Neorepresentationalism is a new and problematic (in the hermeneutic sense) school of expression and signification within the Postfuturist Project. Outwardly resembling the more conventional school of "abstract" art, neorepresentationalism is in fact something completely different. In abstract art, geometric forms and colors are used to convey a deeper, symbolic meaning; that is, the signifier/signified binary is privileged and perpetuated. Therefore, although neorepresentational art, like its abstract predecessor, uses as its textual material a collection of lines and shapes, it differs from abstract art in that it is not symbolic: a neorepresentationalist work is in fact a photorealistic depiction of a collection of geometric forms.

To understand the significance (again in the hermeneutic sense) of the Neorepresentationalist movement, it is enlightening to examine the career of Neorepresentationalist pioneer deHenry Ludendorff. Although initially (cons)trained within the traditional framework of abstraction, Ludendorff was soon to transgress, not the boundaries of his context, so much as the very textuality consisting therein. This astonishing discovery, that liberation can proceed (hermeneutically speaking) from intergression as well as from transgression, was to critically inform Ludendorff's Neorepresentationalist reform and its ideal of the bedeutungsloskunstwerk. (For more on the notion of "informed reform" and its role in situatuational transgressivity, see Warner, 1983; Browder, 1996; and of course Spivak, 1975.)

At the risk of priviliging historicity, to properly contextualize Ludendorff's oeuvre we must first interrogate his "early" career. Representative of Ludendorff's early works (to use the hermeneutic term) is his 1987 text, Modernism and the Problem of Subjectivity. This text bears all the hallmarks of "high" abstraction: through its use of a semiotic depth-of-field which consumes not only the text itself but also a symbolic subtext, it aspires, with no small degree of success, to consume the viewer as well, indeed, to consume the consumer and thereby to deconstruct the very society which sanctions its consumption. But as accomplished (in the sense of hermeneutics) a symbolist as Ludendorff was, one cannot help but be left with the impression (or expression?) that there is an unquestioned kernel of subjectivity to his abstract works, which finally undermines their very underminings.

But then, in 1992, Ludendorff launched his career in a new direction. In this year he produced his seminal Circles and Ellipses of Various Size and Texture, a clear departure from the earlier Modernism text. Juxtaposing the two works contextually only underscores how far apart they are in their problematics. Whereas Modernism is semiotically loaded almost to the point of becoming a Lacanian "master narrative" that canonically induces the reader to become a sort of semantic flaneur, Circles takes a more (hermeneutically) distinctively postfuturist approach, literally "circling" the charming modernist predelections for "meaning" and "truth".

A striking characteristic of Ludendorff's texts is their exclusive use of binary chromaticity. When questioned on this matter in a 1997 interview, Ludendorff discoursed:

"For me, what is crucial is not the choice of palette per se, but rather the radical ambiguity which can arise therefrom. By opening the door to this radical ambiguity, we utterly preclude its possibility, and this ironically leads to the questioning of our received notions of literacy."

He then went on to deride those who seek "to entrench the visible spectrum and its linear hierarchy," and called for "a radical questioning of the binary/not-binary binary." One need merely reflect on the work of his fellow Neorepresentationalists, such as Håns van der Veeck's Shapes, Not Black and White, to understand exactly what Ludendorff meant.

But -- and one must here forgive the heavy use of hermeneutic terminology -- it is Ludendorff's own past works that are implicitly rebuked by the texts of his mature period. The bold statement of his 1998 "master"piece Wavy Lines is an interrogation not so much of prior art as with it (Greek meta), managing therefore to evoke no meta-phor whatsoever, and, in fact, no reaction whatsoever. Ludendorff has written of this aspect of his texts, that "the artist should strive not to affect the consumer, which would be an act of othering, but rather the text itself should be its effect."

Ludendorff's later texts thus are perfect realizations and instantiations of the Neorepresentationalist ideal of the bedeutungsloskunstwerk. Through their liberatory dialectic, the signifier and signified become a single object; which is to say, they cease to exist.