In his reversioning of the Tate website, Harwood has jumped precisely into the modern version of this problematic. For the last few weeks Harwood has been sniffing around the Tate's armoured cupboards. At any one time only a small percentage of the Gallery's holdings are on show. The digital camera allows a proximity to material, to skin, to the surface of paint that excels the eye's trained ability to sort and recognise. Skin pores become alien matter folding in billows, blunt bags trimmed with iridescent grease, pinked mudflats.
Hair meets paint slabbed on like cold marge.
Beeswaxed curls crust up into sheets of colour, a microcosmic gesture on canvas becomes enough to smother a head. Michel Serres suggests that, 'Turner was the first real genius of thermodynamics' 1 . The Thames becomes the tropics, threatening, diseased, full of ambivalent bodies and volumes, uncertain edges. For Ruskin, avatar of the early modern, Turner fused light, air and water into a compositional machine that never ends. Reflections, planes, banks of cloud that disolve into pelucid goo, haemorrhages of light.