But in the 1920s, the Dutch group De Stijl, among others, argued instead for a radical notion of space

as continuum, an idea which held that space, inside and outside, was uninterrupted and infinite. In its challenge to the role of enclosure in creating space, this notion resulted in a desire for unbounded freedom and weightlessness. Modern architects would only partially satisfy this desire, seemingly levitating ground floors above the ground through the use of slenderpilotis, expansive sheets of plate glass in place of walls, and flooring materials that were continuous from interior to exterior. As the Viennese architect Frederick Kiesler wrote in a De Stijl manifesto describing his City in Space installation at the Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925: Walls, walls, walls ... we want: A system of tension in free space. A change of space into urbanism. No foundation, no walls. Detachment from the earth, suppression of the static axis. In creating new possibilities for living, a new society is created.6 Forty years later, images of massive, democratic crowdsuncircumscribed by walls underneath the hovering plinth of Lina Bo Bardis Sao Paolo Museum (1957-68) testified to these ideas about space as a continuum.

an early 20th-century style and movement in art, esp. painting, in which perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage. the one that understands space as a continuum, in other words, that interior e exterior are one and infinite. This concept is central to Neoplasticism and Bauhaus School, with large reverberation in Post-war North Americans architecture; c) the one that understands Space as continuum inside and outside are continuous important for the Dutch De Stijl group and Bauhaus around Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitsky

Space-time is the new spatial conception crucial to modern architecture as suggested by Sigfried Giedion in Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition published in 1941. Based on the concept of Zeitgeist, or the spirit of the age, Giedion finds the new spatial conception not only in modern architecture but also in cubist painting, and he suggests that there is a historical progression from cubist painting, which first realized the space-time conception, into modern architecture. This paper would look, in particular, at how Giedion draws an analogy between Picassos LArlesienne of 1911-12 and Walter Gropiuss the Bauhaus, Dessau of 1926, and thereby analyse how Giedion establishes the relationship between the cubist painting and architecture based on the concepts of simultaneity and interpenetration of space. This paper would argue that the relationship between cubist painting and architecture based on simultaneity and interpenetration of space is actually far from convincing, and under Giedions method of writing history, which aims at identifying the significant cultural interrelationships within each epoch, he establishes the relationship between the two as a discursive fact in the historical discourse to support his view that there is a unity of art and architecture under the concept of space-time in the modern era.

ART CAN NEVER BE A SCIENCE. Its claims are not falsifiable. There is no hard data on which to resolve disputes about what, when all boils down, are matters of taste. Yet the urge to gild art with the luster of science keep bubbling to the surface. John Silbers Architecture of the Absurd sets the blame for this squarely in the lap of Sigfried Giedion (d, 1968), a Swiss art historian, architecture critic, and champion of modernism. Since it was published in 1941, Giedions classic studySpace, Time and Architecture has been required reading for students of modern architecture. The 900-page text leads us on a remarkable scholarly tour through architecture and city planning from the citt ideale of the Renaissance to the modernist movement. Along the way, it exalts architectsand with them, artistsas geniuses whose production is beyond the ability of even a reasonably informed public to assess. As Silber puts it: Architects are now to consider themselves descendants of Nietzches Zarathustra, geniuses who by right break all laws and conventions. Silbers prcis of Giedions premise goes like this: Genius is its own authority. Those chosen few who possess it owe nothing to their clients or the public; the gift of their genius is enough. They are commissioned by a kind of divine right to stamp the world with their products. This royal absolutism extends also to the painting world, which no longer needs to address the human condition or concerns. Yes, I know, it sounds cranky. But there is much truth in it. The very mandate from heaven an egalitarian people reject in politics (or, at least, are presumed to reject), they accept in the arts. We need our betters, it seems. We find them in artists and architects. No small component of this deference is a cultivated association between art and the intellectual rigors of science.

Silber is not belittling the reality of excellence, denying hierarchies of achievement or taking aim at the hard-won expertiseand authority that flows from itthat every culture needs to prosper. Not at all. What he wants to humble is the exalted aura that surrounds art and architecture and its priesthood of practitioners and commentators. A season does not go by without yet another artist posing as a scientist of some sort. Press releases chirp about the juncture of art and science. The lure of scientific precision tempts critical organizations like AICA to seek a theoretical basis for critical judgment. No more mistakes, if we can get the theory right. (Even hair salons have hopped aboard that bandwagon. Next time you are in Chicago, try Art + Science Salon in Lincoln Park. If you do not like the cut, it just means you do not understand it. There is no such thing as a bad haircut anymore, just bad heads.) The conceit was advanced by Giedion who attributed to Picasso and the Cubists a knowledge of Einsteins special theory of relativity that none of them possessed. He claimed that artists in their laboratories untangle pictorial problems in the same wayand, implicitly, on the same plane of intellectual significancethat scientists perform experiments with nature. A small band of geniusesPicasso, Braque, Le Corbusierwere the spear carriers for true invention and research. They sought a

new concept of space. With no evidence to support the claim, Giedion insisted that the artists he championed were close followers of scientific developments, especially in physics. It is worth repeating in full: Cubism, Giedion argues, was the attempt of artists to come to grips with nonEuclidean geometry. Cubists, he claims, realized it was no longer possible to present exhaustive description from one point of reference. Space in modern physics, he continues, is conceived of as relative to a moving point of reference, not as the absolute and static entity of the Baroque system of Newton. Giedions assumption that artists look to scientists and respond quickly to the latest scientific discoveries is suspect. Non-Euclidean geometries were conceived . . . not at the beginning of the twentieth century, the decade of Cubisms birth, but in the 1820s by Lobachevsky and in the 1850s by Riemann. It it was the conjecture of non-Euclidian geometry that inspired artists, why did it take them eighty years to come up with Cubism? And if was the publication of Einsteins special theory of 1905 that set them on their hunt, how was it that these artistsabysmally ignorant of advanced tensor mathematics and physicsunderstood Einstein years before more than a handful of scientists? More important, Giedion and his admirers ignore the fact that classical architects knew that buildings could be seen simultaneously by different people from many different perspectives, and that each perspective was as valid as any other. We know, for example, that the architects of the Parthenon carefully tapered their columns so that they appeared in balance from a range of perspectives. They also knew, no less than we, that a single person can never view all perspectives simultaneously. Over time, one can see an object from all perspectives and later remember them. But any any single moment one can see an object from only one perspective. I love that phrase no less than we. As used here, it is an implicit call for modesty in the face of what history teaches. And without modesty, our arts are doomed by hubris. As with Nietzsche himself, dementia sets in. And art ends in a dribble.

A fundamental tenet of the historiography of modern architecture holds that cubism forged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early twentieth-century painting and architecture. This collection of essays, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, takes a close look at that widely accepted but little scrutinized belief. In the first historically focused examination of the issue, the volume returns to the original site of cubist art in pre-World War I Europe and proceeds to examine the historical, theoretical, and socio-political relationships between avant-garde practices in painting, architecture, and other cultural forms, including poetry, landscape, and the decorative arts. The essays look at works produced in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia during the early decades of the twentieth century.Together, the essays show that although there were many points of intersection -- historical, metaphorical, theoretical, and ideological -- between cubism and architecture, there was no simple, direct link between them. Most often the connections between cubist painting and

modern architecture were construed analogically, by reference to shared formal qualities such as fragmentation, spatial ambiguity, transparency, and multiplicity; or to techniques used in other media such as film, poetry, and photomontage. Cubist space itself remained two-dimensional; with the exception of Le Cobusiers work, it was never translated into the three dimensions of architecture. Cubism's significance for architecture also remained two-dimensional -- a method of representing modern spatial experience through the ordering impulses of art.Copublished with the Canadian Centre for Architecture/CentreCanadien d'Architecture

