Digital Art: a blank canvas for the artist of the future
As all developments in Art are tracked in movements, so mine is too. The genre is known as
Didactic
Dialectical
Multiparafragmentationism
and is a candidate for Art as a sport in a future Olympic Games.
For fuller details both of the philosophy behind the genre, and the Entheos Gallery itself, please see my story "The Unity" in "Tall Tales & Short Stories".
All the paintings in this short book were executed on, or the photographs downloaded to, orange canvases, for reasons that I cannot now recall, but which should not be misread or misinterpreted as having any symbolic value; I think I just picked them up cheap at a garage sale.
The entire collection was first exhibited at The Entheos Gallery in Whitechapel (Entheos, to save you looking it up, means "the spirit within", in Greek, and is the source of the English word "enthusiasm"; the gallery is owned by a consortium based in the Lebanon, with other galleries in Fehér in Hungary, Bely in Russia, Abyad in Morocco, and Branco in Portugal), but is now stored safely in an investors' vault in the basement of Taksheyven Banking PLC, in Luxembourg.
An extended version of this essay, under the title "The Book Of White", may or may not receive formal approval from the Royal Chamberlain and the Official Censor at some time soon, in order to move publication forward. If permission is refused, the book will be published anyway, but sadly all the canvases will be required to be printed blank.
CONTENTS:
1. Colour Palette
2. Gaspard, a sculpture in white marble
3. A Wall at The White House in Washington D.C
4. Still Life…
5. The Rauschenberg Triptych
6. Cherry Blossom in Kyoto, Apple Blossom in Hampstead
7. White Canvas
8. Tribute To Sam Beckett
9. The Heritage of English Church Art in the Middle Ages
10. Snow in April in Miami, Snowstorm in Toronto
11. LA Smog
12. Portrait of Robert Ryman
13. Open Spaces
14. Black Canvas with Eraser Marks
15. Snowflake
16. Hommage à Wilkie Collins
17. Acid Dream
18. The Hole in a Henry Moore
19. 22-8-69
20. Polo Mint,through a microscope
21. The Emperor’s New Clothes
1. Colour Palette
The pictures gathered on the pages of this book are all (unless specifically stated) examples of digital art. Because my understanding of the technology is limited, I have worked exclusively in Microsoft Paint, a software programme generously provided at no cost to any would-be artist by the philanthropic capitalism of Bill Gates. Many other, more sophisticated but payment-required software packages, can be found on the Internet, but while these may be needed for digital photographic art, they are not necessary for the pure digital art which is my methodology here.
The painting on this page is, I admit, not truly mine - one might even call it a forgery, certainly a counterfeit, and definitely ersatz. It shows a fragment of the colour palette that can be found in Microsoft Paint, and uses that programme's (technically "that program's" as it is American) magnifying technology to zoom in on the section where 252 units of red, green and blue paint have been synthesised, at a hue of 160, a saturation of 0, and a luminosity of 237, to make a single syllogised pixel of absolute imitational veracity. Like you (I imagine), I have no idea what these terms mean, or how they work, and the white that they have created is not absolute; but then, if white is simply a synthesis of all the colours, then even pure white is never pure white. Does it really matter?
2. Gaspard
2. Gaspard
Gaspard had reached the end of painting. That is to say, he had mastered every genre, every form, every technique of the painter's craft, but still he had not found any visual language articulate enough to express what he needed to express. Worse, decades of reviews and criticism, of eavesdropping on the conversations of those people who attended his exhibitions, had taught him that a painter paints in the language of paint, but that a spectator always and automatically paraphrases back into the language of words, in order to derive meaning from the painted object.
Why not, then, Gaspard decided, cut out the middleman and paint words directly? The second phase of his glittering career was initiated, and can be summed up by that question - years of painting letters that looked like faces, love, houses, Madonnas with Child, trees, war, landscape, the passage of time, whiteness, death; or whole words that were indeed just words, standing alone or conjugated into sentences. Even without reading the vitriolic defamations of the critics, Gaspard knew that these works were failures, for it is not possible to hang language in a gallery and call it Art.
