The Butt-head's Prominence In 'Modern' Art
Introduction
In Escher's Liminocentric
Eye we've shown how Escher in at least one painting created a warped pictoral space that has an obvious liminocentric structure. The picture's OUTERMOST frame is represented as also appearing at the center of its own INNERMOST recesses. As we mentioned in that paper, in the
kind of structure that we call liminocentric contextual 'levels' of organization are permitted to cross in a way that offends the principle that some philosophers would invoke as the quintessence of logic - that what is 'contained' cannot itself contain its own 'container', to paraphrase what they would say on the subject. But others have argued that to merely outlaw such structures in this way - by definition, as it were - is simply to 'beg the question' regarding their existence.
Interestingly, when we permit ourselves to conceive of such structures
we recognize at once that they have some rather interesting properties - properties that could only be
In any case, this feature IS a consequence of liminocentric organization,
as Escher clearly recognized. And it runs through his work like an
unbroken, albeit twisted, thread.
Escher not only explored what we would call liminocentrically structured space, he also delighted in portraying the other side of the same coin - the paradoxical object. One of these - the mobius strip - we examined
In the present paper we want to show how Picasso (1881-1973) sought ways of depicting similarly
reconciled incommensurable orders. Like Henri Bergson (1859-1941) attempted to do before him, and Yeats after him (see About Face - Part Three), Picasso tried to picture an interpenetration of opposites that would turn out to be
Picasso's efforts involved him in an exploration of what 'sidedness' really is. It also inevitably led him to a deep investigation of paradox and paradoxical structure - although this may not be quite so obvious in his paintings as it is in Escher's. When, however, we see in Picasso's work an attempt to express on canvas what it is like to experience a liminocentrically structured consciousness, various seemingly diverse elements in his work come together.
In his attempt to find a way of articulating on canvas what he, as an introverted intuitive, felt about how experience is essentially structured, Picasso would, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, have already explored -
So the thesis that we want to put before you, in other words, is that
here is an instance in which art anticipated science, as Shlain 3 maintains
has often been the case throughout history. Unfortunately, this foreshadowing would be accomplished in a fashion the significance of which has, to date, gone largely unrecognized. 4.
We would furthermore suggest that Picasso (and the entire 'modern art movement' in which he undeniably figured as a central influence 5) was not merely exploring conjectures about the physical structure of material objects, but the very shape of the experiential space in which human consciousness
itself abides.
And so, in this way, the modern art movement might be said not only to
have anticipated Jung in significant ways, but also to have prefigured a post-Jungian psychology that has yet to emerge - one in which consciousness itself is conceived as complex and liminocentrically structured.
Section One - A Bit of History
The poet Apollinaire (1880-1918) was a close personal friend of Picasso's and a mentor
of the young surrealist Andre Breton(1896-1966). It was Apollinaire who coined the word 'surrealism' in 1917 6, and it was he who 'discovered in the works of the cubists the fourth dimension of reality, which he deemed not only a proof of creativeness but of divinity'. 7 'This new dimension,' says Anna Balakian, 8
Both the Dadaist movement (1916 - 1924) 9 and Surrealism (1924-1940) embraced Picasso as a valued
predecessor. They adopted as their own many of the concerns that he had succeeded in introducing into art. But Picasso himself did not operate in a cultural vacuum, and it would be unwise to give him sole credit for having fashioned the issues with which he grappled. Nadia Choucha demonstrates, for instance, how in the project that Surrealism inherited from Picasso (the 'joining of two distinct realities on the same plane') the influence of the mystic Swedenborg (1688-1772) also deserve recognition.
In this context she describes how the poet Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), another friend of Picasso's, had developed a pseudo-science that he called pataphysics, which not only 'asserted the identity of opposites', but also spoke of objects that are paradoxically 'at the same time bigger and smaller' than themselves. She also mentions how Breton, following Jarry, described 'a point where opposites cease to be perceived as contradictory'. This idea, according to Choucha, was 'derived from occult theory (particularly Levi's writing on Cabalism) as well as from Jarry.' (Choucha, 18).
To understand how this reconciliation of incommensurable orders actually
works, Breton also tapped into what the poet Pierre Reverdy (1889-1960) had to say on the subject in 1918. Balakian tells the story:
What is of particular interest to us in this passage is the idea that it
must be in the very STRUCTURE of the analogy created by the juxtaposition of incommensurable images that the 'modification' producing the sur-realist image, capable of transcending the sensory world, must occur. This structure will therefore involve an element of paradox or 'absurdity' (not to mention 'chance' 10.) This is significant, of course, because it comes very close to saying that the type of 'structure' in which Reverdy and the Surrealists were interested is the type we would call liminocentric.
