The performance lasted about 40 minutes; materials included live and pre-recorded voice and sound; 3 semi-transparent hanging scrims (as projection surfaces); 3 slide projectors (2 with images, one with text). The script was read aloud with sections of pre-recorded voice-over. For the first presentation, there were three readers. After that, I read the text alone. Projected text and details from paintings were shown, their focus dismantling through layers of semi-transparent scrim in the gallery. Commissioned by the Theatre Centre, Toronto,'Writers Into Performance' program, curator : Sky Gilbert, 1983. Subsequently presented in the 'Art Talks' series, Optica Gallery, Montreal, 1983; the S.L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto, 1984 and 'Active Surplus: The Economy of the Ojbect', curator: Bruce Grenville, The Power Plant, 1988.

€ The first work of van der Weyden's I saw was the portrait series. I was staying in New York. I was staying at Acker's apartment. It was very physically unpleasant in the apartment and I think, as a result, just of the claustrophobia of the rooms I was living in, I sympathized with the portraits, that are in a very claustrophobic and small space too. They are tiny, and so resemble the space I was living in. From within their confined and real space, the figures seemed serene.

* The apartment was either hot or cold and uncomfortable and there was almost no room, and no matter where I walked in the city there was no room, no visual room and no access to the horizon line. There, the illusion of depth increases. If you look down a street, your eye is drawn to the end of it because you try to read some kind of space. Here in Toronto, I try to flatten the space, to bring it closer and make it a two-dimensional surface, to construct the walls of an enclosure. So the portraits appealed to my desire for quiet and flatness of perspective.

€ A strict, spare way of seeing with a very quiet surface - Panovsky says 'it is as if a living chain of figures has been thrown across the picture plane. A chain whose links remain distinct yet are united by ingenious repetitions and variations.' Against a flat backdrop, a line connects one figure to another. There is no individuality, no naturalistic detail, no map of the face - the figures, costumes, sets, backdrops - keep to a constant formula. Yet I found van der Weyden's portraits more emotionally moving than any others.

* The figures are connected in unconscious realms - the curve of a brow or the arc of a nose, the downward movement of a hand as mirrored and elaborated in the downward movement of another's clothing. The line of a drapery fold continued in the lines of the things and people which surround it. All parts not moved by muscle.

€ The lines of his faces - part of what makes them compelling is the weight of the world upon them. If I am tired, or if something has made me unhappy, gravity shows on my face. I get lines on my face as a result of that weight. Van der Weyden did not depict weary, falling faces, but the eyelids seemed to have real weight. It allowed him to make an eye not shaped round, but shaped like the moon.

* The face is formed, formed by the painter, formed by outside influences. One of these influences is gravity. Not so much in the portraits, but in the larger compositions, the figures slump and hang. There is gravity but no illusion of depth. The horizon is interrupted by buildings or gateways, portals, so that instead of receding the space is cut from top to bottom into strata.

€ The illusion of depth, the actor's face which is molded from muscle - this to me corresponds to the will, that first phase as a woman artist where part of what you're fighting out, or part of what you sense, is feeling that you are performing, or trying to win approval, or achieve, accomplish a big task on a public level, an extreme task. The task you are trying to accomplish is that you are trying to justify your claim to be an artist. I felt I had a claim to be an artist, though I had not yet produced any art. Once I had done so, then I could go on to ask, OK, now that I'm an artist, what is my view?

2. € * As I waited in my room in New York, or went alone to a seminar room at NYU and wrote my stories, the stories tried to depict my own uncertain limits, and my uncertain identifications with the things around me. Not as an artist, but as a person in a room waiting to become an artist, a person waiting, doing evasive things like not eating, or eating, being obsessed with knowing that I had to produce something, to accomplish a task which would express...what?... my own mental state at the moment before accomplishing that task. The task seemed arbitrary. What is still voiceless always seems arbitrary.

€ It was a tiny apartment, alternately extremely hot or cold, and my mind was circling. It was a battle with myself to do anything - to think. The stakes felt high. If I thought too much, if I really looked at the way that place was, it would look exactly like the edge of my own uncertainty. I wanted quiet. The more I watched my own doubts, the more they amplified as the subject of my looking. I wanted to keep still, instead of approaching an unease that built itself up in the process of observation. I wanted a lucid, flat, transparent light. That was what I thought I saw in the paintings.

