Log24

The Nine
(Readings for
Weyl’s birthday)

“The grid is a staircase to the Universal….
We could think about Ad Reinhardt, who,
despite his repeated insistence that
‘Art is art,’
ended up by painting a series of…
nine-square grids in which the motif
that inescapably emerges is
a Greek cross.

Greek Cross

There is no painter in the West
who can be unaware of
the symbolic power
of the cruciform shape and the
Pandora’s box of spiritual reference
that is opened once one uses it.”

— Rosalind Krauss,
Meyer Schapiro Professor
of Modern Art and Theory
at Columbia University
(Ph.D., Harvard U., 1969),
in “Grids”

Krauss

“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.”
— Katherine Neville, author of The Eight,

in The Magic Circle,
Ballantine paperback,
1999, p. 339

Neville

“To live is to defend a form.”

(“Leben, das heisst eine Form verteidigen“)
— attributed to Hölderlin

For details on the above picture,
which deals with properties of the
nine-square grid, see

Translation Plane.

For more on the defense
of this form,

see the Log24.net entry of
June 5, 2004, A Form,
and the Art Wars entries
for St. Peter’s Day, 2004.