Untitled Document

"Speed and Painting"

by Jaime Gili

1. PARKED CARS. Car design, car marketing, from arrows to vectors to computers, depicting motion in a moving object, 'go faster' stripes.

2. ONE MOVEMENT, FOUR DIRECTIONS. Duchamp, distortion, Bacon, Kandinsky, tension and harmony, the arrow an the machine, Picabia.

3. MINIMAL DISTORTIONS. Futurist sculpture, distortion in the minimal-rooted 3D work, Gabriel Orozco, Peter Cain.

4. THE CAR OF NOTHINGNESS THROUGH THE ROAD OF NOTHINGNESS . Tony Smith, Pessoa, trains, speed and circuits in the control society, Peter Halley, the nets, my painting.

5. THE SEA. Pessoa's futurism, finding movement into Deleuze&Guattari's smooth spaces, nomadism and slowness, Internet is not a rhizome. Bibliography.

1. Parked Cars . "The Hispano Suiza is hidden behind its bonnet, between the radiator and the engine there is one ashrin of distance. This lier ashrin, placed there for the Snobs, this ashrin violating all the rules of construction gets me angry. If I ever hate you, I could say: Disappear oh streets that I've passed! Then I would send my memories of you to that empty space of the Hispano Suiza." (Viktor Sklovski, 1923) Before arriving on the streets, the shapes of vehicles would have been modified as they passed through designers and wind tunnels, and even as they underwent testing at race circuits and during market research. These shapes have shifted over the years many times from long and pointed to rounded and softer. Roland Barthes in 1957 had already written about changes in design that are still in progress today. When the Citroën DS first appeared he pointed out that the shape had changed from a sporty and "athletic" shape, from being too aerodynamic to a not so aggressive and almost classic form, of which this Citroën was the first example. He found in these changes relations with changes in the society. "The Citroën emblem, with its arrows, has in fact become a winged emblem, as if one was proceeding from the category of propulsion to that of spontaneous motion, from that of the engine to that of the organism." Baudrillard seizes as well upon this change for his sociological analysis: from psychological needs of power and speed to the need for control and domain. The automobile -then as now- no longer resembles the object-spear, projectile or arrow representing a projection of the ego. Instead it becomes a vector representing self-control and security, a capsule with a dashboard like a brain, in which the landscape passes just like on TV. "No more fantasies of power, speed and appropriation linked to the object itself, but instead a tactic of potentialities linked to usage: mastery, control and command, an optimisation of the play of possibilities offered by the car as vector and vehicle, and no longer as object of psychological sanctuary." Although this evolution appears to be true, if we look at some advertising campaigns we still see plenty of examples to the contrary. In fact both these personalities of the cars co-exist and both play an important role in marketing. Cars are still being sold to egos that are still projecting themselves onto the objects, even though the appeal of speed and power is somewhat veiled. Sometimes this subliminal ploy is perhaps a deft way of disguising the enjoyment of speed, which seems to have become politically incorrect. We can see another consequence of these changes in the market of car accessories. More specific accessories are being created for more differentiated cars. Although it is now possible to find a model to suit any kind of personality of customer, the chance of introducing on them adaptations has been removed, there being no room for making personal alterations with doubtful function. Even the empty spaces like those within the "Hispano Suiza" are designed at the factory, there are no options left to change anything. Nowadays hardly any accessory can deviate from the original design of the car. In many respects, cars and sport shoes have become quite similar: extra back red lights, air filled spaces cushioning from the floor, rubber soles and shock absorbers raising to their bodies. Air Jordan and Ford Ka, are both advertised in the same arenas addressing a very specific customer, who will know exactly when to replace the existing model for a new one, not because the product has become obsolete, but because of the needs of the market. Between those dispensable elements of the car that today seem to be disappearing, we find the decorative lines, so called "go faster stripes". Long and thin colourful stickers, they were created to emphasize the dynamic horizontality of the car, the arrow-likeness of the automobile. Those lines may have originated with the black masking tape used by the designers to project the cars, to draw the "line" of the car in a real size. Then they may have had a direct translation into reality, in the straightness of the shapes and in those decorative stripes along the body. Today, a shift in the design process, towards the use of modelling clay and computer, has resulted in the disappearance of those added lines, and in the softness, roundness and continuity of the curves in contemporary style. We observe how those long thin stripes along the car seem to be substituted in the current rounded models by an exaggeration of the lines produced by the gaps separating the sheets of the bodywork, and by prominences and splits on them like those along the bodies of the last coupés (96-97) made by Fiat, Lotus or Alfa Romeo. What has been wanted on the cars, for a long time ago is staticity, lightness and silence "Frequently there is a "dead" quality about the motion of motor cars or airplanes. In distinction from the animated activity of horses or birds, they show no sign of being possessed by forces. Magically and incomprehensibly propelled, they exhibit pure, uninspiring locomotion". As a result of this the car, even on the road, has never really looked like a "speedy thing". In some ways the design of the shapes and the adding of lines attempts to fuel this formally missing idea of motion and power. Those lines are surely less important when the car is in motion than when it is parked. When the car is moving the most important is the functional side, the engine, the wheels and the way the shape cuts the wind. But when the car is parked, the visual side must play more of a part, shapes and arrow stripes going along, the wheels, each one of the static details must emphasize the idea of its capability of motion. We can say that to see an arrow as a sign of direction and movement has become an habitude, an almost natural reaction, as happens with the stripes. But apart from them, it has not been developed any painting or light in the vehicles in a direct relation with the movement. We do not see any shape, colour or added light increasing the insinuation of motion, playing with the capability of speed to create a new visual experience for the viewer. Always the same arrow lines as a symbol of motion, but paradoxically working only when the vehicle is stopped. In other modes of transport, such as airplanes, trucks and trains we do not find new ideas about the representation of motion. In some of these vehicles there are big letters and logos, where we can see just how deep rooted some "dynamic forms" are in the designer's mind. We do not find any use of the movement of the object as a way of giving new visual experiences. We do not go farther than the pure symbolisation of one idea of speed, by means of inclinations, depicted projections, diffusions and cuts applied to the typography or to the stripes. Trains, because of their length, are the most indicated modes of transport to play with their colours and the eye. When the trains are passing we have enough time to hesitate and stagger. We can follow one fixed point with the eye, a window or a wheel, or relax the eyes, looking how the coloured lines pass, redrawing the length of the train. But in very few trains is this length really used. The decoration of the trains is nothing more than just that. It is based almost exclusively on the very straight lines along the wagons. Another example, of an individual variety, are the sprayed trucks and vans of the sixties and the seventies especially in the United States. Some of them could depict interesting displacements of sense on their sides. Ideologized but interesting ideas on the relationship between speed and moving objects. We could find, depicted on the sides of the vans, racing cars sharing the van's own wheels, carefully depicted highways to camouflate the van and make it disappear on the roads, or motorcycles travelling in the opposite direction from the van confusing the eye in their long journeys. [Fig. 1, index page] The imagery in all those cases came from topics of hippie life; car tattoos, with its ideals of masculinity and feminity. They always had in common a love for the life on the road and its pains and pleasures, and obviously reflecting the love for the moving object as something unique and the most precious personal possession, which one must make different and visually owned. The colours of racing cars and motorbikes all through their history, -nowadays they seem to be more interested in advertising their sponsors in a clear way-, the maillots of the speed cyclists, with their glowing colours, are as well evidence that we have hardly advanced towards a use of motion as part of the aesthetics in moving objects. If we see the designs of Frank Stella, Roy Lichenstein and other American artists for the BMW in the seventies and eighties we can realise there must be a visual barrier in our capability of viewing and making speed, and consequently in the way we represent it. We cannot go farther because of the insufficient speed of the objects we create and the fixed speed of our vision. There is another barrier in the obligated functionality of the shapes. As any change in the structure could affect the function, all the implications of motion in the examples we have seen can never be made with external annexations to the body of the vehicle. Excepting maybe the flaps of sport cars, as annexations for helping the speed, every implication of motion happens, and must happen on the surface of the car. The prototypical lines, stripes of colour, (those glowing and reflective of the police cars and ambulances, and those arrow-like ones on the Starsky & Hutch's Torino, of the eighties can be examples) in some ways make us imagine the speed that could eventually convert the car itself into a flash of colour. If in motion (theoretically or in the cinema) each point draws a line and leaves a trail, then the go-faster stripes in the parked car can make us remember its capability of speed. The line is not the only way, but is the simplest one of representing the passing of something, since a single trace left by any drawing object is already a sign of the pass of this object.

