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Bois: Henri Matisse liked to say to students "do you want to become a painter? Then first you must cut out your tongue, because such a decision deprives you of the right to express yourself by any other means other than your brush." No one obeyed of course. Matisse himself hardly remained silent, he is in fact one of the most articulate writers on art ever. He is certainly the best analyst of his own work, so good that it is very difficult for anyone wanting to address his paintings to stray very long from his own explanations. Barnett Newman is of the same ilk as Matisse, except that he wrote much more than Matisse, and much more fastidiously, endlessly rewriting drafts of various essays. In the last decade of his life, when he was at last enjoying a certain degree of fame brought about by the sudden adulation of a young generation of artists, he was prone to give interviews. These were no less carefully edited than his written statements, and several were never published because upon reading the transcripts he found them wanting. Those documents are a treasure trove for us historians, largely because of their retrospective mode. Newman had always been saddened, in fact deeply hurt, by of the lack of recognition, if not sheer scorn, he received from peers of his own generation. Now he was exploiting the chance to speak to younger admiring ears and set the record straight. One the constants of all his late interviews was a narration of his fundamental conversion, his Ur-moment, the creation of what he often metaphorically called his "first painting", Onement 1. I will not dwell on this at any length here, for this is perhaps the best known episode of a radical break in any artistÕs career. But here is a quick reminder. On his forty-third birthday, January 29th 1948, so goes the legend, Newman was suddenly stopped in his tracks. He had applied a coat of varnish red paint on a small canvas, and he had fixed a piece of paper tape down the center, which he had smeared with red orange paint so as to test the color. He was going to work at this much more, texture the background, modulate the color, and activate the picture’s surface. Instead, he was struck as if by lightning. The work in progress was just perfect as is, it didn’t need any further manipulation on his part. It was saying as such, and with remarkable economy, all he wanted to say. Newman was immensely puzzled by this discovery. He pondered over it for months, resolute not to touch his brush again until he had understood the mystery of Onement 1. In the fall, as he was finally coming to terms with his "eureka", his initial bewilderment was gradually replaced by a swelling sense of exhilaration. He verified his findings by painting Onement 2, which has the same bilateral composition but is much bigger, and more reddish-brown with a darker red stripe in the center. Then he braced himself for the most productive two years of his entire career, with eighteen canvases in 1949 alone. As an aside, one reason why I admired Newman so much is that he painted only one hundred and twenty paintings, that’s his corpus. It would be unfair to those familiar with the literature to rehash the complex discussion surrounding the shift that took place when he created Onement 1 in 1948. To be brief, when he spoke about the works that preceded these paintings, he criticized them for their sense of an "atmospheric background". Here we are speaking both of paintings divided by one or more vertical elements, such as Two Edges, and the kind such as the one called Pagan Void. He said about all these paintings that they include a kind of void, a sort of empty circle from which emanated aspects of creative life that he projected purely out of nothing. The fact that Newman could switch indiscriminately from the Two Edges-type of painting to the Pagan Void when dismissing the atmospheric background of early canvas confirms that the realization of Onement 1 lead him to recognize that the void he had been struggling with was not just that of Pagan Void, not just this empty circle, but the condition of spatial possibility that he suddenly perceived as a common denominator of all his pre-Onement 1 canvases. What I had been doing was trying to fill the void. But this void is something I had assumed as a kind of condition of pictoral space. So he had envisioned his blank canvas as an empty scene to be populated by imaginary actors, such as gestural marks or abstract shapes. As he himself said, he had manipulated space, now in Onement 1 he was declaring it. He had been making pictures, now he was making paintings. A picture is necessarily a picture of something, it is an intransitive object, a painting is a statement, it is addressed to someone. It is important to remember that this discovery happened on the theme of bilateral symmetry. Newman had first become interested in symmetry in 1946, first in a series of drawings, then in a painting called Moment. This canvas, with its striking similarity to Onement 1, is particularly helpful in pinpointing the way in which the two works radically differ. Comparing the two, as Newman surely did during the eight or nine months of intense reflection in 1948, we can easily perceive that their symmetries are not of the same nature, and don’t have the same function. In Moment, the image has a symmetrical organization, it is centrally divided by a wide yellow band flanked on either side by planes of marbleized brown, but it would be wrong to say that the picture is in a stricter sense symmetrical. Each brown plane is carefully individualized, far more so than the two wings of a Rorschach test. Not so for Onement 