real things as painting. That is to say i find it more interesting to use a real fork as painting than it is to use painting as a real fork.
My work feeds upon itself.
Most of my thoughts involve impurities …
A Dead Man.
Take a skull.
Cover it with paint. Rub it
against canvas. Skull against
canvas.
Shake (shift) parts of some of the letters in voice (2). A not complete unit or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together. One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of thought. It is not thought which needs showing.
After the first Voice, I suppose there was something left over, some kind of anxiety, some question about the use of the word in the first painting. Perhaps its smallness in relation to the size of the painting led me to use the word in another way, to make it big, to distort it, bend it about a bit, split it up.
In my early work, I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly due to my feelings about myself and partly due to my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve. I think some of the changes in my work relate to that.
Try to use together
the wall
the layers
the imprint.
The question of what is a part and what is a whole is a very interesting problem, on the infantile level, yes, on the psychological level, but also in ordinary, objective space.
Entities/splitting.
An object that tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include them? Deluge.
I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can’t avoid saying.
Yes, but it’s skin.
I think it is a form of play or a form of exercise and it’s in part mental and in part visual but that’s one of the things we like about the visual arts the terms in which we’re accustomed to thinking are adulterated or abused.
NOTES
John Cage’s “Anarchy” (quoted in chapter epigraph) is printed in John Cage at Seventy-Five, ed. Richard Fleming and William Duckworth (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989), p. 122.
The MESOLIST program, used in all of Cage’s mesostics that employ chance operations, was developed by Jim Rosenberg. In his introduction to I–IV Cage credits Norman O. Brown with having come up with the term “mesostics” for the way Cage was writing these acrostic-like compositions with the key letters running down the middle of the text. Early on, Cage wrote his mesostic compositions directly, without the use of MESOLIST, with the capitalized meso-letters serving to gather associations to what were often strings of proper names. Later, as in “Art Is Either …,” he also began to use the more complicated chance operations described in the conversation that follows, where both meso-letters and source text serve as oracles when utilized with the assistance of the MESOLIST and IC computer programs. The IC program was written by Andrew Culver, the composer who worked for eleven years as Cage’s assistant. It simulates the coin