2 One movement, four directions. I want to lead the analysis in this text to "formal" manners of representing the motion of objects in painting, trying not to go to subjects of time displacements implying motion, or to write about paintings presenting the motion in themselves, as in optical art. The modes I use in my painting to deal with movement is probably the reason why I have taken this choice. The history of painting in some ways is the history of the representation of movement, but I will try to work only within this century in order to extract a possible change in attitude within contemporary painting concerning the topic. The forms which I will try to work with are those implying the idea of trail or mark left by the passing of something (of light), as well as the deformations, projections or distortions caused by the movement of objects. All the possible formal and conceptual options of "escaping the picture", and all the ways of introducing temporal elements in painting, were defined and studied by both cubists and futurists in the beginning of this century. Later, in the forties, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy returned to the subject enumerating with a positive view how motion should come into the fine arts. Between those moments, we find the one that could be the best definition for our approach to the subject, even though denying it. It is the opposition to any dynamism in painting that Wladislaw Strzeminski wrote in his Unist manifestos, around 1925. Strzeminski tried fervently to make paintings from which nothing could escape neither mean any kind of movement, his theories influenced in an important way some earlier minimal artists: "When the finality is dynamism the painting is only a subordinate thing, a medium. As dynamism is not a purely pictorial element, since it relates to the time, the latest consequence is that the painting abdicates in favour of non-pictorial objectives; the form should grow starting from the shape of the stretched canvas, it should be bound directly to him; a form that floats or that tries to escape, a form that is not married to the surface of the square, but rather is there against their nature, their will and their motives, demonstrates that the square is one thing and the form is another one." (Strzeminski 1925) [fig. 2] Cubism, starting at the formal analysis of the object, gave plastic form to simultaneous vision; this can be understood as an expression of dynamic vision. But the futurist way was the one of the expression of a dynamic penetration of the world with an important use of the imagination. Objects were represented in a very complex interpenetration of external processes and internal forces. Simultaneity transformed the succession in adjacency, superposition and interpenetration. The object in rest, is explained by its implicit movement and is expanded in lines of force. In paintings like Giaccomo Balla's Study for the materiality of light plus speed (1913) [fig. 3], we can recognize a passing in those lines, a current or possible passing of the object in front of the viewer. A mobile potentiality of the object, and not the object itself (a car, in this case). The lines fall, occupying the canvas, and they could continue out of the picture, with their own rhythm, and trying to introduce a multidimensional event, full of camps de force like crystalline structures. Spirals, diagonals, radial lines crossing between them or growing from another, fading away or vanishing in a juxtaposition of directions where any direction is possible, although they refer to only one object. "The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be an fixed moment of the general dynamism: it shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself. (...)On account of the permanency of the objects in the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves, they forms changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career." ." We have declared in our manifesto that what must be rendered is the dynamic sensation, that is to say, the particular rhythm of each object; its inclination, its movement or, more exactly, its interior force." (Boccioni, Carrá, Russolo, Balla and Severini.1910 and 1912) Duchamp, in Le roi et la reine traversées par des nus en vitesse, [fig. 4] or Le roi et la reine entourées par des nus vites, (both 1912) using some of the topics of cubism and futurism (if there's anything Duchamp did not invent it is this way of looking at the things), is showing us, based on the chess game more than on Republicanism, an interesting dialogue between static and moving objects. The king and the queen, are supposed to be standing, in opposition to the nudes that crosses or wraps them like a surprising situation or a sudden shower, the king and the queen are represented with external projections to their bodies, as futurist statues with implicit forces or, in a cubist way, seen from all the angles that the nude that crosses them could perceive or touch, the nude as the cubo-futurist gaze. The time for the royalty seems to be paralysed or minimized. This is not the case for the nudes; in their passing they leave a trail through the bodies of the monarchs. On the one hand, the passing of the nudes is very rapid only for the king and the queen, is an instant that they live in a different, fleeting time, like a dream, after which they don't know where to locate the lapsus. But, on the other hand, for us and for the speedy nude the same interval of time becomes an eternity. Duchamp locates the spectator on the side of the nude; we have as much time as him in order to travel the whole painting. Crossing in slow motion, so that the nudes and we can see in detail the monarchs. Or pause, still image for the kings, in order to give us an indefinite time to travel on them. After that fold in time everything continues, the chess game continues. So the time in this painting is also detained like time in thought in front of the chessboard, a pause in the battle as opposed to the fleeting moment in which the hand, expert and naked, moves the pieces. The body of the monarchs is like the staircase descended by the nude, and also a nude-machine crossing machines at rest. The nakedness could give a