The trouble with James Hyde's The Trouble with Space in Painting
a case study in applied philosophy, or philosophy at work making an honest living and no longer morose, but happy as a dog who gets to help on a fox hunt, shepherd the sheep, or pull the sled. Love can easily turn destructive, but when love of knowledge or anything is productive, it is joy in the morning as well as ecstasy at night, or vice versa for night owls. Especially happy is the leader of the pack, however presently there's a dangerous fight to the death brewing between two top dogs. Luckily we aren't literally dogs, but artists, who should be Ruby Tuesdays dying all the time, and wise to welcome a refreshing refreshment course. Zen mind is beginner's mind.. But pace yourself everybody. The whole world's been sleeping in the matrix, is stiff as a stick, and I might just be what everybody's been waiting for, that weird bird who starts whistling at 4am. as relentlessly and effectively as an alarm clock with a shotgun attachment to prevent you from disabling it.
Mr. Hyde is a practicing artist with an intense interest in art history, and language. The Trouble with Space in Painting addresses the history and use of the word "space" especially as applied to art, historically up to the present Mr. Hyde argues that pictorial space was not in the artists' minds in the imitation of nature, which the painters lauded, among other stated things, and the indisputable evidence of his thesis lies in the fact that no texts use the word "space" until centuries later. He also argues that the word is as vacuous as what it signifies and should be avoided from now on. In perpetrating this thesis, he points to the things that were talked about and that did clearly enter into the art, a welcome summary and development toward illuminating the past. He also provides a fascinating history of the word "space".
Hyde argues that purging both Renaissance and contemporary art of the word "space" corrects history and liberates art to forge ahead true to itself. Hundreds attended his book launch and there have been conferences and a European tour. He claims to have integrated his insiders knowledge of art and his deep knowledge of history. Despite, again, conscientiously gathered supporting material and secondary insights still otherwise beautiful and useful, the thesis, I will argue, is seriously flawed, in line with current trends in the humanities, with Hyde's status as practicing artist lending credibility to the flaw, and in approaching from so many different angles, helping to entrench these trends in a possibly decisive way. That the book is so good is why it's so bad.
The health of art, the soul of a culture, depends on the health of its history and criticism. The fragile fate of humanity is not just reflected in, but reflects the fragile fate of the humanities that might just, I will argue, turn on the question of space.
The writer doesn't have a phd in art history, but so knowledgeable is he as well as imbued in the dangerous trends that both would earn him one, I project that the alter-ego who's an art historian, who directs the proceeding but never seems to be present at the scene of the crime, is a doctor. It's not too late for that never seen doctor to repent compliance with these dangerous trends with their intoxicating fumes and dictate to Mr. Hyde a revised edition with a more positive spin on the word "trouble", which you always get in when you do something great that people don't have words for yet. My late mate, a good friend of Mr. Hyde, when meeting a person replaced the obnoxious "What do you do?" with the charming "How do you make trouble?" and an exhibition of his work at PS1 was called "Double Trouble". Hyde's tempest in a teapot, not just threatening space, but implying something's wrong with trouble, if not removed from the stove asap, might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Phew. Thank God for cliches for desperate situations, when you absolutely must save nine with a stitch in time, which also applies to words, situations like those that send alcoholics to Alcoholics Anonymous, with its slogan slurred speech that turns out consummately wise.when someone is finally humbled into acceptance of being just more salt of the earth. I propose that pernicious trends in the humanities and elsewhere are denied addictions we can only conquer by admitting this culture is as helpless helpless helpless as Neil Young before the beauty allied to the danger of nature, and turning it over to a higher power. I'll go first, reciting the list of all of Dante's invocations -- this heroic duel with Brother James on which the fate of the humanities bound to that of humanity may depend, is the critical outline of a hair raising chapter in an epic poem, where the Instagram academic writing professor says it's all in the outline. Invoking now....
Okay I'm back.
I'm in sympathy with what feels like the original impulse that drove Mr. Hyde's idea. When painters paint from nature, we are touching the painted body as we are touching the brush to the panel or canvas, we are lost in a lover's collapse of distance, and the space that arises is incidental. There's a bond across time of all painters recovering the tactile, material, embodied world since the origin of non-pictographic writing created a decisive divide. But were painters any more interested in painting space when people, including painters, started talking about space?
