One of this week's non-related* reading was Linda Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. It's a fine book, with a relatively straight-forward argument, that four-dimensionality was important spatially before it became important temporally. Even before Einstein's relativity, artists were finding great inspiration in the idea of a fourth dimension, and Einstein's work represents the beginning of an end for these kinds of ways of thinking about the world, and not simply the beginning of some movement. Or, at least that's what I think is going on. At any rate, I think that the best part of my reading notes (and the most important thing I learned while reading) was this:
"Dali came up with the visual idea for the watched in The Persistence of Memory while looking at a plate of camembert cheese, and in his The Conquest of the Irrational, he described the melted watches as “the extravagant and solitary Camembert of time and space.” What the hell was this man smoking"
That, I'd say, sums up the level of critical analysis for my reading of the work.
*that it, non-related to anything I am remotely thinking about working on, but which I still read because I thought it was fun, or I thought it was useful, or I had to read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment