Staring into the abyss

After images of a sinkhole in Japan circulated this week, Kelly Grovier looks at the meaning of chasms in art.

In the Japanese city of Fukuoka this week, just as Americans thousands of miles away had begun casting votes to determine their next president, an enormous sinkhole opened up outside a major railway station, swallowing part of a six-lane city street. Once photos of the terrifying urban abyss began to circulate around the globe, it didn’t take long for users of social media to comment on the coincidence of the two earth-shattering events taking place. “Trump’s winning!” tweeted one admirer of the billionaire tycoon, “I know because [Fox News] is showing a sinkhole in Japan”.

Kyodo/via Reuters

The sinkhole, it seems, is slowly emerging (or submerging?) in contemporary culture as an ambiguous omen, portending either good or ill fortune, depending on your perspective. When, in June of this year, the road suddenly gave way in downtown Ottawa to the groaning depths of a rain-soaked crater, Twitter was abuzz with competing prophecies. “You gotta see the positive in everything”, Christopher Skinner insisted, “where someone sees a flooding sinkhole, I see a street pool.”

The disparity in perspective between the two Americas that voted on Tuesday is stark and poignant. Reconciling the two divergent vantages without privileging one or disparaging the other requires an artist’s agility and a master’s sleight of hand. Is it possible empathetically to depict the expanding fissure from the prospect of one outside it, while at the same time sympathising with those who already feel as though they’re sinking and are desperate to be lifted out?

Wikipedia

The early Renaissance Italian painter Sandro Botticelli accepted precisely that challenge of harmonising discordant perspectives when he undertook to map the spiralling chasm that connects the realm of reality from the plunging depths of the underworld in a pen-and-brush vision he created sometime around 1485.

Inspired by the contours of Dante’s depiction of hell in the Inferno, Botticelli stage-manages an intensely ambivalent point-of-view. Observers are neither wholly inside nor outside the funnel-like plunge, yet both simultaneously. At once removed from and enmeshed in the ghastly descent, the eye that meditates upon Botticelli’s vellum vision (which maps in excruciating detail the nine strata described in Dante’s epic poem) is poised on an impossible pivot between philosophical detachment and claustrophobic entrapment. Perhaps few images in the history of art can capture so well the equivocating attitudes of the US as it stares vertiginously into the widening unknown of the future.

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