The Twittering Machine of the Future, by Alfred Russell, Iconograph magazine, Summer, 1946
Paul Klee’s twitter was heard around the world twenty years ago and its reverberations have at last begun to fade away. The odds were against Klee when he invented star dust boxes, little cosmic clocks, and tinkering man. Something stronger was needed to combat tyranny of vacuity, of death, of democracy, of the mob, of common sense, the voting machine, the average man, cellophane, Paul Klee lost because he ran away to St. Helena and his exquisite private experimental world has become the common property of the drone, the harpy, the amazon. But there is still Joan Miro and Andre Masson to check the shrinking orbit of human experience at least until new blitzkrieg tactics have been devised. If we are not allowed to create, we will defy the “mob” and create into its very face. The mob will die of consternation. Creation, creation, creation is the only answer to the ever present rigor mortis, the ever encouraged, ever subsidized rigor mortis. We will create our own life, synthesize realities and experiences in paint, in ink, in defiant scrawls.
And here is the synthetic world of experience, the improvised life to take the place of the one atrophied by the amoebic mob. Language has died and consequently the written word, especially the verb; hence we explore and invent experiences on the laboratory, the field of the canvas, the vast void of paper, or shapeless masses of matter. Each canvass is a universe of its own with its own gravities, magnetisms, cosmic rays, sentiments, thought trajectories, intuited mathematics. Each canvas has had its own legendary past, its archaicisms, its classical, its baroque.
Here is any canvas, any sheet of paper on which the post-Klee man improvised a new gamut of experience, eliminates the tyrannical machine age from the twittering machine once and for all.
The line is life, is its own duration, and creates its own personality of forms. This line darts across this canvas, juts, jags and creates a grating music beyond human experience. There is action, visual verbs, as line passes from form to form, as a line explodes or contracts or vanishes. There is abstract metamorphoses as a line passes over a black smudge. Each touching, departing, concentrating, expansion is a unique experience to sharpen our awareness of existence. In a drawing will occur an abrupt environment in which there is flux, a collision, and disintegration of forms. We have never seen these forms in life before, but from this point on we will be poignantly aware of these improvised forms. Add to them the new ballistics of splattering ink and pigment. Our senses will be acutely awakened by the hair gashes of lines across the flesh, plane of the canvas. The vertiginous swirl of a pen line over a plane and back to a smudge is a verb in itself, inexpressible and meaningless, but nevertheless an experience to which we will respond. This is the touch, this is the total awareness, the essence of communication we find in sixth century Kouroi, in geometric Greek vases, in Coptic textiles, in Klee’s Twittering Machine. Sometimes it’s only the eyes which speak to us in an intimate little language, the eyes of the Etruscan Warrior in the Metropolitan Museum, the eyes of Klee’s “Holy One,” or the eyes of a dozen Congo masks. We will forget the occasions over a period of millenniums during which we have spoken that intimate language and remember the language. We will at last recognize it, write a grammar for it, conjugate its verbs. With it we improvise realities of never-to be-realized experiences, unknowable unknowns, essences of numbers. We will isolate the look from the eye, the action from the verb, and extricate the twitter from the machine.
But how cold, how distant, mirage-like and unattainable, will be this experimental world as long as it is born, acts, and transpires on a canvas, outside of the artist’s understanding! What can a metamorphosis of a line, a grating of a form, the music of attraction, repulsion, and concentration, the exquisite touchings of paint fragments, mean to us? If you are decrepit, if you vote, if you would rather ride than walk, if you are patriotic, if you are communistic, if you are social workers, earn a salary, if your hearing is bad or your sense of touch and taste not acute—then the experiential creation of pigment and ink will meaningless to you. If you are a surrealist, a neo- surrealist, a refugee surrealist, there is no hope for you. But we who are strong will fight off your clinging atrophy and step into our new experimental improvisations claim our own universal personalities of eloquent forms, live our synthesized realities.
Twentieth Century Machine Engraving and Offset Color, by Alfred Russell, Laurel Gallery, New York, Number Two, October 1947
The inevitable effect of the brave new world on the artist is that he will toss it to Aldous Huxley's pneumatic maidens singing "orgy-porgy” in the Aphrodisium — then make his own world. This will be a world in which there is a sense of history, of time, of classic and romantic attitudes. This is not an escape; the heros and heroines of a synthetic historical sense, the participants in the classic attitude, will assume new dehumanized but tragi-comical guises.
