Clark Art to Host Artist Talk with Tauba Auerbach
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Tauba Auerbach, one of two artists featured in the Meander exhibition, shares stories from a winding path of research on the nineteenth-century mathematician Giuseppe Peano live in the Clark's auditorium on Sunday, Oct. 9 at 6 p.m.
This program will also be broadcast simultaneously on Zoom. Advance registration for the Zoom transmission is required. Register at clarkart.edu/events.
The Peano curve is named for Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932), an influential teacher who printed his own books, advocated for international languages, and was a committed feminist. The Peano curve describes a space-filling curve, or a line that, if folded infinitely in a particular fashion, passes through every point of a square.
In their work PEANOPOEM I, Auerbach creates progressive iterations of that curve using the letters S and Z, a convention the artist often uses to symbolize opposite directions of rotation. Each cluster of nine letters is expanded in the grouping below, in which the letters S and Z form larger versions of themselves, creating a symmetry across scales that could continue indefinitely (and is mirrored across the fold of the page).
Auerbach’s abstracted poem nods to early twentieth-century concrete poetry, in which the arrangement of linguistic elements conveys meaning, but is distinctive for its mathematical rigor. Auerbach’s monograph, Diagonal Press, published PEANOPOEM I at the time of the opening of the Meander exhibition.
