Hamlet. Do you see nothing there?
Queen. Nothing at all, yet all there is I see.

Shakespeare 1

Begin by explaining a single contemporary painting
(and the more apparently empty of content the better),
and if you continue describing it you will find yourself
touching on more subjects to investigate--philosophical,
social, political, historical, scientific, psychological
--than are needed for an academic degree.

Harold Rosenberg 2

This endlessly elaborating poem
Displays the theory of poetry
As the life of poetry. A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
of poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,
In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,
The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

Wallace Stevens 3

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest
tradition away from a conformism that is about to over power it.

Walter Benjamin 4

I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.

Charles Olson 5

Abstract Matters: Recapitulation and Transcendence is an interrogation of the situation of contemporary abstraction through a survey of artworks. As such, it is an inquiry into the present appearing of abstraction, of how it is that the idiom of abstraction is as it is now, of how the idiom of abstraction has a present criticality, of how it is that the idiom of abstraction is a matter now demanding attention. The artworks in the exhibition Abstract Matters: Recapitulation and Transcendence are instances of current practices that stand in relation to the idioms of abstraction constituting the legacy of the once center of the field of avant-grade modernism. The relationship between current and antecedent abstraction is a problematic: a nexus of heterogenous questions. Fundamental to this problematic is the relation of present to antecedent works in the idioms of abstraction, relations that may be subsumed under the category of the anxiety of influence. 6 The matter of influence is fundamentally a matter of relation between past and future engaged in the present. This is to hold influence to be indistinguishable from the history of the enterprise, since that history is made by the action of the artist in positioning one's work with respect to that of others, clearing a working space through the operation of a system of difference. Influence is a mode of revision that in opening a working space, a position, is at once a recapitulation and a transcendence of the antecedent by the subsequent. 7

As an inquiry into the problematic of the relationships of contemporary abstraction to its antecedents, this writing re-doubles the doubling inhering in the relation of artist to precursor, of present to antecedent abstraction. This writing thus does not engage the artworks in the exhibition independent of their context, but rather engages some aspects of the cultural situation in which the artworks are embedded and intervene. While not exhaustive of the discursive field it engages, this writing implicates a dream of the whole, even as it rejects the totalization of the discursive field it engages. This writing is thus a parergon, a framework around the artworks, itself situated neither within the works nor separate from the works comprising the exhibition. 8 While neither a part of nor separate from the artworks, this writing is a part of the situation of this exhibition of the artworks, part of its apparatus, a making explicit of what is implicit within the raison d'ˆtre of the exhibition; it is embedded and intervenes in the cultural situation in which the artworks themselves are situated and in which they intervene. In so doing, it necessarily presupposes a certain distance, though such a distance, as Yve-Alain Bois urges:

remains fundamentally unavailable to anyone attending to his or her own discourse. One cannot be, at the same time, embedded in a field and surveying it from above, one cannot claim any secure ground from which one's own words could be read and judged as if written by someone else. But this impossibility is far from being a loss, for it obliges the autoreferential discourse to admit that one always takes a stand. The strategic nature of the field, often repressed or simply taken for granted, cannot but be asserted: any field is a field of forces in which any discourse maintains a position. 9

As Harold Rosenberg suggests:

The basic substance of art has become the protracted discourse in words and materials echoed back and forth from artist to artist, work to work, art movement to art movement, on all aspects of contemporary civilization and the place of creation and of the individual in it. 10

This discursive field consists both in artworks and in the parerga of texts surrounding the artworks. Obviating a simplistic distinction of practice and theory, the artworks as the originary aspect of the discursive field are themselves the conjunction of theory and practice, as Marcelin Pleynet urges:

This discourse [of artworks], although essentially pictorial, is also of a high degree of theoretical rigour, a rigour precisely capable of taking in what the art of the second half of the twentieth century has studiously tried to forget: that rhetorical mastery is a major condition of the disposition of the discourse. 11

