The Mother of all Diagrams? It’s right here
“The Temptation of the Diagram” (2017; detail of edition), by Matthew Ritchie Just Follow the Arrow and the Dotted Line Matthew Ritchie explores the history of diagrams at ESMoA Noema. The very word brings us up short. We might recall that noetics is the study of the intellect, of pure thought, with noesis being the intellect at work, its functionality. And here, swimming in this linguistic teapot, is the vague but powerful noema, defined as the object or content of a thought. In more human terms, it’s a diagram, and “Noema” at ESMoA is no ordinary exhibition but rather a monumental exploration of diagrams as they’ve been employed throughout the ages. This has been Matthew Ritchie’s journey for the past several years, hacking his way through the underbrush like a character in a H. Rider Haggard novel and discovering a lost city that was in some ways right here the entire time. “In art historical terms,” Ritchie says in “The Temptation of the Diagram,” his new book, “the diagram is refuge and refugee, a universal visual bridge between the written and the seen, without a home in either.” Diagrams, which can be summarized in many ways, often function as tools that help us grasp and…
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