Abstract art, which achieves the break with
	mimesis in a particularly salient and polemical
	way, has for that reason become an obvious
	whipping boy, and indeed is still - from various
	quarters - under attack ! 

	Abstraction has always occupied a contentious
	position in Australian art. The impossibility of
	incorporating it into a nationalistic discourse
	assures its continued position on the periphery.
	This is not an exclusively Australian position;
	with its hey-day in America well past,
	abstraction exists on the edges of art through-
	out the Western world. This outsider status,
	in recent times, has been compounded by the
	dominance of structuralist, and later, post-
	structuralist discourse. The refusal of abstract
	art to yield to deconstruction has left it a
	languishing unreconstructured leftover from high
	modernism. Occasional exhibitions prompt art
	writers to rethink the issues of abstraction,
	but few ask the fundamental question: why
	does it continue to exist? Often perceived as
	an anachronism, many writers seem to wish
	abstraction would quietly go away
 
	Most writing on abstraction takes either the
	offensive or defensive position. Abstraction is
	either cursed for the crisis it has caused to
	representation or defended as an authentic
	response to a crisis that already existed.2
	Reasoned, considered, unbiased accounts are
	rare. No other mode of art has had to defend
	its position so persistently and continually.
	The central problem, from the inception of
	abstraction to the current day, revolves around
	the issue of meaning. What does, or can,
	abstraction mean? How does the viewer gain
	access to that meaning? Is abstraction a
	'language'? The complaint, not just from the
	lay person, but by theorists such as Levi-Strauss
	is that the work is without meaning; that the
	meaning exists in the exclusive, private,
	impenetrable realm of the artist's mind or
	that meaning is too contingent upon a knowl-
	edge of the artist's intentions and personal
	visual language.The~experience of looking at
	an abstract painting, with its apparent refusal
	or inability to impart meaning, can provoke
	frustration, confusion, discomfort and even
	anger in the viewer, and the theorist. How is
	one to penetnte that hermetic code (if indeed,
	such a code exists
 
	One artist in this exhibition, Heidi Wood,
	presents a post-modern pastiche of abstraction.
	Her work is reflexive, representing a critical
	break in the history of non-representational
	painting. The remaining artists continue to
	work within a European tradition. Looking back,
	through an awareness of contemporary theory,
	it is the art of the pioneer abstractionists,
	rather than that of later American `hegemonic'
	abstraction, that informs their current practice.
	The theosophical influences of Kandinsky and
	Mondrian; Malevich's idea of a sublime
	geometry; and the Constructivists' and Neo-
	Plasticists' beliefs in the possibility of a meta-
	language have not been discarded by these
	artists, though their understanding is both
	tempered and enhanced by their critical awarenes.1
	of their predecessors' strengths and failings

	Constantly testing and re-evaluating the
	boundaries of their self-imposed limitations -
	a restricted repertoire of colour and form -
	these artists confront complex aesthetic and
	conceptual problems. Like the esoteric mathe-
	matician working within the realm of complete
	abstraction, theirs is a demanding and isolating
	occupation. Indeed, some of these artists share
	much territory with the mathematician; in their
	search for pure form and sublime geometry they
	also create something which may have no
	meaning beyond itself. So where does this
	leave the theorist, and the viewer?

	Theoretical discourses of this century have
	privileged language and the communication of
	meaning through language. Abstraction,
	despite its aspirations to create a meta-language,
	as yet, has not fulfilled this goal. Is this failing
	sufficient to declare abstraction invalid? Surely
	not. Does the inability of a theory to explain a
	phenomenon negate the phenomenon? A recent writer
	suggested that painters need to constantly reassess
	their practice in the light of (but not as defensive
	reaction to) theory and cultural conditions.
	3 I would have thought theorists and art writers
	(who may be one and the same) need to reassess theory
	constantly in the light of actual practice.Art does not
	illustrate theory: theory attempts to illuminate
	and explain art.

	As to the problematic issue of meaning, I again refer
	to a recent commentator who asked whether `much abstract
	painting might be about avoiding "meaning", in the
	academic sense. The abstnct art object remains resiliently
	silent. It supplies no narrative, anecdotal or symbolic
	clues to its meaning. It exists purely, but not simply,
	as an art object. It is, I would suggest, in many ways
	a respite from meaning. The abstract art object offers
	a place free of the mundane and banal, it aspires to
	the sublime and offers a space of aesthetic appreciation,
	retinal stimulation, conceptual meditation: it can offer
	more but at best never offers less. It can be experienced
	but perhaps not understood or explained: and this perhaps
	is the key. Could it be that rather than abstraction
	failing because of its apparent absence of
	language, it is language that fails to deal with
	abstraction?

	To defend abstract art is... not to defrnd a genre
	or a movement. It is to accept responsibility frr
	scrutinising the relationship of art to knowledge in
	the modern world 5


	1.	Stephen Bonn, `Abstract art - a language?', Towards
		a New Art, (exhibition catalogue),
		Tote Gallery, London, 1980, p. 145.
	2.	Bonn argues that abstraction was a response to a crisis in
		representation that already existed. Ibid, p. 145.
	3.	Blair Fnencfr `Staying alert to change'Art Monthly, no. 9 1,
		July 1996, p.30
	4.	Sebasflon Smee `A headlong dive into cultural theory'
		a response to Blair French's "Staying alert to change')
		Art Monthly, no. 92, August 1996, p. 22.
	5.	Bonn, op.cit., p. 145.


	Julie Roberts is a writer
	currently living in Melbourne