Vital Signs: Embodying Abstraction

But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in colour
as well as sex

and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations.
—Audre Lorde¹

Maria Lassnig’s 1970 stop-motion animated film Encounter opens with a loose and lumpy fuchsia form that floats midscreen, gently pulsing with energy. The crescent of a closed eyelid suggests a bodily orientation. The form stretches out and begins to move, pulling itself across the screen on two limbs, becoming more human, wide-eyed, with each surge. Abruptly, it encounters an angular blue interlocutor, whose bristling spikes and discontented expression impede the smooth flight of the protagonist. A brief standoff ensues, until the amorphous form gathers momentum and glides over its pronged opponent. This passage causes the spikes to wither, transforming the blue entity into an inert slab. It’s unclear whether we’ve witnessed a scene of defeat or synthesizing union. In just under a minute, this deceptively simple drama offers a concentrated meditation on individuality, conflict, desire, and difference—central aspects of the human experience moved through by a pair of abstract forms, one geometric and hard-edged, the other an organic amoeba.

Maria Lassnig. Still from Encounter. 1970

In the catalogue that accompanied MoMA’s landmark 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. evoked a similar scene to describe what he saw as the two primary strains of abstraction that had developed over the previous 50 years. “The shape of the square confronts the silhouette of the amoeba,”² he wrote, setting out a dichotomy that informs aspects of MoMA’s collection and continues to resonate in accounts of modernism today. The square—the “more important” current of abstraction—was “intellectual, structural, architectonic, geometrical, rectilinear, and classical in its austerity and dependence upon logic and calculation,” exemplified by the work of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, while the amoeba was “intuitional and emotional...organic or biomorphic...decorative...and romantic rather than classical in its exaltation of the mystical, the spontaneous and the irrational,”³ represented by artists such as Joan Miró and Jean Arp. Each of these artists appeared in Barr’s exhibition, which featured work almost exclusively by men (of the nearly 400 works, fewer than 10 are attributed to women). Clearly, there are blind spots and simplifications in Barr’s analysis caused by its exclusionary purview.⁴ How might this foundational text on abstraction, with all its limiting binaries, have been different if Barr had widened his lens?

At the outset of his text, Barr observed the slipperiness and inexactness of the term “abstract” itself. The adjective, as in an “abstract painting,” he wrote, has “the implications of both a verb and a noun. The verb to abstract means to draw out of or away from. But the noun abstraction is something already drawn out of or away from.”[^5] Parsing these meanings as they apply to artworks, he arrived at categories of “pure-abstraction” (engaging the noun sense of the word) and “near-abstraction” (the verb sense, suggesting a picture that makes apparent the process of abstracting a recognizable, natural form), among which there are many variations. He decided that this nebulousness is “really useful for it reveals the ambiguity and confusion which is inseparable from the subject.”[^6] That Barr maintained ambiguity around the meaning of abstraction—amid a text meant to clarify the term for an unfamiliar audience—is revealing. Abstraction’s resistance to determination undergirds the importance it held and would continue to hold for artists in the 20th century and beyond. In particular, abstraction’s boundless capacity for significance that evades rote comprehension makes it fertile territory for artists who have historically worked in the margins—including those who are women, gender-expansive, queer, and/or people of color—and whose embodied experiences may not align with dominant cultural narratives and forms.

Dust jacket, with chart prepared by Alfred H. Barr Jr., for the exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936

Foregrounding work made predominantly, though not exclusively, by women and gender-expansive artists, Vital Signs: Artists and the Body takes MoMA’s own collection as a starting point for considering the development of abstraction in the 20th century as it is intimately tied to radical and imaginative expressions of “the body”—itself a historical concept whose valences continue to evolve. Inspired by the driving event in Lassnig’s Encounter—the biomorphic form’s ambiguous defanging or absorption of the geometric abstraction—we return to the amoeba. While Barr was interested in the amoeba’s silhouette as a kind of shorthand for biomorphic abstraction, what if we look beyond its shape to consider its corporeal indeterminacy and expansiveness? Perhaps the amoeba suggests a little spark of animism within the histories of modernist abstraction itself, a vibrant aliveness feisty enough to “confront” the boundaries and structures of the square. What if we view the brief reference to the amoeba in Barr’s text as a sign that points to a larger set of questions around embodiment and abstraction, a broader scope of artists and approaches that were harder for Barr (and others) to recognize, see, or name?

MoMA’s collection offers a useful framework for addressing these questions, as its development traces the ongoing evolution and reassessment of art-historical understandings of abstraction. This exhibition and essay are only marginally concerned with the “biomorphic” abstraction associated first with the Surrealists and later with figures such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Arshile Gorky, though these histories are germane for their paired investigations of organic forms and notions of the unconscious.⁷ This project, rather, is curious about how different bodies—and their attendant material and subjective realities—variously conceive and make use of abstraction. How might we rethink the histories of abstraction if we consider the myriad ways bodies exist in terms of weight, volume, elasticity, and changeability, but also in terms of notions of race, gender, ability, and identity? Vital Signs offers a partial accounting (because no accounting could be exhaustive) of works that have too often fallen into the blind spots, willful or otherwise, of art historians and critics dating back to the 1920s. For many of these works, recuperation, scholarship, contextualization, and appreciation have been belated and are being addressed in the present moment. For others, the existing scholarly frameworks warrant a tune-up.

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Vital Signs: Artists and the Body today.

Vital Signs: Artists and the Body is on view at MoMA November 3, 2024–February 22, 2025.