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Kevin Richardson In the Park, the Horses Didn’t Mind (2013)

Artist’s Statement My Uncle Robert once gave me a painting of a duck that he had made, and I noticed it was done

on the cardboard back of a Pampers box.

I’ve been using improved paintings in my arsenal of presentation for a while now, and usually a

few are featured in my shows. Using already framed masterpiece prints, I took for granted nobody

would think I was trying to fool them, that I wasn’t aware, or that the viewer wasn’t aware. Pictures

were introduced on top of the surface, usually some version/vision of the first-decade Rolling

Stones or the New York Dolls. At least I had the decency to paint over the original artist’s name.

Entertainment, life affirmation and noise. Do you wanna dance?

Influences? They come in all directions. Run right out in front of the car. Yer stars of art. Worn

library Pop-art hardcovers. Wayward uncles in for a visit. Pop-culture kindling.

I like this painting. We all get it, we’re all in on it and there’s free punch. Makes for a wonderful

gathering.

Thank you to Catherine and everyone involved in this project.

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Critical reviews Zwanzig, Anna. What if in the park the horses really did mind? (5-6)

Ossias, Matt. Postmodern Frame Breaking as Liberation or Defeat? Analyzing Kevin Richardson’s

In The Park, The Horses Don’t Mind. (7-8)

Cairns, David. Review. (9-10)

Dawson, Josh. Material Citations: Photo-paintings, readymades, and Improved Paintings. (11-12)

Lynch, Nathan. Heralds of the Apocalypse in Kevin Richardson’s “In the park, the horses didn’t

mind.” (13-14)

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What if in the park the horses really did mind?

(Anna Zwanzig)

Artist Kevin Richardson creates artworks he calls “improved paintings” through his

process of acquiring old pictures and adding something of his own to them. For example, in his

piece titled “In the park, the horses didn’t mind” he has taken two pictures and glued the one on

top of the other; the top picture is depicting a nineteenth century pastoral scene and he painted a

Rolling Stones concert into it. Upon analyzing the “improved painting” my question is: why do

the horses in the park not mind? Is it because they are just passers-by, not participating? Are they

supposed to idly sit back and watch? It seems harmless enough: an innocent Rolling Stones concert

in the park with women and children observing. Just for a minute let us allow ourselves to have

the perspective of the horses [an active engagement with the painting and observing, not

necessarily participating] and deconstruct the painting by giving them the voices of critics. From

the perspective of the critical on-looker of the “improved painting” being analyzed, here are some

of the issues I hope would be in their discourse.

When regarding works of art [whether it’s an original or in this case “improved”] the

tradition of the subject matter depicted cannot be avoided. Therefore, the tradition of the pastoral

is the underlying foundation in this artwork: with blatant imagery of the sexist poet with an elitist

attitude of the colonizer who uses narrative as a means to control the feminine. Looking closer at

the physicality of the artwork, its various layers fall into the discourse reinforcing the tradition, as

well as the term [“improved”], associated with it.

Now I do agree our [horse] critics are being a bit harsh but there is validity in their critique.

The influence of the Greek and Roman pastoral had a lasting impact on Western ideology in

literature, which spilled over into painting. The pastoral as a genre is focused on a romanticized

male figure, often a shepherd, who was created by the poet. In painting, this character of the

shepherd is the embodiment of the poet. The poet as writer praises love and sings about the

feminine as his muse for inspiration (Highet 162-177; Kleiner and Mamiya 521-522). By using

the female in this way the poet is creating a hierarchy with the male as dominant [the dominant

figure]. The male being romanticized in the form of the poet creates an elitist persona that can be

seen as the embodiment of a colonial attitude as well. Reinforcing these notions is the construction

of the “improved” artwork by the various layers it consists of creating a sense of time. And what

about this term “improved” when referencing the artwork. Is it really

improved…aesthetically…maybe? But “improved” from all the loaded imagery associated with

it…possibly not. The implications associated with the imagery are still relevant…the only things

that have changed are their clothes. Now going back to our [horse] critics let’s hear how they

deconstruct the “improved painting” within this genre’s imagery.

