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February 28, 2009
The heroic narrative of modernist abstraction painting, is structured around the destruction of mimesis and representation, the militant gesture of the avant garde opposing the market system, and the separation of medium for purposes of defining "core" attributes is fundamental. It has remained in place, despite its deconstruction by the mixed media experiments, return to figuration, the eruption of language into the visual field and the undermining of the hegemony of the museum/gallery system by artists and critics working within postmodernism.
Modernism---ie., the investigation by art of its own nature----continues to live on after its aesthetic autonomy and self reflexivity came up against art's grounding in the social and economic world. postmodernism. The heroic modernist narrative has also remained after the moment of postmodernism, even though painting has lost its dominant position in a visual culture and abstract painters are now working in a residual rather than emergent tradition. What if we push that narrative into the background and look at abstract photography?
Gary Sauer-Thompson, abstraction, 2009
Abstract photography has had a resurgence, judging by the number of abstract photography Flickr groups. For years it had the status of second-class art , the pitiful case of one art form aspiring to the dignity of another. Photography that emulated the abstraction of modernist painting has been treated with a dismissive gesture. Abstract photos were once seen as a betrayal.
No longer. There is too much happening and it has its own weight. What we see is that the modernist ideals and institutions of photography as an autonomous discipline with distinct boundaries - the condition so beloved by modernists - lives on after postmodernism. Self reflexivity within postmodernism means a questioning or a contesting from within the modernist tradition, not a standing outside, since it works within the very traditions it attempts to subvert.
For instance, we can question and rethink modernism's purist break with history from within the abstract tradition.
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