On Margate's Sands Poem by gershon hepner

Something which is not specific
may focus our mind on not being,
and lead us to think we’re terrific
by seeing what other’s aren’t seeing.

Such is the concept that’s basic
to art that’s conceptual, but I,
with vision once sharpened by Lasik,
can’t see any answers in “Why? ”

A concept is merely a void
to which no one who’s normal conforms,
until with its shape you have toyed,
showing artfully all of its forms.

However, on Margate’s sands
I can nothing with nothing connect,
for its sands, as they run through my hands,
provide forms for this word architect.


Inspired by Holland Cotter’s article “The Year of Tumult” in the NYT, October 30,2009, and T. S. Eliot’s lines from The Waste Land (“On Margate’s sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing”) . Cotter writes:
In the fall of 1969, the country was having a nervous breakdown, and I was in my last year in college. I’d spent half the summer working in the emergency room of a New England factory town hospital, the rest traveling across Canada in a ruin of a car to visit friends in San Francisco. Being in Canada, away from the political tumult at home, was a huge relief, though news kept breaking in throughout the ride: war, the moon walk, Charles Manson, Woodstock. Back in school in the fall there was more news: of Altamont, of Black Panthers killed in Chicago, of a panic-inducing draft lottery. By many accounts, this was the year that finally snuffed out the flower-power high, turned the era sour. Whatever the reality, the cultural atmosphere was unforgettably manic and clamorous, though almost no sense of this comes through in the exhibition “1969” at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens. True, the show was conceived with certain restrictive parameters. Almost everything in it is from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, P.S.1 being a MoMA affiliate. Maybe this explains why the selection adheres so closely to the late-1960s art establishment demographics, with a negligible presence of black, Asian, Latin American and female artists. In addition, almost every piece dates from the year of the title, a year that fell squarely within the early, intensively dematerializing phase of Conceptualism, an art movement that privileged ideas and words over object and left relatively little to look at — a printed phrase, a list of instructions, a documentary snapshot — after the visual glut of Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism. Radical discretion, though, is what made this art look revolutionary, as is evident in the first gallery. On one side you see a kooky Pop drawing of a scowling face by John Wesley, a gleaming brass Donald Judd box and a big Helen Frankenthaler painting that suggests a patch of aquamarine mold spreading elegantly across the wall. Opposite the Frankenthaler is something quite small, a sheet of framed writing paper with a single typed phrase: “Something which can never be anything specific.” It’s by the Conceptual artist Robert Barry, who had earlier gained notice for a solo show consisting entirely of radio waves…
Radical discretion, though, is what made this art look revolutionary, as is evident in the first gallery. On one side you see a kooky Pop drawing of a scowling face by John Wesley, a gleaming brass Donald Judd box and a big Helen Frankenthaler painting that suggests a patch of aquamarine mold spreading elegantly across the wall. Opposite the Frankenthaler is something quite small, a sheet of framed writing paper with a single typed phrase: “Something which can never be anything specific.” It’s by the Conceptual artist Robert Barry, who had earlier gained notice for a solo show consisting entirely of radio waves.

10/30/09