1. There are indeed still some fluctuations in the surface modulation, but we have to remember that the brown fields of the canvas had only been thought of at first as a first layer, a background probably for something like the marbleized quasi-wood grain of Moment. Above all, in B1, which marks the climax of this renewed investigation of symmetry, Newman would dramatically reduce the fluctuation to a perceptive quivering. Rather than remaining on the entity of the field’s surface, as Moment’s wood grain had done, the relative unevenness of certain color applications in some of the symmetrical paintings that follow Onement 1 is meant to make of the very surface a breathing, so that it would not be as Newman said later, a "combination of parts". Symmetry, in short, had no more to do with the formal pattern, as a way of dividing the surface, it was as he said a "declaring the surface, enunciating it as a totality." The zip, as he called the line, was its measurement. It gave you a yardstick to intuitively gauge its width. It was also a comment to the beholder. Stand here, just in front of it, and you will know exactly where you are, it is the middle of your visual field just as it is the middle of the painting. Newman always said that what he wanted most to achieve was to give the beholder a sense of place. In bilateral symmetry, which relates so much to our bodily structure and to the way we organize our perception of the world, he had found a perfect mode of address. He noted, "When you see a person for the first time, you have an immediate impact. You don’t really have to start looking at details, it’s a total reaction in which the entire personality of the other person and your own personality make contact." It is the type of contingent immediacy that symmetry achieved for him in painting. But now what? Staunchly opposed to repeating himself, which is why he painted so few paintings and destroyed so many, Newman was as unlikely as can be to limit his pictorial syntax to symmetry, even if he never let go of it and had periodic recourse to it until the very end of his career. To make a long story short, I would say that almost immediately after Onement 2 Newman began to realize that what was essential for him in bilateral symmetry was less the central axis than the lateral extension. He began to sense that in forcing our perception to expand from a central axis towards the outer limits of the fields, for this is the only way one perceives symmetry, he was forcing the beholder to appeal to his peripheral vision. This was no mean feat, in fact it was radically transforming the mode of pictoral reception that had remained basically unchanged in the West since the Renaissance. The first major painting in which Newman explored his new understanding of laterality as a mode of human perception is Abraham. There are many aspects of this painting that are worth exploring, especially its black-on-black achromatism, and its close color value, which engages the beholder, if he wants to experience anything at all, in a slow-motion unfolding of perception in time. Unless you stay for quite a while in front of this painting you basically don’t see much. It was this particularity of the canvas that Newman liked most to discuss if only to point to its anteriority to Ed Reinhart’s canvases of the mid-fifties. It is quite possible that in accordance with the accounts of Hess, the first historian to write on Newman, and contrary to what I used to think, another painting By Two, preceded Abraham. Both paintings made the same move in regards to symmetry, sidestepping it without altogether discarding it, since in both cases one linear element is congruent with a central axis: the right edge of the band in Abraham, and the left-right blue zip in By Two. Both paintings are governed by a modal division of their width in sixths. But in Abraham, the axial displacement is of far greater consequence than the narrow blue painting. It is combined with a transformation of a line into a plane, a transformation which eliminates any possible reading of any area as an interstitial zone. In other words, while the area separating the two blue zips is still seen as an interval in By Two, the fact that the shining black band of Abraham is not delimited by lighter zips but has become a wide zip itself prevents us even from entertaining such a possibility. Now, Newman would often insist later on that his zips are not lines but color planes, and that the zip and its surrounding field are not different in nature, but in extension. He verified this in a small canvas of 1949, where a portion of the field is squeezed between a yellow zip and the edge of the painting, and thus has a kind an ontological ambivalence, is it part of the field or is a zip itself? In Abraham this breakdown of the traditional opposition between line and color, or between line and plane, is accentuated by the modular division I’ve just mentioned, which in turn helps to undo the perceptual dichotomy of figure and ground. The shiny black zip in the center just fills one module, the plane at its left fills two, the one on the right fills three, so strictly speaking the painting is not black-on-black at all but black next to black. However, our certainty of perception, which depends on a clear recognition of the figure-ground hierarchy, is also assaulted by other means here. As plane, the vertical zip has two vertical edges, a fact that is emphasized in this painting by the very width of the zip, but Newman makes it difficult for us to read the two edges as equivalent and thus to obtain an immediate synthetic mental image as a geometric figure, as a timeless Gestalt. Positioning one edge on the