The Bliss Engine

Full Transcription:

Good evening.  My name is Jim Blake.  I’m a resident of Redwood City.  I’m an architect, painter, and writer.  I am going to be speaking tonight on a subject that I have been studying for 35 years.  It’s very close to my heart and mind.  It’s a subject that brings together my architectural interests, my interests in painting, history, and philosophy.

My topic tonight is a mechanism I have developed to unite a broad array of ideas.  why am I interested in this topic?  We’re going to be discussing one of the key elements of the history of postmodernism.

Most thinkers that I have encountered—architects, artists, art historians and philosophers have not traced the origins of postmodernism back more than about 40 or 50 years.

I am asserting that the key roots of postmodernism are one hundred years old.  This  lecture series, of six sessions, celebrates the centennial of the birth of postmodernism.  I have set the birth of postmodernism 50 years further back than other academics, scholars, architects, philosophers.  What have I discovered that would set the birth of postmodernism back 50 years further than accepted notions?

Well, to give you a little background on my education and how that ties into tonight’s topic, I studied architecture at the University of Washington. I studied art at the University of Washington as well and continued my studies at Harvard University where I received a Master’s Degree in Architecture and had an excellent architecture theory course taught by Professor Werner Seligman.  He was a renowned architect and architecture theorist in America during the 1970s and 1980s.  A statement he made while introducing his course was that “an architect practicing today cannot not know Cubism ” and I thought, “Wow, here I am in architecture school, I had been painting for the past 25 years, loved to paint and here I am at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and this renowned professor is referring to an historic painting movement as something that every architect has got to know.  This was exciting to me.  This was something that I had the knowledge and experience to explore.  I could discover the  elements of  Cubism that makes it important to architects.

Soon after earning my degree, I started painting very intensely for a year.  During that time, I was exploring Cubism.  This is the Cubism of Picasso and Braque that they had developed in the early years of the 20th century.  It had always been mysterious to me.  It’s that style where the subject matter is jumbled up.  It’s as though you smashed the lens of a camera and took a photograph using this distorted lens.  It was jarring to me as a high school student  but here I was in my early 20’s, I had time on my hands.  I had paints and canvas.  It was time to explore, really dig in and try to find out what it is that makes Cubism tick.  What are Cubism’s secrets?  What aspects of Cubism make it important to architects?  Over  the course of the next year, I felt that I understood reasonably well what Cubism was, what was going on, how it related to traditional painting methods, traditional ways of seeing—

Another big question since high school was “Why do we admire Paul Cézanne’s work so much?” When I was in high school, he was always identified as one of the great painters of the 19th century, if not of all time.  His name always came up in histories of painting.  To my young eyes, I thought “Well here’s a painter who can’t draw, he paints like a 14-year old, his sense of color is marginal until his later years, his sense of composition…uh very weak until he hits age 65 and then he begins to get the drift.”  “Why are we worshiping Paul Cézanne?” I didn’t get it.  I looked at his work and I thought, “Jeeze, I can draw better than this guy.  I can paint just about as well as he can, according to me.  What’s he doing that I can’t do?” and I just didn’t understand the heroics. So, that was always a gnawing question, “What is Paul Cézanne doing in his late paintings  that I just cannot fathom?”

My breakthrough, conceptually, was when my Cubist explorations and this hunger to know why Paul Cézanne was being valorized by the art world collided.  I can see how Cubism  and Paul Cézanne were essentially the same thing.  That Cubism was simply a distillation of  a single feature of Paul Cézanne’s late work.  As I got older and I started seeing original Cézanne’s in art museums, I could see that there was enormous emotion conveyed in these fabulous late paintings.  At Harvard,  the Fogg Art Museum, has a marvelous Cézanne still life.  I went to see one day.  I stood in front of it for 90 minutes I  couldn’t move, didn’t want to move. It was transfixing. I’m in love with this work of art.  There’s something going on here.  This old man, who has spent his late years sitting on a canvas stool out in the hot sun and rain in Southern France has created these paintings in which he’s captured as thoroughly as I could ever determine, the spirit of the cosmos.  If there’s a god, if you believe in God, Cezanne had a  long conversation.

