A

Pile of
Orange Peels

Bernardo Ortiz

1.

I am having trouble trying to remember a passage from Julian

Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot. I no longer have access to the book,
but to be honest I prefer this hazy recollection. I suspect that I’ve
added things that weren’t really there. In my mind Flaubert enters
Egypt with Napoleon’s army. He climbs to the top of one of the
pyramids and when he reaches it, he sits down, tired, to eat an
orange. He thinks about the amount of work that went into
building the pyramid on which he is now sitting (a small rounded
figure on top of a big triangle). He thinks about the huge boulders
that had to be hauled to the construction site. He thinks about
the weight of the stones at the base of the pyramid. He thinks of
the absurdity of the enterprise. A pyramid is a structure that
supports nothing. A fat writer eating an orange, for example. He
somehow manages to come back down leaving behind a pile of
orange peels.

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2.

Another scene from a novel, Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece:

When Frenhoffer sees Porbus’s Marie Egyptienne he asks for what
is missing in the picture. “Nothing”, he answers to his own ques-
tion. “Ah, but that ‘nothing’ is everything”, he adds. Frenhoffer then
grabs a brush from Porbus’s hand and finishes off the painting. In
this case, to finish off the painting means to add a brushstroke
here, another there. Subtle touches. Much to the amazement of
everyone at the scene those subtle touches reveal what can’t be
painted: air, space. That “Je ne sais quoi qui affriande les artistes.”

As if Porbus’s otherwise fine painting was murky and muddled with

the very paint, the physical stuff, that makes it a painting. Fren-
hoffer’s last strokes render the paint invisible. The white touches
that transform a blue blob of paint into Velasquez’s Infanta Mar-
garita sateen dress. Think of the pile of orange peels that Flaubert
leaves behind on the tip of the pyramid.

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3. (A digression)

Porbus’s painting isn’t made of paint. It is really (!) made of 2,436

words –Frenhoffer’s brushstrokes included. It takes up around six
pages from Balzac’s novella, depending on the edition (and the
type size, page size, typographical box, line size, etc. used to
reproduce it). Most of all, it takes time to read it.

4. (Another digression)

What does this phrase mean, ‘to read a painting’? Why use read-
ing as the image that describes metaphorically the way someone
approaches a painting? As time goes by, the metaphor becomes
deeply ingrained in the way people talk about an image (or even
art in general), and we might be caught saying things such as “it
doesn’t say anything to me.” As if a painting (or even a work of
art) had to speak, to talk back, to mean something.

5.

A near-sighted art student looks at the images of paintings repro-

duced in art history books. No matter how closely she looks at
them, there is a point in which all the brushwork (that “Je ne sais
quoi qui affriande les artistes.”) dissolves into information – be-
cause the halftone screen that gives the illusion of a painting is
basically that: information. Frenhoffer’s masterstrokes become
four-colour dots… cyan, magenta, yellow or black. That murky
and muddled surface that forced Frenhoffer to grab Porbus’s
brushes, reappears again like an illusionary veil through which the
painting is merely remembered – even when seen for the first
time. Think of what constitutes the image of a painting.

6.

A conversation with A about his drawings. He describes in writing

everyday scenes. The corner of a post-office in Berlin, for exam-
ple. A human leg in front of a table leg. A woman falling asleep
on a subway car. A has developed a short-hand code that helps
him in fixing even the most minute detail of each scene. He then
goes back and, using these descriptions, he painstakingly renders
each scene by hand. I suspect he uses a 0.1 mm technical pen
to make constellations of dots that make up the image. When
these drawings are reproduced at their actual size (10 × 15 cm),
the dots that make up the image (of the woman sleeping on a
subway car, for example) are almost the same size as the half-
tone screen dots. Both systems clash on the surface of the image.

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7.

Modernism’s reflection on the two-dimensional surface has been

all too hastily dismissed as a mere formalist endeavor. At the
same time there is today some sort of repression of the fact that
our world is more and more two-dimensional. Think of the perva-
siveness of screens and flat surfaces. Everything is flat, everything
is smooth and everything seems transparent. Computer interfaces,
windows, and even touch-screens that are gradually eliminating
roughness and coarseness from the way objects are manipulated.
Think of the consequences of this illusion. Think of how useful
modernist anti-illusionism might be here.

