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The shock of the odd

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2015

Boris Jardine*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge

Extract

When Linda Dalrymple Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art first appeared in 1983 it generated a lively discussion, most conspicuously in the pages of the journal Leonardo. Here was a book that undermined two of the central tenets of modernist theory: first that developments in art and science were linked not by any real connections or strong form of shared endeavour but by the fact that both partook of the modern spirit or zeitgeist; second, and more specifically, that Einsteinian relativity and cubism were in some way analogous embodiments of that spirit. By relentlessly pursuing the fate of two nineteenth-century developments – the non-Euclidean geometries and higher dimensions of her title – Henderson clearly showed that many of the avant-garde artworks so admired by critics for their formal innovation were at once more literal and more bizarre than anyone had previously suspected. Some were attempts to expound the ‘geometrical occult’ or to engage in multidimensional communion, some projected the enhanced intellect of ‘four-dimensional man’ and others explored the lonely but profound reaches of hyperspace. As she puts it in the ‘Re-introduction’ to this new edition of The Fourth Dimension, ‘these works function as “windows” on an invisible meta-reality of higher dimensions and etherial energies' (p. 27), and, elsewhere, ‘belief in a fourth dimension encouraged artists to depart from visual reality and to reject completely the one-point perspective system that for centuries had portrayed the world as three-dimensional’ (p. 492).

Type
Essay Review
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2015 

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References

1 See Loeb, A.L., ‘Art, science and history: on Linda Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art’, Leonardo (1985) 18(3), pp. 193196CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the responses in Leonardo (1986) 19(2), pp. 153–158. The book is now republished, appropriately enough, under the Leonardo Book Series imprint.

2 Baxandall, Michael, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985Google Scholar.

3 See Donna Haraway ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: staying with the trouble’, talk at the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet conference, 9 May 2014, available at https://vimeo.com/97663518 (accessed 13 February 2015); Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See, for instance, Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013Google Scholar.