Abstracts Philosophy, Religion, and Theology

The big news: the impartiality of event

by Joan Margery Weber

Most events and paintings have a beginning, middle, and end  – or if not that  – they have some kind of order, even if it be only cause and effect. My type of order is based on what is immediate to me. I can't see something "in the round" until it is over or turned into something else – -becoming part of a pattern that we impose on it. Life is made up of illogical relationships and in my paintings I juxtapose these illogical or fragmentary images.(Experiences are fragments and are illogical as well so why not put them side by side, just as they are given to us?) The way the "news" is shown on television says it again  – not the seven o'clock news which we have willed ourselves to believe but the six o'clock "local" news which is as friendly and pointless as the Food Giant. It is a series of events, supposedly presented in some kind of order of importance  – riots and deaths of Presidents come first there is the same ritualistic attention to weather, sports,and the stock market as in real life; it becomes a kind of hopped-up parody of real life which I try to reflect in my paintings. What holds the news together, among other things, is that it all happened on the same day; and that CBS has a certain point of view. Stockhausen or John Cage do that by throwing their music on the floor and letting the way the performer picks it up be the way it is played that night. If all this seems anti-reasonable,anti..logical, all I can say in defense of the fact that there is no "song" is what Adam Clayton Powell said about his son's engagement to some lady whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower." It's got nothing to do with the Movement. It's just personal."