Or perhaps it is? Perhaps there is a way, and perhaps Gaspard discovered it. His final exhibition, in Paris in the year that he abandoned painting altogether in favour of the noble profession of tax-collector, consisted of a series – precisely twelve, the apostolic, the tribal, the constellatory number – of white canvases, all of different sizes, all, if you looked closely enough, of slightly different shades of white, all painted with different materials, on different types of canvas. And underneath each one, in dull stencil, their titles: "The Emperor's New Clothes", "Black Canvas with Eraser Marks", "Snowstorm", "Homage à Wilkie Collins", "Apple Blossom", "Acid Dream", "Still Life", "White Canvas", "The Hole in a Henry Moore", "Polo Mint", "Self-Portrait".
Where the critics had acclaimed the first phase of his career, and universally derogated the second, opinion was entirely divided over the merits of these final works.
From my collection of minimalist tales, "The Captive Bride".
Sadly all of Gaspard's paintings are now lost, and the versions printed in this book are mere stealings of his titles.
Sadly all of Gaspard's paintings are now lost, and the versions printed in this book are mere stealings of his titles.
3. A Wall at The White House in Washington D.C
As a tourist I have visited DC innumerable times, and taken multiple photographs of all the obvious places, from the Smithsonian to Congress, and of course the White House. The opportunity to draw it, with the building as live model, is not generally available, because Homeland Security proscribes it. I wanted to draw the whole building, but had to make the very partial sketch at speed, as two rifle-toting heroes of Fox News were already descending on me at even greater speed, and it was fortunate that I had a digital copy of the First Amendment on my cell-phone before both parties agreed that I would arrest my drawing in exchange for their not doing the same to me.
4. Still Life…
"Through all the turmoils and the troubles, the disasters and the setbacks, no matter what, there is still life…" (from “The Complete Works of Anonymous)
Over the years I have made several attempts to capture this platitudinous cliché in paint, but only once did it occur to me to paint it in pure white, rather than the pure black that it seemed wilfully to invite.
That once itself became several, because the first effort was destroyed in a flood, the second in a fire, the third stolen by an ex-girlfriend, the fourth vandalised by a burglar. The fifth, even more sadly, failed to reach its asking price at auction. The sixth I ruined myself, in a fit of temper.
So there is this final version - superstition prevents me from extending creation beyond seven - which I have tried, in the manner of Cézanne, to pursue from several simultaneous directions, not all of them quite so idealistic or optimistic as the canvas here; though I do feel confident in stating that this one, this time, is the one that transcends the black nothingness and achieves the Immaculate Success. And if not, if I am wrong…
5. The Rauschenberg Triptych
There were one-, two-, four- and seven-panel versions of the original "White Paintings" of 1951, but it is the three-panel that I have always been drawn to, because of the radical interpretation of both Moslem and Christian theology which Rauschenberg offered in this unquestionably heretical and quite probably blasphemous work (see the illustration of a section of the work on the left).
A triptych is a picture or relief carving on three panels, typically hinged together vertically and used as an altarpiece. On it is represented either Christ Crucified or the Three Maries, and self-evidently it is the latter which Rauschenberg has investigated here, painting her once on each panel, so that she becomes three, as the daughters of al-Lah were three in pre-Moslem Arabia, as the Graces were three in Hellenic Greece, as the Demoiselles d'Avignon were three in Picasso's original sketches, before he turned religious coward and secularised them as five.
No such cowardice in Rauschenberg, though whether each of the three is Mary the Madonna, or whether Mary Magdalene and Martha are intended, is not clear. But these are not the revolutionary elements anyway. In traditional Christian Art, just as in ancient Babylonian and all cultures between, the gown of the Great Mother was always depicted in lapis lazuli blue, but the whiteness of her face was always tinted slightly yellow, a symbol of hope, of the innocence of the fallen Eve that will be restored at some time in the future. But not in the Rauschenberg. Just six years after the Holocaust, Rauschenberg's triple-Mary is already Eve restored; his white the purity of grace fulfilled.