Once I understood the emotional depth of Cézanne, I could understand how he was such a powerful influence on all the young painters in Paris of the early years of the 20th Century.  The reason I got hooked by the topic that I’m going to be launching into here tonight, is that there was my breakthrough both in understanding Cubism and in understanding Paul Cézanne.  It was very exciting and extremely interesting.  It was a thrilling intellectual experience, a thrilling aesthetic experience to feel very close to this work and to understand it and I could reach that understanding, as a painter. I could draw and paint in a Cubist manner.  I could come close to grappling with form, space and the Picture Plane in a way similar to Paul Cézanne, not as transcendent perhaps  but in my own way I was able to carry on a conversation with Cézanne, that was exciting.

A few words about my method here of explaining this idea that I have about postmodernism.  Are any of you familiar with Kodalith photographic paper?  Kodalith photographic paper, which maybe archaic by now—I don’t even know if it’s still in use with digital photography taking over—but it’s a paper that will take a grayscale and anything that is darker than 50% gray, it will turn it black and anything that’s lighter than 50% gray, it will wash out entirely, it will disappear.  So all you’re getting is the black and the gone.  It is a very dramatic material in that it takes a whole universe of grayscale and just it’s either “on” or “off”.  So that’s what I’ve done here.  I’ve taken a whole history of the last 600 hundred years as I understand it through my reading and I’ve simplified ideas.  They’re either on or off, this or that and the reason I’ve edited out all subtlety, is so that I’m able to even have this discussion.  This hour lecture tonight would take a semester class of two hours a day for six months there’s enough material here to keep a century’s worth of academics busy for their careers.  So, in order to make my points, I’ve simplified some things in a very dramatic way.  Hopefully, I haven’t misrepresented too much.  It depends on your point of view I suppose but things have been abstracted dramatically.

One of the key ideas here involves definitions of lengths of time.  There are three spans of time that I deal with.  One is an “epoch”.  And I’m asserting that an epoch lasts for 500 years and then  there is an “era” which lasts for 100 years and then a “generation” and a generation lasts for 25 years.  Now, an epoch is defined like bookends by paradigm shifts.  That’s that fabulous concept that first showed up in the book called “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn, published in 1962.  He defined paradigm shifts.  Now you see that word in the Sunday comics, which is kind of funny.  Little Dennis the Menace or Dilbert is having a paradigm shift experience.  So, the term has definitely filtered into popular culture.  Anyway, it has a kind of archaic ring to it now but it  still works.  It’s a bookend.  So, a paradigm shift—the word “shift” identifies an epoch.  So you have this 500-year span of time and something really powerful happened on this end and something really powerful happened on this more recent end and that defines the way that people think—a whole population of people for a five hundred year span of time. And when I say “that’s how they think”, it’s not how everybody thinks.  It’s not how half the people think.  It’s just how, if you had—Let’s say if you were averaging out the dominant axis/ locus of the thought of this epoch, it would tend to be this color not that color.

So, here’s where I get into the Kodalith idea.  When I’m talking about epochs and ideas that characterize an epoch, it’s just the general tenor of that epoch. It’s the armature of ideas that were popular, that captured people’s imaginations and those armatures of core ideas then attracted / enabled many other ideas.  Kind of like a coral reef collects little units of coral.  So, when that armature changed into something different, then a whole new realm of ideas became possible.

An “era” is defined by a paradigm swerve.  It’s not a shift, it’s just a swerve.  We’re just going in a different direction here.  And then there’s a generation and a “generation” is defined by a juke like in football.  When a running back’s running and he jukes.  It is not like a shift  It’s not like the whole line is moving over.  It’s just one player and he’s giving a little juke, he’s changing direction and things on the field are changing.  So, generations are composed of 25 years.  Every 25 years, there is enough accumulation of change to register a new zone.  It’s like the way that technology tends to run or used to run in 25-year cycles.  Popular music styles change every three years.  So if you’re following the history of rock n’ roll, you’ve got the Elvis era, that was like three of four years.  And then there’s some kind of a swerve or a juke or a blip or whatever you want call it but it’s kind of going off in a different direction.  societies have these shifts and swerves and jukes in order to edit out tired ideas.  Exhausted ideas that don’t serve the population any longer.  So you have a new cohort of 16-year olds entering consciousness every three years and they need a new music.  So there’s going to be a paradigm “blip”, let’s call it.

So, tonight’s discussion is in these past realms of time.  The epoch, the era, the generation, the blip.

I was taught architectural graphics by two of the masters of architectural graphics at the University of Washington, Jim Donnette and Douglas Zuberbuhler.  The UofW Architecture Department had a fabulous program that instilled all the fundamentals of several methods of how to describe a building or any object on paper.  It was a 2-year program and it went into great detail and I’m going to try summarize here in about ten minutes what that 2-year program was so that you can take those ideas and carry them into the body of the lecture.

The reason this important is that my key avenue into my notions of Western Thought has been the way that people represent their world on paper.  You’ve heard throughout your adult life that art has this capacity to represent culture, that if you look at the art of a people, you can understand their soul, you can learn a lot about them.  And if you look at their architecture.  The art and the architecture of any population will tell you a lot about who they are, how they think and how they lived their lives.  Taking that a step further, if you look at the ways that this art and architecture are conceived, the nitty-gritty every day graphic tools that are used to describe architecture, you can get a clear idea of how a whole epoch of people are conceiving their artwork and their built-environment.  So, these little tools here, I’m going to try to whip through these, 5 minutes a piece, just to give you an idea.

So, one of the fundamental ideas in the Western traditional paradigm—actually I think before I do this, I’m going to have a quick description of this. I’m going to give you the outline of tonight’s discussion and then we’re going to flip back to this set of graphic tools and then we’re going to go into the big color diagram of that.

Here is a point in time.  The year 1412 is one of the bookends for this epoch that we’re going to deal with.  1912 is the second and this epoch which is 500 years has an operative paradigm and we’re going to talk about what that operative paradigm is and it so happens that that operative paradigm is—here it is, it’s developing, it’s getting bigger, more massive and then something happens right here in 1912 and it shifts dramatically.

So here we are in 1912 and there was a big redirection that happened here but it was just a redirection.  It wasn’t as though all this 500 years of thought was obliterated, it’s just that it got hit by an asteroid of thought in 1912 and it got redirected and then it split off another direction, another armature here.

So, what I’m going to discuss in these diagrams is some of the conceptual tools that allowed these people to describe their art and their architecture and thus—and the reason that that’s very important, very interesting to me is that the way they conceive their painting and architecture is also integral to their world view.  So, what we’re going to look at here is three different ways of looking at objects and representing them on a two-dimensional surface.

The first is called Orthographic Projection.  What we have here is a piano-shaped box.  It’s got 2 square sides, 2 piano-shaped, flat surfaces and one curved surface like the slide at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, if you’ve ever been on that but it’s kind of a—it’s called a “Corbalto” a Le Corbusier-Alvaar Aalto curve because those were two great architects of the 20th century who loved  this piano shape.  They put it in lots of architecture and art and furniture.  We have this box.  In trying to describe this box, using orthographic projection, you break it into different views.  You look at it from the top.  From the top, it looks like a square.  You don’t really see its “piano-ness”.  You don’t see that curve at all in orthographic projection.  If you look at the side view, if you look at it from there, that’s called an elevation view or if it’s a building, it would be called an elevation, if it’s something smaller than a building it would be called the side view but you’re looking, your optical axis, the center of your cone of vision is aimed straight at that object.  And here, if you look at the side view, you can see the piano curve.  And now, if you look at the front of it, the front view, you see just the square again.  So you can see that this method of representing this object tells you quite a bit about it but it doesn’t tell you everything about it.  It’s useful in machine tool design and production and certain other things and it’s useful in describing buildings that are comprised primarily of right angles.

Let’s look now at another way of looking at the world that is representative of this epoch that we’re discussing.  It is a method called Linear Perspective.  This is a method of representing, on a two-dimensional surface, a three-dimensional scene that contains objects, a landscape, hills, rivers, clouds, whatever and it’s a combination of a plan view—let’s say we’re drawing a palazzo and I’ve simplified it down to be a Monopoly hotel just so we don’t get carried away here with detail.  Here you can see the Monopoly hotel in plan and it’s tilted a little bit from our optical axis.  So, the point where—in this particular way of documenting reality, there’s point where a human being stands and that’s called the Station Point and then you have what’s called the Picture Plane.  I’m drawing it as a line here but imagine this thing is the Picture Plane and if you look at it from the top, you’re just going to see the edge.  Do you see the edge?  That’s all you’re seeing is the edge and it’s getting so heavy, it’s going to fall and I’m going to hurt my back. It’s very dramatic, so remember, that’s one of the toughest things to comprehend when you’re trying to understand the rules of linear perspective, that when you’re looking at the picture plane in plan, all you see is a line, it’s actually this whole picture like a sheet of glass.  It could be a big, heavy canvass that I spent $800 for.  It could be a big piece of fiberboard like this but you’re looking—it’s more than just a line.  This line represents a whole plane.  And it’s the plane upon which I’m going to create my image.  This is the idea that fueled 500 years of picture making in the West starting in 1412 with Pietro Brunelleschi who developed the rules of linear perspective. He actually discovered the principles of this vital system and wrote them down in a way that could be taught and it just exploded during the Renaissance all over Europe and became very, very popular and it’s still taught in architecture schools around the world as a method of representing two-dimensional objects, of representing buildings.

