our look is what keeps (forever)

The black is a cruel tangent to the little girl’s forehead and cheek. We can never escape from the other, grown-up face that has to deal with our looking and has seen our type before: we are intruders, we feel the pressure of the pages – the possibility of imaginative freedom – against our fingers; our look is what keeps (forever) the pages unread.

T.J. Clark, in his preface to the revised edition of The Painting of Modern Life, 1999. The painting he's describing is Manet’s Le Chermin de fer, 1872 – 73.



Here nothing is decided but only here can the power of decision be tested.

Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1948, tr. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

like Empson's Milton, finds "all" useful

The lake's level, or the balance of branches on a tree – human beings only take advantage of orders already present. It is just that nature gives no clear priority to such orders. It is also flow and fissure. The snake is horrible above all because it has no level, no centre of gravity – it is endlessly obscene motion. The man reaches out preeminently to put an end to that.

(T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death: an Experiment in Art Writing, 2006 (The snake is the snake in Poussin's Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake, 1648.))



The encyclopaedic nature of Ashbery's work – inextricable from the matter of attention – might best be suggested by his use of a small word, namely, all. William Empson wrote of "all" that "you could hardly parody Milton without bringing it in." This is also true of Ashbery, who, perhaps like Empson's Milton, finds "all" useful "because of its very obscurity; it provides confusion only at the deep level where it is required."

(Andrew DuBois, Ashbery's Forms of Attention, 2006)

people stream past it

Walking through the Getty Center last weekend I caught sight of a painting that I recognised without knowing how I recognised it or why, and as I was recognising it I had two impressions at the same time, one, that that it was important and intelligent, and, two, that it was mediocre or ordinary.

I knew why I thought (without seeing it clearly yet) that it was mediocre or ordinary, because it was neither huge nor small, there was nothing in the picture that tried to impress you; the colours were low-key blues and browns and there was a lake in the middle; it looked like an ordinary landscape, not Dutch, but with a similar placidity. And it seemed especially flat because I had been looking at Rubens' green and red Entombment, c. 1612, which was at the opposite end of the same room.

Then, although I was not seeing any more details, I realised that it was one of the two paintings I had been reading about only a few weeks before in T.J. Clark's 2006 book The Sight of Death: an Experiment in Art Writing.

The idea that this was the same painting I had been reading about did not interest me very much. I could remember some of the things Clark had said about it but they did not change, I thought, my way of looking at the work now; and primarily I remembered how irritated I was at the end of the last chapter when he waited in the last rooms of the National Gallery recording cutting thoughts about visitors who were ignoring the other painting he describes in the book, Poussin's Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake, 1648. "[F]or several hours during the day thirty-plus people stream past it, one or two of whom give it a passing glance."

Too often at the end of gallery visits I have used up almost all of my time on other work and the terminal rooms have to be sprinted through against my desires. At the end of that visit to the Getty I wanted to stay longer with Lorenzo Lotto's The Madonna and Child With Two Donors, c. 1525-30, and also Jacopo Bassano's Portrait of a Bearded Man, c. 1550, which has an enigmatic grey shape ballooning in from the left side of the canvas. To the artist this must have been the shadow of the man's head but there is no pictorial evidence that the greenish background is actually a surface that would enable a shadow to exist and instead it looks as if someone has laid in the canvas flat on the ground and dropped a cup of grease on it. The man is looking away. Another painting in a different Getty building shows you a group of clean middle-class people gathered in a public place to enjoy the sight of a multi-coloured featureless biped performing an unidentifiable action on the paving in front of them. The label identifies it as a puppet but it might as well be a monster and I picture it as one.

human beings only take advantage

As I look at The Porthole again I believe that I could spend a long time going through the book page by page and listing all the variations that Spatola finds in this thwartation or resistance play. Why did Samuel Richardson write books that put him (not him but his written voice) in situations of apparent anxiety and why did he (his voice) exacerbate those situations instead of ending them? Asking, "Why did he create such a perfect character as Grandison?" might be something like the same question. You picture a man observing his voice as if he is watching a very exciting film. Spatola describes a war in which his character Guglielmo takes part on both sides at once (meaning that the name "Guglielmo" is partaking in contrary actions simultaneously in different places), torturing people, stealing horses, etc, baffling the normal expectation that an author who writes about conflict will ask you to sympathise more with one body of combatants than the other. This is a bit shocking: shouldn't he give you a position; shouldn't he find some noble rebels or reluctant army recruits or something to sympathise with? Removing a dead war-horse's shoes, the narrator 'I' also removes its "glasses, watch, ring, gold teeth, hair, and orthopedic limb." I think of Alice in Wonderland's argument for the dominance of algebraic principles in language. By insisting on the vigilant mediation of words, the Wonderland characters point towards a hypothesis of language that has been changed from a common property to a private one. As a Wonderland person you are not inevitably unhappy. You appear abrasive to others, but your privacy ensures your character. It is like having a house to live in. If Alice could handle language algebraically like the others then she would not have to worry so much about warping and stretching. She would be the manipulation of formula.

The inhabitants of Wonderland are living machines in costumes. (Is a living machine also a malfunctioning machine?) Reading the art historian T.J. Clark's 2006 book The Sight of Death I notice how often he refers to boundaries in his work; how he notes the overlapped straightnesses of the landscape in the two Poussin paintings and the outstretched arm of the fleeing individual in Landscape with Man Killed By a Snake, c. 1648. I am interested in his appreciation of the stillness this helps to create upon the canvas; and how his description of a real event, a trip to Michael Heizer's Double Negative earthwork, 1969-1970, is a lifeless sketch. The people in the car gave a "great shout" when the cutting finally comes into view, he says, a phrase so routine in British English that he can rely on it to represent nothing much. Returning to the boundaried world of the paintings he goes back into evocation again. Double Negative has not been an opportunity for thought. Eventually he comes to this idea about the intersection between the painter and the world: "The lake's level, or the balance of branches on a tree – human beings only take advantage of order already present. It is just that nature gives no such clear priority to such orders." It will be interesting to see if Heizer really goes through with the plan to shore up Double Negative with concrete.