ERNST

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, because it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. – Wittgenstein

A Note on Ernst

^{The writing about writing about art becoming art itself, in itself as art, as writing, as notation, as the noting of notes as notes and nothing more than notes, nothing notes, notes about nothing, the nothing that is noted and again as rhythm as movement as writing as notes on notes as notes as noted down but not transcribed but expressed, as something made and nothing referred to and as yet it is that something that nothing is as noted as written as seen and maybe heard in how it moves and doesn’t move, in how it’s here. This is how he drew it, what he drew, the way he wrote when he was here.}

A Tape Recording of Ernst

^{from an interview discussing his work habits and procedures    my almost fanatical obsession regarding pens                   fountain, felt, fine tip                 I like to vary and make   to mark               an almost calligraphic glide and swoosh over the surface of the page      I move my hand and something else appears, something happens      only later do these somethings begin to take on the images of letters and of words                 a movement often indiscernible}

A Note by Ernst

^{askew       slanted and lopsided, almost falling down}

^{but not like this        a hissing informality of gesture. It is like that picture I have framed over my desk                                    a brick wall                                  it’s conspicuously hanging off its nail        trying to fix the gestures into words that don’t just garble themselves in the mouth of sense but spit themselves out into a line that doesn’t contour but invents. This might very well be what I mean if I were to mean or if I meant or if I wanted anything besides the frisson of seeing the line invent as I hang by, passenger-like, merely following along agog at what is or might be happening or not as I glide and float and stop after a flop and quite a stutter and begin to paint over the line itself, to let the Liquid Paper cross it out, enfold it into an opacity, an all-too-narrow space that isn’t space at all but only surface and surprise and letting color, or the lack of color, hang its head and rest, if only barely, as my own hung on last night, my ears and mind and chest taking in the sounds of these Nordic fellows playing B’s quartet as the movement, the almost of it, quiet, moved around it in itself in shades and almost stopped.}

A Note on Ernst

^{Gray white beside black plane which hovers over thick and ropy streak of bleeding red into the yellow echoed in the ghost-like play of scratched off letters, almost words, a syllable, an almost “well” without the “e”}

^{His way into the paintings, Webster’s Third. Patiently, he fills the surface, every tiny canvas little script, meditating copy path and valley of each word, read the map of its contortions smooth as color sounding muddled sense of sense, trying never trying he could fill his “little etymologies” of paint.}