BRANCUSI: PERCEPTS AND CONCEPTS Roy Forward
Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957; actually Brâncuşi; pronounced Bruncoosh)
Bird in space, c.1931–36, white marble 184 x 44, limestone collar 17.1
x 17.8, sandstone base 117 x 42.5 x 42.5, National Gallery of
Australia, Canberra, purchased 1973
Bird in space, c.1931–36, black marble 193 x 47.8, white marble collar
18.1 x 18.1, sandstone base 117 x 51.4 x 51.4, National Gallery of
Australia, Canberra, purchased 1973[i]
'A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.'
Those words come from Archibald MacLeish's 1926 poem 'Ars Poetica,' which
also says: 'A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit…A poem
should not mean / But be.' Philip Guston hoped that his paintings would not
(quoting Paul Valéry) 'disappear into meaning.'[ii] A picture, like a poem,
opens up a lot of space in which to move around. Should we not respect that
space, and not try to fill it up with verbiage?
In translating a Grecian urn into the language of poetry, John Keats did
not explain it, or say what it meant, or say what its maker's intentions
were. Instead he acknowledged the urn as a 'bride of quietness' and a
'foster child of silence and slow time,' who could 'express a flowery tale
more sweetly than our rhyme.' He did not even look at it for information;
it is true that he asked ten questions about the legends, characters,
actions, sounds and places depicted on the urn, but he, or it, answered
none of them. All his questions were rhetorical; no answers were expected,
wanted or needed – in the same way that the music from the painted pipes
was sweeter for being unheard, because it thereby addressed the spirit.
Rather, the poet reflected on how the music, love, beauty and youth on the
urn, all of which he described, would never fade or end. Finally, he
addressed the urn as a 'silent form' that 'teases us out of thought' and
has only this to say to humankind: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.' So the
urn spoke to him, and he wrote down what he heard.
Well, not literally. Far from giving out advice like a dictionary of
proverbs, the urn, as always, said nothing. So we must conclude that it was
Keats alone who spoke, and that if he heard anything coming from the urn it
was because he was a kind of ventriloquist. It therefore remains an open
question whether the same urn could be heard to say the same thing by
someone else, or by Keats on another occasion.
'I prefer not to know,' said George Sand of a question she had put to
herself, 'for it might detract from the pleasure of wondering.'[iii]
'Seeing…is irreducible to thinking and cannot be comprehended by it,' said
Mikel Dufrenne.[iv] 'In art it is hard to say anything as good as: saying
nothing,' said Ludwig Wittgenstein.[v] Or, as the Straw Man says in The
Wizard of Oz, 'Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking.'
Should we, then, attend to the silences? Jean Baudrillard replied that in
the case of photographs, yes.[vi] There is indeed an eerie silence in the
'still' photograph. The camera silences its subjects in its images, cutting
them off from communicating with the viewer, who is of necessity silent,
too, towards those subjects. Silent attention could also be appropriate
with abstract modernist art, from which many critics insisted 'upon
excluding "literature" and subject matter.'[vii] The high point of Henri
Matisse's students' visits to his studio was when he showed them Paul
Cézanne's Three bathers: 'His silence before it was more evocative and
eloquent than words,' recalled Max Weber. 'A spirit of elation and awe
pervaded the studio at such times.'[viii] Henry James wrote, 'There is a
limit to what it is worth while to attempt to say about the greatest
artists.'[ix] To which Roger Kimball added, 'I believe that is true of all
art. The great occupational hazard for an art critic or art historian is to
let words come between the viewer and the experience of art – to substitute
a verbal encounter for an aesthetic one.'[x] Paul Valéry wrote, 'One must
always apologise for talking about painting';[xi] and again, 'A work of
art, if it does not leave us mute, is of little value': to which Susan
Sontag added, 'Of course, we don't stay mute.'[xii] Rosalind Krauss wrote
of 'modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to
narrative, to discourse,' and of defending itself 'against the intrusion of
speech.'[xiii] For Iris Murdoch it was a Titian, however, of which her
husband noted, 'Iris went to see it countless times, and never said a word.
To be mute about pictures was her way of paying them homage.'[xiv] For
Italo Calvino's Kublai Khan every report by Marco Polo – who had yet to
learn the emperor's language – was enhanced 'by the space that remained
around it, a void not filled with words. The descriptions of cities Marco
Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought,
become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.'[xv] The pianist
Susan Tomes regarded silence
…as the backdrop against which I hope to play, the canvas on which I
work, it's the material which runs through the pauses and gaps in the
music. Silence is heard in every tiny musical rest. In a way, silence
is the very essence of rhythm, because what is rhythm except the
organised interaction between sound and silence? Silence is the realm
into which any individual note dies away.[xvi]
Sometimes the merest hint of some aspect of a work can be sufficient to get
thoughts moving in a fruitful direction. Many people start with the name
plate or label that is attached to the frame, plinth or wall. It should, if
it is of the useful variety, give details of the artist's name, date of
birth (and death if applicable), the country or countries in which he or
she mainly worked, the title of the piece, the place and the date or dates
of its execution, what materials it is made of, and how and perhaps from
whom the institution acquired it. Even so, Paul Valéry argued that:
such historical remarks may be highly interesting in themselves, but
will in no way add to my actual enjoyment, which can result only from
contemplation of the work itself, independently of any notice written
under it. I am so convinced of this that I did not hesitate to say, at
the Council of National Museums, that if I were responsible for the
administration of the museums, I should have all the painters' names
removed…Let the eye choose for itself![xvii]
Valéry clinched his argument in favour of works of art themselves by
relating an experiment of his:
I went to the Brussels museum, entered a room at random, closed my
eyes, turned once round, and opened them again: giving myself the soul
of an amoeba, one of those amoebas that are used for experiments on
tropism, I moved toward the picture that attracted me. It was one that
I never should have noticed on a normal visit, a feminine martyr by a
fairly well-forgotten Bolognese painter. I should never have thought
of looking at that picture; I should have headed straight for
Rembrandt or Rubens. Try it at the Louvre, you'll see.[xviii]
Donald Friend:
You can't really talk about a picture. The picture, if it is good,
does all that. I would not paint a picture if I could say it in a
conversation, or play it on the piano, or just live it.
A picture is good when it is so utterly, independently a thing in
itself that it cannot be expressed in any other medium.[xix]
So out of the gallery windows with all that pseud's talk about explaining
pictures, about discovering their real meaning, about artists' intentions
for us and about what the works should say to people. Remember, 'every
image is polysemous'![xx] The only thing clear about a work of art is that
it exists, and with ephemeral and conceptual works even that is not always
certain. Educational and information programs have their place, marketing
programs in which works of art become corporate advertising logos may be
inevitable, but room must be left in all this hullabaloo for looking, for
reverie, for free-floating contemplation, for Keats's slow time in which
works of art may speak their silent words to our eyes. It was significant
that in a 1990 survey of visitors to three art galleries in South
Australia, 92 per cent agreed that art galleries should primarily be for
the enjoyment of art, compared with only 65 per cent who said they should
mainly seek to educate about art.[xxi]
Anyone taking visitors around an art museum must beware of needless fact-
mongering. For example, the exact year in which a work was made is not
usually relevant to understanding what we are looking at, but the rough
date almost always is, because dealing with a work on its own terms
requires that we take full account of its age. Locating it in time suggests
some of the circumstances of its making and of its subsequent history, all
of which is essential to our understanding of what it is we are looking at
and to our appreciation of it.
Ambivalence towards art museum guides is very common. For every person
whose heart is warmed by the sight of a huddle of visitors around a work
discussing it with their guide, there is another whose ire rises at the
intrusion of an organised group into the sanctuary, and another waxing
satirical at the credulous who listen to someone else. It may be that
guides suffer from being linked in people's minds with poor teachers, or
with tourist guides who have a bad name as touts; perhaps it is that men do
not like seeing women purporting to know more than they do, or that young
people must disparage anyone over fifty; or it may be tacit agreement with
the ancient Chinese saying: 'Those who know of it do not speak of it; those
who speak of it do not know it.'[xxii] Donald Horne had all such sourpusses
admitting to 'understanding next to nothing of what we are seeing' and
'despising the people who show it to us';[xxiii] but even he was merciless
towards 'the pseudo-precision of the spiel of guides,' including the guides
at Maya monuments who 'go on spinning ludicrous stories which, out of
nothing, explain everything'; at Amber in India, 'the indomitable verbiage
of our guide, alienated by the cruel traditions of his occupation, has put
me into a panic. Unless I take care, I might hear what he is saying.'[xxiv]
Bernard Berenson's contemplation of the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel was
interrupted by 'herds of tourists bellowed to by their guides,'[xxv] Italo
Calvino in his 'A King Listens' had the monarch hear around the palace 'the
blathering of the guides,'[xxvi] and Richmal Crompton's visit to a church
in San Martino was marred 'by the beastly and amorous guide who insisted on
placing me in best position for each picture, with a lot of mauling and
pawing. Couldn't do anything in circs. but grin and bear it.'[xxvii]
Marcel Proust might have agreed, for in Remembrance of Things Past he has
his narrator say, when on his way with his love Albertine to a little
church she was painting:
The carriage could not take us all the way to the church. I stopped it
when we had passed through Quetteholme and bade Albertine good-bye.
For she had alarmed me by saying to me of this church as of other
monuments and of certain pictures: 'What a pleasure it would be to see
it with you!' This pleasure was one that I did not feel myself capable
of giving her. I felt it myself in front of beautiful things only if I
was alone or pretended to be alone and did not speak. But since she
had hoped to be able, thanks to me, to experience artistic sensations
that cannot be communicated thus, I thought it more prudent to say
that I must leave her, that I would come back to fetch he at the end
of the day, but that in the meantime I must go back with the carriage
to pay a call on Mme Verdurin or on the Cambremers, or even spend an
hour with Mamma at Balbec…[xxviii]
A good friend, Keryl Kavanagh, writes, 'I have to confess to having spent
much of my time in museums avoiding overhearing guides giving a spiel about
this or that work.' She speculates that things might improve were they
differently trained. 'Of course it's much easier to trot out the prepared
ten minutes on the Mona Lisa and then rush to the next work. But really,
there's no point in having living guides if they can give you nothing more
than a tape-recording can. Oh, they can answer questions (possibly) if one
has the temerity to ask. I've also reacted to those (usually) male (mostly)
Americans you come across in galleries who are loudly telling their (often
female but not always – sometimes younger male) companions what to think,
with a barely repressed desire to strangle them.'
Henri Matisse was 'distracted rather than stimulated by the riches of the
Uffizi galleries and the Pitti Palace' when he visited Florence in 1907,
wrote Hilary Spurling.
He found it hard to remain patient with Leo [Stein], who, having spent
the past seven summers perfecting his knowledge of Florentine art, had
laid on a highly specialised programme few tour guides could match.
Leo's helpful comparisons and didactic tips were admirable for opening
the eyes of inquisitive young art students. But Matisse had been
looking at pictures as intently as Leo for a great deal longer, and
with a ruthlessly professional eye. Travelling was for him essentially
a solitary experience. He said that the last thing he needed was Leo
buzzing at his back, allowing him a short pause in front of each new
masterpiece before darting forward to solicit his impressions. Matisse
became exasperated, Leo felt hurt and disappointed.[xxix]
About that occasion, Wendy Beckett reported Matisse as complaining, 'I was
only looking at art so as to talk about it.'[xxx] 'What does the visitor
most desire in a museum?' asked Robert Hughes. 'And the answer is: to be
alone with works of art,' so that he even condemned museums for supplying
acoustiguides 'so that the visitor could be spared the discomfort of being
alone with his own thoughts in front of a masterpiece.'[xxxi] (The more
telling case against audioguides was Lawrence Weschler's reference to their
being marked by 'the same bland, slightly unctuous voice you've heard in
every museum slide show...the reassuringly measured voice of unassailable
institutional authority.'[xxxii]) The division over how people should
behave showed up in a report on visitors to three art galleries in South
Australia: on the statement that art galleries are places for peace and
quiet, 51 per cent agreed, and a surprising 30 per cent disagreed, the rest
being undecided.[xxxiii]
There is a view that the ideal visitor to an art museum is like the classic
flâneur or stroller in the streets of nineteenth-century Paris or Weimar
Berlin, as celebrated by Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel. On an imagined
'sight-seeing' trip in Berlin Hessel thought any effort by the tour guide
('our Führer') to direct or filter the perceptions of his charges highly
suspect. 'The Explainer now forces our gaze' toward national monuments, or
'tears our gaze' over to the palace of justice. The 'bus travels too
quickly' for the flaneur, 'we must put it off until a journey through the
streets on foot.' 'There is no time to research the native secrets of the
area from this tourist bus.' 'Sometimes it is worthwhile to enjoy, rather
than the antiquities, the entertaining presence of the doorman of the arts
and lords and his carpet-shuffling herd.' He advised his 'dear fellow
stranger and fellow tour member' to 'come back to this area and have time
to get lost a little.'[xxxiv] There is no reason why a voluntary guide in
an art museum should not suggest something of 'the art of getting lost,'
refuse to convey the suggestion of any predetermined interpretation of the
works of art, and follow Hessel's dictum: 'It is not necessary to
understand everything, one only needs to look at it with one's eyes.'[xxxv]
The model is not that of the tourist guide doling out slabs of predigested
interpretation to passive followers, but an equal group of travellers, of
whom the voluntary guide is but one, launching themselves into the
adventure of the unknown.
The US artist and critic Fairfield Porter consistently played down
extraneous information, insisting that 'experience is the only way to know
[art]', that 'Art can be known best in its own terms, artistically', that
'The experience of art is inhibited if it is experienced as something to be
"understood"', and that 'Artistic understanding comes from confidence in
one's intuition.'[xxxvi]
Harold Acton had these words of praise for a user of few, but exact, words:
'Professor J.D. Beazley, the great authority on Greek vases, rarely utters,
but his few utterances are pregnantly to the point. He is a purist,
concerned with the object and not with his own emotions and their literary
form. After hearing so many of our Florentine phrase-mongers, one turns to
him as to a spring of healing water.'[xxxvii]
Guides must not even be afraid of the occasional silence. Barbara Hepworth
was very taken with the silences of Herbert Read, saying, 'Whenever he was
in the presence of a new work, of any kind, he was totally silent and he
probably wouldn't speak for half an hour. But the silence itself was a
great inspiration because one began to look at the work through his
eyes.'[xxxviii] Now and then guides should give their voice a rest and join
the viewers in facing the piece and looking at it in silence. By so doing
they will be letting viewers' imagination, and their own, work on what they
are looking at without the guidance or distraction of mere words. It was
Oscar Wilde who said that James McNeil Whistler's conversation in Edgar
Degas's presence was reduced to 'brilliant flashes of silence.'[xxxix]
How many tours have been spoiled because the guide talked too much? Henry
James, of all people, criticised Eugène Fromentin for attempting to say too
many things about his painters. 'He can say so much so neatly and so
vividly...that he loses all respect for the unsayable – the better half, we
think, of all that belongs to a work of art.'[xl] Which is very like Walt
Whitman: 'At its best, poetic lore is like what may be heard of
conversation in the dusk, from speakers far or hid, of which we get only a
few broken murmurs. What is not gather'd is far more – perhaps the main
thing.'[xli] About music, Daniel Barenboim went so far as to say, 'Whenever
we talk about music, we talk about how we are affected by it, not about it
itself…I don't think you can speak about music. You can only speak about a
subjective reaction to it.'[xlii]
If silence is too radical an option for gallery guides, they can at least
practice the eloquent pause. 'The most precious things in speech are
pauses,' was attributed to Ralph Richardson, the British actor. Pauses
convey guides' hopes of being suggestive, open-ended and undogmatic, of
allowing for other interpretations besides their own, including the
eccentric, and they can contribute to a productive alternation between
active and passive viewing.
