David Plante will give a reading from Becoming A Londoner at the New York Public Library this Tuesday, September 24 at 7pm.  

Michael Craig-Martin has had an exhibition that consisted entirely of an ordinary glass of water on a high glass shelf, the glass itself the idea one would have of an ordinary glass. The glass of water on the glass shelf is high up on a blood-red wall, the whole length of Waddington Gallery. But, as an accompanying card informed, printed in red on white pasteboard, the glass of water is no longer a glass of water but an oak tree. Michael was brought up a Catholic, which he has, as I have, rejected, but what else but his religion informs the miracle of the transubstantiation of the glass of water into an oak tree?

But, more than our shared Catholic pasts, I have my own view of Michael’s work – which he seems to respect but not to be convinced by – in our both having been taught by Jesuits. I went to Jesuit Boston College and was taught Scholastic epistemology, which discipline has remained with me as my essential sense in my own apprehension of the world. I like to think that Michael was just long enough at the Jesuit university of Fordham to have been inspired by some idea of Scholastic epistemology, and to be intrigued by the mental process by which a specific object such as a glass of water is held in a state of momentary suspension before it is judged as this or that glass of water, so that in that state of suspension, of apprehension, the water glass becomes an oak tree.

– – –

We’ve become regular guests at the Queen Anne house of Adrian and Ann Stokes in Hampstead, with sherry first in the sitting room hung with a large nude by William Coldstream, and considered by Adrian a major work. Dinner downstairs in the basement, by the Aga, the table laid with Ann’s pottery, with large ceramic animals as centrepieces.
Adrian especially warm towards Nikos, whom he embraces whenever we arrive, Nikos appearing to revive in Adrian a youthful erotic attraction to someone as attractive as Nikos. As for worlds revolving around Adrian – think of Ezra Pound, think of Osbert Sitwell, think of all the Saint Ives artists including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and . . . And Adrian knew D. H. Lawrence, whom he visited when Lawrence lived in Italy, in the Villa Mirenda – not only knew Lawrence, but delivered Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Lawrence’s Italian publisher Orioli, no doubt reading that novel on the train! Nikos is very impressed that Adrian was analyzed by Melanie Klein, and thinks that the great disappointment in Adrian’s life is that analysis could not cure his daughter Ariadne of schizophrenia.

– – –

R. B. Kitaj is painting an almost life-size portrait of Nikos.
R.B. and his wife Sandra come to meals, or we go to them. At their large round dining table there are always interesting people to meet, as if R.B. (Nikos calls him Ron, but he prefers R.B. or, simply, Kitaj) sees his friends as references to the richness of culture as he sees the figures in his paintings as referring, too, to the richness of culture.
His library, with high shelves of books, forms part of his studio, there where a punching bag hangs, and I easily imagine Kitaj punching the bag when he gets frustrated at a painting not going well. He can have a mad look.
There are so many references in his paintings. In the branches of a tree hung what looked like red ribbon, and I asked him what it referred to. He said, off-handedly, ‘I just wanted a bit of red there,’ which impressed me, for I sometimes think that Kitaj will sacrifice composition to the references.

At the large round table in the basement kitchen, Nikos and I have met the very old American painter Raphael Soyer and his wife. R.B. is keen on artists of the 1940s Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, all figurative artists, as R.B. is trying to promote figures in paintings as opposed to abstraction.

Other people we’ve met at their dinners:

The painter Avigdor Arikha and his wife Anne.

The film maker Kenneth Anger, whose Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome I’d seen years before. As good looking as he was, I was frightened of him because I’d heard he was under a satanic bond to kill someone.

The poet Robert Duncan, whose portrait Kitaj has drawn and who clearly has exhausted both Kitaj and Sandra by his relentlessly inventive talk, as he exhausted Nikos and me when he came to supper, theorizing about, say, Gertrude Stein in terms of the inner tensions in her work, his mind, it seems, filled with inner tensions that flash out in different directions while one tries to make the connections among all the flashes. His lover Jess Collins sat back.

Robert gave us some of his books of poems, with photomontages by Jess. So we are building up a collection of signed books given to us.

Also at Kitaj and Sandra’s, we met a coroner, who said that there was nothing more beautiful than the naked chest of a dead young man.