By virtue of what is said in the above paragraph it is clear that the
'surrealist image, almost by definition, displays paradox. Breton himself gives further evidence of this when, in his formal classification of surrealist images, he includes 'contradictions', 'images in which one of the terms of the image is hidden', 'images that lend to the abstract the mask of the concrete', and 'images that imply the negation of some elementary physical property'. (123-127, Balakian). The last category bears a curious resemblence to the point that Hofstadter would later make, in 1979 (see Saving Face), when he expressed the hunch that if a physical system isomorphic with consciousness is to be found, it is very likely to be one that somehow negates its own existence in the same way that the socalled 'liar's paradox' (i.e., the sentence which states 'This sentence is false') deems itself to be false.
The pursuit of objects of the sort spoken of by Reverdy and Breton,
which Balakian calls 'original' objects, 'became a collective preoccuptation of the surrealists in all fields of artistic expression':
These were pieces in which the 'the container... and the thing contained... achieved an entirely new reality as a new object.'
The debt that these artists owed to Picasso, which we hope to make clear in the remainder of this paper, was often readily acknowledged by the artists
whom he influenced. By infusing paradox into the fundamental structure of the object, Picasso would blow it up and out, into a four dimensional space. As Balakian put it on one occasion -
According to art critic Leo Steinberg (1972) the 'Three Graces' by Antonio Federighi (1420-90) is -
When one looks closely at Federighi's painting it is easy to see how it's
structure resembles that of the t'ai-gi-tu (or 'yin-yang' symbol),
And although, in the Federighi painting, the anterior and posterior aspects of the three graces are shown side by side, sometimes what is called 'serpentination' - a twisting of one figure, so that its front and back can be viewed simultaneously - is used to achieve a similar effect.
'Some of the effects exploited by the cubists were known to art for a long time,' says Gombrich (1960, page 283), 'though they remained in comparative obscurity as decorative devices'. So, although it was surely not Picasso who invented 'serpentination' -
Nor he who would be the last to use it -
It was Picasso who would explore it most thoroughly. Not only by 'borrow[ing] every known form of serpentination from the stores of the past' (Steinberg, 18), but by pushing the technique further and deeper - in ingenious ways that would constitute a profound investigation into 'perspective' the likes of which the world had not seen since the Renaissance. This, as Steinberg points out, would indeed render the term 'serpentination' somewhat of
an understatement, a misnomer. Serpentination was only one facet of a larger project that Picasso had in mind.
According to Steinberg (page 190) it was as if Picasso wanted to become 'circumspicuous', wanted to see with 'circumambient sight' as it were. He apparently wanted to make 'visual rays [bend] around corners' - which is precisely what happens in an Einsteinian world when space is radically warped around densely packed matter and light rays are trapped in a circular motion that does not permit them to reach our eyes - thus creating holes from which light cannot escape, the 'black' holes that we hear so much about in physics.
Gombrich asks an interesting question: Why is such a project worth trying?
A very good question, indeed. For not only is 'the idea of a simultaneous fore-and-aft image absurd and irrational,' as he points out, 'even if it succeeded, its effect would be either illegible or else a reduction to flat processed data - departing further than ever from its goal, the total grasp.'
It is unjust to look at cubism 'mainly as a device to increase
our awareness of [physical] space,' Gombrich concludes, in his book Art and Illusion, and insofar as that WAS its aim, 'it should be pronounced a failure.' (Gombrich, Art and Illusion, page 283)
In trying to understand the purpose of Picasso's project does it help to point out, as Kandinsky did, that cubism has as its aim the de(con)struction or 'dematerialization' of the object? -
But perhaps it was something more fundamental than either the physical object, or physical space, that Picasso was exploring. Could it be that he was trying to describe a liminocentrically structured experiential space? We submit that it was primarily as a result of his attempt to do this - not only in cubism, but in his pre-cubist serpentination experiments, and his post-cubist explorations of interpenetrating orders - that modern art can be said to have discovered more complex, less linear, relationships between figure and ground. And this, in particular, is what makes his project both 'significant' and 'worth trying'.
It was Picasso's early efforts in this area that paved the way for
others. Take, as an example, the manner in which Escher (1898-1972) later employed figure/ground reversals (such as in the painting below). Each of the two different types of object (the white and black bird) emerges out of the other, as paradoxical as this might at first appear. And each is somehow made to 'include' or envelope the other - provide a context, a setting or 'set', against the background of which the other appears.