The Rolling Stones band takes on the role of the poet, serenading their audience of women

and children. Bringing with them their songs of love inspired by the past/present loves of their

lives, reducing them [women] simply to a muse. The fact of the band being higher up on a stage,

mimicking a pedestal, shows their dominance over the female viewers. Contributing to an elitist

attitude, if we do a play on words, is interpreting the “British Invasion” in music [in regards to the

major popularity, almost assault like, of British bands in North America] akin to the invasion of

the British colonial powers. Although the former is an ironic title given to the movement, both hint

at the ongoing and lasting effects of colonialism (Randall). Also, the term “improved” isn’t

necessarily the best suited here because it doesn’t improve the underlying cultural issues evident

in the artwork. If anything it reaffirms them by showing how these issues are imbedded in our

culture and subconscious more then we realize. Perhaps the term “edited painting” would be better:

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exposing the applicability of the imagery through time and space. Emphasizing the imbedded

issues even more is the layering of canvases and painting alluding to the deeply rooted imagery in

Western ideology of power through oppression. Even if the reason for choosing the canvases and

painted subject matter was arbitrary it cannot be seen as obsolete and meaningless due to the end

result.

So by deconstructing the image in the final “improved painting” within its traditional genre

it opens up criticism to various themes; such as the Western genre painting of the pastoral with its

imagery of the presence of the poet who is used to symbolize the embodiment of larger cultural

issues such as the oppression of the feminine and colonialism. The technical aspects of the

“improved painting” when deconstructed reinforce these issues. By discussing these themes

hopefully I’ve uncovered a greater understanding with deeper meanings behind the imagery.

By putting ourselves in the [horse] critics position, being far enough removed from the

events in the painting, we can chose whether to observe, ignore or participate. Maybe what this

“improved painting” is telling us, is regardless of time and space these issues, imbedded in our

Western culture, still have a huge impact on our everyday lives that we simple overlook. And until

we have the knowledge or the will to deconstruct these issues we will continue to just let them

slide by and remain passive. I believe this “improved painting” opens up a discourse, ever so

subtly, that goes beyond itself.

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Postmodern Frame Breaking as Liberation or Defeat? Analyzing Kevin

Richardson’s In The Park, The Horses Don’t Mind (Matt Ossias)

Servants and horses wait hand and hoof on their masters wearing summer dresses in a

painting improved upon by Kevin Richardson: In the Park, the Horses Don’t Mind. One with

nature, women in the pasture, so serene - so cliché! While a feminist may have wanted to

appropriate the original pastoral image by framing it as the patriarchal clap trap it truly is, we will

instead join Richardson on his own subversive stroll through the perplexing world of

postmodernity in which a mutant punk band has been invited to entertain and enlighten.

Richardson’s pastiche painting and its peculiar framing offer us postmodern flâneurs an

opportunity to diagnosis the syndromes of a dying era as well as to speculate on a cure for our

own. Richardson’s euphonic zombies seem to be singing an ode to postmodernity, a cultural

phenomena emerging in the West around the 1960’s and arguably still holding global hegemonic

dominance today. The first postmodern attribute to catch your eye may be the juxtaposition of

historically distant cultural artifacts. This bricolage represents the monumental shift from

modernist ‘masterpieces’ towards postmodernist pastiches. While the painting improved upon by

Richardson was never avant-garde to begin with, it certainly radiates an aura of ‘high' art whose

picturesque pretensions are parodied by the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the mutant musicians.

Art is no longer for art's sake for the most astute postmodernists, for the mass culture industry has

turned life itself into a marathon of spectacles. The mass culture industry has become dominant in

postmodernity, in which society is drowning in an endless hyperreal hurricane bombarding us with

a hailstorm of images. We have become cultural forecasters following the latest trends with

panicked compases; curators identifying our ‘essence’ with the memes we share in our own neo-

galleries on Facebook and Twitter - that is, if we are privileged to these technologies. The

transfigured flesh of the undead rock orchestra in Richardson’s painting can be seen as signifying

this metamorphosis of modernism to postmodernism. Western culture has come a far cry from the

romantic yearning for a union with nature as expressed by the original painting and its modernist

antecedents who sought to hail the aesthetic over the naturalistic. In lieu, the West has plunged

into a chasm in which new and old, fact and fiction, art and life are ‘mashing up’ at an ever

intensifying rate - dragging much of the world along for it’s expensive, and perhaps apocalyptic,

excursions. Richardson’s zombies arose from the grave of modernism, leaving six feet beneath

them the avant-garde conception of the aesthetic as an autonomous utopian realm that can no

longer answer the plea “Gimmie Shelter”, instead they have sung forth a sonic call for us to have

