Pictures
for the People: Visual Multiples and their Role as Supporting Tools for the
Democratic Process
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I
am sure that everyone here realizes by now that I am the ringer. Usually
the ringer is a hidden expert, such as a well trained soprano, who sneaks
into a school chorus and sings like an angel, and I am certainly not
that, but instead I am here to hold down the end of this lecture series,
and attempt to leave you with the pleasurable experience of looking
at pictures, as some sort of antidote to all the spoken words that this
class has depended upon. I have ended up here today because of a deep
failing on my part, which manifests itself with my inability to keep
my mouth shut. At a pleasant lunch one day last year at the President’s
office Rick Levin and Tony Kronman, two of the lecturers in this series,
were outlining their proposed DeVane lecture series to accompany the
University’s Tercentennial celebration. They rolled off all the names
of the distinguished Yale faculty members who would speak, and when
they finished I couldn’t help pointing out that there wasn’t an artist
among them, except for the presence of David Gelertner, and even he,
I worried, would speak about the computer and democracy instead of art
and democracy. My comment resulted, of course, in Tony and Rick calling
me up a day or two later with an invitation to join the series. |
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In
most places it wouldn’t be surprising to find art left out of an academic
discourse. Whenever curriculums are planned, and courses of study are
laid out, visual art and its audio sibling music always hover at the
fringes, ready to be cut or eliminated if the budget becomes tight.
At Yale, however, this should never be the case, because in this institution
we all believe that the pursuit and study of art are central to our
examination of the world; art doesn’t hover at the fringes here, but
instead shines brightly at the center of all our activities. Pictures,
of course, have vital importance in the realm of art. This lecture series
is about democracy, and the challenge for me is to attempt to describe
the role of pictures in relation to this social construct. I have chosen
pictures as the central subject because I have spent all my working
days with them- making them, fixing them, wrecking them and reproducing
them, and now I had been called upon to back up my love of these visual
objects by making a compelling case for their importance in our society. Pictures
are everywhere. They turn up in every nook and cranny of our culture,
and accompany us in most of our daily chores. We start the day with
the changeable picture of the bedside clock 1, heave ourselves out of bed to lurch over to the living
picture of our selves in the bathroom mirror 2, and then, after the daily ritual of arranging and dressing
ourselves for the coming day, we as often as not settle down to the
morning paper, which, through its printed visual imagery, fills us in
on the state of the world 3. |
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It
is challenging to examine pictures and their relationship to democracy,
because we immediately bump up against the fact that these visual tools
are so widespread in our society that their role is far more basic than
that of simply supporting any particular social structure. If our culture
is thought of as a house, then we first might think of pictures as the
windows 4,
through which we are able to view the world in which the house has been
built, but after only a moment or two with this metaphor, we must decide
that the picture acts not just as the window through which we see, but
also 5
as the stone, mortar, wood and nails which frame and define the view.
Pictures provide a look at something, but they also act as the linking
elements between ourselves and our constructions. |
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Let’s take the New York Times as an example of this 6. This familiar newspaper, which guides me through each morning’s waking ritual, conveys its content through the mechanism of printing ink on white paper. The daily rag carries two different types of pictures; the first kind are the photographs 7, drawings 8 and diagrams 9 which give us traditional pictorial views of the outside world or of ideas we have about it, while the second type are the headlines and columns of letters, numbers and words that we read each morning10. Every printed word is an assemblage of the tiny symbolic pictures that we, as a society, have agreed to use in the empowering structure of written language. |
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I
claim these letters as pictures, and I expect that some of you will
object, and think me overstepping the bounds of good behavior by doing
this. However, if they are not pictures then what are they? They are
supremely versatile visual tools, the holders of wide-ranging symbolic
meaning, and they literally hold our societies– democratic and otherwise
–together. The cultural house with picture windows is framed and shaped
with these other kinds of pictures– the small and numerous letters and
numbers that form the visual language with which we communicate. If
they all disappeared in a flash we would instantly be returned to the
very origins of human development. |
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The
difficulty with showing you this set of pictures, however, is that they
really don’t tell us anything about democracy, or the role these images
might have played in its existence. The subjects portrayed are obviously
about democracy– what could be more central to ours than the signing
of the Declaration of Independence, or the picture of Abraham Lincoln
on the five dollar bill? But this obvious connection is simply not enough;
if we are to learn anything here today, then we need to dig deeper,
and find out just what these visual objects are and how they work. I
am certainly not qualified to explain how democracy works, but I do
feel confident that there are things about pictures that you don’t know,
and if I can explain these then perhaps the role of pictures in our
society can be made clearer. If we go to the dictionary for a definition of the word “picture” we find it closely linked to the notion of painting. This distresses the photographers among us, but on closer examination it turns out that the newer the dictionary, the more open minded it’s authors tend to be about what the word “picture” means. An old Webster will say pictures are basically paintings, but a modern update, edited within the last 50 years, will admit photographs into the definition. I don’t like any of these, and so let’s give, right from the start, a new definition: let me propose that pictures are two dimensional visual structures designed and made to alter the viewer. Their role and purpose is to leave the user in a different state than existed before the picture’s impact. The alteration might be one of increased knowledge, or it could be one of feeling, say of pleasure or unease. The key is that we see a picture and are inevitably made a different person as a result of this contact.
