Open Work

Impressionism: a blurring of contours, a vibrancy and dissolution of form, a greater inter-connectedness of forms, a reaching out. But, eventually, just as an image in the water is reconstituted once the ripples have subsided , so each form becomes distinct , isolated.

Sculpture: Lippold: a continuous metamorphosis with no apprehension of totality or a unified image, but broken-up, mutually exclusive perspectives.

Ezra Pound: 'Brancusi had set out on the maddeningly difficult exploration to get all the forms into one form-this is as long as any Buddhist's contemplation of the universe. ...Or putting it another way, every one of the thousand angles of approach to a statue ought to be interesting, it ought to have a life (Brancusi might permit me to say 'divine life') of its own.

G. Mathieu, D'Aristotle a l'abstraction lyrique: 'The move from ideal to real to the abstract to the possible mirrors the changes in our perspective of the world, in our scientific concepts.'

Cubism: A rejection of the classical world (see Robert Hughes as well, Shock of the New) , of Euclidean geometries, Cartesian rationalism. Discontinuity and the lack of a coherent image of the universe, the shattering and disappearance of the familiar..vitality over form, life over thought, the biological over the mathematical. Can this be a Zen-like experience , pure consciousness without subject or object or must it necessarily be a re-presentation? Can we (the west) abandon itself to contemplating drifting clouds , the shimmer of water, sunlight on a dew drop? Do we seek a pattern, an order of the soul and the world? We take a step outside of ourselves to do so. Half of us wants to reduce everything to the mind, half of us wants to escape...

An open work is still a work, on pains of a dissolution into complete and utter randomness, a splintering of our vision , an incommunicable and unintelligible truth. Language buckles under the pressure...

---after Umberto Eco