Entrance, c1985, 98 x 98cms, oil on canvas.
 
VIII. Entrance

And now we’re talking with all the actors gone. I hear the trumpet blast as in the spotlight I see my disappearance. My chequered career is over and here in these colours and stripes that I attract is my apotheosis. The shadows will fall long when the searchlight is cast. In this small square within the city’s gridlines my absence achieves great monumentality.

Oh you say – the rhetoric of abstraction.

Don’t speak too soon. I am surely not gone in being absent. Devise some festive music perhaps for the grandeur of my apparition is all your doing. If you can endure the endlessness of this – the intermission in the Grand Guignol of representation.

The Artwork Looks at the Artist, c1971, 15 x 21cms, ink on paper.

IX. The Artwork Looks the Artist

A profile you know is always a fictional constraint from which one can only look askew, an abstraction of other for the self, of self for other and I, for one, was sceptical – retained the mobility of my eye despite your cruel will to cartoon me. After all, a profile’s a coined identity, can’t you see, a deadening representation on coin or stamp, identity as currency my eye recoils from. I will retain my capital, my head. We never live in profile for ourselves. But you’re keeping to your profile and won’t rotate your gaze.

I want a coiled subjectivity ready to spring apart the lines of representation. I want you to find the breaches, the apertures where fervour breaks through, undoing all policed identities and firing our desire.

I can see you have these – these trembling intimations, this incipient mirth, even in the downward indentation of your lip. I see it in the unease of your easel, try as you might to stabilise the armature it lends us in our coupled disjunct need.

Ah yes, but here’s the rub, the happy friction, in the breach between our styles – where else would desire profile itself, where else might it draw its febrile line?