The detailed sections on feet and spurs and, especially, combs make one ponder about the adaptive and evolutionary purposes that lead to peculiarities like, say, the comb of the Minorca black hen, something like a many-fingered red rubber glove abandoned on her head.
These actions made one ponder the title.
It does make one ponder the awesome power of the profit motive.
It also makes one ponder the word stuff, one of the most overused words in the language.
Driving the roads around Pound Ridge, Bedford and Crossriver makes one ponder the cultural impulse behind these ribbons of black-topped perfection.
Meanwhile at the O'Hana Gallery in Carlos Place, W.1, a collection of pastels, water colours, and drawings done mainly between 1900 and 1903 makes one ponder.
(This may be for home crowds what it is for western viewers to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger interacting with those talking meerkats: enough to make one ponder the long-term mental effects of consuming all that whey protein).
Go to the house of the painters Merlin James and Carol Rhodes, at 42 Carlton Place, and you will see an extraordinary miscellany, including paintings by Sickert and Derain, to make one ponder how (and when) contemporary art becomes the art of the past.
As an assemblage, these images have the capacity to haunt, to make one ponder, even as the extreme neutrality of Mr. Handke's writing has an anesthetizing effect and makes one yearn for less purity and a good old-fashioned plot.
Just as this film makes one ponder the strange quiddity of shadows – that they are caused by us, and in some profound sense representations of us, and yet neither self-portraits nor even quite images of us – so the black-and-white self-portraits in the opening gallery are not conventional depictions either.
