JF Ptak Science Books – A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

Things Out Of Place Department: Ledoux’s Architecture of Multiple Planets
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A Cosmology Seeded in Salt?

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?–Sherlock Holmes

I’ve written a little earlier in this blog about the beautiful Claude-Nicolas-Ledoux (1736 —1806) being the 18th century Marcel Duchamp (or vice versa). I was struck by this image by the master–a depiction of the Earth nestled in clouds amongst other planets in exceptionally close proximity. There was evidently very little explanation to go along with this idea, except that it was inspired by his utopian plan for the saltworks of the factory-village at Chaux. On the face of it there seems to be no physical connection between the two–it must be the philosophical connection that Ledoux was thinking about. From my point of view the idea for the city of Chaux was of course idealistic, perfect, communal, with a vast sense of fairness and correctness, and of great sensibility. It was a “gathering of brothers” as Ledoux wrote, a city of lodges of workers, gathered together for mutual profit.

Perhaps this vision of cushioned planets was a larger expression by Ledoux of heavenly gratuity?

Anthony Vidler points out (in his book The Writing of the Walls) that Ledoux described his utopian Chaux as a “galaxy of…utopian forms” (page 101). Since Ledoux also described the architect as the “delegate of the Creator”, perhaps he reverse-engineered a cosmology describing a mutually beneficial community of planets from a community of brotherhood gathered around the (admittedly important in 1780) production of salt.

Or perhaps not–this may just be way to simple and, well, just wrong.

NOTE: I do just want to point out here (and discuss at another
time) that Ledoux was by no means the first to describe multiple-world
systems. One of the prettiest of the earlier attempts, for example,
belongs to Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle who published this
delightful rendition of an extra solar-systemic galaxy in 1682 in his Entretriens sur la pluralite des mondes. This
sort of thinking was somewhat well-established by the time Ledoux
offered his idea around the time of the turn of the 18th century.

Should we not come to the rescue of a cosmic phenomenon trying to reveal itself in a sea of errors? Peter van de Kamp (1983)

For a beautiful romp, have a look at Ledoux’s L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législatio. I’ve included a short list of projects (with links) in the expanded reading section below.
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Architecture and Building — Astronomy — Outsider Logic
An Unusual View: Looking into the Past and the Future–St. Quentin, 1917

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This lovely, seemingly antique daguerreian view is what the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) commander General JJ Pershing saw at the front lines of St. Quentin in July 1917. The U.S. had entered the war, finally, on April 2 1917, nearly three years after the war began, landing in France 13 June 1917 and entering almost immediately into battle at Chateau-Thierry. On 2 July Pershing estimated that the U.S. would need a million fighting men; the day that this photo was published in The Illustrated London News, he revised that estimate to three million. The view he was seeing here was more than of a town about to be pounded by thousands of artillery shells–the magazine was sharing a view of what the European and Empire countries had been seeing for 31 months, and what the Americans would now be sharing for another 17 months.

It is a beautiful and deadly view, seen through French field binoculars at the tip of the front for the battle. The large building to the right is the town’s Gothic cathedral/collegiate masterpiece: it was old and large, with a 370-foot-long and 130-foot-high nave. It was a highpoint for that part of France, and was the burying place for St. Quentin and St. Victorious–their graves would be covered by the rubble of the cathedral’s collapsed roof very soon after this picture was taken. The building was shelled and burned all night long–the French blaming the Germans and vice versa.

If Pershing had really good sight he might’ve been able to see the 116,000 American soldiers who would be killed in battle, though I suspect he had a pretty good idea of what was to come, thinking as he did that he need 3 million soldiers. To be utterly fair I don’t think that he could’ve possibly seen in his imagination what 9 million dead soldiers looked like, or what 16 million dead soldiers and civilians looked like, or what 37 million dead and wound soldiers and civilians looked like, all the casualties of this war, all done in 4 years.

I’ve found it odd in a way that I’ve not really been able to explain that Pershing is buried so very close to Ira Hamilton Hayes at Arlington. I used to leave a good twig on Jackson’s headstone on Memorial Day, and then get that unusual, uncomfortable emotion on seeing the large Pershing monument just a few hundred feet away.