6. Cherry Blossom in Kyoto, Apple Blossom in Hampstead
a) Cherry Blossom in Kyoto
Think of Japan and you think of the tea ceremony, whose history, and whose enormous influence upon western civilisation, is told in a wonderful book by Kakuzo Okakura entitled "The Book of Tea". But even more sacred than the tea ceremony is Hanami, the going-out en famille to look at the cherry blossom, usually starting in the last week of March, and continuing for about three weeks.
I performed Hanami with my friends Jeremy and Miki when I was in Kyōto pursuing Sei Shōnagon and the Lady Murasaki for a chapter of my book "Travels In Familiar Lands". Miki was the expert, who knew all the best places to see the trees in their full whiteness: the Philosopher's Path between the Ginkakuji and Nanzenji Temples, Maruyama Park beside the Yasaka Shrine (though the blossom had come early there that year and we had already missed the best of it), at the Heian shrine or in Arashiyama.
We chose Heian, mostly because you can see even more blossom by taking a boat along the Okazaki Canal, where the cherry trees grow in hyperbolous abundance; but then saw even more the following day, when we visited the Kiyomizudera temple, for the temple in fact, but who could resist yet still more white cherry blossom. In making this painting later on, I wanted to capture the intensity of the whiteness rather than the photogenicism of the tree.
If the cherry blossom is Japanese, the apple blossom is unquestionably Chinese.
6. Cherry Blossom in Kyoto, Apple Blossom in Hampstead
a) Cherry Blossom in Kyoto
Think of Japan and you think of the tea ceremony, whose history, and whose enormous influence upon western civilisation, is told in a wonderful book by Kakuzo Okakura entitled "The Book of Tea". But even more sacred than the tea ceremony is Hanami, the going-out en famille to look at the cherry blossom, usually starting in the last week of March, and continuing for about three weeks.I performed Hanami with my friends Jeremy and Miki when I was in Kyōto pursuing Sei Shōnagon and the Lady Murasaki for a chapter of my book "Travels In Familiar Lands". Miki was the expert, who knew all the best places to see the trees in their full whiteness: the Philosopher's Path between the Ginkakuji and Nanzenji Temples, Maruyama Park beside the Yasaka Shrine (though the blossom had come early there that year and we had already missed the best of it), at the Heian shrine or in Arashiyama.
We chose Heian, mostly because you can see even more blossom by taking a boat along the Okazaki Canal, where the cherry trees grow in hyperbolous abundance; but then saw even more the following day, when we visited the Kiyomizudera temple, for the temple in fact, but who could resist yet still more white cherry blossom. In making this painting later on, I wanted to capture the intensity of the whiteness rather than the photogenicism of the tree.
b) Apple Blossom in Hampstead
For decades I had looked at Chinese water-colour paintings of apple blossom with envy, wishing I could paint something of the same quality myself, but doing so in a manner that acknowledged my Jewish-European origins, rather than imitating the ethnically Chinese.
My earliest attempts used white charcoal, white gouache, white acrylic, white pastel, white crayon, white ink, but none of these had the capacity to capture the texture of the apple blossom; simply they depicted shape, which was important, but also insufficient.
Oil, whether applied by brush or palette knife, whether thinned with turpentine or linseed oil, invariably took the blossom beyond its still point, the magnificence of its full flowering, and rendered it porcine, entropied, already rotting. Only when digital art became possible was I at last able to catch the blossom at that still point, the perfection of apple blossom which is the height of the wave, the opening of the flower, the emergence of the sun, the point of harmony and balance in a transitory, ephemeral universe.
The tree whose blossom modeled for this painting was actually a plum, though the whiteness is indistinguishable, and the location of the tree far more important, especially as I had stripped it, with full permission, of two full bags of delicious plums the previous Autumn. It stands in the garden of the Keats Library in Hamsptead, adjacent to the house where Keats lived for many years, and garden-wise abosolutely adjacent to the mulberry tree beneath which he sat to create several of the immortal blooms and blossoms of his genius.
