This post's title is that of a book by Marshall McLuhan,
Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting .
From a post of 6 PM yesterday —
Click image to enlarge.
From the Web —
" The mystical school of thought came to be known as
Kabbalah , from the Hebrew root Qof-Beit-Lamed ,
meaning 'to receive, to accept.' The word is usually
translated as 'tradition.' " — Judaism 101
Gruber reportedly died yesterday — November 17, 2016.
Marshall McLuhan in "Annie Hall" —
"You know nothing of my work."
Related material —
"I need a photo opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard"
— Paul Simon
It was a dark and stormy night…
— Page 180, Logicomix
A photo opportunity for Whitehead
(from Romancing the Cube, April 20, 2011)—
See also Absolute Ambition (Nov. 19, 2010).
* For the title, see Vanishing Point in this journal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/movies/
barry-newman-dead.html
An Actor Prepares . . .
See the previous post.
See also the film "Vanishing Point" discussed
in the above New York Times obituary.
Barry Newman's dies natalis is reportedly May 11.
See "On the Route" from that date in this journal.
| Harvard University Press on a book, Persons and Things, it published on March 31, 2010 Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies psychological and social dynamics; she also re-dramatizes the work of important tropes—without ever losing sight of the ethical imperative with which she begins: the need to treat persons as persons. In Persons and Things , Johnson turns deconstruction around to make a fundamental contribution to the new aesthetics. She begins with the most elementary thing we know: and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence.” She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds. The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space. The entire process operates via a subtlety that only a critic of Johnson’s caliber could reveal to us. |
I prefer the more straightforward insanity of Operators and Things .
Barbara Johnson reportedly died on Aug. 27, 2009. See that date
in other posts now tagged Autistic Enchantment. (That phrase is
the sort of sneering tag one may expect from deplorable academics.)
The online New York Times this afternoon has an article on "the
preparatory cartoon for Raphael’s fresco 'The School of Athens.'"
Other preparatory cartoons:
The first New Yorker cover above is from a search for Hustvedt
in this journal. See the 2003 post "Art at the Vanishing Point."
"… as though echoing the road's vanishing point
up ahead…." — Album review, 2002
See Vanishing Point in this journal.
See as well Rolling Stone four days ago
on Stevie Nicks in 1976:
Keep in mind, the audience has
no idea who Stevie Nicks is.
"Eight is a Gate." — Mnemonic rhyme
Today's previous post, Window, showed a version
of the Chinese character for "field"—
This suggests a related image—
The related image in turn suggests…
Unlike linear perspective, axonometry has no vanishing point,
and hence it does not assume a fixed position by the viewer.
This makes axonometry 'scrollable'. Art historians often speak of
the 'moving' or 'shifting' perspective in Chinese paintings.
Axonometry was introduced to Europe in the 17th century by
Jesuits returning from China.
As was the I Ching. A related structure:
McLuhan in Space by Richard Cavell—
As the word "through" in the title of Through the Vanishing Point □ hints… key reference points for McLuhan and Parker in writing Through the Vanishing Point were the "Alice" books.
[The footnote symbol □ here is mine.]
Alice Rae, McLuhan's Unconscious, doctoral dissertation, School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide, May 2008—
What McLuhan calls the "unconscious"' is more often named by him as Logos, "acoustic space" or the "media environment," and I trace the debts that these concepts owe not only to Freud and Jung, but to Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, gestalt theory, art theory, Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Wyndham Lewis, Siegfried Giedion, Harold Innis, the French symbolist poets of the late nineteenth century and the British modernists of the early twentieth.
The declaration section of the thesis is dated November 19, 2008.
Related material— Halloween 2005 and The Gospel According to Father Hardon.
□ A work suggested by Ander Monson's new Vanishing Point . (See April 17 and April 23, together with the April 22 picture of a non-Euclidean point □ in the context of "The Seventh Symbol.")
From today's NY Times—
Obituaries for mystery authors
Ralph McInerny and Dick Francis
From the date (Jan. 29) of McInerny's death–
"…although a work of art 'is formed around something missing,' this 'void is its vanishing point, not its essence.'"
– Harvard University Press on Persons and Things (Walpurgisnacht, 2008), by Barbara Johnson
From the date (Feb. 14) of Francis's death–
The EIghtfold Cube
The "something missing" in the above figure is an eighth cube, hidden behind the others pictured.
This eighth cube is not, as Johnson would have it, a void and "vanishing point," but is instead the "still point" of T.S. Eliot. (See the epigraph to the chapter on automorphism groups in Parallelisms of Complete Designs, by Peter J. Cameron. See also related material in this journal.) The automorphism group here is of course the order-168 simple group of Felix Christian Klein.
For a connection to horses, see
a March 31, 2004, post
commemorating the birth of Descartes
and the death of Coxeter–
Putting Descartes Before Dehors
For a more Protestant meditation,
see The Cross of Descartes—
"I've been the front end of a horse
and the rear end. The front end is better."