sympathy for the devil - the dangerous but necessary game of an immanent critique. Rising from the grave of modernism is not easy, for the rapturous abyss of postmodern

culture only sinks deeper as Richardson’s painting illustrates the contemporary collapse of grand

historical narratives. The hightide myth that ‘culture’ is reserved for the bourgeois has been

subverted as art has become integral to the daily lives of everyone; a sentiment embodied by the

undead pop symphony invited into the park by Richardson. For our aesthetic concerns, the most

pertinent meta-narrative to collapse in Richardsons’ painting is the notion that art should be a

mimetic imitation of ‘reality’. The original painting attempts a mimetic translation of nature into

art, but the zombie rock orchestra reminds us that we cannot have this unmediated relation to

reality, it is not given nor can it simply be made but it must be interpreted with the new set of tools

emerging at the birth of the postmodern: ‘theory’. The band In the Park - the monstrous sonic

spectres - may signal a world to come that we must think anew.

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Among the most important meta-narratives to crumble has been communism, the fall of

which brought about that other key characteristic of postmodernism: globalisation. In the wake of

communism’s (momentary) defeat, capitalism has transformed cultural production on a global

scale with a ubiquitous mandate for technological ‘development’ that has spread postmodern

culture across the globe.1 However, this ‘post-industrial’ fairytale ‘end of history’ has been shown

to be a farce in the face of global warming, the global ‘recession’, and the perpetual eruption of

cultural conflict. In these dire times the art world is once again demanded to head to Walter

Benjamin’s call to politicize the aesthetic. Richardson’s pastiche painting is akin to détournement: the aesthetic device conceived by

the militant Situationalists who advocated the appropriation of cultural dominant aesthetic forms

and the politicization of their contents. For example, editing a picture of George Bush so as to turn

the ‘I heart New York’ shirt he is wearing into ‘I heart New Orleans’. However, Richardson’s art

seems to avoid the unfortunate trapping of détournement, whose radical aesthetic praxis became

co-opted, reified, and rendered non-subversive by corporate advertisers who now use this

technique to critique their capitalist competitors, as well as cyberjunkies who use this style to

create an endless flux of cat memes. Richardson might be seen as circumventing the dangers of

détournement by framing his pastiche painting as a work in progress - an aesthetic that seemingly

cannot be readily commodified. Intentionally choosing a wooden frame too large, Richardson enacts a liminal space to blur

the borders of the already improved upon painting; the paint spilling over from the park onto the

cardboard matting and even the frame itself. How are we to read this postmodern frame breaking?

As a work in progress that acts as a call to action of critical interpretation in our historical era in

which we are suspended above a nihilistic abyss on a neon tightrope connecting the nightmares of

the past with a potentially ‘redeemed world’, as Theodor Adorno once prophetically deemed our

future potential? Is this nebulous horizon of the art an emblem for a postmodern culture whose

chaotic bricolage induces a nihilistic ambivalence? In The Park, The Horses Don’t Mind, the title

featured on the frame, suggests the absurdity of our contemporary situation - for the horses

certainly would mind - but does it offer a solution? Although Richardson does not provide us with

answers we can nonetheless give these zombies an applause. Richardson’s art provokes pressing

questions that provide us with a crucial insight by virtue of being paradoxical: art, criticism, and

culture are irrevocably intertwined in the astonishing postmodern era in which we live.

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Review

(David Cairns)

“In the park, the horses didn’t mind”…and neither did the Stones

The obscurity, fragmentariness, and arbitrariness of allegory all signify the absence of a

fulfilling event; this absence, in turn, serves to invoke that event with greater urgency and a

desperate faith.

—Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory”

The provocative thrust of Kevin Richardson’s “In the park, the horses didn’t mind”2 does

not rely on symbolic unity, but rather on disjointedness and anachronism. The text that is written

on the frame of “horses”, rather than giving symbolic order—gestures towards each successive

figure’s disjunction and isolation from the others. Richardson’s “horses” becomes a stack of

images or a “pile [of] fragments…without any strict idea or goal”, a feature which Walter

Benjamin would call allegorical (178). Craig Owens proposes that an allegoric impulse can offer

a great deal of insight into postmodern art, and perhaps we might draw from these two thinkers

and the concept of allegory to cultivate a productive, interpretative relationship with Richardson’s

“horses”.

Owen’s posits that “the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them” (69).

