We look at paintings not to see ourselves (they function too poorly or too well to be mirrors), but in order to see how a specific circumstance of looking can reconfigure ourselves. Sometimes we just use it to confirm a self-image. Either way this information is often consumed quickly, but that information can remain and change its apparent shape enough for us to go back repeatedly. I think it’s an interesting painting that is interesting after you turn away from it. And it’s a beautiful one that is interesting when you turn back to it. In the end, the satisfaction of looking at painting may have more to do with the gyrations in from of it than the thing itself. I like the idea of a non-formal art. It gives me an image that we could be moving through the world brow-deep in these objects without realizing it. We’d see them as well as someone could understand a sentence without having language. "Painting is text masquerading as perception." This statement is accurate in so far as it allows that each of the terms are unstable and relational to the others. Each painting addresses text, masquerade and perception in a different way, with inequal emphasis. At different places in a single work the emphasis can be very different. This statement reflects the dynamic that floats the immediate pleasure of the painting’s consumption. How is painting a "body art"? As soon as painting becomes a subject its body becomes apparent. This body is its histories. These histories’ compositions are no the ideas of painting, its historical moment, its personalities, artifacts or even the way they seem now, but all of these things, not all at once, but in many sets of sets, as well as subsets; all bodies, all figures. How is painting a "body art"? How can a painting be seen if the convention of "seeing into it" is abandoned? A painting without "interior light" or "deep space"? This alternative painting can have a physical significance beyond being a collection of conceptual marks and colors. Instead of locating the viewer's body by some form of perspectival logic, the body of the painting can inscribe itself on the body of the viewer. Instead of the focusing procedures of a telescope or camera, this type of painting operates like "all over you like a cheap suit." How is painting not a "body art"? If it is the text of painting, (i.e. making it a linguistic gives it its bodies as a "body art" it's also a "text art." As a not "body art" is it a not "text art"? Which gesture defines the act of apprehending a painting - - stare or stance? Is the viewer the painting constructs more bi-ocular or bipedal? If we speak of the face of a painting, if there is psychology implied, isn't "face" a verb, not a noun? Behind "face", the noun, there's a head, but as a verb, "face" is a stance and behind that, perhaps the psychology of painting. A painting is made by covering a surface with paint. It is this covering which reveal the painting. It reveals what it is generically; that thing - - a painting. The covering as an act locates the place where the painting become individual; this particular painting. Covering to reveal, does this sound like the logic of lingerie? James Hyde, 1993