axis of symmetry and the other not, Newman deliberately gives them a different weight without tilting anything in space. He would pursue this type of disequalibrium by other means in a few other paintings, such as Convenant, Promise and Galaxy. In Abraham the fleeting apparition of a halo on each side of the zip further teases our perceptual capacity. We never manage to take in everything simultaneously, and the other certitude that we are able to grasp in front of such a vacillating image is when we step back to take in the lateral expanse of the whole canvas, which is more than human height. Abraham, more than any other previous work by Newman, catches us in the process of perceiving and realizing that the yardstick of scale, by which we measure our own spatial relation to the objects we behold, is what gives us overall a sense of being "here", not "there", to paraphrase one of the titles of his paintings. I would like to briefly allude to Galaxy. This is the next major step in Newman’s exploration of laterality, for it allows us to judge how far Newman has gone in only a few months from works like Two Edges. His titles are very pretentious but they do have a function of linking paintings. The title Galaxy links it to Abraham, although while far less obviously so than to Convenant, you might recall that in issuing his convenant, God promises the aged and frail Abraham that he will have a son and that his progeny will be as numerous as the stars in heaven. At two feet and twenty inches wide Galaxy is one of the smallest canvas that Newman painted, and it is also the most worked-upon. The decisions which presided over its final stage must have been pretty hard to reach. According to Hess, Newman was disappointed by the failed placement of the two zips in Galaxy, which is why he returned to a symmetrical division of the canvas in a large painting called Concorde. By "failed", Hess meant that the placement is not determined by any system of proportion or geometric division. This argument would require at least two conditions to be deemed valid, neither of which is fulfilled. First, he is sure that Galaxy preceded Concorde and his return to bilateral symmetry. We have no document attesting to that fact and to my mind we have several significant features testifying to the contrary. Second, Newman did in fact abandon "the failed placement" of his zips after Galaxy, but even Hess, whose proportional computations were essential to his cabalistic reading of Newman’s work, knew that it was not the case. There are many works in Newman, most works actually, in which he has no system of proportion. It would be wrong to imagine that abandoning symmetry was easy, that Newman was simply retrieving the kind of composition he had explored in an earlier work like Two Edges. Even though in terms of the "failed placement" these two paintings are fairly similar, the great divide separated them, which is the creation of Onement 1. With Two Edges, Newman was not yet attempting to unify the surface of his canvas, and he had not yet discovered that symmetry could instantly perform this task. With Galaxy, painted after the "eureka" of Onement 1, he’s not going back to square one, but looking for other means to maintain a similar unity of the surface, a means that would further Abraham’s timid departure from symmetry. The reluctant asymmetry of Galaxy and of the works that immediately followed, such as Convenant, does not represent a step back but a strenuous move into uncharted territory. Just like Abraham, Galaxy is remarkably difficult to reproduce or photograph. Its various colors are very close in value. The photograph is not how you perceive it, it’s a very harsh light here. To be more specific, the zips function somewhat differently under the artificial lighting required for any photograph than under natural light. In a strong spotlight, the chromatic scale of the canvas is heightened, the maroonish red appears much redder, the broad khaki zip much greener, and one small value contrast is immediately perceptible, that between the dark thin bronze zip and the reddish field. Under ambient natural light things are much more equalized and our perceptive capacities are strained. The maroon darkens considerably, which makes the thinner zip recede deeply into the field, while the broad khaki zip emerges ever so slowly as brighter. As in Abraham, the temporality of our perception is brought to the fore, for it is only through time that we can have access to the subtle inequivalence of the zips. There is clear evidence that Newman fiddled a lot with value differentiation or lack thereof in his canvas, but he agonized also at the same time about the width of the zip. IÕll spare you the details but close inspection reveals that both zips were initially skinnier, darker, and painted thicker. At this first stage, the value differentiation must have been very minimal, all the more since the zips were painted free hand. When you have a sharp straight line, the contrast is much greater than a fuzzy one painted by hand. The dulling of value contrasts and of chromatic saturation contributed to one single effect, that of making the zips fairly invisible. While in the final state of the painting our gaze is ordered to slow down,