7. White Canvas
This, I have to confess, is not simply unoriginal, but actually plagiarism, though I am uncertain which of several self-acclaimed originals I have actually plagiarised.
Hofmeister's 1917 "White Canvas" was rejected by the First Paris Dada Exhibition, as it had been rejected by the Salon des Artistes previously, the former finding it much too conventional, the latter much too revolutionary.
The Del Prado "White Canvas" of 1922 was much more fastidiously executed, applying accretions of oil in the manner of Rembrandt, but with brushstrokes that were more reminiscent of Franz Hals than van Rein.
The 1938 Bernstein was burned by the Nazis, though photographs of it are still in existence; the 1948 "recovery" is marred by the absurdity of the painter's signature in the bottom right hand corner, though signing in charcoal (an allusion to the burning of the original) does add a touch of bitter irony.
Of the dozens of imitators in and since the 1970s, I like the David Irvine in the Chicago Getty Museum best, though this may be a consequence of the custodian's decision to hang it on a white wall, and without either canvas or explanatory plaque, allowing the painting to come upon you by surprise.
Janice Willard's 2012 "White Canvas", which won the Tourner Prize, is the one which inspired my version, though I fear that mine may have come out far too white to make its point effectively.
8. Tribute To Sam Beckett
Where Harold Pinter would later invent the pregnant pause as an idiosyncrasy of theatrical writing and direction, it was Samuel Beckett (long, long before John Cage) who developed the silence as a form of musical notation, distinguishing the long from the short pause in much the same way that Mozart's Sonata K331, for example, distinguishes a regular andante, played at around 121 beats per minute, from an andante grazioso, played at 120, though I have heard versions which rush the piece at 120 point 5.
Probably Beckett’s least-known play, "Ping", is about the colour white, indeed employs the word white at a relativity rate of about 1 to -5 to all other words combined, as in these lines which open it:
"All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn. Light heat white floor one square yard never seen. White walls one yard by two white ceiling one square yard never seen. Bare white body fixed only the eyes only just. Traces blurs light grey almost white on white. Hands hanging palms front white feet heels together right angle..."
I have seen versions of the play-script in which the word "white" appears to have been blanked out, though this turns out to be an illusion, created by using white ink for it, where all other words use black ink. I am not certain if the meaning of the sentences is altered by this apparent absence.
A rather different, second "Tribute to Sam Beckett, can be found in "The Agon Gallery".
A rather different, second "Tribute to Sam Beckett, can be found in "The Agon Gallery".
One of the great artistic and cultural achievements of the Elizabethan Age, long before Shakespeare and the Golden Age of Theatre, was Queen Elizabeth's extraordinary innovation in the art of fresco. She took her cue from her father, but Henry's experiments had been with limewash, and the tawdry graffiti on the church walls simply continued to show through; it was quickly evident that the limewash would peel away in time, and the graffiti would become fully visible again.
Elizabeth insisted on whitewash, and applied it in layer upon layer, much as Rembrandt would do in his oil portraits later on. The impact was stupendous, and it quickly became the fashion in all of England's churches, to the extent that not one single piece of previous graffiti remained anywhere in the country within just ten years, and in their place the magnificent virgin whiteness which would become the glory of the Anglican church from that time forth.
The illustration shows the Elizabethan fresco overlaid upon "The Three Maries mourning Christ at the North Gate of the Temple", in the Church of St Margaret of Antioch in Rochdale, believed to have been graffitoed by Thomas Ruthwell around 1384.
For a slightly fuller account of the history of whitewashing, see my June 24 page in "The Book of Days".
10. Snow in April in Miami, Snowflake in Toronto
One of the lingering memories of my four years in Toronto is of shovelling snow, often several times a day, the first time to get my car off the driveway in order to go to work, the second to get it out of the school parking lot to attend a meeting, and then the parking lot after that meeting, and school again at the end of the day; sometimes two feet of snow can fall in an hour, and then again, and then again, four or five times in a single day. The painting was made while looking out across my balcony, one New Year's Eve, waiting for the guests to arrive; they never did, because the blizzard that night made the roads impassable, even for the snow-ploughs.
