Sergei: the English idiom is “skating on thin ice.” It applies not only literally, as in Hazel Shade’s fate, but to all kinds of “risk-takings.” Thus, idioms being the source of much humour, one might say that, unlike Jesus, when St Peter ventured out of his boat onto Lake Galilee, he was “skating on thin ice.”
Cheers — CTaN
On 17/11/2008 15:54, "NABOKV-L" <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
> I don't understand here why Matt Harris speaks all the time
> about "thin ice" while in fact it is obvious reference to
> walking on water in Bible. It is well known that tension
> film exists on ordinary water and small insects "running
> on water" do use this tension film.
>
> Best to all -
>
> Sergei Soloviev
>
>>
> http://www.newcallgallery.org.nz/2008/11/11-11-08-frater-opacity-matt-harris.h
> tml
>>
>> FRATER / OPACITYThe Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov once dismissed
> his
>> reviewers for mistakenly assuming that 'seeing through things' was his
>> professional function, as if the prescribed role of the novelist was
> to
>> probe hidden meanings or to delve into the historicity of his subject.
> For
>> Nabokov (at least, for this incarnation of Nabokov – he had many
> faces)
>> someone approaching a work of art with these intentions is distracted,
>> even hazardously distracted, from its real and immediate significance.
> “A
>> thin veneer of immediate reality,” he writes in Transparent Things, “…
> is
>> spread over natural and artificial things, and whoever wishes to
> remain in
>> the now, with the now, on the now should please not break its tension
>> film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle worker will find himself no
>> longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish.”
> His
>> point is, I guess, that if you stop and stare at any one spot for too
>> long, you’ll crack the surface of the ice and fall through. Things
> pretty
>> much are what they are, and when you start reading into them too much
> they
>> lose their immediate meaning. Or to put it another way, someone who
>> over-analyses can be in as precarious a position as a complete
> dim-wit. I
>> mean, I might be able to read all sorts of brilliant things into a dog
>> turd on the pavement, but if I step in it my foot’s still going to
> stink.
>> Sometimes it’s better to look once and keep moving on, sliding over
> the
>> surface, than it is to stop and plunge right into something. At least
> if
>> you want to stay dry and keep your feet clean. Anyway, I think
> Nabokov’s
>> principle is a good thing to keep in mind when looking at art
> sometimes,
>> especially if it’s the kind of work that an artist like Richard Frater
>> makes. Frater’s objects are a lot like a sheet of ice in some ways -
>> they’re pretty ‘thin’. And I don’t mean ‘thin’ in a pejorative sense;
> I
>> don’t think they lack conceptual substance. I mean they’re transparent
> –
>> they work in the opposite direction to the sorts of art that Nabokov's
>> reviewers expected. Looking back over Frater’s recent work this is
> pretty
>> obvious: a fridge made of paper, several empty aluminium frames,
> various
>> curls of hose-piping…and you don’t get much thinner (or more
> transparent)
>> than his brick incident which had all of it’s materials removed. These
>> works don’t ask you to spend too much time studying their detail. They
>> don’t have a lot. And when they do they tend to frame something beyond
> the
>> work itself. Empty space. Gallery space. Snow. Water. For the most
> part,
>> you're more likely to start looking past the pieces into the area
>> surrounding them. To stop and look too closely at the works, as though
>> they might be laden with all manner of political and cultural ideas,
> might
>> tempt you away from their immediate significance, the materiality of
> their
>> present. They’re purely incidental. I kind of agree with something Sam
>> Rountree Williams said about Frater’s work. Talking about one of his
> rug
>> pieces, R.W. wrote that the work “is both useless and
> non-informational,
>> and must be thought of as much more than an aesthetic phenomenon: it
> is
>> question of the work’s role within a greater immanent system.” Well, I
>> don’t know much about immanent systems or aesthetic phenomena, but I
> do
>> agree that if you look at Frater’s work for information and utility
> (as
>> Nabokov’s reviewers did his novels) you’re probably looking for the
> wrong
>> things. You might be about to drop through the ic> glide through the works,
>> appreciate their dimensions, take in the
> gesture
>> as a whole. Matt Harris, November 2008.