Abstract Art and Narrative Elimination

In the modern era and through abstraction, art turns to a path in which the beginning and end of an artwork get closer together than in any other era in an attempt to make the minimum space between the subject and the object, or the work and viewer so that the work is created while receiving the minimum influence from the external world and maximum closeness to the very essence of abstraction and artist’s mental and personal picture in mind. In order to omit as much as external influence as possible, the modern artist tries to omit verbal and narrative elements from his work which in the end forms the main basis of abstract creation. Therefore, it seems that in the period dominated by the linguistics and comparative literature, the path of visual representation tends to an anti-narrative creation in which the painting turns to silence and the abstract art in particular is inclined to a kind of visual language of forms trying to erect a wall between visual and verbal elements. The decision of abstract art in making a silent work and bringing the representation to an exclusive visual territory as well as the artist’s obsession with eliminating the verbal and literal elements from art, is itself a manifesto of this tendency in art. But, the main paradox here is that the modern artist, more than any other era, is affiliated to and dependent upon the modern ideologies as well as the literal and linguistic theories governing the period and this is contrary to the objective of narrative elimination and creation of a pure abstract art. In the present research, after analyzing the process of elimination of narrative elements and natural comparison from visual representation and the change in relation of representation and truth, the elimination will be visually explained in selected works of abstract painting art based on which one could claim that in an attempt to eliminate narration, the abstract art completely outcasts the very act of art creation and tries to make a minimum or no communication between the work and the viewer in favor of making a silent art which unfortunately resulted in abstract art becoming a mere bourgeois style. The abstract artist’s main goal is to create an independent “text” capable of justifying its existence on its own and free from any external influence other than those raised from the artist’s mental and personal experiences. On another side, the undeniable reliance upon the modern ideologies and the governing literal and linguistic theories is in complete contradiction with this claim. In the modern era, despite of the claim for creating pure abstract art, artists are more prone to the governing literary and linguistic theories which makes creation of a pure art almost impossible. The results of this research show that at the culmination of abstraction and narrative elimination, abstract art somehow exits the cycle of representation and turns to existence; an existence which cannot be included under any definition including the definition of representation itself.