The illustrator subjects the image to the text, but the artist recreates the world anew, whole and one with itself, scorning the mirrors or passed to the other side of them. In fact this clear separation between art and illustration, however threatened today with a little that could still amount to a dangerous amount of help from Mr. Hyde, is a response to an escalating condition that gave birth to the distinct category of art, before it was so named, in the work of late medieval painter, Giotto, a key victim of the purported pictorial space fallacy. The work itself bears witness to the difference attended by Giotto's stated claims of art's rivalry with written poetry, which earned him the name of the father of modern painting.
Giotto thus uses his own words to call out Hyde's failure to distinguish art from the illustration of ideas carried in prosaic labels in common use. As if prosaic labels could describe the Arabian horse of art that will not be so tamed. This preoccupation with labels throws up the scales to the eyes that art, artists, and good art historians are here to remove today yesterday and tomorrow. Boccaccio says that Giotto paints what the eye cannot see. The eye sees lines, shapes, red, orange, dark, light, the sun the moon, and space or voids if they've been named, but it doesn't matter if it's been named to Giotto because he paints what the eye cannot see, pure chi, life energy, the not yet named; it enters through the pupil and goes right to the heart. The ignorant cannot understand him, says Petrarch, a poet, who arranges the names to transform them alchemically as does Giotto.
Relevant to the case, a contemporary novelist, Michael Robert Liska recently published a critically acclaimed seafaring novel called Alice, or the Wild Girl. Liska is not himself a sailer and did not think it necessary to spend time on a boat. That would encourage identification with the characters, and he is featuring their otherness. The rigorously researched historical novel could not be more wry and engaging as it relates how truly strange and brutal the ruthless Christian text obsessed boatmen generally were.
Reading, you really feel you are a ghost, a virtual being, who blew back through time and is spying on this world without tampering with the evidence. This doesn't account, though, for the fact that he and you are viewing the evidence through modern, totally different eyes, therefore not seeing it through its own eyes. The otherness of the evidence is only half protected, to protect the other half you'd have to become a person from the past, then become yourself and be able to retain the memory, which you couldn't do, as the memory could only exist in the language of your present being. You cannot even recreate, except by trying as an adult to occupy isolated frozen memories, what it is to be, continuously, a child, though you actually were one, continuously. That a bite of a Madeleine could restore the continuity of past and present is pure fiction, but that art can is not fiction at all. However to know that you have to trust it's got your back and fall into its arms. Liska and Hyde and the God forsaken era at large that I've been as invisible as ghost in don't have the heart or guts, or have been hypnotized into believing they don't, but as mentioned, this alarm clock as much as comes with a shot gun, which I don't have to tell you, you can just watch the news.
The ghostly spy so keen not to tamper with the evidence, or so he thinks, takes in the things he sees, but cannot assemble the puzzle into a coherent image, he can only glue together the shards of the mosaic with gaps and irrational juxtapositions as many parts are missing. This is an honest view not of history, but of his view of history, It can generate, as it does in the case of Liska, a serious work of art, but as a historical method, it is disrespectfully anachronistic to confuse history with how the relatively few artifacts of history available make history look to us, doting on the authenticity of artifacts including words, hardly closing the gaping divide while serving as a distraction from it, unto a downright cover up, and meanwhile the history confused with the appearance of history just happens to reflect the displacing, dystopian world from which the spying ghost hails and where he returns to transmit this rough reconstruction and dubiously dub it data, when a blue can become green when a context is different from the one in which it is seen.
Novels are prophetic, some of doom alone, others of doom and redemption, and while it's good to face up to the bad and not underestimate the enemy, even good to resign oneself to suffering and abuse and pour out compassion and disgust, however helpless to prevent its insistent profusion, it's yet better to find some way to be a believer in the better, a Billy Budd or Dostoyevski idiot and make a fool of yourself when you're in over your head and you fall on your face, against all the evidence if necessary and continually scorning it, for what we picture as present persists the more insistently we picture it.
Liska, as a novelist, does an iffy thing in his relation to the trending idea that authenticating each shattered shard of the past really helps provide a picture of it, but as a novelist he does a good thing to displace himself reflecting his own displaced and displacing time, speaking in form and content across space and time to all the displaced and displacing. But through my own kaleidoscope eyes and feverishly calculating mind scanning the space of time, I find there's nothing iffy or merely good in Melville, and history having sorted things out agrees. He, a seafarer true, up against the thing itself, manages to love and believe in the present connected to everything that was or will be as absorbed through all the senses in immediacy, just standing or sailing in the place where he is, and he is so filled with his moment that he breaks the skin of the balloon and takes off into outer and inner space joining the two.