€ * TAPE :

Much of my life now is in the second person, in the second person singular, both in language and in imagery. I know it is to you, a communication to you, that may never be seen or heard by you. It is a very strange orientation. At the end of a night like this, at the end of whatever circumstances go on - I think of you. You are the last thing I think of before I sleep. This persists obstinately without changing though my attention strays. As a chair continues to act substantial. As I continue to rifle through my papers, some part of me still behaves as if you are with me. I wonder over you and I think - what are you doing now, and what is being done to you? Your silence is characteristic.

I had an idea for a story written in the 2nd person. The story was about another person's silence. Each time I met this person, he would not speak. The room, my being there, my friends, my behavior, felt watched from above, assessed by his silent presence. I felt not myself, but an example of myself. I started watching myself, and became party to his silent watching and appraisal. If a child said 'I will not speak to you', I would want that child to speak. Speech is not what he would say. It's like a flow or linkage. This is what I mean by the flow which moves between the lines of the drapery and gestures of a van der Weyden painting.

* Alone, half-reading, this room seemed to fill with my thoughts, thoughts which went on to live lives of their own independent of me. In the absence of anyone, I had the thoughts and feelings for books I might have had for people - the same inattentiveness, romances, temporary allegiances. Things I read seemed radiantly true and instantly forgettable. I saw an angel once. It was a fleeting allegiance, a second of total identification with a sentence, an idea - one I believed for a few moments explained itself completely. It was like seeing a stranger on a late street, and making the kind of contact which evaporates in two seconds.

3. € My thoughts are not thoughts at all. They are images of thoughts. Memory performs a complex work on them, and they wait, mute and inarticulate. Against a sense of laziness, formlessness, there is a desire for a stillness I believe is true. The odd moment of false luminescence, false clarity - these only seem false afterward when my view falls off again. Pictures, congested with names and associations, advance toward a quiet spot at the centre of a careful description of solitude.

€ I always felt that all I had to do was want something and I would accomplish it. If I wanted it badly enough, I would get it. Not just a question of getting it - I would do it, or see it, or reach it. If I didn't reach it, the reason why was because I didn't really want it. As if there were no other wills in the world, as if there were no matter, no physical obstacles, no fatigue, no time either. The notion of the maniac, or simply an absurdity. That kind of blindness can accomplish a great amount. But delusion is unsatisfactory, and to recognize delusion as delusion, you can't just go back to delusion. € * (BLACK) I lost faith in the sureness of my own will when I felt sorry - genuinely sorry - that I had hurt someone. No matter how sorry I felt, there was no way that I could change that. My will cannot change my own history. To recognize my grip on my past as finished, and over, beyond my control - that was like incorporating a little of my own death into my life.

After something falls but before it is broken, there's a moment of silence. When I drop a piece of glass, there's a moment when I know it's done and can't be reversed. € * It's a cold, very stark moment of both regret and recognition, a moment of sudden clarity. It's like being wounded. These paintings, in their silence, are still things. Everything is falling. The stop motion only heightens and emphasizes stillness - the still recognition at the moment it's done and can't be reversed. That moment, in Descent from the Cross, is the moment when the body of Christ is broken. I am aware that when I wound things, in reality, I wound myself.

€ There's a quote - that we are intact insofar as our objects are intact. In this painting, everything is falling. The figures will never hit the ground, but I know it's going to occur. I am being very un-Christian in this way. The Christ will never be reborn, and furthermore, there is something in me that will never be intact either.

* A still will never move anywhere and will always show an almost-connection. The line that you follow is this almost movement, and the downward movement of gravity is like that. Eventually people hit the ground. One person is falling over here, another is reaching down, another's knees bend - and the Magdellin's knees bending gave him a lovely opportunity to make a lyrical 'S' curve to the figure. People were fixed in a suspended union of release and anticipation. A state which is only possible in a still thing.