In this way context and object are made to overlap in complex and curious ways, reminiscent of how Braque defined cubism. 'Frames in flight',
he called it.
In earlier art,' Gombrich explains, 'the figure had to stand out unambiguously against the ground.' But in cubism, 'even coherent forms are made to play hide-and-seek in the elusive tangle of unresolved ambiguities.' (237). 'The function of representational clues in cubist paintings is not to inform us about guitars and apples,' Gomrich correctly observes, 'nor to stimulate our tactile sensations.' Their function is 'to narrow down the range of possible interpretations till we are forced to accept the flat pattern with all its tensions'. (286)
And it is the 'frequent reversals' of figure and ground in cubism that have the result of 'forcing out attention' to a plane on which those tensions are brought starkly into relief and must continue to abide - unresolved at it were, if we are to believe Gombrich. Our attention is not permitted
to come to rest in the spaces created by cubism. It is kept moving, in the same way that the whirling pattern in certain Roman floor mosaics set us 'searching for a point of rest from which to start interpreting,' he points out. But we cannot find it. [For an analysis of a similar effect, caused by the meditational diagram that is called the Shri Yantra, see The Enneagram as Classic 'Double Mandala' - Part II - Shri Yantra, Kabbalah, and Inner Alchemy.]
Our only recourse, in such a case - is to accept the tension, learn to remain within it. This is not unlike the position the Jungian psychotherapeutic patient finds himself in when encouraged to stew in the juices of his own diametrically opposing psychological 'sides'. But why? Because eventually this forces one to stand back far enough from the problem to break frame, and assume a slightly 'wider' perspective - a perspective in which the double-binding nature of the cues (in the painting, the relationship, or experience in general) can finally be acknowledged, allowing one to step out of the double-bind. By doing this one steps
out of the framework which encourages one to naively seek resolution at a 'lower' level of description, where it is simply not possible. One is thereby hurled into a 'higher level' synthesis, which not only acknowledges contradiction, but INCORPORATES it, as paradox, into the very scheme of things. [See the section on 'integration' in About Face for further discussion of what such a synthesis entails.]
The paradoxes that Escher presents, for instance, are not just attempts to entertain us with pictures of an alternate world constructed according to some strange non-Euclidean geometry. If they do surprise and entertain it is precisely because they seem to offer us a direct SUBJECTIVE experience of what living within a world constructed according to such a geometry would be like. They also - and this is perhaps even more significant - awaken in us the hunch that this is what our PRESENT world, at some very profound level of description, is really like. And not merely because the physical world, the 'world out there', is structured in such a bizarre manner, but because consciousness itself - the awareness with which we apprehend the world - is so structured.
The kind of figure-ground organization that is depicted in these
pictures - one in which figure stands ultimately in a PARADOXICAL relationship to ground - calls into question our everyday assumptions
about how our experience is structured. 11 It does this in a way that is of course similar to the way in which Einsteinian physics calls into question our assumptions about the shape of physical space. But these paintings are more than second-hand representations of a strangely ordered physical world. They are, in effect, the traces left behind by human beings in their attempt to express the paradox that is at the CENTER of consciousness, built into its very structure.
Modern art is not about optics, or even about how we REPRESENT the physical space in which our seeing takes place. It is about consciousness, and the shape of the EXPERIENTIAL space (if we are might be permitted to call it that) in which consciousness exists. It is the structure of THAT space which attracted the attention of the Modern artist, and it was the Modern artist who pioneered the investigation of the inter-relationships that obtain between its dimensions.
In this way twentieth century art, although it may indeed have prefigured
twentieth century physics in a rather startling manner, might nevertheless best be conceived as having anticipated (and, indeed, inspired) the twenty-first century psychology toward which we are now headed - one in which consciousness, and its complex and paradoxical structures, will take center stage.
1. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, 1972, (New York: Oxford University Press).
2. The dream in question is Jung's famed 'liverpool' dream.
Jung began painting mandalas in 1918, near the end of the six year
period in which he 'confronted' his 'unconscious'. About the liverpool
dream he says: 'After this dream I gave up drawing and painting mandalas.
The dream depicted the climax of the whole process of development
of consciousness. It satisfied me completely, for it gave
me a total picture of my situation.'
Why was the dream fulfilling? How did it represent the
'climax of the whole process of development of consciousness'?
Jung is somewhat vague on this point in his autobiography, and
the dream is not, on its surface, terribly remarkable.