The station point, which is where the person is standing in this whole set up, represents a human being and it assumes in most cases that one is looking parallel to the surface of the earth at this building.  So, station point refers to the point where the person creating the picture / seeing the scene,  is standing.  And that is going to be the key idea for my whole six-lecture thesis.  The station point – the eye of man.  What is it, how  it changed, how this evolving idea of what the station point is, created this powerful revolution in our culture.

I was Googling physics videos this morning.  I had a little free time, I thought I would prep for my presentation, I was trying to do a little research on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and there are these fabulous little videos coming up.  One of them was postulating alternate universes and it said if there was just one tiny characteristic of a neutron was different—like if neutrons had a positive charge or if neutrons were this or that or just some little piddling, seems like nothing difference, the whole universe in this alternate universe would be a different place.  It would have nothing solid.  It would just be vapors of different consistencies.  So, it’s a fascinating notion that some little, teeny change, some little change that seems very small, sends out powerful shockwaves through all of reality. And this—the way that the Station Point has been reconceived is the essence of this big, this paradigm shift of 1912.

So, we’re not going to go into any more detail on that or I’d never finish but…This…just learning the principles of 2-point perspective—it’s probably a 6-hour studio exercise to just get into this enough so that you can create your own little drawing of your house.  Now they have computer programs that do it in 10 seconds but that’s another story.

Ok, Cubism.  What’s Cubist?  Here’s a little image, a portrait done in a traditional,  let’s call this the Enlightenment Project Paradigm where the Picture Plane is a window.  So, it’s a window, that’s all it is.  You’re not announcing, celebrating or manipulating the Picture Plane, you’re not playing any games with the Picture Plane, you’re just trying to get through it.  It’s a window, a clear sheet of glass,  it’s not there. So, this whole 500-year paradigm treated the Picture Plane as though it’s a transparent piece of glass for the most part and any artist that treated it any differently was run out of town.  You just didn’t do it.  If you did you were crazy or simply ignorant.  It’s just—the Picture Plane is glass and you get in there and you work on your image using every painter’s trick of the trade until the glass disappears.

So that’s what this represents.  So here’s a portrait of Bill, with his sweater.  He’s in a room, you can see the baseboard there and there’s a window in the room and you can see a mountain range in the background.  You can see a river and there’s the sun.  So, you go foreground to 93 million miles away because we’re looking through this clear window.

So, what’s Cubism?  The Cubists—Paul Cézanne initially, was the instigator of the whole Cubist revolution.  Remember, the Cubists didn’t invent anything new.  For the last hundred years, art historians have been trying to define “Cubist” as though “My God, this is great, it’s something, oh so…wooh”.  Something major has been invented here.  These  guys were geniuses.  They were struck by a bolt from the cosmos.  They’re Cubists. It’s Picasso for God’s sakes.  It’s Braque.   You know, it’s…If Picasso had died before World War I, he would still be noted as the greatest painter of the 20th Century for the work he did with Cubism.  The work he did before 1912.  He lived until the 1970’s.  He did a hundred thousand works of art but the work he did before 1912 was…So vital to the world of art. Theorists and art critics and poets at the time this work was being created were going to great lengths to try to describe what it was.  What is it? what’s the nature of it?  What are Picasso and Braque really trying to do ? and all this blah, blah, blah.