sensual opposition to the hieratic crowned figures, but the representation of the nude in vitesse endows them with the indifference and the explicit engagements of the gallant and sexual relationships that cross each one of Duchamp's works. The angular corners, the dynamic arabesque, the oblique lines "that fall on the senses of the viewer like arrows from the sky”, the evolvable circle, the ellipse, the helical, the inverted cone are some basic futurist forms as described by them. This list can be applied also to every Kandinsky's painting, but there is a basic difference: Kandinsky gives always much more importance to the whole equilibrium, to the composition, by means of the compensation of tensions. He subtracts carefully each potential movement with another one, to find the equilibrium, while in the futurists the forces may continue with their rhythm out of the painting. Very few times Kandinsky allows an element, tension, rhythm or direction to "escape" off the picture. Each one of them find an opposed one. The nudes of Duchamp have always calculated points of entering and to leaving, they have conceptual reasons to enter on the upper right hand corner and of leave from the lower left one, but the bodies that enter into Kandinsky's paintings cross and greet tightly in the centre with another that they take upon to oppose it. [fig. 5]. Individually, each one taken alone, the elements would escape. In connection with the rest they stay in their place. As a result, this control gives a composition that sometimes may be triangular, as an equilibrium of centrifugal forces, sometimes circles with centripetal/centrifugal movement, but never a square calm "blue" composition. Futurist painters also made a tribute to the circle since their first manifestos, but in their painting we do not find the circle which everything enters or leaves, but the circle that, as a moving wheel, is able to generate an orbit or a helical. Circle for its implicit displacement ability and not circle as depth and concentric infinity. In Kandinsky, the whole directs the eyes perfectly, in order to keep them moving inside the painting. This movement, interpreted for us as a circulatory one, can be related also to the active parts of Francis Bacon's paintings. "Distortion may mean vision in motion", wrote Moholy-Nagy in 1947 , in Bacon, this distortion is not only the expression of a rapid movement of the head or of the arm, but also the distortion of death and a progressive loss of the body, a slower and less visible destiny. The ellipses are the ones that close the movement fields of the bodies in Bacon. Like the go fast stripes, acting only within the cars, the distortions respect a clearly marked space within which they are allowed to move: the Baconian ellipse. Explicitly curved, the movements in the ellipses are chained to a centripetal force, that we can relate to the force of death. Arms, mouths and several shreds of flesh are showing us very often a pathetic and solitary gesture of a futile attempt to escape. With several motives and manners, the elements in Kandinsky's paintings do not escape off the square, but we can find the reasons why they do not on the same paintings and in Kandinsky's compositional theory. Both reasons are no less important than those not allowing the bodies to escape from themselves in Bacon's paintings: the human nature. [fig. 6] The arrows with which Bacon sometimes accompanies, supports, or highlights the movement of the body, the points with which he directs the viewer, closes the figures even more in their gnarled solitude. Neither ornamental no dispensable, vaguely functional, Bacon's arrows are as useless as the expressions of the highlighted figures, when death is inevitable. Bacon's centrifuge helical and his distorted figures are also related to the futurist body. In Bacon's work a deformed body makes efforts to flee out of what keeps it joined, but the futurist body is obsessed with its outer projections. Duchamp's arrows in la broyeuse de chocolat (1911), are useless and so Duchamp will learn not to depict them anymore, (although he will always use their directions). The annalists of Duchamp's work, and the machine explainers will be the ones who will draw arrows in those diagrams that pretend to clarify works like la mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires, même, in the place where Duchamp obviated them. In Francis Picabia's machines the arrows become a more important issue, even though his machines could comparatively be read as more pictorial than Duchamp's engines, (they can be more playful or less "reasonable"). In Picabia the machines are more like diagrams of operation, they are something more than just arrows [fig. 7]. If Léger practiced an external vision of the machine, we could say Duchamp practices a super-interior vision of the mechanisms, while Picabia would be a mixture of both: the form of the apparatus is as important as the executed function, and as important as the final product. The arrows are nothing more than a way to indicate the movement of parts of a machine as "bodies with organs"; the arrows signal clearly the internal functional movements, and also the external points of connection with other machines. One is the way Picabia, Duchamp, or Bacon painted arrows, and the other is the way the futurists or Kandinsky did it, both more reasoned ways, thinking each painting as a machine.

