The Abstraction Crisis

Many of the images I have created lately have been heavily symmetrical, so this time I decided to make something balanced asymmetrically.  Since my original “Sporange” comic panel was about the “missing symmetricator,” I thought I would follow up on that theme with another comic.  I also was inspired by the stone tiles behind my stove which look to me like an abstract painting…a mix between the painterly abstraction of Jackson Pollock and the hard edge images of Piet Mondrian.  Mondrian in particular was obsessed with creating a perfect frontal and asymmetrical balance within his images, so that seemed a great fit.  However, while I like abstract art well enough, I have never made an image which falls into the category of total abstraction. Therefore, I decided I would make the image, but immerse it within a narrative context. Naturally, since I previously established that Sporange is my super hero identity, this image would be in my secret identity as a mild mannered artist experiencing a crisis of conscience about abstract art.
 
The balance was fun to play with as there are figural and text elements both of which strongly attract attention. Then there are the images in the gallery themselves and how they fit in. Color balance was important but also repeating squares around the picture plane to relate everything back to the Mondrian-style image.  However, my favorite touch was warping the pepper and making it red so it would look like the big “M” in “meanwhile,” thus creating a counterpoint on the other side of the comic panel. 
 
Formal elements aside, this image once again references Roy Lichtenstein, who was interested in comics as pop imagery. However, he was also interested in their technical components which is why he painstakingly enlarged them printer-dot by printer-dot in his paintings. This is not unlike the concern I think Chuck Close had in some of his work to reproduce the way layers of film make images but with layers of paint. However, I am more interested in the relationship to Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills”. Sherman gave us one still from a movie that did not exist. However, because entertainment media are so ubiquitous, repetitive, and predictable we can make up the rest of the story in our heads. I think Lichtenstein’s images have the same affect; therefore I am also trying to take advantage of this phenomena. Finally, I would like to give a nod to Chris Crans.  Years ago he made an image depicting a museum/gallery setting titled,  “One Mao Away From a Man With a Tea Cosy On His Head” which was hilarious. Ever since I have been looking for a reason to make humorous image in a similar setting.

Finally, there is a little timeline of art history on display here.  On the far left we have a realistic image refencing the time when art’s main purpose was to depict the word.  Then there is an abstract image which comes from the modern art period where the concern was making art for art’s sake.  Finally, there is a pepper on a platform which has been duct tapped to the wall. I felt duct tapping a banana (or any other fruit/vegetable) would be too obvious so I taped the pedestal instead…as a reference to post modernism where the concerns in art tend to be narrative, multiple, and often metacognitive in relation to the entire endeavour.