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consider a question posed by artist Robert Irwin: How did art go from the hyper-realism of David to the total abstraction of Malevich in less than 100 years? Why was a gloriously perfected pictorial machine swapped for one that was unknown and unstable? The reasons for this are varied, complex, and buried in the psychic ruptures that took place in the 19th century. The question, however, contains part of the answer. As scientific knowledge increased, multiplicity replaced certainty, relativism grew, our experience of our world became more unknown and unstable, and the hierarchical way we pictured the world no longer seemed adequ ate or accurate. Single-point perspective and realism were originally devised to present a kind of double-positive: Things were rendered realistically in order to be known. This worked visual wonders for several hundred years. However, by the mid 19th century it became evident that there was a latent negative lurking in the double-positive: Things were bein g named but they weren't being known. A hole formed in the ozone of representation. Technique was only leading to more technique, perspectival space unraveled, and representation began to feel suppressive and deficient.

A visual analog for indefiniteness and instability had to be devised. A space for intuition was needed. Ab straction was one antidote. The wish was that abstraction would reverse the charge of the double-positive by presenting a double-negative: It would portray a world beyond naming. In this way a negative would be transformed into a positive. Although it led to astounding things, this premise has at least two glaring faults. First, understanding is an essentially useless measure for art. No one "understands" a Botticelli or any work of art. Second, there's ultimately no difference between abstraction and representation; both are simply depicting systems. Abstract space exists in representational art and vice versa.

From the start, many who touted abstraction made grandiose claims for it. Soon formalists took up residence in abstraction. Today tiresome, mostly male academics who can't get over Greenberg persist in draining the juice from nonobjective art. Yet abstraction is far sexier than these dogmatists imagine. Abstraction is a way of seeing that which cannot be seen. It was one of the more massive gambles in art history. Not even Picasso went fully abstract, believing that it implied the death of painting. Those who took the full leap into the nonobjective void were heroes.

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