FROM THE LIBRARY
A Much Needed Synthesis in Colliding
By Julia Buntaine
Editor-in-Chief
Art history, the academic discipline rooted in
the exploration of art as framed in its historical
and cultural context, remains a popular major
among liberal arts students and is required for
those who pursue studio arts at most institutions.
To ground oneself in the historical context of art
is to understand what a work’s significance was
when it was made, context that often involves
biographical details of its maker. In shedding
light on the life of the artist we can enhance
our understanding of how this work came to be,
which in turn informs what it means to us today.
For example, that Picasso was reading French
mathematician Poincare’s publication Science and
Hypothesis, which Einstein read at the same time,
provides a meaningful link between Picasso and
Einstein, who were both focused on the relationship between time and space in their own ways.
Picasso’s formative work of this time, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, clearly takes on notions of the relationship between time and space, showing more
sides of a figure than normal space/time perspective allows for. Or that Russian artist El Lissitzky
based his infamous Monument to the Third International, containing highly complex mechanized
geometries, on Russian mathematician Hermann
Minkowski’s publications concerning the relationship of the four dimensions. Or that surrealist painter Salvador Dali was largely influence
by reading Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and
General Theory (think the image of melting time
in his Persistence of Memory). Or that Billy Klüver,
brilliant electrical engineer at Bell Labs in New
Jersey was also a pioneer in computer art, a cofounder of Experiments in Art and Technology
(E.A.T.), as well as a pioneer in science-art collaborations in the piece Homage to New York that
he made with artists Tinguely and Rauschenberg,
debuting at MoMA in 1960?
What… none of this sounds familiar?
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