There is nothing tinny, funny, old fashioned, or othery in his voice, he is one of us. Had this book been written today as a historical novel, it would have been critically crucified for its anachronistically modern voice and vision, aligned with the critics crucifixion of it in its own time. Weirdly, the expedition in Moby Dick begins with a reflection on the divine pre-visioning of history followed by a break in the text to feature two specific headlines that each specifically apply to the moment I happened to pick up the book -- Bloody Battle in Afghanistan, Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
Just some data, a co-incidence. But it points to the way Hyde allies with grand inquisitors and the like who would, while basking in its aura beginning to freak him out, come down hard on the witchcraft of timeless art, which by being hyper present to its own time, visibly audibly crashes through it and decimates otherness itself as effectively as LSD on slow drip trip, if you swallow the whole pill, prepare for nausea until you get your sea legs. By continually regenerating experience in the present, such art discredits the artifact or "fact" presenting itself as the authentic thing itself, not what it actually is, an appearance of a past phenomenon seen through a glass very darkly, and this messes with people's nicely stabilized prosaic reality. The inquisitors must protect the social order against this kind of disruption and keep the machine well oiled. The great work's beauty, the natural face and a happy hiding place for truth, is recognized only when the higher consciousness it carries, a very smart virus, becomes general knowledge, and it no longer threatens the authority of the present body of "facts".
And when the culture starts regressing, it becomes threatening again. A very good poet and writer allied with Liska in his fact worship, Alan Jones, who co-wrote The Art Dealers, once sloshed as usual at Robin des Bois in Brooklyn ranted for two hours about the terribleness of Melville in his pernicious implication that the flat "facts", a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing, aren't the be all and end all of being, that everything is a symbol and a sign reading through to everything, that there is such a thing as divine presence. What consummate rot, if you can stand this dark world sober or you dream the mere hope for some deeper meaning, you're no better than a confidence man selling manifestation techniques that only work, coincidentally, for manifesting the expensive cars you want enough to do the work for.
I don't blame Jones or Liska. The true disciples of art are constantly losing their faith spending most of their time pinned to the Cross of the next blank page, resisting the last temptation of the savior of the world, so relieved in finding comrades to corroborate their despair they deny the holes in it, that's different from the devil and all his minions, some human ones just practicing to see how it feels, not yet irrevocably signed on, the demonically rigorous critical thought and thinkers who are systematically plotting the demise of all hope for a better world by pounding art and its history, at the cutting edge of life and bringing up the rear, just to make sure everybody's corralled, into an airless, spaceless two-dimensional Flatland.
Meanwhile, how different the earlier inquisitors literally burning the bewitching at the stake, from the later inquisitors in Don Quixote, who only condemn the factual guy indulging in factually dangerous mischief in trying to recreate the past in all its finally understood as common goofiness instead of letting the dead bury the dead. They protect those bewitching Renaissance romans or romances rising to timeless art whose beauty carries truth. Cervantes makes fun of the inquisitors as aesthetes, just as he makes fun of the believer at the back of the class, the bumblingest of the clowns, the black sheep, the Mr. McGoo blinded by the light who keeps walking into walls, the dreamer at the watch, the consummate artist, also an aesthete. He's just laughing at himself, at each artist making a havoc of his life being the be all and end all of all artists -- see Melville's poetic eulogy of narcissism, the toxicity of which the scourge and exorcism that is art washes away -- and laying himself as art itself to rest in perpetuity, I hope you really laughed at that part after reading Moby Dick, while they crown his beautiful work with laurels.
If all that sounds as perniciously romantic as the beleaguered knight himself, that's because all the roads that lead to Rome also lead away from it. You can't judge the case by just dissecting the turf and putting all the travelers there in one box, as Mr. Hyde, a radically materialist, literal letteralist historian, is doing. In truth we only know the past in memory and records that are fixed and, if reliable, unchanging. But memories and records of a thing are not the thing itself. In the case of the past, there is no thing itself. It's only the memories and records that create the illusion of there existing anything but the present now gone now gone now gone too soon to produce any memories and records of itself. Not that we don't owe respect to the grand illusion, l'cheim! but you don't respect a mere bubble blowing in the air by trying to reach out and touch it. You don't respect life wherever it is happening by sticking to the stickers that are the signs of it and gluing them together and calling whatever that calls to your mind what life is or was.
