Dear Michael,
I write to you from yet another wet day of grey dullness.The working-class building across the street has a screaming, multi-coloured façade. If we were in China Mieville's novel, which you have read, could be the connecting gap between two very different cities, Barcelona and Berlin. We could walk through it at the same time, without ever seeing each other, to change cities without changing location. Less fantasy-like but just as abruptly as a leap in time, something similar happens when you start an exhibition by the room sheet or by the artworks. A first dilemma arises: to begin with the world of words or the world of objects. Both start in our eyes, but the experience is different.There are those who choose to start with words because of some vertigo produced by sheer things, so clear and vague at once. Others allow themselves to be joined by words without paying much attention to them.They even take them home, folded on a sheet of paper that sooner or later ends up in the rubbish bin. There are also those who jump from one world to another, paying no attention to either. Exhibitions are full of writing. What's more, words give them an afterlife. But it seems that words and artworks never quite get along. Why? Is this even true?
Hola Sonia
I don't know, I think it is definitely an uneasy combination, words and artworks. I think that we make art about things we can't describe in words is true and I have the impression that some artists, (particular painters! haha,) are grumpy about the compulsion to translate the visual experience into a literary one, but I accept it, (now at least, I probably was once a grumpy painter too.) I accept it as it is also true that words are people's preferred method of communication, so not using words to describe artworks, or at least trying to, is ridiculous. Of course there will be words, there are always words, in our heads if nowhere else.
But I want those words to be good words, I want the words to give to the artworks, to add another level, to orientate, (or disorientate,) the viewer in the right way. A lot of those room sheets that we fold into our pockets and throw away when we get home, seem to take away from the artwork, to reduce it somehow, to distract us from whatever it was that held us in the artwork.
So maybe they can get along, just that they need a mediator..
I don't know, I think it is definitely an uneasy combination, words and artworks. I think that we make art about things we can't describe in words is true and I have the impression that some artists, (particular painters! haha,) are grumpy about the compulsion to translate the visual experience into a literary one, but I accept it, (now at least, I probably was once a grumpy painter too.) I accept it as it is also true that words are people's preferred method of communication, so not using words to describe artworks, or at least trying to, is ridiculous. Of course there will be words, there are always words, in our heads if nowhere else.
But I want those words to be good words, I want the words to give to the artworks, to add another level, to orientate, (or disorientate,) the viewer in the right way. A lot of those room sheets that we fold into our pockets and throw away when we get home, seem to take away from the artwork, to reduce it somehow, to distract us from whatever it was that held us in the artwork.
So maybe they can get along, just that they need a mediator..
Words are so skilled at teleporting… Yours have prompted those of a writer who wondered how words can't be good enough. It is one of those many ideas that wish to say the opposite of what it says. When looking for those exact words in her book,I found a past me portrayed in pencil marks and also a better line. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. Nor is there a cure for the conundrum about what words capture and what they release. Now painting should get grumpy because I am ignoring it with my blabla -strokes, but still I would like to teleport two more ideas. The grumpiness of painters is as renowned as the patience of painting, which outlives all technologies.
The other day algorithms took me back to 1977. I landed on an interview with a philosopher who has written a lot about photography. She stated how we want -raising another conundrum- pictures to tell the truth by lying. When a camera appears in front of us, we want a real but improved self. She also said that photographs are records in a way that paintings are not. Do you agree with her? Here painting (especially abstract one) might be happy if I ask you to address another conundrum by telling me what painting can record and words - and photography - cannot. What an obsession of us putting things in contest…
The second idea is also not mine. It's from an amusing art critic and (I hear) boring curator. He equates texts in art with bikinis that disguise the embarrassment of the naked work. If works of art were proudly nude and not naked, perhaps they would feel differently. Embarrassment aside, he says that texts about works of art are texts written to not be read. They are also conundrum-lovers: while promising to clarify the work, the more they obscure it the better..But better for whom? And here, with the self-confidence of the once important art critics, I will unsurely assert that “the text” flirts with “the painting” because it creates an image of something it is not. Textual bikinis are also portrait-texts that claim to tell the truth by lying. But who or what do they portray? Perhaps it is a problem of over-mediation and of risk aversion. Speaking clearly increases the accountability of our words…
How do we lower the volume of words to let painting speak?
