Figures Cut Into The Air

The Ballet of Mathematical Elegance

Page III

The sheer alacrity of his imagination, the energy that Greenberg observed, the vast degree of variation operating within the rigor and definitions of an accomplished and recognizable style—the velocity of his dreaming—suggests that Smith drew upon a source, that there was a well of inspiration, a fund of ideas that formulated themselves in his work. It speaks of a spontaneity of expression, an ease of fomenting of sculptural ideas that Smith seems merely, as if this were some small thing, to have followed. Certainly, it was how he spoke of his life’s project. In discussing the intrinsic nature of an artist, he observed, “Identifying himself as the artist, he becomes his own subject as one of the elements in nature. He no longer dissects it, nor moralizes upon it; he is its part . . . I’ve made [this work] because it comes closer to saying who I am than any other method I can use. This work is my identity. There were no words in my mind during its creation, and I’m certain words are not needed in its seeing; and why should you expect understanding when I do not?” Greenberg noted the spontaneous impulse when he complimented Smith on the ability to “act unconsideredly on every impulse.”

The operative phrase in Smith’s observations is “identifying himself as the artist.” Clearly, the hypothetical scenario is not one in which some person claims the mantle of “artist” and then follows whatever impulses come to him, the results therefore by definition being art. That is an error for our time. It is rather that the individual qualifies himself as an artist by entering into the enterprise of authentic art, and then the impulses he follows will be those of an artist. In short, there is something there, somewhere from which art draws its water.

And it is well and good for Smith not to need words, not to require “understanding,” but that will not do for us, even if Smith could not understand why. He may well have known himself to be legitimately “the artist,” but we do not, not until we understand what has been accomplished. If Smith was drawing from the well, then presumably something is being expressed through his work, whether deliberately on his part or not, whether knowingly or not, and it is our business to determine if he knew what he was talking about—if this is the real thing. Or, more to the point, since it is we who nominate Smith from among the uncountable number of candidates for our respect to be found from the artists thrown up by the gallery system and then disregarded, and from the far greater number never even acknowledged by the system, and since we continue to do so every time we attend to his work, the question more appropriately should be: Do we know what we are talking about?

To know that, we must know what Smith’s work is talking about, what its meaning is—even, if there is a meaning. Otherwise, we have fallen into the art superstition, and worse, we have focused our mystified respect by the direction of what is in the end merely a merchant system. We have been sold Smith, among so many others. Should we have been? Should we continue to permit ourselves to be? Should we love what we are told to love?

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Smith’s protestations of ignorance are really claims of an alternate knowledge. They are knowledgeable claims. More significant, they are not credible. Beyond the fact that they fit all too well the image of the inspired artist who needs not know what he is doing to know what he is doing, it is simply not probable that, if there is the intrinsic importance that Smith implicitly asserts, the artist, who among other things is the person who must be most intimately familiar with the work, would come to know nothing of what is there. If such close exposure to the work does the artist no good, informs him of nothing, then what can we expect it to do for us, who will never know it so well? Certainly, Smith drove by spontaneous impulse, working, or at least “thinking,” more rapidly than his interpreting mind could follow. The meaning of individual works likely would not come to him, or need not for him to accomplish them. The mirroring structure of self-aware thought that watches itself do as it does what it does would preclude the full investment of the creative mind—that is the very heart of the problem. But it is not likely that Smith would come to realize nothing of his overall project, that he would know nothing of the nature of his art per se.

At moments, Smith does give us clues to the buried meaning—he does let slip. In writing on his Landscape series for a 1947 catalogue, Smith observed that for him, “a landscape is a still life of Chaldean history.” The “Chaldean” reference is biblical: in Genesis 11:31, Abraham is said to come “from Ur of the Chaldees.” Smith is referring to his work as coming from the very beginning of our civilization, as expressive of impulses that reach back to the origination, to how we thought and what we knew when we began. Thus, we see the significance of drawing in space and of the glyphs of so many works, of The Letter, Wagon II, and Voltri VII—Smith claims he is “writing” in an original language, in an artistic language that precedes the degradation of civilization. One may say that it is a position in league with that presented by Ernst Cassirer, for one, in Language and Myth—language, human expression, began not with prose but with poetry, which possessed the capability to express with full immediacy, with purity of feeling, with the capabilities of the mythic mind. As civilization develops, the capacity for abstract thought does as well, at the expense of language’s initial poetic power, which is retained in one realm: art.

In Cassirer’s own words:

But although language and art both become emancipated, in this fashion, from their native soil of mythical thinking, the ideal, spiritual unity of the two is reasserted upon a higher level. If language is to grow into a vehicle of thought, an expression of concepts and judgments, this evolution can be achieved only at the price of forgoing the wealth and fullness of immediate experience. In the end, what is left of the concrete sense and feeling content it once possessed is little more than a bare skeleton. But there is one intellectual realm in which the word not only preserves its original creative power, but is ever renewing it; in which it undergoes a sort of constant palingenesis, at once a sensuous and a spiritual reincarnation. This regeneration is achieved as language becomes an avenue of artistic expression.

To “speak” artistically is to speak in our first language, in the language of our first world, in which we knew more than we now, ordinarily, know. Put differently, the Dionysian preceded the Apollinian, and, as we know, we can return to it only by means of art.

But, what is the nature of that first language, the language to which Smith assigns his art, and how can it be read? In a title of one of his sculptures, Smith gives us another and more substantive indication.

The work is Helmholtzian Landscape, 1946, a small collage of painted abstract metal elements that looks distinctly like a Miro composition. In itself, it is no more revealing than any other of Smith’s more Surrealist works, but the indication here is in the title. To my knowledge, Smith did not say to whom “Helmholtzian” was intended to refer, but there is only one likely possibility: Hermann von Helmholtz, the nineteenth-century physician and physicist who, among his numerous achievements, devised the principle of the conservation of energy, created a theory of perception, and authored a treatise on the nature of music.

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In Helmholtz’s theory of perception, sensations are determined in their qualities largely by the nature of the sense organs that “perceive” them. Our sense organs, in essence, create the sensations they report, which are then conveyed to the brain and ultimately to the mind by a sequence of nerve stimulations. Sensations are, in Helmholtz’s terminology, signs of what it is in the world that initially stimulates them, rather than images of what they sense—they indicate something that they do not simulate. But they are not entirely internally devised. Sensations are responsive to the world in the way we track them, in the way they change as we peruse them: if one turns one’s head, what one is seeing is fabricated, but the understanding of the difference in direction is reliable. Equally reliable are the sense of distance and delay in perceived physical interactions. A bit more refined—our understanding of space is intuitively given, an internal formulation, but it is the way in which we comprehend our exposure to “lawful regularities” among what there is in the world, whatever it is. That aspect of our perceptions of space is true.

For Helmholtz, art holds a special position in the hierarchy of our forms of knowledge. Art, and Helmholtz emphasizes in this poetry and the plastic arts, is oriented on the most reliable of our perceptions, those that best reveal what is authentically given us regarding the relations in the world. It is the business of art, because it is the capability of art, to isolate those aspects of experience that reflect necessary relations in what is perceptible and disregard reflections of accidentally related qualities—those relations that are imposed by the workings of our sense organs.

(It should be noted that Helmholtz’s theory of the workings of the sense organs in creating the larger substance of our perceptions is virtually identical to Nietzsche’s theory in his essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” Portions of Helmholtz’s theory are included in his book On the Sensations of Tone, beginning on page one, a book that Nietzsche read in April 1873, two months before writing his essay.)

All our perceptions are unreliable in that they offer no verisimilitude. Our language is similarly deluded in that it reflects and works with things as we perceive them. What then is the language in which art can do better, the language that Helmholtz recommends and with which Smith aligns his sculpture? What is the first language?

Our impulses aid us as we view the broad range of Smith’s works, when we come upon the Cubi series, his final series, which he began in 1961 and worked on through 1965. These are most people’s favorites from among Smith’s sculpture and for legitimate reason. There is a sense among them of something having arrived, all the promise and invention of the enormous body of prior works having come ultimately to this. There is a sense of culmination to them. When one thinks of David Smith, one thinks first of these sculptures. They are inherently likable, but more than that, they seem inexplicably right.

