Culture Mechanism: The World is Flat

Georges Braque's The Portuguese (The Emigrant)

The French artist, Georges Braque, was influenced deeply by Cezanne who led him on the path to Cubism. Later in life, he became close acquaintances with Picasso, and in 1910, both artists were in a phase of a highly competitive relationship between each other, producing some of the most complex works of art of their careers. During their high phase of their collaboration, both artists' style can be described as Analytic Cubism, where in the painting the “object is analyzed, broken down, and dissected.”

One of Braque’s painting that falls under this category is The Portuguese (The Emigrant), where Braque says it shows “an emigrant on the bridge of a boat with a harbor in the background.” Towards the upper right you can see some traces of a docking post and sections of nautical rope, and toward the bottom half of the painting you can make out a guitar. Toward the top right you can see some stenciled letters and numbers that seem to be a fragment of a word. The letters D BAL, for example, may come from Grand Bal, probably a reference to a common dance-hall poster.

In the picture, everything is fractured. For example the guitar player is split up to many pieces, almost like glass, and the background is nothing but shattered pieces of reflecting the different perspectives upon the dock and emigrant. By breaking the picture into smaller fragments, Braque is able to “overcome the unified singularity of an object an instead transform it into an object of vision.”

My understanding of Cubism, specifically Analytic Cubism, is that we are trying to capture every perspective of a certain object, for example the object would be a paper bowl. We want to see this bowl from the top, the bottom, the sides, the inside; pretty much everywhere. So then to do this, we have to tear the bowl apart to shreds of paper, because as an Analytic Cubist painter, I want to be able to capture both the back and front, and inside and outside, all at once. So instead of viewing the painting in the traditional one point of view in a single point in time, we see the painting from many different angles and at many different moments in time. It is kind of like looking at the world, but since we want to see all different perspectives of this circular world, we created a flat version of the world.

Cubism was not only popular in the form of painting, but in works of literature as well. The French Poet, Pierre Reverdy, is one of the foremost poets associated with Cubism, and his work was also a direct inspiration for the emerging surrealist and Dadaist movements. One particular poem that captures the concept of showing all perspectives would have to be “The Same Number.”

THE SAME NUMBER

The hardly open eyes
                The hand on the other shore
The sky
           And everything that happens there
The leaning door
              A head sticks out
From the frame
And through the shutters
You can see out
The sun fills everything
But the trees are still green
                          The falling hour
                          It gets warmer
And the houses are smaller
The passersby go less quickly
And always look up
                 The lamp shines on us now
Looking far away
We could see the light
                          Coming
We were happy
                          That evening At the other house where somebody waits for us

Cubism overall is mind blowing, and trippy. Though you may not think so, the idea of Cubism can be referenced to pop culture today. Movies such as Babel, Mammoth, Crash are considered to be, according to The Washington Post, “World-is-flat” movies. In my opinion, all three movies are pretty DARN amazing, I love the way they capture different perspectives that will eventually combine into a big, brutally, honest narrative.

“[A] new breed of ensemble movie emerged, straining for seriousness and significance, using large casts, intersecting plots and aggressive cross-cutting to tackle Big Issues and illuminate Universal Truths.”