1) Skating on ice so thin that it will break and cause the forbidden utterance to erupt from behind the stylistic alibi; and

2) Freezing his real utterance over a crust of (“artistic”) ice so thick as to cause the elemental utterance, and the effect pertaining to it, to be lost thereby turning the boiling lake into a refrigerated indoor rink, where figure skating pattern-making on ice becomes the real goal.⁶

 

^{It was the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, who suggested in his The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life that the dominant goal of primitive religion and art is the recognition of oppositions and contradictions. Whereas, because we are dominated by scientific thought, it is the principle of identity that defines our lifestyle—and perhaps our art as well. As I have indicated previously in my article on Duchamp,8 sacred art is defined by the conjunction of the ambiguous and the hidden; a relatively harmless outer message is used to mask a more profound statement, usually one that poses irreconcilable opposites or contradictions about life.}

^{https://www.artforum.com/print/197106/hans-haacke-s-cancelled-show-at-the-guggenheim-37767}