11. LA Smog
Heading for Mount Baldy by way of the Glendora Pass, the vista opened out and there was LA five thousand feet below me, getting married, as it seemed - a very gay wedding, of course - under a chupah, a canopy, of what was actually white smog.
In planning the photograph I used the camera on my telephone, which took a much better picture than the box brownie used for this final version, but as I was recording a historic moment it seemed fitting to use a historic camera, and this was a Brownie 127, a bakelite camera named for the 127 film which it employed; it has a simple meniscus lens and its curved film plane is designed to compensate for the deficiencies of the lens. I took several pictures, but the one posted here used a parfocal zoom lens, which may explain the minor blurring in some of the outer pixelation.
If you look closely, you can just make out the glorious Getty Centre on the hillside above Brentwood.
The historic moment was personal; I see no reason to divulge it.
12. Portrait of Robert Ryman
"I have overcome the lining of the coloured sky, torn it down and, into the bag thus formed, put colour, tying it up with a knot. Swim in the white free abyss, infinity is before you."
So wrote Kazimir Malevich (in Russian; my translation), in the catalogue to his 1918 Moscow exhibition, where "Suprematist Composition: White on White" was shown for the first time.
But Malevich's painting was really rather grey, an asymmetrical square in one shade on a canvas in another: by no means a pure instance of the philosophy of the art of pure white.
The same is true of another Muscovite, Vladimir Weisberg, who dedicated his life to the geometry, but never quite mastered the colour.
But Malevich's painting was really rather grey, an asymmetrical square in one shade on a canvas in another: by no means a pure instance of the philosophy of the art of pure white.
The same is true of another Muscovite, Vladimir Weisberg, who dedicated his life to the geometry, but never quite mastered the colour.
Nor indeed did Robert Ryman, the edges of whose paintings tend towards a nostalgia for unnecessary framing, and whose brushwork all too often suggests a man with a nagging wife who wants the walls of the bathroom dry before the evening so that she can shower. But he came closer to absolute purity, so close indeed that he was able to sell one of his white canvases for a staggering fifteen million dollars, for fellow-artists the most inspirational act of his entire career.
13. Open Spaces
Traditionally painters have always preferred to capture the form, and paid scant attention to the emptinesses which those forms inhabit, and without which they would have no context.Sometimes the emptiness gives structure to the form – look at the non-background to Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" for example, or at any of Rembrandt's self-portraits.
Sometimes the emptiness appears to have been a burden to the artist, who feels obliged to fill it in, ruining a serenely blue sky with clouds (Turner, for one obvious example), or placing a dimple on an otherwise cosmetically perfect face (Vigée-Lebrun is particularly guilty of this in her Marie Antoinette series).
In this painting I have focused exclusively on the space, leaving out the form in order to show more clearly how space operates as both an optical illusion and an optical clarifier. I had not anticipated that it would lead to a revolutionary discovery (the "revelation of imagination", as it has become known in critical circles), and take humble pride in having done so.
14. Black Canvas with Eraser Marks
I learned the technique of "painting backwards" from a friend of my student days, who liked to work deep charcoal into a sheet of cartridge paper, thumbing it with great vigour and intensity as though he were eradicating the very sources of whatever psychic wounds they were that drove him to the task. He would then use his finger to remove, or smooth, or blur the blackness, driving it from the page as determinedly as he had first engraved it there, until a greyishly white shade and shape appeared that was discernible as an eye, a tree, a naked woman, a bowl of apples…
To achieve the same effect in digital art, I simply began by making a shape - in digital art, any shape will do - clicked "fill" and then "black"; then clicked on white and... unfortunately there is no illustration on the adjacent canvas on this occasion, as what I discovered when I reached this point was "work-block".
I regard this painting as a failure, but have included it anyway.