To return to the possibly yet more timeless and redemptive than Melville, painting in question, Giotto in his finest work at Padua and Santa Croce does actually create a purely tactile lovers world, so repletely that it suggests that he was aware of and reacting against his own earlier preoccupations. Meanwhile Mr. Hyde does not focus on these later works. He refers to Assisi, which some historians do not even believe is Giotto's work it is so different, so relatively immature, and so visibly preoccupied with what the historians he admonishes for it call pictorial space, which arises in the reading of an image, not just the seeing of it. It is a map of a world you move through interval by interval, space by space, as with the space between the letters you are reading, and the gaping space between the queue of squiggly marks and the world it signifies. It is clear to the eye and mind that young Giotto -- I believe it is his work for the very reason that he reacted so strongly against it, not to mention the colors -- had discovered the trick to it and was concertedly featuring what we call pictorial space, however not yet named.
While Giotto's greatest work is consummately tactile, any what I'm happy to call space evoked incidental, space is not incidental with Piero della Francesca. His work alone is a reason to preserve the word "space", which referring to the phenomenon itself, as Hyde recognizes, pretty much means what is simply dumbfounding, something not of this world. Yet here it is, hovering in particles of paint and beyond and in front of them and ineffably beyond turning the infinite multiverse livable forever in again. Okay, maybe they didn't see it that way, but I'll bet they actually did, it just wasn't that surprising to envision heaven -- all space no time, as Dante put it -- as an actual phenomenon, as this was by then common knowledge.
Piero is an ultra-intellectual painter who keeps writing while painting, thriving in separation as in union with the painted body. His treatise on perspective notes that the method he uses to such striking effect, both presenting and absenting, both familiar and strange, depends on the separation of subject, object, and picture plane as distinct entities. His perspectival colonnade in The Annunciation is as show offy of pictorial space, or effect of the picture being a window on the world, that had begun to fascinate Giotto at Assisi as you can get, and also resonating with the musically mathematical construction in its implied infinite extension, the theatrical ontological, the calculable incalculable. Witchcraft
It is fun and somewhat illuminating to fly over there in the guise of a ghostly spy and see the world that people in the past saw through the shared image of the world that is limited to the named, a porous winding labyrinth of differently rendered labels, even as artists since Giotto, the key player in the story told, both share that image and are tampering with unto shattering it when you situate these tools of prayer in their intended and realized original context provoking contemplative identification with the crucified Word. Hyde claims he is humbly respecting the otherness of the other, as the historian ought, but he is so near the surface of that effort he has not exchanged his snorkel for deep diving equipment.
But art history is different from the history of other things, to walk in the shoes of artists is to partake in the history of awkwardly stepping on the other's toes and tripping into the masterpieces of new dances. To respect the otherness of art is to respect the defiance of otherness that makes Mr. Hyde dote on those images and want to protect them as a mother hen protects her own. He claims I'm the smothering mother and I that he is. He doth protest too much his little chickadee's otherness. We're both rightful mothers -- child is father to the mother -- in our love and our refusal to cut the baby in half, but only one of us is a good one. Let the reader be the judge.
Entering into the image of the world to which painters have an ambiguous relation thus can further obscure the case, as it is not a fair representation of what is actually going on, especially in painting -- "if you know what you're doing, you're not doing anything" (Degas) and how much more so when it's still in God's hands -- where few notice the footprints and fingerprints and can put it all together in the way that Sherlock Holmes does, to nail the case even beyond a reasonable doubt to a probable provocation of confession. To say that there's nothing there because the people there didn't see a thing is tantamount to saying bacteria didn't exist until the microscope, and to say it did is anachronistic.
The site of study unto the whole universe pipes up with confessions of their conformance with a viable new scientific theory or critical perspective, such as The Trouble with Space, check it out, until a better one, the trouble with the trouble with space, creates yet more confessions of conformance, stay tuned. Of the potion Mr. Hyde's Dr. Jekyll -- we all have them -- conjured up Mr. Hyde is not aware, but it makes him forget one of the salient reasons he decided to be an abstract painter -- to escape the blinding image of the world, such art a servant of science and all manner of liberating detachment. This blinding image is conjured up in a magic show in which the man in the gorilla suit saunters onto the stage, stops, does a dance, and leaves his footprints, and remains completely invisible to the audience, which is focused on the magic show.
