I, late this spring—maybe April—I saw a factory in Schaffhausen near Zürich where the top floor was full of a retrospective show of Robert Ryman’s work. It’s all white. His exploration of white has continued over his entire life and of course is very extensive. He puts white on a variety of different materials. So he’s had an experimental relation to white in the world of painting that exceeds that of Tobey who earlier did it, you see, but didn’t do it, so to speak, faithfully. He didn’t do only that. He did more, different kinds of things. So we were wondering, had Tobey not been so Picassoid (laughter), would he have been a better artist? Sounds silly, a proposition like that. If he hadn’t been who he was, would it have been better for us in terms of white painting? A perfectly silly thing, but as we were thinking along those stupid lines we realized that the idea came to him, so to speak, in the same way that it came to Robert Ryman—out of the air, hmm? He did—because of the time, perhaps, that it came to him, in relation to all the other things that came to him—he did it as … he did what he did. And we’re grateful. It’s a question then of forgoing the thought that it would have been better for us had he done more than he did.
JR: So, interestingly, that came to your mind after my talking about the mind as a strange attractor … and weather systems …
JC: And I really couldn’t tell whether the strange attractor was subjective or was “in the air.” And I don’t know whether you mean it to be one place or the other.
JR: Well that’s an interesting question.
JC: Yes, we don’t really know where it is, do we? Because the mind in Buddhist terms is part of the air, so to speak. Which is Mind with a big M, hmm? So the little—this mind and that mind—are Mind, and there’s a communion, hmm? In other words, there can be a flow. In fact there must be one, otherwise we can’t explain the fact that several people invent the same thing at the same time independently—or that these two artists deal with white—satisfactorily—over a shorter or a longer period of time, earlier or later.
JR: So in a way that would be like those two minds having similar local weather within a larger pattern. That’s interesting, because I was—I think you picked up on it—I was thinking more in terms of the mind creating the weather patterns rather than being subject to them.
JC: It could go in one direction or the other.
JR: In this respect I’m thinking about Jackson Mac Low, and connections between your work, along with the earlier question of time. Jackson talks about five temporal arts—music, dance, poetry, film, and video.
JC: That’s very good.
JR: That interested me because, though I think of poetry as involving time more than any other form of writing, I have been approaching it lately graphically too—as a spatial art.
JC: With Apollinaire it could go in the other direction. It can be in both. But this is close to Indian thinking. I forget what they call it, but there’s a term for the temporal arts. Of course they weren’t thinking about video. But they certainly thought of music and dancing—those are the two that make it real, don’t you think? And poetry.
JR: Yes, and this complex realism seems so far from the contemporary fascination with various forms of irony. (pause) Has irony as a vehicle of change, in the Kierkegaardian sense—as a mode that can move us from aesthetic to ethical to religious perspectives—has that played any part in your thinking or your work? (Pause.)
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
