Chapter 9

Technology

In his seminal essay “The First Man Was an Artist,” Newman virulently denounced science and technology. Motivated by a “drive to conquer” and dominate “all realms of thought,” science denies “any place to the metaphysical world.”1 By identifying “truth with proof,”2 science dominates “the mind of modern man,”3 stifling both humanity’s original curiosity and the artist’s fascination with “the elemental mystery of life.”4 In modern times, Newman declares, we have betrayed the first impetus underlying scientific inquiry: to answer metaphysical questions.5 The only “questions worth discussing,” Newman declares, “are the questions that cannot be proved.”6

This attitude intersects poignantly with Heidegger’s. If Newman decried science’s denial of the metaphysical world, the philosopher affirms that “[s]cience today in all its branches is a technical, practical business of gaining and transmitting information. An awakening of the spirit cannot take its departure from such science.”7 This distrust of science walks in lockstep with Heidegger’s critique of technology, which, to his mind, substitutes an attitude of control for the respectful attitude of letting things be. The indictment should also be seen in the context of Heidegger’s larger agenda to divorce philosophy from rigorous logic, demonstrable proofs, and the implementation of a completely dispassionate methodology. Already cited were Heidegger’s assertions that philosophical concepts are accessible only to those whom they grip emotionally, assertions that align philosophy with art and poetry. And just as Newman excoriated scientists for fetishizing the ability to prove, insisting that the most important questions are those for which no proofs can be found, Heidegger considered philosophy to be inherently ambiguous. In opposition to science,8 philosophy “remains in the perilous neighborhood of supreme uncertainty. No knower necessarily stands so close to the verge of error at every moment as the one who philosophizes.”9 Irrelevant and “of little value,” anything provable carries “no intrinsic weight in itself.”10 Since metaphysical questions provide no exact answers, philosophy cannot be put to practical use. Inasmuch as Newman lambasted Marxist thinkers for insisting that art must be useful,11 Heidegger dismissed any attempt to impose utilitarian demands upon the discipline (i.e., that its “knowledge be practically applied” to “factical life”).12

According to Thomas Hess, Newman visualized this suspicion of science in Euclidian Abyss (figure 9.1), a canvas meant to evoke the “perils of geometry,”13 with “geometry” as code for an oppressive, exacting state of mind. “It is precisely this death image,” the artist declared, “the grip of geometry, that has to be confronted. In a world of geometry, geometry itself has become our moral crisis. . . . [The] only answer is no geometry of any kind.”14 In parallel, Heidegger insisted that mathematical knowledge is “the emptiest knowledge imaginable.”15 Mathematics, he maintained, pales when compared to philosophy. And if Newman, Gottlieb, and Rothko averred art to be an adventure “violently opposed to common sense,”16 Heidegger warned against “making sound common sense the ally and guide of philosophy.”17

Figure 9.1. Barnett Newman, Euclidian Abyss (1946–1947), oil, oil crayon, and wax crayon on textured paperboard, 27.75 3 21.75 inches. Private collection, Artherton, California © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Newman did not fully explain his hostility to technology, but Heidegger’s stems from the contrast he strikes between a respectful attitude toward the world—one that lets things be—versus one that looks at the world from an exploitative perspective. As already mentioned, the philosopher thought it imperative to let things “be as they are and in order that they be such.” He denounced the modern proclivity not to let something be but to “work over it, improve it, destroy it.”18 Think of the difference between a bridge and a hydroelectric plant; the bridge permits human locomotion yet respects the river by letting it be. The power plant alters the landscape, diverts rivers, disrupts natural habitats, and sets ecosystems out of balance. The power plant ignores what the river is by turning it into inventory, as it were.19 Turning things into inventory is a recurrent metaphor in Heidegger because it extends to widely asymmetrical power relationships: between rulers and subordinates, individuals and the they, human beings and the state, and so on. At issue is whether the relationships are respectful, wherein things or individuals are allowed to fulfill their potential, or whether these relationships are motivated by the drive to control and exploit. Newman would have concurred. “Only by first ridding itself of this obsession for utility,” he writes, “this human desire for a set of hierarchies of usefulness, can a true morality begin to be postulated. The only moral act is the useless one, and the only useless act is the aesthetic one. The artist is the only man who performs an act for no useful purpose; he is, indeed, opposed to its usefulness. His behavior is completely, unalterably, and profoundly futile.”20 Again, this statement squares with Heidegger’s view that “it is meaningless to ask why and to what purpose we philosophize,”21 or that philosophy “cannot be directly applied, or judged by its usefulness in the manner of economic or other professional knowledge. But what is useless can still be a force, perhaps the only real force.”22