3. Minimal distortions. "Every object reveals by its lines how it would resolve itself to follow the tendencies of its forces. This decomposition is not governed by fixed laws, but varies according to the characteristics of the object and the emotions of the onlooker." The tendencies of the internal forces of an object may come from different sources. It was in the titles of their works that the futurists used to explain to which kind of desegregations they were referring. In Boccioni's sculptures Helical expansion of muscles in movement (1912) and unique forms in space (1913) [fig. 8], curved or flat plains with angulated corners seem to be adhered to the body, deforming it in such a way that the sculpture figuratively needs the walking position of the body, the open position of walking legs, to imply the possibility of motion, a movement to be done or one which has already been done. Very often, despite their writings and intentions, those lines of force transformed into 3D forms actually look like they have been added to the sculpture, extending a basic form like the flaps and aerodynamic wings of the racing car. But those additions have an contradictory function: in Unique forms in space, every addition is placed in a past or future moment, to a figure that is currently immobile, while in the car the wings help a mobile present of motion, working only in the present. "Distortion may mean movement." If the distortion that Moholy-Nagy has in mind in 1947 is a mechanized and a very reasoned one, the minimalist distortion coming some years later, is still mechanic, controlling with a scrupulous exactness what happens to the object, but not meaning movement anymore. After Ad Reinhardt we will see "No movement. Everything else is on the move, art should be still" . The cube as a minimal ideal figure is controlled in all its changing possibilities by Sol LeWitt. There is a step-by-step presentation of the object in transition, and no more a projection of it, no more speed that could make the cube disappear from sight. This cold distortion can still be read as movement, but no longer as speed. The topic of the theatrical in minimal art, started by Michael Fried in "art and objecthood" (1967), sets the idea of movement linked to it. Often this is a real movement made by the viewer, and no more the movement of the object, or the movement that the object might represent. Seen in this way, we could perceive in time and motion in all minimal-rooted art, and the relations between objects and space-time perception, as we perceive them in architecture. Architecture as the space where the the viewer moves, proposes in every case the mode in which we should perceive the spaces. Much minimal-rooted art regulates the dynamic on the viewer in the same sense, but the works by themselves do not manifest any kind of movement. We can consider the form of an automobile as distorted by the wind, but we have also known distortions of distortions. We can consider as minimal-rooted the modification (distortion) that Gabriel Orozco made to a Citroën DS in 1992 [fig. 9], by extracting its central third section the length of the car. Converted to a capsule of a different era (the era when speed was important, although for Barthes that model of Citroën represents exactly the opposite) Orozco wants to see the "new gothic cathedral" again as a projectile and coffin. The interior, penetrable space, does not remember anymore the "modern kitchen" that Barthes saw, but rather spares any excess of comfort, in order to leave us again alone with the speed. With only one front seat, the aerodynamics of the DS becomes again that of the experimental engines of the thirties and forties, when the whole car was a turbine, but Orozco's DS conserves, or even exaggerates the Citroën's classical character. "The succession of events is achieved through the intuitive search of one single form, which produces continuity in space". This single form was, for Boccioni, different to a succession made by a "multiplication of legs, arms or faces", but rather a form closer to movement as Rodin knew it: he potenciated the sensation of movement by manipulating the natural positions of the human body, not by freezing a body in movement but by working the sensation of movement. Can we read Orozco's DS as a Boccioni's "single form which produces continuity in space"?. The solemn and majestic dynamic of the DS before Orozco arrived, was already a perfect form, (the futurists saw this union as impossible, the solemn and majestic forms in art were in his manifestos still opposed to any dynamic form). Orozco is working on both sides, in this easy and pleasant piece of work. The nostalgic ambience that DS brings to us can also tell how far we are in contemporary art, from overcoming satisfactorily the control society described by Foucault some time ago, and maybe how afraid we are of accepting the omnipresence of the new alienation within the order of the times. The time to which Orozco's DS belongs is still the time of the futurists. The fashionable nostalgia of using that model of car makes us remember the years when the object that moved us was at least as important as the points of departure and arrival. "...Com o destino a conduzir a carroça de tudo pela estrada de nada" After a time of critical positions that gave birth to some politicised art, we seem to have returned to a more indirect way of working, as consciously as Orozco returns with his DS. Nostalgia like that, may become for us something poetic, but still having an ironically political load: its most important critical power is simply to try to be only poetic nowadays. Peter Cain in his paintings introduced similar formal distortions into cars, as hyperrealisticly and cleanly as Orozco did in the DS; we cannot see the joints in any of their works. Cain's distortions mean motion only since we know the object represented there is a mobile one, a symbol of speed. [fig. 10] The cars of Cain are useless as cars, -because they are only representations, firstly- and because they are mutated; sometimes the space between the wheels is missing, not only in order to fit the whole car between the edges of the canvas, but also to dehumanise it a bit more. Not penetrable, because it is a painting and because it has no door, the depicted object becomes more an object, but never denying the very simple, symbolic level of the represented object. The sensation produced is no longer the one of "the object as projection of the ego", but rather the sensation of repulsion. Monstrously clean, the cold cuts wants to transport us to the future moment when cars will no longer exist, they show us their end, a time when they will be mythologized again. Cain's engines, although they do not let us in, belong to the days of the instantaneous, bypassing the time of displacement and communication. The instantaneous that makes the way through which the information is passed more important than the information itself, much more important the crossed space than the object that crosses it, monstrous when we look at it.

