Page 44 - Studio International - May 1968

attention, and I found a near literary relation for what it was about problem, how to tap the know source. Here is a physical environment
in the Brothers Karamazov. You will remember one of the brothers was that is in that series.
head-on into whatever happened to him, and he never observed
himself in the least; the next one was observing himself so closely Have you found it works?
that the only free act ultimately open to him was suicide. However It led to more episodes. I do use it to look at the newspapers
acute his observation the world was still an illogical farce. The third, through and it gives alternative solutions to those being adopted.
youngest brother was reflective but not stuck on his intellectual I'm certainly not who I was.
rigour, and this left him free to 'intuit' right solutions in the context
he was in. To demonstrate this set of distinctions seems to have been Is there 'a solution' as such?
Dostoievsky's main preoccupation, though he was always existential I used the word in a general way. I want the picture to operate in
and unmoralistic about it. It's an introduction to the way that ideas people to see whether there is a more authentic answer to your ques-
work in one's head and so of how to bring about an attitude which tion than I can give. I am certain for myself. Change the point of
can be fully functional without absurdity, free. vision and problems aren't solved so much as dissolved—you don't
In the Skoob box there is a mass on the low left wall that is random see them as problems any more perhaps. The artist's attitude is
deposited junk, some books in it, but a heap in disorder. It could basically an engineer's but using information in the people context.
correspond to the memory record of the Dmitri character. Like he
never got outside of it. On the adjacent wall and at eye level there In what sense did you use the word 'picture' ?
was a smaller mass, a more or less orderly library. Now, observation Here is our verbal hangup. A picture now is off the ceiling. Not a
from a point outside itself of the primary experience-record will blue- surface, or an appearance certainly. I could say an eventpattern, as
print 'an intellectual', in principle. So the interaction of the two a guess at what goes on using a particular set. I mentioned five event-
centres of information can correspond with the second brother categories that are present in a communication. One is usually
(Ivan). I was using a tangible spatial analogy for relationship be- dominant for a particular artist (I saw anti-art as a deliberate choice
tween experiences as we have them; and continuing the principle of of a category of event that hadn't been used in the context of 'art').
observation from a new position, there is a third mass—at a position So the image of the person that we can grasp is through his inter-
where the spiral curve continued through masses I and 2 would meet actions. Let's go back behind those we can have met. Cezanne could
the surface—which is on the ceiling. This carried one book, a black never paint what he was optically aware of and you could only guess
light and an occluding white light. Observation of the intellectual at what he was driving on by looking at the work. As I see it he was
confronting the world. The question of principle accepted, we should using two main event-categories: the make-episode, and multivalued
consider the terms in which information could be stored at each time form. Cezanne's working idiom aimed to where one could see
centre—appearances would be a universal base language, while ab- time as n units long, good for any value of n. On the other hand the
stracts and generalizations would characterize the second. It isn't pictures are also defined in terms of his own working. The two time-
illogical that the third mass should be indecipherable or that it would values didn't come to coincide easily. It was a marvellous example
give out some very accurate information when tapped. Many ancient of the collision of two exclusive events. The result was Cezanne, our
regimes of the spirit have devoted their full attention to just such a picture.
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