Pictures
can represent inaccessible things, such as a far distant rain forest
14, as depicted
in this painting by Martin Johnson Heade, or the invisible colors of
outer space 15,
as we see in this remarkable photograph by David Malin. They can also
stand in for ideas, so we can find powerful symbolic pictures in the
form of numbers, letters and drawings that express mathematical formulas
16 here are three visual
versions of the Pythogorean theorem. Pictures can also be powerful symbols
for social structures, in the form of such diverse designs as the Jewish
Star of David 17,
the Christian cross 18,
or even the noble native American swastica 19,
so cruelly usurped to become the symbol of Nazi madness in the last
World War 20.
The sign itself is innocent here– the horror comes from our knowledge
of the activities carried out by those it represented. |
By
listing some of these possibilities, I am broaching the notion that
pictures can be of different types. If we study them and attempt to
put them in categories, not of subject matter, but rather of the way
they work visually, then we will probably end up with three different
kinds of pictures. I name these categories the representational, the
symbolic and the decorative. |
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The symbolic pictures are of a different type entirely. A symbolic picture works because it has a recognizable form, though not one that necessarily attempts to represent something, and the users of the symbol have agreed that this form can be a surrogate for a more complex object, or idea. Some symbols, such as the cross, have a representational root, while others, such as lettering, are completely arbitrary in their design, restrained only by the agreement about their appearance held by the parties using the symbols. These
three aspects of pictures- the representational, symbolic and decorative-
are almost always present in varying degrees in any given picture, and
few pictures are ever totally of
one sort or another. Let’s look at examples of these three kinds of
pictures. 22
This is Velazquez’ portrait of Juan De Pareja, painted in 1649 and this
23 is
Yosuf Karsh’s photograph of Winston Churchill, made nearly 300 years
later 24.
The Velazquez portrait represents not just the sitter, but also, for
our purposes, an already ancient system of formal, representational,
portraiture. The Karsh photograph, disdained by the avant-garde photographers
of its time, is an obvious continuation of this earlier portrait tradition.
The Velazquez is a great work of art, but the Karsh is not. While Velazquez
was describing his subject in the context of a highly developed and
living system of representation in paint, Karsh instead took the old
visual structure of traditional painted portraits and applied it to
the medium of photography. |
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25
This picture, by the photographer Paul Caponigro, of symbolic
carvings on an ancient Irish tomb, is of a completely different type.
