03. the fence maker’s folly

As the sun began dawning upon the 20th century, the grandfather of the modern image, Paul Cezanne, declared that the vastness of the visible world could be rendered within the boundaries of the picture plane by organising its entirety within a collection of cubes.

He pronounced, “We must not be pleased with reality itself, we must give structure to reality, rearranging it through a process of re-composition. We must readapt it to our rules of composition”.

This militancy of comprehending reality by categorisation has plagued Modernity’s finest minds. Much to their chagrin, however, the containment cube has remained humanity’s most enduring civilizational motifs. The cube has followed humans across the farthest reaches of the oceans and to the stars. For, everywhere that man went, he laid cubes.

From stone fences to bricks, iron cages, concrete blocks, cardboard boxes, border walls and quarantine zones, humankind has an exemplary ability to put itself inside cubes. Categorizing, segregating, excluding and excommunicating. All that refuses to be contained is banished to the realms of rumour.

But fear not, my friend, for rumours, as we know, have begun to spread.