Backwards and Digressive15

1. Building Houses

Building a house for the mind and, as soon as it is built, walking out of it – that has been the pattern of my career. Cambridge, Istanbul, Vienna, London, the Aran Islands, Connemara, and now London again. Each of these location-names approximately covers a style too, and the abrupt transitions between these styles are my subject here. Roundstone Bay, beloved but wayward old neighbour, suggested it. Early in 2014 the fortnightly alignment of the sun, earth and moon gave us the usual high spring tides, and the moon’s orbit happening to bring it to its nearest approach to the earth at the same time added heft to them. Coincidentally a succession of deep troughs of low pressure lifted the surface of the sea, brought storms that drove more than usual of the Atlantic Ocean into the bay, and added torrential rain to this compilation of astronomical and meteorological extremes. One effect (minor compared to many other peoples’ watery woes) of this joint attack of perigee and syzygy and anticyclone was to flood our studio with six or more inches of brine.

We were away in London, and by the time we had returned most of the water had seeped out through the floor (for this is a rickety building that leans on an ancient seawall) or had been bailed out and mopped up by a devoted neighbour; nevertheless a long, chilly and dank task faced us, of emptying bottom drawers of filing cabinets, peeling apart clumped documents, and festooning the place with maps hung out like washing. As we worked our way through the seaweed-smelling rooms of the studio, we both were aware of, but perhaps hesitated to articulate, the fact that the sea had probably found its way into a tall cupboard yet to be investigated, in which were stored my paintings – works that had followed us from Vienna to London to the Aran Islands to Connemara and had hardly been seen for decades. Eventually M insisted we look into it, and I prised open its warped door. One by one we manhandled out and unwrapped the paintings. Some had dim watermarks six inches wide along their lower edges; others had blotchy areas of damp; one was at first glance fit only to be scrapped. But many had survived unscathed, and after an initial aghast inspection it was as if the damage done to others could be lifted aside visually, leaving their intentions and achievements clear for scrutiny.

But what were they, these revenants from the 1960s and ’70s? How did they relate to each other, and to work done since in such different media as maps and books? It was at this juncture that M suggested we arrange a series of pop-up exhibitions, more for our own information and assessments than for others’, but nevertheless welcoming reactions from friends and visitors. There have been four of these brief, unadvertised and casually hung micro-shows so far; the first was a miscellany of works from all the above-mentioned periods, and it looked ragged and amateurish. The others concentrated on groups of related works from one period, and the present essay is a response to them. They betray the usual ambitions concerning public exposure, acceptance, praise, fame – but this essay does not pretend to evaluate the works either aesthetically or monetarily.

Is that true? Even the rudimentary curatorial effort we expended on them brought to light unsuspected affiliations and forgotten themes, and the works so linked became one, to some extent, and borrowed significance from each other. The further we unravelled this network of affinities the less ready we were to say of any piece, ‘Not good enough. Away with it!’ And the effect of this genealogical research (first in the pop-up shows, now in this writing) is to knit certain groups of works into meta-works to which all their components are essential. The risk in such a procedure is of exhibiting its elements in their comparative poverty of individual significance, and so drawing attention to weakness of execution or naivety of conception. Thus values and self-evaluation creep in at the cracks and joints of this present venture as the sea crept into our studio and started the whole thing off. Therefore I will stand up for my works and meta-works, while acknowledging their failings if and where I can bring myself to do so.

I begin with the most recent works and trace their genealogy backwards in time.

2. Maps and Marginalia

Apart from my maps, I produced few visual artworks during our time in Roundstone as I was concentrated on the literary works, of which I make brief mention here since in relation to my subject matter, the visual, they functioned as hoards of potential quotations, and otherwise carried on a parallel evolution. They are: Tales and Imaginings (2002); two collections of essays: Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara (1996) and My Time in Space (2001); the two volumes of Stones of Aran (1986, 1995), and the three volumes of Connemara (2006, 2008, 2011).

A group of works on paper, rather derisively called Doodleworks, are the most recent creations. In 2005 I was invited to contribute a work to an exhibition of ‘large drawings’, curated by Jim Savage. I had never made any really large drawings, but I remembered a promise I’d made to myself, to investigate certain very small drawings of mine: the doodles that I produce without thought in the left-hand margins of my pages whenever I’m writing by hand. I ferretted through the scribbled notes and manuscripts of many of the books listed above, photocopied a selection of pages bearing the more luxuriant specimens of these flowers of an idling mind, and had them blown up and printed on rolls of paper about 2′6″ across and 4′ to 7′ long, which we hung up like Chinese scrolls. In most cases bits of the text – the beginnings of each line – had been caught up (accidentally at first) by the process of enlargement; thus on the right hand of each scroll one had a column of broken phrases which, even if incomprehensible, was evidently the wreckage of some conscious process of thought, while on the left was a tangle of lines and dots, hatchings and crosshatchings, abortive Book-of-Kells fauna and invasive plant-life, equally evidently produced quite unconsciously. And the challenge of these twin texts or textures is to spot apparent interactions of left-hand wanderings and right-hand focus on the matter in hand or, better, in two hands. Whether the bannerlike hangings we made from these confrontations of thought and unthought quite attain to the status of works of art I am not sure, but perhaps they amount to a crude anatomical exhibition of the sinews of writing.

Another work of this period also was evoked by an invitation, this time from Simon Cutts of Ballybeg Press, who in connection with Cork’s year as European City of Culture, 2005, was curating an exhibition of works on or incorporating vinyl (and it appears that many artists have used vinyl in ways other than as a ground of imagery). He proposed that we get my map of Aran blown up to make a large wall hanging; that did not inspire me, but the idea of a floor map that people could walk on grew out of it. The result was a 22-foot-long map of the three islands, at a scale that invites one to step from island to island like a giant of the Fir Bolg, the islands’ mythical inhabitants in larger times. This floor map was glued down in a rough old school courtyard, and was accompanied by a notice embodying a discreet challenge to the public:

The original Aran map was printed in an edition of several thousands, and when one copy was worn out another could be obtained. But the present vinyl edition is unique, and what will become of it remains to be seen. You are invited to walk on it, to dance on it, to write on it, to treat it as you see fit.

As it turned out, the map was treated with respect. After a month of hard wear and weather it came back to us rather creased and crumpled, with a few skateboard marks and some rather touchingly romantic graffiti. In 2010 it was exhibited again in the pillared library of the Royal Geographical Society’s grand London premises, in connection with Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Serpentine Gallery Map Marathon. This time we gave it a title, ‘The Distressed Map of Aran’, and it accumulated another layer of minor damage. We hope that it will continue for a long time to make occasional appearances on the same terms. There is perhaps an element of magical thinking in this project, that the actual islands might be spared whatever happens to the map – for the stones of Aran are more heartbreaking in their fragility than any sheet of vinyl. As a materialist I should suggest at least the beginnings of an idea as to how that magic might work, and the best I can offer would be that the experience of treading on the map could awaken a thoughtfulness about the islands, which might filter back to the islands by the devious ways of art and influence those who hold Aran’s future in their practical hands, especially the islanders themselves.