In the dream Jung found himself in London, in a town square around which the quarters of the city were arranged. At the center of the square was
a pool, in which there was an island, with a single tree. His companions in the dream commented on the 'other' Swiss who lived in the
vicinity. 'I know very well why he has settled here,' Jung thought
to himself in the dream, and then awoke.
Jung comments -
On the significance of this detail, Jung does not comment.
But it is obvious to anyone who has been sensitized to
what a liminocentric structure is that this is precisely what
is being represented in the dream - for at the very center of the island,
one finds the island, as a whole, appearing as a small replica!
It is rather remarkable that Jung does not comment on
the meaning of this structural feature. And in the very next
sentence he makes an assertion about the dream's
structure that is actually ANTITHETICAL to what
is implied by liminocentric structures. He says,
'one could not go beyond the center'. But in a liminocentrically
organized space one is not only capable of going beyond the center
(or, more accurately perhaps, 'through' the center), by doing
so one winds up at the structures outermost fringe!
Although Jung was apparently able to FEEL the importance of what
this dream was showing him, he apparently resisted KNOWING what
it was that was trying to emerge - namely, an insight into the
quintessentially liminocentric structure of awareness.
Jung could never have thought of consciousness itself as structured
in a paradoxical manner, by the way, since he embraced a model of consciousness that would have prevented him from doing so - the one that Evans and Fudjack called the 'spotlight' model, which was
not only the prevailing one at that time, but has remained the
dominant model throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.
So on those occasions on which Jung had glimmerings
of the significance of paradoxical mental structures, he had no recourse but to speak of them as if they belonged to the 'psyche', something
much wider and more inclusive than consciousness per se.
This locates such structures outside of the scope of conscious experience. They no longer need be, in such a view, subjectively experiencable
structures. For further discussion of the difference between these two approaches, see footnote 1 in "Enneagram as Mandala - Part I - Ego, Self, and Liminocentric Structures".
3. Leonard Shlain's intriguing thesis, that art anticipates emerging ideas in science, is articulated at length in his book Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light [1991, (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc.)].
'Repeatedly throughout history', he says, 'the artist introduces symbols and icons that in retrospect prove to have been an avant-garde for the thought patterns of a scientific age not yet born.' The ideas that art anticipates, according to Shlain, are the ideas that constitute science's view of 'reality' (page 19).
It was at the beginning of the 20th century that physics was on the brink of a new era, and socalled 'modern' art was at its height. Whether or not it be true that shifts in scientific views of reality are ALWAYS temporally
preceded by anticipatory movements in the arts, interesting parallel
developments do at certain points appear to occur in these seemingly unrelated arenas. Perhaps both fields manifest larger shifts taking place at a profound level in the culture in which they were embedded. One such profound shift - affecting physics, art (... and also political reality,
if we are to widen the scope of Shlain's thesis) did seem to occur in the
early 1900s.
In his book Shamanism and the Modern Artist: Technicians of Ecstasy [1993, (Connecticut: Bramble Books)] Mark Levy attempts to show how the modern artist (and for him, this includes contemporary late-twentieth century artists) uses shamanic practices to enter non-ordinary realities. Levy's thesis intrigues, because the purpose with which the original shaman entered such realms was to heal. Contemporary Jungians delight in comparing Jung's methodology to shamanism, and Levy's thesis, by connecting art with shamanism, bridges the apparent gap between modern art and Jungian thought - lending further credence to our thesis that modern art foreshadowed Jungian psychology.
4. There are some very good sociological reasons for the fact that the parallel between science and modern art is not more widely recognized. For one thing, neither Jung nor Einstein appreciated modern art, and both resisted having their work compared to what was simultaneously going on in the art world.
Although Jung knew nothing about modern art (and stubbornly insisted, late into his life, that he WANTED to know nothing about it), this did not prevent him from writing, in 1932, a scathing review of the 1932 Picasso retrospective. His analysis interpreted characteristic features of the artist's work as expressions of mental illness. This essay, in turn, brought Jung's knowledge of art under severe and vociferous criticism from representatives of the art world. Art critic Herbert Read would have known about this incident - to which he
gently alludes when he remarks, in his 1942 book on art and Jungian typology (reviewed in About Face), that 'if Dr Jung had been [more] familiar with modern types of abstract art' he would have been able, in his book, Psychological Types, to give illustrations 'of a more definite nature' with respect to the Types of contemporary artists (page 103).