In assuming a position within this discursive field I shall contend that present abstraction is not a repetition but a recapitulation of antecedent Modernist abstraction, yet precisely in this recapitulation present abstraction is a transcendence of antecedent Modernist abstraction. While contemporary abstraction is informed by antecedent abstraction, this relation to earlier idioms of abstraction entails the operation of a dialectic of identity and difference. The operation of this dialectic results in abstraction being not as a singularity, but rather as a ramified set of diverse but interrelated idioms. The relation of present to antecedent abstraction entails a thematization 12 of the idioms of abstraction, and conduces to regarding abstraction as a symbolic form. As a symbolic form, present abstraction entails a set of reflexive operations conducted on and through cultural terms. This understanding of art as operations on a set of cultural terms through material objectification within a medium 13 funds the reflexivity connecting present abstraction with the thematized idioms of antecedent abstraction. Regarded synchronically as well as diachronically, abstraction is not a single practice and discourse. Rather, abstraction is a set of idioms and practices: a symbolic form. As "progressive states of the self-emergence of consciousness" a symbolic form is a "representation of the process of creation itself." 14 Applied to artworks, the concept of symbolic form is a mode in which "meaning is given to a concrete, material sign and intrinsically given to this sign." 15 As perspective is the distinguishing symbolic form of post-Renaissance culture, abstraction is the distinguishing symbolic form of the present cultural situation. 16 To subsume the diversity of practices and discourses in current abstraction within the concept of abstraction as a ymbolic form is fundamentally syncretic: it is to urge that what is oppositional at one level is reconcilable at a metalevel. I shall urge that the formalism associated with some aspects of antecedent abstraction, insofar as it entails a separation of form and content and a concomitant disavowal of content, is supplanted in contemporary abstraction by an openness to content. This opening of formalist analysis to content, or more precisely reference, is the necessary precondition for a sublation of the perduring "dialectic of decadence" 17 obtaining between abstraction and figuration into a general theory of representations.

Current practice in abstraction engages the problematizing of the narratives of legitimation underlying antecedent abstraction, and is inextricably linked to the problematic of the master narratives of modernism, paralleling the engagement of these narratives by early abstraction. The present problematic of abstraction in the visual arts cannot be considered apart from the historicity 18 of the present cultural context in which the facture of contemporary abstract works occurs, nor can it be considered apart from the position of abstraction in the history of modernism. Indeed, that current abstraction entails the problematic engaged here is predicated on the relation of present to antecedent abstraction. Present abstraction is not a return of an absence: abstraction has been a constant presence in the art of this century. 19 Indeed, abstraction predicated on the premisses of the Modernist paradigm perdures beyond the duration of the period of Modernist hegemony. But present approaches to abstraction are not simply those obtaining during the period of Modernism, and insofar as this is the case, the paradigms of abstraction under Modernism are problematized in current abstraction. Nor is current abstraction a matter localized within a particular medium, e.g., painting; the materiality of a medium mediates the engagement of the issues in a given work as a particularization of universals, but does not in itself require nor preclude that engagement.

The relation of particular current works in abstraction to the thematized idioms of abstraction is analogous to the relation of parole to langue in Saussurian linguistics, but with the extension of the synchronic moment emphasized by Saussure to an expanded attention to the diachronicity of the relation of antecedent and current works. 20 The conditions obtaining in the cultural situation of contemporary abstraction are distinct from those obtaining during the ascendencies of abstraction in earlier twentieth century; these conditions are of consequence for the practices and theories entailed in contemporary abstraction. That current abstraction occurs through the agency of artists whose intentional horizon subsumes antecedent abstraction is true and nontrivial, for the similarity of current to antecedent abstraction entails both the present as a development from the past (even insofar as it opposes positions articulated in the past), and allusion to and resonance with the antecedent idioms of abstraction.

The centrality of abstraction in twentieth century modernism is founded on the assimilation of abstraction to the modernist principles of historicism and essentialism. The modern shift to an industrial economy produced the

threat of the collapse of art's special status into a fetish or commodity. It is in reaction to this threat that the historicism and essentialism of modernism was developed. 21

Historicism here consists in the notion that each art undergoes a teleological development by processes which are operative in history but which are not amenable to human alteration, hence the view that a history of a phenomenon is a sufficient explanation of the phenomenon; that a phenomenon is accounted for in an exhaustive description of its origin and development. In the visual arts during modernism, essentialism consists in the purist move of eliminating from each art what is singular to other arts. The principles of historicism and essentialism fund the modernist rhetorical claims of progress and necessity. Together, the claims of necessity and progress instantiate modernist abstraction as "the leading edge of avant-garde experimentation," 22 obtaining in the self-definition of the modern, distinguishing the modern from the past by vitiating the latter. 'Avant-garde' is understood as:

the point in each phase of Modernism at which Modern becomes or achieves itself. . . . As the cutting edge of [the] Modern, the avant-garde establishes the point at which [the] Modern must enter its new phase in order to keep up with itself. The avant-garde points toward the future, and as soon as it is absorbed into the present, it ceases to be itself and becomes part of Modernism. 23

