Tesseracts: The Vernacular, and Sacred Space - The Paintings of Nancy Newman Rice and Brigham Dimick

tesseracts: the vernacular, and sacred space the paintings of nancy newman rice and brigham dimick cedarhurst center for the arts

Tesseracts: The Vernacular, and Sacred Space The Paintings of Nancy Newman Rice and Brigham Dimick MAY 12 - JULY 14, 2019

New Semantics Gallery - Mitchell Museum Cedarhurst Center for the Arts Mt. Vernon, Illinois GALLERY SPONSORS Hunt and Donna Bonnan

Special thanks to Pamela Kirkpatrick, Graphics by Design, Mt. Vernon, IL.

An activity of the John R. and Eleanor R. Mitchell Foundation.

Support for this program has been provided, in part, by the Schweinfurth Foundation.

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency

Copyright Š2019 by Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, Illinois All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing by the publisher.

Works of art reproduced with permission of the artists.

Tesseracts: the Vernacular, and Sacred Space The Paintings of Nancy Newman Rice and Brigham Dimick

by Rusty Freeman “...it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher...” El Aleph, 1945

The paintings of Rice and Dimick explore what may be called the Fourth Dimension of Space.1 It is the idea there exists beyond our sense of sight other worlds to explore. The sacred dimension visualized by Rice is an imaginary and unseen dimension representing ideals of spirituality.

Dimick’s vernacular is the antonym to sacred; it is the dimension of everyday realities, for example our homes. This essay pairs the vernacular with the sacred in order to define both terms in opposition, that is, each defined by what they are not. Both terms must function in tandem. The Tesseract is a model of the Fourth Dimension and a graphic to compare oppositions. Sacred Space, or sacred geometry, originally began mapping the night skies.

Medieval quadrivium studied arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The interactions of points (stars), lines (paths), planes (space) began to suggest whole dimensions beyond mortal reality.

Art historian Linda Henderson unequivocally established the concept of the Fourth Dimension of Space as a leading leitmotif of the entire span of the 20th century affecting artists, scientists, and the general public.2 Prominent American philosopher Arthur Danto praised Henderson book’s for restoring to the content of Art “spiritual exercises by geometrical mystics, opening into some higher reality of space and moral substance, repudiations of mere nature, and declarations of metaphysical freedom.”3 The American artists using the fourth dimension of space that Henderson’s book documents is extraordinary and include Stuart Davis, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Smithson, and Marcel Duchamp.

In addition to the fourth dimension of space, this essay will use the disciplines of humanistic geography and cognitive mapping; the models of the tesseract and semiotic square to comment on the Rice-Dimick paintings which open pictorially life’s polarities and double-binds.

Rice charts an architectural space metaphor of sacred space.

Nancy Newman Rice, St. Patrick’s, New York, Ash Wednesday, 2014, oil on canvas, 30 x30”

The human body has been the measure of architecture since Vitruvius to Le Corbusier to Robert Venturi. Rice-Dimick paintings allegorize the experience of the human body emerging from the artists’ original conceptualizations of a fourth dimension of architectural space. Their visual portals of sacred or vernacular architecture transport one’s body to an “out-of-

body” experience.

The sacred and vernacular spaces are mapped to define an aspect of our senses and our minds that goes by many names— the inner eye, the unconscious, mythology, the fourth dimension, among others.

3

Real space magically warps revealing structures and interiors not seen. As the inert structures animate the living spaces become “living spaces.” Ordinary home architecture begins to suggest metonymy and metaphor. Family plays crucial roles as sacred representations of life’s significance.

Timespace unfolds as one meets herself across history. Books signify microcosm tesseracts that echo throughout the home, itself a hand-built tesseract which echoes into the night sky’s own tesseracts of stellar constellations.The sacred geometries of the night sky shine from the heavens illuminating the quotidian American Camelot.

Brigham Dimick, Reading/ Viewing, 2016, oil, photograph, on prepared paper mounted on panel, 50x48”

Sacred space is a hallowed concept that attempts to define what we have longed sensed in the material world, another dimension, but cannot see. Nature is the best indication of the sacred dimension.