I wanted to capture the essence of an individual snowflake, which is like a genome in shape, and even more like a fingerprint in its individualism, for every snowflake is precisely and unequivocally itself, an ice crystal tumbling in slow motion through the air like a parachutist, freezing, thawing, settling, melting, never the same snowflake at any point of its existence, never identical to any other snowflake.
I even looked up "snowflake" in the encyclopaedia, hoping thereby to clarify my undertaking, but like so much of science the information simply left me more confused:
"Snowflakes encapsulated in rime form balls known as graupel", it informed me. "In warmer clouds an aerosol particle or 'ice nucleus' must be present in (or in contact with) the droplet to act as a nucleus".
Oh dear.
"A non-aggregated snowflake often exhibits six-fold radial symmetry."
Enough! I am a painter, a metaphysician of art, not a physicist. I want to paint the essence of the snowflake, not write a PhD thesis about it.
As with my "Portrait of a Tea-Cup", exhibited elsewhere, in the end I had no choice but to ignore the ceramic and the glazing, and just climb into its hinterland and paint the storm.
16. Hommage à Wilkie Collins
Published in 1860, "The Woman In White" was the first book to take the elitisms of Literature and Art out of the salons of the snobs and place them where they belong, in the hands of ordinary folk, in the form that ordinary folk best understand and can appreciate, that of the useful and mundane object.
No housekeeper would go out in public unless she was wearing her "Woman in White" cloak and bonnets, smelling of her "Woman in White" perfume or other "toilet requisites"; and when her beau took her to the vaudeville, she danced a "Woman in White" Waltz and a "Woman In White" Quadrille. Boats were named after the novel, comic strip versions appeared, alongside parodies in "Punch" magazine.
Art as merchandise, as capital, as real estate, as commodity - utilitarian items that bolster the economy, rather than the self-indulgent narcissisms of the bourgeoisie. For those of you who are interested in obtaining them, the pictures in this book are all available from TheArgamanStore as toilet tissue, santitary towel, table napkin, and in a multitude of flavoured condoms. Or you can solve them as jigsaw puzzles by uploading them to ArgamanJigSawCreator.app.
17. Acid Dream
No housekeeper would go out in public unless she was wearing her "Woman in White" cloak and bonnets, smelling of her "Woman in White" perfume or other "toilet requisites"; and when her beau took her to the vaudeville, she danced a "Woman in White" Waltz and a "Woman In White" Quadrille. Boats were named after the novel, comic strip versions appeared, alongside parodies in "Punch" magazine.
Art as merchandise, as capital, as real estate, as commodity - utilitarian items that bolster the economy, rather than the self-indulgent narcissisms of the bourgeoisie. For those of you who are interested in obtaining them, the pictures in this book are all available from TheArgamanStore as toilet tissue, santitary towel, table napkin, and in a multitude of flavoured condoms. Or you can solve them as jigsaw puzzles by uploading them to ArgamanJigSawCreator.app.
17. Acid Dream
I have never had one, but friends who have tell me that this is what it is like – the world simply dissolves before your very eyes…
18. The Hole in a Henry Moore
When we look at a painting, there is both the presence and the absence. The presence is what we see; the absence is the infinitude of possible objects, shapes, forms, colours, which the artist, on this occasion, chose not to include. And this is obvious; so obvious that it hardly needs stating.
But with a sculpture it is not so obvious, and it does need stating, because the absence affects the presence. A sculpture is an object frozen in no-space, but then placed in a specific space that may have nothing to do with itself - a gallery, a sitting-room, a street-plynth, a church rood-screen, the arch above a door.
And so there is the presence - the sculpture itself - but there is also the space in which it sits, and that space impacts on the way we see the presence; and even as we walk around the object, changes in the space around it impact upon it differently.
And then there is Henry Moore, who regularly makes the absence part of the presence, leaving what may just be holes, or backcloths for the surrounding absences, or as I prefer, white absences (not to be confused with the "Open Spaces" elsewhere in this book), for the viewer's imagination to fill in as it pleases.