The ‘Distressed Map’ hales me back to the making of my first map of Aran, and further back to various floor-based or ground-based artworks, realized and unrealized, dating from our last two years in London, before our removal to Aran. The first of these works, dating from 1969, was a large installation called ‘Four-Colour Theorem’. This title reflected my interest in the famous hypothesis stating that four colours are enough to colour any map, however complicated, in such a way that no two adjacent ‘countries’ are of the same colour. An interminable and contentious computer proof of this apparently simple but fiendishly elusive statement had recently been advanced, and by chance I was at that time in touch with the rebel mathematician George Spencer-Brown, who dismissed the computer proof and claimed to be working on a radically original approach to the problem using his own weird theories of imaginary truth-values. However, my art project had no properly mathematical relationship, straight or deviant, with the deep puzzle to which its title makes a bow. My ‘Four-Colour Theorem’ consisted of fifty or sixty pieces of hardboard two to four feet across, each of one of four shapes and painted in one of four colours, laid out on a lawn in a walled garden of Kenwood House in Hampstead. The four shapes, constructed from straight lines and arcs of circles, were ones I had been using in large abstract paintings (to be described when I get back that far in time). Certain choice geometrical relationships between them ensured that the pieces could be laid edge to edge or corner to edge or corner to corner in an indefinite range of conformations. As with the ‘Distressed Map’ the public was invited to play its part, in this case by arranging and rearranging them like features of a geometrical garden. Over a wet Bank Holiday weekend, play got out of hand and my pristine and visionary world of arcs and lines was reduced to a muddy mess. (The challenge to the public of the ‘Distressed Map of the Aran Islands’ must have grown out of this sore lesson.)

A year later, in the Camden Art Centre, I showed an indoor version of this participatory work; it was called ‘Moonfield’ and was inspired by the almost incomprehensible black and white TV images of that first human step taken on the moon, which instantly changed its landscape more than millions of years had done. This time the flat shapes were presented in a large blacked-out gallery with its floor painted black. The shapes were black on one side and white on the other, and initially they lay black side up and were invisible; then as people discovered them underfoot and turned them over, a pallid moonscape came into existence. This was my last public work, before shrinking myself out of the London art world through ever smaller and more private works, as will be described below, and taking myself off to a little house from which, night after night, I could see the dim world of Aran’s bare rock sheets.

3. Two Installations

I have made two attempts at forging a meta-work out of at-first-glance hopelessly disparate elements. One, The View from the Horizon, in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1996, was a contribution to Event Horizon, an exhibition of European art curated by Michael Tarantino. The other, entitled The Decision, was shown in the Dublin City Gallery (the Hugh Lane) in 2011 as the final exhibition in an annual series, The Golden Bough, curated by Michael Dempsey. Each of these installations centred on a construction consisting of a yard-long white wooden rod about a third of an inch thick, suspended vertically in mid-air by twenty to thirty silk threads of various colours attached by tacks to scattered points of the high ceiling. These threads converged on and were glued into a little hole in the centre of the top end of the rod. In their upper reaches they all looked dark grey, but just above the top of the rod their colours seemed to merge into a faint iridescent blur; it was as if they were gathered together, blended and swallowed, to become the white of the rod. In the Hugh Lane show this construction represented for me the making of a decision out of a multitude of vague and incommensurate factors; hence the title of the show. (The decision I had in mind was the life-defining one that took us from London to the Aran Islands.) In the IMMA show this construction was called ‘To the Centre’, and I thought of it as a stride taken towards the centre of the earth.

In each of these installations two accumulations of rods lay on the floor beneath the suspended rod. The larger collection comprised twenty or so rods varying in diameter from a quarter of an inch to an inch, and in length from about three to nine feet long; they formed an almost random heap, like giant spillikins ready for the ancient game of extracting one of them without making the others tremble. I called it ‘Autobiography’, thinking of the varied pace, weight and unforeseen crisscrossings of the factors of one’s life. These rods were painted white with black bands around them; a critic I invited to see them in my studio when they were new thought they looked like ‘measure become organic’ – as if measuring rods could interbreed. The other collection consisted of thirty-one slender rods, painted white but each having a different inch-long section painted grey; I called it ‘Inchworm’ as it reminded me of some twig-like geometer caterpillars I kept in a jamjar and who were my silent and usually motionless companions for long hours in my studio at the time I was working on this piece. One could order these rods side by side on the floor so that the grey section appeared to crawl from one end of the collection to the other, but in truth I did not have any particular way of arranging them in mind when they were made (in fact I can’t remember making them at all and was surprised when they came to light some ten years later). By the time of the IMMA show I had discovered that if I held them like a vertical sheaf with one end resting on the floor and then let go, they fell apart into a fan-shape, an elegant example of a broken symmetry.

These titles and the significances attached to them are the work of my wisdom after the event – many years after, in some cases, for these rod-works date from 1971 or so, shortly before our move to Aran. Or perhaps they are the work of my foolishness, for although I admire the rigour of artists who eschew titles and leave the interpretation of their works to the viewer, I cannot forbear to nudge people’s attention in the direction of whatever I currently regard as the features that link my works into a net of mutual references. That knitwork, precisely, is what I’m at in the present writing.

So: the ‘stride taken towards the centre of the earth’ could be the summation of all the strides, steps and paces that mark the progress of my two-volume walk, first around the coast and then in and out of the holes and corners of the interior of Árainn, the largest of the Aran Islands and, as I wrote in Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, ‘the exemplary terrain upon which to dream of that work, the guidebook to the adequate step’. The concept of this good step is introduced with the help of dolphins I once watched off an Aran beach, plunging through their element as if they were ‘wave made flesh, with minds solely to ensure the moment-by-moment reintegration of body and world’. ‘Let the problem be symbolised as taking a single step as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin’s arc to its wave’; that is, for us inhabitants of a craggy and multifaceted world, being mindful of its plenitude both physical and social. (For the universe is a mighty small place and we have to make what we can of it.) But by the end of my book’s circumambulation of the island I am ready to admit that ‘the notion of a momentary congruence between the culture one bears and the ground that bears one has shattered against reality into uncountable fragments, the endless variety of steps that are more or less good enough for one or two aspects of the here and now.’ Nevertheless, the step continues to work as an energizing motif throughout the book, and towards the end reveals its secret ambition. Near the end of Stones of Aran: Labyrinth, after describing the panic-inducing experience of trying to walk blindfold across one of the island’s crevasse-ridden cliff-edged plateaus, I claim to have realized the nature of the step: ‘As the foot descends through space, a surface exactly the size and shape of the foot-sole receives it; this support is the top of a column of inconceivable height that goes down and down, narrower and narrower, until it rests upon a point, a nothing, at the centre of the earth, and from that point opens up again in the opposite direction like the cone of futurity opening out of a moment, into the unsoundable.’ An attempt, this, at trusting the physical world in its incalculable richness, and a mad ambition to include totality in each contact with it! Perhaps life is too short to accommodate more than one idea. The cone of silk threads opening out from the top of the white rod and embracing whatever room it is hung in was constructed in 1971 or ’2, while the passage it seems to illustrate was written in about 1993. That inescapability of one’s own stock of mental imagery is the theme of ‘The View from the Horizon’.

