Wednesday 28 November 2007

Capital Letters for Duplicity

(In a room with Robert Morris and Carl Andre)
Written by Catherine Borra

I looked away from the window for the light was too strong.
I turned back to the room and wondered if there would be any difference, yet no: all the steel square plates were there, arranged to form some bigger square: not great, nor grand; just bigger.
The squares reflected the blank, white shades of the room in the same, non-obvious, opaque way, just as they were doing before, and they themselves were reflected by the mirrored sides of four cubes engaged in an infinite mute dialogue, between each other.
Objects. Objects! You cannot have any great relationship with a motionless form that engages so little with its contingencies: the squares will stare up at the cubes like a bed-ridden old man that has lost his glasses, and the cubes will toss a glance back to them, still absorbed in their everlasting picture frame of uncontaminated perfectness. This could go on forever. I was clearly uninvited.
I was pushed back, put on a hold – numbed by the rigueur of this private act. I was to disturb if it interrupted the scene with some new reflection. What was left was me, with no particular need for prevalence, no expectation or special need, no need to step out from my own privateness, but willing to wait for a while.
And finally it happened: a horde of school-children rushed into the room, a horde of little prevailing Is, each with its own particular smell and voice-tone, so strong that they disrupted the silence of the cube and square dialogue.
Cubes and squares just had to look around, no matter how hard they concentrated. They were stepped on and they were contaminated with all kinds of fragmented reflections.
There were dashes of colour flying around the air.
This was enough to shake I out of its seclusion and join in the tension. I is a social individual after all.

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