June 15, 2007
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Annals of Art Education:
Geometry and Death(continued from Dec. 11, 2006):
J. G. Ballard on "the architecture of death":
"... a huge system of German fortifications that included the Siegfried
line, submarine pens and huge flak towers that threatened the
surrounding land like lines of Teutonic knights. Almost all had
survived the war and seemed to be waiting for the next one, left behind
by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death."-- The Guardian, March 20, 2006
From the previous entry, which provided a lesson in geometry related, if only by synchronicity, to the death of Jewish art theorist Rudolf Arnheim:
"We are going to keep doing this until we get it right."
Here is a lesson related, again by synchronicity, to the death of a Christian art scholar of "uncommon erudition, wit, and grace"-- Robert R. Wark of the
Huntington Library. Wark died on June 8, a date I think of as the
feast day of St. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest-poet of the nineteenth century.From a Log24 entry on the date of Wark's death--
Samuel Pepys on a musical performance (Diary, Feb. 27, 1668):
"When the Angel comes down"
"When the Angel Comes Down, and the Soul Departs," a webpage on dance in Bali:
"Dance is also a devotion to the Supreme
Being.""I went to Bali to a remote village by a volcanic mountain...."
The above three quotations were intended to supply some background for a link
to an entry on Taymor, on what Taymor has called "skewed mirrors," and
on a related mathematical concept named, using a term Hopkins coined,
"inscapes."They might form part of an introductory class in mathematics and art given, like the class of the previous entry, in Purgatory.
Wark, who is now, one imagines, in Paradise, needs no such class. He nevertheless might enjoy listening in.
A guest teacher in
the purgatorial class
on mathematics
and art:
"Is it safe?"
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