John Keats was fond of an attitude he called 'negative capability,' which
he thought was essential for a good poet. He thought it 'is when man is
capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason.'[xliii] It is about being able to identify
completely with another, about being receptive, empathetic, passive even.
'If a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick
about the Gravel.'[xliv] So before a work of art we listen. 'Does the
spectator ever succeed in exhausting the objects he contemplates?' asks
Siegfried Kracauer.[xlv]
Short takes
'All I am striving to do is to shift the boundaries of art deeper into the
unknown,' Brancusi said. So, let us start with his Birds in space by
honouring their silence, their timelessness, their simplicity, their pure
form, their reduction of the grossly material to the pure essence of birds
in space, their truth to the material of marble.
There are a number of problems with attempting such an approach:
– there is a good deal of irregularity in Brancusi's Birds, including
around the beak in the first Maiastra Birds,[xlvi] and in all of the
Maiastra Birds around the eyes;[xlvii]
– as well as the process of form reduction over the more than thirty years
during which Birds were made there was a process of form production, a
point that would be clearer, perhaps, had these Birds been moulded or built
up. We have to beware of confusing the reduction of the marble entailed in
its being carved and the reduction of form between the first Bird and the
last. Anyone who tried to end up with a shape like a Bird in space just by
cutting away birdish details would instead find themselves with something
looking like a chicken carcass;
– judging by the number of broken marble sculptures he left along the way,
and by the steel rods up the centres of these Birds in space, it must be
said that Brancusi sometimes worked against the objective properties of his
materials.
In other words, trying to see these sculptures as pure Platonic forms would
be just as intrusive and manipulative a handling of them as any other. We
cannot forget that Brancusi was a real live complicated man – he tried to
hide his homosexuality yet spent two weeks in Corsica with Jean Cocteau's
teenaged boyfriend, Raymond Radiguet[xlviii] – and that therefore
contradictions, departures and tensions exist in his works too.
One solution, as a compromise between saying nothing and too much about
Birds in space, would be to follow Max Friedländer's advice against the
vanity of attempting to describe works of art in detail: 'The "strictest
economy of words" is what he enjoins, and recommends limiting oneself to
"aphoristic remarks, put together unsystematically".'[xlix]
Another solution would be to go for short takes, one being simply: Brancusi
probably worked in the sculpture studio of Auguste Rodin in Paris for a
month in 1907. The extent of Brancusi's revolt against Rodin's style can be
seen in the contrast between Rodin's rugged hollows and lumps and
exaggerated gestures expressive of human emotion, and these smooth, carved
abstractions of the idea of flight.
Another equally restrained take would be: Brancusi's first version of a
bird, in 1910, was based on Maiastra, a famous bird in the folklore of
Rumania, the country where Brancusi was born and where he lived until he
was twenty-eight. In the Rumanian legend it was a beautiful and melodious
bird, which helped the prince and princess of the fairy-tale find each
other with its magic powers.[l] 1910 was also the year when Serge Diaghilev
and the Russian Ballet performed, also in Paris, the ballet The Firebird,
which was based on a Russian version of the same legend. Similarities exist
to stories of golden birds or sun birds in many countries: the Golden Hawk
and Bennu in ancient Egypt, Feng Huang in China, Garuda in India, As-
Samandal in Arabia, and the Phoenix in the Graeco-Roman world.
One notable difference is that Maiastra is a female bird. Another detail
that cannot be ascertained from the smoothed-out Birds is that they have a
front and a back, the flat oval plane at the top being a development from
the open beak of earlier Birds and therefore indicating the front. This
means that if we see the Birds as taking off, they are doing so while
bending backwards, and that if they were to slip aerodynamically through
space like a Concorde aircraft, they would in fact be flying upside down.
A third take could dwell on the contrasts between the peasant origins of
the Birds and the streamlined machine-aesthetic to which they appeal. Some
of Brancusi's Birds are reminiscent of the stylised birds woven in Rumanian
rugs, and the rhombic patterns in the bases of his 1912 Birds resemble
those carved in the wooden posts of the porches[li] in his mountain village
of Hobitza between the Transylvanian Alps to the north and the Danube to
the south, in the Oltenia region of Wallachia, west of Bucharest. Rumanian
poets, such as Ion Vinea and Lucian Blaga in the 1920s, have written poems
about Maiastra and Brancusi's Birds. Margit Rowell argued that it was
because Brancusi, coming out of the age-old traditions of Rumania, did not
fit into modern Paris that he turned for parallels to his own 'remote and
timeless sources' in the equally timeless art of Egypt, Africa and Asia.
His art looked industrially streamlined, but was hand-carved: 'in it,
tradition and modernity blend to form a unity in which all traces of the
contradictions from which it springs are almost, but not quite,
invisible.'[lii]
That could easily diverge into an aside on whether Brancusi is better seen
as coming out of the past to grapple with the present, or as standing in
the present and raiding the past. Rowell seemed to favour the former in her
work just quoted, Anna Chave the latter in her conclusion that Brancusi
could painstakingly shape by hand a unique object, such as a Bird in
space, that appeared to many onlookers as commercially manufactured
and endlessly reproducible; he could make an image evoking the latest
in rocket or propeller design and call it instead a magical, mythical
bird; and he could anchor that gleaming shaft of metal, seemingly hot
off the production line, in a stone cylinder and cross atop a hand-
chiseled, course-grained, wooden base, as if it were a cultish
icon.[liii]
A fourth take: In 1933 the Maharaja of Indore, Yeshwant Rao ('Bala')
Holkar, decided to buy these two Birds and one other in polished bronze
while visiting Brancusi in Paris. Both Holkar and Brancusi wanted the Birds
to stand in a temple for spiritual meditation to be built in the grounds of
the palace; Chave's statement that the temple was commissioned, 'by some
accounts, partly as a mausoleum for his recently deceased wife,'[liv] is
hard to reconcile with the fact that the Maharanee died in 1937. One of
their ideas was that the Birds should stand beside a rectangular pool of
water, pointing the spirit upwards. At the end of 1937 Brancusi travelled
to the princely state of Indore in west central India to deliver them, but
the temple was never built – 'The death of the Maharanee in Paris in 1937
may well have contributed to the Maharaja's failing interest in the
project,'[lv] Holkar quickly marrying and divorcing one American woman and
then marrying another. The Birds' settings in the National Gallery have
nearly always been in some way in sympathy with the original plan, and in
any case their great marble weight still spears effortlessly towards heaven
– or at least appears to do so, even as it presses heavily downwards.