as it was in Abraham, it would have come close to full rest if Newman had not reworked the canvas. He could have, as in Abraham, thrown in the monkey-wrench of sheer differentiation - remember there that the lateral parts were matte and the center strip shiny. But he decided to try another route, and to raise the temperature a bit by enlarging the zips and giving them sharp edges, which increased their chromatic weight, and by very slightly brightening their hue, which softly awoke the lethargic value contrast. He applied four tapes on the reddish field, one on each side, and he painted in the reserve areas rather thinly, over the original thick zips which he didn’t bother to scrape down. The result after the removal of the tape is razor-sharp limits of the zips which contrasts with the overall painterly feel of the canvas, compounded by the thick, modulated opacity of the maroon field, visibly made by many accumulated layers of paint. But it is perhaps the compositional outcome of the alternation of the zips that is most unsettling, and which makes Galaxy a major step in Newman’s struggle against the death image, the grip of geometry. Had the zips remained in their original state, they would have indeed taken part in a game of hidden geometry. The expanse of the gap between the two zips would have been equal to the sum of the two lateral areas on the other sides of the zips. To put it more dramatically, one could have mentally traced a line in the center area of Galaxy that would have divided the image into two compositions, each divided symmetrically by a zip. If he had kept the original proportion, you could take scissors and cut the painting in half and you would have two Onement 1’s. The placement of the zips would not have been felt but determined by a deductive structure, for once the proportions of the canvas had been decided upon, the placement of one zip would have necessarily preordained that of the other. As in bilateral symmetry there would be no leftover surface. This geometric ordering would have most probably not been perceptible but Newman took pains to bring it out. In two subsequent canvas, Promise and Convenant, he will deliberately frustrate our Gestaltist appeal to symmetry. In another series of works that are either contemporary to these canvases or immediately following, Dionisius, the main one, and a small painting mentioned from 1949, he will tease us by emphasizing the dynamic function of what I just called "leftover surface". it’s a very bad expression of course but I keep it for the sake of clarity, because it brings me back to the general issue of laterality. This small painting, which Newman would never exhibit probably because there’s something almost too demonstrative about, is precious to us because it reveals he huge progress of the idea which will become a few years later one of Newman’s most impressive canvases, the eighteen-foot Cathedral. The two paintings obviously share a structural characteristic, there’s a doubling and a leftover. But while the doubling is immediately present to our consciousness when we look at the painting from 1949, we have trouble perceiving it in Cathedral. On this count Hess was right, even if it was silly to speak of "secret geometry". It is not so much that the dimensions of the two squares are slightly different, in fact the left square is not exactly a square, but it is that the lateral pull exerted by the leftover excess at the right side of the canvas prevents us from seriously entertaining the idea of their possible identity. I would like in conclusion to make a few remarks about this painting. The first concerns its title, which came as late as 1959 when the painting was shown at Documenta. By the way, Newman’s titles came very late, paintings which were first exhibited in 1950 were only given titles when they were shown again in 1958 or "59. Until Documenta in 1959, Newman had intended to call this huge canvas Throne, which he wife disapproved of for its potential scatological connotations. In the first book that Hesse wrote on Newman, Hess presents some notes he jotted down during a conversation with the artist during the Documenta show. The notes, which he never explicitly says are dictation but which he claims come from their conversation, are in part regarding Cathedral. it’s one of the more bizarre passages because we don’t know who is speaking, there are so many quotations marks, you don’t know what’s from the Bible, what’s Hess, what’s Newman himself - I felt it was a very full painting, all that blue. And the title refers to Isaiah 6:1, "I saw the Lord sitting upon the throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Or in Newman’s recollected translation from the Hebrew "The fall of his mantle filled the tabernacle." His blue robe fills the holy space. Now it’s well known by specialists of this period that his second book on Newman accompanying the posthumous retrospective that Hess organized for the Museum of Modern Art and that toured Europe, which is where European people really discovered Newman, when it went Paris and London and other cities, was absolutely filled with cabalistic interpretation, which was not at all in the monograph he wrote when Newman was alive. He dwelled on this passage in order to push his cabalistic interpretation of Newman’s art, an interpretation that is so forced and so full of exaggerations of all kinds that after a period of wide acceptance where everyone said "Oh my god, finally Newman is understood, someone has found the key", and now no one really agreed to it. This book had the unexpected effect of bringing to near oblivion Newman’s own words about the Bible as a poetic source for his titles. Someone, however, was not intimidated by Hesse’s poor cabalistic exegesis, and in the folder of Newman’s archive I found an unidentified manuscript by someone about these verses of Isaiah. It should be noted that in the passage it talks about, Isaiah 6:1, there’s only a very, very brief description of the throne, at the very beginning of the description of Isaiah’s vision - as a prophet he’s trembling at having seen God while his