Abstract
My mom told me about this Charlie Chaplin film…said she enjoyed a clip of Charlie Chaplin eating an artichoke. Finding himself befuddled at a fancy dinner, he took one leaf off, looked at it, and threw it over his shoulder. And so on through the meal until he got to the lovely heart, he looked at it, and regarded it a little longer and threw it over his shoulder. And at that age when mom told it to me it was still already a potent image of moving on beyond Immanuel Kant and the thing itself and leaving that borderline with Platonism behind in the dust somehow. All right, so much for that.
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Notes
- 1.
Notwithstanding Sandback’s remark, it appears likely that the film was from an episode of The Little Rascals. This quote is found in [20].
- 2.
- 3.
The list of courses Sandback took while an undergraduate are follows: logic, the history of classical and modern philosophy, “The Philosophy of Existence,” “Symbolism and Experience,” described as “an examination and critical reconstruction of four conflicting theories of literal and metaphorical meaning: logical positivism, traditional rationalism, existentialism, and the neo-Kantian positions of Cassirer and the later Wittgenstein”; “The Ways of Knowing,” a course on Kant taught by Richard Bernstein, an admirer of pragmatism; and finally an independent study course with the art historian George Kubler. For Sandback’s Yale transcript see [21, p. 71].
- 4.
See e.g. Fer’s discussion of the point in [1, p. 134].
- 5.
As Sandback put it in 1975: “A line of string isn’t a line, it’s a thing, and as a thing it doesn’t define a plane but everything else outside its own boundaries” [12].
- 6.
As Fer puts it [1, p. 149]: “This is played out [in Judd’s work] on the border between inside and outside and and where a breach or threatened injury to that ‘skin’ may generate a situation of anxiety. …At stake is not only control over the object but over the relations of inside and outside and anxiety over whether such control is ever to be achieved.”
- 7.
Sandback writes [19]: “Early on, though, I left the model of such discrete sculptural volumes for a sculpture which became less of a thing-in-itself, more of a diffuse interface between myself, my environment, and others peopling that environment, built of thin lines that left enough room to move through and around. Still sculpture, though less dense, with an ambivalence between exterior and interior. A drawing that is habitable.”
- 8.
“The idea of ‘overall painting’ was much more stimulating to me at the time than were the particular paintings” [18].
- 9.
“I did have a strong gut feeling from the beginning though, and that was wanting to be able to make sculpture that didn’t have an inside. Otherwise, thinking about the nature of place, or a place—my being there with or in it—and the nature of the interaction between the two was interesting” [15].
- 10.
The sideways-on-view was attributed to Wilfrid Sellars by John McDowell, critically [6].
- 11.
We thank the anonymous referee for drawing our attention to this passage from Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, 1962. We also thank him or her for the suggestion of the last sentence of this paragraph.
References
Fer, Briony. On Abstract Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Gerard, Alexander. An Essay on Taste (1759). Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1963.
Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 74–82.
Kubler, George. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962.
Macbeth, Danielle. Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014.
McDowell, John Henry. Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Pinkard, Terry. “Sellars the Post-Kantian.” In The Self-correcting Enterprise: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, edited by Michael P. Wolf and Mark Norris Lance. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
The Fred Sandback Archive. “Artist’s Texts.” 2007. http://www.fredsandbackarchive.org/texts.html.
Sandback, Fred. “1970s Untitled.” In [8].
———. “1973 Notes.” In [8].
———. “1975 Notes.” In [8].
———. “1975 Statements.” In [8].
———. “1975 Interview by Ingrid Rein.” In [8].
———. “1985 An Interview: Fred Sandback and Stephen Prokopoff.” In [8].
———. “Remarks on My Sculpture, 1966–86.” In [8].
———. “1992 Interview.” In [8].
———. “1995 Interview by Kimberly Davenport.” In [8].
———. “1997 Interview by Joan Simon.” In [8].
———. “1999 Statement.” In [8].
———. “Conversation with Fred Sandback.” In [8].
———. Fred Sandback: Drawings, Düsseldorf, Germany: Richter Verlag, 2014.
Sellars, Wilfrid. “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.” In Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, edited by Robert Colodny, 35–78. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962.
Acknowledgements
This paper was first presented at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2011. Subsequently it was presented at a number of other seminars, and I thank those audiences for their questions and comments. This paper was completed whilst the author was a visiting fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in the programme “Mathematical, Foundational and Computational Aspects of the Higher Infinite” (HIF). I thank the INI for this support as well as the University of Helsinki for their additional support. I also wish to thank Emily Brady, Harry Cooper, David Gray, Alistair Rider and the anonymous referee, whose comments and corrections led to many improvements in the paper. Finally I wish to express my deepest thanks to Amy Sandback for her generosity in welcoming a mathematician’s fascination with the work and writings of Fred Sandback.
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Kennedy, J. (2017). Kant, Co-Production, Actuality, and Pedestrian Space: Remarks on the Philosophical Writings of Fred Sandback. In: Kossak, R., Ording, P. (eds) Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics and the Arts. Mathematics, Culture, and the Arts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53385-8_4
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