Once art had separated from the sacred, its central question became one of presence. If the image no longer invoked the world, could it still touch it? Could it make meaning felt rather than merely seen? From the first naturalistic murals to the avant-garde experiments of the twentieth century, art’s long history can be read as an oscillation between two impossible desires: to depict the world faithfully, and to recover the immediacy that depiction displaced.
The realist tradition emerged as one answer. By refining the techniques of perspective, light, and proportion, artists sought to bridge the representational divide — to make the world appear as if present. Yet this was presence by illusion, not participation. The viewer’s awe before a lifelike image was itself a symptom of distance; the very need for verisimilitude testified to the absence of what it depicted.
Realism thus achieved what the mythic image never required: a convincing fiction of immediacy. The bison of Altamira needed no illusion; its presence was enacted through ritual and pigment alike. The painted Christ or Vermeer interior, by contrast, demanded technical mastery precisely because the relation between sign and world had been redefined as mediation.
In time, this pursuit of verisimilitude reached its own paradox. The more perfectly the image simulated the real, the more the image itself became the object of fascination. The representation no longer disappeared into its referent; it became the referent. The world was increasingly encountered as picture, the visible as aesthetic construct.
It is from within this paradox that abstraction arose — not as a rejection of the real, but as a return to the conditions of reality as relation. When Kandinsky, Mondrian, or Klee broke from representation, they were not fleeing the world but seeking its underlying rhythms — the relational energies that had once made sacred participation possible.
Abstraction thus marks an attempt to restore what representation had lost: immediacy, intensity, the felt presence of form as force. In Hallidayan terms, one might say that abstraction re-metaphorises the visual: it allows form once again to stand for relation, rather than for referent. The token-value relation is reactivated, but now on aesthetic rather than mythic terms.
Realism and abstraction, then, are not opposites but complementary gestures in art’s recursive search for relational presence. Each seeks to rejoin what language and representation had separated: the seen and the felt, the sign and the act.
Photography — that emblem of the modern — radicalises this dialectic. By automating representation, it both perfects and undermines realism. The photograph’s fidelity exposes the illusion of all pictorial presence: to capture the real is to reveal that it was always already elsewhere. In doing so, photography reopens art to metaphor — forcing it to find meaning again not in resemblance but in relation.
From this crisis of representation emerges the modern and postmodern avant-garde: art that no longer seeks to mirror the world but to world — to create relational fields in which meaning is constituted through interaction, context, and perspective. The participatory returns, but in a new register: not ritual but reflexivity.
Thus, the long arc from prehistoric participation to modern abstraction can be read as a spiral rather than a line — a return to immediacy through mediation, to relation through differentiation. Each phase makes possible what the previous one displaced: a new understanding of how form and meaning, image and world, stand in dynamic alignment.
No comments:
Post a Comment