As already mentioned, letting things be does not simply designate an attitude of solicitude necessary for the granting of freedom; it is also anchored to the interpretation of truth because letting things be means allowing things to come into presence as what they really are. The desire to control, which Newman and Heidegger impute to modern technology, represents its diametrical opposite, and, as such, runs afoul of the ancient concept of truth as presence or bringing forth. Intriguingly, Heidegger locates the idea of truth-as-presence at the core, not just of all genuine scientific investigation—if its aim is true discovery rather than exploitation—but of all artistic endeavor. All handcraft manufacture, all artistic or poetical activity, Heidegger writes, “is a bringing forth, poiesis. Physis also, the arising of something out of itself, is a bringing forth, poiesis.”23 Bringing forth refers to the concept of truth as unveiling; in art or in nature, bringing-forth occurs whenever something concealed comes into unconcealment.24 Technology, in the ancient sense of techné, was also a means of bringing forth. But its modern incarnations twisted that original purpose into the demand that nature “supply energy that can be extracted and stored.”25 If a windmill is left to the wind’s blowing, if a bridge connects two banks without disturbing a river, if a peasant sows grain, these activities do not challenge nature to provide “the maximum yield at the minimum expense.”26 By abusing the environment to satisfy human demands, and forgetting that nature also exists on its own terms, technology turns destructive, reneging on its original function to bring things forth into unconcealment. “Everywhere,” Heidegger writes, “everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing reserve.”27

This is not to say that modern technology fails to bring aspects of nature into unconcealment, only that it is underwritten by a posture Heidegger designates as “enframing.” Enframing is Heidegger’s term for the nefarious attitude of control that dominates modern technology, an attitude that sets upon humanity the challenge “to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve.”28 This mindset is especially dangerous, not simply because it compels us, unthinkingly, to drain the earth of its resources, and thus to imperil its survival (and our own), but also because it compels the true to “withdraw.”29 In other words, if we look at the planet only with a view to drawing economic and financial advantage, we obfuscate the truth of things and do not allow nature to be. As we set the natural order out of balance, the reality of things becomes lost to us. For Heidegger, the epistemological implications are no less alarming than the ecological ones, primarily because enframing, by infiltrating every aspect of our lives, becomes applicable, mutatis mutandis, to humanity itself. The more we push ourselves to master nature, the more we lose sight of our own nature. In time, exploitation serves as the model for all our endeavors, contaminating the relationships established among human beings, even the relationship we have with ourselves. Man has come to the point, Heidegger writes, “where he himself will be taken as standing-reserve.”30

Newman shared the same outlook. “Those who emphasize the world of objects,” he maintained, “make man himself an object. . . . My whole life has been a struggle against becoming an object!”31 Objectification is to Newman what enframing is to Heidegger. In fact, Heidegger also expressed the view that, in the world of technological dominion and market value, man “himself and his things are thereby exposed to the growing danger of turning into mere material and into a function of objectification.”32 If we exploit and objectify our environment, Newman is saying, we exploit and objectify ourselves. It follows that, in so doing, we lose sight of what we are. Similarly, Heidegger maintains that nowhere does man today “encounter himself, i.e., his essence.”33 In such a situation, man, the philosopher likes to say, “withdraws.” Of course, Heidegger does not mean that man literally withdraws or disappears, but in the metaphorical sense that we act in such a way as is contrary to our nature. Withdrawal, in effect, is Heideggerian shorthand for describing the condition of any person or idea that has been unjustly misused or forgotten. Since whatever is so treated is no longer respected or accessible, its reality may as well withdraw. Just as nature withdraws when we twist it into standing reserve, so does our essence withdraw whenever we live in opposition to it. These propositions cement the larger point that, by ignoring the truth of things, enframing is antithetical to aletheia and blocks the “holding sway of truth.”34 Even if enframing is the mode of unconcealment typical of the modern age, it remains, in Heidegger’s words, fundamentally incompatible with the unconcealment particular to poeisis, a mode that, by rejecting manipulation or control, lets “what presences come forth into unconcealment.”35 In his essay on art, Heidegger provides an intriguing example of poetic unveiling: erecting a statue in the temple precinct. Unlike modern technology, whose central means of disclosure is exploitation, and whose working definition of truth is “correctness,” art searches for truth by simply allowing things to be. Heidegger insists that, in classical Greece, the arts were not segregated by a separate aesthetic category but all fell under the rubric of techné. Art, he continues, was originally considered techné because it revealed and brought forth, yet also belonged to poiesis: “that revealing which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and in everything poetical. . . . The poetical brings the true into the splendor of . . . that which shines forth most purely.”36 Unlike modern technology, art has remained true to the ideal of aletheia.

