O’Doherty « Search Results

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Object Lesson

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Crucible Raiders, Cube School, The Building-Block Metaphor, White Cube — m759 @ 3:17 am

Yesterday's post on the current Museum of Modern Art exhibition
"Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925" suggests a renewed look at
abstraction and a fundamental building block: the cube.

From a recent Harvard University Press philosophical treatise on symmetry—

The treatise corrects Nozick's error of not crediting Weyl's 1952 remarks
on objectivity and symmetry, but repeats Weyl's error of not crediting
Cassirer's extensive 1910 (and later) remarks on this subject.

For greater depth see Cassirer's 1910 passage on Vorstellung :

IMAGE- Ernst Cassirer on 'representation' or 'Vorstellung' in 'Substance and Function' as 'the riddle of knowledge'

This of course echoes Schopenhauer, as do discussions of "Will and Idea" in this journal.

For the relationship of all this to MoMA and abstraction, see Cube Space and Inside the White Cube.

"The sacramental nature of the space becomes clear…." — Brian O'Doherty

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Thursday, February 5, 2009

Thursday February 5, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Cube School, Design Cube, Eightfold Cube, Geometric Theology, Namespace, White Cube — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Through the
Looking Glass:
A Sort of Eternity

From the new president’s inaugural address:

“… in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

The words of Scripture:

9	For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10	But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11	When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12	For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. — First Corinthians 13

“through a glass”—

[di’ esoptrou].
By means of
a mirror [esoptron].

Childish things:

Froebel's third gift, the eightfold cube

Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)

Not-so-childish:

Three planes through
the center of a cube
that split it into
eight subcubes:
Cube subdivided into 8 subcubes by planes through the center
Through a glass, darkly:

A group of 8 transformations is
generated by affine reflections
in the above three planes.
Shown below is a pattern on
the faces of the 2x2x2 cube
that is symmetric under one of
these 8 transformations–
a 180-degree rotation:

(Click on image
for further details.)

But then face to face:

A larger group of 1344,
rather than 8, transformations
of the 2x2x2 cube
is generated by a different
sort of affine reflections– not
in the infinite Euclidean 3-space
over the field of real numbers,
but rather in the finite Galois
3-space over the 2-element field.

Galois age fifteen, drawn by a classmate.

Galois age fifteen,
drawn by a classmate.

These transformations
in the Galois space with
finitely many points
produce a set of 168 patterns
like the one above.
For each such pattern,
at least one nontrivial
transformation in the group of 8
described above is a symmetry
in the Euclidean space with
infinitely many points.

For some generalizations,
see Galois Geometry.

Related material:

The central aim of Western religion–

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
 masculine and feminine,
 life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)

The central aim of Western philosophy–

 Dualities of Pythagoras
 as reconstructed by Aristotle:
  Limited Unlimited
  Odd Even
  Male Female
  Light Dark
  Straight Curved
  ... and so on ....

“Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.”

— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993)

“In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd…
And the song of love’s recision
is the music of the spheres.”

— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded:

“Art inherited from the old religion
the power of consecrating things
and endowing them with
a sort of eternity;
museums are our temples,
and the objects displayed in them
are beyond history.”

— Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52

From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space:

“Inside the White Cube“

“We have now reached
a point where we see
not the art but the space first….
An image comes to mind
of a white, ideal space
that, more than any single picture,
may be the archetypal image
of 20th-century art.”

“Space: what you
damn well have to see.”

— James Joyce, Ulysses

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Thursday, May 22, 2008

Thursday May 22, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Eightfold Cube, Jack in the Box — m759 @ 9:00 am

The Undertaking:
An Exercise in
Conceptual Art

Hexagram 54:
THE JUDGMENT

Undertakings bring misfortune.
Nothing that would further.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080522-Irelandslide1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“Brian O’Doherty, an Irish-born artist,
before the [Tuesday, May 20] wake
of his alter ego* ‘Patrick Ireland’
on the grounds of the
Irish Museum of Modern Art.”
— New York Times, May 22, 2008

THE IMAGE

Thus the superior man
understands the transitory
in the light of
the eternity of the end.

Another version of
the image:

Images of time and eternity in memory of Michelangelo

See 2/22/08
and  4/19/08.

Related material:

Michael Kimmelman in today’s New York Times—

“An essay from the ’70s by Mr. O’Doherty, ‘Inside the White Cube,’ became famous in art circles for describing how modern art interacted with the gallery spaces in which it was shown.”

Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube,” 1976 Artforum essays on the gallery space and 20th-century art:

“The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first…. An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art.”

An archetypal image

THE SPACE:

A non-archetypal image

THE ART:

Natasha Wescoat, 2004

See also Epiphany 2008:

How the eightfold cube works

“Nothing that would further.”
— Hexagram 54

Lear’s fool:

…. Now thou art an 0
without a figure. I am better
than thou art, now. I am a fool;
thou art nothing….

“…. in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done. Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known. It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”

— The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14

* For a different, Jungian, alter ego, see Irish Fourplay (Jan. 31, 2003) and “Outside the Box,” a New York Times review of O’Doherty’s art (featuring a St. Bridget’s Cross) by Bridget L. Goodbody dated April 25, 2007. See also Log24 on that date.

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