On Acute-Social Abstraction
by Max Lomak
Moscow, 2020

I speak from within the archetype of the Western world—a civilization shaped by its devotion to bread and spectacle, comfort and desire, stability and illusion. I inhabit a society that, in my view, manifests a pathology of global proportions. Yet to name this condition is already to begin undoing it. The moment for reckoning is now. If we continue to treat the state—not as a contingent construct, but as a natural, immutable given—we risk accelerating a social malaise whose consequences deepen with every second of collective unawareness.

The dangers ahead are not merely political but existential: irrational aggression, epistemic collapse, and the illusion that freedom without responsibility leads anywhere but to chaos. In the digital sphere, this tension plays out through the binary logic of “1” and “0”—not as mere code, but as a symbolic arena where ideals like kindness, sincerity, and honesty are endlessly simulated, yet rarely embodied.

This binary grants us speed and apparent openness—hallmarks of what we call democracy. Yet democracy, even in its ideal form, has always drawn lines: between those who shape discourse and those who receive it. Let me be clear: this is not a judgment of your intellect or spirit. Rather, it reflects a broader condition—our shared difficulty in engaging with realities that resist material form. As Adorno warned, the promise of order often masks deeper disorder. And as the old adage reminds us: every force generates its own excess.

At the heart of this inquiry lies an unresolved question: What comes first—the Word or the world? Was it the Big Bang, or was it language itself? The former shattered the myth of Permanence; the latter gave us the tools to protest it. In my view, revolution is not primarily an act of violence—though violence may trail in its wake—but an unceasing commitment to transformation. True revolution resides in the refusal to accept the present as final. And yet: violence must never be the aim. It is, at best, a tragic byproduct—never the compass.

Consider abstract art. In its purest form, it approaches music: a non-narrative experience that resonates directly with perception, bypassing the tyranny of story. But even here, a pathology emerges—the cult of “style,” the signature brushstroke, the artist’s so-called “handwriting.” This fixation breeds stagnation. When recognition hinges on a repeatable mark, creativity becomes performance rather than discovery. The deepest artistic truth lies not in personal idiom, but in the dissolution of genre, cliché, and brand—the very “stamps” we mistake for identity.

Every forward step is also a departure. And while abstract thought draws from a vast sensory reservoir, that reservoir is not infinite. Human emotion operates within a closed system, bounded by the limits of our environment and embodiment. To deny this is not enlightenment—it is what I would call positive Satanism: the belief that will alone can transcend material reality. Or, more mundanely, office Buddhism—a spirituality stripped of practice, reduced to aesthetic. Both are forms of ignorance.

Yet change is inevitable. Consciousness evolves. And within this evolution, acute-social abstraction emerges as a vital direction in contemporary art—building on the legacy of musical and painterly abstraction, but pushing beyond sensory or “olfactory” lyricism toward a deeper skepticism: a skepticism of literariness.

By this I mean the tendency to anchor art in explanatory text—poems, manifestos, theoretical scaffolding—presented as necessary for the viewer’s comprehension. This framework, often framed as “democratic,” paradoxically shifts value from the work itself to its interpretation. It assumes the audience cannot meet the work on its own terms, and thus demands the artist supply a manual. In doing so, it surrenders autonomy to the very forces that threaten it: the curator, the critic, the gallerist, and the market’s appetite for legibility.

Let it be said plainly: art that resembles Mickey Mouse—slick, branded, instantly digestible—is not merely kitsch; it is complicity. The true allies of the socially engaged abstract artist are not institutions of spectacle, but the intellectual minority, the discerning collector, the conservator who understands that silence can speak louder than explanation.

This practice may take several forms:

• Acute-social abstraction (critical, interventionist)
• Moderate-social abstraction (observational, reflective)
• Fantasy abstraction (speculative, poetic)

Its subject is not the visible world, but the invisible architectures that govern it: religion, economy, statehood, law, morality—those immaterial yet omnipresent systems we mistake for reality. Viewed critically, they reveal themselves not as truths, but as technologies of social cohesion and control.

And yet, this is not a call to war. It is a call to clarity. Acute-social abstraction does not seek conflict; it seeks awakening. We do not dream of a distant utopia. We are committed to the utopia of the present—fragile, contested, and already unfolding. From it, a more honest future may yet emerge.