In The Comics, we use Space as a Time element, too. There is no eternity, only the eternal present experience of reading, that is to say, moving through space, motivation, pure vitality.
Is that abstraction, or is it dreadfully concrete?
Abstraction and Empathy is a dense, heavy read, one that requires rereading and clarification. Not your typical summer reading.
In the section “Naturalism and Style” (page 44), Worringer states:“The primal artistic impulse has nothing to do with the rendering of nature. It seeks after pure abstraction as the only possibility of repose within the confusion and obscurity of the world-picture, and creates out of itself, with instinctive necessity, geometric abstraction. It is the consummate expression, and the only expression of which man can conceive, of emancipation from all the contingency and temporality of the world-picture.” Wow, this is quite a statement. If I understand the above passage correctly, art created since 1900 is steeped in rendering nature. Perhaps I am missing something.
I just finished it. I wouldn't want to try to characterize art since 1900 in a unitary way, and Worringer wasn't attempting to describe the art of his own time (even though his tract became an important reference for the Blaue Reiter.) But if I understand him, the rendering of nature is a merely technical concern of art expressed in different ways as it oscillates between two tendencies of human temperament, a transcendent one that favors abstraction and an embodied one that favors naturalism. What that says about art made since 1906 is an interesting and entirely open question.
In The Comics, we use Space as a Time element, too. There is no eternity, only the eternal present experience of reading, that is to say, moving through space, motivation, pure vitality.
Is that abstraction, or is it dreadfully concrete?
Abstraction and Empathy is a dense, heavy read, one that requires rereading and clarification. Not your typical summer reading.
In the section “Naturalism and Style” (page 44), Worringer states:“The primal artistic impulse has nothing to do with the rendering of nature. It seeks after pure abstraction as the only possibility of repose within the confusion and obscurity of the world-picture, and creates out of itself, with instinctive necessity, geometric abstraction. It is the consummate expression, and the only expression of which man can conceive, of emancipation from all the contingency and temporality of the world-picture.” Wow, this is quite a statement. If I understand the above passage correctly, art created since 1900 is steeped in rendering nature. Perhaps I am missing something.
I just finished it. I wouldn't want to try to characterize art since 1900 in a unitary way, and Worringer wasn't attempting to describe the art of his own time (even though his tract became an important reference for the Blaue Reiter.) But if I understand him, the rendering of nature is a merely technical concern of art expressed in different ways as it oscillates between two tendencies of human temperament, a transcendent one that favors abstraction and an embodied one that favors naturalism. What that says about art made since 1906 is an interesting and entirely open question.