Abstract or Abstracted?

Abstract or abstracted? I lean towards the latter. More movement in it. Abstract is inert, like most nouns. 

Something abstracted implies an action, a motion, a past. Motion is the subject. To call it an "abstract", as in an abstract painting, is to stop us from following the movement (as Greenberg would have it) and settle instead for its painting, to look at it on its own terms (as if it painted itself?)-- and in looking, this stilling.

What is this stilling, to insist on something still. Sit still! Remember how impossible that was, when we were children? How even holding our breath wasn't good enough? We were made to think we were not in our bodies yet, not in control of them as others saw us, controlled us, those who issued the commands -- Stop fidgeting! Imagine talking to a film that way? Walter Benjamin in the movie theatre, fixed on the screen; the truck speeding towards him, covering his eyes before it turns away at the last second (as Benjamin covered his eyes too soon, when he took his life in Portbou?).

So much early 20th century painting concerned itself with making paintings move. Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, sometimes a painting described in a suffixation of all three, each aligning to different nations, with Futurism further divided depending on whether you lived in Italy or Russia, to say nothing of its part in Fascism, which in those days was more a (political) movement than a (totalitarian) condition. (Has anyone ever self-identified as a totalitarian? Written "despot" or "slave" after "Occupation" when filling out a rental agreement? Neoliberalism allows us to engage in this condition, these behaviours, without saying so. Neoliberalism: Democracy's last hypocritical gasp.)

Vorticism. England's entrance into the abstraction racket. I feel its paintings -- the turning inward, the increase in pressure, the pain -- tightening to the point where to turn any more will only break that which generates the motion. I want to see a machine do that. So much work has been done these past years to keep machines from breaking down (planned obsolescence notwithstanding). Modern sculpture emerged with the rise of industrialization, its inevitable effect on the human body.

More and more I feel the word that best describes our current condition is torque, and I have spent a lot of time on Vorticism's pantings of late, notably those of Wyndham Lewis, the progenitor of Vorticism. "To every season turn, turn, turn," says the Book of Ecclesiastes, in a song made famous by the Byrds. But now even our seasonal passages show signs of departing the circle for the line, a lit fuse that ends in a combustable stick. Alfred Noble invented dynamite and felt so bad about it that he came up with an award for people who know better. I have seen pictures of its ceremonies. If ever there was an occasion to fidget.

Pictured above are paintings by Emily Carr, Paul Cézanne, Carlo Carrà and Wyndham Lewis.