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Future, History of the — Militaria — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Strange Things in the Sky Department: the Alchemical Cosmology, 1618

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Well. There’s a simple ton of complexity going on in this difficult, famous print by the
great Mathias Merian—its like a moving puzzle to me, complicated by the
virtually changing size of its pieces. There’s
just too much in it that I don’t understand, too much archaeo-religico-alchemical
bubbly going on for me to make much deep sense of it all. I do like that it is all coming from the sky,
though, which is why I’ve selected it for this continuing series

The engraving, Tabula Smaradina (“Emerald Tablet”) is
Merian’s interpretation of the alchemical cosmology, a schemata and representation of the order of
things. It appears (first) in Johann
Daniel Mylius Tractatus III Seu Basilica Philosophica… (1618) and makes
subsequent appearances in other works by the author, as well as in Lukas Jennis’
Musaeum Hermeticum (1625, see below).

Basically, the Emerald Tablet shows the opening of a
complex heaven and the delivering of the philosopher’s stone to the earth. It is a magnificent effort and no doubt has a
great power to alchemists, and I can understand only a bit and a piece here and
there. For example, in the bottom right,
we see a couple of people holding a((n) eclipsed?) Moon, standing on the wings
of an eagle which protects a double hemispheric representation of the
constellations. The figure on the right
is a naked woman, who may well represent Luna: her right breast is a star, and from her
armpit is a streaming torrent of stars which comes close into contact with
shrubs labeled with the astrological signs of the planets. The cluster of grapes in her right hand and
the stream that she is straddling must indicate a generation, or a birth, or
rebirth, or time, or the universe. Luna
is connected via something to the heaven-element which in turn is connected on
the left sign of the print to a man holding a sun, who I guess must be Sol. Heaven and Earth, Brother Sun and Sister
Moon, and so on. From here it all gets
away from me, no that it isn’t gone already.

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Astronomy — Iconography — Perspective
A Proficiency of Insult: a Biting Poem on the Medical Profession, 1736

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“For even they who compose
treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in verse are denominated poets…” Aristotle’s Poetics
[Translated by Thomas Twining, New
York 1957]

Edward Baynard (1641-1719) of London must have been a pinchy/gouty
physician. Or not. Perhaps he was an overdressed, deeply-dimpled
fop. Or perhaps he was skinnily
invisible, a plain, vanishing custard of a man, scrupulously clean and who
saved all money, deeply in love with his chambermaid, sleeping on a mattress of
gold.

But what he
was a definite cynic, occasionally cranky to his own reaching profession. His poem, Health, a Poem, Shewing How to Procure,
Preserve and Restore It, was a best-selling book, reaching at least
ten editions during his lifetime. It evidently contained a number of frugal
dispensations on achieving health, most of which involved purging. Or sweating. Or vomiting.
Such was the state of the art, much like our own when viewed from the
year 2109. (I overheard a conversation
this morning in a hot dusty field, a physician saying that we would never simply
ingest a plil that would render us a new liver.
Well. How would the
contemporaries of the newly discovered X-Ray have viewed the peek into the
future of the “discovery” of DNA in 1953, only 59 years later? And what about the enormous difference in the
state of medicine and imaging capacities in the 56 years since then? Phenomenal.
It would be nearly impossible to say what developments in medicine await
the grandkids in their late years? Or in
300 years? Hypo-livers in Dixie cups, I say.)

Returning
to Dr. Baynard—he summarized the ten most important words and concepts in
medicine in the second poem of his book, as follows. He held little in
reserve.

“For some
of the ten are always advised:

Piss,
spew and spit

Perspiration
and sweat

Purge,
bleed and blister

Issues
and clyster

These few
enunciations

Cure all
the doctor’s patients

If
rightly applied

By a wise
physic guide”

Indeed.

