Dumanli by Burhan Dogancay, 1974, Guggenheim Museum
Size: 43.8x38.7 cmMedium: Opaque watercolor and fumage on paper
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Anonymous Gift, 1974 © Burhan Dogancay
sun, 1975
“I want everything quiet and simple. For me: walking barefoot, sitting still, reading, listening to stories and now and then telling some myself. Eating fruit, drinking milk, longing to create, but with patience and many insights.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Lou Salomé witten c. March 1904
{2o15} hard | wuppertal | berlin (original uncropped version)
(35mm, lith prints, baryta paper, exposed through the backside)
“I must pour myself out of my hands / into the gardens of / dark blue.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Images: Poems; “The Bride,”
«The Paris Review», No. 56, Spring 1973, New York, NY. Cover: Mel Bochner, Meditation on the Theorem of Pythagoras, 1972
/ «nietzsche once said “one writes not only to be understood, but also to be misunderstood.” the same can be said about the motivation for making works of art, but this strikes me as the moment to try to make this particular work “un-misunderstood”.
when i visited the “temple of pythagoras”, in metaponte, on a cold and wet day in 1972, it was completely deserted. it isn’t much of a temple, just a few reconstructed columns, plus some ancient debris and building stones lying around. but, for whatever reason, i strongly sensed the presence of pythagoras there, and i had the urge to commemorate that feeling. what better way, i thought, than to lay out a simple demonstration, in stones, of his eponymous theorem? so, remembering my 10th grade geometry (3 squared + 4 squared = 5 squared, or 9 + 16 = 25) i picked up, from a pile of debris in the middle of the temple, 50 small stones. i laid them down and found that i still had 3 remaining. figuring a mistake had been made when i initially gathered them up, i recounted 50 stones, and laid them out again. but, again, there was a surplus of three. at first i was baffled, until it dawned on me that the surplus was due to the fact that the corners of the triangle were being counted twice, ie., they were overlapping. what i had stumbled upon was that physical entities(stones) are not equatable with conceptual entities (points). or, the real does not map onto the ideal. which is why the title of the work is “Meditation on the Theorem of Pythagoras” and not simply “Theorem of Pythagoras”. and also why art is not an illustration of ideas but a reflection upon them.
i am pleased that after all these years someone was able to discover this “discrepancy” for themselves (although i have written about it elsewhere in art publications). that said, i do wonder about the unwillingness to assume that i already knew what they had just discovered (do mathematicians still think all artists are dumb?) and not take the next step and ask themselves if it might have been intended to be “confusing”…» – Mel Bochner, «360»,
January 30, 2009 /