In fact the suspended rod and its companion works are the skeletal offspring of a time of no ideas, when I had drifted away from the egotistic dynamism of the London art world into a state of aimlessness, in which I fiddled around vacantly with my wooden rods, painting them white with black bands as described above, stacking them in a corner or handing them one by one to the rare visitors to my studio for them to feel the weight and balance of each. (I bought the rods – dowelling rods in a more functional world – very cheaply from a hardware store; I hadn’t heard of the Arte Povera artists at that time, but coming across their works since I have been moved by their frugal aesthetic. My ‘points’, described below in ‘The Tale of a Washer’, were an even more parsimonious product of this period of apparent sterility, just before our move from London to Aran in 1972.)

The Hugh Lane installation included another element: a set of a dozen ink brushworks on paper depicting winged figures that drew on memories of seeing the majestic Nike of Samothrace, the Greek goddess of victory, in the Louvre. I’ll write about their interior provenance later on; here I’ll try to justify their inclusion in the minimalist world ruled over by the suspended rod. First, their medium, black ink on white paper, pointed through a decade or more of time to the black-on-white maps I made after our move to Aran, copies of which were also exhibited as part of these installations. But this is a strained linkage; perhaps their form validates their presence better. The bodies of these aerial beings consist of a few sketchy vortices arranged on a vertical axis and are borne up by widespread wings, skeletal but feather-light. The suspended rod with its radiating threads could be seen as a generalized diagram of this gesture, which is one of generosity and joy.

Finally, and as if shyly occupying a place in a corner, the Hugh Lane version of the installation included the ‘Ghost Stairs’: a score of very slim rods, unpainted, about three feet long and laid out in parallel. In the plank-floored London room in which they were first assembled (in about 1973) they lay in the grooves between successive planks; in the Hugh Lane they were less comfortable on a fishbone-patterned parquet floor. In either setting they suggested an almost imperceptible staircase descending into nothingness: a shadowy, cautionary version of the white signpost to the centre of the earth that ruled over all these manifestations.

4. The Tale of a Washer

In April 1990, after decades of planning and construction, the Hubble Space Telescope was loaded into the cargo hold of a space shuttle and blasted on the back of a rocket to a height of 559 kilometres, where it was put into orbit around the earth. At that height the atmosphere is so tenuous that it does not interfere with the Hubble’s view of astronomical objects so faint and far away as to be beyond the ken of all previous telescopes. The heart of the Hubble is a bowl-shaped mirror, nearly eight feet across and polished to within a hundred millionths of a millimetre of a perfect hyperboloid, which collects the light from whatever stars and galaxies lie within its field of view and focuses it on a camera of exquisite sensitivity. The prime purpose of this wonderful construction is to pierce the distances curtaining the birth scene of spacetime itself.

Having followed the space shuttle’s blazing ascent, the telescope’s successful injection into the correct orbit, the unfurling of its dragonfly wings of solar cells and the initiation of its functions, no doubt the teams of scientists and technicians responsible for various aspects of this technological triumph sat back with a sigh of relief, and waited for the first sublime starscapes to appear on the monitors in the Goddard Space Flight Center. And what did the stars look like? Squashed spiders! So said one astronomer I have seen quoted. An anguished analysis of the blurry images indicated that the great mirror was slightly too flat (by 2.2 thousandths of a millimetre) near its perimeter. Who was to blame? It seems that the error was due to a fault in an optical gadget used to check the curvature of the mirror. In this instrument a certain lens was out of position, by 1.55 mm. Somebody had omitted to insert a washer behind it, it was said.

The Hubble is designed to be serviced in orbit as needs arise, by space-walking technicians tethered to a space shuttle, for the cost of bringing it back to earth for refitting would be prohibitive. Three years after the initial launch a team of seven astronauts, trained in the use of some hundred specialist implements, were space-shuttled up, and over ten days installed a number of optical devices designed to correct the spherical aberration of the primary mirror. The cost of that washer must have mounted into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Since then, however, the Hubble has been an astounding success and still posts home avalanches of information on star formation and many other research topics, and especially on the early history of the universe, the unfurling of time and space.

Such questions interest me deeply, but my wandering mind is as often drawn to a question that has been left behind, being a triviality. What about that washer? Had it slipped from the fingers and then from the memory of some technician harassed by the everyday pressures of life on earth as well as the Hubble project’s problems of schedule-slippage and cost-overrun? Did it lie, its glints and gleams unnoticed, on the floor of some ‘clean room’, until it was swept up and dumped with other waste into a dustbin? Or might some time-ridden space-stepper like myself have noticed it and carried it off as a memento? To work out what role this little disc plays in my own explorations of time and space requires me to revisit a crucial period in my life and that of my partner: 1972, the year of our decision to leave London.

I was at that time given to long wanderings from my base in north-west London, orientating myself by sun and wind, by the rumblings of distant railway lines, and especially by glimpses of the church spires that watch over Kilburn, Cricklewood, Hendon and others of London’s ingested but not totally digested villages, which I came to identify with the towers that triangulate Proust’s account of a carriage ride in the French countryside, in an essay that inaugurated his literary career. In those walks, roads to me were merely lines of least resistance in the substance of the city I was trying to walk through as if it were wilderness. Vainly, for the sheer extent of the city held my body as on a leash. My mind in turn was tethered to my body, free to drift in blue-blank or tumultuous cloudy skies until occasionally summoned to its function of attention (for experience calls on both body and mind) by the sight of something gleaming on the pavement before me or in the gutter: a little brassy disc, perhaps a button, or a washer mislaid by someone servicing a motorbike or a car. I began to collect these ‘points’, as I came to term them, trying to commit to memory whatever vague ramblings my mind had reported in that moment of recall, so that by the time I had brought them home they already represented a bygone instant, a ‘now’ foregone. In an analysis of the act of pointing, a philosopher – I forget who – introduced the concept of ‘the point of ostension’: the point in which a straight line prolonging the direction of a pointing index finger first meets a solid surface. Remembering this gesture of power, I would pick up the ‘point’, the washer or button or whatever it was, on the tip of my index finger, add a touch of glue, and by pointing affix it to a wall of my studio. Sometimes then it happened that I would notice a sudden intensification of the gaze of a visitor idly looking around the room and by chance catching – or being caught by – sight of the little star. Or I might give the point to someone, with instructions to throw it away at home, forget about it, come across it by chance after some years, and let me know, if I should still be here to know anything, the exact mental content of the moment of rediscovery. In either scenario I would know that a moment, an instant, had been salvaged from the memory-drowning onrush of time. In reality I never heard back from any recipient of a point, and to be honest I don’t positively remember ever handing one over to such a dubious future. Nor do I have any of them now. Perhaps they are still glued to those points of ostension, occasionally remarked upon by some puzzled occupant of the home that once was ours.

