THE BAGUETTE-THROWER
One day last summer I saw this scene - a man throwing a baguette from the street up to a window where someone waited to receive the catch. In the first moment it looked as if the thrower was simply, in some fit of chagrin, throwing the bread into the air - as folk used to throw their hats at the end of a war. Then I saw the hand awaiting the catch, the window, the connection between the two people as the bread flew. I know little else about this original moment, this historical event, not even if the two people knew each other - perhaps, rather than an errand fulfilled, it was an odd method of charity, or perhaps of friendship sought: of using bread in lieu of a chat-up line. The various possibilities of the scene, therefore, were the instigation of several drawings, all different - or the same drawing sought several times and found to be different each time - with different characters playing the parts of thrower, bread-catcher and witness. It is a scene that is both ambivalent and involved, both merely itself and intricately connected with all life: from the bread (never caught in any drawing, nor will it be in the future drawings I will make of this scene) which grew in 'the kind and holy earth' of France, as de Gaulle called it in his great broadcast from Tunis in June 1943, and the square of window, which represents every canvas ever painted - every square filled with a portrait: Mona Lisa or Jacqueline reaching out with fingers expecting to feel bread. Never caught because it is in the throwing, it is in the flight, that hope resides, where the spirit is lifted, where all possibilities are frozen while the consciousness of three souls - and now you! - focuses upon a flying baguette.
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Ink on Arches paper,
310mm x 230mm,
$200
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Ink on Khadi paper,
310mm x 230mm,
$200
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Ink on Khadi paper,
310mm x 230mm,
$200
)
Ink on Khadi paper,
310mm x 230mm,
$200
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