[“Clyster” is
an enema; “an ‘issue’ refers to
the Galenic practice of creating an infection at some designated spot on
the body because of the belief that some kind of ‘sympathy’ between the illness
and the localized pool of pus would draw the illness out of the body”. ]

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Bad Ideas — Medicine, History of
The Anatomy of Comparison Department: HMS Ships Firing On London, 1909

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HMS Ships Firing On London,
1909, Old vs. New Comparing Shipboard
Firepower: a Compelling Comparative Graphic Display from the Illustrated London News for 24 July 1909

Without looking at the sub-title and explanation of this of this print (“Firing
from Thames Mouth to the Edge of Greater
London”) its purpose might be a fair mystery, given the ships and the targets
and all. The two large ships at bottom are a Dreadnaught Class battleship and a
(smaller) King Edward Class ship, and, yes, they are firing towards London—but they
are doing so to illustrate a point on modern weaponry and the vast, new
superiorities of British advances in the death/protection arts.

In June 1667 during the Second Anglo-Dutch War the British were set upon by
an running attack by the Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, who had advanced as
far up and into the coast as the mouth of the Thames. The Dutch advance up the Thames was repulsed,
though their secondary targets (so to speak) at Gravesend
and the River Medway proved a scorching defeat for the British, and propelled
the rocky war to a quick peace favorable to the Dutch.

This image shows what could’ve been the results of that engagement at
Gravesend had the Dutch fleet been outfitted with the HMS’ new 12-inch guns—de Ruyter
would’ve been able to reach the outskirts of London from that position, and
could’ve b=done so from a distance of 25 miles or so. Of course the artist and
editor aren’t really suggesting a “what if” scenario to the course of events of
the Second Dutch War—they were merely creating a very compelling, highly
illustrative comparison from old to new firepower, and to perhaps quite some fears
about the strength of the Navy as the unstable and rickety international system
limped its way into WWI, just five years in the future.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Statistics–Fossil, Found, Odd, Forgotten
Outsider Logic Department: Earth Clocks, Ocean Spigots, and Mystery Exhausts

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 597

Several years ago I purchased a very large collection of pamphlets of the Library of Congress. It was all housed in 2400 blue document boxes, all the document boxes were labeled and neatly ordered. The problem was that the classification scheme really didn’t relate to one thing in particular, and the judgment which set one pamphlet in a box wasn’t the same through and through—the alphabetization could have related to author or title or region or keyword or publisher. In short, each box was an adventure—and a lovely, bizarre one at that.

It may be a unique one, too. The one thing that really did hold this thing together as a collection was that the vast majority of the pamphlets were not located in any other libraries in any part of the world. Now for many of them it was probably okay for the work to slip into a bliblio-singularity, but for thousands and thousands of others, it was a good save.

And here’s the larger rub: as I classified and segregated the pamphlets into the “normal” areas of interest, I also started a pile of good-god-what-is-it pamphlets. The GGWII material was extraordinary—some had fantastic covers (and which many times was the most interesting thing about the publication), some had extreme titles, some had ludicrous subject matter, and some were just, well, bizarre. As the GGWII pile grew into the low thousands, I started to box them for a rainy day project, because I frankly didn’t want to deal with them. Some of the pamphlets’ covers/subject/title were rather mundane, pedestrian things when they were originally published; however, the high-winded sands of time ripped the flesh from this commonness, making them somewhat unapproachable, unknowable, and incredible–this group was called The Naïve Surreal . A subset of this group are works that were not approachable and enveloped by their own unique needs from the day they were born; pamphlets made of the stuff of incomplete dreams and adventurous vocabulary—the Outsider Logic group.

The Naïve Surreal has all manner of representatives: pamphlets with just question marks or exclamation points as the title, or histories of unknown things, or beginning with “The Story of ______ “ [mud/zippers/a stone/a bubble/etc]. You get the picture. The Outsider Logic pamphlets are really very difficult to categorize—perhaps that is their unintended job.

Today’s emergent beauty from the Outsider Logic collection is .A. Alles Suggest theory The Clock of the Earth, printed in Pug, Pa., in 1935. This pamphlet is only 18 pages long but I just couldn’t read it.

Here’s why: the first sentence reads:

“The Clock of the Earth represents strange matter from inner-stellar space collected and compounded at the equator which accurately controls the revolutions of the seasons…”

It goes on but I just can’t type it out. Sometimes there is a benefit to reading the Outsider Logic pamphlets, and sometimes the benefit is knowing the cover.