For me, these instants, anchor points of evanescent nows, stood for moments of revelation to oneself of one’s own existence. Rethinking them now, though, perhaps they represent the not-quite-dimensionless intervals between our mind’s experience of past and of future, the allowance made for dawdling nerve signals and redundant neuron-work in such imperfect confections of flesh as we; they fill the gaps in our consciousness of self and world. But in any case, in my imaginary gallery of points pride of place goes to the washer lost in the building of the Hubble telescope. It stands for the first of all moments, separating not past from future but nothing from something; it is the grain from which the universe burst into existence and begat all that is and ever will be. All things stand at ground zero of that explosion; it links us all in a universal cousinage. It is the All-Thing lying in the palm of the mystic, bereft perhaps of maker and sustainer, but not of love.

5. To the Sun, to the Moon

The cut-out pieces of ‘Moonfield’ and ‘Four-Colour Theorem’ inherited their shapes from an immediately previous generation of large abstract paintings fed by geography and geometry in equal parts. The geography I found in Provence (but could have found its equivalent elsewhere) in the course of a strenuous and solitary wandering on foot and by lifts, in the summer of 1968; the geometry was invented on my return, in a sudden release of creativity. That historical and magical date, 1968, prompts one to ask why I did not go to Paris where a new mode of social being was struggling to be born; but, sympathetic as I was to les évènements, I wanted a way of being of my own, and although it was hardly a matter of physical wellbeing, foot-blistered and way-weary as I was much of the time, I flourished in the empowering sunlight and my freedom to accept whatever lifts were offered, wherever they were headed. I came home with a new series of paintings in my head, or at least their titles: ‘To the Sun’, ‘Windward’, etc. These would be thoroughly abstract compositions, answering to my concept of topographical sensations, that is, sensations such as crossing a pass and seeing the lowland beyond open up, completing the circuit of an island, or reaching the summit of an isolated hill – experiences the kernel of which does not depend on the texture of the terrain but solely on its topography.

To give the maximum of room to my visions and make them embrace the viewer, I took to working on big (five- or six-foot square) canvases hung by a corner so as to stress the surprising length of their diagonals. Their surfaces were divided up into two or three shapes, in bright flat colours or white, defined by edges of the canvas and circular arcs of certain radii, calculated to give the shapes some interesting theorem-like interrelations. (These radii were those of the following circles, all somehow maximal in terms of a unit square: the largest circle that can be fitted into the square; the largest quarter-circle that can be fitted into the square; the largest circle that can be fitted into the preceding quarter-circle; the largest circle that can be fitted into a half-square, i.e. a square divided along one of its diagonals.) Because of their diamond-wise hanging these works urged the viewer onwards in one direction or the other, like big road signs, or promoted a balance between opposite impulsions.

How few of these canvases survive! – too few to explore the abstract schema underlying them by using all possible combinations of the arcs it defines. However, this clutch of works provided the shapes for the installations that succeeded to them, and no doubt through that line of descent have an affinity with my maps, while the idea of topographical sensations that underlies them makes itself known here and there in writings of much later years. Nevertheless, sometimes I wonder if a thorough exploration of their potentialities could be carried out as a series of black-on-white prints. But perhaps that Orphic backwards glance would just leave them stranded between past and present.

If the mathematico-topological works described above were energized by sunlight, the paintings that immediately preceded them owe a debt to the moon. That series was called ‘The Dreams of Euclid’, from which one can see that they inhabit some tidal region between the high seas of the irrational and the dry land of reason. I was very interested in, not the meanings so much as the phenomenology of dreams in my early years, when my nights almost capsized under the weight of them. Two sets of prints from that period, ‘The Theory and Practice of Dreams’, laid out in little panels somewhat like a comic strip, explore the extreme transformations a dream-object can undergo while still being the same thing throughout. ‘The Dreams of Euclid’ nodded to the same theme, but with a severely limited repertoire of forms.

In several of these oil paintings a square canvas is nearly filled by a four-by-four or five-by-five array of plate-sized circles touching each other edge to edge, with another such array slightly tilted and off-centred relative to the first and nearly eclipsing them, leaving the canvas almost covered by a pattern of sickle moons. In other works of this period single circles or slightly off-circular shapes arrived at by merging two or more overlapping circles occupy most of a square canvas without being exactly centred within it. Near the centres of these floating shapes is a handful of circles hardly bigger than an old penny coin; one might notice that they form a triangular array, or one array superimposed on another; an analytic look, ruler in hand, would find a congruence between these little constellations and the (unmarked) centres of the big circles. Colours: subdued, silvery or greenish grey. Geometry is born of mystery, these works could be understood to say, or mystery is born of geometry. I always took it that they hinted at cosmic processes, but when we resurrected them after the flood and saw them as a group for the first time for decades, M pointed out what then became obvious: these paintings could be seen as tender likenesses of tiny embryos in the tranquillity of a womb. So perhaps mine was a censored and escapist interpretation of them. It would be a breach of privacy to follow this theme further.

6. A Day in Darkness

In March 1963, in the Vienna State Opera House, shortly before a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre, the body of a little girl was found in a backstage washroom. She had been stabbed thirty-seven times. The performance went ahead; the corpse was discreetly being removed as the curtain went up. She was aged twelve and she had come to the Opera House to attend a ballet school rehearsal. Her name was Dagmar Fuhrich.

Soon afterwards a man understood (if that is the word) to be a pathological woman-hater, who somehow had gained access to the cavernous labyrinths behind the scene on stage, was arrested, tried and found guilty of the murder of Dagmar. He had only shortly before this event completed a prison sentence for another attack, and he warned the court that he would offend again if released. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he spent forty-one years in virtual isolation before his death in 2004. His name was Josef Weinwurm.