lips are impure. One of the angels flanking the throne comes down to touch his mouth with a glowing ember from the altar and tells him that his sins are just erased. In Newman’s way of thinking up his title, his allusion might have just as well referred to the following verse. To the question that God asks after Isaiah’s purification, Whom shall I send, Whom shall be our messenger? The important part I think is Isaiah’s answer, Here I am, send me. In this "here I am", this affirmation of existence, is everything that Newman wrote about his desire to give the beholder a sense of place. Here I am, I see you and I respond. But in the sense of Cathedral in particular, this "here I am" can also mean I am barely visible, almost leftover, but I can do the trick. The second element that I would like to bring to the dossier is an interview Newman gave to Newsweek at the time of his watershed exhibition at French & Company in1959, his fourth one-man show. Until that show he was basically either ignored or scorned, and at the show all the painters of the new generation discovered he was actually their father. Speaking about Cathedral’s size to a journalist, he exclaimed I’m not involved in size, but in scale. That one, for example, the blue stroke is the most powerful thing in the world. To be able to hold that all together. The whole canvas, anything can make what passes for a painting. Like you put something in the middle of the canvas, and that’s the focus. Or you put something in each corner and leave the middle empty, that’s something else. But here I’ve got the whole thing. What is a painting? it’s filling up a canvas, you have a canvas that’s so wide and so high and you fill it up with paint, but it can’t look like you just filled it up with paint. That’s the paradox. In order for you to see the connection between this statement and my explanation of Newman as filling up the void in the painting, IÕd like to introduce one last small element. The photograph of Newman and Dorothy Miller looking at Cathedral in the artist’s studio has been published several times, and perhaps it is even better known as it was published in Hess’ first monograph of Newman. The next photo is of Newman and Miller looking at another painting, taken in 1958 in Billington’s college, during Newman’s third one-man show. These images have long been related, and rightly so, to the painter’s statement wall during his second exhibition in 1951, saying there is a tendency to look at large pictures at a long distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen at a short distance. But the staged character of the photographs may not have been noticed enough. They’re totally staged, and the staging just emphasizes what I find so telling in these picture. The beholders do not look straight, but obliquely. They are not focused on the zips, their gaze is not frontal but lateral. Newman placed his wife there and said don’t look at the zip but next to it. Everything counts, every part and parcel of the painting is entitled to say "here I am, you can’t ignore me, even if you aren’t aware of it, I change everything". Which means that there is never any void, never any leftover. Or, which amounts perhaps to the same thing, we are entitled to say to the painting "Here I am", even particularly if we do not take it frontally.
Schirmacher: So, now I know what a close reading in your field means. But at least at the end we had some photographs and some surprises. It really made a big difference, because first we saw the paintings and you can tell us about the size but it doesn’t mean anything, but here, with the human body together..
Bois: Newman hated reproduction of his large works without context. He always wanted to make sure you understand the scale. He even tried to have a cat at least, but it didn’t work, nobody wants to have cats in the picture.
Audience: You spoke about Newman’s difference between a picture and a painting, in which a painting makes a statement and is for someone. I wondered if you could discuss a little further, either from a historical or systematic perspective, the dilemma in the creation process of wanting to make a statement, of presenting a philosophy, yet still considering your audience. If you’re writing philosophy I don’t think you necessarily consider your audience in the same way an artist must consider their audience, because you’re hanging something on the wall and you want people to come see it.
Bois: I don’t think that philosophers write without audience. When Newman said you write for someone he didn’t mean a particular public, it’s not targeted or marketed, but you write to be read, even if you write in your private diary you write to be read, and so you’re saying something That’s going to elicit a response. it’s a kind of standard, almost a Bakhtinian notion except that Newman’s philosophical grounding was really Martin Buber, he was really close to "I and Thou" in many ways. The way you oppose picture to painting, picture always implied depiction, result, something that is an a priori image that is then put on the canvas. For Newman there’s a phenomenology of presence, he didn’t want to have anything prior. The canvas is some statement of presence for the beholder. I don’t necessarily completely buy it, but what he claimed he aimed for was the presentation of the painting as an object which exists, a presentation that would force the beholder to realize his own scale with regard to the canvas, and to realize that he’s there. That was what he would like the reaction to be from his beholder. If you make a picture, it’s just an image, and he used the "image" to dismiss his previous works, to say "now I’m doing a painting."
