| “Don’t Look Yet!” was
one of Ornoth’s earliest
attempts to express a burgeoning Dada ethos via what would become his
signature traits of permutation and recombination of found textual
matter. It remains the earliest and most precocious example of his
propensity for nonsequitor and the absurd.
The work demonstrates the artist’s early preoccupation with logical perplexity. If the viewer is instructed to “not look yet”, when can we look? What is the enigmatic “refrance” that cities smell of? Is “No election—olympic results” two separate conceptual entities, or one event: an “election-olympic”? When directed to go “back to 1*”, where is the reader to continue, when there are no less than three asterisks spread throughout the work? The work ends by attributing itself to the “Unsanatairy Eaters Digest”, a note which embodies the author’s keen sense of irony and wry humor, even at such an astonishingly young age. |
“Although the origins of “Don’t Look Yet!” are not well
documented, we can provide an approximate date of November 1973, at
which time the artist would have just turned ten years of age. This date
is arrived at through a direct comparison with an existing
correspondence addressed to his elder brother, dated 11/11/73. Although
the styles are markedly different (printed versus cursive writing),
materials are identical: lead pencil on five-hole ruled notebook paper,
indicating that “Don’t Look Yet!” is indeed
contemporary with the letter in question.
The letter is also of some historical interest, as the artist begins the missive with the declaration, “My bike has 312 miles on it.” The preoccupation with cycling—and in particular the accumulation of mileage—is characteristic of the artist even in his later periods. |