When you meet someone at Kitaj and Sandra’s, you feel the person must be rather esoteric to be of interest to them, and, in meeting this esoteric person, you hope you are rather esoteric too. Kitaj, an American, wants to belong to what he calls the London School of Painters, wants, I think, to become as much a part of the art world of London as Whistler and Sargent were.

He is close to David Hockney, with whom he appeared on the front cover of the New Review, both of them naked, arms across shoulders.

Sandra asked to paint my portrait – in the nude, if I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. Then she suggested I come again and pose with another male model, very sexy, both of us nude. ‘And you never know what will happen.’

She and R.B. go to Amsterdam to the live sex shows and afterwards clap.

Kitaj likes to go to the airport and take the next flight out to wherever, the last time to Athens, where he went to a whorehouse and waited until a large woman came out and, raising her arms high, shouted, ‘America!’ He tells this story before Sandra, who laughs, I think a strained laugh.

Their understanding is: never with friends.

Sandra is very beautiful, with a wide white smile.

– – –

While I’m making pottery with Ann, Adrian works in his study, but at tea time she asks me up to his desk and we have tea from Ann’s cups.

I always bring Adrian little gifts, mostly postcards. One was of a Mughul miniature, which he liked. Another was of a Surrealist  painting, and this he did not like, though his way of indicating he doesn’t like something isn’t to say so, but to laugh a little. Later, he told me he didn’t like the Surrealists, but as an aside. My little gifts – besides postcards, a volume of three Greek poets, fancy cakes from a pastry shop in Hampstead – are offered partly with the wonder of how he will react to them.

I have no idea what Adrian’s likes and dislikes are, and I realize that this both intimidates me and excites me. All I know for sure is that he has a vision, and vision excites me.

Once, having been first to Stephen Buckley’s studio, I went to Church Row with a little work of Stephen’s under my arm which I showed to Adrian: he looked at it for a long time on his desk, and I, standing by, wondered what he was thinking. When he said, ‘Yes, I like it,’ I was very pleased.

I’m always aware that his appreciation of something is, in a way, refl ective, that it has to do with deciding something about the object. His appreciation is, I feel, based on the object’s standing up or not to Adrian’s awareness of it. I don’t think: Adrian is coming to terms with the object. I think: the object is coming to terms with Adrian.

– – –

Sonia invited Nikos and me for a birthday party for Francis. I sat next to Francis, and across the table was David Sylvester. I asked Francis if he ever worried about the meaning of art. ‘No,’ he said, and laughed.

‘I just paint. I paint out of instinct. That’s all.’ ‘Then you’re very lucky others like your work,’ David said. ‘That’s it,’ Francis said. ‘I’m very lucky. People, for some reason, buy my work. If they didn’t, I suppose I’d have to make my living in another way.’ I said, ‘I’m sure people buy – or, if they can’t buy, are drawn to – your work because you do paint out of instinct.’ ‘Perhaps it’s just fashionable for people to be drawn now,’ Francis said, and I said, ‘No, that’s not true, and you know it’s not true.’ He said, ‘You’re right. I do know. Of course I know. When I stop to wonder why I paint, I paint out of instinct.’ David looked very thoughtful. He sat away from the table, his large body a little slumped forward, his hands on his knees. Slightly wall-eyed, he stared at the table as he thought, and he fi nally asked Francis, very slowly, ‘How does luck come into your work?’ Francis answered, ‘If anything works for me in my paintings, I feel it is nothing I’ve made myself but something luck has given to me.’ David asked, ‘Is there any way of preparing for the luck before you start working?’

‘It comes by chance,’ Francis said. ‘It wouldn’t come by will power. But it’s impossible to talk about this.’

This excited me, and I immediately asked, ‘Because it’s a mystery?’

Francis jerked round to me, his eyes wide. He said flatly, ‘I don’t think one can explain it.’

I knew that I was trying to push Francis into saying something that I wanted him to say but which I also knew he disdained, as he disdained all forms of the mysterious.   Nikos warned me. ‘Do you know what you’re asking of Francis?’ I took the risk and asked Francis, ‘Do you ever think that if one knew enough one might be able to explain the mystery of chance? And if one could explain would the mystery go and the work be destroyed?’

Francis pursed his lips. He could sometimes appear to be parodying the expression of deep thought. He asked me, ‘Are you asking me if I ever think I could destroy my work by knowing too much about what makes it?’

