With the publication of his general theory of relativity a century ago, Albert Einstein swept aside traditional notions of a static and unchanging space and instead gave us the stretchy, supple miracle fabric of the space-time continuum.
No longer could space be seen as a featureless void, the nothingness between the somethingness of galaxies and stars. Einsteinian space has heft, shape and a sense of place. It bends around giant suns and plunges down the throats of black holes. It expands restlessly in all directions and drags us along for the ride.
The sculptor Rachel Whiteread expresses the pushiness of space graphically by creating what are often called negative spaces. She uses resin, plaster or other material to fill in the area under a table, behind a bookshelf, or an entire room.
The resulting three-dimensional impressions are like space trapped in amber, or the frozen ghost of a room, prompting the viewer to appreciate the specific power of interstitial space and to recall what it felt like to hide under tables as a child or to seek solace in the compartmentalized wilderness of a college library’s stacks.
“Music is the space between notes,” the French composer Claude Debussyis believed to have said — that is, only by the grace of precisely articulated pauses can the character of individual notes be perceived and music distinguished from noise.
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“The flat surface was seen as a place for the arrangement of colors,” saidNoam M. Elcott, an associate professor of art at Columbia University. For artists like Cézanne, he said, “the space between figures was granted equal weight to the so-called foreground.”
The concern with spatial democracy reached its apotheosis in the work ofJackson Pollock, in which there is no foreground, no background, “and every square inch of canvas is equal to every other,” said Dr. Elcott, the author of the coming book, “Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media.”
Other modernist painters like Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Kazimir Malevich became fascinated with the idea of a higher fourth dimension — not the dimension of time that, through Einstein’s general theory of relativity, was merged with three spatial dimensions into space-time, but a fourth dimension of space, said Linda D. Henderson, a professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of “The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art.”
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On average, however, one’s personal space — as measured by an experimenter walking slowly toward a subject until the subject feels on the verge of uncomfortable and says stop — extends about two feet in front of the body.
That distance happens to correspond to the length of the arm, suggesting that personal space amounts to defensible space. Personal space has been found to enlarge in people holding sticks or pointers, and to contract when they are burdened with weights.
Our personal space is human specific, said Dr. Daphne J. Holt, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
She and her colleagues recently found that while the image of an approaching face will arouse the parts of the brain that monitor personal space, the image of an approaching car will not.
And when we’re forced into uncomfortably close quarters with strangers aboard a crowded subway car, we reach for our smartphones and carve out some personal space-time online.