Vernacular space is the defining opposition to sacred space.

Vernacular is the everyday space of our homes, businesses, farms, schools, cities and towns, and the in-between spaces of cemeteries, museums, and parks.

4

Both terms are a celebration, a characterization of life, and recognize the reality of our existential double-binds (life and death). Sacred space relates to those times when each of us needs time alone to think; vernacular space relates to those time when we desire the company of friends and family.

Knowledge of Geography as Animal Instinct Mapping (or painting) the sensibilities of an unseeable world started with the study of the stars and the tracking of their movements into measuring the Earth. Geometry has a long history as a genesis for creation narratives. A geometer is one who measures the Earth and our artists may be said to be geometers.

The Humanistic Geography of Yi-Fu Tuan asks “what is geographical knowledge?” A unit of space with attached human concepts. Tuan situates the Body within Space and makes mandatory the study of geography intertwined with our bodies. We have feelings for a place; our emotions and thoughts give a place a range of human meanings. Shrines dedicated to birth and death are uniquely human places. A geography of religion connects the land and its structures (reliquaries, sarcophagi, cathedrals, synagogues, mosques) to our bodies and cultures. Humanistic geography measures place and space against the events of History.

History informs geography.

Humanistic geography studies how space and place affect our use of it and how we are in turn affected by the land.

Paramount for Tuan’s work is that the “knowledge of geography is necessary to biological survival.

All animals must have it. Timber wolves have ‘mental maps’; birds have ‘navigators.’ Knowledge of geography is animal instinct” (my italics). As animals, in order to survive, we must have and use maps to navigate where we live culturally and geographically and where we dream.4 “Cognitive mapping” guides navigation through our cultural urban spaces today in all their complexities— real spaces, cyberspaces, and our minds’ meta-spaces. Ordinarily, we use physical landmarks throughout a real city to get around, to get our bearings. Cognitive mapping uses as way-finders art, film, and literature. Rice and Dimick’s paintings are cognitive maps that orient us to our cultural landscapes. Functioning as cultural signposts, the paintings visualize larger-than-life relationships between ourselves and life. Within the scope of cognitive mapping there resides the political element.5

Nancy Newman Rice, Vector Space, 2017, oil on paper on panel, 12x12” Courtesy of Jim and Evie Shucart

The arc of the two terms— sacred and vernacular—bear latent dimensions of political representation. Sifting their connotational relationships from the semiotic square suggest potential political events, biological survival, for example. These two oeuvres work in tandem and put into play the formal (visual) codes of a spiritual dimension connected to a mimetic dimension of real

life. Both oeuvres embrace the possibilities within social and cultural values and with awareness of the political. Rice and Dimick paintings parallel humanistic geography and cognitive mapping in cartographies that revolve around explicit and implicit human relationships. Rice and Dimick represent exceedingly well the ineffable.

5

Brigham Dimick, Vitreous Chambers, 2017, oil, charcoal, photographs, 25x42”

Semiotic Square A semiotic square is a kind of map or compass for navigating cultural meaning. The semiotic square models dimensions within language that, like the Fourth Dimension, are not seen but affect the meanings of words.6

6

The semiotic square is a diagram summarizing the logical relations

between four terms. The diagram charts the connotations influencing the meanings of the terms.

SACRED- VERNACULAR define each other in tandem by what the other is not. CATHEDRAL-HOME are related terms used by Rice and Dimick in their architectural expressions of the sacred and vernacular. Between the terms are lists of words that influence meaning and give a fuller sense of

the terms.

[see Semiotic Square chart on page 12]

Oppositions that define are Man/ Woman; Light/Darkness; Up/ Down; Right/Left; Wave/Particle; and so on. It is a heuristic device to explore and unpack meaning.

Each term defines the other by what it is not. “Up” has no meaning without “down.” A semiotic square shows how connotations influence

denotation. The semiotic square elicits a bigger picture establishing contexts for the main terms.

