Word: abstraction
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...that time meaning was conventional; hence art or architecture was judged primarily by comparing it to prevailing social standards. This approach made the critic’s job wonderfully easy, but of course it was also problematic because it meant that people were paying more attention to an abstract cultural rubric of meaning than to the individual characteristics of the works themselves...
...formal qualities did not amount to genuinely granting a work of art autonomy when discussing meaning. True, formalist critics had thrown out social conventions of meaning in favor of formal analysis, but they then proceeded to use their discussion of form as a platform for the construction of abstract interpretations. Consider what happened with one of the classic formalist darlings, the painter Jackson Pollock. Formalist critics raved about his explosively gestural drips and splashes, but only so that they could begin talking about those marks as vehicles of existential self-expression. Likewise, formalists loved the austere combinations of line, plane...
Contemporary critics have long since grasped this problem with the formalist approach, and have begun to focus more on the ways in which the work itself actively constructs meaning rather than falling into the pre-formalist and formalist traps of proposing that meaning exists in abstract externalities foreign to the work. Artists, too, have begun to create work that explicitly called for this new kind of critical analysis. Minimalist sculpture, for example, took a kind of phenomenological or experiential approach to meaning, attempting to force an examination of the ways in which the viewer’s interaction with...
...Yawkyawk, 1983, in which the two creatures consume each other. Mawurndjul's brother Jimmy Njiminjuma pushed the concept even further in his large-scale serpents from the mid '80s, which wrestle with the very edges of the frame. But no one inhabits Ngalyod better than Mawurndjul, whose increasingly abstract depictions give an insider view of the supreme being. "Where I live," he has said, "a Ngalyod lives under (water), but I paint her from inside my mind...
...innumerable number of dead bodies disfigured by improvised explosive devices, I wondered why this never made it on the news. Whether you’re watching Fox, CNN or PBS you seldom see the contorted faces, the torn and charred flesh. We only get the most vague and abstract sense of what a war is: x dead, y injured, cartoonish maps showing where the fighting is going on. In the popular mind war is being turned into a largely abstract game...