Rose Ferronato, Graduate student
Department of French, Italian and Spanish
Have you ever walked past an abstract painting in a museum and wondered who did that? Puzzled at how the National Gallery of Canada could acquire abstract art, spending substantial amounts of money on a canvas painted entirely blue? Convinced that your three-year-old niece could do the same thing?
I was guilty on all three counts. Abstract art was my least favourite kind of art. After all, it doesn't look like anything. With no realistic point of reference, what could abstract art possibly convey?
I quickly realized that abstract art functions on a conceptual, not a representational level. When I looked for objects like an empty cave, a speeding train, or the bright sun, I didn't find them on the abstract canvas, but my chances were much greater when looking for concepts such as darkness, bleakness, speed, or energy. During the earlier part of this century when abstract art began, some artists reduced objects to their minimal parts (basic geometric shapes such as the triangle, square, circle, or cone) so the canvas became an expression of the relationship of these parts to one other.
As a graduate student of French literature, I realized that I could gain further insight into early abstract art by adapting something familiar to me - literary theory - to the canvas. At first glance, this approach might sound strange, but it is useful in examining the structure of artistic works in both disciplines. Ideas about how the different elements of a novel (character, plot, setting, narrator) are put together can also be extended to how the various elements in painting (colour, depth of field, perspective) are put together. I was eager to try this method on some of the earliest abstract canvases, those of the Czech painter Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957), an Orphic Cubist painter. His work particularly appealed to me for his use of brilliant colours and flowing shapes. While I was relying on this structural comparison in order to understand what was happening on the canvas, I also became curious about how the spectator unravels abstract structures, whether in print or painted form.
An eclectic man, Kupka's interests ranged from Einstein's special theory of relativity and Etienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography to the fourth dimension and theosophy, which became the underpinnings of his paintings. He was interested in portraying time through movement on the canvas, and many of his paintings are studies of this idea. Similar to Kandinsky and Mondrian, Kupka's contemporaries, the artist also believed that by entering into the fourth dimension, the viewer could access a higher reality beyond visual perception. He indicated these thoughts in his treatise La Création dans les arts plastiques (1923).
Since motion was so important to his work, I wondered if his ideas could be taken one step further: what would his canvases look like if they could move? Could another dimension be attained? What were the effects on the viewer? Could modern technology aid in the depiction of motion on an essentially two-dimensional surface? Janice Bakal at Com/Media assured me that technology could help. With Judith MacCrae's expertise using Macromedia Director and funding from The University of Calgary Multimedia Resources Allocation Committee (UCMRAC), copies of two of Kupka's paintings were scanned into the computer, made to move, and recorded on CD-ROM. Suddenly, Animated Lines (1920-21) was liberated, and the blue and silver lines of The Blue (1913-24) were released and came crashing towards me. What could only exist in Kupka's mind's eye during the beginning of this century is now available for anyone to see on the computer screen as we approach the close of this century.
While I didn't feel like I had entered into another reality when viewing these moving paintings, this demonstration of movement in Kupka's paintings is important as it helps to ascertain spectatorship involvement in twentieth century art, which is part of my thesis research. No longer was the viewer drawn into the painting's space as with the traditional one-point perspective, which dictated painterly spatial representation for centuries; in Kupka's paintings, the objects depicted were actually moving away from the background towards the viewer. The extension of a modern art object into the viewer's space commands the participation of the viewer, just as the modernist novel commands participation from the reader. The major implication of the art object into the viewer's space indicates the viewer's active participation in understanding what is portrayed on the canvas.
These results were presented during a talk I gave last March, entitled Navigating the Abstract Text: Narratology and the Paintings of Frantisek Kupka. The reaction from the audience was as varied as the number of people attending, which demonstrates one of the positive points about abstract art: its interpretation is extremely individual. Each person reacts differently to the same painting, since each person brings unique experiences and personal tastes to understanding. There are no right or wrong answers in appreciating abstract art. If you free yourself from the expectation that abstract art is supposed to look like something, you have the most freedom of any observer throughout the history of art to interpret it any way you wish.