€ The two hands in Descent from the Cross - the hand of Christ as he is lowered from the cross hangs momentarily alongside the hand of the Virgin, who has lost consciousness. You have two figures falling. One is a Mother and one is a son. From the outside, they look so similar.

4. About gravity - every movement is a downward movement, with a characteristic rate of descent. You can't go too deep into one of his paintings, and that's the way it is emotionally too. The one measure is verticality, gravity.

There is a release that comes from falling, falling from what I demand of myself, falling from my project. When something falls from a greater state of potential to a lesser one, it gives off an excess, a remainder, heat, or light.

€ * TAPE

If alive means a state of corruptible and changing matter, then angels are not alive.

They are incorruptible, and they have never been known to die. They are not less alive than we are, but much more. They are much more pure act. Milton, through the archangel Raphael, suggests that angels have some form of erotic relations with each other. Raphael's appearance is made to blush as he says this to Adam, who does not know of such things.

There's a tradition of looking down on creatures that have souls, souls being like bodies, which inevitably decay. The soul is present in a body, and the body fails, as opposed to spirit, which is independent. Spirit, meaning breath.

How do angels see each other and how do they communicate? To us, they use voices, though often act through promptings and suggestions of the heart that aren't in any way articulate. Angels were depicted most at a time when there was no doubt that they existed. But few believed in beautiful young men with wings. Rather, airiness and extreme rapidity of motion.

The creation of light at the beginning of the bible was explained as the creation of the angels.

  € Late, home alone, when I did not think that would be the case. I'm not talking about anything sexual. Rather, a sense of possibility arose in the room, held between us. Just this sense, a possibility which might have terminated at least in sleep. An indefinite conclusion. Instead, alone with a vague sense of possibility. As if overlooking a chasm. A broken chasm of both rock and thought, a dark, downturned horizon. It makes sense the Wagner songs make no conclusion, but fall, and fall off, terminating in a weariness I mistake for ending.

€ * TAPE

I will not measure the distance between us in miles. Instead, I'll gauge it in time, the geographic time of the land I flew above when I left you. For three hours, I flew

5. above mountains untouched except by sight. I flew, and as my eyes fell to the sheer rock and ice, ascertaining the track of glaciers, I knew I could not live there. No one has lived there, and measurable time is very small. From my plane, from my envelope of history, I felt cold and contrite, and my eyes fell.

You are in my mind's eye. A few stills, or your isolated moves stick in recall, aside a sheer rock burning in cloudlessness. My thought of you has this clarity of altitude.

I saw an angel. It was very small. I know I am an impersonal thing. At the moment I wanted you most, you had the least individuality, the least singularity. I wait for your voice to break above the disquiet of the air around me.

€ * I have consciously refused to speculate about you anymore. What are you doing this second, what are you thinking, what do you feel about me? If I just had eyes and did not have to relate them to me - to what I feel is myself - things would be much easier. Your actions would be much less ambiguous that words. Like the last time I saw you. That came across for a few moments so cold and clear. That stupid clarity. But then it entered my mind and the situation started to drown, slowly, noisily, into a morass of possibilities. So I have refused to think about you.

We met on a street, dark, just on the verge of concentrating, thinking of concentrating, the way concentration feels, physically. Just the sense of action, its edge. There is the loud sound of the engine, a remainder.

€ * The ship is called Kefalonia, meaning 'wind' or 'spirit' - a Greek ocean-going bulk carrier of extraordinary size and darkness. Inside the ship is like inside a Mother, and like waiting, dark, very close, Mycenean.

I thought of a long conversation between two women in a small room. I'm not sure why.

€ If I were to describe your impersonality, your distance, I would speak of a physical sensation more than a quality of mind. A sense of distance, its temperature, drawn to my mind through my body at a rate faster than any words.

