The Second Person

There is a moment in the studio when a painting stops.

It does not announce this. Nothing in the room changes. I put the brush down for what I assume is a normal reason, to reload it or to step back, and then I do not pick it up again. Sometimes I know within a minute. Sometimes I know four days later, having spent those days walking past it and not touching it, which turns out to have been the answer arriving slowly.

The difficulty comes after. Someone stands in front of the finished thing and asks what it is.

I have been failing that question for six years. Not failing to answer it. Failing to answer it in a way that leaves the person any better off than when they asked. I could say oil and cold wax on linen, which is true and tells them nothing. I could say it is about impermanence, which is a lie, because it is not about anything, and the moment I hand someone a subject I have taken the painting away from them and given them a caption instead.

So I built a language. Six dimensions that read the painting. Three that read the encounter. An Abstraction Quotient at the center, measuring how far a work has traveled from representation. A vocabulary of eight feelings. A discovery system underneath all of it. Years of work, most of it done at night, all of it aimed at the same problem: giving language to the thing that arrives when nothing is being depicted.

I want to describe the objection to that project, because I read it last week, stated more cleanly than I have ever been able to state it against myself.

The objection

The essay is by Werner Erhard, on abstraction, experience, and concept. He lays out three domains. Concept is stored form, the record, the past. Experience is the living present. Abstraction is the source from which both arise, and it has no time, no place, and no form at all.

Then he makes the cut that costs me something. Abstractions generate. Concepts explain. These are not two grades of the same activity. Concepts account for what already exists and cannot bring anything forth. Abstractions bring forth and cannot account for anything. And a thing that can be neither experienced nor conceptualized cannot be explained. It can only be pointed at.

He is hard on Russell for exactly this. The theory of logical types tries to reach abstraction by reasoning up from concepts, which Erhard calls a conceptual handling of abstraction rather than an abstract handling of concepts. Coming from concepts instead of to them. The result is a system that closes at the precise moment it believes it has opened.

Wittgenstein is a slide later, with the sentence everyone knows about what we should pass over in silence.

I sat with that for two days, because by that argument my entire body of infrastructure is the Russell error wearing a studio apron. A conceptual apparatus, meticulously constructed, aimed at the one thing concepts by definition cannot reach. Nine years of business systems, six years of taxonomy, all of it pointed at a target that recedes exactly as fast as you approach it with a category in your hand.

I am not going to resolve that by appeal. Erhard is not my authority and neither is Heidegger. I am standing on their thinking to reach for a level of language they did not need, because they were not the ones in the room when someone asked what it is.

What arises

Start with what I actually know, which is smaller than a philosophy and more reliable.

Abstraction is not invented. Nobody made it up. It comes from the ground, and the ground includes everything I have been: New Delhi, my father's rooms full of Souza and Swaminathan, the gallery I grew up inside, four companies, three dogs, a marriage, the particular gray of Phoenix light at six in the morning. All of that is in the paint.

But what arrives on the canvas is not a representation of any of it. This is the part people get wrong most often and most kindly. They want the blue to be the Yamuna. They want the vertical break to be a door in a house I remember. It is not. The past is not depicted, it is not encoded, and it is not hiding in there waiting to be decoded by a sufficiently patient viewer.

It is colored by all of it. That is the honest verb. Colored, in the sense that light passing through a window is colored by the glass and is still light, and the window is not the subject.

So the painting has no concept in it. Not a hidden one, not an obscured one. There is nothing to decode because nothing was encoded. What is there arose, and arising is not the same operation as expressing.

Which is why I have never described what I do as reframing. Reframing implies I took something that had a meaning and gave it a better one, that I stood outside the work with authority over its interpretation. I do not. What I do is bring language to the frame. The language arrives at something already operating below naming. It does not create it, it does not explain it, and if it is any good it does not obscure it either. It stands next to the thing and gets the person into position.

Pointing, in other words. Erhard's own concession contains my permission. Something that cannot be explained can still be pointed at. A pointing system is not an explanation, and a taxonomy that knows it is pointing is not making Russell's mistake. It is refusing to close.

The turn I did not expect

That defense held for about a day before I noticed it was answering a question I have stopped caring about.

Everything above is a language about the painting. It defends my right to describe the work without falsifying it. Fine. But describing the work accurately is not the reason I stayed up for six years, and I only understood this by watching what happens when the language works.

When it works, the person stops talking about the painting.

They start talking about themselves. Not in a therapeutic way and usually not on purpose. They say something like, I keep coming back to the left side and I do not know why, and then thirty seconds later they are telling me about a room they have not thought about in twenty years. The vocabulary gave them a handhold, and the handhold was not on the canvas. It was on their own attention.

That is what I am actually building. Not a language for abstraction. A language that lets abstraction address somebody.

Erhard's essay is written in the first person. It is an epistemology for the one who knows, an account of what self is when you strip away personality, history, character, and the whole stored record. Self as context rather than content: not the point of view, but the space in which having a point of view is possible at all. He says that when a context takes itself to be its content, what we value most is thrown away.

I believe that. But he is describing a condition. I need a second person. I need language that does not describe the condition but produces access to it, in someone standing in a room, on a Tuesday, who came in to look at art and has forty seconds of real attention before the rest of their day returns.

That is the level I am reaching for. Not a better account of abstraction. A grammar that hands the arising to another person in a form that opens their own.

Three things that resolve

Once the second person is the point, several things I have been saying for years stop being preferences and start being consequences.

Convergence, not sequence. I have refused the pivot narrative so many times that people assume it is vanity about the résumé. It is not. A pivot story is self as content: a chain of stored events with a before and an after, cloud computing then ride sharing then paint. Convergence is self as context. One thing arriving in whatever form was available to it at the time. The companies were not preparation for the painting and the painting is not a departure from the companies. They are the same arising, differently housed.

The transformed. I paint over older canvases. I named that body of work the transformed, and I named it before I had the argument for it. Erhard says transformation is not an event. No position, no location in time, no beginning and no end. A transformed painting is not the earlier painting plus a later date. The underpainting is not erased and it is not corrected. It is included. That is the difference between becoming complete, which never finishes, and being complete, which was never a process.

Aliveness. It is one of my eight feeling words. Awe, reverence, tenderness, longing, solitude, aliveness, defiance, restlessness. It is also the word Erhard reaches for at the end of his essay, describing people who create space for others because they do not experience themselves as their point of view. I did not take the word from him. It came out of scoring 250 paintings and finding that a certain quality kept needing a name. Two people arriving at the same word from opposite ends is not evidence of anything. But it is the kind of coincidence that makes you keep going.

Why this is the obsession

I said earlier that I have been failing the question for six years. Here is the closer version of what I have been trying to do while failing it.

A painting with no representation and a self with no content are the same problem. Both are real. Neither has a subject. Both dissolve the moment you hand someone a caption. And the ordinary tools we have for pointing at things were built for things, for objects with edges that can be indicated across a room.

I am trying to build the tool that was not built. Not so people understand my work. So that a person can stand in front of something that is not depicting anything, find that they have a response, and have somewhere to put it other than I do not know much about art.

That sentence is the enemy. It is the sound of a context deciding it is only content.

If the language I am building works, the person leaves knowing something about themselves that they did not know when they walked in. That is the whole ambition, and it is why the taxonomy and the paintings are not two careers. The painting is the arising. The language is how the arising reaches you.

The work is not finished and the language is not right yet. But I know now what it is for. It was never for the painting. The painting does not need it.

It is addressed to you.

Thread Witness