A Brief Meditation on Abstraction
Shutterstock AI-generated image prompted by Dan Grossman
A Brief Meditation on Abstraction
On June 17, I went to the ribbon cutting for the opening of the new Fishers Art and Municipal Center, where I checked out the silkscreen prints Kurt Vonnegut Jr. made in collaboration with Joe Petro III. One of these prints was an abstract representation of an anus. Four lines arriving and departing from a central point. Four thick black calligraphic lines against a white background. This piece was politely titled “Sphincter” after the muscle that helps us keep it all in. Helps us keep it together. Robert Mapplethorpe used his sphincter, back in the 1970s, to grip a bullwhip snugly between his cheeks. He then photographed it for posterity. (Or should I say posteriority?) I can pretty much guarantee you’ll never see this particular Mapplethorpe photograph in the Fishers Art Center. The abstract anus is probably a better fit for Fishers considering the extreme right-leaning bent of some the city’s politicians. Abstraction has its detractors, like the late Tom Wolfe, who pooped on the likes of Jackson Pollock in his book The Painted Word. But it also has its passionate adherents like painter Salma Halaby, who talked of arriving “at a space of light and depth” in her work, at an artist’s talk at the Eskenazi Museum of Art in 2021. The Palestinian artist was set to have an exhibition at the Eskenazi, her first American retrospective. But that exhibit, titled Centers of Energy, was canceled out of “safety concerns,” per the university. But the university president said nothing about the real reason for her cancellation; her outspoken opposition to the Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza. When I went to the Eskenazi Museum recently, I found the featured exhibition space, the space where Centers of Energy would have taken place, empty and dark. A darkness to which she had arrived against her will. Seeing that space empty was like seeing an asshole instead of a mouth. A black hole instead of a star.