‘More than that. I wonder, have you ever wanted to explain what makes a painting work even though you knew the explanation would destroy it? I mean, do you ever worry that your work is too explicit in its meaning, not latent enough?’

Francis said, ‘I can’t wonder about that, because I know I would never be able to explain.’ He laughed.

– – –

Whenever I am in the West End, I stop to look in at the shows galleries are putting on. I stopped in the Kasmin Gallery in Bond Street and found the entire large clear white space filled with one work by Anthony Caro, Prairie, a vast bright yellow sheet of metal supported as if magically at one corner so the vast bright yellow sheet of metal appeared to fl oat. I was struck: this is a great work of art. This is sublime!

– – –

I asked R. B. Kitaj what he thinks of Francis’ painting, and he wrote me, on many postcards, his favourite form of communicating:

For me, Bacon is not a great painter like Matisse or Picasso. He is a narrower talent, and he seems to have refused to draw, but from my perspective he is the best, most original and engaging painter . . . I cherish unusual paintings and, boy oh boy, are they rare and hard to achieve! Bacon keeps doing them . . . Of course it’s all a matter of taste, so I don’t wish to argue Bacon with those who are turned off by him, including brilliant friends of mine . . . But I do think he sings the song of himself. His pictures are every bit as elegant as the high American abstraction, but he engages his urbane nihilism to one’s one neurotic unease and achieved a psychological bloody pitch which almost always holds my attention.

– – –

A conversation with David Sylvester. He wondered if Yeats, great a poet as he was, failed to be the greatest because he lacked ‘helplessness.’ Nikos said that Yeats is limited because he is, however subtle, rhetorical – his poetry is constrained by its complicated intentions.

I said I wonder if this applied to Francis’ paintings, but with an essential difference: he himself is aware of the constraint of intention and tries, with more than will power, with passion, to go beyond intention and give his work ‘helplessness.’ I wondered if Francis in fact succeeds, if there is too much intention in his attempt to give himself up to the unintentional, even by throwing paint on the canvas then to work it into a figure. Nikos smiled and said nothing, but, as he always does, David looked at me for a very long time, and after a very long time he slowly, carefully said, ‘That is very interesting,’ as if he himself had not thought, among many, of such an obvious comment about the works of Francis Bacon.

When I think of ‘helplessness’ in writing, I think of Victor Shklovsky, who started out a novel with an intention but at the end he found he had written a novel completely different from what he had intended it to be, a novel that had occurred and expanded beyond his intention; so, when he started a new novel, he gave in helplessly to whatever novel would occur, that novel expanding as if on its own intentions beyond his, and he did this by writing whatever came to him, however seemingly disconnected, taking it on faith that everything in the end would connect, but not as he had thought. The unintended is truer than what is intended, because – and this I wonder at – what can’t be helped is truer than what can be helped, what is allowed to happen is truer than what one tries to make happen, what one gives in to is truer than what one imposes oneself upon.

But what is the unintended that expands on its own, to which the writer and the artist give themselves up helplessly? What expands beyond intention? What is it that we can only ever have a ‘sense’ of, can never give a rhetorical name to? What? We can’t say, but it is in us – it strains in us, it strains with a longing in us – to want to say what it is, to release it, to see it formed out there around us into – what? – a bright globe of everything, everything, everything all together held in that one great globe, is that all I can imagine of what it is?

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Author’s note: I interviewed Rosalind in my apartment in New York, in October, 2003, typed out the interview, then cut myself out and somewhat edited Rosalind’s responses to my questions, eliminating the hems and haws and tightening the syntax a little. As Rosalind is very articulate, this was no problem. Curiously, what I remember vividly of the interview is the way Rosalind gestured elegantly with her hands, her long fingernails clearly lacquered, sometimes delicately touching her cheek or lips with an index finger. I can’t recall which publication the interview was meant for.  DP

When I was a child, in Washington, D.C., I painted in a way a lot of children do. My parents took this very seriously and sent me to art school. My father was an attorney for the Department of Justice, which was down town right next to the National Gallery of Art, where he and I would have lunch together then go through the galleries. In the modern galleries, my father would make objections to the works and I would defend them.  I adopted a certain militancy, for I had to try to convince my father that these modern works of art were not phoney, that they were really important. This sharpened my desire to explain.

