I would imagine all painters, writers and film-makers generate their greatest enthusiasms for what they are presently working on. If that was not so, then surely something must be wrong. But, after many years painting, writing and making films, all new work inevitably looks back as well as looks forward. So to write about current preoccupations must be to consider past practice and interest. I will now hope to do that.
I have quite recently embarked on a large series of paintings which, as a collection, will probably be called simply 92. The atomic number of uranium is ninety-two. The series may take me a long time. I suspect every painting will not exceed two metres along its greatest length, and will probably be painted with acrylic paint on untreated hardboard, though in some cases, where I hope to attach hooks and bolts and other sundry items, the paintings may be painted on a thicker backing, perhaps plywood or blockboard. The backing is untreated. The hardboard might sometimes be given a wash with water, or maybe even a sanding with sandpaper - but can you really call such activity, "treatment". The days are gone when you had to prepare a surface with exotic materials like lime-wash and egg-white and gum arabic, a curious activity and practice, and one I have occasionally attempted to interpret in my own way, but I am not in this instance so interested in the material substance of the backing; it is, in this project, though not necessarily in others, only a surface to attach paint. But there again the paint might be stiffened with both natural and alien substances, and lime-wash and egg-white and gum arabic might, in the circumstances, be alien substances. So too might be coal-dust and shoe-polish and paraffin-wax. The surface should of course be reliable. I have used hardboard often enough to know it is reliable. I am sure, given reasonable circumstances, it will last ninety-two years.
Almost certainly the majority of the paintings in this series, if not all of them, will be rectangular, and to find some idea of conformity, at least one side of every painting will have a common length with all the others. If I depart from the rectangular, it will certainly not be to make an irregular shape. The exceptions to the rectangular will be perfect circles. Here already are two interesting mathematical givens, one, the number ninety-two is a universal constancy in that uranium anywhere and always in the universe has the atomic number ninety-two, and the other that every painting will have a geometrical constancy at least along one edge. I enjoy such disciplines, though the ubiquity of the rectangle needs thinking about; it gave rise to the idea of the rectangular frame which can indeed be a prison. For this project I am not adverse to using the prison of the frame, or indeed the prison of the rectangle. Indeed it will be used as a desirable necessity so much so that the rectangle's edges will often be consciously emphasised. Certainly I hope to paint around the painting's edge to make indeed the painting be perceived as an object. The idea of using the rectangular frame like a window to see through towards a view is not particularly of interest to me in general, either in painting, or indeed in the cinema - though that might sound extremely paradoxical considering the way we have made cinema in the last 105 years.
From this optimistic position, at the start of things, I think there will be little, if any, use of orthodox illusionism in this series.
I have already noticed how I qualify most statements. Despite firm convictions of how to proceed, nonetheless I should be sensible, on the principle of never say never. I should convince myself that the unexpected should not be barred. After all the unexpected is what I am always looking for. Keep conviction but avoid dogma.
I know that the prime reason for the overall size of the paintings measuring under two metres is solely to make the paintings manageable. I have no ambitions in this project to make any comment or investigation into scale, or any purely optical or retinal excitements, though, curiously, having said that, I know that some of the content of the series will make reference to largeness, to open featureless visual spaces, indeed to what can be called deserts, metaphorical and literal, and curiously to that most false illusion of all, the desert's particular curiosity, the mirage. Consideration of the mirage could be said to be merely a retinal phenomenon. These references will of course be made in an essentially non-illusionistic way, at least in the major aspect of the case.
I would make no apology for the pre-eminence of the characteristic of manageability. I need to carry these paintings up and down narrow staircases in Dutch houses where traditionally, architecturally there is little space for a staircase. I need to transport the paintings in cars, possibly in planes. I have indeed cut down a painting in anticipation of carrying it on a plane as a passenger. It may be of interest that KLM are more generous than British Airways in this matter. But then the Dutch are rather more aware of painting than the British, and they have cause to be considering their more august traditions. Mondrian would have been amused.
I need to store the paintings conveniently. And I would like to hang them all together when the series is finished, and since ninety-two paintings indicates a large series, then I would need a large space, and if that space should be domestic, then a reasonable size of hardboard makes a great deal of sense.
Besides, if I want to make very large images I can use the cinema.