Looking more closely at the word ‘confiscate’—from con: together and fiscus: basket, chest,

treasury—it seems very appropriate to the stack or ‘basket’ of images that is Richardson’s

“horses”. But the word also carries for us the connotation of seizing personal property, taking us

into the realm of capital, commerce, and commodity; where we might begin to unravel just what

it is that is provocative about “horses”. Richardson begins an improved painting by buying one or

more artworks that have only decorative (which is primarily commercial) value. Richardson does

not strip the reproductions of their monetary value; (this is not what confiscate would mean and

we should be well aware that the monetary value of these found pieces are bound to increase under

Richardson’s hand) but one of the strengths of allegory is “its capacity to rescue from historical

[might I add commercial?] oblivion that which threatens to disappear” (Owens 68). Richardson is

able to rescue from the oblivion of decoration a painting that again, or perhaps for the first time,

becomes provocative.

Owen’s goes on to explain that “[a]llegorical imagery is appropriated imagery” but the

allegorist “does not restore an original meaning that may have been lost or obscured; allegory is

not hermeneutics. Rather, [the allegorist] adds another meaning to the imagery” (69). “In allegoric

structure, then, one text is read through another, however fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic

their relationship may be” (69). The disjointed, the chaotic, and the anachronistic relationships in

“horses” can be understood by the very core of allegorical thinking, which can be seen best by the

light of which contemporary allegory opposes—the romantic symbol.

The romantic symbol is a distillation, or a condensation; it seeks to capture the essence of

a whole. As Benjamin writes; the Romantic symbol promises the “unlimited immanence of the

moral world in the world of beauty”—the symbol promises a transcendent answer to the tensions

of human life, in contradiction to an allegory which only produces more questions about an

imminent but chaotic and tension filled world (160). That the symbol cannot deliver on the promise

is (almost) beside the point, for the distinction I wish to restate is that while the Romantic symbol

is consumable, allegory is always provocative. It is perhaps here that we cross the provisional

threshold between the allegoric impulse in artistic creation and an allegorical way of seeing, much

like Owens argues: “allegory is an attitude as well as a technique, a perception as well as a

procedure” (68).

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To understand what it is to see allegorically, I think it best to review something written by

Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move

away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his

wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage

upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and

make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his

wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels

him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

This storm is what we call progress. (Paragraph IX)

There is not a scrap of wreckage in the painting itself. The angel faces squarely toward the viewer.

We (the viewers) and our world are the catastrophe that Benjamin sees in the painting. In an

allegoric way of seeing there is no boundary between the interiority of a work of art and its

exteriority that interpretation cannot cross. In an allegorical work like Richardson’s (created in

mode of allegorical impulse) this imaginary or provisional boundary must be crossed to produce

any worthwhile meaning at all.

In light of what I have just written how might we read “In the park, the horses didn’t mind”

allegorically? In “horses” I see/read the collision of recreation and re-creation. We might consider

Richardson’s allegorical mode of reading one text through another as a provocative act of re-

creation, which stands in contradiction to the banality of recreation found in the work itself. The

recreation of the bourgeois family in the park, however, is also an attempt at re-creation. It is a re-

creation of the pastoral. The pastoral mode rests on a nostalgic view of wandering shepherds; the

family does not re-create the labor of shepherds but re-creates pastoral nostalgia itself in aimless

recreation. The unbearable banality of this scene is compounded by the family’s and the horses’

unresponsiveness to the loudness of the Rolling Stones concert. A Rolling Stones concert in the

park, however, is also a type of recreation and, to me, equally banal. If it is a re-creation we might

posit a connection to Woodstock. Woodstock, while perhaps partaking in its own dose of banality,

also contained some truly subversive elements. Jimmy Hendrix’s rendition of the American

national anthem, complete with the intruding sound of cascading bombs, was itself an apt allegory

for the distorted national thinking that placed young Americans in the vicinity of very real bombs.

We might say that Richardson’s re-recreation (“horses” as a complete work of art) escapes the

banality recreation in two ways. First, its disjointed and anachronistic nature forces its viewers to

make connections; it is allegoric and requires us to question history and an imminent world.

Secondly, the images in “horses” that I have mentioned thus far all sit on another image. The

bottom image, mostly concealed, offers no complete figure but reveals the edges of its gloomy

palette. This poses a further question. Benjamin argues that in allegory melancholy is not

melancholy for its own sake but is partly brought forth by seeing (in good faith) the successive

catastrophes that make up history. The figures in “horses” are all oblivious to the melancholic

vision they conceal, horses, family, and Rolling Stones equally—it is only the viewer that is

provoked. And in contradiction to banal recreation/re-creation, the viewer has the capacity to

unconceal and propensity to act.

