Installation View; Abstract Exhibition (2008), GCGCA(i)
Abstract Exhibition
Museum of Leftover Ideologies, City of Death
21 Jun - 22 Sep 2008
One reason for suspicion of philosophy by other disciplines is the level of abstraction at which it constitutes its concepts. While abstraction may be associated a withdrawal from reality of the object of experience, its deeper philosophical history entails focusing in on the essence of an object, as a condition of the possibility of knowledge. Abstraction is a condition of knowledge.
‘One does not know why one has come - in search of culture or enjoyment, in fulfilment of an obligation, or in obedience to a convention’; A Tour of the Void Thoughts of the Museum of Abstract Exhibition; Abstract Exhibition (2008), GCGCA(i)
Marx connected theoretical abstractions to experience, since it is as elements of experience that, ultimately, abstractions acquire truth. Conceptual abstractions transfigure the experiences they relate to - much like novels and works of art transfigure the experience of their readers and viewers.
‘Like casinos, they cannot lose, and that is their curse. For people become hopelessly lost in the galleries, isolated in the midst of so much art’; A Tour of the Void Thoughts of the Museum of Abstract Exhibition; Abstract Exhibition (2008), GCGCA(i)
Both Expressionism and Constructivism are inherently connected to the movement towards abstraction insofar as each involves a downgrading of the representational content of the work in favour of an increased self-consciousness of (one aspect of) the process of its production, in response to the development of mechanical forms of reproduction (photography).
‘Art does not have it in its power to decide over the possibility that everything may indeed not come to anything more than nothing’; A Tour of the Void Thoughts of the Museum of Abstract Exhibition; Abstract Exhibition (2008), GCGCA(i)
‘Modernity’, at the level of a philosophical concept, is a culture of temporal abstraction centred on a restless logic of negation - the temporal dialectic of the new, and the field of art is one of the various fields of experience that are subjected to its logic.'The modern' is primarily a schema, in Kant's sense: a 'rule of pure synthesis' or 'transcendental determination of time' that mediates the pure givenness of appearances with categorial or intelligible forms.
‘True art is unable not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society’; A Tour of the Void Thoughts of the Museum of Abstract Exhibition; Abstract Exhibition (2008), GCGCA(i)
