Cubists like Pablo Picasso had already attempted to represent four-dimensional shapes on the two-dimensional canvas, excited by the theories of 19th-Century mathematicians Bernhard Riemann and Henri Poincaré
“To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour” William Blake
According to Henderson, Fleming was one of the few artists in the 1960s who saw how the fourth dimension could be applied to art. Fleming said he was living in Pittsburgh when he began learning about the different functions of art besides just being a decoration on the wall.
“What I wanted to do was give geometry a liveliness that was not inherently straight lines, which could kind of be almost deadening to your spirit,” Fleming said. “That meant that if I made a grid [with] a specific form, the thing that would give it the liveliness would be the color.”
According to Fleming, by 1964 he was tired of dealing with Pittsburgh’s cold winters, so he and his friend decided to travel someplace warm. Fleming said they meant to go to India, where he would be able to paint and surround himself with spirituality, but they ended up in North Africa after taking the Yugoslav freighter to Tangier, Morocco.
“The first thing that I saw coming into North Africa was the brilliance of the light and the vibrancy of the color,” Fleming said. “The other quality that was immediately visible was that there was geometry. Geometries that were actually very close to what I was trying to deal with.”
“With the popularity of Einstein, everybody thinks the fourth dimension is time,” Henderson said. “Painting was supposed to be flat. Space was not supposed to be part of the deal.”
There are actually two different interpretations. It’s interesting to note that both views are interpreted in art. The first view (philosophers call it the ontological view) is seeing an object in terms of time, and as a result the object shows movement. A sculpture that moves can be caused by wind, motors, light, heat, etc. becoming 4 dimensional art.
The other view is called spacial 4th dimension in which length, width, and height have one more addition (not time). This gets into some physics; so bear with me. First it means that one dimensional lines together make a 2 dimensional plane (let’s say a square). Then 2 dimensional planes together make a 3 dimensional shape (a cube). Then that would mean; 3 dimensional shapes together would define a 4 dimensional thing (called a tesseract or a hypercube).
In this groundbreaking study, first published in 1983 and unavailable for over a decade, Linda Dalrymple Henderson demonstrates that two concepts of space beyond immediate perception—the curved spaces of non-Euclidean geometry and, most important, a higher, fourth dimension of space—were central to the development of modern art. The possibility of a spatial fourth dimension suggested that our world might be merely a shadow or section of a higher dimensional existence. That iconoclastic idea encouraged radical innovation by a variety of early twentieth-century artists, ranging from French Cubists, Italian Futurists, and Marcel Duchamp, to Max Weber, Kazimir Malevich, and the artists of De Stijl and Surrealism.
In an extensive new Reintroduction, Henderson surveys the impact of interest in higher dimensions of space in art and culture from the 1950s to 2000. Although largely eclipsed by relativity theory beginning in the 1920s, the spatial fourth dimension experienced a resurgence during the later 1950s and 1960s. In a remarkable turn of events, it has returned as an important theme in contemporary culture in the wake of the emergence in the 1980s of both string theory in physics (with its ten- or eleven-dimensional universes) and computer graphics. Henderson demonstrates the importance of this new conception of space for figures ranging from Buckminster Fuller, Robert Smithson, and the Park Place Gallery group in the 1960s to Tony Robbin and digital architect Marcos Novak.” “Eagleman and Paariyadath suggested that the time expansion was an artefact of memory: intense situations cause our brains to soak up more sensory details, laying down a richer memory “???
