5. Reference in Taylor's Work

BEYOND DUALISMS: THE QUESTION OF REFERENCE

The divisive hierarchies and the arbitrary assumptions about the concepts of Figuration and Abstraction, need to be re-examined through the 'problématique' of reference, as theorised by semiotics. 
This can significantly expands the theoretical and epistemological basis upon which the works can be seen and discussed, and their value appraised.
This shift from ideological affirmation to semiological analysis has the advantage of bringing us closer to the works and to the processes associated with their making, and to their respective ways of working as representations.

Although in St Ives and in London artistic circles, the distinction between 'FIGURATIVE' and 'ABSTRACT' was used to distinguish between traditional and progressive artistic practices, many exponents of 'ABSTRACTION' did not claim for their work total autonomy from nature and from the real world. To make life easier for themselves, critics played down this aspect.

Barbara Hepworth, for instance, wrote in 1934: 'In the contemplation of Nature we are perpetually rewarded, our sense of mystery and our imagination is kept alive, and rightly understood, it gives us the power to project into a plastic medium some universal or abstract vision of beauty' (quoted from Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography, p. 30).

In his essay Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, Mondrian pointed out that the distinction between 'figurative' and 'non figurative' art was 'approximate' and 'relative'; pointing out that 'every form, even every line, represents a figure, no form is absolutely neutral' (' Circle, p. 42).
Art Historians and critics have played down this aspect to emphasize and promote the problematic notion of non-referentiality as the basis (or the nec plus ultra) of Abstract Art, instead of examining how Figurative and Abstract Art implemented diverse forms of reference to the world.

In 1955, (date of the first Documenta), in response to claims made by a group of American artists and critics that the most advanced art was 'non-referential', Elaine deKooning remarked:''The exclusion or inclusion of nature is, however, not a matter of the individual artist's choice. For art, nature is unavoidable'.

For Mondrian 'abstract art' was not an art severed from nature, but an art that did not represent 'relations with the natural aspect of things' (p. 49).

The key term, here, is 'aspect'; i.e. 'appearance'. Mondrian did not imply that abstract art was cut off from reality but only from its external aspects. 

In a platonic spirit Mondrian aspired to deal with essences and universals; by making visible those invisible, constitutive elements of the real at a higher level.

Thus, drawing from the neo-Platonic philosophical tradition and from Theosophy, Mondrian claimed for neo-Plasticism the status of a superior form of Realism.

After positing that a higher reality exists, hidden beneath a veil of appearances, the first exponents of 'abstraction' (Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Kupka, etc.) developped ways of giving form to and manifesting this 'higher reality'.

A remark by Jackson Pollocks confirms that his 'abstract' works was not exempt from concerns about the real world: 

'It seems to me, writes Pollock, that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own techniques'.
Only simplistic assumptions, based on a facile dualism, could justify the epistemologically naive notion that art could ever be self-referential and, thus, make every other art forms obsolete.

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'The contemplation of nature…gives us the power to project into a plastic medium some universal or abstract vision of beauty'

Barbara Hepworth (Unit One, 1934)

'As soon as I sit down to draw the land or the sea in front of me, I begin to draw ideas and forms for sculptures'.

B. Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography, 1978 (p.23)

'… the forms that one sees in nature, in people, in trees, are reproduced or get mixed up with one's sculpture because they are part of living.'

'I see no reason why realistic art and purely abstract art can't exist in the world side by side at the same time, even in one artist at the same time. One isn't right and other wrong'.

Henry Moore (1960)

'The exclusion or inclusion of nature is, however, not a matter of the individual artist's choice. For art, nature is unavoidable'.
Elaine de Kooning (1955)

' … I had been born in an Earthly Paradise from which we have all been expelled. Not so long ago, a sculptor could still be content with a search for full, sensual and vigorous forms. But in the past fifteen years, nearly all our new sculpture has tended to create forms that are disintegrating'

Marino Marini (1958).