“Nonobjective” when referring to artwork has a particular meaning in the visual Arts. Objective means “expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.” It seems impossible, to this creative, for an artist to approach such a state- I don’t think I’d be able to make work free of personal feelings, nor would any audience be capable of perceiving without the same. And, while the objects that result from my practice could be called non-objective in the sense that they do not represent or point to objects outside of themselves, I also like the description nonobjective as a way to refer to activities that do not have a destination. Interestingly, the definition in the Merriam Webster link above has very abstract and open terms- an objective can simply be a “goal.” Maybe it is impossible to be either objective or not-objective?
The context for the thought exercise above is the recent resolution of an object. I finished up a piece (first image in the gallery below), which was the last of several iterations of a composition. The object- or perhaps the idea?*- first came to be as part of my work with Oblique Strategies. The first instance resulted from the card I drew on 1/6 which asked “what would your best friend tell you do;” I wrote in my journal that “Michael would tell me to do what feels right” (and what felt “right” was using my cube system to iterate a composition). The result seemed very much… right. Not a thing, not a place, not a surface, not really space; not of this moment or the past. A few days later on 1/14 I drew a card that granted me permission to retrace my steps; seeing the opportunity to revisit something I really wanted to anyway, I responded that “yes, I literally repeated a composition.” I also tried scaling it up on 2/12 because of my attraction to this collection of shapes. At the time I was asked “do we need more holes” (my response was “yes, use color and texture of paper” referring to the absence of media for some trapezoids).
*Sol Lewitt famously said that the idea is a machine that makes the work- work here can be an object. Which is why notions of “object” and “objective” have been on my mind- there is an idea here that is driving the making of the object. BTW the 2 albums featured below are both worth a listen if you haven’t, in particular The Oh Sees joint.
I also used Chat GPT to name this one. There are many reasons to engage AI; for myself I see this “collaboration” as a way to create a reflection of us back to ourselves (if one thinks of this iteration of AI as an amalgamation of all humans have thought and written about abstraction).
A few more images of new things going on in the studio below to round out this update; a couple of drawings that are a revisiting of compositions created during my daily drawing practice (which will impact future paintings), and some images of the largest painting I’ve made in a minute nearing completion.
Painting After Art is Dead 
One thought on “Nonobjective”