The difficulty with which art satisfies practical purposes also makes it less vulnerable to enframing. As Heidegger put it, “the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.”37 Accordingly, Lyotard’s remark that, in Newman’s abstractions, there is nothing “to consume,” might itself be an example of enframing (an attitude that sees works of art as entities from which something should be extracted). Ignoring its ability to enable the unveiling of truth, such a mindset transforms art into standing reserve. In contradistinction, Heidegger paints art as “a refuge in which the real bestows its long-hidden splendor upon man ever anew, that in such light he may see more purely and hear more clearly what addresses itself to his essence.”38 By extension, Lyotard should have shown restraint and resisted the expectation to consume anything; in simply letting things be, truth will be disclosed. The ancient Greeks understood this relation, formulating ideas on truth that, on the one hand, were inconsistent with the dominance of technology, but, on the other, inadvertently set this same form of dominance into motion. Ever the etymologist, Heidegger exhorts us to attend to the forgotten levels of signification revealed in Greek figures of speech. When we say “something works,” we mean that it produces the desired effect, reflecting, for Heidegger, modern technology’s emphasis on predicting the consequences of particular actions so as to exploit them for maximum profit. The Greeks, conversely, thought of “working” differently: namely, as bringing “hither—into unconcealment, forth—into presencing.”39

Since art functions as an obvious counterpole to science and technology, it is logical for Heidegger’s critique of technology to mirror his praise of art,40 although most art historians, alert to the political purposes visual images have served throughout history, would discard the contention that art is inimical to domination and control as unrealistic at best, and hopelessly naïve at worst.41 But if a belief in art’s potential to counteract the control of technology seems no more than innocent, it is important to remember that, in opposing the artistic to the technological, Heidegger is attempting to distinguish the “essence” of art from its “practical” applications. Just as science could have spawned from a spirit of wonder and degenerated into an attempt to master, so could art have begun as an evocation of lofty, metaphysical ideals and then degenerated into political propaganda and commercial advertising. Which is not to say that these claims do not raise a number of unresolved questions (e.g., the legitimacy of any strict demarcation between theory and practice, essence and appearance, meaning and application), only that, without digressing into a point by point critique of Heidegger’s position, it is perhaps more productive (for the purposes of this study) to ask how, according to Heidegger, art, like early Greek science, approximates aletheia.

In this endeavor, George Pattison’s summary proves especially helpful. Considering a Greek temple, he observes, Heidegger “describes how, by means of the presence of the Temple, nature is made visible in its materiality as if for the first time.”42 Although building a temple requires that natural materials be employed and refashioned, it is imperative that architects take precautions against these being exploited as standing reserve. Artisans can work in such a respectful way as to allow materials to exhibit their inherent properties without dissimulation (i.e., their surface appearance, texture, tensile and compressive strength, and so on). And if these qualities emerge in Greek architecture (figure 9.2), it is because the Greeks conceived of art and craft as complimentary forms of knowledge. In art, things come into presence and show themselves as they are. As Pattison puts it, “the artist is understood primarily in terms of techné . . . not because art is a kind of making but because it actively uncovers, actively brings beings forth into unconcealedness, into the openness of disclosure, and thereby enables us to see things for what they are, to see metals glitter and shimmer and colors glow.”43

Figure 9.2. Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sounion, Greece, circa 440 BCE.

Heidegger’s account, regrettably, is not grounded in archaeological research, and one wonders how a cognizance of the Greek practice of painting their temples would have altered his reading. All the same, making no attempts to disguise the properties or textures of his media, Newman made truth to materials a hallmark of his own sculptures; upon reading Heidegger’s stress on metals coming “to glitter and shimmer,”44 in fact, one cannot help but think of the highly reflective, gleaming surface of Here III (figure 4.1). Employing materials without encroachment or dissimulation is, of course, perfectly consistent with the attitude of letting things be, an attitude that should govern artists’ use of materials, and encourage them to work in conformity with the guiding principles of nature. According to Heidegger, the Greeks believed that nature was that which is “continually forming and passing away of its own accord, as distinct from that which is of human making, that which springs from [techné], from skill, invention, and production.”45

Figure 9.3. Barnett Newman, Gea (1945), oil and oil crayon on cardboard, 28 3 22 inches. Art Institute of Chicago. Through prior gift of the Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In is perhaps the very autonomy of nature, rather than truth to materials, that Newman’s early works such as Gea (figure 9.3) and Songs of Orpheus were meant to connote. In these pieces, effervescent, biomorphic forms evoke nature’s ability to act independently of human interference. Whether Heidegger would have appreciated these pastels remains an open question, but many are comparable to images created by Paul Klee, who was fascinated by organic life, and highly esteemed by Heidegger.46 The philosopher also claimed that one of the varying potential connotations of physis was the “self-blossoming emergence (e.g., the blossoming of a rose), opening up, unfolding, that which manifest itself in such unfolding and perseveres and endures in it; in short, the realm of things that emerge and linger on.”47 Such language is particularly appropriate to the suggestion of continual germination and dynamic movement in Newman’s formative work. Heidegger’s other claim, moreover, that “physis originally encompassed heaven as well as earth, the stone as well as the plant, the animal as well as man,”48 is echoed in Newman’s praise of his contemporary, the painter Theodoros Stamos (figure 9.4), whose “ideographs capture the moment of totemic affinity with the rock and the mushroom, the crayfish and the seaweed. He redefines the pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural phenomenon. One might say that instead of going to the rock, he comes out of it. In this Stamos is on the same fundamental ground as the primitive artist, who never portrayed the phenomenon as an object of romance and sentiment but always as an expression of the original noumenistic mystery in which rock and man are equal.”49

Figure 9.4. Theodoros Stamos, Sounds in the Rock (1946), oil on composition board, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edward W. Root.

Like many of Newman’s early pastels, Gea also evokes the sensation that nothing in nature is static. For Heidegger, physis means “growth, that which has itself grown in such growth.”50 And since physis denotes “the ‘self-forming prevailing of beings as a whole,’”51 man is included in this category. The events human beings experience, “procreation, birth, childhood, maturing, aging, death,” Heidegger explains, “are not events in the narrow, present-day sense of a specifically biological process of nature. Rather, they belong to the general prevailing of beings, which comprehends within itself human fate and history.”52 One sense of physis is thus primordial and all-encompassing: nature seen through Heidegger’s fascination with beginnings, and “not meant in the modern, late sense of nature, as the conceptual counterpart to history. . . . Rather it is intended more originally than both of these concepts, in an originary meaning which, prior to nature and history, encompasses both.”53

These statements are congruent with Newman’s description of the original artist’s quest to commune with nature in this primordial sense, nature as differentiated from the creations of humanity, and, more specifically, from the dominant tendency toward control endemic to technology. “In clarifying the expression [physis] in the sense that which subsists independently for itself and grows and prevails from out of itself,” Heidegger writes, “we distinguished it from those beings that are on the basis of their being produced by man.” But the philosopher also mentions an “opposite concept” of physis, one that is more in tune with Newman’s mature work, and “one which comprises everything referring to human deed and action, including man in his activity . . . a being who is distinct from nature in the narrower sense.”54 Just as Heidegger insisted that translating physis into natura ignores the “fundamental poetic and intellectual [Greek] experience” of physis55—that is, an all-encompassing experience including man as well as nature—Newman claimed that the primordial artist’s quest for true communion with, later changed into one of admiration for, nature—an admiration that, paradoxically, succeeded in excluding man and “setting him apart to make nature the object of romantic contemplation.”56