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Material Citations: Photo-paintings, readymades, and Improved Paintings

(Josh Dawson)

Kevin Richardson’s ‘improved painting’ In The Park, The Horses Didn’t Mind is a work

which can best be analyzed by examining it alongside two dominant figures in the art world,

namely Gerhard Richter and Marcel Duchamp. To begin, I shall examine the concepts that Richter

grapples with, by foregrounding the materiality of the painting in his abstract work. In particular,

I hope to investigate Richter’s use of ‘valleys’ and ‘hills’ of paint rather than figural representation,

as well as the use of layering in his abstract works so as to invoke some answers regarding

Richardson’s own choice to ‘layer’ using complete paintings. Next, I will move onward to compare

Duchamp’s work Pharmacy to compare the aesthetic choices in this ‘readymade’ versus

Richardson’s ‘improved painting’. This analysis will focus on two key points, the role of the artist

in evaluating such works, as well as the difference that exists between a ‘readymade’ as opposed

to an ‘improved painting’.

Gerhard Richter began his abstract works in the late 1960’s but has remained active into

the twenty-first century. In a sense, these abstracts can be seen as taking up the technique he used

in creating some of his famous, earlier “photo-paintings” wherein he would use a squeegee to

“blur” the figure in a portrait borrowed from a photograph. In his abstract work Richter takes this

one step further by rejecting the use of a figure at all. Instead, he uses the texture of the paint on

the surface of the canvas to convey meaning. This is accomplished by creating a series of ‘valleys’

and ‘hills’ of paint on the canvas using traditional brush strokes as well as the aforementioned

squeegee. A prime example of this can be seen in Richter’s Grey (880-3). What Richter can be

said to accomplish in this rejection of figuration, in favor of an explicit material representation of

meaning, is the liberation of the medium of painting from its dependence on the world of figures,

to create meaning. In other words the painting is free to produce meaning without being a mere

reflection or, as Levinas claims a mere, “shadow of reality” (129). Relatedly, Richter also makes

no effort to mask the layered nature of his abstract works, and while this is present in the

aforementioned Grey, it is better illustrated by looking recalling an earlier work Abstract Painting

(809-3). In Abstract Painting the yellow surface is punctured by “planks” of grey, blue, black and

white showing the background, or foundation upon which the painting is constructed. In this same

gesture Richter shows the painting’s material history, those conditions which allowed it to come

to be. I believe that both of these elements, materiality, as well as layering and history, play

important roles in Richardson’s “improved painting.” However I will first introduce Duchamp’s

‘readymade’ Pharmacy to introduce all the necessary themes to understand Richardson’s work.

Pharmacy was created when the artist in his own words “bought a cheap reproduction of a

winter evening landscape” and subsequently added two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the

horizon (141). In Pharmacy the original winter landscape remains largely unaltered. However by

virtue of adding the two small dots, the status of the artwork is changed from a “cheap

reproduction” into a “readymade”. What is most interesting about this transformation is that it

occurs without a drastic change in the material work of the art. Rather the artist’s presence, seems

to be the primary vehicle that drives the change. Duchamp, then, is at an impasse with Richter in

that where Richter emphasizes the material paint as the genesis of meaning in his abstract work,

Duchamp seems to be poking fun at the notion that meaning is generated by the painting, and

instead links this capacity to the presence of the artist. In other words Duchamp appears to be

claiming that what is painted on the canvas doesn’t matter so much as who has painted it.3 This

claim, however, is performed satirically and Duchamp would likely agree with Richter’s gesture

in that the painting itself is something to be evaluated independently of its ability to mirror the

Ti< 3:1 (2014) 12

world via figuration, or of the artist’s name.4 Thus, my present concern is to illustrate how

Richardson’s work interacts with the work of Richter and Duchamp.