I think that a painting records the painter, the person who made the work, more than the photograph records the photographer, we are more conscious of the individual who made the creative decisions we are looking at when we look at a painting. We know that the camera lies, but that doesn’t stop us believing that what we are looking at is real, we forget about the photographer unless we have seen enough of their work to recognise them from the photo. But we think about the painter when we see a painting, we think what a good job they have done, or otherwise, perhaps wonder why have they chosen to dedicate their time to make this thing we are looking at. But we no longer think that the painting we are looking at is a record of something. And (to my mind anyway) that is a good thing. As I have said before, somewhere else, when it comes to painting, I have no use for the truth.
I think you are right that text creates a new image of something that is not the work. It is a very precise way of putting it.
Actually I think the same and that is why I include texts written by me, so that this textual image, be it about parallel universes or crossing dimensions, adds another level to the work, or another image to the paintings that compliments them, to invites the viewer to go back and look at them again, but through this prism.
That’s why an artist needs to be careful, they don’t want their work looked at through the wrong prism, (to continue the metaphor,) but if it is the right one it can add to the work.
I have been thinking where I am now as a painter or as a writer, and I feel I am in a moment where both have equal protagonism (to use a Spanglish word), they are complementing one another to create a kind of Gestalt experience of my work.
So maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to speak on behalf of painting haha as I am also a writer, and I think that perhaps words or writing play the role that drawing plays for other painters. So I have a question for you?
Do you draw?
I think you are right that text creates a new image of something that is not the work. It is a very precise way of putting it.
Actually I think the same and that is why I include texts written by me, so that this textual image, be it about parallel universes or crossing dimensions, adds another level to the work, or another image to the paintings that compliments them, to invites the viewer to go back and look at them again, but through this prism.
That’s why an artist needs to be careful, they don’t want their work looked at through the wrong prism, (to continue the metaphor,) but if it is the right one it can add to the work.
I have been thinking where I am now as a painter or as a writer, and I feel I am in a moment where both have equal protagonism (to use a Spanglish word), they are complementing one another to create a kind of Gestalt experience of my work.
So maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to speak on behalf of painting haha as I am also a writer, and I think that perhaps words or writing play the role that drawing plays for other painters. So I have a question for you?
Do you draw?
By the role of drawing towards painting, do you mean a subsidiary one? Drawing being there for the painting to glow?
If by drawing we mean handwriting,scribbling emojis on household notes or even failed suns on pictures of the relentlessly grey Berlin sky to boost the mood of friends, then I can say that I draw very often. If by drawing we mean gathering lines with the intention of making a work, then I have hardly ever drawn in my life. Being a child, I started to experience anxiety with every request from teachers to do a "free drawing". I much preferred technical drawing, leaning my pencil and creative responsibility on the square and bevel. Were you one of those children touched by the wand of art goddesses? Ironic how the skills of the artist can become so different once you are older and working in art. Will networking children be the artists of the future?
I did curate an exhibition inspired by drawing in which there were hardly any works as one would expect them to be. It had a pretentious (to use an Spangl-ish word) title that I would not give now. I'm very bad with titles, but I've discovered a technique: borrowing them. Everything is borrowed in one way or another. What we think is most unique - the inner self - is not even ours. But this can be further explained by a prominent anthropologist. Do you do well with the titles you chose? I remember you from a future life brings up many images, also in motion ones. It could be one of those stories that happen in a single sentence. Back to titles, how did you and this particular one meet? Then there are the titles of paintings in your show, which you make speak like a poem. Is this so? I will make a belated confession: I went to your exhibition but I didn't read the labels. If my time machine wasn't broken, I would go back to January and choose another order for your poem lines to get to the paintings.
On how painting records the painter I was recently listening to Crystal Z Campbell - researching their previous conversations for our podcast - say that there is always someone with a whole life and emotions behind the most abstract gesture. I don't know if you are interested in the field of Black Abstraction. Here I think of abstraction as a strategy to talk about black bodies and black experiences without representing them. Their arguments are very insightful and revealing. They confirm, time and again, how many things are still the right of a few, including abstraction in painting.