The vitiation of the past in Modernism 24 by an attenuation or refusal of antecedent art produces the thesis of discontinuity between the Modern and its predecessors. Negation of the thesis of discontinuity produces the thesis of continuity between the premodern and the Modern. The thesis of continuity bifurcates: in its strong form it is a thesis of historical necessity funding the ascription of progress; in its weak form it is a thesis of possibility. This relation of antecedent to subsequent in the relation of the premodern to the Modern as entailing discontinuous and continuous moments is recapitulated in the relation of the Modern to its successors. The problem is strategically identical in both the case of Modernism and its antecedents and of Modernism and its successors: self-definition is seen to require discontinuity, but legitimacy of successionis seen to require continuity.

The turn to the essential in early abstraction parallels the attenuation of external reference in abstraction, and the refusal of overt external reference in nonrepresentational art, a refusal that does not simply obviate figuration as being definitive of antecedent art, but asserts an inward move for the artist and of autotelicity and autonomy for the artwork. Connected with the Romantic assertion of sincerity, 25 the inward turn in early abstraction is the subject-side correlative of the object-side turn to the assertion of the autotelicity of the artwork. Thus, inter alia, Kasimir Malevich:

Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and it believes it can exist, in and for itself, without 'things'. . . feeling, after all, is always and everywhere the one and only source of every creation. 26

Malevich's move entails distinguishing the meaning of the work from a figurative referent, and shifting the pretext of the facture of the work from figurative reference to a nonfigurative referent, from a meaning to the means of meaning. 27 The transformation of natural appearance is not a sufficient condition of modernist abstraction; rather, reduction of particular to universal is necessary, as Piet Mondrian asserts:

The fact that in abstract art the natural aspect of representation is transformed to a certain degree and is rendered more or less unrecognizable leads many to consider that this is what makes it 'abstract.' It must, however, be recognized that there are different degrees of abstraction, which makes every tendency appreciable. Naturalistic art is also an abstraction. Not every one is conscious that in abstract art the transforming of natural appearance by which things are rendered more or less unrecognizable is not sufficient to create abstract art. As abstraction is reducing things from the individual to the universal, the universal expression of reality is indispensable. 28

The general case of distinguishing individual from universal is the ontological distinction of beings and Being. In reducing things from the individual to the universal, the other of a thing is no thing, nothing. As Rosalind Krauss notes:

the twentieth century's first wave of pure abstraction was based on the goal, taken most seriously indeed, to make a work about Nothing. The upper case n in Nothing is the marker of this absolute seriousness. If anything ever drove Mondrian and Malevich, it was Hegelianism and the notion that the vocation of art was defined by its special place in the progress of Spirit. The ambition to finally succeed at painting nothing is fired by the dream of being able to paint Nothing, which is to say, all Being once it has been stripped of every quality that would materialize or limit it in any way. So purified, this Being is identical with Nothing. It is onto this experience of identity that Hegel's dialectic opens. To wish to paint the operations of the dialectic is no small ambition. 29

the kind of significations of which abstract art is capable: significations generated from relationships of pure difference. The Nothing that emerges from this play of oppositions, this structuration of binaries, is absolutely beyond picturing. 30

As the first and most important item upon its agenda, the avant-garde saw the necessity of an escape from ideas, which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society. Ideas came to mean subject-matter in general. (Subject matter as distinguished from content: in the sense that every work of art must have content, but that subject matter is something the artist does or does not have in mind when he is actually at work.) This meant a new and greater emphasis on form, and it also involved the assertion of the arts as independent vocations, disciplines and crafts, absolutely autonomous, and entitled to respect for their own sakes, and not merely as vessels of communication. 35

The arts lie safe now, each within its 'legitimate' boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy. Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art. . . . The arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated and defined. It is by virtue of its medium that each art is uniquely and strictly itself. To restore the identity of an art the opacity of its medium must be emphasized. For the visual arts the medium is discovered to be physical; hence pure painting and pure sculpture seek above all else to affect the spectator physically. 36

Greenberg's version of formalism entails a separation of form and content predicated on the distinction of the physical and visible from the conceptual and invisible. This conception of formalism, connected through Clive Bell and Roger Fry to the Symbolist separation of form and content, follows a Kantian distinction of phenomenal from noumenal, though Greenberg denies a noumenal behind the phenomenal of the artwork. 37 But Greenberg's formalism is not the only possible formalism: a formalism not requiring the separation and disavowal of content is possible. As Tzvetan Todorov suggests: "the form of the work of art is not its only formal element: its content may equally well be formal." 38 On the position advanced by Todorov, the post-Greenbergian repudiation of content as serving the valorization of form in isolation from content (or subject-matter, given Greenberg's distinction of subject-matter from content), is not a matter of necessity.