Such a cleavage is even symptomatic of Newman’s own later production, one best clarified in light of another distinction Heidegger draws: that between “Being” and “becoming.” While becoming is a state of not-yet Being, Being is endowed with the stability and permanence of presence. “What becomes,” Heidegger explains, “is not yet. What is need no longer become. What ‘is,’ the essent, has left all becoming behind it if indeed it ever became or could become. What ‘is’ in the authentic sense also resists every onsurge of becoming.”57 Newman’s development seems to straddle this same fence. Early works such as Gea suggest the growth and energy that permeates nature as a whole, a dynamic of which humanity remains an integral component; by imparting a sense of flux, energy, and impermanence, these images might be construed as examples of becoming. Mature paintings such as Onement or Be, conversely, suggest the way Da-sein comes to itself only upon feeling distinct and different from nature; by imparting a sense of fixity, stasis, and permanence, these images might be construed as examples of Being. To reinforce his point, Heidegger cites Parmenides: “being present . . . is entirely, unique, unifying, united, gathering itself in itself (cohesive, full of presentness).”58 This description, arguably, tallies with Newman’s ambitions for Onement or Be, insofar as the unified and singular beam evokes the intransient stability of presence, in opposition to Gea, whose suggestions of growth and transience evoke the temporary state of becoming or not-yet Being.59

This interpretation may be directly applied to visual images because, immediately after citing Parmenides, Heidegger could not resist awarding the status of presence to Archaic Greek sculptures. Standing, seemingly stationary and immobile, resilient against whatever surrounds them, erect Kouroi (figure 5.3) ostensibly provide the perfect visual analog for unified and gathered presence.60 “Being appears,” Heidegger contends, “as the fullness of the permanent, gathered within it, untouched by unrest and change.”61 A logical intermediary between Heidegger’s Kouroi and Newman’s beams, of course, might be supplied by Giacometti’s emaciated human beings (figure 9.5), sculptures that Newman fervently admired,62 a bridge, if one wills, between Greek Kouroi and Newman’s own abstractions.

Figure 9.5. Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman (1947, 1948 [cast 1949]), painted bronze, Museum of Modern Art, New York, James Thrall Soby Bequest © ARS, New York (Photo Credit: Digital Image © Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York)

The distinction between Being and becoming thus helps differentiate Newman’s earlier production from Onement, and clarifies why this painting signals such a radical break in the artist’s career. While pondering the implications of a new image he did not fully understand, even upon its completion, Newman came to identify and empathize with the vertical orientation of the red stripe. Contemplating the stripe’s opposition to the surrounding field, he came to realize that he had devised a visual formula befitting a different understanding of humanity’s relationship to nature than that reflected in his previous works: he now fully felt his own presence and experienced an alternative sense of his place in the world. This realization instigated the irreversible development of his signature style, a rift so drastic for him that he identified completing Onement I with the “beginning” of his “present life.”63 From then on, the mature work was no less incommensurate with the artist’s formative phase than the distinction between Being and becoming. Any entity in a state of becoming, after all, hovers between being “no longer” (i.e., different from its anterior state) and “not yet” (i.e., different from the state into which it is moving). Heidegger even suggests that becoming is actually permeated with non-Being: “In view of this ‘no longer and not yet,’ becoming is shot through with non-being. Yet it is not pure nothing, but no longer this and not yet that and as such perpetually other. Consequently it looks this way and now that. It presents an intrinsically unstable aspect.”64 Given the above, it is not surprising that Heidegger appreciated Archaic Kouroi over their classical or Hellenistic progenitors (figure 5.3), sculptures whose greater suggestions of movement evoke a vacillation between one state and another. Nor is it surprising that Newman, who harbored a keen admiration for non-Western art, moved from evoking transient germination in Gea or Orpheus to sensations of permanent presence in Onement or Be. “As contrasted with becoming,” Heidegger writes, Being “is permanence, permanent presence.”65

Against this background, one may return to Euclidian Abyss (figure 9.1) and address its denunciation of “the perils of geometry” which Newman associated with “death.”66 For “geometry,” in this case, one could read, not that branch of mathematics per se, but the imposition of standardization and efficiency upon human activity, an imposition that Newman saw reflected in the impersonal character of geometric abstraction (“If we substitute Mondrian’s name for that of Euclid,” Barbara Rose writes, “we may better understand the battle Newman fought to find some avenue of escape from geometric painting”67). Heidegger would have sympathized. He decried the use of mechanical apparatuses that conceal “the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same.”68 For some, of course, Newman disparaging geometric abstraction is like the pot calling the kettle black, given that his own employment of masking tape often left hard edges that, at first glance, look completely mechanical, conveying little if any emotional content or personal touch. But Newman defended his approach—and, ostensibly, its difference from the kind of emotionally neutral and cold geometry he despised. “Straight lines,” he insisted, “do exist in nature. . . . A straight line is an organic thing that can contain feeling.”69