The Cubi series is Smith’s series of geometric works, in that here he is working with what artists turn to when they wish to signal that the matter of importance is to be found in the geometry of the work: the simple forms of plane and solid geometry. Here we find the side of Smith’s work that corresponds to the other mode of Abstract Expressionism, that of Rothko and Newman, in pursuit of something other than immediate emotional expression, and here we have the answer: the better language is the language of mathematics, more specifically, of geometry—the language by which we register and calibrate principles of relations, the language Helmholtz trusted.

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III

Setting abstraction aside, the subject matter of art is ego-oriented, which is to say that it suffers from a tremendous naivety. Art with subject matter in the normative sense is set to a human scale. What’s more, it is dedicated to human issues. This is not true just of art concerned with social issues, where the point goes without saying—it is equally true of art that aspires to other concerns available to the imagination, to the life of the mind and of the spirit, even, and equally, to the art of the sublime, for all its ambition for the transportive experience and the vision that penetrates the veil of earthly illusion. The nature in which we live is simply not awesome, regardless of how it strikes us in our quotidian experiences. A mountain range is not monumental. It is puny in comparison to colliding nebula. It is merely a pile of tectonic wreckage. A peaceful stream is not soothing inherently. Inherently, it is neither particularly smooth and quiet nor particularly vibrant and exercised. Its range of options is just not that great in comparison to things as they are, except to such as we. Nothing we know directly is comparable to black holes, or supernovas, or collapsed dead stars. We are extraordinarily naïve in what we permit to impress us, and in the values and insights we root in those impressions, for we measure everything against ourselves, and what truly out-measures us is beyond that scale of worth. It fades off in the imaginative distance, and it includes most things in the universe.

It was undoubtedly this that Pascal comprehended when he regarded the scale of the universe and said, “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then.

It is easy to disregard Pascal’s reaction as the naïve response of the earth bound mind when first confronting the scientific facts we now know so well, but Pascal is right, and it is we who are naïve, and all of us are congenitally earth-bound. Our imaginations are for the most part engulfed by flat-world thinking. Pascal grasped what can never be rendered harmless by knowing attitudes: the stunning realization that we will never appreciate how insignificant we are. We are simply not capable of it. And it undoubtedly, as well, was what Plato had in mind when he observed that “no human thing is of serious importance.”

The terror of that which is so vast, so out of all imaginable scale that it eradicates us by its return gaze is so entrenched, so ineluctable, that it is a portion of our very natures. And it can be said that in the face of a science that refuses to turn away from this truth, Phenomenology is the attempt to reinstall the human scale, and the human naivety, through the study of perception and the pre-conditions of experience in place of empirical fact and ontological speculation. It can be argued that the Phenomenological error—the impulse to establish the human scale of perception as the yardstick for all philosophical speculation—is an infection, a carrier of the contagion of the humanly naïve, and as such, that it is a function of the very fear Pascal felt, that it is a gesture of terror, an act of philosophical cowardice, an attempt to tame the mad dog of the universe so that it will not maul us.

Abstraction is the mode of art that deducts the human naivety, that removes from the imaginative conception all reference to what we now know to be the mis-conceived scale of values and impressions of significance. It eliminates from its formulations all use of imaginative language that carries the contagion, that dreams on the scale of that which is innately insignificant. Its language is rather that of pure form, which is to say that, whatever its mode of abstracting, its language is geometry, for geometry is the very substance of all shape, all form. Geometry is the pre-condition for shape, for it is the pre-condition for expanse, for the possibility of anything beyond instantaneity, which means it is the possibility for anything at all, and not merely “things,” not merely discrete objects of the world and of the imagination, but the world and the imagination themselves, which can exist only in that they have geometric specifications. Which is to say that geometry is the medium of existence and of thought, and all specification of existence or thought has a precise geometric nature.