The white absence in the illustration here is from Moore's "Recumbent Figure", at Tate Britain. I am working on a replacement picture now that the Tate has moved the sculpture to a different location in its gallery.
But with a sculpture it is not so obvious, and it does need stating, because the absence affects the presence. A sculpture is an object frozen in no-space, but then placed in a specific space that may have nothing to do with itself - a gallery, a sitting-room, a street-plynth, a church rood-screen, the arch above a door.
And so there is the presence - the sculpture itself - but there is also the space in which it sits, and that space impacts on the way we see the presence; and even as we walk around the object, changes in the space around it impact upon it differently.
And then there is Henry Moore, who regularly makes the absence part of the presence, leaving what may just be holes, or backcloths for the surrounding absences, or as I prefer, white absences (not to be confused with the "Open Spaces" elsewhere in this book), for the viewer's imagination to fill in as it pleases.
The white absence in the illustration here is from Moore's "Recumbent Figure", at Tate Britain. I am working on a replacement picture now that the Tate has moved the sculpture to a different location in its gallery.
19. 22-8-69
The third painting in this book that pays homage to an earlier artist of the white canvas. Bob Law entitled his "Nothing to be Afraid of V 22.8.69", which seems to me an eminently courageous title for what, by that date, was no longer a statement that required much courage, the white canvas having become accepted and assimilated as a genre in its own right, alongside the Dadaist ready-made, the Rileyesque optical illusion, and MOMA's uncertainty whether to put semiotic labels beside its fire extinguishers, lest ignorant punters mistook them for works of Art.
Law was regarded as one of the chief protagonists of Minimalism, and it was perhaps appropriate to that craft that he received virtually no attention, no public interest, no critical commentary, and very little by way of income, during his short life. He died in 2004, at the age of 70, which was not as short a life as a successful Minimalist might have achieved, but then Law did not believe that Art and Life needed to follow identical principles.
Despite the courageousness of the title, I have always been disappointed by the two serious acts of cowardice in this work, first the grey border, which is prolix and unnecessary, the same nostalgia for a frame that we noted in the Ryman. The date is worse, and not simply because it is both unnecessary and a spoiler of the pure ideal, but because the brushwork is shoddy.
In my repaired version I have valiantly removed both the frame and the date.
Despite the courageousness of the title, I have always been disappointed by the two serious acts of cowardice in this work, first the grey border, which is prolix and unnecessary, the same nostalgia for a frame that we noted in the Ryman. The date is worse, and not simply because it is both unnecessary and a spoiler of the pure ideal, but because the brushwork is shoddy.
In my repaired version I have valiantly removed both the frame and the date.
20. Polo Mint, through a microscope
Is this actually the Henry Moore repeated, following the principles of Wilkie Collins?
The same hole?
The same space?
Are Art and Commercialism that closely interlinked?
Must we admit that, ultimately, Art is only Real Estate, Capital, Merchandisable Commodity, Chazerai with a designer label?
21. The Emperor's New Clothes
Van Gogh, the Impressionists, Dadaism, Cubism, the formaldehyde cow - we can trace in linear degrees a decline in culture and civilisation that has taken a hundred and fifty years to reach nursery level, and is probably not yet complete.
Until what remains today, rather more cardboard and spray paint than fresco and water-colour, located in every gallery of contemporary art throughout the world, is the nothingness of the same blank wall, occupied by the same blank canvas, salvaged only by the post-modernist irony of text.
As to the Emperor, you can find an alternative version of the ancient tale under the title "The Emperor's Gardener" in my collection " The Captive Bride". Most encyclopaedia will tell you that the original belonged to Hans Christian Andersen, published in 1837 in the 3rd volume of his "Fairy Tales Told for Children"; but the very title of that book confirms that the tale is much older, quite probably Chinese. Today, picking up what I have written in my "Obloquy for Samuel Beckett" on the page of "The Agon Gallery", the tale simply serves as an allegory for the state of modern Art.
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