The Anxious Spiral

The spiral exemplifies the tensions between pattern and chaos, as a privileged figure that embodies both – between spring and swarf, a bridge between evolving harmonic structures and ideas of vertigo, instability and collapse, taking in threads such as morphology in nature and architecture, the spiral in the Cobra group, early C20 speculative cosmology, appearances of the spiral in the avant-garde, film and popular culture. The spiral is read as a mobile link between evolving harmonic structures and vertigo, instability and collapse.

Keywords: anxiety ; architecture ; avant-garde ; chaos ; Cobra ; Ferderick Kiesler ; geometry ; Goethe ; Marcel Duchamp ; pattern ; The Situationist Times