Kaleidoscope, continued:
Austere Geometry
From Noel Gray, The Kaleidoscope: Shake, Rattle, and Roll:
“… what we will be considering is how the ongoing production of meaning can generate a tremor in the stability of the initial theoretical frame of this instrument; a frame informed by geometry’s long tradition of privileging the conceptual ground over and above its visual manifestation. And to consider also how the possibility of a seemingly unproblematic correspondence between the ground and its extrapolation, between geometric theory and its applied images, is intimately dependent upon the control of the truth status ascribed to the image by the generative theory. This status in traditional geometry has been consistently understood as that of the graphic ancilla– a maieutic force, in the Socratic sense of that term– an ancilla to lawful principles; principles that have, traditionally speaking, their primary expression in the purity of geometric idealities.* It follows that the possibility of installing a tremor in this tradition by understanding the kaleidoscope’s images as announcing more than the mere subordination to geometry’s theory– yet an announcement that is still in a sense able to leave in place this self-same tradition– such a possibility must duly excite our attention and interest.
* I refer here to Plato’s utilisation in the Meno of graphic austerity as the tool to bring to the surface, literally and figuratively, the inherent presence of geometry in the mind of the slave.”
See also
Noel Gray, Ph.D. thesis, U. of Sydney, Dept. of Art History and Theory, 1994:
“The Image of Geometry: Persistence qua Austerity– Cacography and The Truth to Space.”