A fifth take: Between his first Bird in 1910 and the beginning of the
second world war in 1939 Brancusi made twenty-seven Birds in marble or
polished bronze according to Athena Spear (although Ann Temkin says 'more
than thirty'[lvi]). The first seven stood very upright, with rounded bodies
on straight legs, heads and beaks stretched up high. Then came four in
which there was no separation into two legs, and no shoulders, but just a
long, thin, body-like shape, swelling out to be widest where the chest and
shoulders used to be, and tapering off towards where the head and feet used
to be. Finally came sixteen Birds in space, of which these two are numbers
24 (white) and 26 (black), the last two to be carved in marble, the purest
expression of aerodynamic streamlining imaginable. Brancusi told Henri-
Pierre Rochè in 1936: 'My last Birds in black and white are the ones where
I most approached the right measure – and I approached this measure to the
degree that I was able to rid myself of myself.'[lvii]
A sixth possible take: Can you notice any differences between the two
Birds? From below they look fat, oleaginous rather than marmoreal, which
can be partly attributed to the lighting and the kinds of reflections it
produces off the surfaces. The one in black marble is bigger, being nearly
ten centimetres taller, and nearly four centimetres more around at the
widest point than the white one. The black Bird has a white marble collar
that is also slightly bigger than the other Bird's, which is made of
limestone; and the black Bird stands on a sandstone base that is the same
height as the other one, but wider and deeper, and the indentations on two
of the sides of the bases are shallower. There are also slight differences
in the proportions of the upper and lower parts of the Birds, and in their
tilt from the vertical. And do you notice something about the shape of the
sandstone bases? The waist of each base is less than halfway up its height,
so that there is a greater mass of stone above the indentations than there
is below, echoing the greater mass of marble that is being lifted up higher
still by the base as a whole.
Brancusi's bases, including pedestals and plinths, were to him not optional
extras, but integral to what they supported, and were even sculptures in
their own right. Bases have certain effects anyway: they root a work to one
spot, they serve to protect it, they lift it up where it can be more easily
seen, they set it apart, they give it greater presence, and they tend to
turn anything on top of them into 'art.' In addition, Brancusi created
interplays between the forms, materials and textures of superstructure and
base, and often intended the rise from base to work to symbolise a progress
up a hierarchy from lower to higher: in our case, for instance, from
geometrical to organic forms.[lviii]
One work that can be seen as relating to looking at the base as sculpture
is Robert Morris's Slab (platform), 1973[lix] (originally shown on its own,
but intended by the artist to be accompanied by his Slab (cloud),
1973[lx]), after the first exhibition of which John Cage reported 'that he
didn't see any works of art in the gallery, just a slab on the floor.'[lxi]
All six takes could be strung together if the occasion called for it, but
any one of them is capable of standing on its own as an admirably self-
restrained reflection. They focus, in turn, on bouncing off the work of an
older sculptor, as Brancusi did; on seeing the sculptures' links with world-
wide legend; on their hauling of peasant handcraft into the machine age; on
seeing their intended Indian setting; on seeing their place in Brancusi's
oeuvre; and on a close scrutiny of them as material objects: a small sample
of delights from the endless smorgasbord of the artist's context, style and
intentions, the work's subject matter, contents, materials and viewing
contexts and current viewers' contexts and points of view, and so on. In
each case a particular conception of the Birds governs our perceptions.
Mary Eagle said something similar: 'There are many ways of looking at a
painting, and for each approach there are many sightings.' Because adding
up the information from all of the sightings would produce nothing less
than life itself, and a synthesis would subsume everything to its own
logic, her preference was for seeking out the relations between overlapping
and contradictory points of view, without requiring that the differences
between be resolved.'[lxii]
Shakespeare has Hamlet offering short takes of the clouds for a gullible
Polonius, except that his were not meant to be helpful:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a
camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.[lxiii]
Charles Schulz's version of this was perhaps even more relevant to art
appreciation:
Lucy: What do you see in the clouds, Linus?
Linus: Well, those clouds up there look to me like the map of
British Honduras in the Caribbean. That cloud looks a little
like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and
sculptor, and that group of clouds over there gives me the
impression of the stoning of Stephen.
Lucy: And Charlie – what do you see?
Charlie: Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie. But I
changed
my mind.
We may take our pleasure of any art, but few works permit such wanton
interpretation, and we would jeopardise the right of the work of art to be
itself were we to elevate our authority over it in the way of Hamlet. Far
better to involve everyone in the effort of probing for their own facts and
producing their own meanings than of having to listen to imposed
interpretations. We should not be trying to tell viewers everything anyway.
Asking questions is often better, including leading questions which we have
no intention of answering ourselves or of waiting for an answer to from our
listeners – so that viewers can work out their own responses independently
and privately for themselves.
What I mainly want to take from Hamlet, however, is the lesson of just how
much perceptions are governed by concepts.
Ian Burn (1939–93) claimed the right of the artist to dictate the takes –
nine of them – that viewers were expected to make of his Blue premiss, no.
2, 1965–67, remade 1992.[lxiv] The work consists of a large blue painting
and a small white page. On the left half of the page is a table with nine
empty rows, below which Burn put these words:
BLUE PREMISS (PART 1): OBJECT
1. The surface of the painting is a single uniform colour.
2. The surface is defined into nine sections or 'areas' through the
effect of light on the differing finishes: the mat 'lines' absorb
light while the gloss 'lines' reflect the light.
3. All 'areas' are stated with equal size, proportion, colour and
surface. Visually, they are all 'the same'.
On the right half of the page is the same table, but with each row now
labelled in the top left corner, from 'NINE FEET' in the top row to 'ONE
FOOT' in the bottom one, and with the following words appearing in larger
type in the middle of each row, from top to bottom:
INACCESSIBLE
RETRACTIVE
POSTULATORY
COINCIDENT
CONCESSIVE
ADMISSIVE
INDULGENT
APPROXIMATIVE
ESTIMABLE
Below the table are these words:
BLUE PREMISS (PART 2): LINGUISTIC CONDITIONALS
1. Attached to each 'area' is an experiential word.
2. Each word, since it does not conflict with a viewer's responses,
conditions the responses to each section of the surface.
3. By establishing a condition for each section, the viewer's perception
is influenced, thus allowing each section to be seen as different and
displacing the visual 'sameness'.
As Michiel Dolk commented: 'Much in the way that catalogue information
tends to mediate perceptions of works of art, the spectator was forced to
reconcile two separate orders of information: the linguistic and
perceptual…This time the play on sameness and difference was transferred
from object to text, a play which translated the untranslatable and exposed
the (incommensurable) gap between concept and percept.'[lxv]
Earlier in 1965 Burn had made Yellow premiss, which consisted of six
identical paintings. 'Sameness seemed to offer a functioning outside of the
direct perceptual mode,' he later said; '"sameness" seems to function in
language prior to perception.' He said he had reached 'a point arrived at
by eliminating everything that wasn't vital and what I have done since has
been built from that point. This is why I have called it Yellow
Premiss…concentrating on the idea or concept to the point of denying any
physical qualities whatsoever…a way of working where the actual paint has
no qualities of its own…'[lxvi] Blue premiss, no. 1 followed in 1966, which
Burn described as 'a painting consisting of nine areas which appear the
"same" in all respects, but the sizes of which are all slightly
different.'[lxvii]
That these three works were all made in London enabled Dolk to speculate
that Burn nostalgically edited out all but the beach-yellow and the sea-
blue from his 1963–64 tributes to Sidney Nolan's St Kilda, with even the
yellow 'to disappear in the glacial (glazed) surfaces of saturated
blue.'[lxviii] Blue premiss, no. 2 was not the end of that road for Burn,
for as Dolk said, 'as a physical support for the projection of language,
Blue Premiss proved cumbersome. The disparity in scale between the
phenomenological space of painting and the textual space of the page still
revealed a fundamental incongruity between two domains of activity bound by
their respective conventions';[lxix] and Burn's theoretical concerns were
developed in his 1968 essay, 'The role of language.'[lxx] But this painting
did mark a progress in Burn's work from the discovery of the premiss or
fundamental presupposition that the perceptual properties of a work of art
are of secondary relevance to the act of seeing and thereby thinking it, to
the logical conclusion that conceptual properties are primary.
