Abstraction has developed its own myths, realities, supporters and detractors since its genesis a century or more ago. The discussion on what abstraction is—its temperament, character, variety and lucidity—continues to the present day and will no doubt ensue over the next decades or longer. American art critic and writer Clement Greenberg’s formulation of abstraction’s syntax hailed painting’s objecthood over and above subjectivity and symbolism with an overriding “emphasis on abstractness, on radical unlikeness to nature.” Greenberg’s ideology removed abstract modernism from the living world.
On the way to Telly Tu’u’s studio in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville, I think about how we now view abstraction: as more discursive, and capable of expressing