If you approach Cubism as “Cézanne for Dummies”, it becomes very clear. It becomes…It’s crystal clear.  Cubism is nothing more than two young painters in Paris, taking the last remaining feature of Paul Cézanne’s painting that hadn’t been exhausted by the avante garde artists of Paris and making a fetish of it.  It just so happens that the last remaining  unexplored feature of Cezanne’s late work was the Station Point.  Now, Matisse and his cohort had reamed Cézanne of all of his notions of revolution, of trying to dismantle the academic art of this time, of trying to turn over a new leaf, invent new ways of looking.  So, for 10 years before Picasso and Braque invented Cubism, Henri Matisse had been building his reputation on taking Cézanne’s ideas about drawing and color and exaggerating them to great and alarming effect.  And the only thing left by the time Picasso and Braque showed up on the Paris art scene was the Station Point. So, in taking the Station Point and playing games with that…Wow, they ended up, I think, as far as I can tell, it was more by accident really than intent.  It was just the only thing left that they had to play with here is to riff on Cézanne’s use of the Station Point and really, the late Cézanne paintings are the first Cubist paintings.

These two young explorers in paint found a way to make Cezanne even simpler, to abstract it, to take just the essence of the Station Point and create what we know as Analytical Cubism where the Picture Plane itself becomes fractured.  Where, the technique that is being used is an effort to engage, to merge the Picture Plane itself with the image that you’re trying to represent, the object of their narrative. So there’s an image that has been conceived and then there’s this game playing with the Picture Plane.  The Picture Plane is no longer a transparent window.  It has become a very active, real thing that’s being announced and integrated into the way the image is being portrayed.  It just shatters, in the most fundamental way, this very entrenched, 500-year old idea about pictorial space.  This conflation of the picture plane itself with the subject matter really was revolutionary.  It was clear in Cézanne’s late work that this conflation had happened but Picasso and Braque separated it out and exaggerated it lest someone miss the point (pun intended).  It’s like you’re separating the cream from the milk.  It’s as if Braque and Picasso took the essence of what Cézanne was doing and created this new way of looking at the world.  So, that’s Cubism in a nutshell.

We have these two paradigm shifts and then we have the 500-year epoch bookended by them. What is going on here before 1412?  Prior to this point, 1412, life in Western Europe was known as—it’s referred to as the Medieval Epoch.  It was a time when life was brutal and short and disease was rampant.  The plague would revisit from time to time.  People didn’t live much older than their 40’s.  It was, as everyone knows, a very difficult, brutal time and it was a time that was dominated by the church.  See “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”  So the average—here we’re getting into our Kodalith idea, our average individual in the Medieval Epoch spent his life praying to God, he’s looking up.  His optical axis is up.  And then he’s just scared to death of going to hell, which he’s told from his earliest years is where most people go and where, if he’s not really well-behaved, he’ll go as well.  So, this fear of burning in hell was a part of your average person’s existence.  This notion that there’s a God and he’s not very friendly was a part of everybody’s life.  So, you spent your days staring down at the row you were digging with your primitive plow behind your ox.  You were praying to God and you were acknowledging the devil.  So, your Station Point is unpinned but it’s unpinned in much more simple way than it will be in 1912.  It’s either God, the devil, the plow.  So, it’s just—life, there’s not any real focus on temporal matters,  the Earth itself, on the deeper causal nature of events on Earth.  Philosophy and the intellectual life is concerned with analyzing ecclesiastical  ideas, the meaning of the Holy Ghost, the hereafter, the broader cultural locus is not centered on the realities of the surface of the Earth but on heaven and hell.

So, what happens here?  In 1412, Humanism starts to get traction in what’s now Italy.  The writing and architecture and sculpture of the ancient philosophers, historians, playwrights, architects was revived and the beauty of ancient architecture was acknowledged and this thought that’s about the world itself that’s not directly related to religious matters, started gaining a foothold. The optical axis of the population begins shifting from heaven and hell to the surface of the Earth.

The optical axis of Western Man becomes aligned parallel to the surface of the Earth. The Station Point has become pinned.  During the Medieval Epoch, the Station Point is unpinned and then in 1412, Brunelleschi identifies the Principles of Linear Perspective, thus symbolizing the pinning the Station Point which enabled a whole universe of discoveries about the surface of the Earth.  Brunelleschi’s invention of linear perspective embodied the ethos of his revolutionary time. These discoveries are referred to as the Descended Grid.  It’s a term that I first read in the work of Ken Wilber, a contemporary philosopher.  I don’t know if he invented it or got it from somebody but it’s a beautiful term to describe this grid of ideas that descended on Western man that enabled a powerful tool for  understanding  the world.

