What are words worth?
I like them. Words.
Their rythyms, and the particular satisfaction that comes from seeing an apt word - like traverse, say - perfectly placed in a sentence. But when it comes to art there’s one I struggle with - abstract. As a noun, verb, or adjective it essentially means the same thing; a summary. Yet when referring to a painting it describes something which is non-pictorial or non-representational. And I don’t get why that is. Like orange and spicy, they’re just different things.
In the summer of 1994 I was stuck in an overpowering and disinterested Dallas - where all galleries, shools and hospitals have either Methodist or Presbyterian above their doors - covering the World Cup for Reuters. Escaping the media centre’s plastic lunches I got an air-contioned taxi to the other side of town. Gliding through one dazzled and soulless street after another, everywhere felt like nowhere. Only the bow-tied Nation of Islam paper sellers were hardy enough to stand under the high and unforgiving sun.
Arachne (A Sibyl)
Velazquez
1644 - 1648
Half an hour later I am in front of a minor Velazquez. I move closer, look and then step back. This goes on for a good ten minutes. I’m transfixed by a small pink blob of paint on a fingernail. It has no reason to be there - it doesn’t describe the form and it’s also too bright - and despite all the fabulous brushstrokes around it, it’s all I can see. It’s a blob of paint. It’s a fingernail. Yet clearly it’s both things at the same time. That mark describes the experience of being a mark as much as it describes a part of a finger. So although this is representational art it is as much about reduction and abstraction as any Mark Rothko is some 300 years later. Perhaps the real difference is that while one sets out to describe the outer world, the other portrays the inner. Artistically sated but now hungry I head back in the frigid taxi air. On the other side of the tinted windows a sluggish city trudges by.
Concrete words, abstract words
Crazy words and lying words.
The Tom Tom Club knew their stuff alright.