Richardson takes up the layering technique of Richter, but in an appreciably different way,

namely by using completed paintings in lieu of paint itself. However, the effect is similar in that

the material conditions that allowed the “improved painting” to exist are made present, albeit in a

limited way because of the other layers of the painting.5 In this gesture Richardson is providing a

history or genesis of the painting, and showing that such work does not take place in a vacuum but

rather in a world dictated by causality and development over time. However, such development

does not inscribe a hierarchy, in that Richardson is careful to explicitly connect the foreground (or

present) and the background of the past by virtue of painting over the limits of the foreground onto

the background and even onto the frame itself. Through this, the many layers of In The Park, The

Horses Didn’t Mind are brought into relation with one another. However, Richardson does call

this work an “improved painting,” which suggests an influx of value based on the changes he made

to the painting, and this can be examined in light of the difference between a ‘readymade’ and an

‘improved painting.’

What Duchamp’s Pharmacy accomplishes is a criticism of the valuation of an art work

solely on the basis of its creator, a valuation process which denies the materiality and technical

process involved in the creation of an art work. Richardson is performing a similarly ironic gesture

in layering the paintings in that the material basis or history of the “improved painting” is mostly

denied by being covered up, but remains present as a subtle sliver along the right hand side and

bottom of the completed work. What is ironic in this gesture is that Richardson, rather than

completely covering or denying the material basis, instead leaves a sliver, which provokes our

curiosity as to what may lay underneath.

Additionally, in claiming that he has “improved” the painting by layering it atop of others

and painting a Rolling Stones concert taking place, Richardson is making a prescriptive value

judgment whereas Duchamp’s Pharmacy was mostly left to “speak on its own behalf.” However,

I think Richardson is continuing his irony with this statement in that he does not refer to the

completed work in isolation from the paintings that made it possible, but rather that the material

bond that the compiled works share mark an improvement over the paintings that stood alone,

prior. Thus, what In The Park, The Horses Didn’t Mind comes to stand for is a metaphor for the

way in which art builds upon a concrete, material history that it sometime forgets, but that can be

remembered by peeling away some of the layers that compose it.

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Heralds of the Apocalypse in Kevin Richardson’s “In the park, the horses didn’t mind”

(Nathan Lynch)

Richardson must have thoroughly plumbed the depths of the flea market to find someone

unaware of the implications of our Apocalypse. Why else would he be unleashing the undead upon

these docile, unsuspecting noble ladies? It is not enough that the Stones bespeak or symbolize

impending doom – these cats are amplified! “LOUD, LOUD, LOUD” reads the inscription,

reminding us that precious few have not yet heard and must be briefed posthaste at deafening

volumes – but the horses still won’t mind. Why should they? We don’t. Neither are we

flabbergasted when the piece has the audacity to speak to us directly. When Beethoven tipped that

‘sacred cow’ by desecrating the fourth movement of his ground-breaking Ninth Symphony with

the impurity of human voices – tainting so-called absolute music6 with this quintessential scourge

of the programmatic, namely words – the composer told us how to feel about the “Ode to Joy”.

Much in the same way, Rene Magritte told us what not to think when standing before “La Trahison

des Images”. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. This is not a pipe. For Richardson, this is not a park. This is

not a possibility.

Such transgressions were once revolutionary, but we are no longer obliged to listen when

art speaks to us out of turn. It can no longer tell us how to feel with an authority born of felicitous

novelty. We are post all that. Now, we can examine the implications of art’s attempts to speak to

us directly from a hyper-rational privileged position above or outside of the ‘aesthetic’ experience.

Splendid, isn’t it? The question then becomes: Can Richardson’s anachronism, and the tension

between this work’s explicit manifesto and it’s juxtaposition of conflicting horizons shake us from

this hypermodern, supposedly privileged position and implicate us in the artwork despite our

delusions of transcendence? In short: If the horses didn’t mind, why should we?

We are presented with an “improved painting”. A once-valiant attempt to let art imitate life

and reproduce the elements available to the naked eye on a lazy bourgeois Sunday afternoon in the

park has been inflicted upon some unknown work barely visible beneath the serenity in the

foreground and ostensibly chosen for the qualities of its soon to be all-important frame. This placid

horizon is intersected by the cartoonishly zombified heralds of the Apocalypse – apparently

without incident. These horizons are imbued with a blue continuity that sonically radiates outward

from the Stones and reverberates throughout the piece, eventually blending into the trees and the

grass; permeating the scene’s entirety. Through this blue Richardson makes an explicit claim to

the readymade portions of the piece and unifies the disparate horizons in a single gesture that

embodies the impossibility of its own wholeness. Is this intersection of worlds impossible, or has

its message only become audible after Duchamp placed a toilet in a gallery and Cage stamped

vinyl with silence? “LOUD LOUD LOUD” as it may be, no one seems to hear the deafening

impossible blue threnody radiating from the epicenter of ‘the improvement’ into the unflinching

classical serenity.

