Telescope Carpet | N [explanation below]

Wool Carpet 108" x 67" | 1995

Full size drawings were prepared for the study and production of this carpet, whose proportions approximate the Greek golden rectangle. Designed in 1995, the carpet was milled in Koyoto Japan in 1996. As an extension of the project research into MOVEMEANING, the planar composition represents a conflation of abstract visual themes of FIGUREFIELD (inspired by artists such as Malevich and Diebekorn) and self-referential narrative content based on site specific geo-planetary phenomena (i.e., the idea of north and the constellation of the Little Dipper) and on significant dates within the history of painting, architecture, and science. The major, rotated white bar signifies a telescope: It aligns with north (an N is tangent to the bar at the lower carpet edge) in the carpet's correct position relative to the living room . The five dates, which constitute a spatial organizational datum along the top edge -- it implies grided subdivision of the idiosyncratic, syncopated rectangular field -- as well as a conceptual datum with respect to time -- they imply an infinite temporal dimension, which extends beyond the boundaries of the carpet, analogous to but independent from implications of infinite spatial extension -- signify the following historical landmarks:

2001 _2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke (book), Stanley Kubrick (film), 1968; the central mystery -- the 1:4:9 Monolith (i.e., the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly/TMA -- 1), one of the ex-post facto inspirations for the Dante Monolith; links architecture to astronomy, Galileo, Rome, literature/film...

 

1907 _Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso; if not the first genuinely "Cubist" painting, then the first truly modern painting, the definitive threshold-to-Cubism painting; marking the overthrow of perspective, the decisive break with 500 years of Western art since Alberti; the cataclysmic rupture in the fabric of art history...marking the decisive emergence of abstraction

 

1610 _Siderius Nuncius (The Sidereal/Starry Messenger), Galileo; discovery of the four largest moons of Jupiter, the imperfect surface of our moon and the phases of Venus -- discoveries that showed the traditional view of the world, maintained for thousands of years, to be erroneous; prior to 1609, the year in which Galileo perfected the telescope to the point where it could be used in astronomy for the first time, no means existed to prove Copernicus's 15th-century discovery that the solar system is heliocentric.

 

1519 _Letter to Pope Leo X, Raphael; announces the modern orthographic conventions of architectural drawing: plan, section, elevation; death of Leonardo; 400 years before the Bauhaus...

 

1435 _De Pictura (On Painting), Alberti [published 1453]; first modern, Renaissance treatise on the theory of painting, including this first systematic description of one-point perspective, based on the work of the avant-garde artists of the moment, Brunelleschi (architect), Donatello (sculptor), and Massacio (painter); annunciates the mathematical substructure of nature and art & the importance of outline & plane, vision & visibility...