We can imagine that we see flowers, stars, and perhaps a zig-zaging
river here, but the marks on this stone have clearly left the realm
of pure representation and become strongly symbolic. Some symbols, such
as these, appear to have been spontaneously created, while others have
obviously derived from representational images. |
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In Egypt, and elsewhere in the ancient world, representational pictures 26 gradually turned into written language 27, and these early hieroglyphics, arranged in vertical columns to denote the order in which they should be read, bring home to us how logical it is that letters and numbers be accepted as intricately linked symbolic pictures. 28 Handwriting spread culture world-wide, and out of the manuscript tradition came the printing press, and the invention of moveable type 29 The clear and flawlessly repetitive impressions from this type 30 meant the work of scribes would no longer make the majority of books. |
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31
This beautiful old sheet of paper demonstrates a set of alphabets
and letter designs that appear at first glance to be made by type. The
sheet is, in fact, hand made, a specimen sheet of the hand lettering
styles mastered by John Clarke. He advertises his ability to produce
lettering to accompany pictures engraved on copper, and, ironically,
here is the ever adaptable hand immitating the very type that drove
generations of scribes out of business. This is a great example of the
complex and puzzling divisions that often occur between old and new
technologies. |
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Decorative pictures are the third type 32 and these don’t attempt to represent something, or even to symbolize something, in the manner of the printed word. Instead decorative pictures impact the viewer directly, without the need for translation within the mind. Decorative pictures are perhaps the most ancient of all, and it is quite reasonable to assume that body decoration has always been a cultural accessory, probably antedating all other forms of picture making.33 The tiles of this mosaic from Seville certainly have symbolic meaning, but they function even more strongly as purely decorative visual devices. The walls, floors and ceilings of our buildings all tend to be covered with decoration of one sort or another, and we are here today in a room that represents an extreme case of this– the walls of Battell Chapel are obsessively covered with marks of a purely decorative nature. |
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It
is obvious that, if we can accept my broad definition of pictures, and
embrace decorative designs and symbols as well as more traditionally
representative pictures into the definition, then we will find pictures
everywhere, permeating every level of our lives and our society. Without
the pictures society would grind to an immediate halt– not just the
democratic institutions but every other organized group of human beings
would simply dissolve, and the people would be left in a state of chaos. |
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When printing came along an entire different world of multiples came into power; many copies could be easily made, and so the multiple versions in the mind’s eyes were generated in a new way. A book might be printed in a thousand copies, and these copies each had their effect on one or more readers. The multiplicity acheived by many users was boosted by the availability of multiple copies which each could do this job. |
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The
two ideas I have so far touched upon are, first, the notion that there
are different sorts of pictures, and second, that these pictures gain
much of their power through affecting multiple users. The third idea
is not so much about the pictures as about how they have been made.
40 Virtually all the pictures
used throughout history had been generated by the human hand. This is
a portrait by Chuck Close, and a close look at Close
41 shows us that
it is actaully done by fingerpainting- not even a tool as unobtrusive
as a paint brush has been allowed to intrude between artist and picture.
Within the last few hundred years, however, all this has changed, and
technological processes are now usurping the role of the hand in picture
making. Since the invention of photography, and the development of immensely
powerful electronic descriptive tools, the hand has slipped to second
place, and technology itself has taken over the job of generating the
pictures which form the fabric of our society. The photographic lens,
coupled with film or electronic sensor, generates data from the light
in the world, and the pictures so made, whether still photographs in
the morning paper, or rapidly displayed images on the television screen,
carry meaning and connectedness to the viewers. Astonishing descriptions
of the world come to us through such technological means, and these
pictures flow from the world to us with less and less human intervention. |
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42
For hundreds of years the hand has manipulated tools to create pictures.
This small cuneiform tablet was made by impressing a triangular ended
tool into the soft clay surface of the tablet. The hand- which holds
the object in this picture- is virtually identical to the one that held
the tool thousands of years ago when the tablet was made. Over time
the tool held by the hand changed, and a mark in clay was supplanted
by a pattern in ink made with a pen 43.
The makers and users of these hand-made objects lived in a highly ordered
society in which maker and user shared a culture that allowed the writing
to be legible. None of us in this room can read the clay tablet 44
(although I better be careful here, because there might be a scholar
among us who can!). We also would probably be stumped by the average
manuscript page from the 14th century, and even this piece of writing
45
, in ordinary modern English, and only a hundred and fifty
years old, is probably unintelligible. This is a letter written when
paper was precious; the handwriting runs one way across the sheet in
the beginning of the letter, and then continue at right angles
46 for
the rest, once the page was full. |
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All
these variants on the hand-made letter developed in stride with the
societies that used them, and for about five thousand years the hand
held a tool which directly made the marks of our words and pictures.
When printing from moveable type was developed, the hand began to recede.
The type became the tool, and the hand no longer shaped the letters,
but instead only arranged them on the page. Once standardized metal
type was invented, it took a few hundred years for automatic type setting
to come along, and then, by the start of the twentieth century, machines
could arrange the type according to instructions from a punched paper
tape or a pressed key on a keyboard. The hand still sat behind the whole
procedure, but it now had slipped even further away from the making
of the image itself. As the hand receded from the making of letters-
our most widespread symbolic pictures- it also was disappearing from
the making of representational pictures. Photography was invented in
the early nineteenth century, and within a hundred years after that
more pictures had been generated by lens, light and chemistry that had
been made in all of human history before. Today
we are witnessing the end stage of this process. In much of our daily
lives the pictures we use derive from neither the hand nor even that
upstart photography– instead they tend to look like these.
