“Abstraction and Empathy” is Wilhelm Worringer’s
doctoral dissertation. It has a great signification to contemporary art
history. Generally, art theories rarely appear before art practice. But this
dissertation becomes the guide of Expressionism and Abstract Expression rising
later. Worringer used three basic concepts to analyze aesthetics from
psychology’s point of view. Besides of “Empathy” and “Abstraction”, there is
another one called “absolute artistic volition” that highly influences art
history and art making. Worringer mentioned, “By ‘absolute artistic volition’
is to be understood that latent inner demand which exists per se, entirely
independent of the object and of the mode of creation and behaves as will to
form.” which affirms the independent and self-sufficient spiritual values of
art. He also criticized Semper’s materialistic viewpoint of genesis of the work
of art and established new standards for art valuation, arousing people’s
awareness about the form contend and spirituality instead of just materials and
techniques. In the dissertation, he proposed that art style comes from the
constraint of “the feeling about the
world”, which reveals the national basis of art and then embodies the relation
between art and ethos consequently bestow more historical and cultural values
to art.
Worringer thought that the value of a
work of art, what we call its beauty, lies in its power naturally stand in a
causal relation to the psychic needs which they satisfy. This psychic needs,
decided by “absolute artistic volition”,
can be categorized into “the urge to empathy” and “the urge to abstraction”.
The difference between these two urges is from the different object of aesthetic experience. One is to “find
its gratification in the beauty of the organic” and the other is to “find its
beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or in all abstract law
and necessity”. At the beginning of
Renaissance, the happiness arousing from organic forms is always an end instead
of a means. When time moves to High Renaissance, people begin to take realism
as the indispensable means instead of the ends. The relation between art and
real life gradually becomes inseparable which finally results in the birth of
“the urge of abstraction”. What we can see in that is the urge to get rid of
dependence on life and the pursuit for eternity and the consequence is embodied
in “the approximation of the representation to a plane” and “the suppression of
the representation of space and exclusive rendering of the single form.”
When we take a
look at Egyptian frescos, we can easily find that the characters always have a
posture with their heads turning aside and bodies turning forward. These
graphics give us an impression of geometric abstraction.
Such techniques used in these
paintings will avoid the optical depth that might be generated by specific body
parts, like nose, toes, etc. This pursuit of flatness may originate from an
inner sense of security.
However, there are limitations to
Worringer’s abstraction theory. In a wider sense of abstraction, “the urge of
abstraction” doesn’t follow what Worringer elaborated – the pursuit of
crystalline beauty (abstract beauty). Instead, it tries to go back to the
spirit of early Renaissance which takes
“happiness of organic forms” as the highest goal. But this time, it no
longer uses figures and concrete images but organic lines, colors or stroke
itself.
In a conclusion, I think that abstraction always
bonds with empathy, but which one is in the dominant position may vary. Just
like every painting is composed with basic abstract elements such as points and
lines, and is empathized by the artist himself more or less whether it is a
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