Abstraction, Banality, Huxley, the Personal Self

I find it almost astonishing how banal and uninteresting the work of most exalted figures of abstract art is, particularly American figures within the parameters of Abstract Expressionism, but very much abstraction as a whole, including people like Mondrian, Kandinsky, etc. This was dealt with in an off the cuff piece here: https://wwwinabstentia-andrewk.blogspot.com/2022/11/rothko.html.

Regarding all this though, something that came to mind is a passage from Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, about his first experience of the psychedelic drug mescaline. In it, the principal effect he experiences is the transfiguration of the visual external world, where “the doors of perception are cleansed”, and the infinite or divine is revealed in ever more miraculous depths. At some stage Huxley closes his eyes, also expecting the transfiguration of this internal world into the mystical realm, but instead he was very sorely disappointed as what changes there were were not particularly beautiful or interesting. Huxley’s view of things was essentially that with the external world, or world of nature, he was in a sense independent of what he was seeing, he was being granted entrance, in some much deeper sense than normal, into the glory of God. However when he closed his eyes, he was forced to see that he was now back in his own untransfigured personal self, and its mediocrity. He experienced it as a painful but helpfully humbling experience! This isn’t to say the inner world can’t be also transformed, but generally the ordinary personal self and its psychological dimensions is a far less interesting phenomenon than the realm of nature. Were nature the outpouring of the human personal self it would be a very banal phenomenon!

With abstract art, the artist separates themselves from the natural world, and is left with their personal world and its outpourings. There may be elevated notions of the spiritual floating around at the start of the movement, as there was with artists like Kandinsky, but the reality very quickly asserts itself that the personal self is left with little but itself, and cut off from its greatest resource, the external world, it descends into repetitive sterility. But of course there is the vanity connected need to believe in and exalt both the personal self and the surrounding culture, and so vast sums of money may be paid for banal works of abstract expressionism, supposing to prove to all participants involved their mutual exaltation. This was touched on in the earlier linked piece.