Reflection Between Abstraction and Figuration: Towards an Abstracted Heterotopia

In its purest non-objective sense abstract art suppresses the representation of any kind of recognizable reality or interpretable meaning, removing the viewer from all everyday associations. Animation, employing the aesthetics of abstraction in this sense, can exploit ambivalence and ambiguity in the construction of more open-ended narratives that engage the viewer in a different way. This freedom opens up a privileged reflective position from which to encounter extraordinary perceptions and unusual experiences and comment back on reality. Abstract shapes and textures can also be imbued with meaning through movement, repetition, metamorphosis, and juxtaposition, or through their combination with sound or figurative elements. All these aspects can work together to create alternative spaces, yet provide embedded pointers in the reading of the work. In an environment oversaturated with the same media images, representing things in a more abstract sense, while giving hints or meaning, which feed the viewer’s imagination, may be more engaging for some people by offering up an alternative view. Michel Foucault’s (1984) concept of heterotopia can be useful here. Foucault sees heterotopias as “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” In the examination of moving image work through the negotiation of an abstract mode and figurative representation, we would like to propose the term ‘abstracted heterotopia,’ spaces of alternate ordering, which open up this kind of counter-hegemonic engagement, uncoupling viewers to think differently about the social world around them.