Dimensionism

Charles Sirató’s Manifeste Dimensioniste (‘Dimensionist manifesto’), first published in France in 1936, applied Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity to the visual arts: “We must accept - contrary to the classical conception - that Space and Time are no longer separate categories, but rather that they are related dimensions... and thus all the old limits and boundaries of the arts disappear.”

Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein, edited by Vanja V. Malloy, is the catalogue to an exhibition of Dimensionist art held last year, though it also serves as “the first publication devoted to critical writing on Dimensionism.” It includes an English translation of the Dimensionist manifesto, which first appeared in the anthology Manifesto: A Century of Isms.

The book also features the first English translation of Sirató’s essay The History of the Dimensionist Manifesto. For good measure, that essay also incorporates a manifesto for another movement, a form of concrete poetry he called Glogoism: “I started out from the verb glogao = speak and called my new “ism” Glogoism. It sounded eccentric enough. Nobody really knew what it meant.”