While modern abstraction engaged a rhetoric of necessity, in which the origin of abstraction was regarded on an evolutionary model as the inevitable consequence of historical development, current abstraction seems rather to constitute one of a set of possibilities within a field. Thus Arthur Danto:

abstraction is a possibility rather than a necessity, and is permitted rather than obliged. In fact the art world as I see it--and as I now think it sees itself--is a field of possibilities in which nothing is necessary and nothing is obliged. Heinrich Wölfflin famously ended the preface to the later editions of The Principles of Art History by saying that not everything is possible at every time. It is a mark of what I have termed the posthistorical period of art that everything is possible at this time, or that anything is. 39

But merely to assert that at this time everything is possible, or anything is possible, is an empty appeal to the principle of plenitude: it is to beg the question of why a particular thing is as it is: why abstraction (or any other particular move), now? It is likewise to beg the question of how it is that everything is now possible is itself now a possibility. The 'now' that Danto terms the "posthistorical period of art" is a turn in which art qua practice coincides with its correlative theory. Again Danto:

art came to an end when it achieved a philosophical sense of its own identity, which meant that an epic quest, beginning some time in the latter part of the nineteenth century, had achieved closure. 40

Thus posited, the closure Danto posits in the posthistorical period of art seems rather like Hegel's notion of absolute knowledge, an attainment that within Hegel's system asserts a claim the very necessity of which Danto urges has been contravened into possibility. This closure is better regarded as the simultaneity, predicated on an atemporal availability, of the range of positions defining the field. Given this availability (in principle) of the entirety of the discourse, the field is best thought as articulated as a hyperspace, where the several lexia correspond to the individual works, linked in bodies of work defining a position; the several positions themselves, defined by their mutual difference, are linked in chains of influence.41

To thus regard the enterprise as seeking the attainment of its own identity is to posit the artist as engaged in a mode of inquiry, directed toward the disclosure of the necessary and sufficient conditions of being thus engaged. These conditions, and the enterprise of their disclosure, is simultaneously the disclosure of ground of the possibilities of the enterprise. The self-referentiality of present works in abstraction might seem a repetition of the modernist turn of reductivist purism resulting from reflexive criticality. As Greenberg notes:

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself--not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. . . . The self-criticism of Modernism grows out of but is not the same thing as the criticism of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment criticized from the outside, the way criticism in its more accepted sense does; Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized. 42

But the self-referential criticality of present abstraction is not only directed to the specific medium in which the work arises, but engages, via allusion or quotation, its Modernist antecedents and the self-criticism inhering in those antecedents. And this mode of criticality is neither inside, as with Modernist self-criticism, nor outside, as with Enlightenment criticism: rather, it is at once both inside and outside. It is inside insofar as it is within a medium, a discipline, the procedures of which it uses; it is outside insofar as its object is not only itself as a medium, but its synchronic and diachronic situation. In this respect, one may posit that the meta-criticism of present art is to Modern self-criticism as Modern self-criticism is to Enlightenment criticism. Modernist self criticism is implicit; thus Greenberg:

It should also be understood that the self-criticism of Modernist art has never been carried on in any but a spontaneous and subliminal way. It has been altogether a question of practice, immanent to practice and never a topic of theory. 43

Greenberg's claim of the implicit character of Modernist self-criticism is in contrast to Danto's assertion of the attainment by part of a philosophical understanding of its on identity, which constitutes an explicit self-criticism. (It is also, pace Greenberg, in contrast to the explicit theorizing outside their artworks by any number of artists from early abstraction through high modernism; the writings of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Motherwell, Rothko and Reinhardt among others is evidence to the contrary.) 44 This is to urge that present artworks continue modernism by other means. This continuation is, however, the condition of the modern prototype, as entailing an always-exceeding of itself. Thus, asJean-Françoise Lyotard urges:

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in its nascent state, and this state is constant. 45

