George Steiner offers an insight into His uncertainties regarding his ‘Art’. ‘It’ pokes away at suspected distinctions between invention and creation. Writing of an occasion when Duchamp challenges Brancusi (in the Aeronautics Salon at the Grand Palais in Paris, 1912) with “…’Painting is finished. Who could do better than that propeller?’ Art can no longer rival, let alone excel the techne of the engineer. Invention is identified as the primary mode of creation in the modern world.” he continues, ‘It follows that art is becoming amateurish indulgence…..’ (Steiner Grammars of Creation p274.) The uncertainties that continue to surround painting imply a misconception of the nature of the activity of making art in the minds of those (of some of us) who ‘paint’. Painters today are reinventing, sometimes joyously, knowingly, provocatively. He found this. Maynard Keynes suggested that ‘If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.’
(http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economic…)
Mining the past or living in it defines the extremes for the painter. Without wishing to sound too grand, if there is something profoundly pointless about the making of things like this, there seems paradoxically to be some value in it. But if it is simply pointless, then it is trivial. If they are to mean anything, that initial meaning must be His; the first shock must be in the maker. He has been stroking the paper with his hb pencil for some time, looking, reacting, smoothing, softening. Without the bird, what would these acts be? The bird at least offers a reference to the world outside. Or a distraction disguising the possibly true purpose of he work. The lower part of the drawing, shaded on its outside, looks whiter than it should. He loves way that this happens. It’s always a childlike pleasure no matter how many times He repeats it. He tells ‘It’ that this is an image of tensions, visual and felt. The horizontal lines, placed last, seemed to rescue it from aimlessness. (‘It’ interjects with a suggestion about the true extent of the work’s ‘aimlessness’.) Spaces and artspeak hold hands?