At the time of our settling in Vienna this murder was the talk of the city, of which the glittering and majestic Opera House, bombed out in the War and newly rebuilt, was the cultural crown. We soon heard of an unusual addendum to Weinwurm’s sentence: that he was to spend each anniversary of his deed in darkness. When I think of it now, this profound condition – profoundly cruel? profoundly just? – takes me back to Robert Musil’s vast, unfinished and perhaps unfinishable novel The Man Without Qualities, which sniffs the atmosphere of Vienna just before the First World War. Musil’s protagonist is a man of leisure, a flâneur of the intellect who has never committed himself to any activity sustained enough for it to imprint a quality on him, and has even come to envy for his obsessions a certain convicted murderer, a wise simpleton who had stabbed to death a young prostitute he felt was forcing herself on him. This shy itinerant carpenter, who inflicted thirty-five wounds in the girl’s belly and otherwise horribly mutilated her, is in prison pending a decision on whether he is insane or not, and so to be hanged or not. A net to catch the shadow-side of the city could, I feel, be strung between Musil’s pathetic wanderer and the man of annual darkness of our days in Vienna.

However, I cannot blame the city for the streak of darkness that runs through me and is amply revealed by the black-ink paintings I produced during our three years in Vienna; that has been there from the beginning, memory says, and I have no intention of playing Freud about it in this context. But the most disturbing or disturbed of these paintings might well have caught up their explicit content from the Opera House murder, for they represent monsters – solitary creatures, powerful, malignant, almost brainless, pitiable in their bestiality, prowling shadowy tunnels. A related series of black-ink paintings, ‘Cities in a Vacuum’, features towering, windowless buildings aligned by a ruthless perspective on a diseased sun – cities so perfect that my monsters can only peer out at them from sewers or crack-like alleys. Here perhaps I was influenced by a sinister component of the architecture of Vienna, in which the huge grim concrete cuboid of a bomb-shelter left over from the Hitler days, and the endlessly long fortress-like blocks of workers’ apartments, Karl Marx-Hof and Friedrich Engels-Hof, which once housed rebellion and had been shelled in the time of the proto-Nazi dictator Dollfuss, counted for more than all the pompous palaces of the Ringstrasse.

Rather less literal than these paintings, which could be illustrations of unwritten science fictions, were some large ink drawings of beings that look as if they might have evolved into humans had they not half-metamorphosed into leafless birch trees with broken-off branches. (These multiply castrated entities can I think be traced back to a dreary grey-green painting dating from my late teens, a face-on view of three or four pollarded trees raising their fists behind the railings of a featureless municipal park. I now read this early work as a symptom of small-town claustrophobia, a longing for an Elsewhere of cultural, social and sexual delights.)

Allied to these tree-men works are some drawings of half-skeletonized birds falling out of a layered grey sky; I thought of these creatures as having been slain in mid-air by a blast of atomic radiation. My Armageddon fantasies caught the uneasy mood of Vienna; the Russian army had pulled out of our section of the city only seven or eight years previously, and we soon found out that our neighbours were very cagey about their lives in the decade of occupation before that exodus. The frontier between East and West was only fifty kilometres away; defecting artists were made welcome by organizations funded by, it was said, the CIA. Café society was rumoured to be riddled with spies, so that if two intellectuals sat down to found a new movement they would soon find that two strangers had joined them, the spy from the East and the spy from the West. At the crux of the Cold War, when an American spy plane detected Russian nuclear missiles installed in Cuba, daily life, work, love and laughter went on regardless, but something in our minds held its breath. Around that time I was drawing bombers that burst through windows and walls and loomed over loving couples reduced to tangled anxieties. Also I came across a photograph of the Statue of Liberty under construction, a giant skeleton from which ant-sized humans dangled on threads; this suggested a set of twelve small ink drawings done on damp paper, in which the talismanic statue is transmogrified into surreal and sadistic contraptions of metal fangs and squashy entrails, and finally dissolves into night and fog.

I don’t remember that any of these works were done with conscious ideological intent; they grew obscurely but naturally out of the mud of contemporary events. In the end and quite mysteriously, not in response to any amelioration of worlds interior or exterior that I know of, my rampant monsters, as if they had coupled with my falling birds, gave rise to a joyous brood of winged creatures. These light-as-air beings were suggested by the Nike of Samothrace, imagined as about to take off from her glorious stance on the grand staircase of the Louvre, her lopped wings regrown. These calligraphic ink drawings were each summoned into existence in a couple of minutes with a few whirls and swipes of a wide flat brush, in a win-all lose-all mode; about a dozen of them survived the risks of their birth. Looking at them recently I was struck by a feature that had not been salient to me when they were new: their bodies are made up of two halves in close embrace, each with one wing. They remind me of Apollinaire’s mythical Chinese bird, the Pihi, which has only one wing and flies in couples – and so they bring me a happy memory of my first rapturous encounter with French poetry. I take this bird-flight of good augury as an emblem of my awakening from the long dark day of Vienna.

7. Juvenilia

Under this title I sweep together all the artwork done before I turned down an invitation to continue in my teaching post in Istanbul, declared myself (to myself) to be a painter, and moved to Vienna. Looking at the works that survive from time that would have been better spent on getting to know my pupils in Robert College, on my mathematical studies in Cambridge, on servicing the radar devices entrusted to me as an RAF technician in Malaya, or on my homework from Ilkley Grammar School, and so on back to the war-inspired drawings of my primary school days, I see first a glaring lack of talent. Then, here and there in those childhood sketchbooks, so proudly preserved by my parents, I make out a flicker of merit – in fanciful drawings of Flying Fortresses (a new development in aerial warfare we learned about from newspapers, and which I took to be airborne castles with parapets and towers), in a meticulous series of images of butterfly wings earnestly copied from one of the natural history books I pored over as a teenager, or in diagrams of the dozens of different knots that seemed to obsess the Boy Scout movement.

Among the earliest surviving sketches, alongside numerous drawings of tank battles, Tarzan wrestling wild beasts, etc., there are some scenes in visionary or lyric mode. In one of these a child is led by the hand through a wood by a hooded, monkish figure, who indicates with a rapturous gesture the birdsong, represented as huge bubbles, tumbling out of the trees; the child imitates his gesture. This sketch seems to express a need for a protector or mentor, for although my parents were supportive of my artistic effort they would not have followed me into the magical world of surrealism, and nor would our vicar, a family friend, have had much time for my budding pantheism. Some paintings of my early teens express the same mood. In one of them a serene, classically naked, male figure, seen from the back, gazes out of an opening in some structure of stone blocks at a sky in which eleven moons are shown in various phases and settings. Another is an attempt to convey the sensation of drowsing in summer heat; a pair of hands – the viewer’s hands as seen from inches away – frames the entrance to a tunnel that opens onto the night sky on the other side of the world.

