TALES OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION AMELIA BARIKIN

I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1928
March, 1925. Captain Gustaf Johansens two-masted sailing ship has run aground on a strange and unknown island, somewhere in the southern Pacific Ocean. Scrambling across the muddy shore, the crew encounter an alien city; a mind-bending vision of cosmic majesty that appears as a conglomeration of vast angles and stone surfacessurfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. Colossal pillars and gigantic stone blocks tower over the oozing, greenish wasteland. Great monoliths soar above slimy subterranean vaults. More than the scale or material oddity of the place, it is the sheer and total weirdness of its geometry that ultimately strikes terror into the hearts of the sailors. Angles that seem initially to be concave appear on second glance as convex; the position of the sky and the sea are queerly indeterminate and somehow interchangeable; it cannot be decided whether the giant sea-soaked sculptures jutted about the landscape stand as horizontal or perpendicular to the ground. But it is not until Johansens men come across the doora portal of darkness so vast it seems acres-widethat the full extent of the horror is revealed: Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all rules of matter and perspective seemed upset Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness. Visualised by H.P. Lovecraft as a monstrous assault on the human senses, the non-Euclidean landscape is an unthinkably abnormal realm, loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours: the sublime product of an alien mind. Art and The New Geometries In 1928, the year Lovecraft first published his short story The Call of Cthulhu, literary and artistic interest in this kind of aberrant geometry had reached its zenith. References to non-Euclidean space had been paired in the popular imagination with the existence of the Fourth Dimension as early as the late 1800s, crystallised in both the science fictions of writers like H.G. Wells and the scientific papers of mathematicians such as Bernhard Reimann, Henri Poincar, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The notion of a space unbounded by Euclids postulates on right angles and parallel lines was the subject of heated debate amongst English, American and European scientific communities, and the topic attracted significant interest from poets, writers and artists alike (including Apollinaire, Malevich, and Duchamp). In England, E.A. Abbotts novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions was met with near-instant popular success upon its publication in 1884; in Paris in 1909, Matisse and Charles Camoin were discussing the Fourth Dimension in their letters; in 1912, Albert Gliezes and Jean Metzinger published their influential treatise Du Cubisme, in which Reimanns theories of non-Euclidean geometry were explicitly positioned as a way to understand Cubist pictorial space. By the 1920s in America, the idea of Fourth Dimension was firmly integrated in the pop imaginary, in part due to the editorial efforts of pulp magazines such as Marvel Tales and Weird Tales (in which Lovecraft frequently published), and to the regular coverage of the subject in magazines such as Harpers Weekly, Scientific American and The Popular Science Monthly. Significantly, in Lovecrafts works the non-Euclidean bending of space and time was designed not as an escape from the materiality of the cosmos, but as a means to highlight the limitations of human thought when confronted with the infinite permutations of the unknown. I choose weird stories, Lovecraft explained,

