The blind woman in Meyer Schapiro’s famed defense of abstract art, to whom the art historian appeals to teach us how to see, is a symbol for what (artistic, scientific, political, philosophic) thought is in need of closing down and entombing for it to form its own image. There is a heuristic facet to the exclusionary gesture inseparable from every innovative ambition (and I propose two examples: abstraction and conceptual art): a search for a (last/final?) place for art, its field (or the one of its own self-image) blunting, only apparently, the forms of its transitivity.
Jacques ASWAD
A poet writing on art since 1979. At the core of his research “this much: a sound, a color, a gesture, a word, a person questioning his relation to an indefinite whole, never clearly affirmed”.
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