Mr. Alles’ cover is striking and deeply inscrutable, as you can see. Somehow there is a system for the hour hand there at the equator, but it is mainly a secret, even though it is explained. Why the geographic locations are printed in the white space surrounding the earth and connected to Addis Ababa, the Nile, Gizeh and the Great Petrified Forest and placed the way they are and connected to the equator clock will have to stand as art rather than explanation.

Most of the time superior, deeply-removed art like this cover is disappointed by the textual counterpart. Mr. Alles may not disappoint with his writing, though. He ends the book beginning the last paragraph with this:

“Four thousand years ago the open spigot on the equator at longitude thirty-one degrees east of Greenwich , flowing directly to the pyramids in Gizeh…. “ Then there’s something about “exhaust flow”. Again, as I said, I just can’t penetrate this work. I’m happy enough with the art, forever open to interpretation.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Outsider Logic
Missing People: Flerov, Nuclear Fission, and the Development of the Bomb

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In the history of science there are a number of instances where discoveries
get passed by, or un-noticed, or un- (or under-) appreciated. Gregor Mendel’s 1865/6 paper embodying the
discovery of genetics didn’t get noticed (for real) until 1899. The Alpher-Gamow-Herman paper (1948)
postulating the background radiation for the Big Bang went unnoticed even after
Penzias and Wilson found it (by accident) right where it was supposed to
be. And so on. There’s another whole category of names
associated with discoveries that have faded into obscurity even though their
idea has not: Walter Pitts (neural
networks), Vannevar Bush (the internet), Michael Servetus (pulmonary circulation,
Rosalind Franklin (DNA), Robert Hooke (too much to mention), and so trippingly
on.

I had this second category in mind while grazing through the year 1940 in
the Physical Review. I came across a
very significant paper—a paper of exceptionally high standing, of direct
interest to hundreds of working nuclear physicists—that, after publication,
became invisible—or actually publicly invisible. The problem was that it was also of very high
interest to the war effort, and it was published by a Russian. By a Soviet.
The paper was by G.N. Flerov and K.A. Petrzhak (Spontaneous fission of uranium volume 58, page 89, 1940), and it addressed isotopes
U-238, U-235 and U-234 and the influence of neutrons of different energies; their
experiments revealed a new type of nuclear transmutation and observed the world’s first occurrence of spontaneous
fission. And this of course was a big
deal because of the military applications of the continuing series of
discoveries on nuclear fission, and so the paper—as monumental as it was—passed
without comment and without notice. Not
because the paper didn’t merit it, of course, but because the powers that be
thought it most prudent not to tip the very secret developmental hand of
creating an atomic bomb.

Years later in his book The Advisers, Oppenheimer, Teller and the Superbomb,
Herbert York recorded the thoughts of Igor Golovin, who supported the work of
Kurchatov who sponsored the research of Flerov and Petrazhak: “the complete lack of any American response
to the subject of this discovery was one of the foundations which convinced the
Soviets that the Americans were developing the bomb”. As was everyone else, probably.
Peter Kapitza, one of the greatest Russian physicists of the century noted
(on 12 July 1941) that—based on this work— it was entirely possible that a bomb
could be developed that could kill millions of people. And it was right after this that these papers
were no longer published in the Physical Review—for national security
reasons.

There was another reason for not responding to the Soviet paper. On August 14, 1939, Josef Stalin started a letter
so:

To the chancellor of
the German Reich, Herr A. Hitler.

And finished it thus:

I thank you for your letter. I hope
that the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact will mark a decisive turn for the
better in the political relations between our two countries. .

J. Stalin

The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was a pretty good reason for not wanting to “share” with the Soviets.

The Soviets wouldn’t see the light until the Nazis ripped off the curtains
with the start of their June 1941 offensive in Operation Barbarossa, beginning
a brutal attack on Mother Russia that wouldn’t end until the Germans where
defeated by Winter. Keeping the Soviets
out of the loop was a good policy decision.

In a way though it may not have mattered. The only country on earth that had the facilities and resources to develop the bomb was the United States–the sheer amount of energy alone would’ve consumed something like the majority of all energy resources needed to fight the conventional war for both the Japanese and the Germans. This list goes well on, but that’s another story.