As the editors of this collection of 11 essays aver, a link between cubist painting and Modern architecture has long been assumed but never thoroughly substantiated. Two texts in particular have fostered the assumption: Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture (1941), where Picasso's fractured L'Arlesienne half-peers at Gropius' Bauhaus Workshop Building on the facing page; and Colin Rowe & Robert Slutzky's Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal (written 1955-56, published 1963), which refined Giedion's analysis with a distinction between a quality of 'substance' (the literal transparency of a glass curtain wall) and one of 'organisation' (phenomenal transparency with its complex layering of space, as in Le Corbusier's Villa Steinde Monzie). The colloquium at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 1993, on which this book is based, was an attempt to explore the relationship between cubism and architecture in greater depth. But anyone who thinks of cubism as primarily the research in painting, sculpture and papier colle which Picasso and Braque undertook between c1907-14, with 'analytic' and then 'synthetic' phases, will be surprised at how broadly the contributors range. So we find essays on Raymond Duchamp-Villon's Maison Cubiste (1912), on Czech cubist architecture, and on 'Cubism and the Gothic Tradition' (with Robert Delaunay's studies of the church of Saint-Severin seen as 'a second way of representing objects as planes'). Cubist poetry, French garden design in the 1920s, and Fernand Leger's interest in architect- artist collaboration are all considered. These are scholarly pieces but, one can't help thinking, on the margin of what really matters. Fortunately, four participants - Yve-Alain Bois, Bruno Reichlin, Detlef Mertins and Beatriz Colomina - tackle more directly the issues that Giedion and Rowe & Slutzky raise. Bois (sensibly) sticks to a 'resolutely narrow' definition of cubism, distinguishing it from the widespread geometricising style that led to Art Deco. ('To be labelled cubist, it became enough for architecture to be merely cubic.') His focus is the synthetic cubism of Picasso, seen as a play with arbitrary, interchangeable signs (arbitrary because the same sign - say, an outlined circle may be read as an eye in one context, a wineglass in another). Bois believes that Le Corbusier enjoyed similar 'whimsical games' and that the connection between cubism and architecture is a 'semiological playfulness' - but, in his brief account, offers only one example (the hall of Villa La Roche). In a persuasive longer essay that would have benefited from more illustrations, Reichlin examines a number of Le Corbusier's purist paintings of the 1920s and their connection with his architecture of those years - especially in the sense of 'structural correspondences' (for example, interpenetrating contours). Endorsing Bois' proposition that cubism is best understood as a

game with arbitrary signs, he argues that the spatial and compositional tactics of Le Corbusier's purist period can only derive from 'his apprenticeship in cubism'. Mertins returns to Space, Time and Architecture, to the text and sequence of images that first made the connection between cubism and architecture. He suggests that Giedion was more engaged with 'ambiguities and indeterminacies of perception and cognition' than Rowe & Slutzky admit, and that their own distinction between literal and phenomenal transparency is 'inadequate and forced'; inadequate because it confines discussion to 'the pictorial facade' and doesn't pursue the deeper implications for architecture of cubist ambiguity. Where does this collection (in the end, rewarding) leave us? Perhaps tempted to agree with Colomina that the relationship between cubism and architecture can't really be conceived as cause and effect: 'While both cubism and modern architecture are organised around a particular model of perception, they did not produce it; rather they participated in it.' The generative force was rather the nature of perception in the early twentieth century city (speed, fragmentation, etc). And yet this book does not exhaust the topic. Given its catholic contents it is odd, for instance, to find Juan Gris is only glancingly acknowledged. As the artist who, with geometric armatures, brought the ruler and the Golden Section to bear on cubism, his prefiguring of purism should surely be explored.

In his book Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion noted that through developments made during the Renaissance, the conception of space comes to fruition. This conception of space in art was expressed with the discovery of perspective. Through the use of perspective he says every element is related to the unique point of view of the individual. In linear perspective etymologically clear seeing- objects are depicted upon a plane surface in conformity with the way they are seen, without reference to their absolute shapes and relations. The whole picture or design is calculated to be valid for one station and observation point only. To the fifteenth century the principle of perspective came as a complete revolution, involving an extreme and violent break with the medieval conception of space, and with the flat, floating arrangements, as its artistic expression. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1967, first published 1941, pp. 30-31 During the Renaissance, fields of study particularly in the arts were closely intertwined with traditional models. In architecture, buildings were designed with reference to past examples. At around about the early nineteenth century, there came a shift in the conception of space that broke free of the rigidity associated with antiquity. Relativity in our conception of space came about through the development of cubism. Cubism introduced a new dynamic to visual representation. The framed view is coupled with different points of view of the same object, his brings in a factor of time.

