Not Looking at Pictures - Not Reading Texts :: Reading Art Writing Theory

Not Looking at Pictures - Not Reading Texts Here are two persons in an open, empty space. Bound by walls, they are its contents. Now they exit, walking down corridor after corridor, filling and emptying rooms as they go. Four feet strike the floor in steps: two beat regularly, forming measures, and two more land off the beat, sounding irregularly, introducing syncopation; but when the steps intersect-as they now do-there is diaphony, which displaces our memory of the sounds that preceded it. A difficult rest follows, only to be broken by the falling of an uncertain limb, which thuds and drags, thuds then drags . . . . The music stops; we hear silence and presume stillness. The sound of laughter forces our eyes open. We see that two men stand side by side, facing a common wall. Standing behind them, we ourselves behold their object, a painting, and our eyes enter its frame. Here a knight has plunged a spear, a foreign object, into a small dragon's neck, as a fair woman looks on. The faces of the knight and the woman make no cle ar expression, but the dragon bears its fangs. One among the three has been invaded, and only one has sensed the invasion; only the dragon opens its jaw and, at this frozen moment, one sound alone is signified. Our eyes exit the frame and return to the room, where two men still stand. We walk around them to see their eyes and find both sets in motion, yet they move differently. While two paired eyes seem to move easily across the canvas, the other pair struggle-these eyes dart, they dash; and now the eyes appear to relax on a plane beyond the painting, beyond the wall on which it hangs. "Pictures," writes E.M. Forster, bringing us into "Not Looking at Pictures," "are not easy to look at" (130). Standing in the gallery, we are inclined to believe him, having seen St. George and the Dragon as colorless subjects and objects intermediated by verbs; here no paint has dried. Yet there must be some paint in Forster's essay, and we would sooner see it than watch his walls go bare, for ours would go bare, too. Where Forster imagines that the dragon utters some silly things, we too have brought imagination to bear on the picture; where Forster's vision of the picture had amazed Roger Fry "that anyone could go so completely off the lines" (131), the play of our eyes in space might have troubled the critic no less.