To regard the situation of facture of artworks as a constant nascent state is to evoke Nietzsche's image of the Augenblick: the perduring present of the now between past and future as eternal chaos enabling continuous creation, mediating between retention and protention.46 Much traditional art history, 47 and even more so the popularized articulation of traditional art history, has treated the origin of abstraction in terms of foundation myth, as occurring in illo tempore, ab origine, 'in those days, from the beginning', the result of the primordial acts of heros to be recounted in the hagiography of the enterprise. 48 The positing of the postmodern as the modern in a constant nascent state engages foundation myth, but shifts the time from a primordial past to a perduring present. This shift from the inside to the outside of temporal succession is not merely to offer a reassuring continuity; more importantly, it opens the sense of closure in the modernist project to indefinite continuation. For, as Thomas McEviley asks, "what could it mean for a project based on institutionalizing change to be 'complete'?" 49 Lyotard locates the legitimation of continuing creation in the notion of the 'performative': that is performative which enables the continuance of the enterprise, continuance being implicitly regarded as a good in itself. The notion of the performative in Lyotard's sense is sufficient to account for the facture of works by sheer inertia; more importantly, it is sufficient to account for the continuation of the project, including its continuation in the self-referentiality of tradition that implicates simultaneous recapitulation and transcendence in the relation of present to antecedent artworks.

That such a view may simultaneously be both a recapitulation and transcendenceis in opposition to that asserted by Donald Kuspit. What Donald Kuspit terms "the recapitulative tendency haunting all art today" does not necessarily entail an impasse, notwithstanding Kuspit's formulation: "Not only does this signal bondage to the past, but the inability to find a pioneering way out of it." 50 Nor does it necessarily entail pastiche, parody, or bricolage, nor the continuation of an antecedent mode through inertia. Of course, to urge that these moves are not necessary is to urge that they are contingent, and thus possible. Thus Thomas McEviley:

Our habit-expectations about temporal succession (and thus about history) are denied by the atemporal image-cluster. To the extent to which that atemporality, or ahistoricism, seems strange or unacceptable, to that extent we are still controlled by the old habit-expectations. Those expectations were based on a false conviction of our own innocence, our ability to see innocently, to see 'always for the first time,' is affronted by the quoting process as is the ultimately myth-based conviction of a historical inevitability. The confrontation with one's own sense of the strangeness of it offers a glimpse of freedom, as we see that our expectations, our history, our selves, are all artifacts thrown off by infinite regresses of quotations, and that finally freed from the myths of innocence and inevitability, we may do with them whatever we want. 51

Pace Kuspit, recapitulation is to be distinguished from repetition: repetition is simply doing something again, recapitulation is to repeat in concise form, to summarize, etymologically to again put under headings, in its biological sense to appear to repeat the evolutionary development of the species in the development of the individual organism. This summing up, this codification and systemization, is not a terminus, but an incipient transcendence. The apparent academicism, as summa, is less a motionless Alexandrianism 52 than an opening, or the requisite precondition for an opening, as Robert C. Morgan urges:

One might refer to this new endgame as a kind of redemption; that is, abstract painting may be in the process of codifying its own system, thus giving to abstraction a new semantics of representation whereby it can be accepted and understood as a surface language that is not bereft of depth signifiers. 53

What Morgan ascribes to painting need not be thus restricted; it may be broadened to be applicable irrespective of medium. A "surface language that is not bereft of depth signifiers" is signification that, while addressable in formalist terms does not reject referential content. The relation of surface and depth is a relation of the exoteric and the esoteric, of the visible and the invisible. But this is not to require that what is enacted in the work is visible or specifiable as such in the work. As Bertrand Russell urges in his Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus:

every language has, as Mr. Wittgenstein says, a structure concerning which, in the language, nothing can be said, but that there may be another language dealing with the structure of the first language, and having itself a new structure, and that to this hierarchy of languages there may be no limit. 54

In the hierarchy of languages, the visual and the verbal serve as reciprocal metalanguages, each the alter of the other. In visual works, the work enacts that which is verbally unspecifiable, at least in normal language, though it may be specifiable in originary language. 55 The opposition of the visible and the invisible opens a critique of the opposition of abstraction and representation constituting a "dialectic of decadence" 56 throughout modernism and the postmodern. It is thus to recognize, as Valerie Jaudon urges:

that the use of the terms 'figurative' and 'representational' as the defining opposites of 'abstract' and 'non-representational' is not only inadequate but misleading. . . . The terms 'non-representational' and 'non-referential' refers to a practice that is in fact representational and referential. 57

