Mimesis, Abstraction, and Value
Aesthetics in visual art has a history of navigating a continuum between mimesis and abstraction. Mimesis is the degree to which something faithfully replicates our empirical senses. The meaningfulness of representation is often thought to depend on its realism, its fidelity to what we perceive. Abstraction, by contrast, withdraws from depiction and engages with the structures that underlie experience itself. Its value lies in uncovering relations that exist apart from what is directly observed.
On one level, the general justification for preferring realism comes from its link to time. We tend to think that what takes longer to master must be worth more. This assumption binds value to labor and skill to duration, as though patience alone could yield meaning. But the belief that effort itself creates value is mistaken. A person might spend decades perfecting the act of balancing plates on their head, and though the feat may be impressive, it produces little of consequence. The same holds for art. Its worth does not arise from technical mastery alone. Skill can subsidize it, but we care for art because it reaches beyond virtuosity, often toward something abstract. Adding more plates does not bridge the value gap any more than greater mimesis makes art more profound.
However, the mass appeal of realism should not be mistaken for a lack of refined taste or significance. The lingering institutional snub towards representation in the 20th century was often ideological rather than comprehensive. Modernism hoped to create a new aesthetic language capable of expressing truths beyond depiction, which accounts for abstraction's initial rise. Postmodernism reinterpreted that endeavor as an act of subversion against meaning itself. Each stance cast mimesis as passé. Though realism never died out completely, contemporary trends remind us that what seemed old can always become new again.
Perhaps any revitalized appreciation can be explained by the fact that all representation is abstract on some level. A depiction of an object is not the same as the object itself. A painting of a chair is not literally a chair but a conjectural facsimile of its appearance given certain conditions. Socrates, and later Plato, saw such art as twice removed from truth, an imitation of the sensible world that already fell short of their ideal Forms. This ranking carried moral weight, since dwelling among appearances was to descend from a fixed foundation of the Good, thought to reside only in perfect abstraction. Yet if we set aside its epistemic flaw along with the moral prejudice, the structure itself can be read as an early recognition that representation is theory-laden. To depict is already to interpret, since every image encodes a theory of the world into a visible form. In this sense, the artist's facsimile participates in abstraction rather than escaping it. Because all art depends on this interplay between mind and material form, every representation is also abstract by necessity.
The inverse is true as well. There is no abstract art without representation in the broader sense of instantiation. Something still has to be made, a physical embodiment of an idea. Even a work concerned purely with aesthetics must take on external form. Without an output, no one can engage with the abstraction in question. Salvatore Garau’s “immaterial” sculpture The Invisible Buddha had to be written about to be understood. It even came with a certificate of authenticity and instructions for display. This shows that transferring ideas to others, even to elicit an invisible frame, requires an information medium. Abstract work does not escape this simply because of its name.
The consequential interplay between the physical and abstract has plenty of forebearers across disciplines. Focusing on a narrow part of history we see how photography, a medium high in mimesis, presented a crisis to painting in the late nineteenth century. The struggle towards perfect realism was conquered with the push of a button rather than exhaustive practice. Painting’s response was to show that imitation was never truly the highest aim. Abstract Expressionism, as seen in Pollock or Rothko, could be more emotive than a picture of a person showing actual emotion. In this case, painting became more like music. Yet a cacophonous song is no better than the ubiquitous uninteresting snapshot. Both are noise. Copying raw data is structure without content and pure abstraction is content without structure. Each side is meaning-less. We look for what is meaning-full.
When we say something is meaningful, we imply a way of framing the world that suggests insight. Insight doesn't simply skim across the surface; it attempts to iterate a coherent model of the reality that kicks back at us. That we make meaning and experience insight is not proof that we’ve grasped what is true, but life itself could not persist without this faculty. The tools to become aware of what is relevant are necessary for every organism in an informationally rich universe. There’s too much to sift through otherwise. The meaningfulness of art is rooted in its aesthetic form, which shapes how we translate phenomena. When art succeeds, we do not merely look at it; we see through it.
The greatest worth of art does not come from how much it resembles something else, how long it took to make, how fiercely it resists tradition, or how far it withdraws into ungrounded abstraction. Its value lies in the knowledge it creates, knowledge that arises through aesthetic experience and helps us grasp reality. It is a conjecture that brings inner and outer domains into harmony, communicating new orders of meaning. Through mimesis and abstraction, we engage the means by which aesthetic perception becomes insight. Art functions as a mental arrow that directs attention, a form that invites criticism and rewards scrutiny. When a difficult-to-vary creation withstands examination, it reveals content capable of expanding insight. In this sense, art, like science, becomes a mode of explanation. It gives understanding a visible face to behold. At its heart lies aesthetic understanding, causal knowledge felt through form, and with it, the possibility of greater autonomy.
Why mimesis and abstraction have become relevant to my work
The ideas explored above are not just theoretical concerns for me; they have become practical problems within my own process. As an artist who has mostly worked with photography and the nude subject, I have found that too much mimesis can become a distraction. A pose can inadvertently seem pornographic depending on how literally it is presented. This is not because certain kinds of information are inherently bad, but because excess detail can obscure intention. When too much is shown, the mind loses focus.
Photography captures an abundance of data in an instant, while painting begins with a kind of tabula rasa. Reducing information in a photograph or building it up from a blank canvas becomes a way of framing thought. The structure of an image should serve the focus of the idea. Nuance, impact, and clarity can be lost in any medium if the artist is not selective. Nakedness carries its own particular challenges. Without awareness of how perception works, the point of the work can easily slip away.
Over the years, I have been experimenting with degrees of abstraction. I try to maintain a photographic sensibility, though at times the images “break.” When that happens, they begin to resemble illustration or digital art more than photography. I do not yet know precisely what causes this shift, but that uncertainty has become part of the experiment.