I would like to ask you about a question: when is painting drawing and when is it not? I am probably stating the obvious, but I feel that there is more drawing in abstract painting than in figurative painting. Or I remember drawing more in abstraction.How do you relate to the mythology of the abstract gesture? And with that of the painter? Language bridges some gaps by reminding of how -in Spanish- gender and genre share the same word.
No I meant in the role of sketching, as in preparing for a painting, I don’t really do preliminary sketching, don’t prepare for a painting like that. Perhaps I prepare more with poems, or with lines, that might become the titles.. Having said that I am just planning on doing some sketches for some new painting haha, so I can’t be trusted in this sense, but I have a word or words in my head to tell me what I want to try and paint, rather than a sketch.
But what is true is that these days I never draw on the canvas, I just start painting directly, with a direction to head in, but with no idea where I am going to end up. I might do a fast sketch on a scrap of paper whilst a painting is in process, to help me think through the composition, but these aren’t what I would call drawings, in the sense that I would never exhibit them, they almost always end up in the bin, (with the hojas de sala haha).
The title I choose for the painting normally refers to the direction I start heading in the middle of the painting, when I have decided what the painting will be about. For me the titles are very important, when I see a painting is called “untitled” I have to be honest and it is always a bit of a bajón. I don’t think untitled is possible, so the title becomes “untitled” which conjures an aesthetic of a kind of expressive abstraction in the mind of the viewer, (or this viewer at least). And I find the mythology of the expressive abstract gesture a bit tiresome, as I said I have no use for the truth in painting, and that includes emotional truth, maybe this is the same realm, as in, the stereotypical untitled abstract painting is untitled because the artist believes in expresses a non-verbal event in their gestures captured in paint and I am not sure I buy that.
I think one of the things I like about my diptychs is that they question that gesture. For me at least, if I make an abstract gesture I like in an “inspired” moment, what does it mean if I have to repeat it it? Does it make a lie of the emotion contained within it? (Like I said I don’t believe in that emotion, but others do.)
I want paintings to be good and unexpected, and want the artist to do whatever it takes to get to that point. But I do believe that the artwork expresses something non-verbal. I want to be clear about that. There is magic there. What I dispute is that this magic is something we shouldn’t try and describe in words, that the best solution is a dreary “untitled” title.
It is interesting that you think that, for me there is less drawing in abstract painting, as i think there is less pressure on getting depiction “right”, and to do that you probably need to draw, so for me realism = drawing. But again I might be lying as I do have some calligraphic shapes that some people have noticed, I have started to have what some people call “motifs”, hand and leaf shapes that repeat.
I guess an art practice is a kind of swirling event, and when you are in it, making, you can grab whatever is in front of you at that moment and say this is how I work, but the practice keeps swirling and makes a liar of you as what is in front of you when you next make a painting, might not conform to what you have just said. Maybe that is why artists are so nervous of words, as our practices are so mutable, and words seem so limiting..
But what is true is that these days I never draw on the canvas, I just start painting directly, with a direction to head in, but with no idea where I am going to end up. I might do a fast sketch on a scrap of paper whilst a painting is in process, to help me think through the composition, but these aren’t what I would call drawings, in the sense that I would never exhibit them, they almost always end up in the bin, (with the hojas de sala haha).
The title I choose for the painting normally refers to the direction I start heading in the middle of the painting, when I have decided what the painting will be about. For me the titles are very important, when I see a painting is called “untitled” I have to be honest and it is always a bit of a bajón. I don’t think untitled is possible, so the title becomes “untitled” which conjures an aesthetic of a kind of expressive abstraction in the mind of the viewer, (or this viewer at least). And I find the mythology of the expressive abstract gesture a bit tiresome, as I said I have no use for the truth in painting, and that includes emotional truth, maybe this is the same realm, as in, the stereotypical untitled abstract painting is untitled because the artist believes in expresses a non-verbal event in their gestures captured in paint and I am not sure I buy that.
I think one of the things I like about my diptychs is that they question that gesture. For me at least, if I make an abstract gesture I like in an “inspired” moment, what does it mean if I have to repeat it it? Does it make a lie of the emotion contained within it? (Like I said I don’t believe in that emotion, but others do.)
I want paintings to be good and unexpected, and want the artist to do whatever it takes to get to that point. But I do believe that the artwork expresses something non-verbal. I want to be clear about that. There is magic there. What I dispute is that this magic is something we shouldn’t try and describe in words, that the best solution is a dreary “untitled” title.