8. (Awkward allegory)

Imagine a vinyl record that has been recorded with oral descrip-
tions of abstract paintings. Here the problem is staged. The coarse
and inscrutable surface of the record goes round and round
stubbornly trying to reproduce another coarse and inscrutable
surface. Both systems clash on the surface of the image. Can this
be analogous to something else?

9.

I must insist that I’m near-sighted.

10.

I must insist on the usefulness of rendering the image by hand.

The mechanisms that are at play becomes evident. The body gets
close to the point where the image clashes with the very surface
that renders it visible.

(The halftone screen, the pixel grid, the grooves on the record,
among others.)*

*Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript (173e):

“Thinking, a process in the brain and the nervous system; in the
mind, in the mouth and larynx; on paper.
Remarkably, one of the most dangerous ideas is that we think
with or in our heads.
The idea of thinking as a process in the head, in that completely
closed-up space, endows it with an occult quality.
Thinking is not to be compared to an activity or a mechanism that
we see from the outside, but in whose workings we have yet to
penetrate.

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11.

Why not incorporate the concept of “resolution”? That is “resolu-

tion” in the sense that it measures density of information. A met-
aphorical hack of sorts. The same image at different resolutions
may have different “content”, for example. This might be useful
to dodge the dichotomy between form and content that still
plagues writing about images. The same image at different “res-
olutions” might provide different sets of relationships between its
parts.

11.1

This is a letter, sent in 1953, to the editors of the Revista colom-

biana para el estudio de los tiempos modernos [Colombian Jour-
nal for the Study of Modern Times]:

Popayán, March 5, 1953

Dear colleagues,

For the past week I’ve been in this city doing fieldwork for the
Society. Work towards the Material Culture Inventory is going
along with some minor bumps, but I will write in detail about that
in another letter that I will enclose with this one.

I had a very interesting encounter with comrades Valencia and

Patiño. But I will touch on that on the aforementioned letter.
Something, however, caught my attention at Valencia’s house. A
little soviet pamphlet that, according to Valencia, is titled “Clari-
fications on the Errors Inherent to the Early Painting of the Revo-
lution” (Valencia translated the title like this, but I suspect that his
knowledge of russian is not as good as he claims it to be).

Reluctantly Valencia read, while translating it, parts of the pam-

phlet. The author states that some painters “mixed up materialism
with idealism and ended up making paintings (sic) that exist
between a pure idea and a simple thing, perplexing whomever
looks at them, thus distracting from more urgent matters.” I’m sure
Valencia spoke those last words with contempt.

The pamphlet had some illustrations. Valencia’s ironic tone aroused

my curiosity; I wanted to like those soviet painters. I must confess,
however, that I was speechless when I saw the reproduction of a
painting by one Kasimir Malevich. I didn’t see a thing (sic). I
asked for a magnifying glass and just found the tenuous insinua-
tion of a crooked square among the screen dots. There was
nothing there. But, why, then does the pamphlet’s author argue
that these paintings are at the risk of being a mere thing? If we
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can’t see a thing, aren’t we seeing at least paint? Isn’t that
something? I tried to discuss this with Valencia but he was disdain-
ful: “That is the problem with you people, you have spent years
on that inventory, and meanwhile all your critical capacity is lost
on the minutiae of things”

Kind regards,

E.C.

Not much is known of the writer or the project that he or she was
undertaking at the time (an inventory of material culture in Co-
lombia).* What is interesting is the sort of response that the “low
resolution” image of Malevich’s painting produced.

*The issues that can be fathomed in this letter are far reaching
and go well beyond the scope of these notes. It is funny (in a
very tragic way) that this inventory has been yet to be found.

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 Placa no. 1:—Casimiro Malevich, Composición
suprematista “Blanco sobre blanco”

13.

A scene:
A washing machine spinning furiously in its rinse cycle (taca-ta-
ca-taca-taca-taca). Chords from a song by Schumann.

14.

01. sep. 98:

Painting as an accumulation of decisions.
Think of Flaubert on the pyramid.

15.

Gather all the published reproductions of Cildo Meireles’s Inserções

em circuitos ideológicos. What are these images reproducing?
Three bottles of Coke? What about the mechanism that is at play
in that work? How can it be reproduced? At what “resolution” are
these images on all those books and magazines operating? Inci-
dentally could we speak of “raster images” or “vector images”?

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