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even
stronger effect because the surroundings would favour neither interpretation. A
can of brushes and a completed artwork are equally at home in an artist’s
studio.
What is perhaps more interesting than the questionable status of the work itself is the effect of the work on the surrounding reality, which is called into question by the general unease created by the anxious object. By interrogating the boundary between art and reality, the artist questions the nature of reality as much as he/she questions the nature of art. The found object, site – specific work and Land Art all play with the relationship of text to context. A more subtle perceptual game is played by works that have an ambiguous boundary with reality. I would like to term this an “anxious boundary”. These works play with the edges of the object allowing it to merge into its environment in a seamless way, raising questions about where one begins and the other ends. The movement of art out of the gallery with the advent of site specific work and Land Art is a manifestation of the increasingly blurred distinction.
“Any act of semiotic recognition must involve the separation of significant
elements from insignificant ones in surrounding reality.”
It is this very act of separation, deciding what contributes and what does not contribute to the artistic text, that becomes a subject of art when dealing with an anxious boundary as parts of the surrounding reality are included in the reading of the ‘work’ and parts of the ‘work’ (as created by the artist) may be excluded and may be deemed irrelevant, or to be more exact the experienced boundary is in a constant state of flux as different limits are tested. One such work is Beuys’ Blitzschlag (Lightning) (1982 – 5 Anthony D’Offay Gallery), now in the Tate Modern gallery in London. In this piece an enormous (6 metre) bronze sheet with a rough texture is held aloft by a thin pole attached to a steel girder fixed to the walls of the gallery. It is quite ambiguous as to where the work ends and the gallery begins. Is the pole part of the work or part of the mounting mechanism? Is the girder or even the gallery wall part of the object under consideration? A similar dilemma is found in Robert Ryman’s white and grey paintings which interface with the gallery wall in various ways. Some are taped to the wall others conspicuously pinned. It is again unclear whether the means of attaching the work to the gallery wall is a part of the painting or external to it. This situation of course merely makes explicit the way every text is related to the surrounding reality and experiences of the audience:
“Where does one end and the other begin? The issue corresponds to elements
in deconstructionist thinking about the relation of text to context, where
distinctions between the two (as between art and nature) are held to be
culturally constructed rather than essential and absolute. Text can be defined
as such only by reference to the context from which it is artificially separated.
Text depends for its supposedly independent identity on its relationship
to that which it is not; but a dependant cannot be said to have a fully
separate, autonomous existence. Everything therefore is ‘text’; or everything
is ‘context’: ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’, in Derrida’s striking assertion.”
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