Sunday, July 24, 2011

Three Versions Of The Self

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Bas Jan Ader, I'm too sad to tell you, 1970




"I go my lonely way along paths that no one has made for me."

                                                                              - Michelangelo


"Why have we kept our own names ? Out of habit, purely out
of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render
imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think.
Also because its nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun
rises, when everybody knows its only a manner of speaking.
To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point
where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are
no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided,
inspired, multiplied.
                                                                          - Deleuze & Guattari


"This moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do
rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content
of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has
no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object
of our love or allegiance or, as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in her work,
as the privileged focus of attention or will."

                                                                            - Charles Taylor


It was inevitably the case, until very recently, that monographs took
a chronological or narrative form, tracking the development of
a body of work to the course of an artist's life. Change was
understood as occurring within a sense of self or oeuvre that
could be recognized across the changes.

Contemporary practice rejects such continuity as illusory and instead
works from a Deleuzean or post-modernist model of the multiple self,
different in all its moments. Don't expect work from one show to bear
any resemblance to work from the last show or the next. In this
version, ideas arrive (often fully developed) in the breaks in
self-recognition, out of a personal or professional ascesis, from
a prompting of the surrounding culture, or in answer to an impulse
of desire.

Neither of these models seems to fit artists who endlessly produce
the same. Perhaps for them the self is emergent: they will be the
person who will keep their promise, who will carry out a practice,
who will get the work done. In this case, the whole question of a self
may be postponed, in attention to a task at hand.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Opalka: towards white on white

In September 1973 Opalka completed a Detail in which he ‘crossed the million’ – as he phrased it in a telegram to a collector. It had taken him eight years, and he was now 42 years old.

In 1972, the year before, he decided to modify his commitment to retaining an absolute consistency in his canvases in one important way.

He planned to alter the dark grey background on which he had been painting his numbers, ‘to make each subsequent painting about 1% lighter than the one before it’. It is also apparent that with the passing years the portrait photographs he takes of himself are becoming increasingly lighter.




Opalka envisages the day when, in his Details, figure and ground will merge completely, and he will be applying white on white, so that the numbers become entirely invisible. At that moment, the only lasting documentation of the artist’s activity would be the audio recording of him counting out the digits as he proceeds up the number continuum.

It is clear that the whitening of the canvases is intended as a visual correlative to numerical progression. If a range of his Details were arranged sequentially, a viewer would perceive at a distance a gradual, controlled bleaching of the paintings – only accentuating the continuity of the project from decade to decade.

Opalka explained that he came to this decision to modify the colour of his backgrounds after having reflecting on how many Details he would be able to produce over the course of his life: he calculated this, apparently, based on the life expectancy of an average European. We can surmise then that he estimated he would be approaching white on white at a stage extremely late in his life.

In a similar way as Achilles will never get ahead of the tortoise in Zeno’s famous paradox, it is physically impossible for Opalka ever to attain a pure background by adding a little more lighter paint to his grey mix. In perceptual terms, however, he is now noticeably near to painting on a white background.






Opalka will be eighty this year, and it is hard not to analogize the paleness of his canvases to the whiteness of the hair in the accompanying photographs, which are now very light and over-exposed. Yet the whitening might also be perceived as symbolic of a gradual reaching towards infinity in an absolute sense.

Opalka’s art seems to constantly invoke the ideal of infinity as completion, enlightenment, wholeness – as something superior than what Hegel would call a ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ infinity (just one thing after another, going on for ever). The prospect of attaining this state is the constant underlying drama underscoring Opalka’s relentless progression. 

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Opalka's consistency


Opalka's studio in 1972, indicating the camera and lamp positions 
he uses for photographing himself

Opalka is conscious that his program needs to retain an exceptionally high level of consistency. The canvases must remain the same size (195 x 135cm), the lines of numbers must stay straight and not vary in height, his black-and-white self-portrait photographs (shot at the end of the day when the painting is concluded for the evening) must be taken always against a white backdrop under the same lighting conditions, with the same expressionless frontal gaze, and so on. Only if he strives to keep his project utterly consistent, and consciously works to constrain any differences, however slight, will tiny, involuntary variations gradually become apparent. These little variations and differences might merely register the contingencies of everyday life, such as a pause to answer the phone, or a momentary slip of concentration, or whatever. Or, they reflect his inevitably aging bodily facilities.