4 The car of nothing on the road of nothing. "Au volante do chevrolet pela estrada de Sintra, Ao luar do sonho, na estrada deserta Sozinho guio, guio quase devagar e um pouco Me parece, ou me forço um pouco para que me pareça Que sigo por outra estrada, por outro sonho, por outro mundo, Que sigo sem haver Lisboa deixada ou Sintra a ir ter, Que sigo, que mais haverá em seguir senâo nâo parar mais seguir? Vou passar a noite a Sintra por nâo poder passal.la em Lisboa, mais, quando chegar a Sintra, terei pena de nâo ter ficado em Lisboa [...] Na estrada de Sintra ao luar, na tristeza ante os campos e a noite Guiando o Chevrolet emprestado desconsoladamente. Percebo?me na estrada futura, sumo?me na distância que alcanço E, num desejo terrível, súbito, violento, inconcebível Acelero... Mais o meu coraçao ficou no monte de pedras, de que me desviei au vêlo sem vêlo. A porta do casebre O meu coraçâo vazio O meu coraçâo insatisfeito O meu coraçâo mais humâo do que eu, mais exato que a vida." The car that Peter Cain depicts is, in some ways, opposed to the one that carried Jackson Pollock to his death, and is also different to the one that carried Tony Smith and two of his students, in the fifties, to a life-as-art drive from the Meadows to New Brunswick. In both Pollock's and Smith’s travels, the pierced space and perhaps also the speed to be reached, were more important than the vehicle in which they travelled or any possible destination or departure point. "Motion is no longer optical perception of points and surfaces.(...) It is no longer a gliding but an inner devastation, an unnatural perturbation, a motionless crisis of bodily consciousness." This perturbation also applies to painting; after the experience, Smith saw painting most of the time as a kind of "pretty pictorial” decoration. More than the art as experience that Smith wanted to highlight in his comments, and more than the theatrical element in Minimal art that is clearly explained by this happening, I am interested in highlighting the meaning of the highway as something that already signifies, backwards and forwards in time, places of obligatory passing, places through which the future will run, the highway as a dead neutrality between two points, as if through the desert. "I see myself in the future highway, I add myself to the destiny I reach" The predicable character of the roads, makes the landscape spread in the windows of the car comparable to images passing on the television screen, as Baudrillard saw it. The automaticity of what has been previously programmed, the new centralized control on most of the "unexpected" possibilities of "accident" on the roads, and the boring routine of the main routes, make us never feel like passing through a place for the very first time, it is hard to regain a virginal gaze, when we are travelling on the highways. Pessoa in the quoted poem, implies the few poetry left, the little room we find on the highways to "leave our heart" via our gaze, and how incompatible the speed (of the couple automobile-highway) is with sensory perception. With Pessoa, we could see Tony Smith's experience as a search not for the speed but for the lost immobility of the group. No longer looking for the joy of speed, no longer trying to feel the pierced highway as a marvellous space, but rather feeling deeply a need for slowness, making their minds suffer the need, and the impossibility of rest, through a landscape that they were not really living in. We could say that both of them, Smith and Pessoa, are trying to catch the phantasmagoric images of passing things. They perceive those "seen but not-seen" landscapes, -the abandoned airports, which Smith visited, Pessoa's stone mounts-, as mere creations of speed. The highway nets are clearly marked. No longer are we virgins in relation to it, as no landscape on earth can be free of us. This speed is not our speed, but one of the things passing around and in front of us. The act of crossing highways in which we are not the only participants makes the travel safer and more transitory, subtracting emotions form the experience. The danger of stopping and staying on the road, the danger of not finishing our desired itinerary or of not having any itinerary, is quite rare nowadays. Those connecting lines, through which things pass, and which can no longer be modified, are those depicted by Peter Halley. As a previous step and context for his paintings, we should mention Mondrian's work. In paintings such as composition with two lines [fig. 11], the diagonal element finally takes a preponderant place over the perpendicular, floor-parallel relations. Mondrian always related diagonal lines to the idea of dynamism that he was trying to avoid, and that distanced him conceptually from Theo van Doesburg. His last works, though, include this dynamism, provoked maybe by the big metropolis and the music of the USA. Those lines, in relation to the city, prepared the terrain for Halley's paintings, as did Foucault's history of the strategies of control. But Mondrian's lines were not streets, at least not until this last period. Before, we could only in a forced way understand his zones of colour as architectural elements, perhaps walls, deducting it from some works of De Stijl. Halley directly converts these elements, trying to hide an excess of formalism, in what he called prisons, cells and walls. His "underground conduits" that "connect the units", and the "vital fluids" that "flow in and out" can be related with Mondrian only in works like Broadway Boogie Boogie or Fox Trot. But what for Mondrian was in his last works a positive sense of the city, a 24-hour generator of sensations, a painting of the life in every corner, is for Halley a completely different sense of the city, more of a Foucaultian prison. Halley seems to take ideas about how colour should be used from the futurists: "The time has passed for our sensations in painting to be whispered. We wish them in future to sing and re-echo upon our canvases in defeating and triumphant flourishes.