Rushing around today, so here’s a notebook entry from when I was lurking in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was a very exciting wander – and particularly exciting was seeing Mondrian’s various late New York paintings. So, I sat in front of them and pondered.
‘The geometry of this composition is partially based on sketches of partially demolished buildings.’ The artist as a maker of partially demolished buildings – paring back to the fundamental structures, destroying as he / she goes, creating something that explains and defines but can never be lived in – or at least, occupied only by the mind, the imagination, the viewer recreating a personal whole from the objective part and then moving into it as an inhabitant. ‘What would it be like if I lived there?’ The great question of the viewer / reader of art. The impossibility of ever finding out.