Confused by Abstract Art? Embrace the Uncertainty
Julie Mehretu, immigration, and our mediated reality
Complicated Abstract Times
This week I’m sharing this 9 minute video featuring the American abstract artist Julie Mehretu. I’m a really big fan of her work, and I’ve featured her in a previous post about how art is always political.
The way she talks about abstract art is really interesting. I think a lot of people find abstraction difficult because it doesn’t have a clear and obvious subject matter, and it’s uncomfortable for some to not know what to think. That feeling of discomfort is definitely something I find when I’m teaching my undergraduate art history students about the emergence of abstract art in the 20th century: most of them struggle with it because they are looking for definite signs they can recognise from their visual lexicon to help them find the meaning.
I tell them to embrace the uncertainty of not knowing, and to think about abstract art as a visual metaphor for what one might call reality. The meaning in Mehretu’s work is difficult to pin down, it’s hazy. But uncertainty is precisely what her work is about. Mehretu argues that it’s really hard to know what our reality is now when so much of how we understand the world is mediated. Through her art she explores…