It is interesting that you think that, for me there is less drawing in abstract painting, as i think there is less pressure on getting depiction “right”, and to do that you probably need to draw, so for me realism = drawing. But again I might be lying as I do have some calligraphic shapes that some people have noticed, I have started to have what some people call “motifs”, hand and leaf shapes that repeat.
I guess an art practice is a kind of swirling event, and when you are in it, making, you can grab whatever is in front of you at that moment and say this is how I work, but the practice keeps swirling and makes a liar of you as what is in front of you when you next make a painting, might not conform to what you have just said. Maybe that is why artists are so nervous of words, as our practices are so mutable, and words seem so limiting..
Someone once told me that the least an artist can do is to take responsibility for naming their stuff. Intuition is needed to name and is always a good advisor when it comes to seeing exhibitions. This does not detract from the fact that we sometimes strive - with words - to like things more. Or less. But let's confess here that I myself wrote some “untitled” texts, not thinking much about the headache for designers when making the table of contents and for myself when I need to include them in a CV. Actually, they are easily forgotten. Titles are also a memory aid. We don't remember what a book we read was about, but we can still remember the title.Does this happen to you? Are there paintings that you forget more easily than others? Do you remember paintings that you have not yet done?
My most intimate relationship with (drawn) gestures has always taken place in notary offices. Having to sign ten pages, one after the other, non-stop, and on page six realising that I don't remember my signature anymore. There is some panic there, again the awareness of forgetting. It also happens to me with password numbers. My hands remember them better than my head. To what extent do you paint with your body and not with your head? Years ago a friend used his signature to tell us about his work. With two images he made us understand how behind the most obscure scribble there can be a very clear, rational method.We also discovered that we both have the same method when signing. Not only is it perfect for signing in the name of the other, but it takes away the unique singularity of a human hand gesture. Thinking about how you duplicate paintings that neither are nor want to be identical, repeating their gestures would be like forging your own signature? Between one canvas and another, are there many discarded ones?
Allow me, pushing the confidence that words are giving us here, to ask you “that question”: What makes a painting good? What is the oddest thing -in the sense of leaving the painting - that you have done to make them unexpected? How do you paint backwards?
I like the idea of paintings, not yet done, carried around in my head, I think it is definitely true, though they never take the shape I think they will. I often say to students when I am teaching, “your loyalty is to the object in front of you not the idea in your head” es decir, change whatever you are working on to make it look better, forget the idea that inspired the work if necessary, and my paintings are like that. The idea that inspired them discarded, (with the drawings and hojas de sala, I am creating quite a large pile of discards here aren’t I, perhaps I’ll make a bonfire.)
This painter carrying paintings around in their head sounds very novelistic. Though that makes me think it wouldn’t work. There are a number of novels I have had to abandon reading as the artist-character in them was just too unbelievable for me to follow them in the book. There is a sentence I have tried to paint more than once, from a JG Ballard novel, “As I took her arm she stared through my face at the dark branches of the trees over my head, “ When I read it, the image it forms in my mind is almost a glitch, it doesn’t quite work, and I love it, but I haven’t been able to paint it in a way that captures it’s appeal to me. And in the end I used it for a show of painting I curated..
To circle back, you didn’t read the titles of the paintings in the show?! Have you read them since? What does that say about how you relate to text in a show of paintings?
Ouch that is a difficult question, I need to think about it. Though I don’t think there is an answer, at least not a written one, which maybe does mean there are things I can’t explain in words, or maybe the answer would involve too many words. If I think about myself I like to be surprised by a painting, intrigued. That is what I look for when I go to a painting exhibition. There are only so many ways you can make a painting, so if you feel like something is a little bit different then it is interesting, and that is enough for me most of the time, perhaps it is like variations on chess openings, but I don’t know enough about chess to make that comparison with confidence.
I sometimes say that for me painting is about concealing things, whereas writing is about revealing them. So maybe that is what makes a painting good, that is the answer. A good painting is a painting that it is hiding something.
And I don’t know if it is odd, but in making a couple of the paintings in the show I had a plastic carrier bag I had cut in half and would use it to routinely wipe away what I had painted. This smearing tool would often be used and ended up creating the painting more or less. I have kept these bag halves for future use.