Opalka's final painting

Opalka once called himself an “accountant of irreversible time” and it is hard to think of another artist who is more preoccupied with his own mortality.

“When will the life-work conclude?” – the artist was once asked.

“Your question concerns my last Detail, the biggest suspense of my life-work…. The last conclusion will be what the ponderous painting of the first sign of “1” started at the easel of the first Detail.”

It is clear that Opalka’s thoughts have turned on many occasions to the last painting he will ever produce, when the gradual progression of numbers will reach an abrupt halt.

In 1987 he spoke of his wish not to die in a pause between finishing one work and commencing the next, but mid-way through a canvas: “I never finish a given Detail without starting another as quickly as possible: I thereby reduce the risk of seeing my life draw to an end at the end of a given Detail, rather than putting an end to my work by ceasing to be.”

In 2004 he told his interviewer that he believed that since he would be continuing his project for the full duration of his life, death was “included in the conception of this program.” “It’s rather as if death was collaborating with the work”, he adds. “For the first time in the history of painting, an unfinished painting defines the absolute finished painting.” 

Opalka's Statement of Intent, 1972

In 1972, Roman Opalka wrote out a statement by hand, which has been reproduced countless times in exhibition catalogues. Translated into English it reads:

"In my approach, which is a life-long program, progression registers the process of work, documents and defines time. There is only one date, that of the coming to life of the first detail of the idea of progressive counting.
Each successive detail is one element of the whole. It is designated with the date of the first and last number in the given detail. I count progressively from 1 towards infinity on details of the same size (with the exception of 'travel sheets'), by hand, using a brush and white paint on a grey background, assuming that the backdrop of each following detail will be 1% fainter than that of the preceding one. As a consequence, I envisage my reaching the limit, where details will be counted in white over whiteness.
Each detail is supplemented by a phonetic recording on an audio tape and by photographs of my face."

A decent reproduction of a section of Opalka's first Detail (1-35327), currently in the Sztuki Museum in Lodz, is included in the French catalogue published by Flammarion in 1992.



Unfortunately the picture is cropped on the left hand side, so you can't quite make out Opalka's initial number 1, but this is still a useful illustration:


By 2010, Opalka had completed 233 canvases, and had reached the number 5600000.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Adrian Piper
















What Will Become of Me (December 1, 1985-on. Ongoing
installation: Hair, skin and nails collected in honey jars)

"1985 was a bad year. My father had been diagnosed with cancer
of the pharynx the previous fall. My marriage began to fall apart
in January. I sought counselling to help my mother deal with my
father's illness. My father died in April. In June I received my
senior colleagues' yearly evaluation of my philosophical work,
which they had written up after consulting a university lawyer
about how to deny me tenure without incurring a lawsuit. In it they
described my work as 'incoherent,' 'inadequate' and 'defective,'
and me personally as 'baffling,' 'frustrating,' and 'unresponsive'
(albeit 'poised'). During the following summer and fall, my marriage
deteriorated further. By the time I was denied tenure in mid-
December, my husband and I had not been on speaking terms
for weeks.

I felt sure that if I could just hold myself together for long enough
to escape from Ann Arbor, I'd be alright."

                                                                    - Adrian Piper


Cuttings will continue to be collected in honey jars up to
the artist's death, when her ashes will complete the series.



Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Broken Clock




















One Hour Sun Drawing, Roger Ackling 1976


Roger Ackling burns marks on wood or card, using a small lens
to focus the sun's rays. This is a complete description. Although
the works have changed over the years, becoming more or less
complex, insisting on their own particularity or more modestly
contributing to a larger installation, the moment of focus, of
attention to making, does not change. It is returned to again
and again.

Making is a means of eliciting this quality of attention, in a moment
without qualities, out of time. While early works marked duration
in obedience to a concept ('One Hour Sun Drawing' or 'cloud
drawings' in which the marks were dictated by the coming or going
of the sun), once the moment of making was discovered, the concept
could be dropped. The intentionality of the idea is a poor indicator of
the timeless. Its content is a diversion.

For all their charisma and apparent self-sufficiency, Ackling's works
are little more substantial than the smoke given off by burning. They
exist as a residue or evidence of the focused moment of their making.
This is an art that is all practice.





