Also, I was introduced to the Phillips Collection, in the most wonderful 19^th century house.  This big house, generally empty of people, was filled with furniture and pictures.  Over the piano in the dining room was Renoir’s remarkable Luncheon of the Boaters, which was like sunlight in the room. Upstairs in the bedrooms was a collection of paintings by Klee, a lot of very beautiful Braque and late Cubist paintings, and I would sit on the nice carpets on the floors of these bedrooms and look at these works, completely enchanted by them.

Later, I tried to deal with the work of Mark Rothko hanging in the Phillips Collection.  I found the paintings very beautiful and at the same time very difficult.  I read all the critical literature, which was taking me nowhere until I came across a chapter of a wonderful book by Adrian Stokes in which he wrote about the difference between surface colour and film colour. It was very clear to me that film colour was a way of describing Rothko’s colour. I felt that Stokes was developing a very beautiful, very pertinent critical vocabulary.

As an undergraduate at Wellesley College, I studied art history, and I at first accepted that the way art history was taught accounted for or didn’t account for art. I became very aware of this accepted way of looking at art when I decided to do my senior thesis on the work of Willem de Kooning.  I realized that nothing I had been taught at Wellesley up until then had given me any kind of access to his work, which I thought very important. Access came to me with the just published book of Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, and in reading Art and Culture I began to understand what the vocabulary had to be in order to account for the power of De Kooning’s work. I understood that certain formulations of pictorial structure  — such as analytic cubism — are what later artists like De Kooning call on, and, like De Kooning, are essentially dependent upon.

When I went to Harvard as a graduate student, I was introduced to Clem and we became friends. My break with him was complicated. It was pretty much over the Vietnamese War. He was a big hawk on Vietnam and of course I was a dove. I found conversations with him increasingly painful because they were political, and his politics were very distasteful to me. What really did it was, in New York, where I went every month from Cambridge in order to review for Artforum where I was on the editoral board, I began to be very, very convinced about the work of Richard Serra, which Clem dismissed as he dismissed all of Minimalism.  I thought he was wrong. So we had a parting of the ways about contemporary work and about politics.

Everything I understood about sculpture had to do with the externalisation of an internal armature that is put into stress by the relationship of weight and gravity, with the internal armature that resists weight and gravity, and that’s what I saw in Serra’s work. In fact, I saw his work as hooking itself onto the most important traditions of Renaissance sculpture. I thought Clem’s hostility to it was just not appropriate, not for me.

I think he was hostile to the work because its materiality offended him. Clem’s whole relationship to art was incredibly teleological. His idea was that art had to end up in a certain place, and if it didn’t contribute to that trajectory then he dismissed it. The extreme materiality of Serra’s work, I think, transgressed Clem’s notion that sculpture was moving increasingly toward what he called opticality—to a kind of diaphanous quality, which he found in the work of David Smith.

My first book was on David Smith. At Harvard, I was worried about what I was going to do my dissertation on because I was married to a former husband and because it was complicated for me to go to Europe to work on a European subject.  I woke up one morning to the clock radio announcing that a sculptor had been killed in Bennington, Vermont. I was very upset because I thought that must have been Tony Caro who lived in Bennington, but I heard it was David Smith who had died and I jumped out of bed thinking, ‘Gee, I have my dissertation topic—an American sculptor I can work with it’. So that was it – pure opportunism. I finished it. It was published. Clem, who was an executor of the Smith estate, liked it, though I don’t have the same teleological vision that Clem had.

I think what I’m more interested in is stumbling on work that for one reason or another I recognise as genuine and then I try to understand where it comes from and what it is that secures the notion of it as authentic.  I don’t think there’s a development in my work because I’m very opportunistic in terms of the kinds of arguments that seem to me to be helpful to demonstrate whatever it is I’m trying to demonstrate, so if there are gaps I don’t really care. Each individual artist presents to me a different problem. When I became convinced about the importance of the work of William Kentridge, I took his work as a very special problem.

At the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, called MACBA, where I was doing some work, there was an exhibition of the work of William Kentridge.  I had seen one of Kentridge’s films before but not enough to have a kind of collective sense of the real ambition and importance of his work. Over the course of the four or five days that I spent at the museum, I looked at his work every day, and I left feeling that I had discovered another major artist. The question for me was, how do I explain to other people – most primitively, I guess, my father – why Kentridge is a really important artist, why his work is the genuine article?  Stanley Cavell, the philosopher, says that the problem of modern art is a problem of fraudulence. The traditional way of rejecting the avant garde was for the audience to get up and shout ‘phoney, fraud, fake, this isn’t the real thing’ and storm out, which was of course what my father would say when we were in the National Gallery. So the problem the critic has is how to convince the viewer who’s saying ‘phoney, fake, inauthentic’ that the work is authentic, that this is the real thing, that here is a real example of what art is.