This happens all the time, it's all spelled out, the words have cast a spell. The spellbound world is not the world itself, there's a man in gorilla suit there or maybe a gorilla who escaped from the zoo and is mad as hell, and blessed science, critical attention, critical space, can break the spell. Words themselves awaken from their rabid world devouring frenzy and become again man's best friend, but they're still a lot of work and need attention not to go crazy or die of boredom. Especially when new ideas, forms, or theories are just arriving and are not yet tamed let alone named, you might have just found one on your doorstep whining for some needed pets and to play fetch.
To complicate things, all the world's a stage, and it's important to join the spellbound and not interfere with the performance too much -- and kudos accrue to Mr Hyde for respecting it, however withdrawn for reifying it, such that you're stuck in the theatre indefinitely, as in The Exterminating Angel. New scientific findings and new artistic forms not only do not, but should not be readily universally embraced, as the world awakens as gradually and peacefully as possible; but then again, at a certain point it's time to storm the Bastille. This puts some pressure, to avoid a reign of terror, on the gatekeepers to press past their comfort zones and nag themselves, creating sleepless nights, or their superiors until risking repercussions, so as, before the storming, to open the gates when they're still enjoying starring in a Truman show. Each person or venue's role is different, but a gatekeeper should be ready to err on the side of daring or step aside or the heads that roll later will be in no small part on their heads, sins of omission sins indeed.
The space between then and now allows us to see the gorilla, in this case space, which ran across the stage and did a dance but they were spellbound by the performance of the named. From a distance we recognize something there, the gorilla, or space. But unlike a gorilla space is infused in everything, just not yet isolated as a distinct phenomenon. In un-seeing it we darken the past with the practice of fearing rather than embracing the future, a space not yet crystallized in a limited place, as part of the present, the most beautiful part of that placetime's heart, beyond its beautiful face, as it shines in the Beatrice of its art. That the Florentines lived and breathed what was not yet named or known is shown in the recorded history of their cathedral. In the thirteenth century they laid out the plan for their cathedral to be larger than any in the world, though there was no known method to span the space, let alone a name for the method. But they knew it was up there ahead in the space of time, and by the time they arrived in a couple of centuries at the springing of the vault, it would come into view, as indeed it did.
Brunelleschi rose to the occasion just in time, in the fifteenth-century, and there was something expansive there, not just what rises up as in a gothic cathedral like a gigantic gaunt monk with his eyes to heaven -- not that there's anything wrong with that these days when all you can do is pray -- but what presses out in all directions as well as up, unlike the Pantheon with a hole in the perfectly rounded top to admit the light to our level, not also, as with the Cathedral vault, actively to reach up to it. ("We Christian artists will equal and surpass the ancients." Michelangelo)
And to accompany the magic of being conjured up by fortune tellers, Brunelleschi performed other magic, such as his perspectival demonstration panels. When you brought them to the public square, and you turned the pictures around and had them face their subjects, and looked through the peepholes in the middles at the mirrors showing the images he'd painted of the Baptistery and the Signoria, and then moved the mirrors aside and compared the pictures with the things themselves, and you could not see the difference, this magician had all your attention as he was clearly laying the first stones of something wonderful and unprecedented, like a flight to the moon might have popped into your head and made you laugh out loud. The opposite of inhabiting Flatland and reading Flatland into not yet named but everywhere evident space land and closing the hole where the light gets in and tossing away the key.
Still, there's so much space in space embraced in word and deed that I'm ready to admit that there is some legitimate trouble with space in painting as this trouble spills into and in from the wide world. Though he doesn't put it in these terms, aligned with his thesis, artists allied with spiritual guides including later critical theorists did and do unconsciously or concertedly resist the consummately capitalist discovery and use of space as a practical and political category to control and surveil the world and translate sacred names into numbers and coordinates, beings into commodities hovering in a surrealist void, embodied subjective experience happening in physical places into objectified vacuous terms happening nowhere to nobody really, a purely virtual world, where "all that is solid melts in the air.".
