A while back I had the good fortune of getting to see first-hand the incredible sculpture Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman when it was on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Credit: Beek100, Wikimedia Commons

It depicts an upside-down obelisk balanced (seemingly precariously) atop a pyramid.  Among other things, it made me think of the “Minkowski light cone”, a diagram named after Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909) which portrays light traveling through four-dimensional space-time.  It looks like this:

Credit: MissMJ, Wikimedia Commons

The cones are light traveling vertically up from the past to the present and into the future.  The red dot just below the inverted cone is the present-time, called “the here-and-now.”  The space beyond the realm of light is called “the elsewhere.”

It’s amazing how artwork can appear to not only be an exploration of space but also of time– perhaps profound art allows us to bring the “elsewhere” into the “here-and-now.”