ABSTRACT
All writing, and painting-as-writing is no exception, pre-sumes, provides for and opens on to its readings. And the preceding exploration of painting as a re-presentation of writing, of Language, in a Tradition of re-presentation, calls for complementary inquiry into the practice of reading: the work that any respondent is involved in already in opening up a relation with a painting. This is unavoidable in any consideration of modern painting for central to its practice has been the challenge to the respondent, the reader, to turn back upon his or her own assumptions about the very practice of reading and relating. If modern painting faces us with the question of writing, of itself as an inscription of Being, we can only enter this inscription through a practice of reading in which the inscription is instituted as such.
