There’s something odd about the exhibition “In and of Itself — Abstraction in the Age of Images” at the RHA that I can’t quite shake. It could be a survey of twentieth-century abstraction, but here we are in 2022 with more of the same, which sounds harsh, but I’ll explain what I mean. Although intergenerational, artists ranging in age from their 20s to 70s, the paintings sit in that pocket of avant garde space that is no more. “Make it new” the modernists said, until postmodernism said “make it new by recycling the old as new”. The end of the manifesto. It's the shift in time that torments me as a viewer. It brings up the problem of postmodernism itself, as a moment that regurgitates the past in the present with kitsch results. The same way Freud’s uncanny is the dusty and repressed past resurfacing in the present. And yet this exhibition is more kitsch than uncanny. Painted abstraction in its heyday, from Malevich to Mondrian, could be described as the avant garde’s last stand before the leggy and promiscuous advent of postmodernism from the 1980s onwards. Abstraction, in its most image and content repressed states, was indeed revolutionary (in an artworld sense), the same way Impressionism was before Monet’s Waterlilies became the most popular kitsch postcard gift at museums. The days in which form was one thing and content was another are long gone. Žižek tells us that Freud came up with a clever but paradoxical idea about form and content in relation to the dream. He said that the parts that the dreamer cannot fully recollect are part of the form of the dream. This is a very agreeable perspective for the visual artists, where form becomes content and vice versa. Weirdly, this exhibition does not read as an intergenerational exhibition in terms of form, nor as an exhibition that is timeless, but rather one leaden down with time with no content to save it from itself. That said, an object-oriented ontologist might say the thing in itself doesn’t need a subject to save it. It just is🏴