That into which the work sets itself back and which it causes to come forth in this setting back of itself we called the earth. Earth is that which comes forth and shelters. Earth, self-dependent, is effortless and untiring. Upon the earth and in it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world. In setting up a world, the work sets forth the earth. This setting forth must be thought here in the strict sense of the word. The work moves the earth into the Open of a world and keeps it there.

Martin Heidegger 1

A tradition exhausts itself by mythologizing the symbol: a tradition renews itself by means of interpretation, which transcends the slope from exhausted time to hidden time, that is, by soliciting from mythology the symbol and its store of meaning.

Paul Ricoeur 2

Perhaps these are the works of an astonishingly precocious child, piling stone on stone with a casual deliberateness to form boats, teapots, piles of small stones. Of course these works by Barbara Frey are not the work of an astonishingly precocious child, nor are these works comprised of stones.

Frey's teapots astonish because they engage the "twofoldness" of "seeing-in," not in the flatness of the surface of painting, the domain for which Richard Wollheim originates these terms, 3 but in three dimensions. "Seeing-in," in the context of painting, entails the visual perception of a differentiated surface which underlies the phenomenology of "twofoldness." "Twofoldness," in the context of painting, entails visual awareness of a surface qua surface and as a spatially proximal and distal structure. 4 Something of Wollheim's ur-sense of these terms obtains with respect to Frey's 'stones,' underlying one's trompe l'oeil perception of the 'stones' qua stones, and the 'stones' as 'stones,' as fabrications mediated by human agency. The representation of objects of nature by works of culture, of objects having their being apart from human agency by works of human agency, engages a conception of mimesis within cultural production not in the simplistic sense of a mere copy of natural appearance, but rather as ars imatatur naturam in sua operatione: "art imitates nature in her manner of operation." 5 Thus the 'stones' evoke stoneness, and even stoneness of a particular sort, without being 'portraits' of specific actual stones: imitations of natural in the operations requisite to stoneness of a particular sort rather than imitation of a specific product of those operations. This distinction is furthur thematized in the separation of base and superstructure of these works, of the piles on which the teapot rests, and the piles which constitute the teapot. Thus Frey:

The piles of stones which function as the bases allude to the "natural" condition of these stones, randomly associated and randomly stacked together whereas the stones which form the boat/teapots have been deliberately stacked and organized to create the body, handle, spout, and lid. 6

While the boat-teapot forms are "deliberately stacked and organized to create the body, handle, spout, and lid" of the boat-teapot, the base is also an act of association and stacking, however random the effect produced may appear. That is, the fundamentum divisionis distinguishing the base and the boat-teapot need not be regarded as that of deliberation or non-deliberation, but rather that of modes of organization, of apparent randomness versus apparent order. Otherwise regarded, it is an opposition of articulated form versus l'informe, the formless. 7 The formless also is an operation, which George Bataille analyses into four aspects: horizontality, base materialism, pulse, and entropy. 8 Horizontality may be glossed as inherently in opposition to the vertical, axis of form, culture, correlative with the verticality of the axis of the body. 9 Base materialism entails a radical declassification, an ontological degree zero. 10 Pulse presupposes repetition, and the relation between repeated elements entails rhythym. 11 Entropy, adopted from the second law of thermodynamics, 12 fundamentally entails disordering, and the disordering of the distinction between an entity and its copy: Plato's and poststructuralism's simulacra, obviating the act of vision as the perceptual correlative of the Cartesian cogito. As Krauss urges:

"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. 13

The duality of regard of the 'stones' parallels the duality of Frey's forms as referring to both boat and teapot motifs. Like one's regard of Jastrow's duck-rabbit illusion,14 one's regard of Frey's works shifts between boat and teapot motifs. Shifts between, rather than appearing simultaneously: either this, or that, but not both boat and teapot motifs simultaneously. One sees the same object in each instance, but in each instance sees the object differently. Wittgenstein refers to this difference as "noticing an aspect," a "seeing as" which is at once visual perception and thought. 15 Difference entails alterity. Diff´rance is the movement constituting a system of reference "as a weave of differences," 16 an alterity of difference that is also a deferral, a delay. Thus:

It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called "present" element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is calledthe present by mean of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present. 17

Movement between retentions and protentions is the ur-condition of presence presencing, the situation of becoming, the temporal space of the coming-to-be of the work within the sequence of works constituting an oeuvre, and the longer and broader sequence of works consituting a tradition. It is the site within which the artist always already is, and from which the artist's works come to be-in its radical historicity and inflected with the artist's personal history-as such. It is the trace of this site in the artwork which enables the coming-to-be of artworks to be paradigmatic of cultural production in general, even as each new work displaces the order of its antecedents to disclose a new order18 and thus renews a venerable tradition by reinterpreting its symbolic forms, as do Barbara Frey's boat-teapots and piles of not-stones.

Barbara L. Frey is Professor of Art at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Recent exhibitions include: All About Teapots, The Gallery, Bloomington, Indiana, 2003; Pushing Clay, University of Southern Maine Art Galleries, 2002; The 14th San Angelo National Ceramic Competition, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, 2002; Twenty-Two Ways of Clay: A National Ceramics Invitational, The Meadows Gallery, The University of Texas at Tyler, 2001; Taking Measure: American Ceramic Art at the New Millennium, World Ceramic Exposition, Yeoju, Korea, 2001; Origins in Clay II, Division of Visual Arts Gallery, The University of Texas at San Antonio, 2001; Ceramics USA 2000, School of Visual Arts Gallery, University of North Texas, 2000; Deliberations in Clay, Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art, Dallas, 1999; Clayfest XI, Christel DeHaan Fine Arts Center, University of Indianapolis, 1999; Confluence: Artists From Australia, Bolivia, and USA Exhibit in Kyoto, Kyoto Municipal Arts and Crafts Gallery, Kyoto, Japan, 1998. Frey received the Master of Fine Arts from Syracuse University and the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Indiana University.

1. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadler (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 17-87.
2. Paul Ricoeur, "Structure nad Hermeneutics," in ed. Don Ihde, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, 29.
3. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art [The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1984, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
4. Wollheim, ibid., 46.
5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, I. 117, 1.
6. Barbara L. Frey, Artist Statement, 2003.
7. See Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997). Initial publication as L'informe: mode d'emploi (Editions Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996) for the exhibition L'informe: mode d'emploi, May 21-August 26, 1996.
8. Bois and Krauss, ibid., 21.
9. Krauss, "Horizontality," in Bois and Krauss, ibid., 93-103.
10. Bois, "Base Materialism," in Bois and Krauss, ibid., 51-62.
11. Krauss, "Pulse," in Bois and Krauss, ibid., 161-165.
12. The appropriation of the notion of entropy for discourses concerning artworks seemed, in the 1980's and 1990's, something of a cottage industry. For an earlier treatment, see Rudolf Arnheim's Entropy and Art: An Essay on Order and Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). One may note that the appropriation of the notion of entropy for discursive application to works of cultural production in itself presupposes that cultural production is an imitation of nature in its manner of operation, however implicit and uncritical this appropriation an application may be, and however it may be that the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of nature are also works of cultural production.
13. Krauss, "Entropy," in Bois and Krauss, ibid., 73-78.
14. Joseph Jastrow, Fact and Fable in Psychology (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900).
15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953, 1958), 194f.
16. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 12.
17
17. Derrida, ibid., 13.
18
18. See T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Metheun, 1920), 47-59.