The trouble with James Hyde's The Trouble with Space 

There is much of interest in the book under review that belies its dangerous, truly terrible thesis, which turns space into such a problem in art and art history, it recommends the word be as much as banished from the lexicon -- globally its seems, since as the critic Jerry Saltz rightly insists, art is life.  Let me be clear that everything in the book that has nothing to do with this possibly worst idea in the world -- to get rid of "space" and let all it signifies float off into what was once called outer space -- and would happily coexist with the expulsion of this terrible idea from the book  is a wonderful gift to the world.

Mr. Hyde and I met through my late mate and share many mutual friends.  It was quite surprising to find that, like me, he is both an artist and an art historian -- in the noble tradition of Ghiberti and others -- in love with the dawn of the Italian Renaissance.   I am loath to challenge this compatriot whose art I highly admire to a public duel, but art and history are bigger than we are, gods of sorts.  To insult the gods is to bring curses on the people, however unfair the ordeals they put us, arguably their puppets, through, such as this challenge to a public duel.  Yes, I must fight with a friend, playing an all too typical man, who is grabbing the fire hose and waving it around when I, unlike a lot of women nowadays, intransigently stick to playing an all too typical, good old woman as such, and use it to put out the fire and save everybody in the house.  

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, 

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 thing as space, there is no such thing 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.  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 a 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 ultra-aristotelian versus platonic science-ism,  which demonstrably has flattened the world into a veritable Flatlands, with the amorphous and the regular shapes, the blue and the red states in constant warfare.   To attempt any bridge would collapse the global economy as the whole world succumbed to an adolescent identity crisis.   Erase Plato in the school of Athens, no wonder and thank God that sybaritically spuriously spacious Raphael died of syphilis. 

Kudos to science 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 world for its 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 said 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.  There is a hole (pure 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.  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.   

Though space always does hover in the background, Matisse's eyes mainly are in his hands, always touching everything and resisting reading things into the touch of light on the retina, and insofar as he irons out physical space by tweaking and tweaking the optical image into a surface pattern, you still feel the three and more dimensional space in all your inner atoms as if after a yoga class.  

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.  

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.  

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, as packed as space with punch when loaded with the automatic bullet points that come with everybody's brains these days, 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 more gigantic the more noble the mistake, yours might launch my career and save the world.  If you won't withdraw it, here's a big kiss anyway traitor.  

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.  

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.  And so does space, smelling like a rose, before it’s named. 

spake Sheer