Allegra Harvard
An Idea for a painting and my current situation
I don’t want to be a writer but necessarily and certainly that’s how it’s seeming to go. I am not asked to do gallery shows anymore, I am asked to read or write— which naturally I will rise to do so but in the utmost desires of myself I’d much rather find myself presenting you with paintings generally speaking or some theatre that I stage for you. I’m interested primarily in the illumination of image or ideas which in my most opinionated and preferred state is in the visual form from my own creative means and will. I am only 25 so I still have time to fail as an artist before I resign the image fully into writing. In writing where the great and lonely image is only a perception in your mind and not something I present to you fully and in my intention— something you would tend to make out in your mind as a natural reaction to words and therefore we are not seeing it collectively, it’s become your problem now. And that’s why reading a play and a novel is the same awful thing and looking at a painting is obviously different. Regardless, I will try now to give you a picture. I have gone to the museum of art, the Art Institute of Chicago to be forward, and written it down to describe to you, a proposition I vaguely remember Baxandall challenging the natural passive to do. I had an idea once to write the description of a particular painting onto a canvas for the viewer to interpret the words as an image, and in my hopes for them to see the picture from the museum I was describing to them. I decided never to do it because it seems ridiculous and lousy as a work of art. I digress, the artwork looks like this:
Not quite square, grey, black, and white
Lethal but docile in its momentary passivity
Just as many dogs as men and alike the versus
Bourguoise something or others killing for sport, Oh la la!
Comme c’est Terrible (how terrible)
Many hats
Only one profile in the group faces the viewer, and he looks old
The ground is unsure — smudged and uneven, but where the brightest whites of the painting are located, it is there surely on the ground
There is no hunting, only fashion
English pointers with English men
I don’t know who the viewer could be