Courali Preis FOURTH DIMENSION” Ac fg. hey. ig alt ill Fourth Dimension perfume ad, from Vogue, November 1195.SPACE, TIME, AND SPACE-TIME: CHANGING IDENTITIES OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART Lind: Dalrymple Henders In 1988, Helena Rubinstein’s House of Gourielli introduced a new perfume called Fourth Dimension, declaring it to be “complex, high key, exciting.” The highbrow taste of the wearer of Fourth Dimension perfume is apparent in an advertisement [p. 86] from the elegantly clad couple in the background and the prominent ray lines suggestive of ‘Cubist, Futurist, and Precisionist art. Modern painting had, in fact, first been linked to the notion of a suprasensible spatial fourth dimension by artists and critics in the early years of the twentieth century’ Yet, most women who wore Fourth Dimension perfume probably associated it with time, in the space-time world of Einstein, a meaning also subtly suggested by the hourglass shape of the perfume bottle. With Einstein's celebrity, beginning in 1919, newspapers and popular magazines were filled with explanations of the new four-dimensional space-time continuum (three dimen- sions of space and one of time) that Hermann Minkowski had proposed in 1908 as the bbasic structure for relativity? By the late 1940s, the identification of the fourth dimension with time had become ubiquitous in both the art world and culture at large. It is not sur- rising, then, that the reprinting in the 1940s of early modernist texts such as Guillaume Apollinaire's 1913 The Cubist Painters—with its discussion of Cubist interest in a “fourth dimension’—gave rise to the myth that some connection existed between Cubism and relativity theory, or Picasso and Einstein? However, early-twentieth-century artists, including the Cubists, had been stimulated by the possible existence of an invisible fourth dimension of space that might hold a reality truer than that of visual perception. Rooted in nineteenth-century geometry’s move beyond three dimensions, the idea that our world could be merely a three-dimensional section, of Plato's cave-like “shadow,” of a four-dimensional reality captured the imagina~ tion of the public in the period between 1880 and 1920. Advocates of a fourth dimension of space could cite no scientific proof for its existence (they pointed primarily to the mys terious existence of asymmetrical right- and left-handed crystal growth in nature), but the 1895 discovery of the X-ray served as powerful support for their argument. Who now could. deny the existence of a higher dimension simply because it was not visible? ISON SPACE. TME.ANO SPACETIME 87Although early-twentieth-century artists would take a variety of approaches, Cubist painters generally employed visual complexity, including angular faceting and transpar- ent overlay, in their attempts to represent or evoke the invisible fourth dimension. Like the works of Picasso and Georges Braque, the style’s originators, Jean Metzinger's 1912 Dancer in a Cafe {p. 88] shares certain qualities with geometer E. Jouffret's pioneering, ‘see-through’ renderings of four-dimensional solids, published in 1903 and known in Cubist circles [this pagel. Here transparent, multiple views of an object as well as shifting, shaded triangular facets create an ambiguous space that cannot be read as three dimen- sional, Ifthe X-ray stands in part behind the transparent effects in Cubism (and Jouffret), the fluid interpenetration of form and space in Cubism and styles such as Italian Futurism is also rooted in other contemporary scientific developments that had radically altered contemporary conceptions of matter and space. The discoveries of the electron in 1897 and radioactivity in 1898, along with the universally held belief in an impalpable ether fill- ing all space, led to a popular image of matter as dematerializing into space and of space as filled with particulate emissions and ethereal vibrations.* ‘American painter Max Weber, who had been in Paris from 1905 through 1908, once back in New York published an essay titled "The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View” (1910) and followed closely the subsequent development of Cubism. In his 1915 Partial view ofthe four-dimensional octahedron.” rom Max Weber: Rush Hour New York, 115; il on canvas; E Joutret, Tate lémentaire de géométrie a quatre 364 x 30¥%4 in: National Galery of Art Gift ofthe Avalon dimensions Paris, 1905). Foundation, 1970-6, mage © 2007, Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ Bic-Kunst, Bonn, HENDERSON 89painting Night [p. 90}, Weber uses a similarly faceted geometric style to explore the ethereal, nocturnal reality of the city, beyond its surface appearances illuminated by the light of day. In Weber's best-known painting of 1915, Rush Hour, New York [p. 89], how- ever, the stasis of Cubism is replaced by a new focus on time and motion. Here he seeks to convey the exhilarating dynamism of the modern city, exemplified by its new rapid transit system, including the subway trains and tunnels at bottom center:* Joseph Stella's Battle of Lights, Coney Island [p. 27], dated 1913-14, exudes a similar sense of modern dynamism and energy—now in an amusement park ablaze with electric lights. It is on view, along with Weber's Night, in Measure of Time. Both Weber and Stella were stimulated in their interest in