Studying oppositions is a way to begin, a way into the text. Lao Tzu7 characterized the heuristic value of binary oppositions 2,400 years ago. [see Tao te Ching box on page 8]

Paramount to Rice’s metaphorical spaces are the human body and its relationships to spacetime.

Nancy Newman Rice, Stargazing, 2017, oil on canvas on panel, 24x24�

7

Global geography as political space. Multiple spaces collide in a Bakhtinian carnivalesque of animal habitat, home, with a Bruegel 1567 proverb painting commenting on the human condition.

Brigham Dimick, Megafauna Dissent, 2019, oil, photographs, 36x87”

Tesseract as Hyper-Semiotic Square The Fourth Dimension of Space was introduced in 1904 by Englishman Charles Hinton8 who coined the term “tesseract.”

However, American architect Claude Bragdon explained the idea further in 1913 with his creation of a rudimentary visual of the hypercube or tesseract.9

8

The tesseract proposed in this essay is a metaphor that

inserts the semiotic square into its internal core and allows the square to expand exponentially into endless dissemination of signifiers. If the semiotic square is a methodological device for determining meaning, then the semiotic tesseract simply reanimates the endless flow of language.

Christopher Nolan’s 2014 movie, Interstellar, pivoted on a plain, old-fashioned book library through which intergalactic (space)

and intergenerational (time) communication was possible.

The movie’s inter-dimensional library functioned as a tesseract.

The book itself may stand as a tesseract in an almost literal sense. We read books, deciphering abstract, inert marks on a flat page, which in turn catalyzes the inner sanctums of our minds. Reading “transports” us.

As Rice and Dimick map their respective dimensions of space, so do the semiotic square and tesseract. Rice and Dimick’s paintings are transformative tesseracts that map personal and sacred space, suggesting other psychological, private spaces and sociological shared spaces, represent space to be in motion, ultimately offering new vistas of vision or insight.

Totality in Art Works of art can represent the tensions of life’s double-binds and affirm that reality. From affirmation comes a particular kind of aesthetic closure with narrative totality. Closure occurs with a work of art when there is some sense that the work of art parallels the

entire work’s social and cultural dimensions.10 This parallel quality of totality is evident in Rice-Dimick painting.

Content hinges on the realization that the two different structures— sacred and vernacular— come into focus by internalizing the other. The sacred recognizes the humane within the vernacular.

The vernacular quickens with the supernatural. Each knocks on the door of the other.

The Body in Art We place our so human bodies into metaphysical signs and the material words of language. I am a southerner. Therefore people make social, political, cultural assumptions about who they think I am. Cultural language “wrote” my identity before I was born. We fit/ split our bodies into both oppositions of the “sacred/ heaven” and the “vernacular/earth.” The Body negotiates the Political.

Jorge Luis Borges placed the human body squarely in El Aleph his myth-magic love story that centers on a mys-

The sci-fi plot Interstellar turned on an old-fashioned library that the astronaut used to communicate with his daughter light-years away.

Image courtesy of fandom.com

tical device that pictures every story in the universe including the storyteller’s beloved Beatriz.

(Recall that Dante’s true love was Beatrice). In Borges’ story, Beatriz’s cousin shows the narrator the Aleph.11 El Aleph, the true mise-en-abyme, turning like a wheel inside a wheel, is “one of the points in space that contains all other points.” Points are stars.

As wondrous lodestar, the Aleph is similar to our semiotic tesseract The Aleph is said to be a person pointing to heaven and Earth. The Body has been literally inserted into language.

that maps the endless play of language.

Rice and Dimick paintings picture layered stories. Told using painted mystic portals through which we peer and see their stories that somehow become our stories.

Dimick’s stories and images of material mimesis magically unfold real space itself. Rice conveys her stories through prismatic chromotopias structured in multidimensional space suggesting stories in multitudes.

In Rice and Dimick our bodies are implicated in their stories of journeys through time and space and that implication makes their paintings—these cultural maps

9

Brigham Dimick, Filament and Anther, 2016, oil, photograph, 42x53�

10

Staircases and levels imply the body; a person who will navigate these abstract chromotopias. Staircases may be straight or spiral and indicate metaphors ofthe social and historical moments and events we travel. Color shifts along these multi-directional, either-or journeys constructing new chapters in the story.

