God

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    Photo: Cary Whittier
1979
Ballpoint pen and paint on poster board
22 x 28 inches
Collection of
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
Description

In God the universe is conceived as a set of concentric rings involuting toward God’s central presence. All is in motion: God does not rest. As in Freemasonry or other esoteric wisdom traditions, the spiraling rings—gaseous clouds of debris—obstruct the journey to the center. That center, though is gloriously unstable in this galactic or molecular or Kongo  cosmographic diagram, with its elusive God as cometary energy zipping among the spiraled rings of black and white. (Robertson’s God acts a lot like Ralph Griffin’s Woodpecker , the flying, striped trickster comprising similar alternating bands of white and black.) Perhaps God is away at the moment, like a thief in the night, to visit with his favorite earthling down in Louisiana: BACK IN 15 MINS. This piece also seems to be a roadmap for Robertson’s artistic program, in that the rings function to secure boundaries between outside and inside, emptiness and wisdom, and to establish protective patterns of static.