47 Yale’s
home page on the web, 48
The New York Times, appearing daily on the web as well as on paper,
49 Google’s
home page, giving us access to billions of web pages
50 and,
of course, our favorite, E-Bay, where much of our disposal income seems
to flow today. |
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I
think we have had enough theory, ideas and suggestions about grand patterns
evolving, and it is time to look at pictures. Hopefully the notions
I have outlined will make the role of these pictures more understandable. While I can be accused of drifting far afield from our nominal subject- democracy- I will be showing
you pictures that have strong connections to the social fabric. Democracy
is but one of many systems that have been made possible through the
universal power of pictures. |
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The
great uproar that resulted in the election is almost comic, however.
George Bush is certainly our President, and he has probably been elected
with a greater regard for the law of the land than has occured in any
other presidential election. Many thousands of votes are routinely eliminated
from the count due to inefficiencies and injustices in the system, and
it takes a knife edge balance between the sides for the tallies to be
examined with the sort of care we saw last year. If we want to really
find injustice at the polls, then we only need go back in time before
the civil rights movement of the sixties, when literally millions of
citizens were purposely left out of the democratic process. We have
come a long way since then, although the job is far from complete. The
task of being the President has now become so complex, and the parties
so similar, that any modern leader can almost be thought of as setting
a particular tone, rather than having to be a commanding figure who
guides the country into new and uncharted territory. We need to go back
to the mid nineteenth century to find a little political picture that
really did change the world, and by good luck there is such a
one 52
of Abraham Lincoln, who has figured so strongly so far in
this lecture series. |
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This is known as the Cooper Union photograph, and it shows the Illinois lawyer as he appeared at at the time of his tremendously effective speech, given on February 27th, 1860 at the Cooper Union in New York City. We can see the handsome young man, complete with Bible under hand and column of state hovering in the background. The difficulty with this picture is that it doesn’t look like Lincoln at all, and it brings home the fact that many of the most influential pictures bear little connection to any sort of “truth”. Lincoln claimed that this photograph, and the speech made on the occasion, were what got him elected. We should take a look at how the picture was made. |
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We can say, with some confidence, that the Cooper Union photograph had an overwhelming effect on the history of our country and its democratic structure 58; can we imagine any electorate voting into office a man who looked like the portrait on the right? Lincoln was once accused by a political adversary of being two-faced, and he answered that if he had two faces why would ever be wearing this one. |
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Pictures
have exerted tremendous influence on politics for thousands of years.
Lincoln, and many other leaders, have appeared on coins and bills throughout
the last century, and these simply continue a tradition as old as democracy
itself. Long before paper currency, coins were integral to economic
and political systems, and these invariably carried pictures of some
sort or another 59.
The low relief image on this coin is no less idealized than the Cooper
Union picture of Lincoln. Produced in huge quantities, coins spread
their tendrils throughout human culture and their power, like that of
stamps and mass produced photographs, derived directly from their numbers.
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This particular coin, however, is many hundreds of years old, and its life as a piece of currency, or even relevant political symbol, is long since ended. It resides today in the Yale Art Gallery, as a cherished part of the collection. This brings up another important aspect of pictures and their relation to society: it is one thing for a picture to exist, and depict something, but it is quite another for this same picture to be influential. Not only does our coin have little, if anything to do with politics today, but this is also true for most things to be found in museums. If
we back up for a moment, and look at the Karsh formal portrait of Churchill,
which can be found today in collections of fine art photography, it
looks like this 60.
This cherished museum print did not, however, work its influence in
that form, but rather as the widely produced cover of Life Magazine,
on May 21, 1945, when it looked like this 61
The original Karsh print is worth thousands of dollars- the copy of
Life Magazine was worth 10 cents when it was new, and can easily be
bought today in a nostalgia shop for about 20 dollars. Museum pictures
retain, of course, tremendous value, but this value comes from their
ability to support the internal cultural development of those who are
educated by them. That’s why Yale expends such effort to gather, preserve
and make accessible these fragments from the past. |
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All
that this goes to prove is that art works its wonders in strange ways.
