Q: a blank page A: an area enclosed by an outline
Q: is each 35mm slide blank A: the projector leaves the room black
Q: an enclosed area A: can be either figure or ground
Q: the room is black A: a string of words questions [1]
Q: I hold exhibitions A: figures on a ground [2]
Q: will the gallery walls be white A: a string of words follows
Q: is this how the most difficult questions are answered A: everything is the residue of something larger [3]
Q: this graphic A: that ‘cut’ [4]
Játékok: Eight Personal Messages [5]
Notes:
[1] ‘Every explanation or indication of the meaning of a question consists, in some way or other, of prescriptions for finding its answer. This principle has proved to be of fundamental importance for the method of science . . . Thus a question which is unanswerable in principle can have no meaning, it can be no question at all: it is nothing but a nonsensical series of words with a question mark after them’. Moritz Schlick quoted in Meyer, M. (1995) Of Problematology: Philosophy, Science and Language, trans. D. Jamison with A. Hart. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 72.
[2] Cezanne’s late technique was described as ‘cutting holes’ in a canvas (see Rawson, P. S. [1969] Drawing: the appreciation of the arts 3, London: Oxford University Press, pp 173-4). Rawson always said that my drawings owed a lot to the way Cezanne ‘cut’ shadow paths across the surface of a sheet of paper.
[3] ‘This is how the most difficult questions are tackled: [theologians from the Kuru and Pañcāla clans] come across a curled-up dog or any ordinary thing – and they decide that the answer must be there. If the answer isn’t in any ordinary thing then it won’t be anywhere else.’ (Calasso, R. (2014) Ardor, London: Penguin Books, p. 210)
[4] This idea is based on C. S. Peirce’s ‘Alpha graphs’ in which a ‘cut’ represents the negation of whatever is enclosed within an outline. See Shin, SJ. (2002) The Iconic Logic of Peirce’s Graphs, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, p. 39.
[5] György Kurtág has been composing miniature piano pieces called játékok (‘games’) since 1973. He describes them as ‘pedagogical performance pieces’ in which pianists must trust the visual impact of the printed score, allowing the graphic picture it conveys to influence their interpretation of each piece. Listen to Víkingur Ólafsson play Kurtág’s A Voice in the Distance (Játékok / Book 5): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaacZYiqQHY