3 dimensionality in abstract art

Art veterans among you are probably over-familiar with this, but I have to work it out for myself.

Abstract works are more purely visual – having a preference means having a preference for the colors and negative space, lines and curves in one particular piece, not a preference of subject matter. If you like to look at things, really look at things, they’re wonderful, but if you need to focus on something human, something more object-oriented, then they’re horribly tedious and boring. Personally I like to approach abstract works on a more purely visual basis than try to find figurative objects. It’s kind of a pet peeve of mine when people say something like “it’s like a beach!” Not that that’s not a legit reaction; I just prefer the more purely visual.

Prof. Morten Hansen was lecturing about space and depth in abstract modern paintings, about Malevich and Barnett Newman, and I thought, hmmm, I’d never considered abstract paintings to be particularly spatial. But then I remembered the Marden retrospective as well as a couple of other works at SFMOMA in 2006. Unfortunately, all the pieces I mention are essentially in-person pieces, but I’ll try to talk about them anyway.

Tom Wesselmann, Picasso

Some works that actually have three-dimensional objects protruding out of the canvas, like Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life 30, looks relatively flat, even in person, whereas something like Picasso’s Seated Woman (1927), if you stare at it long enough, has a strange multi-dimensional feel to it despite being simply lines and shapes. I think Wesselmann was going for a more subtle effect of “hey, something’s off here” rather than a real sense of depth, but before seeing those two things, I’d never thought particularly hard about it.

There was also a great if thinly populated Marden retrospective. Guess single-color canvases draw very few people, but I thought that gathered together, there was an odd peace about them. I don’t know how they play on their own, in the midst of other works, but together there was a coherence to each series as well as the line of his career – together, you could notice things like the fact that his colored lines tend to be neat whereas the grey lines tend to be smeary in many works. You could see the progression from single lines on single colored canvases to his more recent gargantuan Propitious Garden of Plane Image. The six panels covered almost an entire wall and each panel alternately using five of six total colors, the sixth serving as background. I loved staring at how different each color looked on a different colored background, seeing the different colors pop out. I’d like to imagine there is also a line of the background color wriggling invisibly about in the background.

Brice Marden

Something about abstract art is weirdly escapist and hedonist.