Broadly Speaking

This is not merely a case of a visual treatment, a degree of translucency, serving as a demonstration of the words, “not transparent.” This is something much more deeply connected to the way the operations of the mind and eye take in and derive intellectual and aesthetic substance from a thing—a physical stimulus—made, after all, of old rags. There are echoes of the transcendence and even the elegiac tone of Yeats’s “rag and bone shop,” in this drawing’s low-voiced yet urgent inscription. These words might have been carved in stone, but Bochner has found something better to do with them.

Citation:
Spector, Naomi. “Broadly Speaking.” Drawn to Scale. New York, NY: Fifth Floor Foundation, 1999. © 1999 Naomi Spector