the Modern
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The following meditation was inspired by the recent fictional recovery, by Mira Sorvino in "The Last Templar," of a Greek Cross — "the Cross of Constantine"– and by the discovery, by art historian Rosalind Krauss, of a Greek Cross in the art of Ad Reinhardt. |
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Note that in applications, the vertical axis of the Cross of Descartes often symbolizes the timeless (money, temperature, etc.) while the horizontal axis often symbolizes time. T.S. Eliot:
"Men’s curiosity searches past and future |
There is a reason, apart from her ethnic origins, that Rosalind Krauss (cf. 9/13/06) rejects, with a shudder, the cross as a key to "the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it." The rejection occurs in the context of her attempt to establish not the cross, but the grid, as a religious symbol:
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"In suggesting that the success [1] of the grid
[1] Success here refers to
three things at once: a sheerly quantitative success, involving the number of artists in this century who have used grids; a qualitative success through which the grid has become the medium for some of the greatest works of modernism; and an ideological success, in that the grid is able– in a work of whatever quality– to emblematize the Modern." — Rosalind Krauss, "Grids" (1979) |
Related material:
Time Fold and Weyl on
objectivity and frames of reference.
See also Stambaugh on
The Formless Self
as well as
A Study in Art Education
and
Jung and the Imago Dei.