This piece accomplishes its most explicit gesture on its frame in red by denying the

purportedly disinterested viewer the prima nocta of interpretation. Inelegant block capital letters

make the blatant anachronism explicit and rob, from those who would assume a detached

perspective, the task of this rather rote analysis. We should read this portion of the piece in red on

the frame as more than mere text. It can be a calligram in which the red speaks as both text and

image. In his work on Magritte, Michel Foucault tells us that such a calligram “…brings a text and

shape as close together as possible.”7 In considering the red as a single unit, one notices the spartan

functionality of the letters that spell out our perspicuous clue. This is brought into striking relief

against the flowing grace of the artist’s signature – accomplished in a single gesture without

Ti< 3:1 (2014) 14

attempting to equally communicate each detail in the sort of fascist leveling totality that allows

you to read these printed words so clearly right now. “By its double function, [the calligram]

guarantees capture, as neither discourse alone nor a pure drawing could do.”8 You cannot help but

read the superbly legible analysis and yet you must struggle with the significance of the signature

beside it. Who is it that is speaking so clearly to me? The artist’s identity has been obscured in the

act of creation. Function and flow are revealed as enemies in this flagrant red gesture.

There is a sense of urgency, even desperation, in the fact that the piece is compelled to

speak to us explicitly. The red cannot be read this way forever. At the moment Richardson imposed

their likeness upon the serenity of classicism the Stones had been defying their mortality for quite

some time, and not even the mighty Stones are immune to history.9 Even the once-revolutionary

elements of Beethoven’s Ninth must be further extended and augmented in order produce affect

in the very artworld it has forever changed.10 Likewise, if Richardson only sought to reproduce the

contradiction of Rene Magritte’s painting we would further sympathize with the horses’

indifference. This is not the case. Here in the park, the immanent mortality in art is made apparent

and any delusion of transcendence is torn apart in the interplay between the synthetic unity

imposed in blue and the poignant dirge that bleeds from the frame of the piece in red –

contradiction and continuity. “LOUD, LOUD, LOUD” as this flippant elegy may be, it only

matters to those for whom the history of art is present at hand. The intersection of worlds in this

improved painting is an intersection of cascading apocalypses, but the horses didn’t mind. Should

we? Perhaps there is no longer time for answers.

Ti< 3:1 (2014) 15

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Tr. John Osborne. London: Verso, 2009.

---. “On the Concept of History.” Ed. Andrew Feenberg. Simon Fraser University. Web. 18 Jan.

2014 <http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html>.

Duchamp, Marcel. “Apropos Of ‘Readymades’.” The Salt Seller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973. 141-

142.

Highet, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature.

New York: Oxford UP, 1949. Print.

Kleiner, Fred S., and Christin J. Mamiya. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: The Western

Perspective. Belmont: Thomson Higher Education, 2006. Print.

Levinas, Emmanuel. “Reality and Its Shadow.” Trans. Alphonso Lingis. A Levinas Reader.

Malden: Blackwell, 2000, 129-143.

Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” October. 12.1

(1980): 67-86.

Randall, Anne J. "British invasion." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford: Oxford

UP. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.

<http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2234548>.

NOTES 1 This spread of Western postmodern culture has not been met without resistance, as the postcolonial theory of

creolization demonstrates. 2 Referred to as “horses” hereafter. 3 This does not mean that Duchamp himself agreed with such evaluative criteria, but rather it seems that Duchamp

was cheekily pointing out the criteria that the artworld at the time used to evaluate whether a work of art was “good”

or not. 4 Though coincidently Richter’s work is among the most expensive to be sold at auction by virtue of his fame. 5 Limited in the sense that the material conditions of the painting are only partially, but never fully revealed. 6 For a deeper engagement with ‘absolute’ and ‘program’ music, see: Dahlhaus, Carl (1991). The Idea of Absolute

Music. U of Chicago P. 18. 7 Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 20-21. 8 Ibid p. 22 9 "Who, What, Why: How Is Keith Richards Still Alive?" BBC News. BBC, 28 Oct. 2010. 26 Nov. 2013.

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11621076>. 10 Turuskin, Richard. "Resisting the Ninth." 19th-Century Music 12:3 (Spring 1989). 241-256.