Humbert was the most beautiful boy in the town.He had blue eyes and golden curls.He was very beautiful, but he was nasty.He liked putting rats in the beds of his sisters.The little girls cried.One day, Rose, his sister, put a crocodile in his bed.“AI” yelled Humbert, “I’m afraid there’s a crocodile in my bed!”But Humbert was so beautiful the crocodile gave him an agreeable smile. Humbert and the crocodile had become friends.The child was even nastier than he was before because he could go everywhere with the crocodile. Leonora CarringtonPAINTED IN THE 1950S on the walls of her sons’ bedroom and
Art by Matt Chase.
The law of imitative representation, aka mimesis, reigned supreme in Western art for so long that its resistors sometimes found
it hard to stop battling it, even when and where it had lost its grip. Consider, for example, some responses to so-called concrete poetry on the part of advocates of so-called conceptual art. The writer and critic Lucy Lippard differentiates between concrete poetry’s naive strategies of linguistic resemblance “where the words are made to look like something, an image” and conceptualism’s more sophisticated liberty “where the words are used only to
avoid looking like something, where it doesn’t make any difference how the words look on the page or anything.”