So, let’s peel off this diagram.  Ok, this is our fleshed-out diagram, in full color for Dave who’s a videographer.  You may think that that pink is here to get your attention and to have a sexy color up but it’s really part of the ideas that are at hand. You’ll notice that there are two colors at work in this large diagram.  There’s this pink swath and then  this orange.  In this diagram the orange represents this 500-year epoch, this Epoch of the Descended Grid.  And the the pink represents the unpinned ideas that you can see launching off here after 1912, separating from this intense descended grid.  So, back here, once Brunelleschi pinned the Station Point, fixed the optical axis parallel to the surface of the Earth, all kinds of opportunities developed.  It was a time when trade was was accelerating throughout Europe.  There were Venetian merchants trading with the Far East.  There was a lot of trade up and down the coast of Europe.  These Venetian  and Genoese merchants needed to keep track of their material, of their ships, of their cargoes.  So, ideas started coalescing here that allowed this population to control their environment.  Merchants developed double-entry bookkeeping.  It’s an element of the Grid.  It’s a component of the Grid.  When I say that the Grid, I mean I’m referring to a set of ideas that allow humans to give order to the chaos of the Universe, of the Earth itself, of the chaos of human relations. The  constituent features of the Grid allow people to find their way on the surface of the earth and to track their possessions, to lay out their cities, to translate their music from one generation to another, to communicate their aesthetic ideas, to enable their art and architecture to move from the mind to the real world.

So, what are the components of the Grid?  You have movable type—Gutenberg and the blossoming of the idea of the book, the printed word.  You have double-entry bookkeeping that allowed merchants to keep track of five ships, going to five different places, coming back into port at five different times. They could track what they were sending out and what was returning to port, how much money they were making.  Very useful.

The Cartesian Grid is an idea that was around in ancient Greece and Rome but it really exploded during the early years of this epoch where this idea of putting a grid around the whole globe itself allowed navigation to develop a very useful level of precision.  The Cartesian Grid manifests itself—it’s a very fundamental idea that’s—we can see it here, the way the streets are laid out in Palo Alto.  You drive up one street, you turn 90 degrees and you drive down another street.  We live our lives in the middle of key features of this grid.

Thomas Jefferson, when he proposed methods of laying out new territories in the United States, proposed that a grid be placed over the whole nation and that cities are divided up into girds and townships and the whole nature was the grid of 90-degree angles.  What is so magic about the grid?  It is an idea that has enduring vitality.  Musical notation, before this epoch, there was no way to communicate clearly, a musical idea from one generation to another.  Musical notation allowed musical ideas to be written down in a very clear way and that could be interpreted by other musicians.

The scientific method elaborated upon by Francis Bacon, English philosopher, developed the notion that you can observe the world in a very careful way, take notes, develop logical ways of looking at the world and discover truth – one can hypothesize, experiment and discern facts that can become the basis for further experiment.  Bacon’s facts are not necessarily ecclesiastical truth.  It’s not a religious truth, it’s the truth about why ice melts at this temperature instead of another one.  Why does this type of tree have a broad leaf and this one a pine needle or whatever.  Looking at the world and identifying it, seeking truth in the world itself through a methodical system.

It was at this time that the idea of centralizing governments coalescing around an absolute monarch evolved.  A notion of hierarchies, that hierarchies of nations, nationhood, that you have a king, you have princes, subalterns, and the population, There is strength, there is power to be gained by centralizing governments.  So, this grid, this idea of a grid, has just been a very broadly-manifest idea, a very powerful idea for people and just unquestioned, especially during the 18th-19th Centuries. The entire enlightened population was on board.

The Grid was doing great things.  Today you can look at our schools.  I grew up in a school system where the Grid got pounded down one’s throat.  It was all Grid, all the time. Our public school system, our universities—The Grid is still a dominant part of our existence. So, it’s interesting to examine these events of 1912 and analyze what happened here that created this very dramatic change that so deeply challenged the Grid, ideas that began to dissolve the Grid.  Why did the Grid lose its total grip on the modern consciousness?  If I had to point to one phenomenon, it would probably be the decay in our major cities in the late 19th Century, the scope of squalor in our major cities was so dramatic that anyone could see  that, there’s a  brutal, life-wrecking downside to this idea of progress and all this focused activity and all of this order that we’re applying here in our culture, that there is a certain very small percentage that seemed to be very well off but the bulk of people were suffering greatly and there’s child labor that was rampant and women didn’t have any rights at all. Slums were getting more dramatically grotesque all the time.  The Grid had lost much of its glamour.

Artists were simply  getting exhausted from a conceptual point of view.  Artists were just tired of the Renaissance paradigm.  For the last 300 years the canvass has been a window and painters slave over these art works for six months and then they have a little picture and then they exhibit it.  It was just boring.  I think as much as anything the pictorial esthetic paradigm just became dull.  Generations of avant garde thinkers in the late 19th Century are just fed up.

Another interesting that happened was that the Grid created a lot of wealth in cities, a whole bourgeois class became manifest and along with the bourgeois you had a new bohemian class.  Never in the history of mankind had there been a situation where a whole class of population could sit around all day in coffee shops and think about what the world was all about.  People had to work from their earliest years until the day they died but in Paris and Vienna and Moscow and London from the early decades of the 19th Century, you had a class of people who—the bohemian class who did a lot of thinking and writing and creating artwork and poetry and this and that and you can read all about them and watch them  in the Opera La Bohème.  That’s kind of the story of the bohemian class and of course most of these Bohemians came to difficult ends:  suicide, alcoholism, drug overdose.  I don’t know.  It wasn’t happy but while they were in Bohemia, they were part of an avant garde and doing a lot of thinking about the culture and writing about it.  So, the notion of a Bohemia is a very socially productive one.

So, I think what I’d like to do now is get into the nature of this second paradigm shift.  This bookend here to the 500-year epoch of the Descended Grid.  In 1912—when I say 1912, I’ve got nine representative cultural revolutionaries here and if you took their productive ideas, their paradigm shifting ideas and you averaged out when it all happened, the locus of time would be 1912.  If you look at Cubism, 1912 was the time of its greatest flowering in the analytical Cubism / early synthetic Cubism of Picasso and George Braque, I have conflated their names into “Bracasso” because I got tired of writing two names all the time.  They’re Mutt and Jeff.  They are always referred to in the same sentence when Cubism is discussed.   Picasso, Braque—if you’re in France it’s Braque and Picasso and the French will die supporting their claim that it was Braque who invented Cubism with Picasso tagging along and anyone else on Earth will know that it was Picasso that invented Cubism and Braque was hanging around when it happened and then he got on board.  But in any event, they were, as Braque stated,  like “climbers roped together on a mountain top”.  Picasso referred to Braque as his wife.  Which I don’t think went over big with Braque because he was a very athletic macho guy that went off to World War I and got shot in the head and Picasso stayed back home and painted pictures all through the war.  Anyway, Bracasso, is the inventor of Cubism.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Acknowledged by one and all,  every architect that I have encountered in 50 years of studying architecture would admit that Frank Lloyd Wright was “The Man”.  He was easily the most important, most influential architect of the 20th Century.  He was carrying the banner for architecture during this great revolution in 1912.  He unpinned architecture in some dramatic ways and the evidence of that work is in a document called the “Wasmuth Portfolio”.  It was printed by a German firm by a German professor who had fallen in love with Wright’s Prairie architecture built primarily between 1905 and 1911 in Chicago.  This work was revolutionary.  Frank Lloyd Wright was a brilliant thinker and a great magpie of architecture ideas.  He was a great synthesizer.  He could look at every bit of architecture that he encountered and synthesize these observations into a new way of conceiving space and form.

Wright’s idea of breaking up the residence from a bunch of little boxes into free flowing spaces, of breaking out of the rigorous symmetries of the Descended Grid and classical architecture into a free-flowing dynamically balanced form and space was revolutionary.  His unique ideas are magnificently expressed in this portfolio of drawings that effected young European architects like a bomb going off in their heads.  Wright’s Wasmuth portfolio changed their lives, gave direction to careeres.  When Le Corbusier saw this document, he admits that it changed his life. It energizes his thinking about architecture.  When Mies van der Rohe saw the Wasmuth Portfolio, it was like a religious experience.  When Walter Gropius saw it, he knew he was in the presence of a great thinker about architecture.  They all acknowledge Frank Lloyd Wright, The young European luminaries went on to perhaps get more traction in the course of the twentieth century than Wright for various reasons but all acknowledge that Frank was The Man.  He was the genius, the Einstein, the Picasso of the world of architecture.