dynamism and motion by knowledge of Italian Futurist painting, which Stella had seen firsthand in Italy and Paris. But the two painters were also aware of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (Wo. 2) (1912) [p. 921, which had been the scandal of the 1913 Armory Show in New York. ‘The impact of the sequential forms of Duchamp's descending nude is apparent in the staccato repetition of forms in Weber's Rush Hour, New York. Both Duchamp and the Futurists, such as Giacomo Balla, had been fascinated by the late-nineteenth-century chronophotographs of Etienne-Jules Marey [p. 92]. which recorded motion and the passage of time on a photographic plate. In Nude Descending, Duchamp draws on Marey’s chronophotography as well as the humorous sexual implications of X-ray stripping, here diagramming the motion of a figure denuded ofits flesh as well as its clothing, These images truly are “measures of time,” what Duchamp termed the “static image of movement."* Although Marey himself was certainly not interested in higher spatial dimensions, Duchamp, the artist most deeply engaged with the fourth dimension in the early twentieth century, would have been well aware of the role that time and motion played in certain explanations of the spatial fourth dimension. In the influential writings of the primary early proponent of the idea, Charles Howard Hinton, time itself was not understood as the fourth dimension but rather as a means toward the end of comprehending the relationship of one spatial dimension to the next. According to Hinton, “All attempts to visualize a fourth dimension are futile, it must be connected to a time experience in three space.” Nonetheless, Hinton believed firmly in the existence of a spatial fourth dimension, as did his Russian follower, the mystic mathematician P. D. Quspensky, who would argue in his. 1911 Tertium Organum that time and motion are illusions—simply misapprehensions of @ higher spatial phenomenon If the analogy of lower dimensional sectioning of higher dimensional forms was one popular time-related method of explaining the fourth dimension, the other was its oppo- site: the generation of higher dimensional figures by moving a lower dimensional form94 through space, such as the tracing of a cube when a plane moves in a direction perpen- dicular to its surface. At the start of his long-term investigation of the fourth dimension, Duchamp may have thought of the motion of the Nude Descending as generating higher dimensional forms by means of traces left in space. He later talked of the painting as an ‘example of his interest in what he termed “elemental parallelism,” or the “parallel multipli- Cation of the n-dim'l continuum to form the n#1 dim'l continuum...” Yet Duchamp must uickly have realized that there is nothing four dimensional about the motion of a three- dimensional object uniess it moves off into a new, fourth direction. That same year he began to read extensively and to make notes for the project that would engage the spatial fourth dimension more fully than any other work of twentieth-century art, The Bride ‘Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, known as The Large Glass, dated 1915-23 [p. 93] Duchamp considered his notes to be as important as the Glass itself and published selected ‘groups of them in facsimile in his 1934 Green Box and 1966 A /infinitif (The White Bow. Determined to “put painting once again at the service of the mind,” Duchamp left behind the complex space of Cubism as well as his initial experiments in motion to inves- tigate a variety of means by which he might evoke four-dimensional space as part of the “playful physics” of The Large Glass. He began making extensive notes for the project beginning in 1912, as he explored four-dimensional geometry as well as the newest sci- ence and technology to produce this unique image-text project. Using unconventional materials (e.g, lead wire, mirror silver, and dust as well as paint on glass) and paralleling the widespread interest in human-machine analogies in this period, Duchamp created in The Large Glass a humorous allegory of sexual striving defined by contrasts between the realm of the biomechanical Bride above and the purely mechanical Bachelors below. In articular, he sought to make the Bride four dimensional, so that she would be definitively beyond the reach of the three-dimensional Bachelors. In notes that Duchamp published only in 1966, he speculated extensively on four-dimensional geometry, working by means Of analogy and developing his own playful laws on the subject” Duchamp considered for a time Henri Poincaré's discussions of geometrical continua and Cuts as well as mirrors and virtual images as means to signal the Bride's four-dimensional- ity, However, he ultimately returned to the simpler idea he had found in Jouffret's 1903 text- book on four-dimensional geometry noted earlier: “The shadow cast by a 4-dim' figure on ‘our space is a 3-dlim’! shadow.” In the end, Duchamp painted his Bride in black-and-white tones to resemble a photograph of a three-dimensional figure, who would herself stand as. the shadow of the true, four-dimensional Bride, However, Duchamp took additional steps to augment the Bride’s four-dimensional “otherness,” creating for her a spatial realm he defined as beyond topological measure (in contrast to the Bachelors’ “mensurable" and