(The opposite position was voiced by Stéphane Mallarmé, when Edgar Degas
complained to him that he was making no progress writing a sonnet, despite
being full of ideas, 'But, Degas, it is not with ideas that you make a
poem…You make it with words.'[lxxi] But, Burns, it is not with ideas that
you make a painting…You make it with brushmarks.)
When he returned to Australia in 1977, however, he reengaged with the
landscape, so that whereas in 1967–68 his Looking through a piece of glass
had been just that (at those words), by 1989 his Homage to Albert ('South
through Heavitree Gap') was of looking at the sentence 'A LANDSCAPE IS NOT
SOMETHING YOU LOOK AT BUT SOMETHING YOU LOOK THROUGH' through a
reproduction of an Albert Namatjira painting. 'At the time,' wrote Ann
Stephen, 'we were writing an essay together on Albert Namatjira which
proposed that the Aboriginal artist's adoption of the European watercolour
tradition engaged in a double vision which resisted assimilation.'[lxxii]
Homage to Albert was a precursor of his 'Value added' landscapes, 1992–93,
in which he took amateur landscapes picked up in markets and junk shops and
covered them with text on perspex, the title being a play on the current
insistence on processing the nation's raw materials prior to export. He saw
merit in the paintings, himself beginning as an amateur painter in the
Geelong Art Society in the mid-1950s. He wrote:
The text self-consciously models a set of relationships – between
itself and the viewer, between itself and the picture, and with itself
as text. Thus the text appears as a psychological presence for the
picture, as an aspect of the picture's 'surveillance' of the viewer,
and as a critical self-reference. The interweaving movement between
these modes of address promotes slippages, simulating the kinds of
shifts which occur frequently in our patterns of seeing pictures. This
'phenomenological' reading reassembles the text within a pictorial
(not typographical) iconicity.
The text contests the representational limits of the landscape
painting, opening it up to other competences of the viewer and
'releasing' new qualities of the painting. This exchange transforms
both text and image, leaving a sense of incompleteness attached to
each element. Parts of the text describe the picture, other bits offer
no match, positioning the text 'out of registration' with the picture.
Hence the picture can never quite anticipate or displace the text, or
the text substitute for the picture. The text engages the picture in
order to insist on incommensurabilities: it proposes a unity to inform
us of discontinuities.[lxxiii]
Try to ignore the text, he said, and words keep intervening – words
separated from their sentences, the picture having that power to take the
text apart. Concentrate on the text, and the picture keeps coming out
between lines, words and letters. Having to see through and around the text
means that we end up imagining the picture as much as we see it. Everything
is moving and changing: a constant process of fresh 'takes'.
Ad Reinhardt and Robert Ryman
At the National Gallery of Australia the placement of other works near
Brancusi's Birds in space has often proved instructive. At one time there
was a wonderful dialogue with the similarly pared-down images of Tahitian
coral, birds and fish in Henri Matisse's Oceania, the sky.[lxxiv] Painting
1954–1958[lxxv] by Ad Reinhardt (1913–67) has also sometimes hung near the
Birds, making two works in the same room to have suffered irreparable
damage.[lxxvi] The white Bird, as we can see, has had the top of its 'beak'
chipped off and glued back on. It was knocked off by Brancusi himself as he
was carrying it on his shoulders through the door of the palace in India to
present it to its first owner, the Maharaja of Indore, in January
1938.[lxxvii] Reinhardt's painting was irreparably damaged by an as yet
unknown visitor to the Gallery in 1997 who, from the two or three
handprints on the surface, may have fallen forward into it after tripping
on a protective box put on the floor to stop viewers getting too close. All
the Gallery needs is one of Lucio Fontana's deliberately slashed canvases
to put in the same room.
Reinhardt would have supported the judgement 'irreparably,' saying on at
least one occasion that only he could restore his paintings,[lxxviii] and
proving it while he was alive when he had them returned to him for repair.
The irony is that the erection of the box was a protective measure
recommended by the first commentator on the painting for the National
Gallery, Lucy Lippard, who said:
The increasingly nocturnal effect of the dark canvases is due to the
oil being drained from the paints…The disadvantage was that the
paintings became extremely sensitive to damage from any oily
substance, especially fingerprints.
Pointing out how bright light can obscure the detail in the work, she
continued:
The more invisible the work becomes, the more impatient viewers
become; they are often constrained to touch instead of look and can
thus damage the painting irrevocably…One solution is low white boxes
in front of each painting to keep viewers at a respectful
distance.[lxxix]
In 1987, ten years after Lippard's advice and ten years before the
Reinhardt disaster, a Mark Rothko painting on loan from the Phillips
Collection in Washington DC, Green and tangerine on red, was damaged when a
woman visitor to the National Gallery of Australia, 'middle-aged and
possibly wearing thick glasses' according to a witness, also tripped over a
low box placed in front of the work and dinted the canvas with her elbow.
Damage aside, at first glance at the Reinhardt we seem to be looking at
nothing more than a black square. This is baffling to anyone who expects a
painting to imitate nature, or to tell a story, or to express an emotion.
A longer and closer look, preferably from several angles, uncovers an
almost invisible cross-like shape of bands and squares. Colours also
emerge, although these can usually be seen only subliminally. 'Looking
isn't as simple as it looks,' said Reinhardt.
Perhaps most intriguing is the discovery that the surface of the work has
apparently been built up with very small soft brush-strokes. In this way
colours such as red and blue have been submerged by the dark grey, changes
in the direction of the brush strokes have defined the shapes, and an
extraordinarily interesting matt finish has been achieved. The surface
absorbs our gaze, as it absorbs the light.
Even so, compared with other paintings there is, as Reinhardt himself said,
'nothing to latch onto.' One of his reasons for choosing matt black was
that black (or dark grey) was a non-colour, and the matt surface would not
reflect anything going on in the room. The result is an absence of almost
everything that might distract us from the contemplation of pure painting.
As time and effort fall away, our perceptions reach out into unexpected
subtleties of an almost non-physical kind. There is nothing here demanding
that we see this or admire that. Instead, we are persuaded to leave nature,
history, literature and religion behind us and to experience art at its
most pure and elemental.
Nevertheless, close as this work approaches to the metaphysical ideal, it
is still a material object, paint on canvas, whose carefully constrained
shapes and colours and textures are fascinating in their fugitive effects.
Reinhardt valued art that was, in his own words, thoughtful, absolute,
pure, cool, empty, quiet, unique, unmannered, negative, lifeless,
soundless, airless, smell-less, motionless, timeless, useless, undramatic,
unpoetic, austere, abstract, square, moral, disciplined, traditional,
formal, colourless, dark, noble, hieratic, symmetrical, repetitious,
invisible, disinterested, complete, rational, conscious, clear.[lxxx] He
drew up twelve rules for art: no texture, no brushwork or calligraphy, no
sketching or drawing, no forms, no design, no colours, no light, no space,
no time, no size or scale, no movement, no object or subject.[lxxxi] As
fellow spirits he cited Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ('No more
imagination, no more movement'), G.K. Chesterton ('I never get enough
nothing to do'), and Lao Tzu ('The five colours will blind a man's sight'),
W.H. Auden (the phrase 'the total dark sublime' in his poem 'The More
Loving One'), and Jeremiah ('and the heavens above be black').[lxxxii]
Also sometimes hanging near Brancusi's Birds in space is Arena,
1977,[lxxxiii] by Robert Ryman (born 1930). It consists of a near-square
canvas covered in near-white paint, the kind of thing that Ryman, by 1977,
had been making for the previous twenty years and would continue to make
into the new century. The black Reinhardt and the white Ryman are a good
pair to accompany the black and white Birds in space.