Do you remember the sound of the boat? It was very low, more a vibration than a sound. It let us think our own thoughts. Against the damp stone of the pier in fog, I just wanted a night on a ship, didn't notice the Greek boy spoke no English, had polio in one leg. Talking to me slowly and constantly in Greek. I recall pictures taped to his wall, pictures of cars. He touched differently. There's a difference, a different rate, an emphasis on the neck, on biting it, touching it. He said 'stay on the ship, just stay. Stay on the ship to Leningrad'. I knew at that moment I'd misplaced my ordinary life because I imagined it misplaced. I imagined I disappeared from that city without a trace, without a word. Nobody could find me. A damp cold was in my clothes and I felt jittery, but daylight reduced some of the gleamy relief from things and put me at ease. I slept. I kept half dreaming and half

6. thinking I didn't know where I was. Not even the city. When I looked at my neck, there were marks all up and down it. I stood in front of a mirror and came to know each mark, the depth of the colour, and was surprised how perfectly I remembered the sense of each one of them.

€ There is something I identify with sex, something close to an idea, only an idea in its purest and most physical form. An idea become a type of mind's eyesight. When I move my fingers, very slowly along a section of your skin, I see that skin. I see it clearly at exactly the same rate as I move my fingers. My fingers draw on the back of my eyes an image. I swear I am seeing it.

* Take a gesture like a kiss or touch. A camera can trace a section of the body at a certain rate, and it's like touching at that rate. The breadth of the surface of skin touched resembles the area of the film frame. The movement is reduced to a character of yearning. You don't have to give in to the resistances that you have in real life. In a way, what you're being released from is performing for the other. You are released from a gaze, and from your own physical body. From your own limitation. As if a strange grace moves over all things equally.

There's a sense in trying to bring a voiceless experience to speech. First, an experience of suffering, the sense of one's own suffering, the physiological sense. The other Paulo Friere would call 'the non-necessity of the prevailing order' - the sense that things don't have to be the way they are.

€ My response in the face of van der Weyden's silence was to speak into that silence, not to construct a silent thing. In the paintings, people are all separate on this earth, in their own dignity. But connected on a more abstract plane, by a line which is a line of compassionate movement. A humility and compassion is evident in everything he paints. That is something I wanted in myself - to have that kind of grace.

Something has changed over the last two years. Maybe I'm projecting this entirely, but I feel as if my friends are survivors of a war. There is something more careful, compassionate - but also more torn. Less at ease, less supple or muscular, decisive. Am I off when I sense this spirit in a room now, this contrite spirit? It is partly because of money, but things are different now. And this graciousness or contriteness binds the figures together in some paintings.

'Nome Le Tengara' - do not touch me - in Latin literally means do not wish to touch me. € In the painting, there's an elegant curving away of the figure of Christ, who having just come out of a grave, is not quite fully clothed. And is somehow in a garden, or a green place. With some kind of expression of desire. And Mary Magdellin, the other Mary, on the ground, with outstretched hands, not allowed to touch, to make sure the wounds he has are real wounds. A body of flesh and blood still. That it is somehow the same body.

7. € * Limited means, unease, anxiety - the contrast between my goals and my limited resources - I suppose van der Weyden stood for grace, humility, limited means. I still can't put my finger on whether going to the Met and seeing the portraits played in that changed, or whether he just seemed to represent that change, or one of those lucid moments when you look at a thing, and it embodies a whole other approach to seeing - very spare. That you could face a thing modestly and simply. That I need not pursue issues of maximum tension - in fact, given that those tensions exist, I could recognize the same relations evident on a much quieter surface.

€ * In Descent from the Cross, the Virgin and Christ - both have arms widely outspread and are vulnerable, and require the hands of others for support. They fall together with their wide-stretched arms, mirroring each other, almost touching, both unconscious, and the Magdellin is awake and conscious. One book talks of the strain on the seams of her dress. Her isolation is increased by garments which are too small for her. As she falls, the seams pull. Her hands for a circle clenched around her face, then an old man's hands, then the feet of Christ - and her eyes focus down on those falling and very dead or anguished, ineffectual extremities. She is an alienated and isolated figure to one side.

€ * After accomplishing his feats of religious depiction, van der Weyden decided that was not his. He went back to look straightforwardly at a world close at hand to him. Part of the attraction is the humility of that kind of gesture.

€ * As I remember you, you are in one position, one room. You are in my mind's eye, but the picture has inverted, at the moment when memory fails. Thought remains, but it is just thought. Night is anxious, the broken thought of a city. I re-read this city and felt sad, as if I could never write something so beautiful again.

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