Aesthetics of Space: Cubism to Language Poetry

Abstract

Cubism and the use of collage techniques are both illustrations of the beginnings of a turn towards the ‘spatial’ in the twentieth century, a turn which was, in part, to escape the over-determination of classical ideas of perspective and historical notions of progress which no longer seemed possible, and to develop artworks which could represent the fragmented nature of modern experience. If this was an experience characterized by an inability to maintain a common perspective over past, present and future, whether that perspective was ideological, ethical or optical, then the freeze-frame of Cubism and the fragmentation of collage provided both the method and the form for its representation. They could simultaneously represent despair at a lack of unity and coherence, while suggesting that coherence might result from a process of rearrangement, as well as demonstrate the increasingly individualized nature of experience.