Were all Ryman's white paintings to be seen together, the differences
between them would stand out, for they range from very small to very big,
and display a great variety of paints and brushstrokes on many kinds of
surfaces – stretched and unstretched, framed and unframed and suspended by
all sorts of attachments – and with all kinds of different relationships
with the wall.
In the 1960s they tended to be seen as colour-field, post-painterly
abstraction or minimalist, with the artist's own 'The painting is exactly
what you see'[lxxxiv] guiding other viewers away from looking for the
earnest metaphors of the earlier Abstract Expressionists; they seemed so
perfectly in tune with Clement Greenberg's insistence that painting be non-
representational within a flattened picture space.
However, Ryman called himself a 'Realist,' taking pains to distinguish his
art from Minimalism and abstraction generally as much as from
representational art, all of which in his opinion made the mistake of
inviting viewers into an imaginary world inside the painting. What Ryman
meant by 'Realism' was the abandonment of the picture, 'and since there's
no picture, there's no story. And there's no myth. And there is no
illusion, above all.'[lxxxv] He painted the paint, and not anything else
with the paint. 'He has said that there is no question of what to paint but
only how to paint – that is, that the "how" of painting contains the
meaning.'[lxxxvi]
The opposite position, from which Ryman was trying to escape, was well-
explained by Philip Guston in 1978 when he said:
The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It
moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion,
a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I suppose the
same thing was true in the Renaissance. There is Leonardo da Vinci's
famous statement that painting is a thing of the mind. I think that's
right. I think that the idea of the pleasure of the eye is not merely
limited, it isn't even possible. Everything means something. Anything
in life or in art, any mark you make has meaning and the only question
is, 'what kind of meaning?'[lxxxvii]
Within 1960s art Philip Leider distinguished between 'abstraction,' by
which he meant an emphasis on line and colour in two dimensions, and
'literalism,' an emphasis on the work of art's existence as a made physical
object (roughly Ryman's position). 'That the differences were immense,' he
wrote, 'can be seen simply by comparing a [Kenneth] Noland circle painting
with a [Jasper] Johns target. The one is about color and centeredness and
two-dimensional abstraction…The other is about an object called a target
and an object called a painting…'[lxxxviii] The critics Clement Greenberg,
Michael Fried and William Rubin and artists such as Morris Louis, Noland,
Jules Olitski and Helen Frankenthaler – the abstractionists – were seen as
pitted against artists such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Carl Andre –
the literalists. Both sides drew inspiration from Jackson Pollock; and
Frank Stella had a foot in both camps, so that when Rubin quoted Stella as
saying that Stella's move to three-inch deep stretchers actually
accentuated the two-dimensionality of the painting's surface, Leider
scathingly wondered why greater depth did not make the object more three-
dimensional.[lxxxix]
One clue to understanding Ryman's work is that he learnt to paint by
painting, after one day wandering into an art-supply shop in New York,
where he was working as a jazz player, and buying some oil paint, canvas
board and brushes:
I was just seeing how the paint worked, and how the brushes worked. I
was just using the paint, putting it on a canvas board, putting it on
thinly with turpentine, and thicker to see what that was like, and
trying to make something happen without any specific idea what I was
painting.[xc]
After that, a couple of short art courses aside, he learnt by looking
directly at real paintings while working as a security attendant at the
Museum of Modern Art between 1953 and 1960 (just before Dan Flavin thought
up his ideas for electric light art while working as a guard in the early
1960s in the American Museum of Natural History in the same city[xci]).
Since the act of painting and the act of looking at physical paintings were
the sources of his art, it may be appropriate for other viewers to adopt
the same curious and intuitive and experimental approach to this output,
concentrating on what is physically present, making the most of
experiencing it at first-hand. What one is likely to experience is a
growing ability to discriminate between shades of white, kinds of white,
paint thicknesses and thinnesses, methods of applying paint, material
supports for the paint and so on.
Most of his paintings have been white, yet he said:
It was never my intention to make white paintings. And it still isn't.
I don't even consider that I paint white paintings. The white is just
a means of exposing other elements of the painting, that can make it
clear. White enables other things to become visible.[xcii]
It is a case of the more art stays the same, the more it changes. White
also is not freighted with much symbolism or mysticism, and does not over-
emphasise a painting as a shape against a wall. Most have also been square,
a quality that is similarly valued for its neutrality. Ryman's position is
very close to that of Robert Rauschenberg, who in the early 1950s made
black paintings and white paintings, and for whom, according to James
Fenton, 'The point was not the paint itself but what happened in the
looking at it. "A canvas is never empty," Rauschenberg later wrote.'[xciii]
Robert Storr took pains to show the falsity of supposed influences on Ryman
of Kasimir Malevich's White on white of 1918, of Rauschenberg's monochrome
paintings of 1951–52, and of Jasper Johns's brushstrokes; and whereas Ad
Reinhardt negatively subtracted all vestiges of representation etc from his
painting, Ryman positively sought the point at which he had enough to work
with. '[I]t is obvious,' Storr added, 'how gross formal comparisons between
works can lead to false explanations of their genesis and meaning.'[xciv]
Ryman, unlike most other artists, valued seeing what is physically there
and then letting the experience of seeing the painting work on one's
feelings (as opposed to using historical, theoretical or philosophical
references to find any hidden content: compare Roger Scruton, 'There is no
greater error in the study of human things than to believe that the search
for what is essential must lead us to what is hidden'[xcv]).
The history of monochromes began with Malevich's quite small black
painting, made about 1913 and exhibited in 1915; he made others in the
1920s; there was also the red one of 1917 and the white one of 1918, all
Non-Objective paintings that symbolised the pure reality of space and
energy in the spiritual cosmos. Then there were Reinhardt's and
Rauschenberg's in the 1950s, and from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s Yve
Klein's bright and sensuous paintings in the patented International Klein
Blue, put on with a roller, with the corners of the canvases slightly
rounded, and symbolic for Klein of the Void. Ryman began in the late 1950s,
and it was not until the mid-1960s that Mark Rothko made his first true
monochromes, which were for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. In the 1990s
there was a revival of interest of an appropriative or a revisiting kind to
test art and art theory, with A.D.S. Donaldson, for instance, making
allover purple paintings and prints.[xcvi]
Whether or not Ryman would claim that the elimination of all meaning is
possible, he certainly claimed that a painting of his is just a physical
and material object, as real as the wall it hangs on, related to nothing
outside itself – except the wall; for since, like other ordinary real
objects, it has no frame, 'there is an interaction between the painting and
the wall plane, and even to a certain extent with the room itself.'[xcvii]
In some respects he presents painting as collage, in the sense that in
front of this work we are able to intuit the essence of painting because it
has been detached from its normal use, in much the same way as Edmund
Husserl and other phenomenologists would have us achieve an epoché or
engagement with phenomena in themselves.
Although Thomas McEvilley found precursors and counterparts for this
position in Piet Mondrian, who wanted his work to be 'free of the tragic,'
in Piero Manzoni, who wrote in 1960 in terms almost identical to Ryman's,
and in the European 'analytic painters' of the 1970s, he argued – in spite
of Ryman's not thinking of his work as sculpture at all – for viewing
Ryman's paintings as sculptural.[xcviii]
In any case, Ryman's attempt to get rid of the picture would have embraced
pictures in sculptures as well as in paintings. Whether or not he succeeded
must be left in the hands of viewers, many of whom, from my experience,
find mystical truths conveyed through his surfaces; McEvilley thought that
'absence was already a kind of narrative.'[xcix] This raises the
interesting possibility, not just that any work of art can mean different
things to different people, but that two physically identical works of art
can mean quite different things even to the same person.
-----------------------
NOTES
[i] Reproduced in Michael Lloyd & Michael Desmond, European and American
Paintings and Sculptures 1870–1970 in the Australian National Gallery,
Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1992, pp.194–95.
[ii] 'Philip Guston's Object: A Dialogue with Harold Rosenberg,' in Philip
Guston: Recent Paintings and Drawings, catalogue, New York Jewish Museum,
New York, 1966, no page numbers; cited in Robert Storr, Philip Guston, New
York: Abbeville Press, 1986, p.64.
[iii] George Sand, Lettres d'un Voyageur, Penguin Classics, 1987 (first
pub. 1837), p.65.
[iv] Mikel Dufrenne, In the Presence of the Sensuous: Essays in Aesthetics,
ed. and trans. by Mark S. Roberts & Dennis Gallagher, New Jersey:
Humanities International Press, 1987, p.70.
[v] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2nd
edition, 1980, p.23.
[vi] Jean Baudrillard, The Art of Disappearance, for an exhibition of his
photographs curated by the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1994.
[vii] Clement Greenberg, 'Towards a Newer Laocoön,' Partisan Review, July-
August 1940, reprinted in John O'Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols, Chicago & London: University of
Chicago Press, 1986/1993, vol. 1, pp.23–38: this quote from p.23.
[viii] Max Weber, cited in Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of
Henri Matisse, Volume One: 1869–1908, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1998, p.409.
[ix] Henry James, 'Les Maîtres d'Autrefois,' 1876, in his The Painter's
Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, John L. Sweeney, ed., London:
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956, pp.116–21, this quote from p.118.
[x] Roger Kimball, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness
Sabotages Art, San Francisco: Endeavour Books, 2004, p.161.
[xi] Paul Valéry, 'About Corot,' 1932.
[xii] Susan Sontag, 'About Hodgkin,' pp.151–60 in her Where the Stress
Falls: Essays, London: Jonathan Cape, 2001 (first pub. in Howard Hodgkin
Paintings, exhibition catalogue, London: Thames & Hudson, 1995): see p.152.
[xiii] Rosalind Krauss, 'Grids,' October, no. 9, Summer 1979, pp.51–64;
reprinted in Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and
Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985, pp.8–22: this
quote from p.9.
[xiv] John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, London: Abacus, 1999,
p.133.
[xv] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver, London:
Vintage, 1997 (first pub. in Italian 1972), p.38.
[xvi] Susan Tomes, Out of Silence: A Pianist's Yearbook, Woodbridge,
Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2010, pp.115–16.
[xvii] Paul Valéry, Aesthetics, translated by Ralph Manheim, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964, volume 13 of The Collected Works of Paul
Valéry edited by Jackson Mathews, p.141.
[xviii] Valéry, 1964, p.170.
[xix] Donald Friend, 26 March 1944, in Paul Hetherington, ed., The Diaries
of Donald Friend, Volume 2, Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2003,
p.48; cf. 13 May 1945, p.241.
[xx] Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music,
Art, and Representation, trans. by Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang,
1985, pp.21–40: see p.28; cf. Roland Barthes, 'Rhetoric of the Image,'
1964, in his Image-Music-Text, trans. by Stephen Heath, New York: Hill &
Wang, 1977, pp.32–51: see pp.38–39.
[xxi] Tony Bennett & John Frow, Art Galleries: Who Goes?, Sydney: Australia
Council, 1991, Table 14.
[xxii] Scott Cook, The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: a study and complete
translation, 2 volumes, Ithaca: East Asia Program, Cornell University,
2012, vol. 1, p.269.
[xxiii] Donald Horne, The Intelligent Tourist, Sydney: Margaret Gee, 1992,
p.6.
[xxiv] Horne, 1992, pp.37, 39, 142.
[xxv] Bernard Berenson, Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947–1958,
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964, p.325.
[xxvi] Italo Calvino, Under the Jaguar Sun, translated by William Weaver,
London: Jonathan Cape, 1992 (first pub. in Italian 1986), p.41.
[xxvii] Quoted in Mary Cadogan, The Woman Behind William: A Life of Richmal
Crompton, London: Macmillan, 1993, p.111; there are at least four villages
or towns called San Martino in Italy, apart from all the churches of San
Martino: since Crompton admired a painting by Veronese in the church,
perhaps it was the village of San Martino eight kilometres east of Verona.
[xxviii] Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott
Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984, vol. 2,
p.1027.
[xxix] Spurling, 1998, pp.393–94.
[xxx] Henri Matisse, quoted in Wendy Beckett, Sister Wendy's Grand Tour:
Discovering Europe's Great Art, London: BBC Books, 1994, p.10.
[xxxi] Robert Hughes, 'What's a Museum For?' Canberra: National Gallery of
Australia lecture, 25 October 1992, pp.1–28: see pp.16, 20. Later he
expanded: 'There is no point in pretending otherwise: when we go to see
works of art, we want to be alone with them…One of the reasons Ludwig of
Bavaria was called the "mad" king was that he built a private opera house
and commissioned works from Richard Wagner for an audience of one: himself.
Privately, I doubt that would stand as proof of insanity, but if we are
honest with ourselves we are all Ludwigs when it comes to the visual arts'
(Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir, New York: Knopf, 2006,
p.397).
[xxxii] Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, New York:
Vintage, 1995.
[xxxiii] Bennett & Frow, 1991, Table 14.
[xxxiv] Franz Hessel, Ein Flaneur in Berlin, Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1984
(first pub. as Spazieren in Berlin, 1929), pp.74, 63, cited in Anke Gleber,
The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999 pp.71–72.
[xxxv] Hessel, 1984 (1929), p.23, cited in Gleber, 1999, p.83.
[xxxvi] Fairfield Porter, Art in its Own Terms: Selected Criticism
1935–1975, ed. Rackstraw Downes, New York: Taplinger, 1979, pp.146, 144.
[xxxvii] Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, London: Hamish Hamilton,
1984 (first pub. 1948), p.59.
[xxxviii] Quoted in James King, The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read,
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990, p.121.
[xxxix] Oscar Wilde, quoted in Rachel Barnes, Degas by Degas, London:
Bracken Books, 1992, p.9.
[xl] James, 1956 (1876), pp.117–18.
[xli] Walt Whitman, 'After Trying a Certain Book,' from Specimen Days.
[xlii] Daniel Barenboim & Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes:
Explorations in Music and Society, New York: Pantheon Books, 2002,
pp.122–23.
[xliii] John Keats, letter to his brothers George and Thomas, 22 December
1817, cited in Margaret Drabble, ed., The Oxford Companion to English
Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 5th edn, 1985, p.689.
[xliv] John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, cited in
Drabble, 1985, p.689.
[xlv] Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997, p.165.
[xlvi] Friedrich Teja Bach, 'Brancusi: The Reality of Sculpture,' in
Friedrich Teja Bach, Margit Rowell, Ann Temkin, Constantin Brancusi
1876–1957, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995, pp.22–37: see
p.23.
[xlvii] Margit Rowell, 'Brancusi: Timelessness in a Modern Mode,' in Bach,
Rowell & Temkin, 1995, pp.38–49: see p.41.
