The algorithms of space by Barnaby Fitzgerald May 2011 (original) (raw)

The algorithms of distance: Metaphors in Pictorial Language OVERVIEW The text attempts to elucidate the motives behind the breaking of perspectival constraints in art throughout the 19th and 20 centuries before World War II. It points to Cubism and Constructivism and most importantly Mondrian’s Neo-plasticism as salient examples of style and ideas about space and representation which attempted to transcend the mediating geometry of customary picture making, by enlisting modern industrial methods of representation such as the ‘Parallel Isometry’ of William Farish, of 1822, and the methods of the École Polytechnique’ in Paris between 1770 and 1830. The narrative addresses, with feeling, the limits of naturalism within the range of expressions. Of particular interest is Mondrian’s growth, the choices made by him and the truthfulness of his conclusions with regards to the destiny of serious painting in history. An effort is made to place Mondrian and others in a setting, described with a broad brush, made of a past and of a future. I summarize the great forces of political ferment, scientific experimentation and cultural analysis that characterize the last three quarters of the 19th century, with an eye to the fragmentation of imperialist hegemonies and the national unifications in Europe. The return of the monarchy in France, the Risorgimento in Italy and the rise of socialism paint a complex picture of industrial growth, disintegration of the Hapsburgs, unification of Germany and Italy, that together with a new urbanized, literate middle class rising from the ranks of the proletariat, all of which frustrates the traditional aspiration of monumental art and religious art, evolving into a language of pictorial thought which is intimate and real; whose methods of representation often coincide with parallel projections in Asian art, which are coincidentally also those of industrial machine design. I use, partly as a contrast, William Dunning’s excellent work, ‘Changing Images of Pictorial Space’ who also paints large tracts of historic time in similar synthesis and sweep, though he reaches complementary conclusions. Dunning summarizes the same time period with “Space and composition… (were to become)… the central theme of modern art. Conceptual, infinite space was a consequence of the spatial illusion first realized by the artist.” I come close to mass communication and propaganda, without entering the territory to keep the text short. I bring in the notions in Marxist parlance of ‘ground’ ‘sedimentation’ and ‘hegemony’. Naturally I think of Le Corbusier as the embodiment of the architect of the future, as I imagine Mondrian would think of the architecture that makes pictures finally irrelevant. Le Corbusier gives us a global architecture that would be a responsible expression of a caring and rational society. What is actually new in what has been so often called new in 20th century modernism? What is actually and succinctly old about what is generally thought of as old in the period prior to the 20th century? They are not easy to extricate from each other, and one could always argue that the new is always a latent energy of what has grown old, and conversely what remains strong and vital of the old has the capacity for renewal. Nonetheless there is much in modernism that was never seen or even imagined before as art, and its old age has arrived too brusquely. Modernism has devolved to taste and style from modernist philosophies of style and taste. In the story briefly told here the protagonists are dignified minds who dismissed the mercantile aspect of art making as a matter of course.