As if to counterbalance these reflective and peaceable works there are some nightmares, some spasms of anxiety, dating from the same period. In a small watercolour titled ‘Doctor Comforting a Patient’, the doctor is an imperturbably massive cubist figure, while the patient is a ragged streak of pain, angular as a lightning flash, lying across him. A rather ambitious, would-be photo-realist oil painting features a man, who could be a corpse, in nondescript uniform, lying among strands of barbed wire; his clenched fists occupy the foreground, and there is fire and wreckage in the distance. Another seems to be a reminiscence of Dante: a huge three-headed dog leads a chain-gang of miserable captives down an avenue of trees in which are hanging strange creatures consisting of hands growing out of trunkless heads. A small scraperboard work perhaps inspired by Dostoevsky shows the face and arms of a mad axe-man seen close-up and from the point of view of his victim; when this came to light recently M immediately spotted it as the origin of the monstrous semi-human denizens of my Viennese paintings of a decade later. Thus my taking myself seriously as an artist began with abrupt alternations of strange but reassuring worlds and abyssal depths of suffering. But let me not fantasize about what these works might have been had they not been so gauche in execution; I mention them only to complete this sketch of half a lifetime’s essays in visual art, and to hint at a fruitful self-contradiction I find in much subsequent work.

One strand of this awkward development is worth separating out from the tangles of adolescence. It shows itself in some oils in villainous colour-schemes done in Cambridge, and in almost decorative pen-and-ink illustrations published in the undergraduate magazines of those days. They have a common form or contradiction of forms: a rectangular grid of lines supports or transfixes a lyrical effusion of flamelike or leaflike shapes. The origins of the grid I can place: it derives from the systems of coordinates I was learning about in connection with the various geometries, Euclidian, projective, Riemannian, etc., that were for me the most fascinating subjects of my maths degree course. And the freeform creations flitting through them like storm-torn sails fighting to rip themselves away from masts and rigging, or like jungle growth overwhelming ancient ruins, originated in my ecstatic encounter with Ayudhia, the deserted former capital of Siam, on one of the most exciting days of my life, during my spell of conscription in Malaya. The individual paintings and drawings of this sort are not worth much in themselves, but they undoubtedly underlie the bipolar nature of my subsequent work, not only in visual art but in cartography and literature too. If reason and unreason, ecstasy and melancholy, go hand in hand in all that I have done, so it was from my beginning.

8. Unrealized Projects

Why now revert to projects abandoned when we made the life-defining move from London to the Aran Islands in 1972? Because at the moment I am battering myself against the same impenetrable void that surrounded me in my West Hampstead studio in those pre-transition days, and they dimly come into view again with a vague promise of release. So it might be a healing exercise to reconsider them in the light or dark of passing years. What were they? Why were they not brought into existence? How is it that some of them seem to pre-echo the Aran literary and topographical work? What do they propose for the present moment? Their names still speak to me:

Exploding mirror

Deadly environments and critic traps

Spots of time

The wavy floor

Ring and cube

Resistance

Arabidopsis

Exploding Mirror

Place a mirror face down on a bed of sand in a shallow open-topped box or drawer. Drop a stone onto the middle of its back so that the front surface of the mirror, now broken up into shards, bulges down into the sand. Remove the stone and spread the back of the mirror with a layer of concrete or plaster to fix the shards in place. When this has hardened remove the mirror from the box and wash any adherent sand off its face.

I imagine that the result would look like a frozen instant in an explosion behind the mirror, or of something, perhaps a mirror image, in the act of breaking out of the mirror world into reality. Words written a couple of decades later inadvertently say something about the mental state that gave rise to this proposed work. In Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara I liken the multitude of lakes of Roundstone Bog, as seen from a neighbouring hilltop, to ‘fragments of a mirror flung down and shattered’. And in Connemara: Listening to the Wind, describing the mood of this same landscape, I write that the adjective that came spontaneously to my mind was ‘frightened’:

For a moment I felt I had identified the force that drives the expansion, the self-scattering, of the universe: fear. The outline of each lake bristles with projections, every one of which is itself spiny; they stab at one another blindly. There is a fractal torment animating the scene, which is even more marked in aerial photographs, in which the lakes seem to fly apart like shrapnel. Of course all this is purely subjective and projective: I was the only frightened element of the situation …

So I can take it that fear, and therefore aggression, underlies the erupting, image-shattering, mirror that never saw the light. Since mine is the reflection I would be most likely to see if the project had been realized, the broken mirror correctly anticipates my sense of myself today.

Deadly Environments and Critic Traps

I reawaken these works from nothingness with reluctance, as they so obviously spring from some short-lived malignity towards the world of art. To quote from a let’s pretend review of which a faded typescript draft has drifted down to the present:

‘The Lethal Environment’. Lisson Gallery

The cellar of the Lisson Gallery this month is given over to an unwelcome development in environmental art. Jagged sheets of broken glass, some of them four or five feet long, project from the walls, floor and ceiling, leaving a tunnel just about big enough to creep along. The glass spikes are smeared with a bluish phosphorus rat-poison.

I seem to detect a certain rancour in the artist’s relation to his audience here, in that the word ‘environment’ appears to be an invitation to experience this work of art from within, which would of course be fatal. I am not convinced that the death of some middle-aged art critic would help to heal the breach between Society and the Artist: and, indeed, so far no one has volunteered the sacrifice. Viewed from outside, of course, the dazzling tracery formed by the edges of the bits of glass, suffused by the vaporous blue tones of the rat poison, produce an effect which is, to put it bluntly, beautiful. However, that may not be the point.

The critic traps thankfully were never constructed or even written about; they were little devices from which a coiled spring sharp as a razor flashed out at any viewer who bent to inspect their ingenuity closely. They presumably date from the period of my (on the whole amicable) connection with the Lisson Gallery, but I do not remember any incident that might have led me to conceive them. I mention them here for completeness, but they would be better forgotten.

Spots of Time

Rods and washers, two sorts of works from the time of my dwindling presence in the London art world have been written up separately, but perhaps a joint consideration of both would be productive. And since the washers did not literally have to be washers but any little discs found lying on a pavement, say, that might arrest the eye and give rise to memorable ‘spots of time’ (a famous and curious phrase I came across in labouring through Wordsworth recently), they could even be manufactured by cutting thin cross-sections from one of the more slender rods.

If these cross-sections of the rods are taken to mark ‘spots of time’ then the rods as wholes can be seen as chronometers of imaginary time-dimensions. Produced one by one out of agonies of boredom, most of the rods were painted with regularly spaced bands of black on a white ground, and when they were casually stacked away in a corner could sometimes be imagined as ticking away to themselves.

The washers are on my mind these days because of the unexpected and partly inexplicable appearance of one stuck to a wall in the Royal Academy, together with a framed text derived from my account of the Hubble telescope and the washer rumoured to have been omitted in its construction. In my days as a radical aesthete I would have regarded the RA as the enemy, but change is the only constant in this world and I was as flattered as I was surprised to be invited by the architect Ian Ritchie to exhibit a work in the 2015 Summer Show. He overrode my protests that it was many a year since I had produced any visual work, and undertook to frame and hang the text himself and affix a washer near it – all of which came to pass (and then somebody bought the work, for £150, on the show’s opening day, despite the fact that the washer was superglued to Burlington House).

