I can't even imagine looking at Pollock that way--my own experience is that
my eyee bounces all over the place. And that I'm forced to penetrate the
space. It's a pretty amazing experience.
At 10:22 AM 11/16/2005, you wrote:
><snip>
>One experiences most paintings temporally, I think, tho the sequence and
>tempo vary. [MW]
><snip>
>
>I don't think it's binary, more a question of degree: whether one parses the
>work primarily as an articulation of time or as an articulation of space. In
>reading a medieval work one is asked quite frequently to follow a narrative
>through a sequence of temporal stages. There are innumerable intervening
>works in which parsing the content means making assumptions (beyond what is
>on the canvas) about what happened or what will happen next. Then there's
>Cezanne's constitution of *reality* through its temporal perception.
>Analytical cubism is still another form of temporality. And so on. Things
>get trickier when representation disappears. Newman manages temporality
>without representation, I think. Pollock. on the other hand, seems concerned
>to articulate a shallow pictorial space even though one can readily parse
>the laying down of the paint.
>
>My other observation was that Rauschenberg removes any sense of direction;
>his doing so is like Johns' use of the Stroop effect. Such a combination
>does, I think, represent some sort of gear shift in what was happening.
>
><snip>
>And one of the wonders of Indian music is that it manages to sustain
>the harmonic tension that creates the drive towards resolution for such a
>long stretch. [MW]
><snip>
>
>Resolution or centring? In Western music, to caricature, boy looks at girl -
>boy fancies girl - goes after girl - boy gets girl. In Indian music, boy
>looks at girl (more and more intensely) until boy becomes girl, like tigers
>becoming butter.
>
>The attack-sustain effect which Reich presents in *Four Organs* seems to me
>more like the latter. That doesn't, of itself, make it either *good* or
>*bad*. It may be open to attack, of course, as a musical version of feeling
>stoned. But again it is a change in strategy, I think, and it is considered.
>
>CW
>______________________________________________________
>
>I am always doing what I cannot do yet in order to learn how to do it
>(van Gogh)
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