Thus Eve in L’Isle Adam's novel L’Eve Futur becomes a system of coldly erotic, functional and predictable valves, but Eve nevertheless. Thomas Edison created an Eve with synthetic flesh, with a phonograph in her chest, an Eve who would do and say what a man in the tide of the twentieth century desired from “burning Sappho”, without the coarse small talk of today's fraudulent enchantress, courtesan turned virgin. The irony of the book and also of modern painting appears when the soul of the sculptress who fashioned her takes possession of our mechanical Eve, the same soul that inevitably creeps into Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Malevich's White on White or Duchamp's epic in cracked glass La Mariée Mise Nu Par Les Celibataires.
The latter is both a relic of antiquity and a document of our bright steel lives today. But the synthetic does not stop here. We may deliberately cultivate out of sheer boredom an interest in mechanical Eves and brides of cracked glass. Think of Picasso's and Miro's interest in the fairy-land circus over a period of fifty years. Pathos is poured into a sad harlequin, a dejected absinthe drinker, in the way the dear fashion model poses on the pages of Vogue with her profile smirking beside Nadar's photograph of Baudelaire. Along with the little men, many titans of the twentieth century are swept on by a sense of duty to a false time-spirit — artificial duties to an artificial time-spirit, with the accompanying artificial morality, sentiments, victories, and defeats.
Let us change the sense of “artificial reality” to “imaginary reality” in order to get closer to a romantic soft-focus view of this too precious synthesis. This will result, I hope, in another source of subject matter in painting, appropriate to a dehumanized society — painting itself as a subject of painting. The production of pictures, the accouterments of painting, the physical activity of painting, the accidents of pigment and line, become profound events — heroic, lyrical, pastoral, depending always upon the associations of one's historical sense. These become as meaningful as past events, the profile on a Greek coin or the legend of Theseus, in a historical sense. Quick brush strokes become permanent, brittle pigment fused with a mood which slowly takes on meaning. This rich pigment is Courbet's Coast at Dieppe or Delacroix’ Algiers.
This mood of Delacroix and Courbet is the mood of a time which we can both keep and return to. Even in the work of Malevich we feel a dramatic and painterly participation with pigment, and in the painting White on White or Composition 1923 we feel a Baroque, Tieploesque [sic] disposition of giddy space along with a rich, painterly pigmentation as Malevich's over preoccupation in the joy of painting. Such painting is non-objective, but is documentary painting, a rich Homeric catalogue of our time.
The modern romantic cynically romanticises the unromantic. He deliberately preoccupies himself with curved space, the circus, or “Composition No. 112”. We see cynical romanticism in the analytical cubist studies of Gris, Braque, Picasso — romantic as Apollinaire, lush as Debussy, brocaded as Proust. The still life with its wine labels, sheets of music, rare woods, wrappers, is spurious evidence of full days wistfully abstracted and hoped for at the same time. The collage becomes an artificial memory of painted days, ageing [sic] into antiquity itself, as old as Chaldea. These trifling bits of an indifferent life forced into an antiquity of paint, sand, and scratched lines, with the collage words of Gris or Braque, cry pitfully [sic] out from the canvas as unheard now as then. Our lie, our game, a children's game indifferently played by adults, continues.
Whether it was deliberate or not, the irony of the collage remains. Just as the cubist-collageist [sic] imbued trivial documents of the times with a tragic meaning, at least in retrospection, we deliberately document our times in a similar manner. Or if we cannot accent the present as real, then we document the past through the eyes of the present. We may deliberately assume a romantic attitude which we know will be condemned. Or we may be like Orpheus looking back toward Hades to what might have been, condemning a Euridice to a fate already prepared for her. We will romanticise the inevitable, pretend, and amuse ourselves with a false time-spirit, knowing that "doom is dark and deeper than any sea dingle”.