Joan Ockman professor and the director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University. Here will be cited her essay The Way Beyond Art published in Autonomy and Ideology, ed.Somol, R.E., the Monacelli Press, New York, 1997, pp.83-120 matter ceased to be understood as opaque mass. The viewer now envisaged different aspects of space simultaneously, inside and outside, convex and concave at once. Matter was decomposed into simple surfaces and lines (as in Mondrian) or became transparent and interpenetrating (as in Lissitsky). With these developments, space came to be understood as a crossing of movements and energies. The change in the conception of space is said to be the demolition of pictorial space by Cubist techniques and substitution of a relative point of view for an absolute one Along with Ockman, Sigfried also wrote about a new conception of space from the traditional. He claims that classical conception of space is related to the notion of perspective and this notion was the primary element in painting since the Renaissance up until the 20th Century. For Giedion, the new method of visual representation after the formation of cubist techniques coincides with a shift in the conception of space and develops form giving principles of the new space conception After Cubism, space conception changes from the static perception of the Renaissance. Giedion claims that the classic conceptions of space and volumes are limited and one sided. For Giedion, the possibilities of this new space conception is like Cubism with its many perspectives that extract the essence of the subject, give it an infinite potential for relations within it. Giedion claims that the dawn of cubism is an anonymous principle just like the discovery of perspective. That cubism is the expression of a collective and almost unconscious attitude and for him, this expression is also closely related to scientific advancements of that period. As Giedion says. Cubism breaks with Renaissance perspective. It views objects relatively: that is, from several points of view, no one of which has exclusive authority. And in so dissecting objects it sees them simultaneously from all sides from above and below, from inside and outside. It goes around and into its objects. Thus to the three dimensions of the Renaissance which have held good as constituent facts throughout so many centuries, there is added a fourth one time: In stage design, the stage itself can become a medium for the exploration and the experimentation of different concepts in vision and space conception. The

stage is the manifestation of the relationship between performers and audience. In her book, Theatres, Gaelle Breton makes reference to ancient theatres. She says that the Greek theatres of antiquity sought to create a unity between the stage and audience areas and combined them under an open air space. This principle she states becomes the model for Elizabethan theatres which she identifies with the Shakespeare Globe Theatre. Breton states that during the Renaissance, theatre design undergoes an increasing separation from the outside world, and within creates an ever increasing divide between stage and spectator who sit in a fix position for an optimum static perspective. This resembles the painting of the time. The way theatres were designed during the Renaissance was challenged by Richard Wagner. Together with architect Otto Brukwald, they collaborated to design theatre which sought a reversal in the separation of and stage. The theatre of the Renaissance was concerned with the audience with the perspective of the audience. No balconies and a darkened auditorium focused the audiences attention to the stage. Theatre no longer sought to create the illusion of reality but sought to express the essence of a play. Breton also claims that the necessity for creating the illusion of reality became less relevant with the advent of cinema and the innovation of cubism which shattered the traditional perception space and style of spatial representation Antonin Artaud (1862-1928) was a famous stage director and the author of Theatre and its Double. He describes the architectural space that he seeks for his productions as a single, universal locale without any partitions of any kind His proposal was to abandon the architecture of his time and set about producing production that could be held in a barn or a hanger for performance. The notion of flexible space such as this can also be seen in the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe around this time. The concept is for a performance space as a total space which can be redesigned and reorganized for different productions. The sculptor and painter Oscar Schlemmer, conducts experiments for stage space at the Bauhaus. Roselee Goldberg state that the work at the Bauhaus was to achieve a synthesis of art and technology in pure form The studies conducted included the problems of performance space such as the opposition of visual place and spatial depth Schlemmers experiments demonstrated a new conception of space on stage. In the 1920s, the discussion of space centred on the notion of felt volume Schlemmer explained that out of the plane geometry, out of the pursuit of the straight line, the diagonal, the circle and the curve, a stereometry of space evolves, by the moving vertical line of the dancing figure. The relationship of the geometry of the

