Message, No. 8 (LAM IV I) 1959

Mathias Goeritz made Message, No. 8 with I don't know what, but look at that surface! It’s like the artist was thinking about how to build something up from almost nothing, maybe obsessively. There are these repeated marks, dots maybe. They’re not perfect; they have this off-kilter rhythm, like a visual echo. The colors, mostly gold and black, give it this sense of something ancient, like you’re looking at a damaged Byzantine icon, although it feels more industrial. There's a patch of green that peeks through like moss growing on metal. I'm intrigued by the way these circular shapes create a pattern that feels both ordered and chaotic. It reminds me of a computer punch card; it's a message but I can't decipher it. It seems like someone like Agnes Martin might have been looking at this, seeing how to make something meditative out of the simplest of forms. Art is like that, an ongoing game of telephone across time.