Broken Clock, Roger Ackling, 1990

Monday, May 2, 2011

The Ordinary As Chosen




















Martin Creed, Work No 885, 2008, Acrylic on canvas

Dean Hughes describes Martin Creed's Work No.885, 2008 as
"a canvas composed of 20 brush marks made with 20 brushes
of diminishing, or increasing size, depending on one's willingness
to acclimatise to issues of scale."

"This sensibility of repetition within Creed's artwork is always
paired with a commitment to the ordinary. As a type of sensory
experience the ordinary is simple yet seemingly rich and complex.
Hum drum, quotidian, everyday, boring, malaise, normal, usual,
regular, common, mundane, all quite effectively locate the ordinary
as something closed and understandable whilst extending its
resonance by inflection."

The repetition that Creed sets up within a single work may be
established by other artists across a whole body of work, or as
an everyday practice, lasting a lifetime. Contrary to what one might
expect, this opens up a space of freedom, since the ordinary is no
longer something merely given and accepted but an area of operation
chosen and maintained.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Weather




















Alan Charlton, Inverleith House, Edinburgh 2002


Along the single road, it seems that the weather
is often grey. There are the grey paintings of Alan
Charlton, Opalka's white on grey, Kawara's predominantly
dark grey date paintings. The early photographs of Hamish
Fulton avoided the black and white contrasts of the period
for a range of soft tones.

Perhaps this is what Roland Barthes refers to as The Neutral,
a preference for the nuance over choice and conflict, a
"refusal of pure discourse of opposition".

Grey may be a prolonged hesitation before the possibility
of colour. Like a Taoist practice, Barthes' Neutral is a way
"to dissolve one's own image." In his book "In Praise
of Blandness", Francois Julien attempts a recuperation
of this term as aesthetic and ethical neutrality: "Blandness
should be our dominant character trait, since it alone allows
an individual to possess all aptitudes equally and to bring
the appropriate faculty into play when needed."

Whatever else it might be, this fondness for mist and smoke
is a mode of minimalist reduction, an exclusion of the inessential,
a means of letting appear that which appears. Perhaps too, on
the eve of a new art, some artists needed a veil or delay to
prepare themselves for the pure transparency of the concept.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Emese Benczur


Emese Benczúr, Should I live to be a Hundred, 1988- (ongoing). Cotton.


'A similarly nuanced relationship to time is evident in Emese Benczúr's work Should I Live to Be a Hundred: in 1998 she ordered thirty-eight rolls of clothing labels machine-embroidered with the words "day by day". She then commenced sewing below this inscription the words "I think about the future", pledging to repeat the sewing of this phrase each day for the rest of her life. There are, of course, major precedents and inspirations: On Kawara's Today series, Roman Opałka's 1965/1 -  series, for example. Artists working in this way share a certain quality of integration with everyday currents, an integrative atemporality - quiet, slow, unobtrusive yet committed, insistent, and independent - that is the ground zero of the ways in which contemporary artists approach the strangeness of their time.'


(from Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, Chapter 11, 'Taking Time...')

Monday, April 11, 2011

World Minimal Music Festival, Amsterdam, 30 March - 2 April 2011




As part of the 2011 World Minimal Music Festival in Amsterdam, the conductor and director Reinbert de Leeuw performs La Monte Young's 1961 piece, 461 for Henry Flynt. The work consists of the repetition of a sound, with the number of sounds being determined by the performer. For this particular occasion, de Leeuw selects the prime number 461.

He sits down in front of the grand piano installed on the stage in the auditorium at the Muziekgebouw. He focuses. Pause. The audience listens.

He clasps his forearms together as though he is about to support a great weight, and carefully but powerfully brings them down across the keys of the piano. The reverberating clash of notes is absorbed by the architecture - by the wood panelled walls, the seats, the stairs, the audience.

Another thunderous impact of sound ... then another.

Sometimes de Leeuw's head shakes as his arms make contact with the piano, sometimes not. As his arm and body position shifts, different notes colour the sound cluster. 


Friday, April 8, 2011

Roger Ackling




















sun
.
lens
..
wood
...
time
....
burn
.....

