Condition of Singularity: Viewer, Temporality and Otherness

Differences are an inescapable factor in the event of presentation. Rifts manifest themselves one after another between the object of presentation, the appearance of the presentation, the method of presentation, what/who presents it and to what/whom it is presented and so on. In fact it is a course of differentiations, in other words distinguishing each categorical state, which instigates events like perception, embodiment and understanding. But what separates them is transparent and the common attitude to the event of presentation attains the reverse effect i.e. the resonance between what has been differentiated. The event of presentation refills the differences at the simultaneous moment when it declares the margins of what are set apart. In this perspective the differentiation may be seen as an automaton for contextualising the resonance.

This is a thesis that concerns a mode of presentation in relation to representation as its modality in contemporary fine art practice. This mode is a methodology in its most technical sense as well as a principle which is prevalent and almost mandatory for an individual practitioner in educational institutions, art criticism, galleries and museums; in short where viewing takes place i.e. the criteria of the viewer. This mode may be proposed as a doctrine that processes visual matter in terms of language, whose tendency reinforces our approach to art with a kind of conceptual value. The application of linguistic exercises in art is acknowledged to provide a conceptual assimilation and the methodical progress which enhances the conceivable quality in a work. Despite this general acknowledgement, it is true that language and the work of art are two disparate modes of presentation as well as two separate occurrences of representation. If a single case of presentation provokes a wheel of differentiations, the exercise between language and work of art to which we are accustomed, may be seen as a course of progressive and multiple differentiations, isolating one matter and concept after another.

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