a force and a life of its own. Like the Italian Futurists, I see an energy field that is a part of the subjects I take photos of -- and when I shoot at slow shutter speeds, the movement of those things, and the rhythm of that movement can register on the photograph and reveal a world that is both familiar, real and also unseen.

Therefore while I understand Mondrian's point that "true non-figurative art gives universal truth, whereas figurative art can give only a subjective truth" and have spent hours looking at his beautiful work, I disagree. I believe the universal can also be found in specifics: loved ones, friends, towns, faces, trees, landscapes, parties. And it is those specifics that can give art a universal power and feeling that is conveyed to the viewer.

"The content of art is feeling;...feelings are neither 'objective' nor 'subjective', but both, since all 'objects' of 'things' are the result of an interaction between the body-mind and the external world."
Robert Motherwell, Abstract Expressionist painter

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
George Bernard Shaw

This is part of a series of articles about visual art and digital photography.
#1. Visual Art & Digital Photography: Realism & Personal Expression
== How digital photography can be both realistic and expressive at the same time
#2. Visual Art & Digital Photography: Part 2: Space, Time And Memory
== How Experimental Digital Photography can evoke a sense of remembrance
#3. Visual Art & Digital Photography, Part 3: Art, Memory & Subjective Truth
== Is figurative art/photography limited while abstract art/photography is not?
#4. Visual Art & Digital Photography, Part 4: A Picture Energy Field
== Composing photographic elements in a dynamic manner

All uncredited work is copyright by Richard (Rick) deGaris Doble 2011.

NOTE:See a list of my other articles here at PIXIQ. www.pixiq.com/contributors/rick-doble

For more about my approach to photography see my book: Experimental Digital Photography.

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