Living (July)

Lessons from Saul Steinberg’s ‘The Art of Living’ (1945). Half the news is got looking over someone else’s shoulder. Staircases to underground platforms come all the way from the bottom. It takes a tree to make a wooden chair. Art is 90% decoration, 10% indication. Pavements are made to be broken. All ideologies lead to 14th July Square. Grand railway stations were the people’s palaces. Music begins with a bang or a whimper. Martians are just human, after all. If you must faint, have someone to catch you. Some artists draw long bows. A bird’s song is the cat’s whiskers. 

Y (May)

Why the divide? Where does it start, and how? Saul Steinberg sat at his draughtsman’s desk. Figures stand at the end of each tip, wondering did they take the road less travelled? YES rolls downhill like a principal’s speech, directly towards an unavoidable BUT. May starts with an mmmmmmm of anticipation, encounters an A of achievement, only to tail off with an unanswered why. Steinberg took an hour with best art paper drawing a Y, all bells and whistles. Asked why, he replied, boredom. His stick figure Y reaches out, in ecstasy, for help, another branch on the family tree.

Steinberg (July)

Saul Steinberg turns words into three-dimensional forces with a life of their own, agents of change in their landscapes. He is a tiger for puns. PELACO stands several metres high on scaffolds, like a Jack ‘Captain Blood’ Dyer shirtfront on the neighbourhood in general. Less overstated is Steinberg’s bittersweet VINEGAR, the evergreen skipping girl hopping eternally above its flat message. The artist’s monthly versions (July is a masterpiece) of Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum’s Highett Street house are surrounded by monster lettering COUNTDOWN, their descending scale indicative of mortality. Hence perhaps the shift to other  transitory Richmond signs: EPWORTH and MELBOURNE CLINIC.