Understanding abstract art – Part 13

Playing the Game

Kate Husar

Spring 2003

“It does thus seem that abstract art and its discourse is without some definite arbiter of cognitive significance which is even marginally within the realm of some defensible realism. The production and its justificatory support, that is to say, is not treatedcannot be treatedas open to possible refutation. It follows that abstract art and its means of delivery or justification are merely dogmatic, formal, and authoritarian ideology.”

– Charles Harrison

“‘Art’ is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers What we call art is a game”(Columbia np). If, however, art is a game, who primarily are the players: the artists or the viewers or both? Through his words, Mexican poet, essayist and 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Octavio Paz (b. 1914) raises a variety of interesting notions. Art is, surely, an inventionan invention derived from the workings of the creative mind as well as that of the philosophical, of the intellectual, as Paz so states. However, to denote art as a game is to imply that there also exists in art a challenge, a set of rules and an end. And if art is in fact a game, is it a game worth playing?

To look at art as a kind of challenge where those in contest are the artists versus the viewers (society) is to bring light to the contentions of art critic Charles Harrison. According to Harrison, the nature of abstract art as “pure” ideology results in it being closed to outside refutation, as there is no “definite arbiter” by which to translate the meaning of such work (if in fact one even exists) from artist to viewer. That is to say, while art may be a game, there is no referee mediating the opponents. There is no third party enforcing the rules, as the product of the artist is, in and of itself, the rule of the game. However, to take the contentions of Harrison at face value is to take abstract art in precisely the same manner. An “invention of aesthetics”, “an invention of philosophers” isit is truea product of the inventor, and thus being an ideology of its own, cannot be refuted. Yet, to stop there is to use this notion as a cowardly excuse by which to, in a manner of speaking, forfeit the game. For one must remember that if the artist claims to be fully trained in the game, so too can the viewer. Therefore, through an examination of the theory and practice of such abstract artists as