plane to the stereometry of the space could be felt if one were to imagine a space filled with a soft pliable substance in which the figures of the sequence of the dancers movements were to harden as a negative form Up until the twentieth century, the criteria for stage design was a framed view and theatres based on the relation of the proscenium. In the early twentieth century, revolutionary stage designers such as Edward Gordon Craig challenged this two dimensional approach to stage design with three dimensional concepts and experiments. For his first production, Craig had to design his own stage as the only available space was the Hampstead Conservatoire. This concert hall was 44ft wide with a series of stepped platforms at one end to house the orchestra. The comprises made by Craig became a characteristic of his work. The ceiling height was level throughout and Craig incorporated Herkomers technique of over head lighting and sky effects. A low proscenium was constructed to facilitate frames and a bridge above the stage for the lighting man. To facilitate a cast and chorus of 75, the full width of the stage was utilized. This created a strikingly panoramic effect. In later production in Coronet and Great Queen Street theatres, Craig lowered the proscenium by as much as 12ft to create the impression of great width. He also found that creating stepped platforms allowed for three dimensional groupings and movement. Craig wanted the spectators to have the same perspective of the plays so no side galleries, or boxes were used, instead a single level seating was used. Another characteristic of Craigs productions which challenged the viewers imagination were, although the sets were openly theatrical, with everything from imitation vine leaves to crude papier-mch boars head, on the other hand there was a deliberate avoidance of realistic detail and simple effects of colour were used, leaving the imagination free and achieving a suggestiveness that one viewer had commented reminded him of the delicate friezes of Pompeii. For these surfaces, Craig explains they stand on the stage just as they are, they do not imitate nature, nor are they painted with realistic or decorative designs Craig studied the theatrical work as it was in ancient Greece, Rome, from the Renaissance to the Elizabethan. He noted that Once upon a time, stage scenery was architecture. A little later it became imitation architecture, still later it became imitation artificial architecture. The two elements which became central to Craigs concept of a new theater were lighting and movement. The two elements which became central to Craigs concept of a new theater were lighting and movement.

The great days of painted scenery belonged to the era of dim lighting from gas-few footlights or candles, which flattened the performer so that he an the picture became one. The day the first spotlight was on the side of the proscenium, everything changed. The actor now stood out, was substantial, and a contradiction suddenly appeared between roundness and the two dimensional trompe loeil behind his back. The great innovators in the art of scenic design, Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig, knew this before the First World War. Peter Brook, Threads of Time, Methuen Publishing Limited, London, 1999, p.48 In 1923, Fredrick Kiesler presented his concept for the Endless Theatre. The theme of this space was the structure did not have any frame, but could still maintain its form. In the 1920s architecture had a strong tendency to interpret space from a functional point of view. Buildings where traditionally of a rectangular shape, however there were no corners in Kieslers endless concept. This implies a meaning of time and space simultaneously which one can interpret as without and en, or in another sense an eternity of time. While this theatre expressed Kieslers concept of space, it was in 1958 when he presented the Endless house that his concept had manifested itself into a space that responded to human sensibilities as well as a functional space acting as a home. An installation architecture piece by Bernard Tschumi called the Glass Video Gallery was constructed in the Netherlands. It is a glass structure which contains 6 banks of video monitors. The projects intention was to challenge our preconceived ideas on the act of viewing. The monitors act as an unstable faade, unlimited space is suggested through mirror reflections. The reflective surfaces which can be interpreted as a modern day equivalent to Edward Gordon Craigs walls. The immateriality presents an ambiguous surface. The architect presented a challenge to the permanence of buildings. The multiplying layers act to dissolve the surface of the glass. Lighting at night acts to transform the space. For Tschumi The endless reflections of the video screens over the vertical and horizontal glass surfaces reverse all expectations of what is architecture and what is event, of what is wall and what is electronic image, of what defines and what activates. Tschumi also claims that his glass box challenges the ideas of television viewing and about privacy. The transparency of the glass walls acts as an opposition to an enclosed private space it also acts as an extension to the street. Within the structure, a person watches and is watched at the same time.

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In his groundbreaking 1938 lectures on Space, Time, and Architecture, the modernist and insider historian of the avant-garde movement Sigfried Giedion credited the rise of the new architecture to a newfound sense of space-time that congealed around the turn of the twentieth century. According to Giedion, this modern aesthetic[215] sensibility described an abstract, four-dimensional unity of temporalized spatiality, much like the kind outlined in physics by Albert Einstein in 1905. This placed a heavy emphasis on the notion of simultaneity.[216] Giedion could have easily added the work that was taking place in philosophy in the writings of Henri Bergson around the same time.[217] In either case, he claimed that explicit awareness of this new sense of space and time appeared first in the works of abstract art, years before the artists insights were later taken up and applied by modernist architects. In the first decade of the century, Giedion asserted, [p]ainters very different in type but sharing a common isolation from the public worked steadily toward a new conception of space. And no one can understand contemporary architecture, become aware of the feelings hidden behind it, unless he has grasped the spirit animating this painting.[218]