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Hence, geometry is the language that remains when we deduct the language rooted in our naivety, the languages, verbal or visual, whose vocabulary is derived from our perceptions, from the human-scaled experiences. More broadly, mathematics is the one language we have in which even the attempt at defensible significance can be phrased. Helmholtz knew it, but he also knew that what was required was the most advanced geometry of his time, a geometry that the principal philosopher before him who had grasped the need of geometry did not have. Helmholtz observed that Kant’s theories were limited, and some of his central assertions dubious, because he “was influenced by the mathematics and the physiology of the senses of his time.” He could not have known that the tenets of Euclidean Geometry are discretionary and not necessary—it is simply that he wrote too early. However, if one updates Kant, as Helmholtz did, by recognizing that the core tenets of geometry are not limited to those of Euclidean Geometry, then Kant’s approach is sound and geometry in its proper core stipulations is, in the way Kant used the term, transcendental. And as if to ratify Helmholtz’s conclusion, using the geometries of multi-dimensional space and of space with positive and negative curvatures, twentieth-century physics spanned the universe.

Which is to observe that mathematics is the language of both science and of art—not just of abstract art, which is reduced in mis-conceptions to the point of rendering nothing but pure form, but all art, for art is rooted in composition, in harmonic relations of parts, in numeric ratios. One need only think of the Golden Ratio and the point is made: anything composed is composed in mathematics. Math is the language in which lyricism is pronounced. And mathematics is the first language, and not only because it was there for us in the beginning, because it was there before us. Look at such works as Cubi XXVII, 1965. Despite the clean, polished, and gleaming surface of the steel, in its basic form there seems something ancient about it, as ancient as Stonehenge, as ancient as the pyramids, as ancient as Pythagoras. Here is the Chaldean still life Smith aimed at.

And as the language of art, mathematics is also the language of philosophy. The naivety arrives when we look to the world in which we live for it is we who do the looking—it is our faces in the mirror. But there is knowledge that comes of knowledge, and we find it arising in two arenas: in mathematics, as Kant knew, and in art. Thus, it is both in math and in art that the a priori synthetic is found and can be delved. Thus, art is the laboratory of philosophy, through the harmonics of composition, through its mathematical nature, which is the language that can be clearly thought, the language fully of daylight. In that language, we find the meaning of geometry, and of artistic composition—it is the intrinsic structure by which ideas give rise to ideas, the pattern of the growth of pure thought.

Even as math is a language of intellectual daylight, it is the language of mystery, like Musil’s “daylight mysticism,” filled with wonder, as any mathematician will note—the mystery of things brought into self-aware thought, lacking the naivety of the human scale, lacking the occlusion of the face in the glass. And it is the language of life. One can see it in the effervescent dance of the forms in Cubi I, in the mounting aspiration of aesthetic dreaming that rises into the air like an elegance of sparkling light. And one can see it in some of the most challenging and intellectually remunerative art of the Modernist period, which despite the established story is to a surprising degree to be found in sculpture. In Naum Gabo, we find bravely failed attempts to convey perceptually the nature of non-Euclidean geometry, tries at pushing perception to begin to instigate some idea of the structure of the world as we must suspect it exists beyond the range and limitations of our perception, as it must be behind the face in the mirror. In Kenneth Snelson—who among his other virtues is beyond question the most intelligent artist working today—we find bravely successful demonstrations of the architecture of the void in which all material existence is suspended and of the immaterial expanse within which thinking engenders itself. And thus we find the proof—offered in schematic ballets of polished aluminum rods and steel cables that seem to lift and pirouette the very air as if it were a sanctuary of meditation, as if the world around us were a Platonic retreat created for the purpose of having us live a life of nothing but intellectual fascinations—that the two are somehow one.

What Snelson tells us is that, with art in which the emphasis is on the geometric, art in which everything specific to human perception has been removed, the face is still in the mirror. Art works such as the sculptures of Kenneth Snelson, such as those of Smith’s Cubi series, are not deep explorations of emotion, or social commentaries, or biographical confessions. Nevertheless, what they reveal is a portion of human nature. What they show is as much a part of us as are heartbreak, and joy, and freedom, and tragedy, and fate. If art is a dredging of what is central in us, then the geometry without which it could not exist, the geometry that creates the lyrical possibility of its being art, is its revelation. When we see the abstract forms that are what remain when the naiveties of human perception have been eluded, it remains that we are seeing ourselves. As much as we are the microscope, so too, we are the mirror itself. The two boxes of images, the image of ourselves and the image of the world, are inside each other. We are Macbeth.

By Mark Daniel Cohen

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