Vertical Thoughts 1 (after Morton Feldman)

There is something about the vertical. The vertical is wild.

A painter will perhaps agree that a color insists on being a certain size, regardless of his wishes. The color may go on the surface as a pointillistic dot, as something hardly even noticed, as a line or a smudge or a dash, or it might cover the entirety of the canvas in one all-encompassing monochromatic wash; instead of merely complementing the landscape, it may become the landscape. Or it may decide instead to just move up and down much more containedly and cover up the space like Barnett Newman’s The Wild from 1950.

When sound is conceived as a horizontal series of events all its properties must be extracted in order to make it pliable to horizontal thinking.

It has nowhere to go and going there is not about telling a story. There is no story. There is no going. There is no there. A sound simply stops.

Christian Wolff once remarked that eventually everything becomes melody.

I’ve always believed in history. The history of art embedded in one’s work. A horizontal line that intersects the vertical its substance through an auto-medium-specific mediation of one’s own devising. One performs a kind of séance. One seeks to haunt one’s work with ghosts.

The mistake is trying to view one’s work as Pasternak does when he writes of his love for the ‘living essence of historical symbolism.’

It can be a sort of harmony. It can even be dense.

And in it red speaks more than blood, although it is, nonetheless, bloody, and sound itself must be allowed to appear the way it does for Kandinsky, in Kandinsky, although his yellow will no longer be enough.

For Guston art at its inception is synonymous with an all-powerful dynamic in nature rather than a man-made history disguised as nature.

Art approaches nature as it begins to transcend it.

Time itself becomes less perceptible as movement, more conceivable as image.

Writing a line. Drawing a line. Making a line. Drawing words on a line. It is praying in Spanish. Making a sentence. An invocation. Interrupt.

The instant is a vertical interruption.

A line from the Talmud.

And life a passing shadow.

Art in its relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out.

Try and hold on to that!

A prayer for guidance. A prayer for presence.

The atmosphere of the work of art, what surrounds it, that ‘place’ where it exists, is where we find ourselves as we begin to lose our place, and a place has been displaced, and we are placed (replaced) right here.