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Atomic and Nuclear weapons — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
French Visionary Architects–Boullee, Ledoux, Lequeu

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I’ve been collecting images by some of the great, visionary architects of 18th century France: Etienne Boullee (1728-1799), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) and the semi-impossible Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1737-1825). It was a tough time for these architects to see far into the future at the time of the Revolution, as people who were even less deserving than these men lost their heads. In any event I’ve compiled a short three minute video exhibiting some of their works, using the music of Wim Mertens for Peter Greenaway’s love poem to M. Boullee called The Belly of an Architect. I couldn’t but help using this music in this context, sorry to say–it just goes perfectly with these images. (Also, I’ve written about M. Ledoux here.)

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

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Architecture and Building
Common Views of the Uncommon–Non-Combatant Photography in WWI

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There are many histories of photography in wartime: early images show cavalry standing at the
ready, troops marching, piles of munitions, heaps of food; later on (as late as
WWI) come actual scenes during the course of battle. War photography changes forever beginning in
the Spanish Civil War, and then of course WWII.

Korea, Vietnam,
and then into the more recent past elevates the camera to being a third-person
and fifth column.

Looking through the WWI years in the Illustrated
London News I experienced a creeping realization of a different sort of
perspective in war photography: turning
the camera to look behind the battle.

Turning the camera exactly around, away from the action, hasn’t a good
history in itself. There are some great
examples: when the Golden Spike was
driven at Promontory Point in 1869 someone had the foresight to look the other
way and make a photo—it shows a vast plain, a long double ribbon of rail, a
long series of telephone poles receding into the horizon, and one man. It is
also a scene that looks pretty much the same today, if you took away the small
dedication center that is there. That
was the reality of the day, not all of those RR workers gathered around the two
hot locomotives, the cleanest of them toasting each other and the camera. (If
you look closely you can find some Chinese laborers in among the crowd and also
occasional bits of Confederate uniforms.)
Elsewhere in this blog I told the story of Ed Clark, the LIFE
magazine photographer who wheeled his camera away from where the hundreds of
other cameras were recording the removal of Franklin Roosevelt’s casket from Hot Springs and made
perhaps the greatest photograph of the FDR years.

But it is a different sort of turn-around that struck me for WWI. These are the photographs of the liminal
spaces after the fight, the clean up, the gathering of spent ammo, the cleaning
of the clothing, the care of the soldiers, the rehabilitation. And I’m not talking
about the Matthew Brady after-battle battlefield photograph style. What I’m referring to is all of the “little”
things that happen when the battles aren’t being fought and the troops weren’t
on the move. There some images for thing that appeared in Harper’s Weekly and
Frank Leslie and so on during the U.S. Civil War, but so far as I can tell the
vast majority of them are drawings.
Having looked through popular illustrated magazines that covered the
Franco-Prussian War, the Spanish American War and all of the conflicts
in-between, I just don’t have much of a sense at all that this life was
recorded very well photographically.

I can understand this—there’s not that much glory in sandbagging Red Cross
stations, or hauling away dead horses by the thousands, or cooking thousands of
loaves of bread in primitive conditions; they certainly aren’t a good case for
a hearts-and-minds campaign. The camera
has enough power to go ‘round, giving and taking, usually at the same
time.

But to my brain these photographs really come into being in the second half
of WWI., and they tell an other, integral, more human story of that same war. The first image (above) shows two soldiers
cleaning up cartridge cases after a fight—when you look closely at the photo
you see that the place is littered with those cases. I suspect that there were hundreds of
millions of these cases ejected from rifles.
Billions, probably. I wonder how
long it would take a thousand soldiers to shovel a billion shells into canvas
bags? The picture reveals a very deep
image of the ways of war at the most basic level.

The next photo is a “simple” image of clothing out for a dry—except of
course that the clothing lines go on and on, railroad tracks into the sun,
tended by hundreds of women, getting the shirts ready for the “men in the trenches”, many of whom won’t need those shirts by the
end of the month.

Many of these men and women wound up being consumed–this photo at right shows one of the ways how that happened. It is an extraordinary crater some 75 yards in circumference created by a massive shell. It is a massive image–brutal, lonely, and speaking the quiet of the end. And it was a different sort of image that people were used to seeing in war reporting.