Jung tended to stress HARMONY in the mandala (and in art in general) - as opposed to focusing on its paradoxical essence (as we have done, in The Enneagram as Classic 'Double Mandala' - Part II - Shri Yantra, Kabbalah, and Inner Alchemy) It was paradox, of course, which the Modern artist (and Picasso in particular) sought to explore. Jung found the presence of paradox in Picasso's work, as he admits in his 1932 essay, 'disturbing'. For these and other reasons of a personal psychological nature that we have dealt with in detail in another work, Jung failed to give the modern art movement the credit it deserved.
In his attitude toward modern art Jung was in good company. Leonard Shlain argues that Einstein also had little or no interest in modern art, and did not appreciate or understand it (Shlain, page 201). Principal amidst the
evidence that he provides in support of this claim, Shlain cites a 1934 observation made by Einstein, expressing a sentiment similar to the one articulated two years earlier by Jung -
According to Shlain, Linda Dalrymple Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art is the book on this subject that is most impeccably researched. It was she who convincingly documented the fact, according to Shlain, 'that Cubist artists did not know anything about Minkowski's spacetime continuum, and that allusions in artistic literature to a fourth dimension are references to a fourth SPATIAL dimension'. Nevertheless, Shlain contends, despite the virtual absence of contact between the two fields, and the discrepancy regarding the specific nature of the fourth dimension, 'nowhere was [the] conjunction between revolutionary art and visionary physics sharper than the intersection of Einstein's relatively theory and Picasso and Braque's Cubism...' (Shlain, pages 202-203)
[For more on this subject, see footnote #6, below.]
5. It can also be argued that Picasso, who was a major influence on Dadaism and Surrealism, was a principle vehicle for carrying the NF 'Romantic' and 'Symbolist' movements of the 19th century forward into the 20th century.
6. Nadia Choucha, Surrealism & the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, and the Birth of an Artistic Movement, 1991, (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books), page 28.
7. In the 1870s the German physicist Helmholtz had popularized the notion of an n-dimensional 'non-Euclidean' space. Nevertheless, as Shlain points out, 'Speculation about a higher dimension had no real meaning for most people because they could not see in their mind's eyes a new dimension of space that was perpendicular to the three of our familiar world. Looking at the corner of a room where the three perpendicular lines of adjoining walls and ceiling intersect dramatically concentrates the problem: Where would one insert a fourth perpendicular?' (For a very similar point, made recently by a contemporary string theorist, see A Conversation with Physicist Brian Greene). In 1880, mathematician E.A. Abbott published a novel entitled Flatland, in which a fictitious two-dimensional character is transported into a three-dimensional realm. Abbott's tale, as Shlain points out, encourages beings who live in a three-dimensional sphere to imagine what living in a four-dimensional reality would be like.
8. Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, 1959, (New York: Noonday Press).
9. The opening of the 'Cabaret Voltaire' in Zurich in February of 1916 marks the beginning of the Dadaist movement. The poster for the event adverstizes 'An evening with music, dance, manifestos, poetry, verses, paintings, masks and costumes presented by Hugo Ball 1886-1927), Emmy Hennings, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, Georges Janco and Hans Arp (1887-1966). In 1916 Jung lived not far from the Zurich cabaret. He was in the middle of his 6 year period of introverted intuitive activities. He had not yet begun painting mandalas, and it would be years before Psychological Types would appear.
10. This passage implies that these artists were also on a similar path to the one Jung investigated when, much later in his career, he would turn his attention to an investigation of what he called 'synchronicity'.
11. Steinberg continues: "Only one final wrench needed to establish the simultaneity image as a conjunction of diametric opposites. And it comes, beginning in mid-1940 - women's heads as instant convergences of front and back. ... The problem of front and back simultaneity is thus turned back-to-front. Instead of starting with the conceptually familiar frontface and wrenching the sides into view, Picasso now starts at the rear,
which we tend to regard as provisionally averted, then brings the more readily welcomed elements of the facade around. Henceforth the full diametric span, the simultaneity of antipodal aspects, is the minimum program." (page 207)
'Escher's greatest fame stems from his clever manipulation of the elements of perspective,' says Shlain (237)-
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in the Renaissance and remained a staple of official art. It comes as a surprise to discover that this late Hellenistic invention survives into the twentieth century as no other antique has been able to do. The Three Graces inspire Gauguin, Matisse, Delauney, Maillol, Lehmbruck, and Braque. They are constant in Picasso's oeuvre where, from 1905 onward, they reappear in almost every period. It was their two-dimensional about-face routine which allowed the Three Graces to survive the flattening of twentieth-century art. (Steinberg, pages 179-180)
the profound and paradoxical nature of which we have described 
