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(sample)
Relativity (woodcut, July 1953)
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Questions
 | How should we look at the drawing? (turn an OHP-transparency in four different
positions). Each one is possible... and impossible at the same time! |
| What message(s) does the artist have for the spectator? |
| How does it refer to DHL? |
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Interpretation 1
| Nearly all the people in the drawing are on their own, walking, carrying something...
for someone else? Everybody seems to be waiting for someone or to be heading for someone.
This work of art illustrates people's loneliness: however hard they try, they live in
different perspectives (realities) and cannot meet even the person close to them. (cf.
DHL: people dare not really meet anyone because of Victorian scruples). The only exception
are the couple, walking arm in arm. They have found each other, but they don't belong to
the world of staircases anymore: they have escaped from it and found their peace. |
| The drawing shows we may not always trust the mind. Take the figure down in the middle,
walking up the smallest staircase... It may get higher by taking another staircase (left
or right) and another one, but then progress is not possible anymore! This may illustrate
how we plan our lives and our future but in the end life has its own ways. Things are all
right for a while, but then something happens that we didn't foresee: an accident, a
disease, someone dies, we lose our jobs... |
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Interpretation 2
Here we have three forces of gravity working perpendicularly to one
another. Three earth-planes cut across each other at right angles, and human beings are
living on each of them.
It is impossible for the inhabitants of different worlds to walk or sit or
stand on the same floor, because they have differing perceptions of what is horizontal and
what is vertical. Yet they may well share the use of the same staircase. On the top
staircase illustrated here, two people are moving side by side and in the same direction,
and yet one of them is going downstairs and the other upstairs. Contact between them is
out of the question because they live in different worlds and therefore can have no
knowledge of each other's existence.
Reprinted from the text of 'M.C. Escher - The Graphic Work';
with the kind permission of Benedikt-Taschen Publishers |
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