I used to make no special case for painting with acrylic other than manageability, which means a satisfactory water base - and you can find water everywhere, and if you cannot, then you can use urine. The supreme satisfaction with the medium is that acrylic paint dries quickly, very quickly indeed in summer or a warmed room with the window open. I travel a great deal, sleep in many different rooms every year, use many hotels, engage in many different types of creative activity, much of which is very gregarious, and painting is a solitary occupation. I cannot afford the luxury of "waiting for paint to dry". This is now a phrase to indicate extreme contempt, celebrated, I remember, in an Robert Altman film, voiced by Gene Hackman to depreciate an art-film. There is a similar phrase concerning telephone books. An American critic wrote that she would rather be forced to read the New York telephone directory three times than watch the film A Zed and Two Noughts, a third of which was a homage to Vermeer. Conceivably, if you are a list-enthusiast like me, the New York telephone directory might be fascinating, demographically, geographically, historically, typographically, cartographically; but I am sure no compliment was intended.
Over the years I have grown very used to painting with acrylic paint and can manage it tolerably well. And I know it stands up to abrasion very well, and I like "to abrade" and generally depreciate. Abrasion can indicate time and wear. And I enjoy these things in a painting. I have come simply to enjoy abraded acrylic paint on untreated hardboard, much as I enjoy seeing unprimed canvas used as a colour and a surface.
There will probably be ninety-two paintings in this project, perhaps more, because I can number them 92A, 92B, 92C, etc. There will certainly not be less than ninety-two, though there will be occasion to make two paintings out of one, so to speak. All the paintings will be numbered but in some cases, very discreetly. I enjoy numbering. As I make the paintings, I will help myself to consider sequence by initially and tentatively numbering the paintings chronologically, but not definitively. Definitive numbering will only occur when the series is complete and settled in, so to speak. I enjoy sequence. Cinema is about sequence, retinally to the tune of twenty-four frames a second. The brain is lazy. If it was not we would never see movement in the cinema. And of course and alas, cinema is also narratively sequential, and for the most part, chronologically narratively sequential. Unlike most cinema, this series of paintings will not be narrative. Or only incidentally and vestigially. This investigation into sequence will give me many opportunities to consider and contemplate its characteristics, which I need to think about most carefully because I have declared myself an enemy of narrative in cinema but a champion of its habits of sequence.
I am not in a hurry. No-one is pushing me to meet a date-line, or fulfil a contract, or meet any budget restrictions. The project is entirely speculative. Nobody wants these paintings except me. Which is as it should be. Voltaire said he only wrote books so that he could have something to read when he was an old man. There could be no more exacting requirement. But it is a difficult obligation to fulfil. Every artist can be, and normally is, their most unforgiving critic. I certainly have little interest in watching my films from my death-bed. The test, when final resignation and exhaustion sets in, is to lie in bed and contemplate the paintings. And hope to be rewarded.
So these could be the parameters. First of all come matters of important practicality, organising the inordinate ambition sensibly and rationally. No fuss. Keeping the metaphorical edges open, and the literal edges constantly in view, so to speak. No restrictions, or only of your own choosing. Perhaps I should insist that all the paintings in this project should be seen together. The temptation to exhibit them separately will be resisted, though, if things turn out well, I might show sections of the series somewhere as a work in progress.
Now to the matter of content. French philosophy of late has declared that there is no such thing as content. There is only language. I sort of buy that. But only with small sums of money. But I have no trouble spending currency on believing language can be subject. Should a painting, or a series of paintings, have a table of contents? That implies order. Should paintings have order? Indeed should painting have content? Greenberg's criteria are too small, and too rigid, and too exclusive. But which ever way you play the game of significance, to fulfil the requirements of a hard and long and unforgiving and very fruitful contemplative stare in old age, the content, and the language of the content, has to be very rich indeed.
My content, direct, indirect, allusive, suggestive, scarcely narrative, very rarely illusionistic, is uranium, atomic number ninety-two.
