Page 35 - Studio International - February 1968

So I sat back in the theatre and tried to grasp for a higher ment like, say, a Zen master shaking a tree (I didn't
meaning, and after about ten episodes I really felt there know this at the time), and then finding that the leaves
wasn't any. That's the business. People who immediately are placed the way he wants them.
criticize things or who make judgements too quickly, many The Front lawn has the same feeling. It's as if you have
of these people are like love at first sight. It can be beauti- that picture in an empty wall space, then all the reasons
ful, but it cancels something. Marcel Duchamp said to for it are as below zero as I can get. Front lawn is a very
me one time, 'I never do anything fast. I've always empty picture for me, with a lot of very unnecessary stuff
worked slow'. It's a good thing. So this picture, maybe it on the surface. The whole thing is a visual vestigial
isn't very good; maybe it is. I've finished painting it, appendage towards an emptiness. Say that it's the differ-
and it still bothers the hell out of me. It's not an end ence between showing an empty canvas which is explicit,
sequence for me; it's a beginning. as opposed to this Front lawn which appears full of stuff
but actually is even emptier than an empty canvas—
You did stylistically related pictures a few years ago, one because an empty canvas is so laboriously designed. If
a tree and the other a front lawn.... this picture fails, it fails through banality; it has all the
Well, they have similar techniques. The tree is life size, excuses to be an empty sight, like an ideal time-break in
except that it extends into a natural perspective. The tree television. It's a lever for your own emptiness.
is like a placement. There are small canvases projecting
from the surface, arranged any place on the surface, in There wasn't a conscious design for Growth plan?
the tree. They're painted the same as the background, No. It's just as it is, as it came from an old photograph.
like a camouflaged object. It was an idea about place- All the junk on the surface, all that handiwork, goes
toward making it emptier. Of course it is still there; a lot
of labour on the surface, that makes it consciously against
visual design which is really an old order in this picture.
For me it allows other thoughts to blossom. I never feel
that this picture could be beautifully disregarded as some-
thing that fits into our lives, like a painting that's beauti-
ful in an environment with people's furniture, that can
be taken in easily and loved and liked, yet dismissed. This
thing seems to poke its ugly part into my mind.
It's an old idea of mine. When I was a young kid,
middle-class homes I knew always had pictures of old
mill streams and landscapes; they covered up spots in the
wallpaper. After a while they became invisible. You
flashed into a room and knew the surrounding, but you
didn't really know those pictures because they were
invisible. These are similar to those old mill stream pic-
tures, except where they stay ugly. The look of them may
become invisible but the question stays disturbing.
I've recently had some more feelings to do with function
and accuracy. I think that all art now is functional, and
ugly, and that all nature is beautiful. Nature is beautiful
because it's an avalanche of accident. Art is functional
and accurate and disturbing, generally. I mean you have
to make an effort to retrieve it or feel it. To be art
doesn't seem to make itself easy for you or come to you
easily.

As contrasted to nature ?
Yes. As contrasted, say, to a sunset or a snowfall or a
snow avalanche.... Here, in this other picture, this is an-
other exploration called Circles of confusion. This is about
identity. I became interested in the paradox between the
eye and the camera. Things occur in the eye—after-
images from seeing a light bulb. In a camera, shiny
objects in the foreground and background become soft
round fuzzy balls on the photograph; they have a tech-
nical term, circles of confusion. This picture is the
beginning colour illustration, out-of-focus balls; the
identity is a General Electric symbol from a light bulb.
The difference between being blinded and seeing blurry
blobs, and then identifying it as light—that's very basic.
It could be something other than General Electric. I