Recognition of the representational and referential character of the 'non-representational' and 'non-referential' idioms of abstraction puts into question the customary distinction of abstract works from figurative artworks: it is to urge that all artworks entail abstraction precisely inasmuch as all artworks are representations, and thus are referential. To assert that a particular work is 'non-referential' is to constitute a category based on the inability to specify the referent. The ability to verbally specify the referent is, as Richard Wollheim notes, irrelevant. 58 However, pace Wollheim, representation in the visual arts cannot be restricted to the re-presentation of the visible: representation is no less the visible presentation of the invisible. 59

That what is enacted in the work obtains apart from what is given in visual perception is to deny the claim that apprehension of visual artworks consists in pure visuality. That the dictum nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu [nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses] obtains does not require that only what is visible be the content of cognition. In contrast to the view of artworks as a matter of pure visuality, the relation of present abstraction to its antecedents is as much an engagement of mind as eye. But as Thomas McEviley urges:

The idea that intelligence should be in antagonistic relationship to the senses is an abomination, like all Manichaean-type dualisms. The dualisms of form and content, spirit and matter, mind and body, are all really the same dualism, one which arose in part as an archaic propaganda system to support an unchanging form of the state. 60

the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being. 61

This is not unlike Robert Morgan's formulation: "deep structures are not vanquished by the surface but, in fact, are what make the surface palpable." 62 Indeed, as McEviley suggests above, all of these dualisms are the same dualism, projections of and from the embodied condition of consciousness, its at once being inside and outside, surface and depth. This condition of consciousness is deported beyond itself: as transcendent, it is always already within a world, among things, with others. 63 Most generally, this condition is an opening. The thematization of this openness is the authenticity of this being-in-the-world. Authenticity must be distinguished from sincerity. Sincerity is an appeal to the closeness of the artwork to experience, and thus remoteness to artifice. 64 In the purist version of the expressionist theory of art, the singular criterion to the valorization of the artwork consists in the demand that the work:

represent an authentic and unadulterated insight, a demand that in the less cautious and more popular versions becomes a call for sincerity in the expression of emotion. 65

In requiring that the artwork "represent an authentic and unadulterated insight," authenticity entails the notion of the human as the site of appropriation for openness to the disclosure of the Being of beings. This sense of authenticity entails the temporality inherent to Dasein as being-in-the-world. Jürgen Habermas, commenting on the Heidegger of Being and Time regarding the ontologizing of the 'existentiale of historicality', urges that:

The horizon open to the future, which is determined by expectations in the present, guides our access to the past. Inasmuch as we appropriate past experiences with an orientation to the future, the authentic present is preserved as the locus of continuing tradition and of innovation at once; the one is not possible without the other. 66

Being-in-the-world always already entails the embeddedness of a cultural situation that is diachronic as well as synchronic. Insofar as that cultural situation is assimilated, it is available as "continuing tradition and innovation at once," for assimilation of antecedents precludes innocence, while the understanding of the being-in-the-world that includes assimilated antecedents is "to project oneself on a possibility." 67 As artist qua subject, so the artwork qua quasi-subject. 68

For if we cannot establish a hierarchy of civilizations or speak of progress--neither in painting nor in anything else that matters--it is not because some fate holds us back; it is, rather, because the very first painting in some sense went to the farthest reach of the future. If no painting comes to be the painting, if no work is ever absolutely completed and done with, still each creation changes, alters, enlightens, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates in advance of all the others. If creations are not a possession, it is not only that, like all things they pass away; it is also that they have almost all their life still before them.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty 69

1. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act III, Scene IV, lines 132-133. Return
2. Harold Rosenberg, "Educating Artists," The De-definition of Art (San Francisco: Collier, 1972), 48. Return
3. Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," VIII, lines 136-144. Poems by Wallace Stevens, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Random House, 1959) 145-152. Return
4. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," VI, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255. Return
5. Charles Olson, "Maximus, To Himself," ed. Robert Creeley, Charles Olson: Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1967), 245. Return
6. Allusion is to Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). Bloom's taxonomy of influence in the relation between precursor and later poets is broiadly useful in considering the relation between antecedent and current abstraction. Return
7. Bloom, ibid., 5, 28-29. Return
8. 'Parergon' has its etymology from the Greek parergon: 'beside the main subject, subordinate, incidentally'. Liddell and Scott, A Lexicon Abridged from Liddlell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), s.v., 531. For the use of the term in aesthetics, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, section 14, trans Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 72; Jacques Derrida, "Parergon," The Truth in Painting, trans Geoff Bennington, Ian MacLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 15-147. Return
9. Yves-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge: M> I. T. Press, 1993), xi.
10. Harold Rosenberg,ibid., 48. Return
11. Marcelin Pleynet, "Art and Literature: Robert Motherwell's 'Riverrun'," in eds. Stephen Bann, William Allen, Interpreting Contemporary Art (New York: Harper, 1991), 23. Return
12. Thematization is the abstraction of an aspect of an enterprise so as to render it consciously contributive to the future conduct of the enterprise as an intentional object; see Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 20ff. Return
13. Rosalind Krauss contends that "within the situation of postmodernism, practivce is not defined in relation to a given medium . . . but rather in relation to the logical operation on a set of cultural terms . . . ." Sculpture in the Expanded Field," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1985), 288. I concur with Krauss insofar as her assertion would distinguish between modernist purism predicaterd on the reduction of each medium to its putative essence, but I cannot concur with her implicvit conceptualism which would seem to place practice apart from the obdurate materiality of a medium. Cf. Victor Burgin, "The Absence of Presence," The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1986), 39. Return
14. Robert S. Hartman, "Cassirier's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms," ed. Paul Athur Schlipp, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirier (LaSalle: Open Court, 1949, 1973), 291. Return
15. By 'symbolic form' is meant the articulating schemata by which a coherent whole is instantiated through connection of the cognitive, affective, technical and social practices of a culture. The term is mediately from Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbollic Form, tr. Christopher S. 991), 40-41, originally published as "Die Perspektive als 'Symbolische Form'," in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924-1925 (Leipzig, Berlin: Institut Warburg, 1927), 258-339. Panofsky adopts the notion of symbolic form from ernst Cassirier; see Cassirier, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Language; Mythical Thought; The Phenomenology of Knowledge, 3 vols., tr. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955, 1957). Cf. Bois on Hubert Damisch, Yve-Alain Bois, ibid., 253. Return
16. See Pietro Bellasi, "New Abstraction and Abstract Society," Tema Celeste 34 (January-March 1992), 92-93. Return
17. Donald Kuspit, The Dialectic of Decadence (New York: Stux Press, 1993). Return
18. By 'historicity' in this context I refer to the "awareness of the inescapability of historical interpretation...." Joan Hart, "Reinterpreting Wölfflin: Neo-Kantianism and Hermeneutics," Art Journal 42:4 (Winter 1982), 298. Return
19. Cf. Al Harris F., "Abtraction's Timely Return," CRCA/Research Series (January-February 1993), 19a-20b. Return
20. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linquistics, tr. Roy Harris (LaSalle: Open Court, 1986); also Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, tr. Annette Lavers, Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); D. S. Clarke, Principles of Semiotic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). The synchronic emphasis of Saussure is complemented by the diachronic trun of the Prague Linguistic Circle, particularly in the work of Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky; see Frantisek W. Galen, Historic Structure: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946 (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1985). Return
21. Yves-Alain Bois, "Painting: The Task of Mourning," ibid., 233. Return
22. Stephen Ellis, "After the Fall," Tema Celeste 34 (January-March 1992), 56. Return
23. Frederick R. Karl, Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist 1885-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 13. Return
24. Clement Greenberg's later assertions to the contrary notwithstanding: "I cannot insist enough that Modernism has never meant anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling of anterior tradition, but it also means its continuation. Modernist art develops out of the past without gap or break...." "Modernist Painting," Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965), 200. Return
25. Inter alia, Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics From Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1966), 147,151-152, 311; Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 355, 418, 437. Return
26. Kasimir Malevich, "Suprematism," The Non-Objective World, tr. Howard Dearstyne (Chicago: Theobald, 1959), 67-100; in ed. Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 341. Return
27. My argument here concurs with that of Rosalind Krauss, "Reading Jackson Pollack, Abstractly," though some equivocation obtains in our respective use of the terminology. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other modernist Myths (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1985), 225. Cf. Barnett Newman: "Most people think of subject-matter as what Meyer Scapiro has called object matter." Quoted in Krauss from Dorothy Seckler, "Interview with Bartnett Newman," Art in America LX (Summer 1962), 83. Return