It may one day be said that the history of the twentieth century could centre around uranium, first nuclear fuel and literal and metaphorical reason for much of the twentieth century's history. Anticipated in 1928, mined from materials found in Utah, near Salt Lake City, home of America's only fully successful newly constructed religion. All religions are constructed according to a series of reasons. This one supremely so. The Mormons were utopic treasure-seekers after a particularly American treasure. Always digging and scratching in the ground. Uranium is the true American treasure, responsible for her supremacy in the world since 1945. The Spanish Empire had gold. The American Empire had uranium. Uranium is the ultimate alchemical material in ways Paracelsus could only have dreamt. It turned dirt into power, and of an unimaginable sort. Dropped in a bomb on Hiroshima it made a sea-change. It suddenly made ironists of us all. Who could be legitimately single-minded after that? Who could be an exclusive believer in any programme after that? And after Hiroshima uranium created the Cold War which lasted from 1945 to, some say, 1989, when Soviet power imploded and the Berlin Wall as a symbol, and as a tired pile of concrete, came down. Forty-four years of Cold War. And Pakistan and India still challenge one another with a fistful of uranium. Uranium is everyone's twentieth century history.
Why mine?
First, some autobiographical notes. Raw autobiography is difficult to use, but I would not be completely honest if I did not mention, in the context of this projected series of paintings, the following selected autobiographical notes. Autobiographical detail seeps into every work of art. With a background. You must forgive presumptions. But we all look for significances, parallels, analogies.
It has been considered that in April 1942, by month and year, Britain was at its lowest nadir since 1066. Facing invasion with dire consequences if successful, low in physical resources, isolated, all allies capitulated. Rock bottom, basic lower line. Empty. Black. With red edges. I was born on the 5th April 1942. On Good Friday. Round about crucifixion time. Archbishop Ussher, a man for dates, who calculated that the world began on September 27th 4004 BC, says the crucifixion took place at three o'clock in the afternoon on Good Friday in the year 33 AD. I was right on time.
My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Peter and John were two of the twelve apostles - arguable the two most significant. Were my parents hedging their bets? John was my father's name. My mother was convinced her lover, her husband, my father, would not come back from the war in the Far East and then in Europe. My second name was a guarantee, a pledge, a bid for continuity, a substitute. Pledges and promises, namings and signatures.
When I was three years old, the supposedly first year of recognisable memories, though I remember nothing of the war save late night planes flying over London whilst I shelter with my grandparents in an Anderson shelter used for storing seeding potatoes, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Inappropriate pairings? Potatoes and uranium? Uranium came of age very quickly indeed. I became , like many many others, a uranium child. Children of Uranium.
I am ten years old and have my first painting experience. From a blackboard. A maths teacher gives the class a lesson in perspective and I am caught. Blackboards become important - arenas for play in association with rules. Black, blackness, chalk, chalk dust, lines, graphs, erasures, pedagogy. Diagrams. Lessons in perspective, painting and rules. Painting and conventions.
I am fifteen and think I am beginning to think for myself. I think I can begin to understand the enormity of the Hiroshima sacrifice. I am being politicised by old information for others, new information for me. Images of the blast-shadow of the bomb outlining a crouching body on a stone staircase. Images of radiation burns. Burnt and irradiated earth. I see Resnais's film, Night and Fog, the first loud cry on film about concentration-camps, and I follow up the footage of emaciated, riven bodies by repeated visits - which I suspect were not entirely devoid of a desire for sensation at looking at death and cruelty - to the London War Museum. The London War Museum used to be called Bedlam, corruption of Bethlehem, an 18th century madhouse open to visitors, voyeurs. I lie down the road in Chiswick, London, not far from Hogarth's house. Hogarth painted scenes of Bedlam and I try to copy his The Rakes' Progress. I am seventeen and visit Pompeii and see the plaster-casts of crouching bodies burnt in a natural disaster nearly two thousand years ago. I sympathise with the Hiroshima Japanese and then I see film of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and read of Chinese and Korean comfort-women. I come across the name Oppenheimer and learn of his disgrace for voicing his doubts in a McCarthy America. I start to consider war-guilt and then survival-guilt. I see the film Rashomon at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street - multiple stories to view one violent rape. I begin to understand a little of the Japanese code of honour but need to see it from other angles. I never understood the notion of sacrifice - and I include the biblical crucifixion - until I saw a justification for the bombing of Hiroshima: the Japanese would never have given in otherwise. The sacrifice of Hiroshima stops the war in the East. We have shame in the West for dropping the bomb and shame in the East for surrendering in the face of the bomb, but no shame in the East for their perpetrated atrocities. Uranium is powerful. I march to Aldermaston in anti-nuclear demonstrations. I join demonstrations in Grosvenor Square outside the American embassy. I read Primo Levi. And am appalled all over again. He is a chemist, and his concentration camp experiences connect with his fascination for the Periodic Table. He is comforted in his grief and his harrowing memories by the abstractions of physics, of numbers, of the fact that gold is always fixed at atomic number seventy-nine. I again come across the phenomenon of survival guilt, brought home some years later when I hear Levi has thrown himself down a stairwell in Turin. And just after the postman has called. Postman, letters, envelopes, addresses, pages and pages and pages of Italian handwritten letters of the 1920s and 1930s come my way. What did the postman bring Levi to make him make a leap down the stairwell in 1987, after resisting death for forty years? Was it the postman or the angel Moroni?