The terms of this work are sunlight on wood. The medium
is sunlight focused through a glass lens, the material small
fragments of wood reclaimed from beaches. As minutes
accrue from successive seconds, burnt dots accrue into
lines. The work happens in a mean space between the
properties of wood and the impression of the burn.

There are traces of previous use in the wood (drilled
holes, nails, paint, machined shapes), the pieces vary
in size but all could be held in the hand. The lines give
an account of the objects whilst marking the time of
their making. We are reminded that history does not
offer evidence of the past but the story of the past
told today.

- David Bellingham

Monday, March 21, 2011

In The Affirmative

No development
No composition
No judgement
No invention
No re-invention
No struggle
No lacunae
No style
No skill
No signature

These redundancies are entirely positive in effect,
involving no effort of negation.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Invariance

This entry is an attempt to clarify further some terms.

It seems important to appreciate that there are two different types of ‘invariance’ – one spatial, and one temporal.


Eadweard Muybridge
Vernal Falls, Valley of Yosemite, 1872
albumen print

Let’s focus first on constancy over time. How do we identify this in everyday life? We learn to distinguish the enduring state or identity of a thing from the flux of its surroundings. We ‘see’ permanence only in relation to mutability and change.

When Eadweard Muybridge photographs a waterfall in Yosemite his camera records the virtual volume of water occupied over the time interval of the exposure, generating a strange, ghostly image that is decidedly different from the way the waterfall would appear if seen with the naked eye. 


Thanks to photographers such as Muybridge, this type of blurring of the image has become a photographic convention for representing physical motion. We look at this photograph and we recognize the shape formed by the cascade of water as an ‘invariant’. But at the same time – even simultaneously – we see disturbance, flux and flow.

The recognition of temporal persistence is always a process of evaluating between what we see now, and some other moment in the past – one recalled from memory. Each fresh glimpse of anything is only recognizable to us when we can connect it mentally to ‘that’ thing, rather than ‘another’ thing. In other words, when we can say ‘I’ve seen that before’.

This is how we discriminate invariants over time. But identifying invariants over entities is different. To apprehend and acknowledge this we have to abstract a concept, or a standard, from a range of concrete percepts. When we are talking of invariants in this sense, we are really speaking about similarities.



In the case of artists such as On Karawa or Roman Opalka, viewers are invited to recognize instantly the recurring format, and to acknowledge the invariants over their extended series of paintings. 

But that's not all (and this is why the term 'seriality' is not wholly adequate on its own to describe this type of art practice). This is because in their art, spatial invariance is not there purely for the sake of mere appearance. It is to be seen as deriving from another, even more profound level of continuity, namely invariance over time.

Monday, March 14, 2011

La Monte Young

The American composer La Monte Young grew up in
a log cabin in Idaho listening to the howling of the wind.

Unlike the other minimalist composers with whom he is
often associated, Young's music does not evolve by means
of repetitive motifs. It lingers on sustained tones. In one of
his best known pieces, Composition 1960 No 7, the interval
of a fifth is "to be held for a long time". Harmonics hang
in the air while time is suspended in the drone.

"The Theatre of the Singular Event" and "The Theatre
of Eternal Music" were two of La Monte Young's inventions.
Melody disappears: for Young, influenced by Indian music
and philosophy, the singular is always a moment within
the unchanging, freedom a possibility of necessity.

"Once this so-called drone-state-of-mind is established,
the mind should be able to embark on very special
explorations and in new directions, because it will
always have a fixed point of reference to come back to,
to relate to; it could perhaps go further into more complex
types of refined relationships than it can in the ordinary state."















La Monte Young, Pandit Pran Nath, Marian Zazeela

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Artistic development

For perfectly good reasons, many artists prefer not to describe their work in terms of ‘artistic development’. They would explain that their practice is informed by conditions, or circumstances, or interests external to the realm of art, and that their work was always a response to a situation, or a certain agenda …or whatever. Arranging all their artworks chronologically – one after the other – would undoubtedly demonstrate ‘development’, but any signs of progression would probably tell you only of the shifting interests and commitments of the artist. As for the work itself, this might well display no formal or stylistic continuity at all. Hans Haacke would be a good example of this particular approach.

It is much more meaningful to speak of ‘artistic development’ when you are discussing a painter such as Piet Mondrian. Most scholars of his work stress that even though he reduces his painterly vocabulary to just the primaries, and although he insists on working simply with horizontal and vertical lines, it is still possible to speak of him refining and developing his work. Each canvas could be said to be an assimilation of lessons gleaned from a previous work, so that his art in its entirety demonstrates the overall advancement of his approach.






















Barnett Newman occupies an interesting position in any discussion relating to artistic development. Every student of Abstract Expressionism knows the artist’s ‘conversion’ story as recounted by Tom Hess:

On his birthday, January 29, 1948, [Newman] prepared a small canvas with a surface of cadmium red dark, … and fixed a piece of tape down the center. Then he quickly smeared a coat of cadmium red light over the tape, to test the color. He looked at the picture for a long time. Indeed he studied it for some eight months. He had finished questing. 





















Barnett Newman, Onement, I (1948) 
oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas, 69.2 x 41.2 cm


He had found an essential form (we are let to believe) that he reiterated for the rest of his life: it consisted of a colour field, intersected by a ‘zip’. Newman’s ‘zip’ paintings are impressively diverse. However, in contrast to Mondrian, art historians have been very hesitant in claiming that they can identify ‘artistic development’ in his mature work. Instead, they have felt that the differences between the canvases do not relate to any synthesis of previous works, nor do they evidence any radical re-appraisal on his part of his initial ‘conversion’. In other words, the differences between canvases provides no substantial indication that he is encountering and solving artistic problems based on his previous experiences as a painter.

Art historians justify their reticence in speaking of serial development in relation to Newman by appealing to the artist’s own intentions. Newman was insistent that he commenced each work as though he had never before picked up a paint brush. For him, each fresh blank canvas had to be approached as if he were painting for the very first time. He never wanted to be understood as someone who merely illustrated a preconceived idea, or just worked up some pre-existing design.

His adamance is easily queried. All the same it would be a misrepresentation of Newman to suggest that simply because his work displayed little evidence of serial development he was repeating one single practice over the course of a lifetime. In his mind, he was reinventing himself with every painting he completed.

Unlike Newman, the artists associated with this project are clear what their next work will be like. It continues a trajectory they have already established. Their art does not demonstrate ‘artistic development’. It consists of variables within a set of preordained parameters.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Hamish Fulton


















                                                                                                                                                                            
How we read an artist's work is often the consequence
of where we place it, in which readily-available, art-historical
category. For instance, if we assign Hamish Fulton's work to
the plausible category of Land Art, a certain content comes to
the fore: the artist's environmental concerns, his ethic of minimal
intervention, the references to and respect for native cultures.

Things look a little different if we take Fulton to be a conceptual
artist having one idea - that a walk can be a work of art. In this
case, Fulton's different interests and concerns may be read as
discoveries yielded by this first intuition. The variety of forms
the work takes, the photographs, wall texts, books and notebooks
exist as documentation leading back to the fading and irrecoverable
experience of the walk.

Hamish Fulton began to make art from walking in the late 60s,
when minimal, conceptual and land art practices were still fluid
and interchangable, in a moment of possibility before attitudes
hardened into form.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Introduction 3


Ad Reinhardt in his studio in 1966


It is important to be clear about what could be considered a single artistic practice, or an ongoing piece. After all, any modernist artists have developed a unique, signature style that has remained relatively consistent over a significant period of time, and still more artists would define their work as single-mindedly pursuing a very distinct field. But we are concerned with artists who have been explicit in declaring that any future art they make will conform to a set of designated criteria.

For instance, this excludes painters such as Agnes Martin - in spite of the fact that her mature work retains a remarkable formal consistency. This is because Martin never insisted that her art must include the formal elements that it does; hypothetically at least, it is possible that, had she had lived longer, she could have gone on to paint quite differently. For just this reason, her identity as a painter cannot be said to be reliant on any particular self-imposed conventions that would govern the appearance of her future art.





Likewise, a painter such as Robert Ryman has been very consistent in his approach over an equally long period of time. He has dedicated his career to exploring the fundamentals of painting as a medium, and it is this that seems to be his primary concern. In fact this, arguably, supersede any personal rules that he has established for his art.