I believed that the work of the Irish artist James Coleman is the real thing when I saw it. Outraged people weren’t saying ‘fake and phoney’, but the critical arguments for the work were themselves, I felt, fake and phoney. The defence of the work was made on grounds that I thought were irrelevant to the interest of the work. The grounds were national identity, the construction of identity, all this constructionalist stuff, which I thought had nothing to do with the work. What had to do with the work was the fact that he had essentially invented a medium. He invented a medium as the technical support for the work. Oil and canvas are a technical support. The armature and clay plaster of the sculpture are another technical support. Greenberg’s position on Modernist painting is that a work of art essentially secures its meaning by specifying its medium and by essentially securing something new about the nature of the medium, and this seems to me to be irrefutable. In most work that we know and respect, particularly abstract art which has broken all kinds of links with the observed world, and which could be said to be about the nature of the medium itself– the two dimensional canvas, the colours, the drawing, the frame of the canvas—the medium is absolutely essential – is crucial — in terms of my appreciation of a work of art.  This appreciation really comes from my relation to Clem, because one of Clem’s most important essays is called Modernist Painting, in which he writes that in Modernism the work of art has to secure itself by demonstrating the nature of its medium. The issue of the medium was thoroughly inbred to his idea of art, was made absolutely central to the possibility of the work meaning anything at all.  I think anything can be a work of art, but only if that thing has been worked on in such a way that it becomes a technical support, in other words a medium. You have to keep working on it. A medium is a little bit like a language—you can’t just speak it once, it is repeated. The way that an artist secures the nature of his support as a medium is to continue to work at it, repeating it. The repetition is very important. This became clear to me seeing the work of James Coleman, who has invented a medium because the slide tape, which is the technical support for his work, is repeated over and over and over again.

Yet, I have to say I hate the medium of printmaking.  The only artist I can think of who is an interesting printmaker is Ellsworth Kelly; otherwise I think that prints have nothing to do with Modernism and therefore I’m not interested in them as a medium. Other forms of reproducibility interest me, like photography and various decorative arts. Photography has a certain distance from Modernism, which creates an interesting tension between the two. In my book L’Amour Fou, about photography, I found it paradoxical that Surrealism, which we think of as courting states of psychological indeterminacy such as dreaming or whatever form the unconscious takes to manifest itself, should be celebrated in the very mechanical medium of photography. It was the paradox of the Surrealists acceptance of photography that interested me. I seem to be attracted to paradoxical conditions in art. Salvador Dalí is one example of a Surrealist working in the medium of photography. Miró is another one. And there is a deeper paradox in Miró. Everybody thinks of his work as childish, or childlike and comical, but I think of it as violent and sexual, which is not at all the popular conception of Miró. When I was analysing surrealist photography, it seemed to me that those photographers were attracted to strategies for undermining categories, so, for instance, in the Man Ray photographs of hats the categories of male and female are undermined. The condition of the formless, which is to say the collapse of oppositional categories, is the basis of my analysis of surrealist photography. But as I began to move from area to area where the collapse of categories was important, form became important, emerged as a major resource, intellectual resource, conceptual resource.

I don’t really like video very much. I don’t know any video work that I find interesting. William Kentridge works in film, not video. I think my most instinctive connection is with painting, and I also I think I’m very instinctive to sculpture, but I’ve had a very long and intense experience of film. At a certain point in the late sixties,  I decided I wanted to teach film, so I had to teach myself the history of film. I was in Paris one summer and every day I went to the Cinémathèque and tried to experience the whole history of film. The kind of film that particularly interested me was American independent cinema, Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, all these people. When I moved to New York to teach at Princeton, the first subject I taught was American independent film. This interest took me to the anthology film archives in New York, where I went every night.  There would be Richard Serra and Bob Smithson and Carl Andre and all of these American artists watching the cycle go around and around and around all over again.  This gave me an instinctive connection to their work.

