Minimalism: 9 and a half lines
September 24th, 2009
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.                                                                                                          -Ankit
Gullible spectator: What a wonderful peace of art! It speaks to me in such personal and dazzling ways. The artist, by not saying anything, has commented upon the unspeakable state of current affairs. His dots, to me, represent new beginnings which begin with the ends - thereby signifying a hopeless, dim, dark future. He has captured the emptiness of our lives with white spaces and by choosing not to say anything, said so much about everything. And did you get the significance of 9? The number that represents the fertility of our specie, and that 1/2 at the end - must be something profound. I just cannot comprehend it as of now. Brilliant, brilliant.
'Philistine': Bollocks more like it.
Gullible Spectator: Obviously you'd say that. Next thing, you'd say that 4'33'' is mediocre.
'Philistine': Bollocks more like it.
Patron Izer: Philistine, go watch daytime TV; such artistic ingenuity is wasted upon you. Please leave aesthetic interpretation to those of us with at least measurable traces of acumen. Gullible spectator, you analysis is tolerable, though flawed and rudimentary. The most accurate statement of your interpretation was “Brilliant, brilliant.†Indeed, allow me to assist. The thrust of the meaning lies in the dichotomy of the title and the art itself. Notice that the composition is entitled “Minimalism: 9 and a half lines,†but the visible aspect of the art presents itself as dots. This smacks--indeed, screams--of the apparent incompatibility of the finite (dots) and the infinite (lines). While there is the eternal cry within the heart of man for meaning, he finds his path marked--yes, punctuated--by stages of mere finite insignificance--yes, vacuity, emptiness--shrouded in the knowledge of his inability to fortify his past and to redeem what he perceives as lost time. His conscious is bombarded with the knowledge of his invariable existence upon the motionless treadmill of life; unable, on his current trajectory, to satisfy his craving for eternal merit.
And the half line at the end was a--frankly, quite apparent--allusion to the third line of Edward Fitzgerald’s (indubitably transmogrified) translation of the 71st quatrain of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a Word of it.
This whole picture of “Minimalism: 9 and a half lines†speaks of the life of mortal man--indeed, the whole of humanity--whose path is punctuated by universally meaningless yet unmodifiable passages of time. And the half line--yes, the utter brilliance of it all lies in the fact that the last line, though invisibly incomplete, is punctuated by a 10th dot, signifying the termination of man’s earthly journey before the completion of all his acquired finite dreams.
Gullible spectator, I hope that helps. Believe it or not, I myself sometimes struggle with art’s meaning in its entirety. Now I must take my leave; it’s time for me to watch some daytime TV while I exercise on my treadmill.
Umm... You Win!
Seriously, the brilliance of your written word is only matched by the subtlety of its sarcasm and the ridiculousness of the idea it is rallying behind :).