While I have made no profit from the discovery of washers (or points, as I prefer to call them), I keep an eye on the possibility of creating them cheaply and merchandizing them in bulk. However, this remains an unrealized project. First, the creative leap. Take a sheaf of rods of the required diameter and composition, and shave off the uneven ends. Then use some mechanical device to advance the sheaf by whatever thickness is required for the sort of points you have in mind, and shave off that much as before (say 1.25 mm for a washer). A golden shower of these precious shapes can now be expelled from your machine as convenient, their number expressible only in Wordsworthian ten-thousands.

The Wavy Floor

My article in the Bulletin of the Computer Arts Society, February 1971, refers to this project as ‘Field Work 3: A Structured Arena’. Most of the article was given over to the mathematics of the thing, illustrated with my elegant little diagrams. I was very proud of the mathematics, although to a real mathematician it would be child’s play, and of my diagrams, which take me back to the period in which I worked as a part-time freelance technical illustrator. Both calculations and illustrations would be beyond me now. I copy the beginning of the text:

Last year [1969 in fact] I showed two environmental works in London involving a large degree of participation [‘Four-colour Theorem’, in Kenwood House kitchen garden, and ‘Moonfield’, in Camden Arts Centre]. Watching people react to these, I became less interested in the transient results of their activities, and more aware of the way in which those activities were themselves patterned by the structure of what I had provided. That is, I stopped thinking of these works as ‘participational’ (as delegating a certain range of aesthetic decision); instead I began to see the actions of those involved as the object of my activity as an artist. This led me to think of creating areas that would impose certain rhythms on anything taking place within them, and on the consciousness of anyone entering them. One project I considered was a concrete floor of regularly-spaced shallow waves, perhaps four inches high and just over a stride from top to top: the area covered would be large enough for a specific rhythm to be generated by the act of walking across it. This floor would not be presented as a finished artwork, but as an arena for experiment by myself or anyone else. It would be interesting to try different lighting effects, for example: a strong overhead lighting, with the floor painted white, would make the surface difficult to ‘read’ as one walked over it; illumination by a flickering candle down in one corner would turn it into a sea of pulsating shadows. Again, people could explore it and discover its structure by touch, in complete darkness.

On this continuously curved surface one could experiment with discontinuous ‘additions’; a scattering of rigid, fragile ‘measuring rods’ would change its character; balls would bounce on it unpredictably; various amounts of water would convert it into a series of ponds, and then into a series of islands. Musical, dance or theatrical groups could let the rhythms of their own activities interact with its periodic structure. In general the interest would lie in the ‘interference’ of the floor’s stable and coherent wave-structure, with the unstable and fluctuating forms of action superimposed on it.

A rectangular array of waves would probably be my final choice, but when considering a triangular array I became interested in the mathematics of the situation: this is another approach to comprehending it as a structure …

… And having explored this other approach and incidentally invented a function that ‘represents a network of triangles turning itself inside out to form other networks of triangles, in a three-stage cycle’, I ended my paper by hoping that a proper mathematician might investigate what underlies this function, and that I would some day see it realized in a wave-tank, ‘or if possible as a computer graphic display’ – a phrase that reminds me how long ago all this was.

Obviously the concrete floor project has its connections with the other floorworks (‘Four-colour Theorem’ and ‘Moonscape’) of 1969, and in all three a dim premonition is to be glimpsed of the development and abandonment of the concept of the good step, which was suggested by a sight of dolphins plunging through waves. Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage is all made up of steps and leads one on a walk around the perimeter of the island; I quote from two stages in the evolution of the trope:

Let the problem be symbolized by that of taking a single step as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin’s arc to its wave. Is it possible to think towards a human conception of this ‘good step’? … But our world has nurtured in us such a multiplicity of modes of awareness that it must be impossible to bring them to a common focus even for the notional duration of a step. The dolphin’s world, for all that its inhabitants can sense Gulf Streams of diffuse beneficences, freshening influences of rivers and perhaps a hundred other transparent gradations, is endlessly more continuous and therefore productive of unity than ours, our craggy, boggy, overgrown and overbuilt terrain, on which every step carries us across geologies, biologies, myths, histories, politics, etcetera, and trips us with the trailing Rosa spinosissima of personal associations. To forget these dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings, but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under foot at any given moment would be a crushing backload to have to carry. Can such contradictions be forged into a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground? At least one can speculate that the structure of condensation and ordering necessary to pass from such various types of knowledge to such an instant of insight would have the characteristics of a work of art, partaking of the individuality of the mind that bears it, yet with a density of content and richness of connectivity surpassing any state of that mind. So the step lies beyond a certain work of art; it would be like a reading of that work. And the writing of such a work? Impossible, for many reasons, of which the brevity of life is one.

[…]

The notion of a momentary congruence between the culture one bears and the ground that bears one has shattered against reality into uncountable fragments, the endless variety of steps that are more or less good enough for one or two aspects of the here and now. These splinters might be put together into some more serviceable whole by paying more heed to their cumulative nature, to the step’s repeatability, variability, reversibility and expendability. The step, so mobile, so labile, so nimbly coupling place and person, mood and matter, occasion and purpose, begins to emerge as a metaphor of a certain way of living on this earth. It is a momentary proposition put by the individual to the non-individual, a not-quite infallible catching of oneself in the act of falling … With this freebooter’s licence goes every likelihood of superficiality, restlessness, fickleness – and so, by contraries, goes the possibility of recurrency, of frequentation, of a deep, an ever-deeper, dwelling in and on a place, a sum of whims and fantasies totalling a constancy as of stone.

Stone, of course, is the other structuring metaphor in Stones of Aran, and indeed it is the dominating reality of life on the island. It was the bareness of Aran limestone, the legibility of its fossils and ruins, its prehistory and history, that suggested the possibility of mapping it. Hence the actual landscape of the islands reminds one of the floorworks, which have features in common with both landscapes and maps. No need to pursue this theme; it is salient in all the books. Instead I turn to a question that occurs to me now:

Why was this so-called ‘wavy floor’ to be made of concrete? Wood or some sort of plastic would be just as feasible, and less abrasive if anyone should fall on this surface, which seems designed to trip one up. I don’t remember looking into this question at the time. Perhaps the answer lies in the word and its associations. Taken adjectivally, ‘concrete’ means existing in material form, in reality as opposed to the abstract. So it has connotations of fixity and solidity – whereas all the possible additions to the basic structure I suggest – light and shadow, measuring rods, bouncing balls, water – are temporary, changeable, unpredictable, unstable. A gallery exhibiting the wavy floor would probably stipulate that dancers venture onto it only at their own risk, whereas in my paper quoted above mathematicians are invited to de-reify it and establish its abstract features by process of proof.

