Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest

1974

1974 15 January How many bathers have been painted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how little do they resemble what is seen on the beaches! In a Dutch painting of a tavern , people clearly behave the way they did at the time, and even Degas's laundresses still labor and yawn like laundresses. But when Malevich paints two floor polishers , he is obviously concerned with the grotesque pantomime of the two figures pushing their pads with their naked feet—and thisjust a few years before the Russian Revolution. 18 January The exercises of "conceptual" artists resemble the thought experiments of scientists. But why, to meditate on the circular path pursued by a point on Earth during the twenty-four hours of the day, does the artist need to mark the spot with a ballpoint pen on a wall at an actual street corner in Los Angeles? Is it because having abandoned the tangible objects of the studio, even the conceptual artist needs something to hold on to, something geographic , to be touched with eyes and hands? 179 20 January I was interested, seeing a middle-aged man with respectable hat and umbrella stand near the curb of Forty-second Street in New York and urinate openly on the sidewalk. Although he looked quite real physically, the improbability of his behavior sufficed to transform him into one of those debonair bonshommes that populate Surrealist dreamscapes . 28 January In dreams we know who a person is with whom we are dealing even though he or she may not resemble that person in the least. It is the only case of pure connotation I can think of. 13 February Pictures in a picture—it is like someone speaking French in a French novel taking place among the natives of Italy or Sweden. 15 March Since a young woman was murdered in the park I liked so much, I no longer walk through it. I have made it into a monument that I observe by avoiding. Lucus a non lucendo . 30 March Even though the proverbial savage has to learn how to "read" photographs, this does not make the viewing of pictures entirely a matter of convention and inculcation. What must be acquired is the perceptual attitude deriving from the knowledge that the texture of a surface can be a picture, and a three-dimensional one at that. 180 PARABLES OF SUN LIGHT 9 April On the north portal of Chartres a sculptor shows God creating the birds and seeing Adam in his mind. Adam stands next to and slightly behind his Creator and is as physically present as the man in whose mind he dwells as a mere image. Seven hundred years later in novels and films of our time, we also see reminiscences, fears, and fantasies presented with the same concreteness as the scenes taking place in actuality. There is, however, a difference in principle between the early and the late conception . The Romanesque artist has not yet worked out a means of distinguishing between mental image and actual perception, perhaps in part because of the powerful reality granted to visions by priests, soothsayers, and dreamers . The modern artist, on the other hand, abandons all the tricks by which he could make the distinction visible because he no longer wishes to attribute greater concreteness to the physical world than to the mental. 27 May Carol, the good teacher, was told by three of her high school girls that they wanted to put on a performance of the Judgment of Paris. This was approved, but soon the girls came back to report that they could not agree on who should play Aphrodite. Carol refused to arbitrate. "After all, if Zeus was unwilling to passjudgment, who am I . . . ?" (And by the way, if Paris had given the golden apple to Athena, Greece would have been destroyed by the Trojans and the history of the West would have been unrecognizably different.) 6 June A teacher's self-esteem is most wholesomely tempered when he discovers what kind of persons his students admire besides him. 181 1974 29June One has to get used to architectural plans being readable from all sides, just as buildings can be approached from any direction. A painter's sketch must be viewed right side up because it is the preliminary embodiment of a work that takes its final form as a picture. The architect's picture has...