I hate installation art, and my hatred energises me in relation to the book I’m now writing on the medium. I just hate it. I think it’s pandering, like belly dancers shaking their stuff and trying to seduce the viewer. I find it utterly meretricious. I especially hate the installations of Louise Bourgeois, a not very interesting artist who has been hyped up partly because she’s an old lady. So irritated by the endless, what seemed to be completely trumped up, exhibitions of this or that person’s installation,  I  decided that it was important to polemicize against these by making the medium, as I’ve said, crucial to the work of art. Installation art professes a contempt for painting, but nonetheless embodies the pictorial within its space. I think of an essay by Jacques Lacan, Seminar on the Purloined Letter, about the Poe story “The Purloined Letter,” in which a letter to a queen stolen by a minister ends up with the detective Dupin, each one of whom becomes effeminised or castrated, so passive that each one allows herself or himself to be the victim of a theft. Lacan’s argument is that the letter is the signifier of effeminacy and castration, and as it circulates among the various figures they each become the subject of that signifier and are marked by it.  The parallel with installation art that does interest me to argue against is that each of the installation artists, like Rebecca Horn or Jessica Stockholder, becomes marked by the very thing they wish to repress, namely painting, so in a sense they become the subject of (subjected to) painting. There seems to me to be a certain strange paradox in installation art in that it continues to refer to painting.

Why I don’t like conceptual art is because it is pretty simple-minded in condemning the medium, the specificity of the medium.

After my first book, my dissertation on David Smith, was published, I decided that all the essays that I had been publishing in magazines should be anthologized, but it was very hard for me to get a publisher to agree to this. I guess they thought, who was I?  it would never sell. Finally MIT Press agreed to publish it:  The Originality of the Avant Garde. At MIT I had taught a course on sculpture, and it seemed to me that the critical vocabulary in relationship to sculpture was very underdeveloped and that it would be worth writing a book, which would address the history of 20th century sculpture. My books take up the various gaps in the discourse on contemporary art that I encounter from time to time.

I sometimes use diagrams in my writing. It amuses me to use them because people – especially students – freak out when they see diagrams and think they can’t understand, and artists think seeing art in terms of diagrams is a gas. When I was learning about structuralism I got very turned on by the diagrams. I thought it was amazing that you could say something true about the history of something with something as static and two-dimensional as a diagram.  I learned all of this from Fred Jameson’s book The Political Unconscious, in which he uses diagrams.  I thought this remarkable, and, trying to imitate him, I found diagrams incredibly satisfying. They are not, the diagrams, about a given work, but more about how to understand something as seemingly complex as deconstruction. It is possible to understand that through a diagram. In my book The Optical Unconscious, I tried to show Modernism through diagrams.  In this case, Mondrian’s was the specific work. I tried to show Modernism’s withdrawal from the world, from the political/ historical context, into a state of art for art’s sake. That seemed to me to be something that the frame of the diagram captures and in a way I felt that it was interesting that the diagram could stand for various very important aspects of the modernist situation, that it could withdraw into the sanctified ground of the work of art, and also such issues as the importance of formal conditions like figure ground relations.

After my aneurism, which washed away synapses of my brain in blood, I went to sessions of cognitive therapy, where I was taught about memory. Essentially, what I was told was that “if you can remember who you are you can teach yourself to remember anything!” the “who you are” is a kind of scaffolding onto which bits of new information can be attached or to which they can be associated. So, for instance, they used flash cards to teach me, and sometimes the flash cards had little drawings, one, that I remembered showed a tennis player and a zipper – tennis player and a zipper, why? Because I play tennis, I know that as a tennis player you never wear clothes with a zipper. Once I’d made this connection with my own experience, boom, I was able to identify the things on the flash card. This connection led to the title of my book, Under Blue Cup, (2011) which didn’t come from a drawing on a flash card, but from a disconnected bit of text. My husband, Denis Hollier, every morning brought to the hospital my breakfast—coffee and a little sweet roll from a coffee shop he passed called A Kind of Blue, and knowing this made it easy for me to think of the title, Under Blue Cup. The subject of Under Blue Cup is the medium, the specificity of a work of art in terms of its medium.

I don’t think you can understand Malevich’s White on White painting without seeing the degree to which the specificity of the canvas and the specificity of the frame are paramount to him. Malevich is an artist for whom the specificity of painting is primary. It seems to be obvious.

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