Nancy Newman Rice, Dusk, 2017, oil on paper on panel, 20x 20�

11

where we gain our bearings in today’s divine comedy—love stories. The Body materializes Love. Borges’ narrator closed his story of all the stories in the world with the reminder of the most important story, “Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in; I myself am distorting and losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz.”

The point (points are stars, points of light, heart of the matter) of ending on Beatriz turns on the logic, the order, the ideology, the representation that our bodies are the very epicenter of political struggle. Our bodies as the Fulcrum of Life. Our bodies as the fulcrum supporting the unbearable weight, articulating the great double-binds, the binary oppositions, the mysteries of absence-presence, the mindbody. The only thing that matters in a world where “History is what hurts,” are those we love. Every artwork a symbolic act tied allegorically to struggle, ineffable aesthetic material utterances trying to grasp one more time the unassailable Utopia.

■

12

A fantasy of Nature seeking vengeance crashing into the home even as homelife strives to rectify Culture.

Brigham Dimick, Snowball, 2019, oil, photographs, 47x44�

13

Nancy Newman Rice, Children’s Hour, 2017, oil on canvas on panel, 24 x24”

14

ARTIST BIOS

The Munsell model puts color in motion and threedimensions. The vertical axis of Value moves color through light-dark. The horizontal axis of Hue maps the traditional color wheel. Chroma, or saturation, is mapped horizontally and vertically. The movement of time is implied in all three axes of Value, Hue, and Chroma. Together these overlapping axes open the Rice paintings to multidimensional readings of color itself as unfolding narratives. Any one color becomes a potential story unfolding in a multifaceted allegory.

Nancy Newman Rice is a St. Louis artist, professor emeritus of Maryville University, St. Louis; past contributor to the first print incarnation of Chicago’s New Art Examiner, 1973-2002; and currently represented in St. Louis

by Duane Reed Gallery.

Image courtesy of Creative Commons.

Brigham Dimick is an

Edwardsville, Illinois artist, where he is Professor in the Art & Design Department of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

He has received individual artist grants from the states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

CURATOR & EXHIBITION

Rusty Freeman is Director of Visual Arts, Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, IL. Tesseracts: the Vernacular, and Sacred Space: The Paintings of Nancy Newman Rice and Brigham Dimick exhibition May 12 through July 14, 2019, Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mount Vernon, Illinois.

FOOTNOTES 1 Be sure to visit the artist’s websites for further study.

WWW.NANCYNEWMANRICE.COM & WWW.BRIGHAMDIMICK.COM

4 Yi-Fu Tuan, “Humanistic Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 66, no. 2, June 1976, pp. 266-276.

2 In early 20th century, Einstein’s influential conception of Time had not yet won over the public’s conception of the fourth dimension. See Linda D. Henderson’s incredibly well-researched and documented book, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, rev. ed., (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014). See also her insightful essay “Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension,” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, ed. Maurice Tuchman (LA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986), pp. 219-238.

5 Fredric Jameson, for the introduction to cognitive mapping see the landmark essay, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146, July-August 1984, pp. 53-92.

3 Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 92.

6 For the semiotic square, see Jameson’s study of structuralism, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, (Princeton University Press, 1972). “We have to cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prison-house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.” — Nietzsche

7 For the three translations, reading left to right, Paul Carus, The Teachings of Lao-Tzu, (NY: St. Martin’s Press, orig. 1913, 2000 ed.); Steven Mitchell, Tao Te Ching, (NY: Harper Perennial, orig. 1988, 2006 ed.); and Ursula K. LeGuin, Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching, (Boulder: Shambhala, 1998).

8 Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 97.

9 Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, pp. 2-4.

10 Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 50-57.

11 Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph, short story first published 1945; http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/ borgesaleph.pdf

tesseracts: the vernacular, and sacred space the paintings of nancy newman rice and brigham dimick May 12 - July 14, 2019 Gallery Sponsors Hunt and Donna Bonan

Mt. Vernon, Illinois