Gallery Imperative

"...we have works that are about immediacy of experience accomplished through the direct presence of the body, but an immediacy that has to be imagined through the mediation of accounts and documents. The more immediate, the more ephemeral, the more of-the-moment or of-the-place the work is, the more likely that it is known through images and accounts, the two sometimes working together, sometimes in isolation from one another. Thus there is a temporal gap built into the reception of work understood in retrospect, only through documents of inaccessible actions-unless, of course, the work is identified as standing not in the initial actions but in the documents themselves. There is in fact always a question of when, within a progression of choices, the document may be transformed from secondary object to something identical with the work itself, either because because the emphasis has tipped toward the material realisation or, at the other extreme, because the work itself is defined as a conceptual idea only partially and temporarily manifest in any specific physical embodiment." Martha Buskirk - The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art

"...we have works that are about immediacy of experience accomplished through the direct presence of the body, but an immediacy that has to be imagined through the mediation of accounts and documents. The more immediate, the more ephemeral, the more of-the-moment or of-the-place the work is, the more likely that it is known through images and accounts, the two sometimes working together, sometimes in isolation from one another. Thus there is a temporal gap built into the reception of work understood in retrospect, only through documents of inaccessible actions-unless, of course, the work is identified as standing not in the initial actions but in the documents themselves. There is in fact always a question of when, within a progression of choices, the document may be transformed from secondary object to something identical with the work itself, either because because the emphasis has tipped toward the material realisation or, at the other extreme, because the work itself is defined as a conceptual idea only partially and temporarily manifest in any specific physical embodiment." Martha Buskirk - The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art

"One might ask how the user is itself produced as a byproduct of software design. Algorithm plus data equals media: which is how the user starts to think of it too. It is a cultural model, but so too is the 'user'. Having specified how software reconstructs media as simulation for the user, one might move to thinking about how the user's usage is shaped not just by formal and cultural constraints but by other kinds as well. And one might think about who or what gets to use the user in turn." McKenzie Wark, Critical Media Theories

"To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible: this is what is at stake in modern painting... As painting, it will of course 'present' something though negatively; it will will avoid figuration or representation. It will be 'white' like one of Malevitch's squares; it will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain." J. F. Lyotard - The Postmodern Condition

"Initially the picture plane is an idealised transforming space. The transformation of objects is contextual... When isolated, the context of objects is the gallery. Eventually the gallery itself becomes, like the picture plane, a transforming force... as Minimalism demonstrated, art can be literalised and de-transformed; the gallery makes it art anyway." Brian O'Doherty - Inside the White Cube

"Fragments of the space of appearance are framed everywhere there is a window, small potential revelations of who we are, available for popular consumption. These temporary revelations are examples of the predetermined crossings of boundaries implied by the very existence of boundaries in the first place" Duncan P R Patterson - There's Glass Between Us.

"... the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.""...it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action." Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Message

"'I am seeing' is the analogous statement at the level of visual form. Reflexive modernism wants to cancel the naturalism in the field of the object in order to bring about a newly heightened sense of the subject, a form that creates the illusion that it is nothing except the fact that 'I am seeing (it)'. The entropic, simulacral move, however, is to float the field of seeing in the absence of the subject; it wants to show that in the automatism of infinite repetition, the disappearance of the first person is the mechanism that triggers formlessness." Rosalind Krauss - Formless

"Fragments of the space of appearance are framed everywhere there is a window, small potential revelations of who we are, available for popular consumption. These temporary revelations are examples of the predetermined crossings of boundaries implied by the very existence of boundaries in the first place" Duncan P R Patterson - There's Glass Between Us.