The Canvas as Logical Space
HENNIX, Catherine Christer. Notes on Toposes & Adjoints. [Stockholm:] Moderna Museet. 1976.
Blue paper folder (301 x 219 mm); pp. 67 ff. unbound photocopies, hole-punched to left margin; spine of folder slightly creased with small chip at head; numerous diagrams in the text; near fine.
First edition, extremely rare, of the first published work by the transgender Swedish polymath Catherine Hennix (1945–2023), issued in conjunction with her only solo exhibition of visual art, Toposes and Adjoints, at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 1976, our copy presented by the author to the painter Jasper Johns.
‘“Notes on Toposes and Adjoints” was originally written for an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and installation works, with the idea of a canvas as a logical space, and “4-color algebras” computing in that logical space’ (Boon). The present work, central to Catherine Hennix’s (born Christer Hennix) artistic output, explores mathematical concepts of space and relationships around which Catherine Hennix (born Christer Hennix), a maths professor as well as an artist and musician, created her visual and musical works.
The exhibition contained black-and-white and colour expressions of her equations, while musically she explored the mathematical relationships within just intonation, a non-Western tuning system in which the interval between each note is a whole number ratio. She had learnt this as a disciple of the raga master Pandi Pran Nath and took it into musical collaborations with La Monte Young and Henry Flynt in a quest to combine logic, altered consciousness, and non-Western philosophy.
OCLC finds three copies only (Getty, MoMA, and Stanford); no copies traced in the UK.
See Boon, The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice (2022).
SKU: 2123097