Abstraction breaks the habit of treating a picture as a record

The argument

The second argument for this position concerns a habit rather than a technique. For most of the life of painting, pictures were valued partly as records: they preserved faces, places, events and stories, and that function gave viewers a settled way of approaching any image, which was to ask what it was of. Proponents argue that the habit outlived its necessity, and that abstraction is the move which breaks it. The break matters, on this account, because the habit does not stay in the gallery. Treating images as records trains people to look at anything visual for the thing it refers to, to pass through the surface to a subject, and to treat the question of meaning as a question of identification. Abstract work refuses that operation. It offers a surface which cannot be looked through, and in doing so it returns attention to the act of attending. Proponents describe this as freeing the mind from a reflex, much as argument frees a belief held only by habit. What follows is a purpose stated in terms of the viewer rather than the artist. Abstraction exists to make a space in which looking is not answerable to recognition, and in which a person may discover that they can respond to something without first classifying it. Proponents conclude that whatever a particular abstract painting does, the practice as a whole has this emancipating function: it loosens the hold of representation over how people see, and leaves them freer in front of everything else they look at.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics answer that the argument diagnoses a habit and then credits abstraction with curing it, without showing that any cure occurs. People who look at abstract painting go on reading photographs, signs and screens exactly as before, which is what one would expect if recognition were a basic feature of vision rather than a trained reflex. They add that treating representation as a constraint to be escaped undervalues what depiction does, since a record of a face or an event is not a failure of attention but a distinct and demanding achievement. On that view abstraction is an addition to what painting can do, and describing it as emancipation claims a benefit for the viewer that remains unevidenced.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Asking what a picture is of is better explained as a feature of how vision works than as a habit instilled by the uses pictures were put to. [Rejecting P2] No reduction in ordinary referential looking has been shown to follow from looking at abstract art, so the reach of the habit beyond the gallery tells against the argument rather than for it. [Rejecting P3] A surface that cannot be looked through is routinely looked through anyway, as viewers find figures, horizons and spaces in abstract work. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that abstraction suspends recognition while the viewer is in front of it, not that it emancipates the mind.