That the artists were indeed proleptically resisting this is evident in the paintings themselves, and my own art historical research points to it from another vantage point. I located the first signs of the high medieval emergence of perspective in an illuminated Dominican prayer manual William Hood discovered at San Marco. Fra Angelico's fresco's are just a refinement of these illuminations, almost two centuries earlier, which show friars "spying" on Saint Dominic gazing at a Crucifix as he gestures in different ways they are supposed to imitate to foster now shock, now reverence, now pity etc. To make appear the appearance of an appearance of an appearance requires a telescoping space, clearly separating at each extension the appearing and the appeared to -- the essence of perspective according to Piero della Francesca in his treatise on the subject. But this deepening space is represented only to encourage the supplicant respectfully to collapse it in self-effacement in the imitation and identification with the appearing to the appearing who is respecting but also collapsing the distance from the appearing.
This features prominently in antique perspective's revival not the visceral Franciscans cited by Hyde only elaborating conventional history, but the intellectual Dominicans, in whose church Masaccio's earliest, evidently diagrammed, dramatic perspective deconstructing itself as the naturalistic extension of space reading from the supplicants station point is featured only to nail itself flat to the Cross. But it's in the Franciscan lore and theology featured at Santa Croce that Giotto plays the accordion of space at its most closed and open, and most musical. Reading the optical imprint as three-dimensional or spatial is the given, named or not, as we need to read it that way to make our way around, and it's un-reading it, or deconstructing it that is the innovation, which allows reconstructing not only it, but its deconstruction, as artist and audience effectively kneel in each other's shoes.
To return to the earlier point, artists sometimes comply with the aspirations of their capitalist patrons and the zeitgeist itself -- the Duke of Montefeltro surveying his owned domain -- or they mirror the world to create consciousness of what is happening as another form of resistance. But in a world deemed sacred to the duke too, mathematical space has its spiritual resonance, the numbers are numinous, that's why believers named them that. Sacred and secular space -- you can read a Mark Rothko and Robert Ryman either way, I prefer the glass half full, as does a priest I know who's writing a book on the former -- are two entirely different things.
Language can represent many angles on a thing or idea, half of them diametrically opposed to the other if you circle all the way around it, that brings it into focus, as science, born in devout medieval universities and on Arabian nights and days after rolling up the prayer mats marches on to heal and illuminate the world. In fact, art and our understanding of it are the vanishing point, distant and always known distantly, but everything is organized around them to be navigable and as numinous as your senses and sensibilities and lack of pride and prejudice allow.
The Dominican innovation described above again suggests that, like the fact that the images were tools of prayer, space was too self-evident and omnipresent to abstract from experience; it is the later flowered scientific paradigm that demands to name and classify everything as evidence the instant that it's identified as evident, scanning everything with sharper and sharper eyed microscopes, telescopes. the effective ones that are finer and finer tuned theories, until all that is hidden is revealed, including the dangerous conceptual black hole that is perceived as extension, the absence that allows presence, where a painter is lost in space without recognizing the actuality -- it acts therefore it is actual -- of negative space. It appears as simply itself, signifying only itself, therefore it is actually more present than the body that is not there, but only signified, casting doubt on everything but itself, and really, are we anywhere, do we even exist until we're standing in front of a Rothko or a Ryman, freed from being and seeing significant bodies? Maybe the trouble is with them.
There is a hole (space) in everything, that's how the light gets in.
space: the mathematically mapped, three-dimensional continuum extended in clocked time through which three-dimensional bodies experience themselves moving -- the indeterminate not yet defined occupied or limited domain that automatically manifests in the manifestation of its opposite or negation,
Neither time nor space are more than organizing abstractions, pictorial space meaning the three-dimensional space, or time, they are interchangeable, we read into two-dimensional images. Birds read or calculate the unimpeded medium we call space to locate and circle in on prey, but birds don't call space that, unless maybe a crow has been taught to. I daresay an artist such as Uccello identifies more with a bird than a theorist, where the theorist Piero della Francesca turns into a bird to paint one.
the opposite of space being a mortal, limited body packed to the gills with blood and stuff read only as that, nothing even implied between the lines -- if the ideals of language ever represented actualities, but the fact that bodies aren't perfectly full nor space perfectly empty mitigates for, not against the effective existence of both, and you can't have one without the other.
Intangible space is so tangible it can be confined in what's called a room. A room gives you room or space in which you can put things, such as yourself. While space or volume can be measured and confined, with nothing to speak of there, not even air, however nothing's perfect, even space, the next best thing, its poetic resonance echoes in the space of your mind when you're confined to a straight jacket, not when you're really crazy, and there's no space, but when it's one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
Like every word in existence, the word "space" only contingently, and relative to other equally contingent concepts, describes and orders a shared world to serve us in living together and cooperating. The two-dimensional figure burned into the retina can fail to read as any message from something outside of the self, separated in space, or "space" and time, the two interchangeable. If there's no such useful term as space, there is no such useful term as anachronism. The word "space" works so much better than most other words do, I wonder if the trouble is with everything but space. Just give me space and leave me alone. The likely outcome of this essay in any case. Phew.