because they suit my inclinations bestone of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and the natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.
Rather than negating the laws that govern human understanding of space and time, Lovecraft viewed the uniformity of the material universe as a front for a concealed, higher order of reality. The point was to reveal the artifice of humanitys imperfect conceptions of the cosmos so as to access the chaos of a shadow-haunted Outside. From the gulfs of space to the wells of night It is this tension between the frame and its contenta tension between the tactile utility of materialist knowledge and the amorphous workings of an unimaginable realmthat provides the most explicit link between the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and the sculptures, maquettes, collages and spatial installations of Roy Ananda. In Anandas world, gridded and locked spaces give way to visions of star studded galaxies; a Rubiks cube is emblazoned with images of deep space; tentacled monstrosities are frozen in hyper-geometrical frames. Forms and images develop provisionally, through processes of physical accretion, while the gallery acts as a kind of experimental laboratory for the making of a world teetering on the brink of collapse (as Ananda has said, a lot of what I do is only a very slightly more grown up version of cubby-building or model making; the exhibition is clearly an exercise in world-building). While Ananda has admitted that his works are, in part, an unashamedly extended fan letter to Lovecraft, the Lovecraftian influence serves less as subject matter and more as an organising principle for his spatial and sculptural manipulations. The motif of the grid appears particularly prominent, functioning as a reminder of the bounded arena from which visions of the unbounded must necessarily unfold. Modularity, too, develops specific connotations through Anandas science-fictional approach. The modular structure of his mutable shelving units plays on the enduring modularity of Lovecrafts legacy: a reference to the way in which Lovecrafts mythos continues to be adapted and re-animated by innumerable fans, artists, gamers and writers to suit their own contemporary contexts. As Ananda writes, The inventory of bizarre entities, nightmarish locales, alien artefacts and forbidden tomes that constitutes the Cthulhu Mythos grows ever larger [the mythology serves] as a conditioner for my preferred sculptural strategies: the spatial manipulation of the drawn or printed image; subtle interventions on found objects; and the use of mutable, modular structures, held just shy of their point of collapse. Subject to change and rearrangement, these works hinge on the creation of provisional spaces in which collections of material objects are brought into a fragile and momentary alliance. Alien archaeology: new old things In November 1931, H.P. Lovecraft attended a lecture by Willem de Sitter, the Dutch astronomer whose research into the phenomenon of dark matter was subsequently co-published with Albert Einstein. The lecture made a strong impression on Lovecraft, and he referred directly to Sitters ideas on the expansion of the universe and the curvature of space-time in his story The Dreams in the Witch House (1932). This tale was marked with the same kind of nonrepresentable spaces and complex, alien geometries seen in The Call of Cthuhulu. Importantly, however, despite Lovecrafts familiarity with the scientific discourse surrounding the new geometries, his most frequent tool for visualising the Fourth Dimension was not mathematics or science, but the language of formalist art history, filtered through the prose of his favourite writer, Edgar Allen Poe. Astonishing works of art appear throughout Lovecrafts stories, primarily as evidence of alien civilizations much older and stranger than humankind might possibly imagine (They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them). Bas-reliefs, clay idols, jewellery, architectural constructions and sculpted carvings provide material proof of the existence of the shadow-haunted Outside. At times likened by Lovecraft to the planar distortions of Futurism and Cubism, the bizarre objects are also attributed to dream knowledge, their designs apparently prompted by alien transmissions (I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than Brooding Tyre, or the Contemplative Sphinx, or the garden-girdled Babylon). Although Lovecraft designates some of the art works in his tales as ancient, most are newly created, hand-made by humans under the influence of alien aesthetics. As such it is their iconography, rather than their age or historical value, which is the source of their greatest fascination. The ability to create new old thingsnewly crafted objects that

element in Anandas practice. This is a way of inventing ancient histories so as to envisage potential futures, a form of inverted entropy in which faked relics or reversed ruins are gifted with a mysterious totemic powerthe kind of power normally bestowed only by the passing of time. Sidestepping a history of art marked by serial progression and gradual innovation, Anandas Lovecraftian assemblages manifest as shock arrivals from an alien time zone: the archaeological remnants of some weird, alternate present.
Notes: 1 H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, in S.T. Joshi (ed.), The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, Penguin: London and New York, 2002, p. 164
2 3 4 5 6

ibid, p. 165 ibid, p. 166-67 ibid, p. 167 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, Du Cubisme, Eugne Figuire: Paris, 1912

See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton University Press: New Jersey, 1983
7 8 9

Lovecraft, as cited in S.T. Joshi (ed.), Introduction, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, p. xv ibid, p. xvi Roy Ananda, conversation with the author, April 2013 ibid. Roy Ananda, Rlyeh Maquettes, artists statement, Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne, November 2012

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Lovecraft, letter to Miss Elizabeth Toldridge, 3 December 1931, re-printed in The H.P. Lovecraft Archive: http://www.hplovecraft.com/life/ interest/astrnmy.aspx; accessed 22 April, 2013
13

Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, p. 163 ibid, p. 143

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