>http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/write-sentence.htm
This is like Mark Tansey's wheel. I saw one of them once in a museum once and just now I can't remember whether you could touch it and spin it yourself or not:
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/27/arts/the-wheel-turns-painting-paintings-about-painting.html
The Wheel Turns: Painting Paintings About Painting
By PHOEBE HOBAN
Published: Sunday, April 27, 1997
Mark Tansey sits back in his TriBeCa studio to observe his latest painting, putting his mug of tea on a wooden wheel inscribed with enigmatic phrases like ''rogue programmers,'' ''the prisoner of foreplay'' and ''encountering the original.'' Although it's now a table, Mr. Tansey invented the wheel as a kind of handmade metaphor machine. Spinning it like a wheel of fortune provided permutations of philosophical and metaphysical problems, which he used as reference points for his paintings.
Mr. Tansey's wheel is, in a sense, a compass, a guide through the territory of his work; he is the master of mordant polemical paintings about modernist art theory and deconstructionism, a painter who makes paintings about the idea of making paintings.
''I think at this point I've gotten beyond the wheel,'' says Mr. Tansey, whose new work will go on view Thursday at the Curt Marcus Gallery in SoHo. ''It was something I used against artist's block to provide narrative. Now I've gotten to another understanding of what motivates pictures.''
After a year's ''self-paid'' sabbatical, Mr. Tansey has found what he was looking for, a new ''technophor,'' as he calls it. He defines the term as ''a metaphorical technique for connecting subject matter and ideas.''
Mr. Tansey's studio, one block from the loft he shares with his wife, Jean, and their three children, is itself a technophor, a model of his mind at work. There is no surface that is not layered with images or images of images; collages, photographs and Xeroxes. Mr. Tansey has catalogued them with labels like ''aperture as object,'' ''light trajectories,'' ''reversal of black and white.''
''I had come to the end of what I thought of as a lover's quarrel with post-structuralism,'' says Mr. Tansey, 47, an appealing, introspective man. ''I like the idea of reverse deconstruction, which is construction. The question I am addressing now is, How do you make meaning pictorial? It's no longer about getting direct equivalence between the material and the idea. It's not about capturing the real. It's the transition, what happens between the material and the ideas. What is that interaction? I think it's basically analogy. I'm working with pictorial rhetoric; how we read different kinds of visual order.''
The curious red painting that dominates his studio needs more work for the show, but already it does what the artist intended: raises questions about the nature of time, space and painting itself. Mr. Tansey has used a mountainside as the backdrop for this latest intellectual inquiry.
The realistically rendered canvas, titled ''Soft Borders,'' is actually made up of four interrelated scenes, each depicted from a different perspective, yet somehow converging, as if Mr. Tansey were trying to illustrate a wrinkle in time. A small tribe of American Indians shares the mountain with a band of surveyors, a tourist group and a toxic-waste-removal crew. ''It's a short history of the West,'' he says, ''from four different points of view.''
Since he moved to New York from California in 1974, Mr. Tansey has been delving into visual conundrums that few contemporary painters have chosen to contemplate. Born in San Jose, Calif., in 1949, Mr. Tansey was exposed to esthetic discourse as a child. His father, Richard G. Tansey, is an art historian who worked on the famous textbook ''Gardner's Art Through the Ages.'' His mother, Luraine Tansey, devised one of the first computerized slide archives.
After graduating from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, Mr. Tansey joined the Hunter College studio-art graduate program in Manhattan. But his real education in modernist theory was as Helen Frankenthaler's assistant. ''I held the paintings while Clement Greenberg critiqued them,'' he says. ''Straight from the horse's mouth.''
In 1980, Mr. Tansey completed the first painting in what became his signature style. The 52 panels of ''A Short History of Modernist Painting'' are witty windows onto various artistic conventions, from the figurative to Minimalism. The painting used painting itself to tackle contemporary art theory and also established his idiosyncratic iconography; figures drawn from popular culture -- particularly that of the 1950's -- rendered in a deliberately archaic, monochromatic style. By 1984, Mr. Tansey's work had been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.
Arthur C. Danto is among the critics who have praised his work. ''Mark made the intellect central to his paintings,'' he says. ''That was about as subversive of received dogma as it was possible for an artist to be.''
Mr. Tansey has quietly painted some of the most acerbic art criticism of the last decade. In ''Triumph of the New York School,'' 1984, one of his best-known works, he borrows the format of Velazquez's ''Surrender of Breda'' to comment on the moment when New York supplanted Paris as the capital of modern art. In ''Derrida Queries de Man'' (1990), Mr. Tansey creates a precipitous post-modern pas de deux on the edge of a cliff of text. He excels at one-upping the schools of thought he refers to by using their own signifiers as weapons in his artistic arsenal.
''I think Tansey has a wonderfully sharp wit,'' says the art critic Robert Hughes, who reproduced ''Triumph of the New York School'' in his new book, ''American Visions.'' ''I've never seen a work of his that I didn't find interesting.''
Mr. Tansey's current source of technophors is the new sciences. ''I've been reading things about catastrophe, chaos and complexity theory,'' he says. ''It's fascinating to go to another field where there is this explosion of kinds of visual order. These scientists are dealing with the problems of the difference between representations and the world as it is. And they are coming to an understanding of the importance of metaphor.'' For Mr. Tansey, that importance has been obvious all along.