Statement, in Véhémencés Confrontées, presented by Michel Tapie, double sides fold-out catalogue, Paris, March 1951
The paradox of American painting is that it exists at all. The painters have heroically battled against an obscene, brutal, and anti-aesthetic civilization to create an avant-guard twentieth century painting as a free and defiant expression of the profundity and dignity of human intelligence. Where all other forms of communication have been stifled in an effort to strangle creative intellectual activity, the avant-guard painters have invented a new abstract language of art as an invulnerable means of free expression. It is difficult to describe this art other than that it is without tradition, a poetry of the anti-poetic, a revolt against depersonalization, against the absence of myth, against anything of any utilitarian value. Even the painting as a durable and precious object of art is distained by many American painters who deliberately ignore the craftmanship of painting in order to stress the importance of the creative act and an indifference to the commerce of pictures. Thus the public, the critic, the collector and the museum have been excluded from the world of the painter once and for all.
In New York such painters as Still, Reinhardt, Diller, Tomlin, Cavallon, Wolff, Glarner, Holty, De Kooning, Hoffman, Vincente, and Newman are a few of the creators of this vital movement in modern painting. They are the spokesmen for their own work, their own critics, and some of the last free men in the western world.
Alfred Russell
On Painting No. 24, Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture, 1952, University of Illinois, Urbana, Il.
“There is poetry in the drying and deterioration of oil paint.”
“There is an absolute Knowledge to be found in the accidents of the studio. The running and splattering of pigment, the brush strokes falling into an implacable order, the gamut of touch from lyrical to violent, the scrawling line are the facts in the terrible void of abstract space. Arbitrary relationships between synthetic studio facts saturate the space of the total picture in which each fragmentary accident has a necessary and unique point of view.”
“Perhaps the vagaries of the brush and the desperate method of the studio with its metaphor of chance struggle further beyond the frontiers of the known world and human ignorance than do the poet, the general and the machine.”
“The space discovered in the studio is a pathetic space filled with sounds and movements, the Homeric clanking of the hoplites, fragments of amber tossing in the Euxine sea, the muffled cries of Villon and Ronsard, Goya’s protest, etc. To indicate them we use calligraphy, invented constellations for future navigation outward to the edge of all space.”
“Calligraphy is parallactic movement like the bright flashes in the gloom of Alessandro Magnasco. It is the slow radiation of life from six persimmons painted by Fa ch’ang in the Sung dynasty.”
“These are some of the concerns of the painter and of Painting Number 24.”
Statement, Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture, University of Illinois, Urbana, Il. 1953
“Here is evoked a dim image from Theocritus and Alcaeus, a dithyrambic interlude. We who are forced to die for ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth’ can destroy the barracks, the factory, and the bank by means of the Lydian mode, an art of intoxication in place of an abstract narcotic art.
“Now is the time to paint the wrong picture in the wrong century and the wrong place, paint Diana of Ephesus.
Charm smiling at the good mouth
Quick eyes gone under the earth’s lid‑ Ezra Pound
“In the light of modern physics, the red shift, the supernovae, the laws of probability tell us that in the known universe, the hydrocarbons have repeated Hellenism 1,000,000,000,000 times complete with Pythagoras, Sappho and Mallarme and his unnamed hermetic reality. Hence the most tentative symbol has a vague familiarity. Somebody got there before us.
“Yes, this Aphrodite has been painted many times before by other young men not quite ‘up to date’—victims of the same dreadful law that arranged Arp’s whimsically fluttering shreds of paper.”
On Returning to The Human Figure,
by Alfred Russell, The Art Digest, New York, November 15th Issue, 1953
Note: This paper was read at a panel at "The Club," titled "The Figure in Painting," March 27, 1953, moderated by Joan Mitchell, with Paul Brach, Edwin Denby, Al Leslie, Larry Rivers, Mike Lowe, Alfred Russell, Leon Smith, and Leo Steinberg. It was this sweeping critique of the avant-garde that led to Russell's ostracism amongst abstractionists. Russell once remarked to me that after the panel only de Kooning would talk to him. Yet in the Winter issue of the College Art Journal (1955), Leon Golub quoted from Russell's critique as his opening salvo in his own essay, "A Critique of Abstract Expressionism." His expressionistic figures also shared an involvement with Greek Hellenistic culture. —David Carbone
The potentialities of abstract painting or of any other kind of painting have not been exhausted. But most painters have exhausted themselves trying to use the traditional tools of painting in the exploration of pure abstract forms; others have adopted new techniques, an extra-painting language, and have entered into collaboration or competition with scientists, poets, philosophers, linguists, anthropologists, statisticians, mathematicians, in order to explore the new illimitable range of human perception. The métier of painting and profession of artist are disappearing in direct proportion to the ever-widening scope of plastic sensibility. Personalities, masters, the universal genius in the Renaissance sense have given way to specialists, technicians who narrow down and refine tiny particulars so that the whole perspective of non-objective idiom is lost. The enlightened public, the poet, thinker, scientist, lose interest in contemporary painting altogether. The painter in the non-objective idiom has eliminated himself as a cultural force by trying to be too much with too little. Perhaps the potentialities of pure abstract forms are better realized in disciplines of philosophy, mathematics and physics.