The pioneers of this radically new approach to spatiality, in Giedions account, were the Cubists. While Cubism was restricted mostly to the medium of painting, and only found itself translated directly into architecture in rare instances,[219] its explosion of linear perspective was a crucial step in the move toward a new spatiality. The cubists dissect the object, try to lay hold of its inner composition, wrote Giedion. They seek to extend the scale of optical vision as contemporary science extends the law of matter. Therefore contemporary spatial approach has to get away from the single point of reference. A consequence of this approach is the simultaneous representation of a single object from multiple points of view. Fragments of lines hover over the surface, often forming open angles which become the gathering places of darker tones. These angles and lines began to grow, to be extended, and suddenly out of them developed one of the constituent facts of space-time representation the plane.[220] This was one of the major achievements of the Cubists in painting: their move toward a geometric, planar spatiality. In this respect, even the self-styled Cubist architects in Czechoslovakia before the war failed to live up to their artistic counterparts. As Teige observed, with characteristic astuteness: Czech cubist architecture failed to assimilate the most fertile lesson of cubism: the adherence to geometry, to [Paul] Czannes truth of geometric archetypes. Czech cubists might have been able to derive the principles of regularity and perpendicularity required by the new architecture from these sources.[221] Marcel Janco, a Romanian-born Dadaist, in his 1928 Reflections of Cubism, was so bold as to assert that architecture would have never freed itself from the decorative arts had it not been for the contribution of Cubism.[222] Thus was the geometric aspect of capitalisms abstract spatiality given definite form, depicted by the Cubist painters in the first decade of the twentieth century. After the war, a new wave of abstract painters rose up to build upon their accomplishments. Kazimir Malevich founded Suprematism in Russia, Piet Mondrian formulated Neo-Plasticism in Holland, and Amde Ozenfant established Purism in France. Giedion regarded these painters as merely carrying Cubism forward to its logical conclusion. And as he correctly noted, each of these movements eventually extended themselves into the sphere of architecture. In France appeared Le Corbusier and Ozenfant; in Russia, Malevich; in Hungary, [Lszl] Moholy-Nagy; in Holland, Mondrian and van Doesburg, recorded Giedion. Common to them was an

attempt to rationalize cubism or, as they felt was necessary, to correct its aberrations. The procedure was sometimes very different in different groups, but all moved toward rationalization and into architecture.[223] Each of these painters would eventually address the question of architecture in their theoretical writings. Moreover, each of them would have major modernist architects join them as allies in the search for new tectonic forms. Malevichs paintings inspired El LissitzkysPROUNs as well as his subsequent move toward architecture. Le Corbusier extended Ozenfants Purism into his writings on building for LEsprit Nouveau. Oud and van Doesburg for the most part followed Mondrians conception of Neo-Plasticism in their architectural works of the 1920s.

In 'Space, Time, and Architecture' Sigfried Giedion explores the ephemeral nature of artistic trends by showing the importance that emotions have in defining beauty. With this concept in mind, he explores the invention of modern art movements such as cubism to a dissatisfaction to a corrupted use of perspective and notes that to understand the architecture of that period one must understand the art of that period. Firstly, Giedion mentions the emotional component of art, in which the objects that are considered beautiful are not dictated by any innate qualities in them but by an artist's decision to present it as art. The example for this is in how Ruskin's work turned mountains, previously a symbol of confusion, into a picture of majestic beauty; a vista contrasting with the smog of industrial life. Similarly, Giedion notes that the seemingly mundane objects used by Picasso and Juan Gris, such as pipes and combs, were part of the constant transformation of material to symbol. Within this also lies artists such as Marcel Duchamp, with his toilet, that stress the fickle relationship between a material and its connotations that generates art. With this in mind, the artist takes an auxiliary role in the creation process. His true role is only reactionary, to create new symbols as other ones die. Giedion mentions how cubism arose as a return to pure forms after the excess perspective of financially driven salon art destroyed its credibility. That is, Picasso's art is in the creation of a new visual grammar as an older form collapsed into irrelevance. Yet, cubism is not an invention of Picasso, but an expression of an unconscious will in that generated an automatic response to Trompe l'oeil. Thus, it becomes clear that the overall complexity with which modern art is viewed by many owes itself to our inability to fully understand the myriad paths it took in jumping from one set of symbols to another. Equally, Giedion mentions that...