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.”
As stated before, the square persists in contemporary culture in the form of raster graphics or “bitmap” digital imagery. Even though viewers look through the digital grid of their mobile devices, the square is still present. Though the dominance of theoretical formalism, a sort of aesthetic fundamentalism that reached a conceptual deadend with minimalism, diminished in the last quarter of the twentieth century, visual creators continue to search for new formats and experiment with new technologies, the grid and the square live on in digital media and cyberspace in the form of the pixel (pic-el,) or “picture element,” of raster graphics. Many contemporary artists have abandoned a single traditional medium, like paint, for what is commonly known as multi-media.
Charles Village, Baltimore, 2017
Today, the square unit is invisible but ubiquitous in the form of the pixel. The pervasive pixel is found in the urban landscape from the Light-emitting Diode, or LED read-outs and other ephemeral signage to cellular phones and other digital displays. And both the grid and the square are found in the recent dissemination of the Quick Response, or QR code. QR codes have proliferated in advertising in the last few years, and although they often clutter otherwise good design, they seem to pop up everywhere. The QR code is scanned by a QR-reader application on a “smart phone,” which automatically takes the user to an online website or page.
What about popular disdain or general aversion of rationalistic structures in Western thought and practice? This is simply illogical and contradictory: without grids and squares, modern existence is unthinkable. The critique comes from within grid-square construct, or from on the grid.
For most people the grid is a necessary aspect of everyday life. They might not like to think about it, but when they do, they realize just how hooked on the grid they are. Yet there is a symbiotic, almost organic, relationship between the grid and the inhabitants thereon. Contemporary culture is as reliant on grids and squares as they are reliant on us. For example, the gridiron street system is not independently sustainable. It requires constant work and upkeep. Anyone who drives regularly knows all too well of the constant detours and traffic caused by perpetual road repairs. Pavement is fairly fragile and needs constant attention. In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman writes:
As pavement separates, weeds like mustard, shamrock, and goosegrass blow in from Central Park and work their way down the new cracks, which widen further. In the current world, before they get too far, city maintenance usually shows up, kills the weeds, and fills the fissures. But in the post-people world, there’s no one left to continually patch New York.
And this is just pavement–never mind more complex and sensitive extensions of the grid-square construct such as the electrical grid, which can be disrupted by solar activity.
Broken Windows, 2018
The grid-square construct persists in contemporary visual culture in the form of digital technology. The Internet, the most representative technology of the contemporary world, and the latest advance in the grid-square construct, is not a single distinct medium in the way that painting or photography is, but rather an accelerator and localizer of pre-existing media. It did not produce photography, graphic design, or typography, for example. It just collected them into one simple package: the pixel-based computer screen. From hand-held mobile devices and laptops, to ATM machines and other computerized displays, the pixel is the basic building block for digital interfaces, allowing for many disparate media to seamlessly converge in one locus, one node: the screen. The grid-square construct facilitates this.
Indeed, all of the media discussed throughout this research is now found in digital form: plans and blueprints are designed in Computer-Aided Design, or CAD, software; maps are viewed online with MapQuest or Google Maps, books are read with Amazon Kindle, digital photographs edited in PhotoShop, and uploaded to websites like Flickr and Facebook, or to a weblog (“blog”) or website. The Internet did not create these media. It just localized them. Perhaps, after all, modernist artists and designers were correct: the grid and the square are universal structures, as the ubiquitous digital pixel aids and alters the lives of more and more people everyday.
Square Signs #1, 2020
In 1990 Sagan famously compared the Earth to a single pixel after asking NASA to turn the onboard camera on Voyager I around to capture a photograph of the Earth from the outer reaches of the solar system. The grainy photograph renders the Earth from across the great expanse of space as a tiny light blue pixel, barely discernible from all the other squares of information in the pixilated image. In the following passage, Sagan eloquently muses on the history of this “pale blue dot”:
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Though the language is dramatic, the reference to the planet as a pixel is apt and eloquent. It cleverly frames the long history of the grid-square construct from prehistoric notions of the Earth as a square–“the four corners of the Earth”–to the single digital unit of contemporary digital technology.
Square Signs #2, 2020
Squares exist in a liminal space, somewhere between the subatomic and the cosmological. Historically, the square has symbolized the “Four Corners of the Earth.” Spreading out from the original square landmark, an orthogonal grid of evenly spaced perpendicular lines supplants itself across the terrestrial landscape. Or at least in our minds and in our media.
Today, visual culture navigates through one form of the grid-square media or another. Modern life is dependent upon the logic and structure of this pervasive and persistent construct, despite historical resistance. When these rationalistic, idealized structures become too explicit a cultural backlash occurs. The recent resistance to grids and squares is itself a symptom of the larger construct. It is thus a critique from within the grid-square construct, and is largely superficial.
Nevertheless, grids and squares persist in the contemporary world in the form of the digital interface. The bitmap-pixel computer screen is but the latest expression of the grid-square construct. From ancient mosaics to digital interfaces, from agriculture to cultural theory, and from amber waves of grids to the pixels in your pocket, grids and squares are persistent in the contemporary landscape.