This statement may explain how Newman could distance his work from “geometry.” Yet how Euclidian Abyss specifically exposes, confronts, or alleviates “the grip of geometry” is more difficult to gauge, especially as Euclidian Abyss includes two elements rarely found, let alone combined, in Newman’s artistic production: a curved stripe and one that forms a right angle.70 Other instances are Death of Euclid (figure 9.6) and a number of works on paper that functioned, quite unusually, as preliminary sketches for Euclidian Abyss. One says “unusually” because, later in his career, Newman purported to be an intuitive painter who never worked from sketches, or planned a painting in advance.71 This attitude, incidentally, is very much in keeping with Heidegger’s: “the moment when planning and calculation have become gigantic. . . . The ‘world’ becomes smaller and smaller, not only in the quantitative but also in the metaphysical sense: a being as a being, i.e., as object, is in the end so dissolved into controllability that the being-character of a being disappears.”72

Figure 9.6. Barnett Newman, Death of Euclid (1947), oil on canvas, 16 3 20 inches. Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The near verbatim repetition of its compositional configuration in several instances, in flagrant violation of the artist’s normal working methods, suggests that Euclidian Abyss must have held a specific meaning for Newman, although its exact nature is impossible to discern with any degree of certainty. Perhaps the bent versus right-angled beam combination could be explained if these elements were interpreted one at a time. Compared to the majority of Newman’s beams, the one to the left of Euclidian Abyss warps or curves. One could almost say that it is slightly, but noticeably, bent “out of shape.” This expression, of course, is used deliberately here, suggesting, once again, how the physical can impart an emotional charge. When we say that someone’s view of things is “twisted,” or that they behave as though they are “bent out of shape,” we mean that their opinions are exceptionally biased, or that their reactions are disproportionately aggressive (taking a page from Heidegger’s book, we may mention that, in Greek, “orthodox” literally means “straight thinking”). Insofar as Newman’s canvases are concerned, we speculate that, if the strictly vertical beams in Onement or Be stand for a resilient, mindful human presence against all in nature that is not mindful, the left beam in Euclidian Abyss could perhaps be interpreted as a failure of resolve, or, from a Heideggerian perspective, a failure of Da-sein to live up to its charge. By bending, in effect, the beam evokes a human presence deviating from its course or acting in opposition to its nature. The Greek words ptosis and enklisis, Heidegger writes, “mean falling, tipping, inclining. This implies a deviation from standing upright and straight. But this erect standing-there, coming up and enduring is what the Greeks understood by being. . . . Something is present to us. It stands by itself and thus manifests itself. It is. For the Greeks ‘being’ basically meant this standing presence.”73

The beam on the right is equally uncharacteristic. Not because it warps, but because it is solidly anchored along the lower perimeter by a right angle and fails to extend beyond the bottom edge. If the left beam’s curvature can be contrasted to the erect posture of Newman’s signature zips, the beam at the right of Euclidian Abyss also evokes a different feeling. To be sure, a beam’s verticality makes it look immobile and unbending—as Heidegger believed the appropriate stance was for standing presence among the Greeks—but, comparatively speaking, the perfect right angle conveys excessive hardness and rigidity. If Newman sought to give his spectators a sense of place, so that they would know where they are, he was equally preoccupied with the sensation of freedom, a feeling he seldom sought to curtail. The same, of course, applies to Heidegger; as Michael Gelven explained, the da of Da-sein should be read as “Here I am, open to possibilities!”74 Thus, while the left beam is bent, digressing from its path, failing in its resolve, the right appears so unbending and inflexible, so similar to the framing edge, as to inhibit any possibility of lateral movement. Instead of freedom, the right angle conveys a sensation of extreme constraint. If this reading seems stretched, it might be recalled that another Abstract Expressionist, Clyfford Still (figure 9.7), also construed the geometric limitations of the framing edge in oppressive terms, and employed derogatory references to Euclid in order to make that point: “To be stopped by a frame’s edge,” he proclaimed, “was intolerable; a Euclidian Prison, it had to be annihilated, its authoritarian implications repudiated.”75 Like Still, then, Newman may have chosen a right angle to visualize the repressive nature of rational thinking, a form of thought that gives short shrift to creativity and spontaneity—a form of thought comparable to what Heidegger disparaged as enframing. Perhaps Newman was even suggesting that the left beam is forced to bend, or compelled to act contrary to its nature, precisely because of the disproportionate severity of the right-angled-beam.