The paradox of vast possibilities and limited accomplishments is perplexing, exhausting the painter. He labors like Sisyphus and has failed to add any significant discoveries to the works of the early galaxy of abstract masters. There is a monotonous uniformity in non-objective painting all over the world. Paradoxically the cult of originality has produced a crude, raw assembly-line product for the needs of mass culture, and imagined differences in it are defended or attacked with chauvinistic ferocity by the very same critics who ignored the original modern masters.
I return to the human figure in order to shorten my lines of communication with the world of visual phenomena, to reduce the problems of painting to the scale of my own possibilities of expression, and to learn more about the rudiments of painting. The challenge of the drawing and painting of the figure is nevertheless a formidable one, enough to have occupied the whole history of civilization; certainly it will be enough to occupy me as a painter.
The limitations of the non-objective idiom are its vastness, its lack of measure, its all-inclusiveness. It tends to equate all possible knowledge—especially intuitions of extra-spatial, non-Euclidian metaphors; the language of sign and symbol; the unconscious, and the laws of chance. I would like to see these concepts transferred to the everyday sensual world and developed in the language of traditional painting; there they could be more potent and contribute actively to our existential possibilities. The sheer ecstasy of discovery is not enough. Painting must again be the inspiration of poet and philosopher.
Another obvious limitation of the modern idiom is that it has failed to preserve the message of the art of the past great epochs and has even discredited it. The result is that today we have no Apelles, Giorgione or Goya, nor even the possibility of such painters being allowed to exist. Hence we speak of the “dead art” of the past. But our recent past is dead too, for have not the discoveries of modern abstract masters—Kandinsky, Torres Garcia, Boccioni, Malevich, Gonzales, Arp, Brancusi, etc.—been abused, plagiarized and muddled up by “Apes of God”?
The intense concentration on plastic problems in the non-objective idiom has limited the non-plastic expressive possibilities inherent in older painting—before Delacroix, the lyricism, idyllic, pathos, drama, bel canto, the Dantesque, Byronic, the Aeschylean. Every facet of these human emotional qualities can be expressed more poignantly and directly via the human figure than via a non-objective equivalence.
The shabby minds entrenched in contemporary pseudo-academic, realist and other forms of figure painting have proved themselves unequal to the task and now flatteringly call themselves humanists in an opportunistic attempt to bluster into a comeback. I believe the language of traditional painting can only be revived by painters who have been absorbed in the non-objective world for several years but who return to the human figure and find it as elusive a mystery as non-objective form.(i.e., the miracle of rediscovery and Dionysian rebirth).
It is my belief that the painter has a chance of survival as an individual in objective painting provided that a very definite ideal and set of criteria for its practice are established, making it a disciplined ritual, like chess, a ritual in which the performer, the virtuoso, is master. This, of course, can be done with certain non-objective forms as in neo-plasticism, but I believe the human form offers more field for action. Also, the obvious difficulty of mastering the human form will discourage the dilettantes and perhaps reduce the vast number of painters and finally establish the difference between artist and non-artist. I don’t believe a scoundrel has ever drawn a man, although many have tried, like the hacks of “Reality” with their crocodile-tear humanism.
Duchamp, Leger, Picabia, Chirico, Masson, Hayter, have tragically reinterpreted the figure for our times—the figure of the “Brave New World,” the Ballet Mechanique, Sweeney, Daedalus, Babbit, willing victims of the cult of “progress,” collectivized and brutalized. This is the final interpretation of the human figure for our time, and it will be valid until the extinction of the human species. All that is left is retrogression‑Nazi and Soviet official art and its U.S. equivalent, social realism, brown academicism, semi-surrealism and commercial illustration which is what a mobocracy really wants anyway. The mass exodus of many recent vociferous exponents of non-objective painting will produce figure paintings on the same level but camouflaged by a “modern” tone borrowed from a misunderstood non-objective idiom. And it will glorify conscription, aspirin or some art critic.