It seems that artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Daniel Buren, Andre Cadere, Alan Charlton, Bernd and Hilla Becher, The Boyle Family, Roman Opalka, or On Kawara have adopted a different model for structuring their artistic output. They have defined in advance the nature of all their future art, and they seem committed to remaining 'true' to these rules over the course of a lifetime.



Ad Reinhardt, 'Black Paintings', 1966
Jewish Museum, New York


It is not the self-imposition of rules alone that interests us. Sol LeWitt is the artist most closely associated with this position, yet the prescriptions that define the nature of his art are specific to each separate work that he makes.


Clearly, the motivation of the artists in this category is varied, and these artist do not display the same level of consistency. Maybe, for instance, we shall need to retain a subsection for artists who have produced many different kinds of art, but who, nonetheless, have kept up a single, ongoing project.

One example that comes to mind is Douglas Huebler. In the early 1970s, he commenced his Variable Piece # 70, a work that consisted of an exceptionally long-term undertaking: it was to document photographically the existence of everyone alive.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Roman Opalka





















Roman Opalka with 1965/1-Infinity
Detail 2910060 - 2932295
acrylic on linen, Caldic Collection, Rotterdam





















detail of 1965/1-Infinity, Caldic Collection, Rotterdam


In 1965, Roman Opalka painted the number 1, in white
on a black ground, in the top left-hand corner of a new
canvas, initiating a numerical series that might continue
to infinity but for the inevitable mortality of the artist.

All the Infinity Paintings are the same size, 196 X 135cm.
A new canvas takes up the count where the last left off.
With each succeeding painting, one percent white paint
is stirred into the ground, giving a gradual lightening
until Opalka will eventually be painting white on white.

As he works on a painting, Opalka's voice is recorded
reciting the numbers in his native Polish. When each painting
is complete, a photograph is taken of his face.

In all of contemporary art, Roman Opalka's 1965/1-Infinity
is perhaps the most impressive instance of a life-long
commitment to one project.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Ad Reinhardt



There is just one art.
There is just one museum of fine art.
There is just one art history, one art evolution, one art progress.
There is just one aesthetics, just one art idea, one art meaning, one ART principle, one art force.
There is just one truth in art, just one form, one secrecy.

There is just one artist always.
There is just the artist in the artist as the artist-as-artist.
There is just the one art process, the one art invention, the one art discovery, the one art routine.
There is just the one art-work, just the one art-working, 
just one art non-working, just one ritual, one attention.

There is just one side, one way, one freedom.
There is just one edge, one framework, one ground, one existence, one fabric, one focus.
There is just one problem, one task, one obligation, one struggle, one victory, one discipline.
There is just one negation, one value, one symmetry, one monochrome, 
one touch, one energy, one shape.

There is just one method, one manner, one interlace, one overall, one overlap, 
one order, one rule, one thought, one spontaneity.
There is just one shape, one square, one execution, one transcendence.
There is just one materiality, one density, one presence, one absence, one disembodiment.
There is just one simplicity, one complexity, one spirituality, one uselessness, one meaninglessness.
There is just one statement, one technique, one texture, one importance, one silence, one texturelessness.
There is just one reason, one means, one emptiness, one irreducibility, one END.

There is just one art-morality, just one art-immorality, one art-enemy, 
one ART-indignity, one ART-punishment, one ART-crime, one ART-danger,
one ART-conscience, one ART-guilt, one ART-virtue, one ART-reward.

There is just one art, one artlessness, one painting, one painterlilessness, one effortlessness. 
There is one difference, one sameness, one consciousnessness, one nothingness, one rightness,
one indivisibility, one diversity, one essence, one finess.
There is just one thing to be said, just one thing that cannot be said...

There is just one painting everytime.
There is just one direction, one directionlessness, one form, one formlessness, 
one formula, one formulalessness, one formulation.
There is just one image, one imagelessness, one plane, one depth, one flatness, one color, one colorlessness, one light, one space, one time.

There is just one repetition, one destruction, one construction, one dissolution, 
one evanescence, one abstraction, one rhythm.
There is just one qualitylessness, one object, one subject.
There is just one style, one stylelessness, one matter, one sequence, one series, 
one conviction, one tradition.
There is just one participation, one perception, one invisibility, one insight.

    Ad Reinhardt, Poor Old Tired Horse, no. 18 (no date)