Color Field painting has retained a varying vitality for over sixty years and, in the hands of certain artists, thrives today. By now, owing to its longevity and identifying qualities, it perhaps can be considered a genre of its own. But for the artists pursuing it, it is hardly that—it is the center of art, based on the belief that abstraction underlies all art and that Color Field painting, as a result, is an abstract art both refined and fundamental.
Writers are those naïfs among us who believe that language can be used to take the measure of experience. Readers demonstrate faith in them when they commit to a book or short story. The reader-writer relationship is a contract of sorts. But because the terms are not written down, there is much room in that contract for misinterpretation. What is at stake is not small: it is a shared picture of reality. Nor is it static. With each new publication or rereading, the reader-writer contract is up for review. What could go wrong?
The cradle of European civilization happens to share geography with a collection of active volcanoes: Vesuvius, Etna, Stromboli, and Vulcano in Italy, and Santorini in Greece. This means that we have records of how thinkers from Western antiquity theorized about volcanism and its causes. It is from Vulcano—named after the Roman god of fire and metalwork—that we take our word “volcano.” The ancient Romans imagined that volcanoes were smokestacks for giant internal furnaces fuelled by coal, bitumen, or sulfur inside the Earth. They imagined a great network of flues within the planet. Volcanoes were where these inner fires burst forth, like safety valves.
Twenty years ago he blew open the doors of the hushed temple of professional cooking—an intimidating, mythical white-tocqued corner of the world—strolled on in, and then held the door open for all of us to follow. I am certain that Tony would be genuinely pleased that his own steadfast work, generously shared over the years, has made this one single aspect of his cookbook feel dated. Today's reader is no amateur. He would allow me, if he were here, to give him shit about his stale, out-of-date idea of the average home cook, the average reader who would be picking up this book.
Its spritzy, berserk energy pulls it together like a force field. Baxter mercifully switches a too-sweet ending for an unsettling finish – but even without that, Woo Woo’s guttural, flamboyant imagination would stand it apart. As Sabine decrees somewhere along the way: “Making art is an athletic achievement.”