presence and abstraction

In Minima Moralia para 145, Adorno writes that, in both art and kitsch, 'freedom from nature is celebrated, but remains mythically entrapped' and adds 'the Eroica, like great philosophy, represents the idea as a total process, yet as if it were directly, sensuously present. In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at its shameless revelling in the joy of imitation, now placed under taboo, while the power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation'. If, as I propose, the kind of abstraction we meet in abstract art is truth to the subject, the self that is imagined is, in Kandinsky for example, or Mondrian, the site of ideas in process, imagined as free of nature, but actually trapped in it, which is how they engage their viewers so intensely, but their freedom from imitation is – in Adorno's account here – never carried out because they, like the nature they disdain, are present. It remains then to see whether the nature they try to rise above is indeed present or is rather a negation produced by the very effort to overcome it. If nature fails to exist, certainly as a whole, and arguably even as part (for example the contrast observable between city and ocean looking out over the bay during lockdown in St Kilda, where the bay is metonymic of Ocean, its freedom from restraint, its curative properties, its self-curing in the absence of trade, its alterity). It is the presence of the artwork (and equally of the kitsch object) both to itself and as object that appears, that distinguishes it from whatever it imitates. This was the discovery of the Impressionists and their impact on early cinema, documented in The Cinema Effect, which however leaves the film open to the criticism's that Bonitzer launches: that it implies not only the visible but the physical off-frame and the fictional/imaginary off-screen. The moment of abstraction occurs in moving image media between frames, at the frame edge, behind and in front of the screen, and in intermittence. Only to a limited degree is it feasible in relation to what is on the screen, photographed or animated. Something else occurs in the relation to sound. Likewise something occurs in lensing, where multi-part compound lenses make up for flaws, as they appear, especially at the edges of the image. Spherical aberration, with its iridescent fringing, is evidence of the emergence of an Other subjectivity in the abstract subject, as it fails to present itself – and is the medium of its failure, as it is also the means of its success.