John Chamberlain

There is a handle to the world that is looked for, a way of taking it in hand. But not as something familiar, nor as some reference to something else. Senses of Chamberlain's sculptures that want to return them to "crushed automobiles" seem to me as absurd as trying to put mother back together again. Surely what has happened is something too.

Things, then, are large or small objects, having the fact of space in whatever dimension becomes them. Space—such as we are given to conceive—is already the dimension of our own. We measure by what we are, as things, in what relations are possible to us. The small man sees the door as large, the large man as small, etc. But what things move more complexly in how they are, come forward insistently, disobliging all such scale, and will be other than big or small—as if we stood finally on our hands, and the so-called bottom disappeared at our feet.

"A new world is only a new mind," says Williams, and equally a new world is not only but wholly a new thing. Our sense of history looks for conformities of acts and effects, and in that respect does us poor service in the arts. Skills are accumulated but the effects of those skills have at each moment to be recognized. There are such things now present that the sciences have no vocabulary wherewith to describe them. They are confronted as facts of literal presence.

You will not live long if you look always for what was there, assuming the world to be no more than the time track of your

particularities. A sudden crash, a disfigurement, the loss of anything not simply a pencil or some wish, and all becomes a present so huge it falls on you, crushing you more than that automobile you thought so neatly to remember. It was there, but now you are contained in a thing already changing, bringing you into its terms—and your house shrinks, far off, and things are bright and twisted.

But what things are is, again, more complex, and more distinct than some incidental violence done you. In that sense they used to say, stand back—but these things neither invite nor reject. It is the virtue of a mountain not to care—or not, at least, in such words as we use. Here as well to be liked is not an issue.

One wants a world wherein all that is possible occurs, neither as good nor bad —however terrifying. It must happen. These things have come from such time that no one remembers it, and from such space they assert their own. It is all here.