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<p class="ydpf9abc60cMsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Dear
Empyre,</span></p>
<p class="ydpf9abc60cMsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Thanking
you all as usual for the important discussion. I just wanted to comment briefly
on Ana Valdes’ menttion of alterity as something that links our present
understanding of ‘The Middle East [that] occupies the place where Eden and the
Paradise were situated in the imagination of the people of the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance.’ So I would also say it is difficult to avoid the eastern in
aesthetics or for that matter in the quotidian task of waking up in the
morning. For example we find Virginia Woolf giving the abstract artist she
creates in *To the Lighthouse* ‘Chinese eyes.’ A way of seeing interpreted.
That (1927) was at a time when the peripheral hadn’t taken on the same sort of
focus as now, Ana, as you indicate, when our global news now comes to us in the
same machine we write and draw on. But the historical palimpsest that
inevitably comes into the symbolic activities that move us have this constant
of easterness. How it’s presented or interpreted is another matter, with all the
obviously dangers—as this month’s whole Empyre thread has brought to the fore.
Artists have to take risks, polititians as well. And it’s never enough. One
example is when, possibly aware that nothing could really say it, the artist Ai
Weiwei egoistically had himself photographed lying on a shore on Lesbos Island
in the same pose as the lifeless body of the child Alan Kurdi, the drowned
Syrian refugee. Thanks again to Empyre for the importance of this, specifically just now the context
provided<span> </span>by Nat Muller’s thought that ‘the
issue remains that the fabric of the contemporary art field makes it very
difficult to have an open discussion about ethics.’ Best wishes, William</span></p>
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