But in France and Italy there is a faint hint of past greatness, a rapport with the message of the masters, in the figure paintings of Giacometti, Filippi de Pisis, Derain, Campigli, Fausto Pirandello. This may lead to a re-interpretation of the art of the past valid for these times, providing we re-interpret the times or reject them altogether. I believe one must be out of key with the times in order to see them at all; one must always be against the grain and never forget his contempt for the botched and bungled mob.
Duveen-Graham Presents Alfred Russell,
Duveen-Graham Gallery, New York, 1957
“Although I was inspired to explore abstraction by the works of the original abstract masters, analytic cubists, futurists and surrealists, I had sought added inspiration through study of the art of antiquity and the Renaissance and Post-Renaissance. About 1951, I began to be absorbed completely by my explorations of the museums, so much so, that I dropped abstract painting altogether. This was the only way to meet the obvious fact that little contemporary work could face the work of Perugino, of Raphael, of Bronzino, of Poussin, or even Ingres and Ensor. Fortunately, my work in abstract painting had sharpened my powers of observation and had given me a few tools of the painter’s trade. When I began to study seriously the art of the past, I attacked the problem of traditional painting objectively as if it were a problem of abstract art. For a few years, the nude, the portrait, still life and landscape were abstract problems to be solved as such but, when I became familiar with them, certain unknown quantities began to appear: the suggestive power of the image, the tragic undertones of a face or gesture. Soon my observations of life itself and even my life began to be effected by this unknown quantity. At last I believe I have found the raison d’etre of an artist. With this new discovery I am able to face the future with some hope of survival as an individual and ,perhaps, have some control over my personal destiny."
Toward Meta-Form, by Alfred Russell, It Is magazine, New York, 1960
Today the informal, expressive, sensitive and subjective nuances of form make up the corpus of art structure. L’art autre is the idiom, the colloquial language, the argot, the code of mass communications from which we build our world picture— which has become fixed, rigid, stagnant and a commodity on the art market.
We have an intuitive familiarity with the tangled web of Georg Kantor space and seem to plot our way ultimately by means of indeterminate quantic signposts, obeying the implacable laws of chance and their dogma. Yet form in art, in physics, in language and in perception is still veiled in mystery, and the simple basic solids which we think we know are unfamiliar to us. Some say that as a result our ability to intuit the new space and its metaphors suffers—our form sense is atrophied. Our minds need the forms of Pythagoras, Plato and Euclid as vehicle, as medium, as causal link in the visualization of the new reality—space-time physics, relativity, continental metaphysics, being and nothingness—and its processes.
The need for a solid image, a logical configuration, a working model self-contained and obeying the classical laws of mechanics, has been stated by most abstract thinkers of recent times. Cannot the graphs and the coordinate paths of quanta-wave energy, the geodesic lines of space (Riemannian space), and the line drawings illustrating simultaneity, rotation, space-time manifolds and other theoretical systems be considered as forms in the traditional Euclidian sense of the word “form”? In his essay, “ The Relation of Sense Data to Physics,” Bertrand Russell says, “ Logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.” Max Plank has stated that there is a need to adopt the idea of our physical world to the requirements of reason. The non-Euclidian geometries of Bolyai, Lobachewski and F. Klein tried to produce, within the framework of Euclidian geometry, a model of non-Euclidian world which would be immediately comprehensible to our three-dimensional vision. The constructions to be seen at the Henri Poincaire Institute in Paris, as well as models of organic molecular structure, crystallography and nuclear structure, are examples of the possibilities of representing the theory, the event and the process of reality as a tactile solid or, in Bernard Berenson’s words, as “tactile vision”.
Although Cézanne, the cubists, constructionists and neo-plastic painters have similarly tried to create a new reality of sold forms and their relationships, it is obvious today that their credo has not changed the visual data, the “look”, of contemporary art. The aspirations, the motivations and real world of contemporary art are far in advance of its tactile sensibility, which is tentative and left to chance. Painting as an object of the vision is open to limitless and extra visual-tactile interpretations in which its inherent and necessary meanings are often completely lost.