According to Mr. Hyde, playing also Dr. Jekyll in this horror story, the following is the case: No-one used the word "space" when artists and theorists were honing the representation of mathematical space and therefore they were not just doing other things as well, they were not honing the representation of mathematical space at all. One might agree that if they had been doing so, once it was there, the instant it was conceived, everybody would have gone aha! something new under the sun and given it a name.
However a host of historians, most notably Irwin Panofsky, have carefully traced the continuous genealogy of the working concept of mathematical space in medieval theology, painting, painting theory, and architecture. I might or might not change my name after I evolve from a child to an adult. My relation to the child is ambiguous. I could be read as a completely different entity or I could feel myself one whole. Sigmund Freud notes that the fear of ambiguity is the root of all neurosis. (If so I must be the least neurotic person in the world, the paradigm of mental health! And courage! I don't need words to swim in being, that's why they love me and dive right in to help me swim, while others still using whips to tame the lion just end up playing with a very wiley pussy footer just waiting for its chance to pounce on a human mouse.)
Further, Mr. Hyde argues we should toss out the whole idea of space in painting.
James James said to his mother, mother he said said he,
you must never go down to the end of the town
without consulting me.
But as he continued to write and write,
she tripped into town and vanished from sight.
Mr. Hyde, riding the tidal wave that is dehumanizing the humanities by treating art as no different from other cultural artifacts — declares that he is respecting the otherness of the other by assuming art fits into a contemporary discourse like any other object does. This anachronistically denies Giotto’s own claims about his art, not to mention its failure to explain the author’s reason for doting on the art in the first place, the scrutiny of his own intervention a part of his job.
I acknowledge the importance of Hyde's book as the apotheosis and let us hope the exhaustion of post-modern really hyper-modern pseudo-science-ism, far more Aristotelian than Aristotle, who rode with reins or tamed the horse before strapping himself to its back and replacing its legs with gas gulping propellers. This power hungry project has demonstrably flattened the inhabited, three-dimensional spatial world into a two-dimensional Flatlands, with the amorphous and the regular shapes, the blue and the red states in constant warfare unable to gain the least perspective or overhead view. To achieve such a thing would collapse the global economy as the whole world succumbed to an adolescent identity crisis.
No negotiations with those fascists on the other side of the divide whichever side you're on. Against the no longer religious religious side, the no longer scientific science-ist side cries -- erase Plato in The School of Athens, no wonder and thank God that sybaritically spuriously spacious Raphael died of syphilis. See we are the religious ones, and often relatively it's true in a way, just as vice versa. The victor is insanity, whose handmaid is the failure of language grounded not in continual dissection such that the arrow never reaches the target, but in trust.
Kudos to good old, simple science, drop the -ism, for finding words for organisms that existed but had not yet been identified except in their effects through its microscopic attention. That is hardly anachronistic. Some things come into focus with distance. Science-ism is post-scientific, science is born in faith in common understanding and progressive knowledge that assumes continuity and refinement of language useful for looking not just nearby, but into the distance.
And kudos to the modern or any world on board with it for common sense and bringing heaven down to earth -- you may not need God, but you need space, especially without God. Without God or space there's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide literally or figuratively. A scholar whose name I don't remember noted how a lot of European medieval people never heard the name Jesus Christ, so only space, the unutterable je ne sais quoi, would have kept them going. You can't prove it, but it's common sense, oh dear, forgot that we need to get rid of that word too, along with space. I'm not saying such words aren't dangerous, but trying to avoid all danger is so dangerous it is deadly.
The space age ended not because we don't still explore space, but because making it a commercial enterprise sucked all the space out of space itself, and everybody knows exactly what I mean. Again, there is a hole (space) in everything that's how the light gets in. and Mr. Hyde would deny it representation, silence it, silencing silence itself. The sound of silence a siren song, tie yourself to the deck!” Where is the hole? I only see a pole, there is no hole. If you're a hole lucky you. we'll let you play a pole. But I don't want to, I want to my own self to be true, says the hole to the pole.
