Dereck Stafford Mangus is a Baltimore-based visual artist and writer who has created an extensive body of work on the subject of the square in the contemporary landscape. In a four-part AKAblog, appearing on “square root dates” – January 9th (3 x 3), 16th (4 x 4), 25th (5 x 5) and February 1st (1 x 1) in January and February 2021 – “Back to Square One” will offer insights into The Square Project, Mangus’ longstanding photographic series that explores the pervasive quadrilateral, which is also the subject of his thesis for Harvard, “The Persistence of and Resistance to Structure: The Grid-Square Construct in Western Visual Culture.”
The square is not only found in the look of art and the lay of the land; it runs through our language as well. Originally, when applied to a person, “square” denoted someone who is honest, loyal, and traditional. When applied to an object it signifies something that is balanced and upright, such as with the try square, the carpentry and metal-working tool used for marking and measuring right-angles. “Are we square?” means “Are we even?” “To square off,” means to take a fighting stance, to face your opponent directly, and not just blindside, jump, or sucker punch them. To square off implies a fair fight and fair play. Squares are integral in board games, from chess, checkers, and Go to Monopoly, Scrabble, and Snakes and Ladders (originally known as Moksha Patam.) In fact, the phrase “back to square one” most likely originated with board games involving numbered squares, popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is also the square sail, the square knot, the square dance, and the square meal, to name but a few other instances of where the term “square” has entered our language. “Square” has been used as a slang term for cigarettes in prison due to the shape of the paper used to roll them since at least the 1960s.
Chess board, 2016
The history of the word “square” has significant meaning in American culture and history. While it began as a positive term suggesting balance, fairness, and order, by the mid-twentieth century it morphed into a derogatory term for all that is boring, dull, and rigid in the world. To describe someone or something as “square” now means they are “uncool” at best or, at worse, part of “the establishment.” In other words, the term was initially used as a symbol for American democracy and later became counter-cultural slang. Outside of the 1986 Huey Lewis song, “Hip to Be Square,” the term is almost always used derogatorily in popular culture, as with the 1957 Elvis Presley “Jailhouse Rock” lyric: “The warden said, hey buddy don’t you be no square, if you can’t find a partner use a wooden chair.” Making a negative-space square with an index finger and thumb to form an “L7” is a gestural variation on the pejorative use of “square” as with the line in “Wooly Bully”, a 1965 hit single by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs: “Let’s not be L7, come and learn to dance.” (This is where the American grunge band got their name.) From the earlier expressions “fair and square” and “square deal”, both of which originated with the Land Ordinance of 1785, signifying an equal allotment of land, to the derogatory use of the term in the postwar hipster parlance of Beat writers and the later hippie generation (“Be there or be square!”), the word weaves through our culture, history, and language.
L7 square hand gesture.
Upon hearing that the square was the subject of my graduate thesis, “The Persistence of and Resistance to Structure: The Grid-Square Construct in Western Visual Culture,” my partner’s brother Stefan exclaimed: “Really? That’s so boring!” Stefan, a reclusive polymath, sincerely meant “boring” as a compliment. He went on to explain that many other research papers try so hard to be interesting by focusing on obscure topics, employing fancy terms, and trendy approaches. The square, on the other hand, is so boring that a research paper about it had to be interesting. At least that was the logic of his adulation.
In any event, Stefan helped me see The Square Project in an interesting historical context. After explaining that I began the photographic series (the impetus to my thesis) in 2001, he observed how that was both the year in the title 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film that blew the minds of its viewers with its stunning visual effects and cryptic science-fiction narrative, and the year of the World Trade Center Attacks. Stefan went on to explain that the squarish monoliths that appear in the film, which play a central role in advancing the human race, resemble the “gothic-modernist” austerity of the twin towers, both of which had perfectly square footprints. I hadn’t thought about this before, and felt like there was something there.
In my thesis, I do mention how the World Trade Center was designed by Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki who also designed the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. Both projects were created with modernist ideals of design: no historical referents, reduced forms, squared angles, etc. The only major difference between these buildings was their function. Pruitt-Igoe was an notorious housing project that was demolished in 1972 due to its abject failure in delivering the modernist dream of “worker housing.” In The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Postmodernism, architectural theorist Charles Jencks wrote:
Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 PM (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite. Previously it had been vandalized, mutilated and defaced by its inhabitants, and although millions of dollars were pumped back, trying to keep it alive (fixing the broken elevators, repairing smashed windows, repainting), it was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.
Footage of the decay and demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project appears prominently in the experimental documentary film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982), while the fate of the World Trade Center, once a symbol of global capitalism, was watched in real time all over the world.
It seems almost ironic that these two modernist building complexes, designed by the same architect–one for working-class residences in St. Louis, the other for international commerce–should be destroyed so soon after their creation. Both events were highly mediated and, in their own ways, symbolize the failed ideals of modernism. While the mysterious squarish monolith in 2001 aids in human evolution within a fictional universe, the destruction of similar forms have come to symbolize failed policy–both domestic and foreign–in the real world. If modern architecture–and, by extension, modernism–died on July 15, 1972, perhaps postmodernism ended on September 11, 2001.
Floor plan of one of the towers of the former World Trade Center.
My own interest in the square is more modest. I prefer seeking out smaller more overlooked squares for my photography series. Some of my square photos are very iconic, and clearly represent the places where they were found, while others are more generic. I seek them out in public spaces as well as more obscure areas, like down back alleyways and around abandoned buildings. Squares are ubiquitous in the built environment. Examples are all around us. In fact, the screen you’re looking at right now is composed of tiny square units called pixels, from “pic-el” or “picture element.” Earlier this year, a controversial new aerial surveillance plane (or “spy plane”) began flying over Baltimore to gather data from above as part of an experimental approach to police work. Apparently, from the height it flies each person on the ground below registers as a single pixel.
The square also represents time, with its four equal sides suggesting the four seasons, and in the form of the calendar demarcating the days of the week in a grid of squares. In 2016, I made calendars based on my square series and mailed them out as holiday gifts to colleagues, family members, and friends. Included in the square mailers were 16 square photographs representing the 12 months and 4 seasons, plus the necessary hardware for assembling a wall hanging. Four years later, I made Square Calendar #2.
Square Calendar #2, 2020
Please remember to check this space for later segments of "Back to Square One" by Dereck Stafford Mangus, appearing in January and February 2021:
Back to Square One: Part 1
Back to Square One: Part 3
Back to Square One: Part 4
