Roads to nowhere

I’ve just got back from a couple of weeks in Ancient Rome. We had fun seeing the sights and all, but it all turned to custard when we went to a party with a bunch of Roman painters.

One of them quoted approvingly that old story about the painting competition where one painter painted some fruit and birds tried to eat it. Then they went to draw back the curtain covering the other painter’s work and discovered that the curtain was the painting. He won, because while the other guy had fooled birds he had fooled humans (which is not that difficult really).

I laughed and said what a stupid story that was. The Romans got all huffy and started quoting Aristotle at me. The exchange went something like this:

Me: ‘Bollocks to Aristotle. He was Alexander the Great’s tutor, and look how that turned out.’
Roman: ‘Yes, Alexander the Great conquered the known world!’
Me: ‘Exactly. The murdering bastard.’

Picabia intervened at this point. He tried reasoning with them and used the example of music. Aristotle reckoned art was mimesis. However, music doesn’t imitate anything. It is a purely abstract art. Picabia then tried to lead them through the way he developed abstract painting through the analogy with music. They just looked at him blankly.

I reckon the problem was with their assumptions. They assumed that Rome was centre of the world. All roads lead to Rome and all that. Because it was the centre of the world, it was necessarily the most advanced city in the world. And since they were Roman, they were the most advanced painters in the world, by definition. These assumptions actually made them very parochial and insular. They assumed they had nothing to learn from barbarians from the sticks, which is what they took us to be. Idiots.

Poor old Piero. He had all his illusions shattered.

Update: Well, I've just had Picabia on the phone. My first clue that he was a little irate was his opening line: 'You fucking idiot!' He thinks I misrepresented him in this post and wants me to stress that the the whole abstract painting through analogy with music thing only reflected his thinking for a short period between about 1911 and 1913. He moved on fairly quickly from there. (I won't quote him on the subject. He did go on for a bit.) The only reason he mentioned it to those Roman gits was because he thought they needed to start with the basics. Fair call. They didn't even get that.

I'm fairly sympathetic. He's a bit sensitive to being misinterpreted at the moment. You should've seen him after he'd read some of the stuff art historians had written about him, especially when he read the one who thought he'd ripped off Duchamp. Of course, it was the other way round. He was a little disappointed no-one realised Picasso ripped him off either (to say the least).

Can't take them anywhere

I was hanging out with Francis Picabia and Piero della Francesca the other day. We’d gone to see the Fall in early 80s London, and Picabia was ranting about how punk rock just ripped off all the least important aspects of Dada and failed to get what it was really all about.

Piero had spent the day in the library reading up on what art historians made of his work. Apparently he got told off because he was laughing too loudly. We got into a bit of an argument about when was the best time to be a painter. Each of us maintained that we’d been born at exactly the right time.

Piero made the point that people were a lot more visually literate in his time than people in either Picabia’s or mine. He pointed out that a lack of standard weights and measures meant that people got really good at judging areas and volumes just from a single glance. He also mentioned that widespread illiteracy meant that the visual communication of ideas was a lot more important.

He used the example of gestures. In the 15th century there was an established vocabulary of gestures, with individual gestures having a highly specific established meaning that viewers in his time would understand. That’s just one example of the highly sophisticated system of visual symbols that were a part of the general culture. They didn’t need to be explained. Not knowing this vocabulary, we miss a lot of the meaning of Renaissance paintings and often misinterpret them. He went into some detail, but I missed a lot of it because I had to go break up a fight between Picabia and Mark E Smith.