Log24

A Cross for the
Goat Men

Related material:

Krauss, Malevich, and
Linguistic Creation

Rosalind Krauss
in "Grids," 1979:

"If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance– we will find that 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, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.

Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."

"He was looking at
the nine engravings
and at the circle,
checking strange
correspondences
between them."
— The Club Dumas,1993

"And it's whispered that soon
if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us
to reason."
— Robert Plant,1971

The nine engravings of
The Club Dumas
(filmed as "The Ninth Gate")
are perhaps more an example
of the concrete than of the
universal.

An example of the universal*–
or, according to Krauss, a
"staircase" to the universal–
is the ninefold square:

"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
— John Outram, architect    

For more on the field
of reason, see
Log24, Oct. 9, 2006.

A reasonable set of
"strange correspondences"
in the garden of Apollo
has been provided by Ezra Brown
in a mathematical essay (pdf).

Unreason is, of course,
more popular.

* The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel:

"Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."

— Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, "Idea of a Concrete Universal Unity"

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon   
 

Today’s New York Times:

“Horton Marlais Davies, Putnam professor emeritus of religion at Princeton and an author of many books about church history, died on Wednesday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 89…. Dr. Davies specialized in the impact of Christianity on the arts.”

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1908) on the communion of saints:

“One cannot read the parables of the kingdom (Matt., xiii) without perceiving its corporate nature and the continuity which links together the kingdom in our midst and the kingdom to come. The nature of that communion, called by St. John a fellowship with one another (‘a fellowship with us’ — I John, i, 3) because it is a fellowship with the Father, and with his Son, and compared by him to the organic and vital union of the vine and its branches (John, xv), stands out….”
 
Related material:

Religious art in the entry Art History of 11 AM Wednesday, May 11, the date of Davies’s death.  See also the following direct and indirect links from that entry:

To a cruciform artifact from the current film Kingdom of Heaven, to an entry quoting John xv, Nine is a Vine, and to Art Theory for Yom Kippur.

For less-religious material on the number nine, see the entries and links in the Log24 archive for June 17-30, 2004.

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.