Steven Schroeder | lyrical abstraction
What I seek in my work (both poetry and painting, both process and product) is “lyrical abstraction”—“lyrical” primarily as a matter of time, “abstraction” primarily as a matter of space. As a matter of time, not one thing after another but every thing all at once. As a matter of space, the whole in every part, every other wholly other—as simple as possible, as complex as necessary, always a play of possibility. In poetry an eye for silence, in painting an ear for emptiness, in both a work of the hands.
“Lyrical” calls music to mind. More to the point, I believe, world calls mind to body in music. What we call “mind” is a lyrical structure that emerges as our bodies engage the world. This is a process of abstraction, creating a particular (simple) interface with which to engage particulars that, without the interface, would entangle us. We organize the particulars of the world (including our selves) in narrative (in language), but we encounter them first the way we encounter music: as Adorno suggested, we do not really hear the first note of a composition until we hear the last. We hear it as a whole, not a collection of parts; and that is also how we engage the world.
I don’t believe the work of art is a matter of “inner” or “outer,” impression or expression, or an object to circulate between the artist and the world. Nor do I believe it is a matter of representation. I believe it is a matter of abstraction akin to the emergence of “mind.” I believe it takes place—it is embodied—between bodies in the world, between you and me, one well-ordered collision (to borrow a term from Helen Frankenthaler) among others. Of course, whether a collision is well-ordered (or ordered at all) depends on all the “others” among whom it is an other, and that means the work is always a collaboration that (if it works) invites more than it contains.
In painting, my abstraction begins with color—almost always three “primary” pigments (a blue, a red, and a yellow) plus titanium white to desaturate and highlight. Occasionally, I add ink or graphite for depth or shadow where my intention is to create the illusion of an object. I almost always emphasize fields of color over line, counting on their overlaps, intersections, and inexplicable collisions to allow my eyes and others to find edges where there are none. In poetry, I most often have Paul Klee’s “taking a line for a walk” in mind—not filling silence with sound so much as seeking silence wherever I encounter a wall of sound. I believe language and music are both matters of silence and that (with Laozi in mind) nothing, more than anything, makes vision work.