Audience: The religious references in Newman’s work are particularly interesting, and I would like to think about the old theological theme of the vestige, the trace, as the only possible kind of representation of the sacred. I wonder whether Newman’s work could be thought of as being a trace, or whether it’s a direct representation…?.
Bois: No, that doesn’t work for him. He is fundamentally opposed to anything vestigial. He was very well-read philosophically, he only painted one hundred and twenty paintings, so he had a lot of time to read. He was very interested in all kinds of philosophical traditions, including theology even though he was not interested in the sacred and was not a religious man. One of the things in theology that he was interested in, despite his metaphysics of presence, was negative theology. He was not particularly inclined to that as was his first friend and then arch-enemy Ed Reinhart, whose thinking was completely based on negative theology. So I don’t know about the possibility of the negative there. He could have developed something in this way but I don’t think he did.
Schirmacher: Then why the Biblical names?
Bois: The title is just a kind of clue of a cluster. He was interested in Abraham because Abraham is the first. All the titles are kind of strange clusters, they’re always very pretentious but at the same time clever. The green painting is called "Dionisius", with an "i", that’s not the way you name the God, he was taking a taking a jab at Rothko who he couldn’t stand anymore at the time and who was speaking about the birth of tragedy and Nietzsche. He was always making these little jokes…
Schirmacher: Art historians must love these little jokes, then…
Bois: Yes, the idea of having to find a key, that’s why HessÕ book was so loved, because he had found a cabalistic solution. Of course Hess made a complete mistake, every time there was something Jewish or Biblical it was cabalistic, as if the Cabala was not altogether a heretical corpus.
Audience: Since you started us with the quote about cutting your tongue off, is there a point where we should consider cutting off our word? Because it seems that much of the interpretation comes from the title as from the painting.
Bois: I’ve worked on Newman for quite a while, and at first by sheer disgust at Hess’ plowing through with his cabalistic truck I decided to leave the titles aside. In fact, looking at the titles later on and seeing them as clusters, giving us a clue about relating the paintings together, then I began to see that you could view them in an interrelated way, not as providing any kind of "ah, it’s a representation of Dionysis". I don’t think it’s obligatory to pay attention to the titles, but if you want to you won’t lose anything there. But I did cut myself from the titles from a long time, in my first text on Newman many years ago I was in fact accused of not taking the titles into consideration.
Audience: Thanks to your seminar of the past three days I can’t help but think about color, and I’m wondering if color is secondary with Newman.
Bois: No, Newman is considered to be one of the greatest colorists, and as I was mentioning earlier, one of the most striking things is that until very late and except for one painting, Dionisius, most of his work has to do with close value, or let’s say variations of one hue. Cathedral is white, it’s either the color as opposed to black, or to white, or related to different blues, bright blue and dark blue, brown and orange, it’s all very tonal, and there are very few painters that did that. Even Rothko did a lot of tonal painting but it’s not a dominant thing. In 1966 he started to do spectral paintings, four years before he died. He didn’t want to be characterized as a colorist. He was so irritated because everyone was speaking about his color, and he said "My colors mean nothing, my most important thing is drawing." Of which he made very few.
Audience: You didn’t mention the sculpture. I’m interested in the lateral thesis, which could also be seen as a form of looking awry. Can you apply that model to his sculpture?
Bois: That’s what the minimalists did. The first generation of artists who really adored Newman were the minimalists: Judd and Stella, and so on. Painting was dead for Judd, then he saw Newman and said "Oh wow, I can do this extension." I think that Richard Serra is a sculptor whose work would not have been possible without Newman, which Serra himself admits. You have this physicality of space, the fact that it requires from the beholder a kind of consciousness of being-there, so of course sculpture could be a direct consequence of that.
Ronell: If I understood correctly you began with a certain notion of symmetry, and I was wondering especially with the title Abraham, you know for Levinas the "here I am" is the ethical exposure. There’s also a certain reading of Abraham in which God demands that that thirdness be eliminated in this relation to the other. I’m wondering if somehow allegorically something in the progression you traced had to be sacrificed, and I don’t know if that works at all. When you moved to laterality, there is a gaze that had to let go of some sort of frontality.
Bois: That’s why it was probably very hard for him to move from bilateral symmetry, it was very hard work for him, because he knew he was going to lose something - as opposed to the direct mode of address you have the lateral. That’s a good idea, I hadn’t thought about that, thank you very much.
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