At nineteen years of age, I am disturbed by hysterical scenes of people watching TV screens in shop-windows and by imagining the worst at the time of the Kennedy, Castro, Kruschev stand-off in the Pacific. I watch a young woman weep at the thought she might not reach her twenty-first birthday because of a cloud blowing in from the Pacific. Wind, dark clouds. I travel to Berlin and watch an American student of art history throw stones wrapped up in snowballs at East German sentries across the wall. I am fascinated by end of the world theory.
What do we have? All these connections. Why 92? Why uranium? Why indeed painting? Well ninety-two is not one hundred. I can put that number behind me. I confess I enjoy numbers, and their significances, but that has been talked about interminably elsewhere. Suffice to say in a shifting, impermanent, transitory, subjective world the idea of the permanence of atomic numbers is comforting. I am sure some savant will debate the permanence of atomic numbers, but it is currently a fixed affirmation.
My first sequence idea is very obvious. It is a chronology of the years from when the idea of uranium is promulgated from the gaps in the atomic table. Uranium is discovered before it is discovered. Mendeleyev fills the gaps with phantom elements. Becquerel plays with potassium uranyl sulfate on a dark day and discovers something is developing his photographic plates and it is not the sun. Madame Curie kills herself proving this newly discovered element is radioactive. In 1928, the atomic table stands proudly at 92 elements, and uranium is synthesized. In 1928 the world believes that uranium is the last element. The end is only the beginning. Let us start then in 1928 and finish the Uranium Age in 1989 when the Berlin wall is down and the Cold War officially over. But this is too obvious and also tiresome to deal with if I need to expand and retard. Besides we are talking sixty-one years and not ninety-two. The second sequence idea is to play the periodic table all the way chronologically from hydrogen with an atomic number of one to uranium with an atomic number of ninety-two. But this is too literal, does not allow for detours and repetitions, follows mathematical certainties and will not expand and contract to my own peripatetic wanderings. Historical continuity and atomic table continuity will attend the sequence but they will not govern it. Much more interesting are sequences that offer multiple meanings even ambiguity, whose closure or terminus I cannot know in advance. These are going to be sequences of colour, texture, shape and composition. Colour, greater and lesser colour, moving towards black, moving away from black, moving towards white, losing white, leaving monochrome, leading to monochrome, introducing blue, diminishing blue. The infinite colour schemes manufactured by the contemporary computer are a challenge. Colours are only percentages of light, you can fix and arrange them with a mouse. Take 30 per cent of red, 14 per cent of yellow, 56 per cent of blue. What do you get? Mix the colours by numbers alone and not by the eye. In Japan in the Heian Dynasty around the year 1000, they say that tiger's-breath-at-dawn-in-winter-facing-east is as fixed a colour as today's chrome yellow. Get both out of a tin. Get both out of a machine. On an Avid computer I test what could be tiger's-breath-at-dawn-in-winter-facing-east.
What if the tiger faces west and it is spring? Add 4 per cent red, 6 per cent yellow and lessen the blue by 16 per cent? What about sequence up and down the picture plane? Integrate colour and texture like an ebbing and flowing tide. Texture and abrasion. Increase and decrease. I profess an interest in the edge. Build the edge, accentuate the edge, increase and decrease the edge's significance. I am interested in presentation of the representation before presentation of the real thing - like making the sequence of ideograms to hieroglyphs to letters. Therefore first make a presentation of an illusory edge, say, a clipped-edge, first draw it in, then paint it in, make it diagrammatic, consider making it trompe l'oeil, then make it real - physically cut into the edge - like a ticket-collector making a clipping, or a coiner making a coining. Think of torn edges. Think of slicing butter with a blunt knife, then a sharp knife, then a sharp and hot knife. Think of cutting an edge with scissors, think of tearing the edge as though it were canvas then silk and then paper. Make a programme that increases abrasion and disintegration. Think of flat landscape erosion - roche moutonnée, erosion by tide and river meanders, glacial depositing of gravel in stages. Think of slow evolution processes. Physically bury a succession of paintings in water, then milk, then vinegar, then acid. I lived near a canal. Bulldog-clip the painting's edge and hang over the quay-side. Douse the painting in the muddy water for one day, and the next successive painting for two days, and the next successive painting for three days, and so on. Progressively wear the edge away by sanding, or abrading. So what have we here? Is this the matter of painting. Or is this sequence obsession the great matter of film? I want to make it the matter of painting.
