Make
your own Barnett Newman
zip painting!
Follow these simple instructions:
1. Grow a little moustache and join your father's clothing business
2. Start painting bad pictures
3. Give up painting bad pictures and start writing tragic commentaries on art and life
4. Return to visual art by drawing pictures of your own sperm
5. Commit yourself to anarchism as a political principle
6. Stand for election as Mayor of New York
7. Suddenly discover the strange mystical power of a thin vertical line as it bisects a field of colour (right)
8. Coin a cool word for these thin lines. The word 'zip' will do
9. Begin extrapolating endless and simplistically complex variations on these 'zip' paintings
10. Speak about arid chromatic expanses of pure colour, 'ideographic pictures', chaos and eternity. Above all, attach yourself to the 'sublime' and let it speak through everything you do, particularly in the poetically evocative titles of your paintings
11. Become an expert on Pre-Columbian stone sculpture
12. Pick arguments with your contemporaries and attack their philistine, 'heroic' gestures
13. Have a heart attack (preferably in a glare of publicity; after all this is the age of celebrity)
14. Be uncompromising in your seriousness
15. Go broke as a result of your uncompromising seriousness
16. Get rescued from poverty and become enshrined as the high priest of austerity in painting (see illustrations above and below)
17. Confound your critics and public by taking up sculpture in your mature years
18. That's it. You can die secure in the knowledge that posterity will claim you. Have a nice time in heaven.
Here's another one we did earlier, called Who's Afraid of Marmalade?
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