Monochrome, Mortality and the Implications of Seeking Meaning: A Study on the Widespread Dislike for Abstract Modern Art
Venus Fung
On a recent trip to the Tate Modern, I stumbled across Yves Klein’s IKB 79, a featureless blue panel hung against a solitary backdrop of white plaster. Amongst the walls set ablaze with garish colour and design, the monochrome painting paled in comparison: a splotch of indecipherable, hollow blue lost in the brilliance of the rest. It was far from my favourite piece of the visit, but nonetheless memorable — not for its beauty, vulgarity or commentary on culture, but for the visceral stir of dread it had invoked within me upon first contact.
IKB 79, Yves Klein
The terror management theory — as proposed by Greenberg, Solomon and Pyszczynski (1997) — suggests that moral salience, or the “awareness of the inevitability of one’s own death” (Gordillo et al., 2017), drives almost all behaviour in sentient beings. It is also suggested that the formation of meaning in reality deters concerns about mortality. As a result, culture is often used as a combatant for existential terror as it instils order and meaning to the human existence “in ways that suggest the universe is stable, orderly and meaningful” (Greenberg et. al, 1997). The art within the bounds of culture, by proxy, witnesses its construction, often viewed by the masses as a medium of physicalised meaning, one beautiful and significant enough to distract one from staring into the chasm of mortality.
Yet, it is to be acknowledged that the traditional expectation of art is ethnocentric (the tendency to view one’s culture as superior to others of the same calibre) and based in the belief of representing realism through narrative. The standards of judgement for “good art” are discriminatory, strict and leave little room for the voice of marginalised artists. And so came the rise of abstract modern art, a movement deliberately overturning the notions of “objectively good art” and opting to experiment with novel ideas and techniques. In a world strongly governed by expectation, this transgression in the evolution of art invokes the expectancy violation theory (Burgoon, 2015), where the reaction of the audience to the change is dependent on the nature of the violation itself.
On whether the nature of the radical change in art is positive or otherwise, it can be said that abstract pieces such as IKB 79 hold no distinct meaning, especially to the untrained eye. There is no inherent value found within the piece upon first glance, which consequently frames the artwork as a negative violation of artistic expectation. While defiant and bold in nature, abstract art offers no promise of terror management and does not seek to soothe the individuals craving for meaning nor positively satisfy the change in expectation: it is simply too unconventional for the unwilling to understand.
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, Barnett Newman
The public’s distaste for abstract modern art is explainable, but it could also be argued that the evoking of negative reactions was the goal. Maybe, in tracing the haphazardly intentional brushstrokes of the artist, humanity may better understand itself, its freedom and its impermanence — not unlike how Yves Klein understood it in his famous IKB 97.