— Old vaudeville joke
For further details, click on
the image below–
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Part I:
"…although a work of art 'is formed around something missing,' this 'void is its vanishing point, not its essence.' She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds."
— Harvard University Press on Persons and Things (April 30, 2008), by Barbara Johnson
Part II:
Part III:
From the date of Barbara Johnson's death:
"Mathematical relationships were
enough to satisfy him, mere formal
relationships which existed at
all times, everywhere, at once."
– Broken Symmetries, 1983
| X | ||
| X | ||
| X |
The X's refer to the pattern on the
cover of a paperback edition
of Nine Stories, by J. D. Salinger.
Salinger died on Wednesday.
"You remember that book he sent me
from Germany? You know–
those German poems."
In Germany, Wednesday was
Holocaust Memorial Day, 2010.
|
"The only wealth he bestowed on his subjects lay in the richness of his descriptive language, the detailed fineness of which won him comparisons with painters like Vermeer and Andrew Wyeth."
— Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in today's International Herald Tribune |
|
"These people have discovered how to turn dreams into reality. They know how to enter their dream realities. They can stay there, live there, perhaps forever."
— Alfred Bester on the inmates of Ward T in his 1953 short story, "Disappearing Act"
Related material:
"Is Nothing Sacred?" |
|
When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?
— Ulysses, conclusion of Episode 17 |
Happy Feast of
St. Thomas Aquinas.
ART WARS:
Judgment Day
“…Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal….”
— Rosalind Krauss, “Grids”
Krauss is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University.
For more on Meyer Schapiro, see the link on the phrase “art historian” in my March 10, 2003, entry.
To view that entry in a larger context, see the web page Art at the Vanishing Point, which includes a picture of Mondrian’s own Paris staircase. The picture below might be thought of as illustrating Krauss’s “grid is a staircase”… a staircase to, in fact, a vanishing point.
Frame not included in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
For a different view of what the New York Times Book Review has characterized as “high culture,” see the link on that phrase also in my March 10, 2003, entry. This leads to a work by T. S. Eliot titled Christianity and Culture. See too the remarks of the Meyer Schapiro Professor in my Oct. 5, 2003, entry, “Art Theory for Yom Kippur,” in which she likens the Cross to Pandora’s box.
Eliot’s attitude toward this Jewish approach to high culture might be summarized by the following remarks of Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day—
Dr. Silberman: You broke my arm!
Sarah Connor: There are two-hundred-fifteen bones in the human body, [expletive deleted]. That’s one.
ART WARS:
Art at the Vanishing Point
From the web page Art Wars:
"For more on the 'vanishing point,'
or 'point at infinity,' see
Midsummer Eve's Dream."
On Midsummer Eve, June 23, 2003, minimalist artist Fred Sandback killed himself.
Sandback is discussed in The Dia Generation, an April 6, 2003, New York Times Magazine article that is itself discussed at the Art Wars page.
Sandback, who majored in philosophy at Yale, once said that
"Fact and illusion are equivalents."
Two other references that may be relevant:
The Medium is
the Rear View Mirror,
which deals with McLuhan's book Through the Vanishing Point, and a work I cited on Midsummer Eve 
…
Chapter 5 of Through the Looking Glass:
" 'What is it you want to buy?' the Sheep said at last, looking up for a moment from her knitting.
'I don't quite know yet,' Alice said very gently. 'I should like to look all round me first, if I might.'
'You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,' said the Sheep; 'but you ca'n't look all round you — unless you've got eyes at the back of your head.'
But these, as it happened, Alice had not got: so she contented herself with turning round, looking at the shelves as she came to them.
The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things — but the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite, empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.
'Things flow about so here!' she said at last in a plaintive tone…."
ART WARS:
Art at the Vanishing Point
Two readings from The New York Times Book Review of Sunday,
2003 are relevant to our recurring "art wars" theme. The essay on Dante by Judith Shulevitz on page 31 recalls his "point at which all times are present." (See my March 7 entry.) On page 12 there is a review of a novel about the alleged "high culture" of the New York art world. The novel is centered on Leo Hertzberg, a fictional Columbia University art historian. From Janet Burroway's review of What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt:
"…the 'zeros' who inhabit the book… dramatize its speculations about the self…. the spectator who is 'the true vanishing point, the pinprick in the canvas.'''
Here is a canvas by Richard McGuire for April Fools' Day 1995, illustrating such a spectator.
For more on the "vanishing point," or "point at infinity," see
Connoisseurs of ArtSpeak may appreciate Burroway's summary of Hustvedt's prose: "…her real canvas is philosophical, and here she explores the nature of identity in a structure of crystalline complexity."
For another "structure of crystalline
complexity," see my March 6 entry,
For a more honest account of the
New York art scene, see Tom Wolfe's
The Painted Word.
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