La Veuve Joyeuse
October 25, 2008 10:02 PM
Click.
If Picabia was the first to switch the rose and the dandelion, did he want anyone to know?
One certainly cannot make off like a bandit until we have already called art a thing, and given to it a high-shelf to be snatched from in the first place. Simply put, there is nothing to be stolen if there is nothing to be lost. And one reason to steal, of course, is to watch the discovery of loss, to learn where the value of the object actually lies.
But the theft could also have been accidental, the result of boredom.
Painting, for Picabia, could have been like some kind of angel who had just received notice that God had, in fact, left, and that work was to be abandoned. Equally, it may have been like some dexterous goat without a mountain. Freed from the trappings that gave painting its history, how long could it make mischief before being weighed down by another? Or were its specializations so particular that no other agenda could possibly be imagined, would aimlessness be the new weight?
That one could speed by in a car, glance through the window, and see the thing one would never see again, blink/click, and start over - and again, never again. To roll back over upon these scenarios that may as well have never occurred, and to drink deeply of them; click. Pictures are things you look at. And to anticipate the passivity in this looking, the automatism of an art-industry that can produce such mesmerizing clap-trap, to hear that glitter is still glitter, is the longevity of Picabia. This does not mean that he predicted it.
If Picabia was the first to switch the rose and the dandelion, did he want anyone to know?
One certainly cannot make off like a bandit until we have already called art a thing, and given to it a high-shelf to be snatched from in the first place. Simply put, there is nothing to be stolen if there is nothing to be lost. And one reason to steal, of course, is to watch the discovery of loss, to learn where the value of the object actually lies.
But the theft could also have been accidental, the result of boredom.
Painting, for Picabia, could have been like some kind of angel who had just received notice that God had, in fact, left, and that work was to be abandoned. Equally, it may have been like some dexterous goat without a mountain. Freed from the trappings that gave painting its history, how long could it make mischief before being weighed down by another? Or were its specializations so particular that no other agenda could possibly be imagined, would aimlessness be the new weight?
That one could speed by in a car, glance through the window, and see the thing one would never see again, blink/click, and start over - and again, never again. To roll back over upon these scenarios that may as well have never occurred, and to drink deeply of them; click. Pictures are things you look at. And to anticipate the passivity in this looking, the automatism of an art-industry that can produce such mesmerizing clap-trap, to hear that glitter is still glitter, is the longevity of Picabia. This does not mean that he predicted it.
