By making the abstract concrete, art no longer retains any abstract quality; it merely announces a constant striving for a state of abstraction and in turn produces more abstraction to pursue. It is this failure of the abstract that lures and hypnotizes—forcing itself onto artists and demanding repeated attention. The abstract draws artists toward itself as a semiautonomous zone just out of reach. It produces the illusion of a series of havens and places that might reduce the contingent everyday to a sequence of distant inconveniences. It is the concretization of the abstract into a series of failed forms that lures the artist into repeated attempts to create the abstract, fully aware that this very act produces things that are the representation of impossibilities. In the current context, this means that the abstract is a realm of denial and deferment, a continual reminder to various publics that varied acts of art have taken place and that the authors were probably artists.
The creation of an art of the abstract is a tautology. It cannot be verified independently. We have to accept that the concretization of the abstract is a record of itself. It points toward something that cannot be turned into an object. But there—in front of us—is this nonexistence. Even further, this nonexistence in concrete form can take up a lot of space, supposedly pure color and variegated form. The grander the failed representation of the abstract becomes, the more striking the presence of failure, at the heart of which is a very human attempt to capture an unobtainable state of things and relationships to the unknowable. The abstract in art is a process of destruction: taking what cannot be represented and forcing it into an incomplete set of objects and images that exist as a parallel lexicon and that form a shattered mirror for what cannot be represented. There is nothing abstract about art that is the result of this destructive desire to create an abstraction. It is a process of bringing down to earth what continues to remain elusive. It is this search that connects the desire to create abstraction with utopias and is at the heart of its neoromantic ideology. It is the basis of the symbolic politics of abstraction and its parallel course as a marker of hope and ultimate failure. It is the process of attempting to reproduce the abstract that causes the truly abstract to retain its place just out of reach.
The abstract, therefore, in the current aesthetic regime, always finds form as a relational backdrop to other activities, terrains, and interactions. By destroying the abstract via making it concrete, the ambient and the temporary are heightened and become an enduring associative abstraction that replaces the lack in the artwork. The abstraction that is produced by abstract art is not a reflection of the abstraction at the start of the process. The making of a concrete structure produces further abstraction—the art object in this case is merely a marker or waypoint toward new abstraction. Tackling the job of producing something concrete through a process of abstraction neither reproduces abstraction—nor does it provide us with anything truly autonomous. It produces a lack and points toward further potentially endless processes of abstraction. It is this potential endlessness—that remains productive while reproducing itself—that is the key to the lure of abstract art. The procedure of producing abstract art does not fill the world with lots of abstraction, despite appearances to the contrary. Instead, it populates the space of art with an excess of pointers that in turn direct attention toward previously unaccounted-for abstractions. This is at the heart of the lure of the abstract—this explains why artists keep returning to the elusive zone. Abstraction is not the contrary of representation, a recognition of which is the key to understanding the melancholy of Gerhard Richter’s work, for example; rather, abstraction in art is the contrary of the abstract in the same way that representation is the contrary of the real.
Concrete structure in this case also lacks. It does not hold a functional role within the culture beyond its failure to be an abstraction. The concrete structure becomes a marker that signifies art and points to all other art as structures that contain excessive subjectivities. Abstraction in this case has little to do with minimalism or formalism. Yet it can easily become either of these things with just a slight tweak in any direction. The intention to create a minimal or reductive gesture, object, or environment requires a suppression of abstraction toward the deployment of materials that may or may not be in balance or sync with their objectness. This is not the same as the creation of an abstract artwork. The desire to develop a minimalist practice is a denial of the abstract and an attempt to concretize the concrete. Through this process there is the demonstration of a desire to ignore and go past the failure of abstraction. It is through minimalistic gestures that artists attempted to cut out abstraction’s failure of transformation and invited us instead to focus on what we imagine is a material fact or set of facts about a material within a given context. The emergence of an identifiable minimalist practice more than forty years ago, while attempting to avoid the problem of abstraction, failed truly to trouble the problem of abstraction. Minimalism highlighted evasion. The minimal created a series of half-facts, all of which continued to allude to the abstract of art. This explains the spiritualization of the minimal in the contemporary context, its interchangability and absorption into the aesthetic of the wellness center and the kitchen, and the association of truth to materials with truthy relationships to cosmic, mix-and-match spirituality.
The failure at the heart of the abstract is its enduring critical potential. The demonstration of the concrete brings down metaphors, allusions, and other tools that can be deployed for multiple ends to a set of knowable facts. Any attempt to represent through art will always deploy a degree of artifice—this is not a moral judgment, just a state of things. The failed abstract reproduces itself. It does not point to anything other than its own concrete form. Its concrete presence replaces the attempt to pin down the abstract and becomes a replacement object that only represents the potential of the abstract. This process of looking at replacement objects is one of the most provocative aspects of some art in the twentieth century. The presence of replacement objects as key markers within the trajectory of twentieth-century modernism is what provokes confused and sublime responses. It is not the forms themselves that have this essential quality. The search for ever more true abstraction merely created and continues to create more replacement objects that scatter across the globe as reminders of the failure of the concrete in relation to the abstract. This replacement function explains why the concrete in relation to the abstract is so vulnerable to being deployed for ends other than the progressive and neotranscendental. The earlier concretization of the abstraction of corporate identity via the creation of logos and smooth minimal spaces can be viewed in parallel to the failure of the abstract in the late-modern period—particularly in the United States.
The endurance of abstraction is rooted in this desire to keep showing the impossibility and elusiveness of the abstract. At the same time, it reveals the processes of manipulation that take place within unaccountable realms of capital—the continual attempt to concretize abstract relationships and therefore render them into a parallel form that can be more easily exchanged. Where in the past the concrete was created from the abstract of the corporate, now these processes of concretization have moved into every realm of the
personal. The abstract art produced alongside such a period is a necessity. It forms a sequence of test sites to verify and enable us to remain vigilant about the processes of concretization that take place around us in the service of capital. The transformation of relationships into objects via a mature sensitivity to a process of concretization is tested and tracked when the most vivid current artists deploy what appears to be abstract but is in fact a conscious deployment of evasive markers.