Abstraction

In the complex landscape of contemporary monumental practices and strategies of memorialisation, the class of memorials specifically devoted to the Shoah offers an incomparable richness of cases that articulate in apparently inexhaustible ways the relationship between image and memory.

At first sight, a major difference splits this class into two principal subclasses: figurative and abstract. However, such a distinction is highly problematic from the point of view of the aesthetics of visual arts: although the first so-called abstract watercolour by Kandinsky was realised more than one hundred years ago, a unanimously agreed definition of ‘abstraction’ is still a desideratum, and the very term ‘abstract’ has been frequently disputed and challenged by cognate denominations such as ‘non-figurative’, ‘non-objective’, ‘non-representational’ (in the German-speaking literature, the term is often dismissed in favour of the adjective gegenstandslos, literally ‘with no object’). In an essay published in 1938, Kandinsky himself took up the formulation ‘concrete art’, coined eight years earlier by Theo van Doesburg to characterise precisely what in ordinary discourse is usually designated as ‘abstract’ art.

A series of controversial issues related to the core of visual representation affects this discussion of visual representation performed both by bi-dimensional and by three-dimensional images: resemblance, likeness, recognition and reference. These issues have engaged various disciplinary approaches: from formalism to semiotics, from phenomenology to analytic theories of depiction. I am well aware of the open and unsolved status of this scenario.