This painter carrying paintings around in their head sounds very novelistic. Though that makes me think it wouldn’t work. There are a number of novels I have had to abandon reading as the artist-character in them was just too unbelievable for me to follow them in the book. There is a sentence I have tried to paint more than once, from a JG Ballard novel, “As I took her arm she stared through my face at the dark branches of the trees over my head, “ When I read it, the image it forms in my mind is almost a glitch, it doesn’t quite work, and I love it, but I haven’t been able to paint it in a way that captures it’s appeal to me. And in the end I used it for a show of painting I curated..
To circle back, you didn’t read the titles of the paintings in the show?! Have you read them since? What does that say about how you relate to text in a show of paintings?
Ouch that is a difficult question, I need to think about it. Though I don’t think there is an answer, at least not a written one, which maybe does mean there are things I can’t explain in words, or maybe the answer would involve too many words. If I think about myself I like to be surprised by a painting, intrigued. That is what I look for when I go to a painting exhibition. There are only so many ways you can make a painting, so if you feel like something is a little bit different then it is interesting, and that is enough for me most of the time, perhaps it is like variations on chess openings, but I don’t know enough about chess to make that comparison with confidence.
I sometimes say that for me painting is about concealing things, whereas writing is about revealing them. So maybe that is what makes a painting good, that is the answer. A good painting is a painting that it is hiding something.
And I don’t know if it is odd, but in making a couple of the paintings in the show I had a plastic carrier bag I had cut in half and would use it to routinely wipe away what I had painted. This smearing tool would often be used and ended up creating the painting more or less. I have kept these bag halves for future use.
My approach to exhibitions has changed in recent years.I see them as environments to hold a conversation with someone and spend some time together.They are an in-between, not a goal. For different reasons, I feel similar when making them .What is the difference between curating your own paintings or those of others? Did you like it? When visiting exhibitions, I like how the works on show make others appear. There are also personal stories and wild theories of art on the fly, all mixed together. Exhibitions as thinking environments, as art jargon would put it. Come to think of it, it's been a long time since I've been to see exhibitions on my own.For months now I have been doing something like an audience strike in Berlin. I find it hard to go and see things in institutions that follow their programmes as if nothing is happening.This indifference, real or performative, makes you wonder what you are doing there in times of cultural censorship and public lies. Art is a powerful tool for concealment, but not always in the way you mention.
I say all this because I saw your exhibition in the company of a close friend, in this extended moment of collective unrest. I was grateful to be at a painting exhibition. Paintings ask you to look at them, without asking much in return.They let you be silent with them. We don't always land at the same time as the body in places and I finally felt in Barcelona on the verge of leaving. It's quite sci-fi, this feeling of not quite being, of having lost half of oneself along the way. Maybe my Moebius strip got broken for a while.
Back on topic, no, I didn't read the titles at the time.I don't read much in exhibitions, let's say. Ironic - or very fitting - having written for so many. I do it afterwards, stretching the experience like a doughnut that turns into a bretzel. But I've come back to your titles thanks to the hoja de sala -an exhibition doppelganger haunting us here- which can be downloaded as many times as you want.It would be amazing if every download made a different version of the content.I am very curious to know who you are talking to and why there are characters from Greek mythology in some of these sentences… it feels as if the paintings were an excuse for their titles.
Do you already have an idea of how to use those plastic bags?Are you interested in painting that doesn't happen on a canvas? These are my last two questions here. There are more going on, but they belong to a mirroring conversation of us taking place in another reality.
No, I am not interested in making that work, paintings that are not on canvasses or board, not that I have anything against that work, just that it is not for me. It is a different puzzle to solve, one that, thus far at least, is not my practice. Painting and writing are enough for me at the moment.
What you said about exhibitions really chimed with me, as an in-between space to have a conversation, that is what I am trying to do at the moment with exhibitions. This in-between might be between the literary and visual, two modes of experiencing the world that we can’t seem to hold in our head simultaneously, so I am hoping a visitor will oscillate between these two modes in my show.
I think this is another of the reasons I like painting pairs. There is a space for conversation created between the two diptychs, there is one and then the other, which came first? Are they identical? The answers to these questions are not really relevant, what is relevant instead is the time spent in front of them wondering. The viewer trying to unpick the decisions made when the paintings were created.