(...) The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight compared with deepest night." That is how we see it, but Halley, says that his fluorescent colours should be read as a "low budget mysticism". [fig. 12] Futurists are in fact more concerned with mobile objects than with roads, with buildings than with urbanism, with information than with the medium. The lines with which they prolonged the objects in the paintings are never explained as paths, but as extensions of the forces of the objects. If we think of it like this, the conduits of Halley could be a "continuation of the forces" of the cells. However in Halley's work there is a relation between a terminal point / flux (the relation cell / conduit) but in the futurists (and I think especially in Giaccomo Balla's paintings) are only between the mobile and its mobility, always a fluent matter. The connections between the cells, a Foucaultian inheritance, applies to the end of the era of enjoyment of the highways and of the modes of transport, as much as to the commencement of the era of the internationalisation of the communication networks. Invisibly, virtual lines as routes for airplanes and communication waves are darkening the sky, the paths across which information is constantly flowing, -due to some not-completely-human "needs of communication"-, are filling the world as do highways on the surface. The difference is only the view of the object, our precious apparatus that moves on the roads: we may see the cables but we cannot see the information travelling, we only can see it reshaped in terminals, we only see things arriving and leaving immediately, "the traject runs ahead of the object", as Virilio says. Touching this topic in my current painting, the passer-by disappears too, leaving only a trail, a luminous mark where it passed. The object that passed is surely still a mobile in the futurist sense (it is not instantaneity, it is still speed, it is not information, it is still an object), but it disappears, leaving a trail across a space which the object does not bother it, a space that is irrelevant to it, a desert or a sea, or maybe still a highway. It does not mind because the trail it leaves (apart from being light that arrives at our eye after a delay), is already a highway, or in spite of me, a groove, a striation crossing an old map. I want to make the object disappear from my paintings like the futurist car vanishes from Giaccomo Balla's paintings, leaving only, as lines of force, its prolongations. No longer looking from the windscreen or the side windows of the car, here we only see through the rear one. Definitely looking at past things, like the stone mount of Pessoa, already containing our heart. [fig. 13]

5 The sea. Previewing a future generation of automobiles, Jean Baudrillard wrote about the possibility of a vehicle-net of information in an even more strongly controlled society. Not yet implying the overcoming of the "objectual" era, if it comes, the connection and links between all moving objects, the information relating objects to spaces, would be much more important than the objects or spaces by themselves. It is not hard to think about a juxtaposition of networks of information and networks of highways, with fluencies being controlled in an 'intelligent' centre. If, with Deleuze-Guattari, we think of those networks and highways of information as predetermined and tree-shaped spaces, it is attractive for us to flow to the opposite type of space, the rhizome-like one, exemplified by the desert and the sea. Once there, we will see the possibilities of grooving those plain spaces. "opposed to the sea, the city is the grooved space par excellence; but as the sea is the flat space that is left fundamentally grooved, the urban would be the force of grooving that would produce again, to open the flat space everywhere." From the structures of Mondrian to the seas of Pessoa, from the futurist meteor to a monochrome painting or a Patchwork, now we have to speak about ships. The predetermined highway and the railway are opposed to the marine open space as much as the feeling of traveling by car is different to the one of travelling through the sea. For Deleuze-Guattari, it is necessary to distinguish between a kind of travel as a line between two points in the case of the grooved, sedentary one, and the space perpetually in-between as in the case of a nomadic movement. Not the nomadic neither the sedentarized type of travel, has any direct relationship to any mean of transport. It is only the configuration of the crossed places, and the state of mind of the traveller, that can make us participate more on one side or another. In the information networks, from the radio to the Internet, everything is tree-shaped, there are only source points and reception points, without intermediate points, not even if we consider interferences or cuts. In the sea no trail is left upon passing, the common routes are marked virtually, only realized by the crossing ship, drawing lines that are quickly erased by the waves. Those lines could be seen as less marked than in the sky of our communication era, where the flying traffic and the density of communication waves makes it difficult to see cleanliness anymore. Deleuze-Guattari saw in the sea an initial "ideal" flat-nomadic-type moment, that later became more and more grooved and sedentarized, but which first grooves, as colonisation travels, have been the most important lines until today in the political shaping of the world. We can understand all the representations of seas and deserts in art, between two opposed poles. One is centred in the infinite and forgets origins and goals or identifies them with a god. The other tendency is the one of the machines of the power, where wars and conquests are placed in the sea or in the desert , using the space like those who go to the desert to beat a speed record. The first is the mode of painting the sea of Friederich or the way of writing on it of Pessoa in Alvaro de Campos' Oda marítima, where the man becomes oblivion by means of poetry. For the other approach, of which Delacroix's scenes and wars in North Africa could be good examples, I want to take one of the last pieces of work of Malevich, oblivion becoming man because of historical circumstances [fig. 15]. The manner of singing to the sea that Pessoa has in the person of Alvaro de Campos is also a passionate one, sometimes in a very futurist way. The life of the port, the sailors and the merchandise that come and go are vertiginously versified, although when he writes about ships as objects, and about the sea as the space to be crossed, he returns to a slow and contemplative poetry: "E o paquête vem entrando, porque deve ir entrando sem dúvida, E não porque eu o veja mover-se na sua distãncia axcessiva" Through the sea, on its surface, the objects cross