Day Six: Thinking about abstraction

Part of this trip is about getting back into motorcycling. Part involves seeing West Coast Friends. And part is a busman’s holiday: I’m attending the Medieval Association of the Pacific (MAP) annual conference at Pepperdine University, and then heading up to the Coursera Future of Higher Education Summit.

This morning I drove down to Manhattan Beach to have breakfast with the organizer and host of the MAP conference, Prof. Jennifer Smith. Jennifer invited me to breakfast at The Kettle just before the conference begins, and I jumped at the chance.  

I don’t know how you made time , Jennifer.  Thank you.

Jennifer and I both write on fifteenth-century English literature and are both have been drawn into academic administration. Jennifer has just stepped up to a position as Associate Provost at Pepperdine. And so she invited me not only to breakfast but to participate on a round table discussion about scholars of the Middle Ages who serve as administrators.

Academic administration needs great people like Jennifer involved in it right now. Higher education faces a number of tensions: public funds have been sucked out of public universities driving tuition costs ever upwards, and demographic and enrollment patterns are shifting radically, as are the expectations for a college degree. Most recently, higher education is under intense political pressure, from outside and from within.

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Part of my mind is churning away on the relationship between teaching, higher administration, and scholarship. I’ve been thinking, too, about yesterday’s museum visits—about the artifacts arrayed at the Japanese American National Museum, and about abstract expressionism in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.

My mother painted all through the college in the 1950s and well into the 1970s. Her style became more surreal in the seventies, but the heart of her work, as I know it, was abstract expressionist.  

None of her work is titled. Two matching pieces, white and gray, are probably my favorites.

Each of these two paintings has a dominant color scheme that establishes its field: the white one and the gray one. For the most part these fields are coherent—the gray one has sections of different shading, the white one has sections of texture created by the brushwork. The fields are intruded into—made momentarily incoherent—by chaotic black and gold sections (black and gold and green in the case of the white painting).

I think of these intruding sections as storm clouds of complexity in the otherwise coherent fields of thought. Yet the storm clouds also connect the two paintings, suggesting that when you step back from either painting, you can see that even chaotic intrusion operates according to a larger patterning. 

A second favorite of mine is of concentric squares painted in a stippled fashion.

This was, if memory serves me, part of a series of paintings in different color schemes, each featuring short hard brush strokes that made the paint literally stand off the canvas. These strokes gives the painting a dimensional quality that, in its way, complements the overall design: as the squares enclose one another to move inward, away from the viewer, the ridges of paint reach outwards, leaping off the canvas toward the viewer.

While the design itself thus implies symmetry, the painting itself is misaligned: there is a singular asymmetrical line in blue on the right, and the canvas itself is far from square. As a result, the whole painting appears to symmetrical but is twisting and turning in tension, moving inward and outward, a helter-skelter square. 

This is much the way I perceive the world—symmetrical at first, but upon inspection, not at all, instead a series of tensions pushing and pulling against one another.

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I’m yoking together too many things here—abstract representation, the tensions facing academic administration, and the trauma of police action: forced incarceration and police squads on campus. 

The thread I am trying to pull on is the relationship between articulation and the truth that lies in the representational space of abstraction. Can a specific feeling of horror or unease or chaos be fully articulated, or is it as in J.T. Sato’s image, truly just a darkness at the edge of the frame. And if it is a darkness, a chaotic intrusion, how do you navigate it?

Perhaps some complexities cannot but fully discerned, but appear only as storm clouds—peppering hail—that we must ride out.