another take

I imagine a painting of the Wanganui River. Between the cloudy sky and the clouds reflected in the water one might paint brick warehouses with doors and lintels—or one might intercept Vermeer's view of delft. Or one might insert a sentence like

     A Persian bishop was present at this conference nor was even a Scythian
     found wanting to the number.

an ornate sentence, obviously translated from the Latin which would serve to stand for the classical language of architecture.

One might introduce a few expletives, half words or advertising slogans to stand for what has been built in the syntactical gaps of Taupo Quay and Drews Avenue.

page 116

If you reduced these rhetorical words—which ripped from context [Eusebius:Life of Constantine] perform a function rather than discharge a meaning—to mere capitals with serifs, the fact of their classical origin might fade before the tendency of an initial to stand for something.

One might be reduced to using fragments of letters or to the invention of a thingwith elegance—a waist and serifs.

It is in fact the mimicry of letters which makes Killeen one of the most interesting artists in the use of words—quasi autonomous fragments in syntactical relation some of which look likethings—though association with thebeing-in-the-worldof a horse for instance is evoked in order to be suppressed.

Obviously a horse beside a heron beside an algae beside an inverted landscape behind stripesis different from a horse grazing in a pasture.

It is one cipher in an alphabet, image bank or sign system, just as sheep grazing in a green meadow and under blue take on the aspect of a word or cheque or token for a whole imaginary.

In the secular hieroglyphs of Killeen and the spatial pronouncements of Dawson there is thought about words, their power and panache and their dual capacity to dance a little ballet by themselves—andto point.