The trouble with The Trouble with Space

 on The Trouble with Space

by James Hyde

No Jim, I’ve had enough.  You cannot own this art as your own as you recognize its over-arching value as if it were gold to add to your reserves, just as you deny its openly uttered, demonstrably realized aspiration to transcend time, oh yes, you doth protest too much because you are the anachronistic one. You flatten it with your post-modern world view not just worthy of but a literal demonstration of Flatlands, denying the existence of three-dimensional space because you worship words instead of letting them work, turning language into a miserable coddled dog.  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.  And so does space before it’s named.  

Move over everybody, I need space.  This Lone Ranger is sick of this town being run by bandits.   I’m Lazarus from a better past resurrected from the dead, when artists could fight, and it would be all right, and I’m ready for a fight.  Because the art and intellectual world should not just mirror every other commercial world as protected experts in a mutual admiration society they crawled and groped their way into by buying its entrenched established views pay lip service to democracy — by allowing just as they ignore the comments and only engage, rarely, to pontificate as if the questioner making a serious point were having a hysterical fit and ranting in a foreign language.

Sir James Hyde, author of THE TROUBLE WITH SPACE.  In respect of our shared noble nature and love of truth that transcends all thought of personal gain, I challenge you to a public duel —   however I will probably lack seconds as this whole cyber world is on your side, all hypnotized children forged into weapons — bravo radical Hollywood, it is our one hope! — to conform to the machine’s agenda.  

I had such a vivid experience of space when I was three years old I never forgot it. I decided to improve on the stick figure by adding a second line, creating space, the space you feel in your body after a yoga class entered the drawn arm that language had atrophied, and therefore mine, and when I came down from the sky, I kept my kaleidoscope eyes.  I did not know the word for space, but when I learned it, it perfectly fit.  If you do not know the meaning of space, you’ve been given too much of it, you need to feel what it is to be flattened.  

You do not protect difference by overstating it. We artists were gaining ground with help from our friends by finding new words that validate art as recovery of, not escape from, reality, “space” referring among other things to the negative space recognized as an operative agent in drawing, when visual experience makes a comeback against the limiting of language more and more to conform only to what can be bought and sold and held in one’s sticky fingers.  It stopped being the space age not because we stopped exploring where no man has ever gone before, but because it became a commercial enterprise, squeezing the space out of space. 

Talk about anachronism — try neo-marxist materialist  — the flip side of capitalism, not an escape from its degradation of sacred holey — that’s how the light gets in — experience — critical theory sucking all space and meaning out of things, while disrespecting form as the language it is formally formed to be.  You showed no interest in the fresco in which Giotto proves he understood space by choosing to collapse it to describe being pierced and bleeding with the wounds of Christ for life in a human life.  That is what is meant by the obliteration of space, which is time, which is being, which is life, so okay get rid of space to be dead to the world, to burn your books and rub your face with coal, not to buy its likes. The dancer did not dance, the jester did not jest after that, but he endured.  And the space that bloomed within him was the space that filled the Renaissance with air and light and space! 

Squeeze the chickens into their places, there’s no such thing as space. A breath of fresh air has no timeless symbolic resonance with infinite extension and possibility?  It is not an incommensurable quality known in metaphor, but just a quantity of measurable stuff.  Space like God. who is no thing, is bullshit, so be sure not to utter its holey name?  Go back to the original technological, bureaucratic age, the dark age when the use of zero was prohibited. Keep all the maps of space secret, in the hands of the deep state.  

Or tremble over your foolish investments in the above and throw them overboard before it’s too late.  For as in the dawn of the Renaissance, Plato, protector of the imagination and its reality, WILL lead us out of this literalist cave, just as the zero or nothing as well as the limit in calculus, or infinity, flew us to the moon.   

Art history is not the history of worldly words, it is the history of art!   And the history of the world either is or isn’t the history of art depending on how hard artists and our friends fight for the right to steady the spinning ship and steer it to the promised land 

Let all the hypnotized whip out their weapons, the most lethal stony silence, at this cowboy riding into town to run out the bandits and make this medium human again, not a mutual admiration society to see which pack of friends can get more friends — there comes a time to put away childish things — and then a gallery that has lots of friends with money — that turned out not to be so childish after all.  Let’s make the art world human again!   Oh yes, the whole art world has its hand hovering over the bowl, but you, art’s dearest friend, don’t drop your hand into that bowl.  Withdraw it and let somebody else play the traitor.  The bigger the mistake, the greater the gain in its recognition.