Part 13 Illusionist Painting and Western Abstract Painting

Liu Youju's first exhibition of illusionist paintings (held at the Kennedy Museum of Art in the United States in November 2014) has caused a strong response in the Western art community, and he is therefore known by Western scholars as a master of Eastern abstract painting art.

Liu Youju's illusionist painting is not simply explained clearly using abstract painting concepts. Although his works possess certain visual features of abstract paintings, he also emphasizes that "form" is more important than "content", and is an artistic creation that uses color and form rather than using themes to express thoughts and emotions.

At the same time, Liu Youju's illusionist paintings also possess the artistic characteristics of the post impressionist school represented by Cezanne. Cezanne insisted on the importance of personal expression, thus creating a form giving language for modern art: replacing light and shadow with pure color and line shapes.

The material used in Liu Youju's illusionist painting is mainly Eastern, which is unique to China's rice paper, brush, and Western abstract painting. The main material used is oil painting. Therefore, calling his work "Eastern Abstract Painting" is a more accurate description. Liu Youju's painting art is modern art, and his illusionist painting attempts to break through boundaries and strive for spiritual freedom and liberation.

(1)

From the perspective of art history, there are two main perspectives for explaining or defending abstract painting: expressionism and formalism. There is an internal connection between Qi and Qi, but it is not completely consistent, and sometimes even opposing each other.

Expressionism understands abstraction from the perspective of subjective spirit. In this explanatory framework, abstraction is always associated with a person's psychological needs or internal impulses. As is well known, the earliest to establish the status of abstract as a visual language in art was Wallinger's doctoral thesis "Abstraction and Empathy". Wallinger uses abstract impulses to explain the psychological motivations behind primitive geometric abstractions, believing that they emerged to overcome the fear of survival. Because life is short and impermanent, in order to suppress and avoid this painful psychological torment, primitive people resorted to eternal and regular geometric patterns, rejecting all factors that may associate with life, that is, the image of concrete things in real life.

However, there are some peculiar dislocations between Wallinger's interpretation of abstract art and its development in the modernist era. Firstly, Wallinger's abstract impulse is the escape and suppression of the fear of survival. This theory may have some truth in explaining the survival conditions and experiences of primitive people, but we cannot understand why this fear emerged from modern society and even became increasingly strong. Secondly, what Wallinger wants to explain is the primitive geometric abstract pattern, which is the art of planarizing and suppressing depth that Rigel referred to as the tactile type. In Liger's narrative of art history, this is the early stage of artistic development, which was later replaced by visual painting. Wallinger's explanation is based on Liger's foundation. If we examine the development trend of art according to this model, we also cannot understand why abstract painting emerged during the modernist era.

In addition, Wallinger opposes abstract impulses with empathy impulses, which easily gives people a feeling that empathy is an aesthetic psychological activity unrelated to abstraction. The actual situation is not like this, and the theory of empathy is also proposed for the form of art, and even inherits some Romantic concepts, such as Schiller's "living images". We remember Lipps' famous example of feeling a downward pressure and upward resistance from the Doric order, which was not directed towards concrete works. This concept of perceiving life, motion, or power from a pure form has also been extended to Kandinsky and Gestalt psychology represented by Arnheim. Arnheim's "Art and Visual Perception" basically discusses works of art from an abstract or purely formal perspective, and even concrete works are included in the abstract force schema for understanding.

Kandinsky, who was the earliest to engage in pure abstract painting, also understood this art from the perspective of expressionism. Kandinsky held high the banner of "spirit" to confront the popular "materialism". In his view, abstract art is a career pursued by a few elite artists at the top of the social pyramid, who can convey the spirit through pure forms such as abstract points, lines, surfaces, and colors, which ordinary people may turn a blind eye to or hear a deaf ear to.

In 1921, Karl Einstein mentioned in his article "Absolute Art and Absolute Politics" that the corresponding dictatorship of the proletariat should be a "visual dictatorship", which means completely freeing oneself from the object and achieving absolute freedom, that is, the freedom of absolute art. According to Bertine, pursuing an "absolute" art is a fundamental impulse of modernism; The reason why modernism has taken the step of abstraction is precisely the result of this "absolute" artistic concept - because abstraction is a form of expression of "absolute". The "invisible masterpiece" that Bertine refers to refers to the "absolute" works pursued by modernism that cannot be reflected through any specific work. In his view, modernism's persistent pursuit of "absolute" art is actually a continuation of the German Romantic artistic concept.

Nietzsche and the German Romantics were also supporters of this artistic concept.

Nietzsche used the fear of survival to explain the emergence of ancient Greek tragedy; Use dreams and drunkenness to conceal the cruelest and deadly truth in life - the inevitability of death. The embodiment of the German Romanticism in Wallinger is his opposition to imitation or reproduction of ideas, treating artistic works as objects independent of natural things. For abstract art, this should be a very important regulation.

Unlike expressionism in understanding abstract art from a spiritual or psychological perspective, formalism understands abstraction from the perspective of art itself. Of course, after formalism separated from psychology, it formed an art theory. This theory holds that the essence of art is form. Subsequently, Greenberg further inferred that the only direction for the development of contemporary painting was towards abstraction. To be precise, his understanding of the essence of painting, or the development direction of modern painting, is the flatness of the visual space and the immediacy of media materials.

