On Monday I was admiring one of my fellow-vagabond’s recent paintings. To say I was visiting ak in his studio would be an exaggeration, we met in one of his rooms which doubles up to encompass a variety of his domestic and artistic activities and vagrant interests, some mundane, some creative.
The painting I admired was resting on top of the radiator against the wall of his room. An essay in colour you could say, neither of us thinking much of the term abstract to describe the painting he does, it was red and green, predominantly green, and shades of red extending to orange as I recall.
Like – Walk / Don’t Walk – which, when you think about it, is another subject for an essay on red and green.
My fellow-vagabond and I were on our way to hear John Lanchester in conversation later that day speaking about “Whoops”, his latest book about the 2008 Banking Crisis and the terrible fall-out since, the catastrophe being at heart the result of a hyper-mathematisation of finance to such an advanced and complex level of refinement as to be genuinely abstract – (in contrast to my friend’s painting) – abstract; that is something about nothing.
How would you put that into words? A woman in the audience, who had worked in the banking world herself for several years, counselled us to always be asking the financers and bankers, and especially their stratospherically-super-intelligent mathematical advisers and inventors. If they can’t put it into words, and they generally can’t, she warned, Don’t believe it.
Good advice!
Like for the subject Red and Green, ask the same question. How would you put that into words?
Back to my memories of the 1970’s in T-shirt protest strolling the city sidewalks of America with their robust coloured signs at the intersections – Walk / Don’t Walk – and those systematic democratic principles which were being worked out through those red and green signs, about how I got to choose (see Rawls J. 1971, A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Harvard University Press); about how we all got to choose and how disobedience could land us in jail, so I could believe, so we all could believe.
And, yes, I believed. Red and Green. I believed in rational choice…
… And went on believing for years until after my last visit to Paris a year or two back, and there looking up at a pedestrian crossing point over one of the vast boulevards of that city I got to see an illuminated red and green man, the red man standing still, the green man walking, walking slowly at first but then faster and faster, eventually running as if he was being chased. I was shocked. Later on, sitting at a street café dumbly stirring my sweetened coffee, I fell into conversation with Serge from Rumania who asked if he could sit at the same table. Serge, like my vagabond friend is also a painter, I could see from his paint spattered white overalls, and also being a migrant worker he told me a lot about red and green, which I hadn’t realised before and needed to know even at this late stage in my life; how red is for running as well as standing still, and green is for running too for all they tell you about this green and pleasant land. And Serge also told me the ways had found for getting around, so that I began to believe the reasoning behind his methods better than the ones I had learnt in America.
Of course it is all common sense, but it is still hard work to find words around the antinomies of being static and in motion… anything but abstract.