28. Piet Mondrian, "Abstract Art [Non-Subjective Art] (October 1941), The New Art - The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, eds. and trs. Harry Holtzman, Martin S. James (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 332. Return
29. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other modernist Myths (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1985), 237. Return
30. Krauss, ibid., 238. Return
31. Krauss, ibid., 238. Return
32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922, 1981), 7, 189. Return
33. Krauss, ibid., 238. Return
34. Bois, ibid., 233ff. Return
35. Clement Greenberg, "Towards a New Laokoon," Partisan Review (July-August 1940); reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, v. I, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O'Brien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 28. Return
36. Greenberg, ibid., 32-33. Return
37. For an adumbrattion, see Victor Burgin, "Modernism in the Work of Art," The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1986), 11-16. Return
38. Tzevetan Todorov, "Some approaches to Russian Formalism," 20th Century Studies (December 1972), 10; quoted in Burgin, ibid., 12. Return
39. Arthur C. Danto, "Art After the End of Art, Artforum 31:8 (April 1993), 67. Danto's reference to Heinrich Wöfflin, The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, is to the Preface to the Sixth [German] edition, Kunstgeshichtliche Grundbegriffe [1922]; in the M. D. Hottinger trans., (New York: Dover, [1950]), ix: "Not every thing is possible at all times, and certain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development." Return
40. Danto, ibid. 64. Return
41. See George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Return
42. Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965), 193. Return
43. Greenberg, ibid., 199. Return
44. That the artists championed by formalist criticism did not necessarily concur in a purely formal analysis of their work - and thus the claim of formalist critics that one should not listen to the artist - is mildly notorious. See Thiomas McEviley, "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds," Artforum 22:10 (Summer 1984), 67. Return
45. Jean Françoise Lyotard, "Answering the Question: WHat is Postmodernism?" Appendix to The Postmodern Condition:A Report on Knowledge, trans. Régis Durand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 79. Return
46. See Stanley Rosen, The Limits of Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press,1980) 198. Fredreich Neittzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1975) par. 109; cf. Thus Spake Zarathrustra, in ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Vintage, 1958). For the connection of the Augenblick with Heidegger's conception of authenticity [Eigentlichkeit] as the moment of decisive manifestation of Being, see Michael E. Zimmerman, "Appendix: Authenticity in Light of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe," Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger's Sense of Authenticity (Athens: Ohio Univcersity Press, 1981), 277-300. Return
47. For the distinction of the 'traditional' versus the 'new' art history, see Art Journal 42:4 (Winter 1982), the issue being devoted by guest editor Henri Zerner to "The Crisis in the Discipline." Return
48. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954, 1971), 2. Return
49. Thomas McEviley, "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds," Artforum 22:10 (Summer, 1984), 69. Return
50. Donald Kuspit, "Fin de Siìcle Abstraction: The Ambuguous Re-Turn Inwards," Tema Celeste 34 (January-March 1992), 54. Return
51. McEviley, ibid, 70.Return
52. The phrase is from Clement Greenberg, "Avant-garde and Kitsch," Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 4; initial publication in Partisan Review, 1939. Return
53. Robert C. Morgan, "The New Endgame," Tema Celeste 34 (January-March 1992), 66. Return
54. Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 23. Return
55. I have in mind, on the one hand, normal language as language proceeding diachronically in a manner analogous to what Thomas Kuhn terms "normal science," on the other hand, I have in mind Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of originary language as that which obtains for one who "assimilates the culture down to its very foundations and gives it a new structure: he speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before." Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt," Sense and Non_Sense (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 18-19. Return
56. Donald Kuspit, The Dialect of Decadence (New York: Stux Press, 1993). Return
57. Valerie Jaudon, "Figuring Abstraction," Tema Celeste 34 (January-March 1982), 91. Return
58. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 62. Return
59. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," The Primacy of Perception: and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie, tr. Carleton Dallery (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 166. Return
60. Thomas McEviley, "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds," Artforum 22:10 (Summer, 1984), 70. Return
61. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 151. Return
62. Robert C. Morgan, "The New Endgame," Tema Celeste 34 (January-March 1992), 67. Return
63. I am assuming a broadly Heideggerian position; see the treatment of Dasein in Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, 1988), inter alia 298ff. Return
64. Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 355. Return
65. Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 418. Return
66. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, tr. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1987), 13. Return
67. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, 1988), 277. Return
68. For the notion of the artwork as a "quasi-subject," see Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomoneology of Aesthetic Experience, tr. Edward S. Casey et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 146. Return
69. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," The Primacy of Perception: and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie, tr. Carleton Dallery (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 190. Return