Lying in bed this morning, I got to worrying about this image/ drawing/ illustration. It’s from Point and Line to Plane (1926), and is what Kandinsky calls the Urbild, or primordial picture. He asked ‘whether one point is sufficient to create a work of art’ (Lindsay and Vergo, p551). He describes the image as a ‘point in the middle of the surface, which is a square’. He goes on to identify two ‘sounds’, the point and the plane.
His description is as intended, I think, but the image isn’t so clear. Using a similarly imprecise trace (in that the ink on the page bleeds and wobbles onto the texture of the paper, and using a line that matches the quality of the point), the square is ambiguous. At one moment, it’s the theoretical edge of the plane, a non-entity in terms of the intended graphic content of the image; on the other, it becomes a third element, a square drawn onto the paper that also plays against the point and the plane.
As such, the square signifies twice – once as a depiction of the edge of the canvas, board or paper, and for Kandinsky’s purpose a non-entity; and again as another abstract element that is equal to the point and the plane in significance. Kandinsky toys with the reader/ viewer and once again, the border between one thing and another is no simple affair.
Fragment originally written in 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment