Concretization of Abstract Art by Liam Gillick

Abstraction, in its simplest terms, means the act of drawing out the essential qualities in a thing, a series of things, or a situation. Liam Gillick said in an interview: “I´m really interested in the gap between these two tracks: the critical subconscious abstract ideas behind modernism in relation to the trajectory of modernity. Is in this gap that I find the ideas” (Gillick, 2011). ‘The trajectory of modernity’ is the quality or condition of being or appearing to be modern, abandoning traditions of a culture for radical new ideas, with a particular relationship to time, and openness to the novelty of the future (Kompridis, 2006). Gillick said his other track is modernism, in particular the critical subconscious abstract ideas behind modernism. Modernism along with modern art is generally used to describe the succession of art from the Realism movement (in the 1850s) to the culmination in abstract art and its developments in the 1960s. Modernism refers a new alignment with the experience and values of modern industrial life in the twentieth century, reflecting the realities and hopes of modern societies (Tate, 2019).

The ‘Abstraccion possible/Abstract Possible: The Tamayo Take’ project was developed as part of an exhibition curated by Maria Lind at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico in 2011. In Liam Gillick’s essay ‘Abstract’ (2011), written for the project, he said: “By making the abstract concrete, art no longer retains any abstract quality, it merely announces a constant striving for a state of abstraction and in turn produces more abstraction to pursue”. “It is the concretization of the abstract into a series of failed forms that lures the artist into repeated attempts to 'create' the abstract - fully aware that this very act produces things that are the representation of impossibilities”. “The transformation of relationships into objects via a mature sensitivity to a process of concretization is tested and tracked when the most vivid current artists deploy what appears to be abstract but is in fact a conscious deployment of evasive markers”. Gillick’s essay dances between ideas of abstraction and concretization, trying to make the reader understand his thinking, whilst also being a meditation around the ideas of concrete and abstract objects. Gillick wakes up the contemporary artists oblivious to the differences between the concrete, concretization, abstract and abstraction.

Concrete art was coined by Theo van Doesburg in his 1930 ‘Manifesto of Concrete Art’. Van Doesburg said there was nothing more concrete or more real than a line, a color, or a plane (meaning a flat area of color) (Tate, 2019).

Why would anyone try to concretize abstract art? Concrete art represents a definite object, line or form, in comparing with abstract art, which doesn’t make clear what it is, but rather leaves it up to the observer to make some sense of it.

Gillick says that “the grander the failed representation of the abstract becomes the more striking the presence of failure”, which suggests the more we try to make sense of the abstract art, the more we try to label it or define it, if we can, then the abstract art in itself actually appears to be less of an abstract piece and rather more concrete than possibly originally intended. “There is nothing abstract about art that is the result of this destructive desire to create an abstraction”. “It is the process of attempting to reproduce the abstract that causes the truly abstract to retain its place just out of reach”. So, could Gallick be saying that if we take something that is supposedly abstract and recreate it, then it may seem to be more concrete? The concrete art is far easily recreated because it’s seen to be something rather definite. Abstract art will be most difficult to recreate if it truly is abstract, difficult to interpret, without specificity, and rather unknown. However, here Gillick is also distinguishing between something abstract and the process of abstraction. Abstraction should not be assumed the process that leads an artist towards creating abstract art.

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“Abstraction is seeing all the shapes in your vision as equally important”, said Hazel Stevens from UCA Student Services. The process of abstracting a leather football to the more general idea of a ball selects only the information on general ball attributes and behavior, excluding, but not eliminating, the other phenomenal and cognitive characteristics of that particular ball (Wikipedia, 2019). But Gallick treats the ‘process’ of abstraction as something different to ‘an abstraction’. He says: “The procedure of producing abstract art does not fill the world with lots of abstraction – despite appearances to the contrary – instead it populates the space of art with the excess of pointers that in turn direct attention towards previously unaccounted for abstractions”. “Abstraction in art is the contrary of the abstract in the same way that representation is the contrary of the real”. Opposite to abstract art is realistic art, which suggests that abstract will not show any sign of being a real thing or make sense. So, on this basis, we may end up with a piece of abstract art that needed the artist to go through a process of abstraction, possibly looking at the world and thinking deeply about it, then bringing to mind what the abstract art will eventually look like.

But going through a process of abstraction does not necessarily produce the purest abstract art. Rather abstract art is arbitrary and any other approach to producing abstract art, i.e. abstraction or concretization, moves the artist further away from producing anything truly abstract. 'Counter-Composition' by Theo van Doesburg (1925) is an example of concrete art, consisting of line, color and plane. Compared to concrete art, 'Untitled 292014A', by Liam Gillick (2014) is abstract art piece, rather more arbitrary but having form, leaving the viewer to decide and decode the image to being something specific or nothing at all.

The viewer may think the object is supposed to be concrete but also Gillick has concretized the object, giving it definitive form and thus making a concept real. It remains abstract in its current form but by looking at it the viewer my go through the process of concretizing it. The work moves away from the abstract as the viewer tries to interpret what it is that he is seeing. If Abstract art is non-objective, a painting or sculpture that does not depict a person, place, or thing in the natural world, then the picture, 'Untitled 292014A', fails to be abstract art because it actually looks like a building. On the other hand, who’s to say it isn’t a building?

It's worth noting that Maria Lind included work by Doug Ashford in her exhibition, which was related to formal abstraction. She said “his precisely small, geometric, abstract paintings, tempera on wood, absolutely exquisite, jewel-like paintings, that you just want to almost drown in when you start looking at them”. In many ways Ashford’s work has inspired Lind’s interest in formal abstraction, which then led Gillick to becoming involved in Lind’s project.

What Gillick seems to imply is that many artists embark on a journey of art not thinking about or contextualizing what they are really doing. Art often reveals itself instinctively, without a clear label, until someone decides that it is, after all, abstract art. If we really want to understand Gillick’s work then we can attempt to tap into his mind that sits somewhere between modernism and modernity.