Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Com­po­si­tion X, by Kandin­sky. 1939

Com­po­si­tion as Cipher, or Num­ber. The work after his ninth, or a paint­ing to rep­re­sent all paint­ings. What­ever his inten­tions regard­ing the title, the paint­ing strikes me as musi­cal, like pretty much all of his art, and he wanted that music to come from within all view­ers so that they could become seers like Kandin­sky. The inner artist meet­ing the work on the wall and turn­ing it into a tun­nel back to them­selves. A tun­nel with ears.

In your works, you have real­ized what I, albeit in uncer­tain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The inde­pen­dent progress through their own des­tinies, the inde­pen­dent life of the indi­vid­ual voices in your com­po­si­tions is exactly what I am try­ing to find in my paintings.

– let­ter to Schön­berg, 1911, after the per­for­mance of Schönberg’s sec­ond string quar­tet and the “Three piano pieces.”

 

George Spencer brings us a new poem below about things that per­haps shouldn’t have a name, like poems, and things that could or should pop­u­late those works. Riff­ing from a work by John Ash­bery, he plays the meta-​​game and finds a few new twists. Here’s an audio clip of Ash­bery read­ing the poem within the poem in ques­tion, with a short intro:

And Ut Pic­tura Poe­sis Is Her Name, by John Ash­bery

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