The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space

Boccioni claimed that the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists did not grasp the "absolute plastic ideas" underlying perceptual experiences but instead "submitted them to the relativity of time and space." As an example of such thinking he refers us to paintings by Henri-Edmond Cross titled Second October (Wind) North-East and Rainbow (East) 19 October, 4:30. [24] Clearly, Boccioni is accusing Cross of reducing duration to discrete, normative units of measure, and he extends this critique to include other sensory phenomena, most notably color. Bergson, in Time and Free Will (1889), had critiqued psychophysicists for resolving color into a series of atomistic vibrations that could be quantified, when in fact each color was a nonmeasurable, qualitative phenomenon, a symbol of pure change akin to duration itself. [25] According to Boccioni, the Neo-Impressionists divided duration into normative units of measure and employed "scientific" analysis to resolve color into a "division of chromatic elements." [26] As the "intellectual Impressionists of pure form," the Cubists did to form what the Neo-Impressionists did to color. Cubism reportedly subjected form to scientific analysis through a "division of formal elements," that is, Cubists divided a singular form into its component parts and juxtaposed these parts across the surface of the canvas, to reveal "the planes of the object that its accidental position prevents us from seeing." "This rational procedure," Boccioni asserted, "exists in relativity, not in an intuitive absolute," for "the integral notion of the object exists, with this procedure, in the three concepts of height, width, and depth, thus I repeat, in the relative, in the finite of measuring." Contained within the quantifiable, "measured and finite" realm of the three dimensions, Cubist technique condemned the artist to circle endlessly around an object in order to analyze its external appearances. Unable to perceive duration, the Cubist was restricted to the realm of the relative, unable to reach the " intuitive absolute." [27]

It is on this note that Boccioni introduces the Futurist concept of the fourth dimension, contrasting the Cubists' "false claim" to the term with his own Bergsonian conception of that idea. Boccioni asserted that the Cubists utilized a "measured and finite fourth dimension" to transcribe their "rotating point of view" around an object onto a canvas, whereas the Futurist fourth dimension was "a continuous projection of forces and forms intuited in their infinite unfolding." [28] As we have seen, by intuition Boccioni meant an ability to empathize with an object and enter into its duree, but he here extends this conception to include a notion of space (the fourth dimension), identified with the "infinite unfolding" of duration in the guise of "forces and forms." Boccioni clarifies his meaning elsewhere in the text Plastic Dynamism:

For every new interpretation or creation, a new effort of intuition is necessary. It forces the artist into a state of terrible tension in order to be able to remain continuously in the interior of the object, living its sensibility and recreating its unity. These forces or directions appear in the form of an infinite number of incidents, which are so many inspirations, ... the mysterious suggestions of lyrical deformation. [29]