August 13, 2005
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Kaleidoscope, continued:
Austere Geometry
From Noel Gray, The Kaleidoscope: Shake, Rattle, and Roll:
“… what we will be considering is how the ongoing production of meaning
can generate a tremor in the stability of the initial theoretical frame
of this instrument; a frame informed by geometry’s long tradition of
privileging the conceptual ground over and above its visual
manifestation. And to consider also how the possibility of a seemingly
unproblematic correspondence between the ground and its extrapolation,
between geometric theory and its applied images, is intimately
dependent upon the control of the truth status ascribed to the image by
the generative theory. This status in traditional geometry has been
consistently understood as that of the graphic ancilla– a maieutic
force, in the Socratic sense of that term– an ancilla to lawful
principles; principles that have, traditionally speaking, their primary
expression in the purity of geometric idealities.* It follows that the
possibility of installing a tremor in this tradition by understanding
the kaleidoscope’s images as announcing more than the mere
subordination to geometry’s theory– yet an announcement that is still
in a sense able to leave in place this self-same tradition– such a
possibility must duly excite our attention and interest.* I refer here to Plato’s utilisation in the Meno of graphic austerity as
the tool to bring to the surface, literally and figuratively, the
inherent presence of geometry in the mind of the slave.”See also
Noel Gray, Ph.D. thesis, U. of Sydney, Dept. of Art History and Theory, 1994:
“The Image
of Geometry: Persistence qua Austerity– Cacography and The Truth to Space.”