A dilemma of contemporary art practice is the condition of the time-frame and who owns it. It is the conflict of gallery exhibition versus stage presentation. Galleries are developing a tendency to become stages and projection-spaces, and installations and non-text-driven works are becoming legitimised on conventional stages. Who owns the time-frame where? A visitor to a gallery can look at a painting or a sculpture or an artifact for as little or as long as they please - five seconds, five minutes, five days if it is considered interesting and necessary. Although the work has been created by its maker, the audience has control over how much it will give the work and its author of their time and concentration. The time frame belongs to the viewer, the recipient, and they make their own drama of inspection and contemplation from it. The advantages are that the viewer can contemplate at their own interest span. The disadvantages are that the focus can be unshareable, unshaped and ambiguous.
The viewer in a theatrical presentation - play, opera, film, TV programme - watches and contemplates the phenomenon according to the dictates, wishes and ambitions of the maker of the piece - director, choreographer, playwright or composer. The maker entirely dominates the audience's attention and concentration. The disadvantages are consequently that the viewer is slaved to the time dictates of the maker. The rewards are that the viewer can contemplate a concentration of information subjectively organised, set around a temporal drama.
It has often been my ambition to find a middle-ground of these two experiences - to capitalise on the gallery and the theatrical experience at one and the same time, to make works that have all the advantages of both without the disadvantages of either. For the most part these works have been associated with making non-narrative cinema of one kind or another, or of abstracting some part of cinema's vocabulary into an exhibition arena. In some answer to this dilemma, I have a project in Valencia. I propose to take a celebrated film and subject it to a gallery presentation. As the audience is Spanish, then the object of contemplation will be the Spanish cinematic classic - Bunuel's Belle de Jour. The proposal is to divide the film up into small sections - ideally of five seconds, the length of a glance beginning to become a stare - and present these 5-second film-bites - some 1000 of them - all at the same time on a thousand TV monitors so that a viewer or visitor can "wander" the film and see any part of it, or all of it, simultaneously. The painting project 92 can, by implication, reverse this process. The whole sequential apparatus can, theoretically at least, be seen simultaneously.
I also want, contrary to orthodoxy, to make the subject of 92 part text. I have, contrary to orthodoxy, sometimes made cinema not from a book, but as a book. It is not fortuitous that there are film-titles in my filmography like Prospero's Books and The Pillow-Book. For consideration I want to view text as image as subject. I have stated already that I am interested in the hidden texts of the Mormons, inhabitants of Utah, later scene of uranium discoveries and uranium treasure-seeking, uranium mining and uranium extraction. In the beginning was the word. Uranium was there at the beginning. What were the Mormon beginning-words transcribed by Joseph Smith and translated by the angel Moroni who delivered the golden plates of a new religion dressed as a postman? A crack-pot tale? But then consider all the other crack-pot tales. Virgin birth for God's sake. Resurrection for God's sake. The fiery plates of Moses. The Rosetta Stone? The Dead Sea Scrolls? Magna Carta? The Declaration of Independence. Sacred texts to some - arcane and irrelevant gibberish to others. I am interested in all hidden texts. Necrotic Egyptian, runes on a reindeer bone comb I handled last week in Groningen in preparation for an exhibition of mediaeval art in Freisland.
