Jun. 30, 2010 - Issue #767: The Bestest of Edmonton 2010

Revue

Exploring the paradoxical

MC Escher remains removed from 20th century art traditions

MC Escher is most popular among math and engineering enthusiasts and professionals as well as, more generally, people who are uncomfortable with abstraction but still somewhat interested in art. But he is not so popular among followers of contemporary art and seems to sit outside of the mainstream of 20th-century traditions: he doesn't fit into any of the readily-identifiable modernist camps contemporary with his work, even though he deals with some of the same material.

Whatever your opinion of his works, however, it's almost shocking how much better his own prints look compared to the reproductions most of us are familiar with in books and posters. Escher was undoubtedly a masterful printmaker, and the lines and tones of his work almost always possess an astonishing sense of perfection: they are precise and pristine and error free. On real paper, in much larger formats than we see his iconic images in books, the ink and the surface has something significant to add to his explorations of depth and illusion.

The AGA's display of Escher's work is grouped by subject matter and chronology, and although their large timeline display only compares him, inexplicably, to the history of the Warner Bros animation studio, it's very much worth comparing him to his modernist contemporaries.

Escher began his career in the 1920s, during the flowering of Surrealism and abstraction. In his early prints, especially a group of landscape prints featuring bits of classical architecture, before his embrace of the fantastic in works like "Castle in the Air," the influence of Japanese woodblock images—which had helped to kick off Modernism in Europe a generation before—is plain. So is his technique, as he begins to explore the tension between the image's surface and illusionistic depth with his careful tones and many lines which draw us in even as they create subtle competing perspectives. For a brief time, Escher even devoted himself to an exploration of flatness which is a cousin to the explorations of Malevich and later various Americans, but his tessellations, inspired by classical Islamic tile art, have an uncertain quality, as they are often framed in ambiguous spaces. Although he doesn't stay in this mode for long, he continues to explore the picture plane with paradoxical images throughout his career.

The tesselation images mark the beginning of a mathematical influence on Escher's work, and perhaps this explains, more than anything, why despite his nods to surrealism in dream-like images and his explorations of abstraction he ultimately seems conservatively opposed to the modern. Artists and art historians have a high opinion of the crises of esthetics and the churn of avant-gardes over the 20th century, but ours wasn't the only discipline rocked by radical changes to its base assumptions. Escher's childhood and early career saw the birth and sudden acceptance of theories of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the Bohr Model and more, and in 1930, just as Escher was turning towards mathematic subject matter, perhaps the most shocking blow to classical mathematics was struck by Gödel in his repudiation of Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russel's Principia Mathematica (Douglas Hofstadter's award-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach identifies this moment, although it's an infuriating read for a visual art enthusiast, as Hofstadter is very uncomfortable with abstraction and grossly mischaracterises modernist and post-modernist art). These are big, scandalous events that point towards self reference, multiple contradictory interpretations and the impossibility of true representation of reality—the same issues the art world confronts.

Although his famous late-career work on impossible structures deals very clearly with paradox and ideas of consistency and impossibility, they are grounded not merely in the same careful illusionistic reality of his earlier work, but steeped in references to the solidity of classical theory: his arches, no matter which way they are turned, are artifacts of a greco-roman/renaissance/enlightenment tradition that somehow hold together despite their flaws, supporting the never-ending march of the most traditional of mathemagicians, monks. Escher falls sick in the mid-sixties and dies in 1972, just as the two revolutions that dominate his works iterate once more into the space/information age and postmodernism, and his work will always look to the past. V

Until Mon, Oct 11
MC Escher: The Mathemagician
The Art Gallery of Alberta (2 Sir Winston Churchill Square)  vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus