Vertical and Horizontal

Horizontal. The structural complementary of the vertical is, of course, the horizontal. A child of about three comes up with horizontals and verticals to make so-called Greek crosses, rectangles, standing figures with outstretched arms, and, a year or two later, houses, doors, and windows. We use them as partneres to describe the square, the rectangle, the cross, the post and lintel, and other peculiarly human constructs. Nature creates horizontal and vertical reticulations in the "cracking pattern" of surfaces as different in substance as paint, dried mud, and ceramic glazes.

Horizontal and vertical lines lend character and proportion to each other. They describe the essential two-dimensionality of the surface upon which they are drawn. When they interact, they create open and closed areas associated with tectonics, systems, and structures of all kinds.

Open Structure. It would be difficult to determine how a principle such as open structure gains acceptance at a particular time. To have continued as a vital factor in the work of almost every important artist and architect of the present era, it must have sprung from the deepest reservoirs of intuition and feeling. Its emergence through form rather than theory alone gives support to the idea that art is able to embody in its very fabric the first principles of a new vision. Certainly, from about 1890 to 1918 there was evident in the work of several artists an obsession with order and expression. Seurat's atomic color units, points; his reinstatement of Golden Section proportions in pictorial design; his reduction of forms to their simplest structural equivalents; and Cézanne's interest in dynamic synthesis and universal geometrics (sphere, cylinder, cone, cube) are but two indicators of creative regneration. Others could be sought in achitecture, music, poetry, and the sciences.

Transcultural influences are often fleeting and unreliable, but the interest shown in Japanese prints by major European artists--Manet, Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin--from the 1860s, and in Japanese houses by Western architects from about the turn of the century, seems to have been more than a passing flirtation. The Japanese use of line, plane, pattern, and texture, their handling of space in their paintings and prints, and their modular partitioning of areas in their dwellings inspired Western artists and achitects over a number of decades. Some kind of basic language of design, bridging time, place, and culture, appeared to be evolving in the twentieth century. Museums, the camera, photographic reproductions in books and magazines (André Malroux's "museum without walls"), scholarship, and travel were pressing all art together for comprision.

The discipline of straight lines--horizontals and verticals--in relationship to themselves has brught us to a consideration of the more technical applications of lines . . . .

The earliest examples of right-angle lines are drawings from the caves of Southern France and from Mesopotamia. Graphic representations and a rudimentary geometry (Tectiforms) seem to have sprung up as twins in the household of humanity. This is not surprising, since both partake of people's eagerness to understand their surroundings and their need to build their own defenses against its seen and unseen powers.

If fear, hunger, and a need for ritual communion with a spirit-world lead to the drawing of animal images or shamanistic images, the building of snares, corrals, and shelters, the technique of weaving, and the making of tools led to the second type of imagery. In the primal society, where acquisition of food by hunting or foraging and protection of the social unit against its foes were all-consuming responsibilties, both of these social-symbolic functions existed in intimate and vital concjunction.

Techniques of weaving and plaiting, of binding saplings to form rectangular pens, and, later, the making of bricks provided a repertory of forms that, in turn, served as models for thinking. They were aids to a simple arithmetic and, ultimately, to geometry and standardized measures; for instance, the knotted cord of the Egyptians. We assume that the brick, which was invented in Sumeria in about 3500 BC or earlier, led immediately to every variation in the art of building. The brick, because it was made by hand to a certain manageable, uniform size, and could be repeated indefinitely, also embodied the concept of a basic unit of measure, a module.

Tools and techniques altered the human environment even as they transformed the potentiality of humanity itself. Symbols, both drawn and spoken, helped people grasp the things of their environment; for to draw or name a thing is, in a sense, to domesticate it. Therefore, image-making, abstraction, language, and conceptual thinking are of the same origin, or lead to one another by a process of cultural growth and development.