Abstracting Photography
WALEAD BESHTY

Semantic vagaries abound in the discussion of aesthetics, a situation that is most likely the result of the disjunction between the visual and haptic realm through which art is received and the site of text and language where it is codified and historicized. It has become easy to mistake one for the other, to forget that art involves the circulation of tangible objects and that they form actual, rather than symbolic, social relations. This misrecognition threatens to displace the material world for pictorial abstraction thus ignoring the implicit power dynamics imbedded in the reception, production, and circulation of aesthetics. This text will first look to the shortcomings of the structuralist linguistic methodology and certain forms of ideology critique as they have been realized in art historical discourse and turn to the possibility of formulating aesthetic practice, particularly that of the photograph, in concrete rather than abstract terms.