[xlviii] Jeffrey Meyers, Modigliani: A Life, Orlando, Florida: Harcourt,
2006, p.71.
[xlix] Quoted in Michael Frayn, Headlong, London: Faber & Faber, 1999,
p.121.
[l] See Athena T. Spear, Brancusi's Birds, New York: New York University
Press, 1969, pp.3–4; reprinted in Edith Balas, Brancusi and Rumanian Folk
Traditions, Boulder: East European Monographs, distributed by Colombia
University Press, New York, 1987, p.50.
[li] See illustrations in Balas, 1987, nos 57–60.
[lii] Rowell, 1995, p.48.
[liii] Anna C. Chave, Constantin Brancusi: The Shifting the Bases of Art,
New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993, p.222.
[liv] Chave, 1993, pp.262–63.
[lv] Lloyd & Desmond, 1992, p.201.
[lvi] Spear, 1969; Ann Temkin in Bach, Rowell & Temkin, 1995, p.110.
[lvii] Sidney Geist, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture, London: Studio
Vista, 1968, p.115; cf. Lloyd & Desmond, 1992, pp.197, 200.
[lviii] Jack Burnham, 'Sculpture's Vanishing Base,' chapter 1 of his Beyond
Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of
this Century, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1968, pp.19–48: on
Brancusi's bases see pp.30–34.
[lix] Robert Morris, Slab (platform), 1973, reconstruction of original made
in 1962, painted aluminium, 30 x 243.8 x 243.8, National Gallery of
Australia, Canberra, purchased 1980; see Lloyd & Desmond, 1992, pp.319–20.
[lx] Robert Morris, Slab (cloud), 1973, reconstruction of original made in
1962, painted aluminium, 30 x 243.8 x 243.8, National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra, purchased 1980; see Lloyd & Desmond, 1992, pp.319–20.
[lxi] W.J.T. Mitchell, 'Word, Image, and Object: Wall Labels for Robert
Morris,' chapter 8 in his Picture Theory, Chicago & London: Chicago
University Press, 1994, pp.241–79: this quote from p.262. Mitchell deals
with relations between Morris's art and Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy.
[lxii] Mary Eagle, 'Sightings,' in Sue-Anne Wallace, Jacqueline Macnaughtan
& Jodi Parvey, eds, The Articulate Surface, Canberra: Australian National
University & National Gallery of Australia, 1996, pp.31–37: see pp.32–33,
37; first published in Art Monthly, no. 52, August 1992, pp.7–9.
[lxiii] Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3: 2.
[lxiv] Ian Burn, Blue premiss, no. 2, 1965–67, remade 1992, synthetic
polymer paint on canvas, 243 x 161.6, and photographic enlargement of
typewritten diagram, 44.4 x 44.3, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra,
purchased 1992; reproduction in Ian Burn: Minimal-Conceptual Work
1965–1970, Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1992, p.68.
[lxv] Michiel Dolk, 'It's only art conceptually: A consideration of the
work of Ian Burn 1965–1970,' in Ian Burn, 1992, pp.17–44: this quote from
p.30.
[lxvi] Ian Burn, 1992, p.59.
[lxvii] Ian Burn, 1992, p.67.
[lxviii] Dolk, 1992, p.18.
[lxix] Dolk, 1992, p.31.
[lxx] Ian Burn, Dialogue: Writings in Art History, Sydney: Allen & Unwin,
1991, pp.120–24.
[lxxi] Stéphane Mallarmé, quoted in Christopher Benfey, 'The Art of
Consolation,' New York Review of Books, 52: 7, 28 April 2005, pp.38–40: see
p.38; the occasion was a dinner at Berthe Morisot's.
[lxxii] Ann Stephen, ed., Artists Think: The Late Works of Ian Burn,
Sydney: Power Publications, 1996, p.13.
[lxxiii] Ian Burn, 'Notes on "value added" landscapes,' in Stephen, 1996,
pp.8–9.
[lxxiv] Henri Matisse, Oceania, the sky, 1946, screenprint on linen, 165 x
380, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1990; reproduced in
Lloyd & Desmond, 1992, p.167.
[lxxv] Ad Reinhardt, Painting 1954–1958, 1954–58, oil on canvas, 198.4 x
198.4, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1975; see Lloyd &
Desmond, 1992, pp.274–76.
[lxxvi] It is not certain that repairs to the Brancusi could not be carried
out so as to be undetectable to ordinary vision; it is just that if it were
possible, it is strange that it has not been done, as it was, for instance
with the Ambum Stone, after it was broken in half while on loan to
Marseilles in 2000 because it was unaccompanied by a curator.
[lxxvii] Lloyd & Desmond, 1992, pp.199, 201.
[lxxviii] Barbara Rose, ed., Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad
Reinhardt, New York: Viking Press, 1975, p.13.
[lxxix] Lucy Lippard, 'Ad Reinhardt: Black Painting,' The Collection of the
Australian National Gallery, Art and Australia, 14: 3 & 4, 1977, pp.286–88:
this quote from p.288.
[lxxx] Rose, 1975, pp.148, 187, 223 etc.
[lxxxi] Rose, 1975, pp.205–06.
[lxxxii] Rose, 1975, pp.xi–xii, 151, 159.
[lxxxiii] Robert Ryman, Arena, 1977, synthetic polymer paint and enamel on
linen on board, 213.5 x 212.3 x 3.8, National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra, purchased 1978.
[lxxxiv] Cited in Thomas McEvilley, 'Absence Made Visible,' Artforum,
Summer 1992, pp.92–96: this quote from p.92.
[lxxxv] Cited in McEvilley, 1992, p.93.
[lxxxvi] Naomi Spector, 'Robert Ryman at the Whitechapel,' Robert Ryman,
catalogue, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1977, pp.9–15: this quote from
p.12.
[lxxxvii] 'Philip Guston Talking,' in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969–1980,
catalogue, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1982, pp.49–56: this quote from
p.49.
[lxxxviii] Philip Leider, 'Literalism and Abstraction: Frank Stella's
Retrospective at the Modern,' Artforum 8, no. 8, April 1970, pp.44–51,
reprinted in Frances Colpitt, ed., Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth
Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.11–24: this quote
from pp.14–15.
[lxxxix] Leider, 2002, p.19; cf. Frances Colpitt, 'Systems of Opinion:
Abstract Painting Since 1959,' in Colpitt, 2002, pp.151–203: see p.171.
[xc] Cited in Robert Storr, Robert Ryman, London: Tate Gallery, 1993, p.12.
[xci] Dan Flavin, '"…in daylight or cool white." an autobiographical
sketch,' Artforum, 4: 4, December 1965, pp.20–24: see p.22.
[xcii] Ryman in Nancy Grimes, 'White Magic,' ARTnews, 85: 6, Summer 1986,
pp.86–92: this quote from p.90.
[xciii] James Fenton, 'Rauschenberg: The Voracious Ego,' originally in New
York Review of Books, reprinted in James Fenton, Leonardo's Nephew: Essays
on Art and Artists, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp.216–26:
see p.221.
[xciv] Storr, 1993, p.38.
[xcv] Roger Scruton, 'The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in
an Age of Nihilism,' New York: St Martin's Press, 1994, p.41.
[xcvi] A.D.S. Donaldson, The singer, 1996, synthetic polymer paint on
canvas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, acquired 1996; Courts and
jesters, 1992, screenprint, each of seven entitled The purples, plus one
title page, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, acquired 1993; two of
The purples are reproduced in Janie Gillespie, 'Courts and Jesters,'
artonview, no. 5, Autumn 1996, pp.42–43; on the history of paintings about
nothing see Michael Collings, BZ\²´º¼Øêî
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