Loose Living by Frank Moorhouse Page B

pushing and shoving matches, argy bargy, with other visitors to the museum because I insist on reading the pieces of newspaper which are sometimes used in collage work.
    Because collage work often employs newspaper scraps which are placed in the painting at an angle or upside down, the reading of the newspapers does involve me in gymnastics which have more than once attracted the worried attention of the gentle museum guards.
    I always carry a large Sherlock Holmes-style magnifying glass to art exhibitions on the advice of the late Dorothy Dundas.
    I read these newspaper components because I happen to believe that the artists ‘choose’ these newsprint pieces.
    These newspapers do not blow in the window. I am inclined to assume that the artists use that day’s newspaper because it was likely to be at hand (after checking that everyone in the family is finished with it, of course).
    I also assume that they read those newspapers over croissants and hot chocolate or whatever, that very morning of the making of the collage, and that their reading of the newspaper that morning, and their reaction to the news, together with the quarrels they may have had with whomever they slept the night, the success of the sleep and whatever else happened during the course of night, and the quality of the chocolate and the croissants, all this shaped what happened that day in the artwork.
    I also look for jam stains.
    It is the Bad Breakfast Theory of creativity. Most importantly, given that they used those newspapers directly in their work, I believe that the news affected them in their choice of the bits they cut up for the collage.
    To superficially illustrate my point: Braque did a joke painting on the death of Max Ernst which involved news paper material in collage. If you examine the newspaper material closely you find, upside down, and virtually obscured, the newspaper headline, in French, ‘What sort of Bird was Max Ernst?’
    Superimposed on the collage work was a painting of an imaginary bird. There was no clue to this in the title of the work or in the catalogue.
    I emphasise that this particular newsprint headline was very difficult to detect in the collage, but that I, being that sort of person, ‘discovered’ it by using my large magnifying glass to carefully read all the newspaper clipping in that collage despite the back-up of seventy-eight impatient viewers behind me.
    I came across this particular painting in a small museum in provincial Switzerland and I pointed it out gleefully to the guards and other visitors (mainly Swiss military personnel on arts manoeuvres) but I was not particularly thanked for my pains.
    However, I rush to say that it is my belief, after many hours of reading the pieces of newspaper used in collages, that artists rarely intended the news stories to literally inform the painting. This Braque was an exception.
    The big shift among the artists today is that they want to ‘say’ things to us. Usually to teach us a lesson or to raise what they see as our anaemic consciousness about some issue they have taken up at breakfast that morning.
    Just in case, for example, we have never in our lives considered the case for or against consumerism, let alone entertaining the possibility that many of us intelligently enjoy consumerism.
    I guess these artists have never been Big Spenders.
    My hunch is that the use of words in visual art, as we understand it, began early this century with Braque and Picasso and that they did all that could be done with it by about 1920.
    I am excluding the use in medieval paintings of Latin religious inscriptions such as ‘Honk if you love Jesus’.
    Hence my sending of a footman to Beaulieu with an appeal to the Duc and his friends for a truckload of Picassos and Braques so that I could confirm my hypothesis.
    To be accurate, the paintings did not arrive on the back of a truck. They were individually wrapped in straw and each carried by two