James Joyce.  Writer.  Irishman.  His great unpinned masterpiece, Ulysses, which I just finished reading last week after spending all summer on it, just to prepare for this lecture. Wow, what a wonderful slog.  What a great book.  It was, you know, it was a remarkable experience.  It was a non-narrative way of telling a story.  James Joyce had unpinned the author from the idea of telling a story.  He tells this story from various points of view.  He writes for 20 pages from the point of view of his wife, he writes for many pages from the point of view of his friend.  He writes, he’s telling the story of one day in Dublin and the book is 772 pages.  It is for that reason alone that he takes that long to tell you about one day, you know that he’s really stretching the envelope here in the way stories are told.  James Joyce just unpins the whole idea, pulls the pin out of Western literature.

Throughout the epoch of the descended grid classical music had always been centered on the idea of a key note.  A musical composition was performed in a particular key.  Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, et al.  When  creating a composition there is a tonal center, one begins a composition from that tonal center and proceed into your symphony, opera, string quartet was as unquestioned as the notion that the picture plane was transparent and not to be f***ed with.

Arnold Schoenberg and his colleagues in Europe around 1912, 1905-1912, pre-World War I, are unpinning this fundamental idea of how music is constructed.  They’ have removed the tonal center from classical music and have created compositions in which there is no tonal center.  You begin on B-flat and you end up on C-sharp.  It was a revolutionary way of expressing ideas in music.  At this point there is a one hundred year tradition of music with an unpinned  tonal center.

I’m calling it a “locus” an “ethos” a “zeitgeist” a “spirit of the age”, “the cloud”.  It’s as though the Earth itself had passed through some cosmic gas cloud and all of these minds began inventing with this idea that the Station Point is no longer fixed,  that it had  been unpinned.

Working our way around this carousel of genius in 1912 we have Méliès, the French motion picture pioneer.  The idea of motion pictures was launched at this time.  Picasso and Braque were seeing the first motion pictures in Paris in little Nickelodeons and they were fascinated by it.  Einstein was doing his fundamental thinking, the thinking that won him the Nobel Prize was done in 1904-1905 and then it was elaborated upon in 1915 or so.  But 1912 is the locus of Einstein’s dramatic rethinking of physics, of thinking about the fundamental nature of light and of constants in the universe, pulling the pin on Sir Isaac Newton who, along with the transparent Picture Plane and the tonal center in music was the unquestioned God Almighty of physics but Einstein, through the clarity of his thinking about various phenomenon, cracks the nut on Newtonian Physics. Opens up a whole world of ways of thinking about matter and energy.  This whole idea that matter and energy are the same thing in essence, that’s all related to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and thanks to my YouTube video, I could go on at greater length here but I won’t because we’ve got to get around  the 1912 circle of revolutionaries.

Isadora Duncan.  The only female in the circle, although Madame Curie could certainly be included.  Isadora completely breaking loose of the Baroque ideas of what dance was.  Ballet, traditional, classical ballet, as it was developed by the Russian ballet troupes through the Baroque Era and the 19th Century, was a rigorous codified way of dancing.  This Baroque notion of taking something that’s phenomenally difficult and making it look fluid light and easy was an idea that had captured the imaginations of Europeans and it had been manifest and solidified in the way people danced.  Isadora Duncan broke that idea wide open. She demonstrated in her movement  that while dancing is about expressing yourself, it’s about moving however you are inspired to move and this was her revolution.

Nikola Tesla.  a brilliant thinker about many things but his great contribution, alternating current, which became the standard way that power is used in the Western world or the entire world, this notion that information could be transmitted on radio waves through the air.  He developed those notions revolutionizing communication.

The Wright Brothers with their little primitive airplanes, their motorized aircraft.  Here it was the  unpinning of human transportation. For the first time, up in an airplane, you’ve got motion in three directions.  There is  pitch, yaw and roll.  Pitching forward and back, yawing, going left to right about the centroid of the craft and rolling, rotating on the longitudinal axis.  Three different axes of movement.  That’s the Wright Brothers.  Picasso and Braque saw the Wrights fly their airplane around the Eiffel Tower and that inspired them in their Cubist explorations where they’re unpinning the Station Point and moving around their subject trying to capture more fully the nature of their subject from many different points of view.

These ideas.  Multi-valance, ambiguity, uncertainty and simultaneity.  They’re the essence of this unpinned Station Point.

We’ve covered several but not all of the key individuals who made a great contribution to the unpinning of the Station Point.  in my second lecture I will discuss some of the implications of that  unpinning and then present an overview of the next five lectures.