But I have to accept I am no longer only making paintings, my practice seems to now firmly involve painting and writing, and both of them exhibited together, the painting the excuse for the writing, and the writing the excuse for the painting.
As to why there are references to Greek mythology, it just comes to me to be honest but you asking has made me wonder why, and I think it is for a few reasons. Firstly, I’ve looked at a lot of paintings, and a lot of old paintings. And this was their subject a lot of their time, so maybe I just feel it is my ‘field’.
But I like it, it’s something that I’ve got from my mum, a love of science fiction and fantasy and for her that extends to mythology and for me it does too. The use of (often fantastical) narratives to explain or explore a topic. The same applies when I reference the lives of the saints and the Christian religion. I think there is a tendency to think of these narratives as too staid, (or perhaps too tainted by the Church in the case of the saints,) but for me they are a rich seam of inspiration, so many stories that we’ve told one another for centuries have their roots here. And it is my culture as a European, I’m not saying it is better for being European, far from it, but it is a resource of narratives I feel I can use and misuse without worrying about appropriating the culture of someone else or misrepresenting it.
I am thinking about creating my own deities for some new work but I’m not sure they will feel as rich as characters that have been passed down to us through the centuries, thumbed, creased and stained like a well read manuscript.
And about paintings letting you be silent with them, it reminded me of this passage by Ali Smith, one of my favourite passages from one of my favourite books, “Artful.” It’s a passage I come back to a lot, particularly with my practice as it is at the moment, inspired as it is by parallel lives, the passage of time, (perhaps caused by having children but that is for another interview..)
“You can’t step into the same story twice - or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’s this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings. Because come then go we will, and in that order,”
What you said about exhibitions really chimed with me, as an in-between space to have a conversation, that is what I am trying to do at the moment with exhibitions. This in-between might be between the literary and visual, two modes of experiencing the world that we can’t seem to hold in our head simultaneously, so I am hoping a visitor will oscillate between these two modes in my show.
I think this is another of the reasons I like painting pairs. There is a space for conversation created between the two diptychs, there is one and then the other, which came first? Are they identical? The answers to these questions are not really relevant, what is relevant instead is the time spent in front of them wondering. The viewer trying to unpick the decisions made when the paintings were created.
But I have to accept I am no longer only making paintings, my practice seems to now firmly involve painting and writing, and both of them exhibited together, the painting the excuse for the writing, and the writing the excuse for the painting.
As to why there are references to Greek mythology, it just comes to me to be honest but you asking has made me wonder why, and I think it is for a few reasons. Firstly, I’ve looked at a lot of paintings, and a lot of old paintings. And this was their subject a lot of their time, so maybe I just feel it is my ‘field’.
But I like it, it’s something that I’ve got from my mum, a love of science fiction and fantasy and for her that extends to mythology and for me it does too. The use of (often fantastical) narratives to explain or explore a topic. The same applies when I reference the lives of the saints and the Christian religion. I think there is a tendency to think of these narratives as too staid, (or perhaps too tainted by the Church in the case of the saints,) but for me they are a rich seam of inspiration, so many stories that we’ve told one another for centuries have their roots here. And it is my culture as a European, I’m not saying it is better for being European, far from it, but it is a resource of narratives I feel I can use and misuse without worrying about appropriating the culture of someone else or misrepresenting it.
I am thinking about creating my own deities for some new work but I’m not sure they will feel as rich as characters that have been passed down to us through the centuries, thumbed, creased and stained like a well read manuscript.
And about paintings letting you be silent with them, it reminded me of this passage by Ali Smith, one of my favourite passages from one of my favourite books, “Artful.” It’s a passage I come back to a lot, particularly with my practice as it is at the moment, inspired as it is by parallel lives, the passage of time, (perhaps caused by having children but that is for another interview..)
“You can’t step into the same story twice - or maybe it’s that stories, books, art can’t step into the same person twice, maybe it’s that they allow for our mutability, are ready for us at all times, and maybe it’s this adaptability, regardless of time, that makes them art, because real art (as opposed to more transient art, which is real too, just for less time) will hold us at all our different ages like it held all the people before us and will hold all the people after us, in an elasticity and with a generosity that allow for all our comings and goings. Because come then go we will, and in that order,”