Free to go
Primary Cacophony
Jerry Saltz once wrote a manifesto on abstraction in twenty parts and left the twentieth blank. He wanted readers to fill it — to say what else abstraction does that's special. I sent it to a friend. He answered the empty slot by way of the third item, the one where Saltz says abstraction doesn't only explore consciousness, it changes it. And what came back was this:
Abstraction has no intrinsic relationship with its audience, but poses the possibility of a most profound and intimate relationship.
I have been carrying that sentence around for days.
What I like about it is that it's cold. It gives nothing away in the first clause. It doesn't plead on abstraction's behalf, doesn't insist you'd love it if you only tried. It states a fact about the nature of the thing: an abstract painting arrives owing you nothing. There is no handle on it that was built for your hand. And then, in the second clause, it grants the possibility of the most intimate relationship available in art. Two true things, and between them a distance I couldn't stop looking at.
So: what crosses it? What happens in the instant a painting that owes you nothing stops you where you stand?
It isn't attention.
Attention is the obvious answer and the wrong one. Attention is something you spend, and the stop happens before you've spent any. You don't decide to look and then find yourself arrested. You are arrested, and only afterward do you notice you've been looking — that some minutes went somewhere. Whatever crosses the gap gets there before the deciding does. Attention is what you pay once the thing has already taken you. It's the bill, not the entry.
It isn't bringing your authentic self, either — or not in the way that phrase usually means. That one is inverted. You don't arrive properly assembled and get rewarded with feeling.
It's closer to the opposite. A painting with no image in it is one of the very few things you can stand in front of that offers nothing to perform toward. A portrait tells you what response it wants. So does a landscape, a battle scene, a bowl of lemons. You can produce the appropriate feeling in front of any of them and never once leave your own performance — the small, constant, exhausting management of how you are seeming. A field of grey makes no request. There is no correct reaction available to fake. And so the faking apparatus, having nothing to do, idles for a moment, and what's underneath it gets a little air.
Authenticity isn't the price of admission. It's what the painting gives back.
And it isn't that the painting is outside your past. This was my own first guess, and it's nearly right, which is the most dangerous kind of wrong.
Your past floods in. Always. The colors mean things to you before you've decided anything — this ochre is a wall in a city you left, that particular weight along the bottom edge rhymes with weather, with certain rooms, with an hour of the afternoon you have feelings about and no words for. Nothing about the encounter is memoryless.
What's missing isn't the past. What's missing is a terminus.
The associations come, and nothing comes to end them. No name arrives. Beckett called it the neatness of identification, and here the neatness simply fails to close.
Think about what naming actually does. You see a face: half a second, and it resolves. Oh — that's my neighbor. And notice that the resolution is also a dismissal. The moment the name lands, the looking is finished. You are free to go.
That's the whole transaction, and we run it ten thousand times a day. Recognition isn't a form of attention. It's the mechanism by which attention is released. Naming is how the world lets us off.
The abstract painting won't let you off. Not because it's holding you — it isn't reaching for you at all, it has no intrinsic relationship with you, the first clause is still true — but because it never issues the release. There is no name coming. You keep standing there because the signal that ends standing there never fires.
That is the stop. It isn't a grip. It's the sound of a name not arriving.
Which brings me back to the sentence, and to the one thing in it I'd change.
The two halves are joined by but. I think it should be therefore.
I don't believe the coldness is the obstacle to the profound relationship. I think it's the condition for it. Anything that has an intrinsic relationship to its audience has a generic one — its claim on you is exactly the claim it makes on everyone with a face, everyone who has stood outdoors, everyone who has been hungry or afraid. That claim is real and it can be powerful, but it cannot be intimate, because intimacy requires that the relation be particular to the two parties inside it. Nothing that arrives pre-connected can be intimate. The connection was made before you got there, and made for anyone.
Abstraction owes you nothing, and that vacancy is precisely the room. Because it is not given, it can be made — and made once, between one painting and one person, in a way that doesn't transfer and doesn't generalize and can't be explained afterward to someone who wasn't standing there.
Owed nothing, you can be given something.
I want to end this coldly, because the warm ending would be a lie.
Most paintings stop most people never. That is the arithmetic of a thing that is not obligated to anyone, and it isn't a failure of virtue on either side — not the viewer's for failing to feel, not the painting's for failing to reach. The possibility is only ever a possibility. That's what the word means.
I know this from the other side of the canvas, too. The painting doesn't explain itself to its maker either. It withholds the name from me exactly as thoroughly as it withholds it from you. I stand in front of the thing I made and it declines to resolve, and I go on standing there, released by nothing.
I'm just the first person it refuses.
The sentence that started this belongs to a friend, quoted with thanks. He wrote it in an email, in passing, and I don't think he knew what he'd handed me.
Related: Abstraction Is Not a Destination — the same claim from the painting's side.