Pictures affect us with their visual power, and their influence can
be private and personal, and this power can be wielded to a small and
even isolated audience. But pictures can also, through the mechanisms
of technology– such as the Life publishing enterprise– become celebrities,
and then their roles become very different. Then they can influence
masses of people, and change the course of history.
It
seems that with each successive picture I talk too much, and drift off
into theory and explanation. I have attempted, so far, to give some
idea of ways in which pictures can directly influence society, but I
have left out an entire other aspect of these visual tools. They also
record and report events, and they do this through the creation of a
fictional account of the events portrayed. Pictures are not reality–
they only provide us with a diminished surrogate for the ways things
looked at a given time. Despite this, however, they act as powerful
time machines, and bring an illusion of the past to the viewer with
an effectiveness that can be deeply moving. Now is the time to stop
all the babbling and simply look at pictures. The pictures that follow
are mainly photographs, and rather than being direct makers of democratic
structure, they report the goings on in this democracy of ours. By so
doing they guide us in the formidable task of keeping our ideals in
sight and our politics on track |
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63 Here is a Gardner picture of a rebel sharpshooter. It is worth noting that this body turns up in other pictures made by Gardner– he obviously dragged it around to use in different places. We must be careful not to confuse any of these pictures with truth. |
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64 George Barnard photographed the destruction wrought by General William Techumsa Sherman’s march to the sea. This shows the remains of the railroad station at Charlestown, South Carolina. Sherman, like myself, was a Quaker, and Lincoln Kirstein used to say that Quakers always made the best generals because these pacifists were extremely clear about what they were doing |
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65
Timothy O’sullivan’s cart and developing tent in the far west. |
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66 O’Sullivan again, photographing the majestic ruins at Canyon de Chelly. These, and many other early photographs of the wonders of the west led directly to the creation of our National Park System. |
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67 Bear’s Belly, a member of the Arikara tribe in North Dakota territory. He served as a scout in Custer’s army. |
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68 Chief Joseph, of the Nez-Percez, photographed in 1880 while visiting Washington DC, to plead unsuccessfully for the return of his people to their ancestral homeland. |
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69 The unfinished Capitol in Washiungton, photographed before the dome went up. |
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70
A mass of steamboats on the Mississippi. These give some indication
of the immense commerce carried out on our greatest river system. Lumbermen
chopping down the giant trees of northern California, taken by Darius
Kinsey early in the last century. |
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71 Lumbermen chopping down the giant trees of northern California, taken by Darius Kinsey early in the last century. |
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72
Lumber carriers of the Pacific Northwest, loading the endless board
feet of timber destined to be the houses and workshops of America. |
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73
Lincoln’s old admirer, Walt Whitman, who coined the phrase Democratic
Vistas, photographed in 1884, toward the end of his long life. |
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74
The old flag appearing again, in an orphanage at the turn of the century.
It is amazing how many variations of this national symbol can turn up. |
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75
The Wright brothers first powered flight, made at Kill Devil Hills,
North Carolina at 10:35 on the morning of December 17th, 1903. |
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76 Charlie Chaplin, hoisted into the air on the arms of Douglas Fairbanks, plugging the Liberty Loan in 1918. They are standing on the Treasury building on Wall Street. |
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77
Lewis Hine’s flying young man, no age at all, no safety harness
even thought of, climbing a thousand feet up on a wire on the steel
frame of the Empire State Building in 1930 |
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78 Walker Evans portrait of a tenant farm wife in 1930. |
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79
Dorothea Lange’s picture of a migrant mother, with two children leaning
on her shoulders. Most people overlook the third child, the baby in
her arms. |
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80 Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of the American way. |
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81
Wright Morris’s picture of the eroded farm land of the dust bowl south
west. This photograph comes from his book The Inhabitants and the text
accompanying the picture reads: “There was a time there was more than
room enough for everybody, it was there to be had, it didn’t have to
be made. But in my time what room there is has to be made. In my time
a solution of topsoil is something more than muddy water, and a river
of it is more than a river is meant to be.” |
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82 Jesse Owens, photographed on the medal stand at the 1936 Olympic games. |
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83 The Hindenburg Zepplin burning up at its anchor post in Lakehurst New Jersey in 1937. |
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84 And Leontine Price, barely 20 years old, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, whose negatives now reside in the Beinecke Library. |
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85 Two posters from World War II, one of Uncle Sam, 86 and one of Rosie the Riverter. |
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87 A young Navy boot, probably only 17 years old– or younger if he lied about his age– getting ready to go off to war. |
