Abstract
Tired ride: iPhone
“That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.”
I’ve always appreciated imagery that takes some work.
The white line at the edge of a Spanish road had started to become my only reference. Through fatigue and dehydration, our hot day met with a purple twilight and I pulled the motorcycle to a stop, peeled sweat-soaked gloves from my hands, and searched for the iPhone buried deep in my jacket.
Squinting into this image I can still recall the fierce heat rising up from the road, fatigued eyes struggling to stay open, and a contemplation of the long remaining miles to the hotel. So, I put the phone away, kick the bike into gear and set off again.
This indistinct, visual abstraction of the journey has done its work on me again.
My colleague in the #CollectiveArtStudio, Fateme Banishoeib, says we must always pay attention to what has been abstracted; we must remember that abstraction is a double edged sword. On the one hand, as Brancusi says, it can move us towards an ‘essential’ reality but, more commonly, language and imagery separates us from the real experience of our lives, giving us an edited view of what lies underneath.
The ancient cave painters, making marks and likenesses on the rock, knew that an image of an ox was not the animal itself but a new power was embedded in the human gifts of representation, language and naming. As our language and written forms developed, so our concepts and knowledge became detached from the reality of our direct, sensuous experience. Today, I might understand the word ‘wolf’ but to encounter one in the wild, eye to eye, living, breathing, snarling, would be a completely different experience.
Conceptual language and abstraction easily becomes a flight away from day-to-day experience; ‘management speak’ safely anaesthetises us to reality. We might talk about the greater effectiveness, improved margins, higher profitability and general benefits of a change while ignoring the very concrete and real issues that directly and immediately affect the quality of our experience in our organisations.
‘Greater effectiveness’ for what? For who?
We all have theories and ideas about what is happening in our organisations and why.
But I wonder if we can see our theories and ideas as the abstractions that they are? And bring ourselves into a different, physical, sensual contact with the reality of our lives? Rather than romanticising our images of the road ahead, we might choose to acknowledge tired eyes and bodies, the heat and stress of the journey, and the deep challenges that lie before us.
And bringing life to images of the future that include the messy realities of experience will take some work.
Notes:
In ‘The Spell of the Sensuous,’ David Abram walks us through the development of the aleph-beth and how basic representations of an animistic world became symbols then letters; the transformation into the alphabet and the progressive abstraction of linguistic meaning from the life-experience.
I’ve been leafing (well, swiping on my iPad) through Sarah Bakewell’s ‘At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails.’ The story begins on the rue Montparnasse in 1933 as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Raymond Aron. It goes on to describe modern existentialism as ‘passionate encounters between people, minds and ideas’ as they focus their attention on the lived experience of the thinking, feeling, acting individual. Btw I love the last line in Sarah’s bio: “…I live mostly in London, and enjoy the usual glamorous writer’s life: putting a comma in, taking it out, putting it back in again, and eventually deleting the whole sentence.”