Women have always had to rein men in, and it's a ruse to let us compete when they always win at their own game -- where are the women at the cutting edge of critical discourse and philosophy, even the art critic Roberta Smith finally conceded to give her sidekick, Jerry Saltz (see also Phong Bui, sharing the papal see of the social mediated art world) free rein to spread his seed wider than Genghis Khan, critical discourse and philosophy being as seemingly nebulous, but as potentially productive as space itself, like the zero in the mathematical field.
Besides being the breath of fresh air evoked by the word space. Also bathing things in philosophy and critical discourse gives one space to breathe and consider the hidden agenda and implications of aesthetic choices and evolve one's sense and sensibility, and open eyes previously atrophied by pride and prejudice, an ongoing process that if ever deemed a done deal has fatally regressed. Progressive thought cultivates taste to adapt to always newly unfolding reality, where the wheel regresses to progress. Mr. Hyde and I share that understanding, but I say we've been back to the dark ages long enough and it's time again, high time, for some space and light.
Yes you, James, are sealing the deal, the final hammering flat of Flatlands and are in compliance with the decree to banish me for insisting there is a third dimension, and when artists get bored with that or find a wormhole into spacetime, they occupy other kinds of space that theorists have not yet found words for.
Imitating life, Matisse however focusing on the tactile and optical surface including that of a woman's body, let space go out of focus and hover in the background. But there it waited undisturbed by post-modern critical theory so he could map the distance and get a cigar across the room.
To overdraw, versus carefully preserve, the difference between then and now simultaneously violates the differences between art, art history and anthropology. It is to deny the whole with the voices of silence echoing across time, not anachronistically, but by formal likeness and shared spiritual understanding taking many forms.
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, space 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.
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.
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.
To take a side and play polemical pingpong, constantly tossing out the baby with the bathwater in a vacuous endless space so that Xeno's arrow will never arrive at the target is to be caught up in the game of wow, another game changer, a game that's like the army of ticks invading the world and sucking its blood, and that is not an exaggeration. Hyde and I are at serious loggerheads, both of us want our side not just to win, but to end this game so we can move on. Alas, so do all the pingpong players want their shot to leave pingpong as it has been previously known behind in the dust. It rarely happens, but this time it might just happen, so do consider carefully who deserves to win before you cast your vote. I'm addressing you too Mr. Hyde, it's not too late to toss out the potion, and print another edition incorporating my position. Like when Leo Steinberg published another edition of The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Painting and Modern Oblivion to address the criticism by Caroline Bynum, but this time instead of exacerbating the antithetical nature of thesis and antithesis, arriving at a synthesis, or regular, peaceful oscillation, as with a happy cardiogram.
Mr. Hyde professes that in writing the otherwise good book, he intended to perpetrate his space thesis, not just strange and illogical, but very dangerous to mothers and others; it is as much as professed the book's raison d'être. I take heart that the road to heaven, to which all the diligent attention to beautiful works and interesting related commentary surely earns him passage, is no doubt paved with bad intentions. By this, I hope to spar with friend Jim for an eternity. He might well call it frenmity, or worse when he's falling into this book's pernicious, space-hostile literalism, but I stick with friend to the bitter end -- like Saint Catherine of Siena, happy to hold his head and take his confession as truth sends it to the chopping block, so his other head, the artist head, can stand squarely between two shoulders without distraction. Would someone would chop off my art historian's head, but it's a good head and so far ahead of everybody else's, they can never get a verdict on it, and to chop the artist's head off an artist would kill her. I am stuck with two heads.
To sum up, if something isn't literally letteral, it doesn't operate is ultra-marxist ideology that would have made Marx cringe, as he left art out of it, his hope was not to turn the world into Flatland, but here we are. The zero operates but that's okay because it calculates physical stuff. Space is just the hole's freedom for no good reason, how dare she? Turn all women upside down and fill that hole that space with stuff or just never withdraw your pole until there's something in there with your name written all over it -- when you carefully line up thousands of letters in the same direction, the zeitgeist will eventually add them up, and you will repent having dipped your hand in the bowl so save your soul and do a performance worthy of Saint Francis. Redeem your beautiful carpet by publicly sewing the flaw in it, and we will all hop on and fly your beautiful carpet to the promised land -- in truth! that's the power of Giotto and our love of him!
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And so does space, smelling like a rose, before it’s named.
spake Sheer
posted by V @ 3:01 AM