Figure 9.7. Clyfford Still, 1954 (1954), oil on canvas, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1957.

It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what Newman had in mind by differentiating both stripes in this manner. But given that he spent extended periods of time examining his canvases with a view to detecting their potential emotive resonance, one may conjecture that, during this process, both beams elicited different physical associations (i.e., the firm versus the pliable, the bent versus the unbending) creating the basis for the artist’s construction of meaning. Inasmuch as Heidegger saw what is “bent” or “inclining” as a metaphor for a deviation from the upward stance of Being, or Still the edge of a painting’s frame as an authoritarian limitation to overcome, Newman arguably read the physical configuration of both beams in Euclidian Abyss in analogous terms, terms that provided the interpretive foil against which he later conceptualized the seminal evocation of human presence in Onement. Although no interpretation can, admittedly, be considered definitive, the one presented here may explain how, in Newman’s mind at least, the beams in Euclidian Abyss could visualize his general antipathy toward rational thinking, an antipathy for which he coined the rather idiosyncratic rubric “perils of geometry.”76

Intriguingly, Heidegger also pondered the implications of the word “abyss,” claiming that its original meaning was that ground toward which, because it lies undermost, all things gravitate downward. But if the “ground is the soil in which to strike root and to stand,” then the “age for which the ground fails to come, hangs in the abyss.”77 There is something suggestive in this passage, insofar as the literal ground, as something upon which to strike root and make one’s stand, provides both the physical and metaphorical basis for Newman’s stripes. In Euclidian Abyss, however, the curved beam does not hold itself erect, and the right-angled beam cannot strike root. They reside in an abyss because they cannot “strike root and stand,” a metaphor, possibly, for an inauthentic and disconnected form of existence, a life, in other words, dominated by enframing.

Newman did not simply alter the physical configuration of his beams. As we shall see, he also differentiated soft from hard edges, distinctions that were also likely to be purveyors of meaning. On this point, we conjecture that, just as Newman (like Heidegger) stressed both humanity’s separateness and connection to others, the edges may be made softer or harder as needed. A razor-sharp edge, in effect, evokes the isolation of the human presence from the world, while a softer one the nature of our existence as being-with. One may also speculate that if the bending of the beam connotes a failure of resolve, a failure to stand upright, perhaps the softening of the beam may be another way of imparting the same sentiment: namely, that the human presence is in danger of being re-claimed by nature, or by the Nothing which stands as an ever-present source of anxiety to Da-sein. Whether Newman intended to employ the softer versus harder edges of the beams in this way is, of course, impossible to say, but this much is sure: whether bent or strictly vertical, hard or soft, nothing would have displeased him more than comparing his lines to anything industrial or technological.

Notes

1. SWI, 157.

2. SWI, 157.

3. SWI, 157.

4. SWI, 67.

5. See also Mollie McNickle, The Mind and Art of Barnett Newman, 25ff.

6. SWI, 158.

7. IM, 49.

8. FCM, 10.

9. FCM, 19.

10. FCM, 14, 15.

11. SWI, 8.

12. FCM, 11.

13. Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 54.

14. SWI, 179.

15. FCM, 17.

16. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko (with the assistance of Barnett Newman), letter to Edward Alden Jewell, art editor, New York Times, June 7, 1943, reprinted in Lawrence Alloway and Mary Davis MacNaughton, Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective, 169. As Max Kozloff also wrote, “All the ideas of the New York School were colored by antagonism to the practical mind. . . . Nothing was more irrelevant and foreign to their conception of terror in the world than American “knowhow.” Kozloff, “American Painting During the Cold War,” in Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 110.

17. FCM, 15.

18. BT, 79.

19. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 398.

20. SWI, 112.

21. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Reason, 10.

22. IM, 8. Heidegger continues, “You hear remarks such as ‘Philosophy leads to nothing,’ ‘You can’t do anything with philosophy,’ and readily imagine that they confirm an experience of your own. There is no denying the soundness of these two phrases. . . . Any attempt to refute them by proving that after all it does ‘lead to something’ merely strengthens the prevailing misinterpretation to the effect that the everyday standards by which we judge bicycles or sulphur baths are applicable to philosophy” (11–12).

23. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 10.

24. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 11.

25. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 14.

26. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 15.

27. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 17.

28. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 20.

29. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 26.

30. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27.

31. Barnett Newman, draft statement relating to an interview with Lane Slate in preparation for “Contemporary American Painters,” aired on 10 March 1963, CBS; typescript, Barnett Newman Foundation Archives.

32. “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 113.

33. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27.

34. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 28.

35. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 21.

36. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 34. See also “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 57.

37. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 35.

38. “Science and Reflection,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 156.

39. “Science and Reflection,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 161.

40. George Pattison, The Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000), 43.

41. See, for example, David Castriota (ed.), Artistic Strategy and the Rhetoric of Power: Political Uses of Art from Antiquity to Present (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986).

42. George Pattison, The Later Heidegger, 48.

43. George Pattison, The Later Heidegger, 50.

44. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 45.

45. FCM, 31.

46. See Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), and Arnfinn Bø-Rygg, “Thinking with Klee,” in Audun Eckhoff, Karin Helandsjø, and Juri Steiner (eds.), In Paul Klee’s Enchanted Garden (Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 86ff.

47. IM, 14.

48. IM, 14.

49. SWI, 109.

50. FCM, 25.

51. FCM, 25.

52. FCM, 26.

53. FCM, 26.

54. FCM, 35–36.

55. IM, 14.

56. SWI, 109.

57. IM, 95.

58. IM, 96.

59. This same distinction may tally, incidentally, with Bois’s insightful observation that, prior to Onement, Newman felt he was “manipulating” space, while afterward he was “declaring” it. Yve-Alain Bois, “Newman’s Laterality,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 32. Perhaps manipulation corresponds to “becoming,” declaration to “Being.”

60. IM, 96: “These few words [of Parmenides] stand there like the Greek statues of the early period.”

61. IM, 97.

62. See Ann Gibson, “Barnett Newman and Alberto Giacometti,” Issue 3 (Spring/Summer 1985): 2–10.

63. SWI, 255.

64. IM, 114.

65. IM, 125.

66. SWI, 179.

67. Barbara Rose, “The Passing and Resurgence of Barney Newman,” New York Magazine 8 (November 1971): 82.

68. P, 81.

69. SWI, 241.

70. Untitled of 1946 (Phil cat. # 28, presently on extended loan to the Princeton University Art Museum) includes a curved and straight stripe, although without the inclusion of a right-angled one.

71. SWI, 248.

72. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowing), 348.

73. IM, 61.

74. Gelven, A Commentary, 27.

75. Still cited in Patricia Still, “Clyfford Still: Biography,” in Thomas Kellein, ed., Clyfford Still (Munich: Prestel, 1992), 162.

76. To add yet another level of complexity to this image, it is also be difficult to gainsay that both Euclidian Abyss and Death of Euclid could be legitimately read as more abstract versions of Genetic Moment, which, intriguingly enough, includes a curved beam on the left and the spherical shape that appears in the upper right-hand corner of Death of Euclid. But since Genetic Moment is often interpreted, and persuasively so, as an allusion to sexual coupling, then the curved beam at the left would stand for the female figure while the right-hand beam for the male one, with Newman using the right angle as a more simplified rendition of male genitals than is found in Genetic Moment (see Jeremy Strick, The Sublime is Now: The Early Work of Barnett Newman, 24, and Mollie McNickle, The Mind and Art of Barnett Newman, 193ff). In which case, any link between the theme of Genetic Moment and the ostensible theme of Euclidian Abyss or Death of Euclid (i.e., the “perils of geometry”) becomes not only difficult to fathom, but reading Genetic Moment as sexual coupling would also throw the entire interpretation of Euclidian Abyss and Death of Euclid suggested above off-kilter. Why? Because the curvature of the left stripe would simply be Newman’s way of differentiating the female form from the strictly vertical male at the right and would have nothing to do with a human presence forced to deviate from its course. Similarly, the right angle of the “male” stripe would be Newman’s way of distinguishing its gender by referencing male genitals in simplified form, just as he did in Genetic Moment, and the spherical shape in the center of Death of Euclid and Genetic Moment might be a reference to an ovum at the time of fertilization.

77. “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 90.