These three photos appeared on only three successive pages of the 15 October 1917 issue of the Illustrated London News.

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Militaria — Photography, history
Return to the Poem-amatic: Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist Poetry Engine
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 530

Each thing we see hides something else we want to see.
–Rene Magritte

I am very fond of images like this–images that show us everything and nothing. The engraving was meant to show some of the ephemeral antique bric-a-brac collected by whatever collector was currently residing at Chantilly. Remove that explanation, and the meaning of the engraving goes spinning into whatever space you open for it. It is a wonderful thing to open these dis-associated image combinatorics to free interpretation, each viewer finding their own meaning in a mysteriously composed components.

This of course was an unintentional artifact of the artist and engraver. Images like this–confusing, anti-intuitive, misleading–weren’t constructed to be so (at least not in a major and determined way) until the arrival of the Dadaists in the 20th century. This was a short-lived, proto-archaic (?) group with a confusing history, a tumultuous existence, and a short and sure ending. They were disengaging from the avant garde to form a group that went somewhat beyond*

(Even the naming of the group is a story of unusual ripeness and spoilage, no one being able to tell the truth of how it came into being. Suffice to say that “dada” either was or wasn’t found by an accidental grazing through Larousse by Tristan Tzara in February 1916. At least Hans Arp tells this as the true story, saying too that he was there, along with his 12 children and a brioche in his left nostril. Anyway the naming doesn’t seem to matter terribly much to a group like this that disposed of and twisted names proper and otherwise.)

An example of a Dadaist work is at right, by Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919)

The Dadaists, born in the Cafe Voltaire, were interested first in the written arts, and didn’t move to painting and the plastics for a couple of years. The first among these creative equals was probably Tristan Tzara (born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro, 1896–1963) who was first a writer and poet before an artist. True to the Dadaist great non-existent history, Tzara set forth a method of constructing poetry. It was basically an engine for a simultaneous poem, as in the “bruitist” Futurists tradition, which built upon the work of Hugo Ball, who in turn was the inventor of the sound poem (Lautgedicht). And so tongue deep in cheek, Tzara set forth these principles:

To make a Dadaist poem:

Take a newspaper.

Take a pair of scissors.

Choose an article as long as
you are planning to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Then cut out each of the
words that make up this article and put them in a bag.

Shake it gently.

Then take out the scraps one
after the other in the order in which they left the bag.

Copy conscientiously.

The poem will be like you.

And here you are a writer,
infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though
beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

(Some few weeks ago I made a post about an automatic poem-making device–the poem-amatic fist micrroscope–a
fun little bit about making poems of ordinary printed pages by
recording what you saw of them in the visual field seen through the
barrel of a semi-closed fist.
Then there is the entry “Poetry from Found-Wordist and Book Pathologist
Mr. Ignatio Norme, Found-Wordist and Page Number Collector (Boston, Mass.;
1923-1988))” in my growing and imaginary museum catalog called Weltin and
Wantin. Mr. Norme constructed poems in
much this same way, except that he stripped his poems out of the lines of his
books. His effort is here, called Primo VI, the Analysis of Man//Fantasies
brillantes (by “the man who found obscure
phi-related connectivity between random word placement, page number and the poetic
ideal”).

Now.
I tried this out, but not with newspaper–rather I did it with Tzara’s instruction itself, and let me tell you, it doesn’t work. There’s just too much left to chance, and, frankly, too many prepositions, too much grunting work.

On the other hand, if you lay out the pieces before you and determine to allow yourself 15 minutes to select a poem from the scattered bits on the table, then the method does stand some sort of chance.
Here’s what I came up with, and it is almost something or other; at least I think that is probably not nothing. In the very least, though, it is a very interesting exercise, trying to get your mind to find a poem in strips of paper. In that way Mr. Tzara was perfectly correct.

(Below is a fragment of Mr. Norme’s work.)