Due to different perspectives of understanding, formalism and expressionism have different views on art. Formalism views the development of art as an objective process, while expressionism understands art as a subjective 'spirit', which is the product of emotional and psychological needs. It can be said that formalism's concept of artistic self-discipline development is another important prerequisite for the emergence of abstract visual language as art. Belting pointed out, "If art is attributed to style, which is a constantly evolving term, then the loss of representativeness appears to be a break from the past, because abstract art emerges as the ultimate victory of form. Here, style does not even need to be extracted from the content, as it itself becomes content

In addition, the reason why modern art tends to be flat or abstract is because capitalism is bound to develop its own advanced art. This proposition is not Marxist in essence. The reason why Hitler and Mussolini encouraged vulgar art instead of avant-garde art was purely due to political considerations, as the latter could not effectively play a promotional role. There is no problem here where the economic foundation determines the superstructure.

The problem with expressionism is that it fails to provide a clear and convincing narrative model for the rise of art in capitalist society, However, if we compare the debate on "expressionism" between Lukacs, Adorno, Brecht, and others with Greenberg's formalist narrative, although they all use the concept of avant-garde, there are significant differences in connotation. For Greenberg, abstraction is the embodiment of avant-garde art, and the avant-garde concept of expressionism has long surpassed the scope of easel painting. It is precisely because of this that expressionism cannot actually provide a narrative of artistic development, because for it, art is a living manifestation of the spirit, and cannot be objectified or historical.

(2)

The development route of modernist abstract painting in Greenberg's mind was from Cezanne to Mondrian through Picasso. In this route, the combination of geometric blocks and surfaces on the screen advances along the visual purity, eliminating all hints. The reason why Kandinsky's works do not catch his eye is because they do not prioritize visual purity, but rather attempt to imply something. His rejection of Kandinsky was due to the fact that geometric and expressive abstractions were originally products of different ideological concepts and cultural stances. Wallinger interprets primitive geometric abstractions from the perspective of expressionism, although it does touch upon certain essential factors of geometric abstraction (such as the negation of life consciousness), it may also be the most serious of the peculiar dislocations in his theory. In fact, the development of geometric abstraction in the 20th century was not based on the suppression of life consciousness, but was associated with a form of technological optimism.

This technological optimism believes that abstraction is a common visual language for all humanity, which can overcome barriers between races and cultures, completely break free from customs and traditional biases, and achieve absolute freedom.

Although modernism has now become an object that we must reflect on, the geometric abstractions that accompanied modernism have achieved decisive victories in our social life. This is because modernist painting should maintain maximum visual purity and cannot be mixed with anything else. Or rather, the reason why abstract painting is the highest form of expression of modernism is because modernist painting is not about reproducibility, but about the essence of painting.

Formalism also acknowledges that the purpose and meaning of form is itself, and there is no other purpose or meaning. This is an important prerequisite for abstraction to be defended as art. In fact, the biggest enemy of abstract art is not concrete, but decoration. Compared to the decorative trend of abstract painting, whether form has meaning is actually a secondary issue, and even becomes irrelevant. In this regard, without referring to expressionism, which defines the meaning and value of form from a spiritual perspective, formalism itself cannot provide a further standard to distinguish between art and decoration.

The proposition that form is meaning has another meaning in Greenberg's view, which is the visual purity of modernist painting. On this basis, we still cannot distinguish between art and decoration.

Deleuze believed that abstract painting can be divided into two types, one related to the eyes and the other related to the hands. The characteristic of the former is that once the composition and organization principles of the picture are determined, it is only necessary to evenly spread the colors, and hands are basically not effective in it, and even try to eliminate traces of manual work. The latter has the opposite characteristic, as long as it is done by hand and does not require visual guidance. Like Jackson Pollock, he does not know what the painting is during the creative process. From this perspective, Deleuze believes that Greenberg's interpretation of abstract expressionism from the perspective of visual purity is actually a misunderstanding and is not as clear as Rosenberg's term 'action painting'.

Deleuze believed that abstract painting is encoded, such as horizontal and vertical lines representing stability, curves representing motion, blue and green representing peace, and so on. However, strictly speaking, this is mainly a characteristic of geometric abstraction. The prominent expressive abstraction is the movement traces of hands and pens on the screen, which always carries personal characteristics, making it difficult to become a universally encoded language.

Greenberg believes that compared to France, abstract painting in the United States is characterized by a fresher, more open, and more direct surface of painting. Although he believes that abstract expressionism inherits the cause of Cubism, using Mondrian as a model, the fact is that we cannot find a straight and regular line in abstract expressionism. The emphasis on movement and expressive brushwork is the true breakthrough of abstract expressionism over cubism.

As many theorists have pointed out, art has actually come to an end in Hegel's view. Hegel regarded romantic art as the last form of art, and its historical counterpart was medieval religious art. It can be said that Hegel's aesthetics is a "recollection" of an art that has come to an end. Adorno is well aware of this. The reason why he did not use the term 'end' and instead used the term 'de artistry' to describe modernist art after Dada is because he has a magic weapon to deal with 'end', which is a generative artistic concept. Because of this, he opposes defining the essence of art from the perspective of "origin". From a generative perspective, we never know what art will become, nor do we know which things will merge into or disappear from art.

Therefore, the implicit "artistic termination theory" in Friedel's theory seems to be a reflection of the inherent crisis in Greenberg's modernist narrative. This modernist narrative can no longer explain the development of art after abstract expressionism. In terms of the two types of abstract painting, as a visual language juxtaposed with concrete objects, they still exist in art after modernism, but their connotations have undergone subtle changes. For example, in the works of German painter Polk, geometric abstraction has lost its connection with technological optimism and has become a legacy of modernism, becoming an object of appropriation and parody; The "pictorial nature" adhered to by expressive abstraction became a part of German neoexpressionist concrete painting.