Perpustakaan Digital ITB

Nonrepresentational or abstract art is generally regarded as the most significant innovation of twentieth century art. It involves, as Clement Greenberg has written, "pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors," that is, in "the processes of [the] medium."[1] It implies "the tendency toward 'purity' or absolute abstractness," which, while it "exists only as a tendency, an aim, not as a realization," informs every effort of abstract art.[2] Whether or not this description is adequate, there is always the eschewing of representational intention, however that might finally be defined. And whether abstract art is the necessary essentialization of art that Greenberg thought it was, there is the sense that the "concreteness" achieved by "renouncing illusion and explicit subject matter" establishes an unequivocal criterion for aesthetic significance.[3] There may be historical precedent for abstract art, and past art may have to be re-evaluated in modernist terms--in terms of its affirmation of the medium--as Greenberg does in his study of the later Monet and reassessment of Titian, but the fact is that in the twentieth century a distinctive canon of abstract art emerges.[4]
Part of the purpose of my paper is to dispute this assumption, from a Freudian perspective on art: to suggest that something more complex and equivocal--more resistant to the modern world--occurred in the artistic response to it that led to abstract art. I want to argue that the tendency towards purity or absolute abstraction does not indicate as much (blind) acceptance of the modern world as is customarily thought, but, on the contrary, a self-protective aesthetic disaffection with it