slowly, visibly; they do not become transparent at all. The space seems virginal, the travelers seem anonymous. "...Ships passing in the night, not greeting each other, not knowing each other." Pessoa's futurism is more sensitive and open than the one of the Italian manifestos, but, in a certain way it is also more radical. It achieves the "simultaneity of states of the spirit" about which Severini spoke not only in many of the poems, but also in his heteronomy, the simultaneity of personalities within one person that he needed, each one with his possible simultaneity of states of spirit. Pessoa divided -more than multiplied- himself, as a project for life, and the most futurist of his personalities was the one of Alvaro de Campos, who wrote about a very futurist "obliqueness of [his] sensations". That transversal obliqueness was, we could say, obliqueness in the sea, a diagonal line creating a new map crossing the predetermined and grooved spaces of sedentarity. No more speed, no more movement almost. To believe in speed is to believe in the predetermined highway. There is no possible speed in the sea as there is no possible speed in the desert for a poetic soul, ([again], although cars are tested, and records of speed are broken in deserts). Speed in empty spaces has the same sense as immobility. The futurist speed believes in the highways as it does in progress and technology. That is one of the reasons why Futurism as a movement fitted in with politics. Pessoa's futurism, on the other hand, is a futurism of the sea that knows that speed is as beautiful as it is senseless. Speed needs of departure and arrival points that Pessoa is not able to choose, leaving his soul in any intermediate point on the road between Lisbon and Sintra. "E eu que amo a civilização moderna, eu que beijo com a alma as máquinas [...] gostaria de ter outra vez ao pé da minha vista só veleiros e barcos de madeira. Porque os mares antigos são a distãncia absoluta [...] esses mares maiores, porque se navegava mais devagar esses mares misteriosos, porque se sabia menos dêles" To know less about the seas would be to forget what is on the other side of the horizon, to have never seen a map. "Disappear streets / that I have passed by" Like a loveless Sklovski, who would like to clear his memory and restart with a new map, Pessoa wants to see the seas of the beginning of history, an absolute distance, that requires slowness. The battles that took place in the sea are grooves from which the political shaping of the world came from, borders and territory. The battles as the records of speed were made in desert-like spaces, both are activities based in furrows, in sedentarity, in hierarchies and points of destination. Malevich painted in the red cavalry (1930-31) [fig. 15] a thin row of horses on a space of coloured lines crossing the canvas from side to side. Is it enough with the linearity to create a desert space, or is the direction of the lines already a way of ploughing that originally flat space? The lines give an order and a figurative meaning to the plain, like in the white square on white the texture creates it on the non-colour. The lines make us able to see the desert. Leaving aside the question of whether or not the cavalry was annexed after a first, abstract finished version of the painting, the direction given to the whole structure and to the desert by the "machine of power" represented in the cavalry is a perfect circumstance for the ideas we are trying to develop . It is not the multitude of horses and riders and the reason why they are crossing a good abstract painting, but simply their identical direction, the vector on the grid, creating a groove and directs, like in Kandinsky's Blauer Reiter paintings, all the tensions. The fields and farmers that were painted by Malevich at that time show clearly this sedentary repartition of the territory, the same sedentary repartition that the cavalry was searching for. The lineal space, with order but without direction, the space that Malevich painted before painting the cavalry is like cable communications, in which we can not see the information until it reached the terminal point, but where we can see connections, directions, -cavalries included- travelling on them. It has been argued thoroughly whether there is still the possibility of the internet and the future communication networks, of being a rhizomatic space, rather than a tree-structured one with hierarchies and centres. The one that at the beginning was going to be the rhizome-network par excellence, where each thing could connect with each other and with all the rest, has seen in the few years that have passed, a progressive groovingness, like the air filled with waves: What in the net was going to be plateaus are today robust branches of a tree already showing its first reserves, centres, subscriptions, pure publicity and censorships. But the speed that supposedly no longer exists, replaced by the instantaneity, and the "intensive" time replaced by an "extensive" one (Virilio), are not so scary and true, when everything relies on the hour when we connect to the net or of the size the computer we are using. We can, as Hakim Bey proposes, attack the system with the same technology provided by it, and fill out with poetry all the real and virtual highways and objects, no longer metaphorising them, but using all their possibilities. Or we could choose the slow route, the one of trusting Duchamp's infra-mince, and see poetics everywhere, wherever we are. Or we could even go back, in an attempt to erase the "vanishing point" and the end of history, and be nostalgic and creative as if nothing has happened. As always, we can imagine today a small humanity, with an eternally-insufficient technology, our movement and speed not slow but inexistent, (as the painting and sculpture were seen in the time of the apparition of the cinema). Or we could also see, - it would be just one more plateau- that in a single movement of our bodies, is where the whole life is manifested, that machines and all the objects created by humans, are marvellous extensions and brilliant prothesis, progress in an infinite line that we can see as a possibility of future.

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It was read as a lecture at:Bow Arts trust 1999(UK),Hull School of art & design 1998(UK) and it was published in Spanish in LAPIZ, Madrid, 1998

He is an artist and PhD candidate Universitad de Barcelona.