I have a long standing collaboration with the excellent American calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander. He makes me think of calligraphic marks in a new way. I suppose I should be entertained by Cy Twombly more than I am, since I know he is interested in the textual, calligraphic, gestural mark, but I cannot work up too great an enthusiasm. The textness in his graffiti is too thin for me. He has, for me, lost the subject in the mark. Lacan suggests we have lost our identity in our text because the conjunction of brain to head to shoulder to arm to hand to pen to paper has gone. We make our marks now with no relevance to the physicality of the body. The keyboard has fossilised the alphabet. It can no longer evolve. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Johnson, Dickens, Eliot all pen-wrote the letter r differently. Now it is fixed by the textual machine. But paradoxically, like Twombly, I am interested in the idea of unreadable texts. I am interested in the sufficiency of text only as image, content to know it might have textual meaning for some, though not for me. Like the idea that the Siberian tiger is alive in Mongolia but I shall never see it, and my not-seeing it does not invalidate it. I am intrigued that Jehovah's name cannot be written, and that non-textual representation is forbidden in Islam. Making an image is hubristic. Pictures are evidence of shame. Man should not picture what God has made.
For the Groningen exhibition, I am taken to a concrete, windowless bunker, purposely built to house texts on parchment and paper and cloth, all kept in prime conditions of humidity and temperature. They are not stored by subject or age or material but by size, a humbling condition, for a 1687 royal House of Orange document lies alongside a 1950s motoring calendar. I am curious about official texts, charters, and legal and ecclesiastical documents. Before the fourteenth century local dialogue usage and eccentric Latin shorthand renders all neat text unreadable. They are self-important, declamatory, stiffly official, literally hedged around like a field of stiff cornstalks by red tape and red brittle wax. Fields of text, fields of incomprehensible wilderness. I repeatedly fly over northern Europe from Amsterdam to Malmö on trips to make an exhibition about Icarus at the Malmö Konsthall. That part of northern Europe is very flat, laid out like the flattest of maps. Coming in low over southern Sweden in the early morning you can easily see the tracks made in fields by very small animals. Fields as pages, pages like maps, rivers of spaces made between the words and the lines. Wilderness, texts, animal tracks, maps with attitude.
I once filmed singing cowboys in Moab, Utah, Marlborough cigarette country, for an opera and I see old uranium mines. My mother's grandparents were coal miners in south Wales. I unexpectedly become interested in mining, underground burrows, pot-holing, sewers, drainage, run-offs, water management. Three hundred metres from my house in Amsterdam is a gold factory. What exactly is a gold factory? I start writing ninety-two stories of gold stolen from holocaust Jews. Mining, red officialdom, seals, gold. I start making black fields hedged in official red, bordering the black with red. Constriction, containment, making the desert official.
I have started. I have more than enough to travel with. I am off making paintings. I sit and contemplate the dark rectangles - and they are dark - and I confess the experience is rewarding. Why? Why is this? Because I can travel like a stranger across an unfamiliar landscape which I have made, or have assisted in making, which can be an ur-text with the unexpected rivers of spaces running between the ur-words, and then can be suggestive text and real texture fighting a battle for space. I get up from my chair and finger the paint. It should be darker perhaps, lighter perhaps. I am a grader. And I enjoy thinking of the possibility of putting the grading right, and sit for long stretches at a time in contemplation of how to adjust that. Push back the feeling of the text, pull forward the crimson edges, abrade the mountains, fill in the glaciers. The black and the red are always fighting. Better dead than red. Better red than dead.
I am already thirty paintings on the make. Five may be finished, though I refuse to commit them to a closure until all ninety-two are shimmering. Twenty more have been started, and some of them are already beginning to be more than just brushmarks and escaped-paint, building a language where the elements are happy to synthesize. Fifteen more are empty, blackened, coal-burnt, lamp-blacked rectangles whose scratches and shadows in a crosslight are beckoning to be interpreted and developed, spread with something. Butter, oil, marzipan, grease from a garage floor, Vaseline, dried bull blood, just paint? I wait a little longer, reluctant just yet to plunge in to shape and order, scrub out, mop up, buff up, abuse, wash, wring and dry. It is true that I can talk about these sensations, true I can work up a description, true that I can narratively describe processes, but the reality and core of my intemperate descriptions is illusive. We have a multiple language here that is really not, really not, really not owing its survival or existence to words, to text, to purple prose, to text-thinking. I know text fixes, determines, defines and I am so sure I do not want that here. I can write you a book if you want. If I want. And of course I do want that. But I do not want it here. This business can be of the best. Consolations are truly forthcoming.
Peter Greenaway. August 2000
