The trouble with James Hyde's The Trouble with Space
The trouble with the The Trouble with Space, I will argue, is not just the trouble with The Trouble with Space, it is the trouble with everything today. The buck stops here. And here commences the correction. The most specialized becomes the most generalized, the most peripheral central, the last shall be first.
In The Trouble with Space, James Hyde argues that pictorial space was not in the artists' minds in the imitation of nature that painters lauded. Mr. Hyde holds that 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.
Moreover, there is some legitimate trouble with space. 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.
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. Figures mediating or pointing to where appearance of the appearing body beyond happens, a widespread device, telescoping space, clearly separating viewing subjects from those on view -- the essence of perspective according to Piero della Francesca in his treatise on the subject -- emerges to help the supplicant collapse it toward total self-effacement in the imitation and identification with the other.
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 at its openest, flattest, 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 Rothko and 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.
This concludes my summary of the legitimate trouble with space, now let us move onto the trouble with the trouble.
Dear Mr. Hyde,
No great work is not dramatically provoking, and so I am here as much as all your lauders to verify the laurels earned. Since I’m breaking the weirdly never questioned rules actually to engage with the material, Mr. Hyde’s-- toss out that potion! -- work alone may survive the fall of this Troy full of trinkets, as he Aeneus is already on his Aeneid to found Rome. Meanwhile, to shift metaphors on the mixed metaphorical mountain bike
thank you Jim for playing beside me the praised folly of scholarship — may we be worthy disciples of Saint Francis and Erasmus — and thank you for gamely filling up that gaping hole (space) with your heady head. I hope you will enjoy the taste of all the berries from my garden in my carefully prepared tossed pies that would win me a lot of prizes were this establishment a fair one. Okay here they come.
First, the Dominican innovation described above 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 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.
Or maybe the trouble is calling out trouble when Mother Mary whispers let it be, except in cases like this, when you hear the alarm and slide down the pole to put out the fire, in this case, it's a fireman, one of our own, who caught fire in the line of duty, all hands on deck!
There is a hole (space) in everything, that's how the light gets in, the elegant tapestry you weave, Mr. Hyde, is quite impeccable, and I encourage all to read your take on the matter, keeping in mind, though, that the tapestry lacks the flaw in the carpet for good luck, again, the hole (space) where the light gets in.
Until the author admits this hole or space, until he stoops to breathe into it some hot air -- a much maligned quantity, what's wrong with lifting up and floating around up there for a more disinterested view -- it stands there limp as a discarded prophylactic that did its counter-generative job -- when -- shift metaphors again -- the durable stretchable thing itself is engineered to be a ride around the world with an aerial view in the eighty days such a well researched book is worth. But until this correction, not just lacking a hole, but against the whole idea of holes, thus not just the opposite of art but against what makes it itself versus everything else -- after expelling "space", time to expel "art" -- even the art of scholarship, itself a space that is as critical as "space" to our having space to widen our view and consider the roots and implications of things.
When scholarship and cosmology fail fully to be arts, all they can do is slice the world into thinner and thinner, tinier and tinier increments as Xeno's arrow fails to find the target. Einstein was dreamer, an artist, that's why the wave function did not collapse as he mused on Being, and space survives and thrives in its binding with time. Indeed it comes alive on a ride on relativity's embodiment, the Mobius Strip (see wiki if needed) -- the thing itself becomes space as spacetime and freed from this mortal coil while still coiled up here there and everywhere.
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.
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.)
It's because what we call negative space, but usually read as not space at all, but simply a shape in contrast to the spacious body adjacent, with Matisse, that negative shape or "space", like the body next to it, no more reads as not space than it reads as space. It is simply not the shape next to it, everything is simply defined as not something else, it's all nothing, pure space, and you hear it singing the sound of silence or nothing because it is pure music and where is music? it is no place, it is a space. if there is no space, the music becomes noise. You can't prove it you can't catch the fish, that doesn't mean it isn't there. The world that's there is built on trust, and trying to nail it down violates its essential mystery and freedom, flattens its space.
Further, Mr. Hyde argues we should toss out the whole idea of space. Granted, the concept of space has been complicated by findings in modern physics, just as it is complicated in medieval contemplations and in mystical experience, but everyday, spatial and space-temporal three- and four-dimensional experience persists, just as arithmetic needed to buy groceries or locate all three of your children in the grocery store persists after concluding that numbers aren't real, just contingent constructs, which further unveils the poetry and music of such numbers, a reason to keep them even if they didn't continue to be so useful.
The poetry mixed up with the practicality is a Rumpelstiltskin, I'll grant, but nobody said it would be easy to rescue the princess locked in the castle and spin all the silos of otherwise rotting straw into gold.
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.
Clearly works of art were tools of prayer formed for this function, and if you want to respect their otherness, you would understand the careful formation of their forms as such, however this is not described in any treatise. What is deemed self-evident nobody bothers to talk about, or even give a name to if it is not yet named.
The excellent scholar William Hood illuminated the form of Fra Angelico’s paintings as tools of prayer by uncovering the aforementioned prayer manual at San Marco. Following his lead, I gained so much insight about the art of the time that I was able to predict the highly eccentric form of a fresco by Giotto that I will address below. Because I gave the name tool of prayer to a painting by Giotto and no contemporary did that, the name is an anachronism?
It turned out that I took too seriously the high principles professed of overcoming anachronism and understanding the other as such. The authorities professed such principles until understanding of the past began to shift the ground of the present in an inconveniently disturbing way, the same way scientific logic reveals its own limits. At least science is overseen enough that it cannot repress such findings as happens in what are still nominally the humanities, by which I could not get support of my findings, comparable in art history to the double slit experiment, but that is another story.
I acknowledge the importance of Jim’s book as the apotheosis and let us hope the exhaustion of post-modern really hyper-modern 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 world into a veritable 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, Jim, 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.
It is anachronistic to disrespect form as the language it is formally formed to be. I tried in vain to engage the author's interest in the fresco at Santa Croce 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.
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
In truth, the only way out of one beast's clutches is into the arms of another --unless you find the space between and set down stakes there, where I live, a space cadet if there ever was one. I suggest that nobody does well to deny language to where we essentially are, floating in space, each of us in our capsules so thrilled to make contact with others typing into the screen. Yes I have my embodied friends in my consummately embodied neighborhood, but I'm a citizen of the world and identify as such and hope you do too. If feeling dizzy or nauseous, good, you're coming to; the aforementioned, Dominican prayer practice called De Modo Orandi or the Franciscan method outlined below may help without allowing counterproductive denial of the global condition.
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
