Page 17 - Art First: Simon Morley: Lost Horizon

think so, but such a conclusion might seem inevitable. As a clever Apple ad cam-
paign from 1994 announced:
Here’s to the crazy ones . . . . Maybe they have to be crazy. How else

can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence
and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and
see a laboratory on wheels? While some see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they

can change the world, are the ones who do’.
Or, as Oscar Wilde declared: ‘Progress is the realisation of Utopias’.

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Western post-Renaissance paintings, with their fixed-point perspectives and their
clear (if hazy) horizons, suggest windows and doors, and images that are to be
viewed in a detached and immobile manner. ey embody the ‘horizon of mean-

ing’ through a representational trope: the vanishing-point. But the thin paper and
silk mounts of East Asian works, floating parallel to the wall behind, or laid on
the floor or table-top, reinforce awareness that the work is ‘a boundary constitut-
ing its own surface environment’, as the art historian Jonathan Hay puts it. eir

framing-edge is much more permeable, opening the painted surface onto its
surroundings. They do not show us an illusionistic three-dimen sional space
to be contemplated as if from a distance, and from one, unmoving position. ey
encour age the viewer to engage in more mobile and somatic modes of perceptual

engagement, and to consider the works within a wider environment of viewing.