Laura U. Marks’s essay Taking a line for a walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to computer graphics, or, The Performativity of the Vector follows important continuities in what at first may appear as disparate traditions in art history: classical Islamic art, European modernism and contemporary new media. Comparing several tendencies shared by both classical Islamic art and contemporary computer-based art, her research traces how principles of the former traveled westward, at several points from the 12th to the early 20th centuries, ultimately informing the development of European modernism.
Laura U. Marks: I should state at the outset the result I hope to achieve from this comparison. Islamic art, as we know, is a religious art, driven by a divine imperative, a will to come face to face with the Infinite. In our secular and ecumenical time, no such drive unifies contemporary art. Nor should it. However, I hope that this comparison sheds light on a certain utopian potential of contemporary art. Within an information-capitalist society, there is little room or time for the infinite. It gets crowded out by ceaseless flows of information, covered over by the pixel skin of consumerist society, supplanted by fake infinities that pretend to stand in for it. Yet people living in this crowded desert of information and capital, perhaps especially people who do not have the solace of religion, have a thirst for the infinite. So I am hoping that the inspiring example of Islamic art will show that an immanent Infinite is imaginable in contemporary society, and that contemporary works of computer-based art may point toward this infinity. I know this is a very grand claim, which may well not be borne out either by contemporary artwork or by the desires most people bring to it, but the immanent nature of this infinity means that it will be there when we finally feel like looking for it.
J. R. Carpenter: One of my favourite imaginings of an immanent Infinite in contemporary society comes from fabulist author Italo Calvino’s brilliant 1965 collection, Cosmicomics, “an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe” according to the back cover. In one story, “The Form of Space,” the narrator and his beloved, Ursula H’x, are falling through space together, “indefinitely, for an indefinite length of time,” at the same speed and rate of acceleration following a straight line absolutely parallel to one another.
Italo Calvino: The universe had to be considered […] as an angular pointed figure where every dent of bulge or facet corresponded to other cavities and projections and notchings of space and of the lines we followed. This was still a schematic image […] in reality the space in which we moved was all battlemented and perforated, with spires and pinnacles which spread out on every side, with cupolas and balustrades and peristyles, with rose windows, with double- and triple-arched fenestrations, and while we felt we were plunging straight down, in reality we were racing along the edge of moldings and invisible friezes, like ants who, crossing a city, follow itineraries traced not on the street cobbles but all along walls and ceilings and cornices and chandeliers. Now if I say city it amounts to suggesting figures that are, in some way, regular, with right angles and symmetrical proportions, whereas instead, we should always bear in mind how space breaks up around every cherry tree and every leaf of every bough that moves int he wind, and at every indentation of the edge of every leaf, and also it forms along every vein of the leaf, and on the network of veins inside the leaf, and on the piercings made every moment by the riddling arrows of light, all printed in negative in the dough of the void, so that there is nothing now that does not leave its print, every possible print of every possible things, and together every transformation of these prints, instant by instant, so the pimple growing on a caliph’s nose of the soap bubble resting on a laundress’s bosom changes the general form of space in all its dimensions.
Italo Calvino, “The Form of Space,” Cosmicomics, Harvest, 1968, p121.
other islands in this text-fed stream