_______

* Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting
point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on
pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for
anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the
foundation for Surrealism.
—Marc Lowenthal, translator’s introduction to Francis Picabia‘s I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation
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Art History — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Revolutions in the Color “Red”: Paul Gauguin and Edwin Hubble

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A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my
mind. Emily Dickinson, 1866

Color expresses something by itself. V. van Gogh

Pure color! You must
sacrifice everything to it… P. Gauguin

Standing in my friends Lucy & Andy Archie’s store, standing near a
window and catching some sun on a cold stinking day, a large red jar cast a
long red shadow along the wall, causing me to think about the color. (It was a
pretty nice shadow.)

Red has turned up as an important color in terms of
patriotic/vitriolic symbolism (as in the revolutions of 1848, Garibaldi,
communism), Aztec cochinealial luxury, important burial dress of the
Cro-magnums, signs of divine favor and
condemnation, Roman red divine, Egyptian danger, royal cinnabar of China ,
Indian bridal dresses, Japanese heroic figures, and on and on (into the lower
realms of red tape, blood red, fire, blind anger, love/passion, evil, crushing
impropriety, and etc.)

Red’s most important contributions, perhaps, at least in
modern times of the past few hundred years or so, comes in the field of art and
science—and its appearance really is pretty monumental, and weirdly
coincidental in their placement in the chronology of Big Important Stuff. The birth of impressionism (with Monet and
the Salon des Refuses), the greatest change in the history of art since the
rediscovery of perspective, and the solidification of spectrum analysis (Bunsen
and Kirchhoff), both occurred around the period of 1859-1863—the great use of
red for both of these developments would come somewhat later, though the red
roots began here.

The achievement of Bunsen and Kirchhoff, started in the
epochal year of 1859 (the same year seeing the publication of the Origin), was
nearly as spectacular as any other scientific achievement of that century. The two men showed—and this would have been
incredible to the mind of the 19^th century—that individual atoms had
their own spectral signature. When the
Englishman William Huggins absorbed their work, he realized immediately (as did
Bunsen and Kirchhoff) that the spectroscope could be turned on the sun and all
the rest of it—the results of the experiments of these three revealed the
elements of what stars were made of, something that must’ve seemed like science
fiction come true. The second part of
the second step* in this fabulous discovery and application came 65 years
later, when American astronomer Edwin Hubble** theorized and proved that the red shift that occur in the spectra
of all galaxies actually (a phenomenon which had been observed for years but
not understood) meant that they were all racing away (at a speed proportional
to their distance, Hubble’s Law) from the Earth—the basis of the Big Bang. Cosmological significances aside, this was
also a big deal for the advancement of color, as it really hadn’t played a very
major part at all in the history of science to this point (excepting the
brilliant occasional bits like Newton’s
Opticks). Color just wasn’t a part of
the great systems and ideas of Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid,
Kepler, Newton
and so on—it just didn’t come into play.

Now, as to the importance of Red in art. It comes for me with Gauguin. Gauguin and his red grass. Red grass doesn’t mean anything today, but in
the early 1880’s, well, red grass was, simply, everything. It was a revolutionary idea to make the idea
of what grass”is” subject to the color that the artist thought was demanded by
it subject, and that all of this was an artistic variable in the control of
each individual interpretation. It
happened right there in the middle of the Impressionist movement, and was the
beginning of the end for representational art, the final blow to which would
not occur until 1911 with Mr. Kandinsky.

This was a lot to blow through in under a thousand words,
and undoubtedly I’ve slandered several good ideas—but I think overall that this
is a reasonable idea, this importance of the color RED. There’s much more to be said about the
Impressionists and a whole bunch more on the absence of color in the history of
science, but that’ll have to come later.

Of no importance but of some smiling interest is the notion
that the paintings that were rejected for exhibition in juried salons (in
France in the 1860’s) and which were used in a new movement and in new “juried”
shows called Salon des Refuses, were all stamped with an “R” on the back of
their canvases.

_______

*the first great advancement coming in the solving of the
so-called “ultraviolet catastrophe”, arriving through the Maxwell equations of
1873 and riding into the quanta of Planck in 1899/1900 (and then to quantum
mechanics).

**Hubble, Edwin, “A Relation
between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae”
(1929) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States
of

America

,
Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 168-173

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Astronomy — Color Theory — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at