Risk and proof, maths and the imagination, structure and freedom – somewhere near here is buried the binary opposition that has informed my creative life.

Ring and Cube

Having used various maximal circular arcs in the directional paintings of 1968, I began to think about three-dimensional equivalents. What is the diameter of the largest circle that can be fitted into a cube? The answer, in terms of the length of a side of the cube, is √(3/2) – but that’s no matter except to the numerical chatterbox mind. Choose a vertex of the cube, and a pair of sides that meet in it. Join the midpoints of these two sides by a line (A). Do the same starting from the vertex opposite to the first one, and the pair of sides opposite to the first pair, to produce a line (B). A and B are parallel. Slice through them both with a plane bisecting the cube. The cut face of one of the half-cubes is hexagonal. Inscribe a circle in this hexagon, touching the midpoints of all six sides of it. Since the sides of the hexagon each lie on a face of the cube, the circle touches each of the cube’s six faces and if it were any larger would exceed the limits of the cube. So it is the largest circle that can be inscribed in the cube.

To exhibit this construction I envisaged a cubic room, say twenty-five feet in length, breadth and height, and a circle in the form of a ring made of tubing a few inches in cross-section. I calculate that a ring of diameter 30′ 6′′ would just fit into it so as to touch each of the four walls, the ceiling and the floor, allowing an inch or two for the ring’s thickness. The room was to be white, the ring blood-red. There was to be an entrance door in the corner of the room nearest to which the ring rests on the floor, and an exit door opposite the entrance, so that anyone who entered would have to step through the ring to exit. Immediately outside the entrance door a silent attendant without explanation would hand each visitor a minute replica of the ring, of the same red and about half an inch in diameter. Only one person at a time would be admitted.

What is this about? The solitariness of the traverse, the enigmatic bestowal of the little ring (which many people might hold in their palm during their visit), suggest ritual, though once inside no particular action is prescribed apart from stepping through the ring, which is a near geometrical necessity. Perhaps a thought of cosmos and microcosmos is at play here. The individual is allotted certain bodily and mental characteristics by the accidents of birth, and has no choice but to make his or her way through an equally unchosen world to death. A clue to the way is that we and the universe are of the same stuff.

Resistance

What happens to a light bulb in the jaws of a vise when the current is switched on? I never had the nerve to try this in practice, but let us take it that if the bulb is very gently held initially it will not explode when illuminated, or at least not immediately. I pictured the vise as mounted on a small work-bench, with the bulb attached to a length of flex hanging from the ceiling above it. This assemblage was to be towards the back wall of a small cell and could be viewed by one or two visitors at a time from the cell’s low doorway. Since the conception came to me shortly after the exhibition of my ‘Four-colour Theorem’ in the gardens of Kenwood, I thought of siting it in a cell-like recess under the tall classical portico of Kenwood House itself; I imagined that there would be access to the door of the cell from a narrow basement area. The contrast between this cramped and dingy underground space and the proud four-pillared portico above it appealed to me. However, I never even got around to ascertaining that there was such a space under the portico.

The cell and the naked bulb put one in mind of Gestapo torture chambers as seen in films; the persistence of the light in shining in such a place of moral darkness directs one to the legend of the French Resistance. But to title the work ‘Resistance’ would perhaps be too coercive; there is more to be deciphered in it than its obvious connotations. It could also be seen as casting rays of darkness on some seemingly purely formal paintings of that time and earlier. Consider the sphere of the light bulb and the parallel jaws of the vise holding it: this entails the geometry of the largest circle in the cube. In fact all the paintings and floor-works consisting of geometrical shapes based on maximal circles can be seen in the cruel light of ‘Resistance’ as preservation of space under pressure.

Arabidopsis

Arabidopsis thaliana is the Latin name of the common weed, thale cress. It is an undistinguished-looking little plant, straggling to ten or so inches in height, with small white four-petalled flowers and inch-long tubular seed cases. It is very easy to grow, sets seed prolifically, and is ideal for genetic studies. Its cells each have five chromosomes bearing a total of 27,000 genes, which is a small number for a plant.

A chromosome is a molecule of DNA, and consists of two strands spiralling around each other. Each strand has a long row of molecules called bases running along it. These are of four different types, abbreviated as C, G, A and T; their function was mentioned in ‘Byzantium’. Because of their different shapes an A on one strand of the chromosome fits together with a T on the other strand, while a C fits together with a G. The genes consist of segments of the sequence of such base pairs along a chromosome, and the totality of these sequences constitutes the genome. In a human cell there are about 3.2 billion base pairs; in a thale cress cell there are about 127 million. Nowadays such sequences can be read and recorded, by means of powerful, complex and ever-advancing techniques.

In December 2000 the journal Nature announced the first virtually complete sequencing of a plant genome, that of thale cress, a task that had occupied an international collaboration of scientists, the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative, since 1996. The sequences of the plant’s five chromosomes were published in separate issues of the journal. This was a crucial step on the way to a complete sequencing of the much larger human genome, achieved in 2003. These matters are central to the question of what life is and how it transmits itself from generation to generation; the sequences of bases along the genes encode the instructions for the building of hundreds of different proteins from simpler chemicals, and it is the proteins that carry out the life-functions of the cells.

What first struck me about the thale cress genome as published was its incomprehensibility. Page after dense page of polysyllabic terminology and cryptic diagrams – I relished the general appearance, the message of which is that reality is endlessly more complex than investigation at any given level can reveal. I would like to blow up dozens of pages from the Nature articles and paper the walls of a gallery room with them, and in the middle of this room, this blizzard of information, place a small flower-stand bearing a specimen – an individual – of Arabidopsis, in a jamjar.

The Arabidopsis project – my proposed artwork, not the work of the scientists – had reached this point of consideration when I noticed that the abbreviated base names A, C and G, endlessly recurring in the transcribed sequences of base pairs, could be read as musical notes in the octave CDEFGAB. Moreover T could be taken to represent an F three octaves higher. So a sequence of bases spells out a tune, or at least a series of notes. How long would it take to play the entire genome, at, say, a rattling rate of four bases per second? If my calculation is correct, about a year. And if we had a loudspeaker at one end of the room playing the sequence of bases on one strand of a chromosome, there could be another loudspeaker at the other end of the room playing the complementary sequence.

The biomechanism plagiarized by the above project is only a small part of the apparatus by which proteins are built according to the instructions encoded in the base sequences. One could musicalize, or at least tonalize, the workings of this apparatus too, with some ingenuity, adhering to the principle that every note or chord is to be determined by the rules of the musicalization, not by aesthetics or any other source of values. One wants the bare clatter or chatter of creation, the rap of molecule on molecule.

And in the middle of the room, a specimen of the thing itself, in all its modest oddity, its asymmetry, its bending before the slings and arrows of plant-existence.