Etienne Gilson’s “ Painting and Reality” defines paintings as physical beings— more precisely, solid bodies— endowed with an individuality of their own. Each work of art is a completely self-sufficient system of internal relations, regulated by its own laws and judged from the point of view of its own structure. But if the nature of solids, their internal relations and laws, are no longer understood or valued, I believe even the informal art, l’art autre, will be of little meaning.
Therefore, I believe a reconsideration of the logic of solids is necessary today, but this study must be limited to the specific problem of depicting basic polyhedral on a flat surface and as observed from those forms, lines and plane relationships. A reading of Plato’s description (Timaeus, 53-55) of the miraculous evolution( from scalene and right-angle equilateral triangles) of the pyramid, octahedron, icosahedron and dodecahedron will remind you of the awesome seriousness of this problem. It is in Luca Pacioli di Borgo’s De Divina Proportione, illustrated by Leonardo, that we may find one of the most complete and clear graphic revelations of the logic of form as it was known to antiquity. Axes, extensions, bisections, arcs, tangents and harmonic divisions submit the polyhedral to the whole repertoire of Euclidian logic, producing new and unexpected forms, sudden transmutations of forms and chain reactions leading to extraordinary formal discoveries. Pacioli’s discovery of the sixty possible superimpositions of the icosahedron enabled F. Klein, four hundred years later, to map out his solution of fifth-degree equations in his multi-dimensional geometry. Dürer’s almost Faustian obsession with the mysterious logic of solids, amorphism and shifting of coordinates, as revealed in his sketchbooks of the 1520’s, is a relatively untouched source of whole new form concepts. But the whole history of art can be explored for this form sense: Ucello, Piero della Francesca, Alberti, Brunelleschi, Pellerin, Cousin, Bosse, Zuccari and Schön, for example.
This, of course, is a long-term project and unlikely to appeal to today’s artist. For some strange reason, art historians and aestheticians have left most of this material untouched or, at most, have treated it superficially. As has been stated by Gilson, they don’t want to make it too easy for artists and too difficult for critics and historians. A more practical solution for the artist is a study of descriptive and projective geometry by means of such books as the famous Anschauliche Geometric of David Hillbert and Cohn Vassen (Berlin, 1922). By means of schematic line drawings addressed to our immediate, visual, intuitive understanding, we may extend our ability to represent the three-dimensional image of form and its logical implications. Through such specific subjects as surfaces of revolution, ellipsoid and hyperboloid solids, plane and multi-dimensional lattices, discontinuous groups of motions, unit cells, projective configurations, stenographic projection, curvature of surfaces, and the twisting of space curves, geodesics and topology of polyhedral can and must become part of our visual data, our formal documentation and daily form-sense.
Mondrian’s statement, “Form is limited space, concrete only through its determination,” and Cézanne’s ambition to construct a geometry of visual appearances are still pointing the way to the future.
The refinements and hidden nuances and still-unexplored regions of form have only been suggested by such men as Matila Ghyka in Ethetique des Proportions, D’Arcy Thompson in Growth of Form and Theodore Cook in Curves of Life. The works of Brancusi, Gabo, Pevsner, Moholy-Nagy, Max Bill and Le Corbusier are but hints to the new generation of artists of the unfathomable enigmas and splendor of geometric solids. Bukminster Fuller’s Synergetic-Energetic Geometry and his Dyaxiom seem again to tackle the problems left unsolved by Leonardo and Durer and point the way to a new liberation of the imagination.
The artist of today and tomorrow will say with Hölderlin:
As my heaven is of iron
So am I myself of stone.
Statement, Brooklyn College Art Department, Past and Present, 1942-1977,
Robert Schoelkopf Gallery and Davis & Long, New York
Painting for me is a means of giving form to the creative imagination, to the romantic vision, to the inchoate poetry of being. My inspiration has always been a nostalgia for some nonexistent golden age somewhere in the dim ages past. I have always believed that the reality of art is unique and beyond all other realities, or, in another sense, that art is the reality underlying the unreality of the everyday world. My life in art has been, in the Heideggerian sense, “Les chemins qui ne mènent nulle part.” Today, at the age of 56, I am still nowhere and don’t expect to be anywhere else.