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88 Bomber pilots in the Pacific theater, back from an all night mission. |
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89 Eugene Smith’s remarkable picture of an explosion during the taking of an island in the Pacific. |
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90 A reconnasiance seaplane in 1944. |
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91 The USS Wasp, mortally wounded off Guadalcanal, September, 1942 |
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92 A marine sleeping with a dog. |
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93 The red white and blue, complete with American Eagle, on the cover of the 1943 US Camera Annual. |
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94 Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. |
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95 And Alfred Eisenstadt’s picture taken in Times Square, of a sailor and nurse celebrating the war’s end. |
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96 The post war power brokers, on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange in 1947. |
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97 An aging Babe Ruth, photographed by Nat Fein, at the 25th anniversary celebration for Yankee Stadium in 1948. |
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98 Senator Joe McCarthy, covering the microphones as he listens to more poison from his aid Roy Cohen in 1954 |
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99
Robert Frank’s picture of motor cyclists in Newburgh, New York. |
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100 Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as president after the shooting of John Kennedy. |
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101 Lee Harvey Oswald meeting his end at the hands of Jack Ruby, just days after the assasination. |
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102 Eddie Adams terrifying picture of an execution in Vietnam. |
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103 Larry Burrows muddy tableau of wounded soldiers at Khe Shan. |
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104 The student strike poster from the riots at Harvard in 1969. |
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105 And Robert Adams picture of the spreading Denver suburbs, from the set of photographs titled “What We Bought: The New World”, which have recently been added to the collection of the Yale Art Gallery. |
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One of the greatest artists of all time was Peter Bruegel the Elder, who lived from about 1530 to 1570. 106 He was the supreme observer of the human condition, and he did so by focusing on the day to day lives and celebrations of the common-folk of his times. This is his picture of a peasant wedding, from 1565. |
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400 years after Bruegel another remarkable artist was at work making pictures in the same manner, and this was Gary Winogrand 107 He used his little Leica camera and his extraordinary talent and energy to make hundreds of thousands of pictures that relentlessly asked the same questions as Bruegel. |
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108 While Robert Adams, in his picture of a Denver subdivision asks “what have we made?”, Winogrand 109 goes to the same place and asks “what are we doing here?” 110 |
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Gary ranged far and wide throughout America, and recorded the life of our times free from the deadening preconceptions of photojournalism, studio photography and the deeply corrupting influences of the Art Market.111 This is his picture of a hard hat rally in the mid sixties. |
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112 This photograph, taken at Fort Worth, Texas, has been described, with piercing irony, as a picture of a man who has been taken away from his country shaking the hand of a man whose country has been taken away from him. |
| 113
And who is this couple, caught in a frozen instant by the camera, as they
drive down a Los Angeles street. |
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For much of his working life Winogrand traveled by air, and he produced a great body of work made in the airports through which he passed 114 This photograph is perhaps my favorite. The aging couple sit low and precariously in the corner of the frame, close together in both fact and alignment115 with her hand gently on his shoulder, and her hooded eyes almost appearing to be sightless, as he looks out at the Orwellian world to which they must soon surrender themselves.116The question asked here is “who are we?” This is perhaps the fundamental query that pictures raise for us, and we might end our talk today by going far back in time for another look at the same question. |
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117The
wall paintings in the caves at Chauvet, France, are among the oldest
known, and they are also among the most beautiful pictures ever made.
The animals parade across the stone in waves 118,
their forms fluid and their evocation of life complete
119.
Antelope, rhinoceros, elephant, lion and horse all line the walls 120 |
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Surprisingly, people don’t turn up as linear drawings of themselves, in the same manner as the animals, but instead as images of the hand. Some are positive 121, made by putting red ochre on the palm and fingers, and then pressing the hand onto the stone. Others are negative 122 |
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Whichever way they are made, these astonishing images represent their makers with a direct and moving immediacy. We can imagine that the artist’s self image was so clear and understood that the well developed art of painting was a natural way to express it. This initial idea, though, I believe to be completely backwards. In making the pictures the rendered hand appeared outside the mind and body of the artist, and only then, I believe, could the human being have a clear understanding of itself. Who we are– dreamer and maker of things– cannot be understood until a constructed artifact provides both the question and its answer. |
