The Shape of Our Times

IN JANSON's History of Art, it is written that turn-of-the century painters saw in cubism "a special affinity with the geometric precision of engineering that made it uniquely attuned to the dynamism of modern life." Substitute "jumble" for "dynamism" and grasp the essence of Rubik's Cubism, a style now immortalized in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection.

The new Cubism is a fad with many facets. American frivolity in the fine tradition of hula hoops and skateboards. Sillier than a corporate executive on a pogo stick, it could lighten the national blue period. But perhaps because the Museum of Modern Art has found the cube aesthetically comparable to Mondrian and Picasso, the trend has assumed and unbecoming air of profundity.

The cube has become the glossy media's darling metaphor for "interlocking challenges." Fitting square cubes in round holes, Time described the world of international arms sales as a Rubik's Cube. The domestic situation being presumably less puzzling to a chauvinistic nation, opportunities for the analogy's application abound mainly abroad Newsweek compared President Reagan's foreign policy problems to the cube. The world, its cover slickly suggested, may not conform to his red hats-white hats view. Thanks to the analogy, Reagan's inability to handle more than one face of foreign affairs at a time fell into place.

If it chastises the President's simplemindedness in foreign affairs the metaphor probably reflects a shared and abiding American faith in a world we can solve. That geometric precision may not be attuned to modern life. The cube cliche recalls the Gordian Knot, that ancient interlocking challenge whose solution held the secrets of Asian conquest. Like Alexander bringing Hellenism to the heathen, Americans want to bear democracy and Western hopes and dreams to an undemocratic non-Western world.

Insofar as these ideals are universally human, the obligation is real, if less manageable than the cube analogy would suggest. Unfortunately, the Administration's puzzle solvers lean towards the engineer's approach to foreign policy take the cube apart, cut the knot with Trident and Lance missiles and try to join the frayed ends.

Turning to another pattern, cubism brings together the American fascinations with the trivia and the inventive Cleverly designed, the cube appeals to a nation that is home to electric can openers, touch-tone phones, and canned hot shaving cream. Americans love garish toys tinged with plastic high tech and the ubiquitous "New, Improved!" label--skateboards with polyurethane wheels, very square exotica from a Hungarian mathematician.

A country is wealthy when it can devote substantial resource to developing gewgaws for its citizens' idle amusement, when it can create needs rather than merely satisfy them. We enjoy the affluence for much the same reason as we welcome the inventive. Both phenomena mirror our self-image as we like it best--well-groomed and creative. Like the beggar watching someone else speed by in a limousine, the clever device prompts an "I could have done that" response. If creativity is the human ability to see pattern in chaos, the cube restores our flagging hope in our own imagination as it distracts us from an untidy world.

MAINLY, THE CUBE is a conversation piece, like the wastebasket collages of Picasso and Braque. It may or may not reflect the dimensionality of man's existence, the shape of our times, or the pretentiousness of slim gold-tipped cigarettes. A bauble that combines the simplicity of pet rocks with engineering savvy, the Cube gratifies our desire for bric-a-brac. In a society where even most of the poor can watch television dreams, the struggle for survival which engages most of humanity can be less squarely faced. Accordingly, boredom, especially the middle class Roman kind which languidly consumers grapes, sets in. Its 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 colorful combinations provide relief. National thumb-twiddling now has direction. Like magpies lining their nest with shiny paperclips and fragments of colored glass, we rushed out to buy several million cubes last year.

But life would be drab otherwise. Were the puzzle not useless enough, the craze has spawned several books which, as they compete for space on the best-seller list with dead felines, make impoverished math graduate students rich. For all the collectors of bottomless ashtrays, Rubik's Cubes now come in monocolored and multicolored, but two faced, models, neither of which encloses a solution. The success of ideal Toy Corporation resembles, that of the Grot Company, a creation of British television Grot sells only useless things. After the sales of Rubik's Cube and its various geometrically precise successors decline, American industry will step up the production of rungless ladders.