Leave a reply

Here’s a background to my exhibition that will open at Easter 2016, Friday the 25th of March  – “Abstract Real”.

Google “abstract art” and you get this definition by Rudolph Arnheim:

“Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form, colour and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.”

It’s often called nonfigurative and “Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be slight, partial, or complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum.”

Further down this excellent Wikipedia entry you read that “Much of the art of earlier cultures – signs and marks on pottery, textiles, and inscriptions and paintings on rock – were simple, geometric and linear forms which might have had a symbolic or decorative purpose.

It is at this level of visual meaning that abstract art communicates. One can enjoy the beauty of Chinese calligraphy or Islamic calligraphy without being able to read it.”

Untitled So Far # 1 ? Jan Oberg 2016

Exactly – that’s what I wanted to say too – abstract is a continuum away from re-presentation of the world; it’s about beauty and decoration with no message – except perhaps beauty. It is nothing new and it can depict a reality – but a reality that we don’t “read” concretely and in a broader sense.

So, what about abstraction and photography?

It sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? A camera cannot take or make an abstraction, in the above sense, of the reality that we point it at. In principle, yes, but also only in principle.

We know that different types of films would reproduce reality in different colour tones – think of Polaroid images – or the differences between Kodak and, say, Fuji films. And we know that processes sometimes happened in the darkroom that changed reality quite a bit. Notice the word continuumabove!

But by and large it is true to reality to say that cameras used to depict or represent reality as truthfully as technology would permit. Or, to put it this way: It could not do anything else and we could not make it produce an abstraction right away of the light that entered from the real world.

And permit a small digression here – now entering the realm of philosophy – we have all experienced how the camera can take a picture of reality or a reality that our human eye had not seen, meaning our brain had not registered. But perhaps we wouldn’t define that as abstraction after all.

Thus, there may have been several stages on the way to photographic abstraction – for instance shaking the camera and getting a blurred image or letting the shutter open for an extended period of time. And then:

Arrive digitalisation or digitizing and the image that consists of pixels, the tiny square building block of today’s images!

Then arrive Photoshop! – a whole new way of working with images, the raster graphics editor created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll! Photoshop, being one of the most complex software, provides you with the opportunities of endless manipulations of raw images.

And finally arrives the app! – the tiny computer program for your mobile phone camera, the first to arrive as recently as 2008.

Thanks to these innovations, some of these apps made it fully possible to set the camera to produce an abstract image in the above sense – a deviation from reality out there, produced there and then, on the spot – something that deliberately did not aim at a truthful depiction of the reality.

In my view this whole process points to the end of photography as re-presentation only. It is still the dominating photographic mode but contemporary photography can just as well be non-representational, non-figurative and present  an original, so to speak, reality of its own.

Now, let’s leave the technology and innovation level and boil it down to something more familiar but still very fascinating – and go back to the reality-abstract continuum.

It may be old hat to say it, but I’ll say it anyhow: The abstract can be found in reality around us.

Here is an example of the abstract in the real – it looks quite a lot like an abstract painting. But it isn’t. It’s a truthful re-presentation of a leather seat on an old chair.

The opposite – an abstract piece of art that is also reality – is more tricky. Philosophically speaking an abstract piece of art – say a painting by Jackson Pollock – has to be an object in reality, something we can take a picture of, something that consists of a canvas with some paint on it.

In that sense it is both/and. But at the same time it is a reality in its own right, created out of the mind or vision of the artist, non-figuratively. So, even the most abstract thing exists in reality… whereas every piece of reality does not exist in the realm of the abstract or non-figurative domain!

Let me try this – a pattern, yes, but with no figurative elements; it doesn’t depict anything from the real world and in that sense it is abstract. However, as you can see by the bricks on top, it is part of a wall in a mosque – a very real thing.

Abstract pattern, Iranian calligraphy and tiles on top ? Jan Oberg 2016

This abstract pattern is certainly abstract and when I take it and show this photo of it it becomes an abstract painting-like object – particularly if I cropped off the tiles on top which do refer to a (known) reality. And unless you read this (Iranian) calligraphy those beautiful shapes are also abstract.

And this is what I try to explore in the exhibition Real Abstract.

And I don’t pretend to know whether what I say here holds water or where it will take me.

But do come by – visit my real studio space or the virtual reality at my homepage – and see more…