The primary act of perception is that of distinguishing. For a thing to appear as a thing entails a distinguishing of thing from not-thing. Things appear: one after the other, one beside the other, in time and in space, Kant's nacheinander and nebeneinander.1 The thinging of things is an anisotropic perturbation of the homogeneous.

The homogeneous, the formless, 2 disorderly, chaos in its ur-sense, 3 is fundamentally distinguished from the heterogeneous, the formed, orderly, Cosmos, world. "The thing things world." 4 Thus Mircea Eliade:

It must be said at once that the religious experience of the nonhomogeneity of space is a primordial experience, homologizable to a founding of the world. It is not a theoretical speculation, but of a primary religious experience that precedes all reflection on the world. For it is the break effected in space that allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the central axis for all future orientation. 5

Every determination of form is making of an order, an articulation of meaning. The thinging of thing is as the figuring of figure from ground. To mark a surface is to intervene in a ground, bringing forth a figure. Indeed, even the delimitation of the ground as having a particular size and proportion and shape is always already to bring forth a figure, always already an articulation of meaning. Every articulation of meaning is an interpretation.

Every taking up of an object in perception is always already an interpretation, insofar as the object is regarded as such, as an object. As an object, the object is an other to an interpreting subject, a being within the field of beings within which both subject and object are subsumed and of which they are constituted in the dehiscence of being. 6 The constitutive determination of the object qua object is logically prior to any determination of the object qua being-object as the becoming-object 7 of the work of the artwork.

The question of the distinction of things which are the "thought-things," 8 the becoming-objects of works of art, and the 'mere' things which are non-art things entails an interpretive act. In all cases, what is presupposed in this act is the site of the interpretive engagement of the object, for this act entails both a material object and an embodied consciousness, reciprocally co-present. To be reciprocally co-present is to be co-present some where. Objections that the claim of a definite locus of reciprocal co-presence are obviated by a either a distributed encounter or by an imaginative encounter are equally specious. In the case of a distributive encounter, in which one encounters the object by photomechanical reproduction or by photoelectronic distribution, one does not encounter the becoming-object as such in its originally mediated material presence, but its re-presentation re-mediated by the conditions of re-production and distribution; for works constituted within the medium of photoelectronic distribution as such one encounters the work in its potentially multiple instantiations within the materiality particular to the medium and the local particulars of its several instantiations. Imaginative encounter with the becoming-object is eo ipso not an encounter with the becoming-object; it is to imagine or to recall an encounter with the object.

So also the placement of artworks within a space presuppose an interpretive act, or more accurately, a series of such acts. The proximate issue is location of the several entities in relation to each other and to the architectural framework. Three conditions can be regarded as applying with respect to the relation of the artwork qua becoming-object and its location: the site is neutral with respect to the interpretive engagement of the object, the site is contributive to the interpretive engagement of the object, or the site is constitutive of the interpretive engagement of the object. It will be useful to regard these three conditions in turn.

To regard the site as neutral is to suppose that the site does not contribute to the production of meaning of the becoming-object of the artwork. This is equivalent to saying that the meaning-production of the material art object, the working of the becoming-object of the artwork, is neither enabled by the framing provided by the site, in what Svetlana Alpers terms the "museum effect," 9 nor inflected by the condition of installation such that the meaning-production of the material art object would be constant regardless of variations of installation. Thus even if the thing is a non-art object having its meaning in a domain other than art (i.e., a readymade), its repositioning within a site situated within the domain of the meaning-production customarily attendant to the installation of artworks necessarily places into question the meaning-domain status of the object. This placing in question of the meaning-domain status of the object is eo ipso constitutive of a new meaning produced in encounter with the object. If the thing is not a non-art object but the material art object, placement within a site associated with the meaning-production attendant to artworks does not raise the question in the form of a seeming category mistake. But this is not to say that site does not inflect the meaning-production of the becoming-object taken up in interpretive engagement.

Thus the works in this installation by Fahimeh Vahdat and Brian Carlson, Time of the Origins. Each of the works is potentially autonomous. Together, the works form an ensemble clustering around the idea of origin and the temporal structure attendant on origin. In the gathering constituting this installation, the center is reiterated and emphasized in the works and again in the installation of the woks with the gallery. The works on paper, large vertical rectangles, depart from strict symmetry but are organized about their respective vertical centerlines, a configuration serving as trope for the condition of embodiedness (the seeming overall symmetry of the body is departed from in small details). Vahdat's paintings, all but Prelude to Eternity, are square in format, which in itself gives emphasis to the center, as is also the case with Carlson's The Idea of Time, consisting both of the set of square woodcut blocks and the prints resulting from printing the blocks in varying combinations and sequences. The role of the center, as vertical centerline as metonymy of embodiment, as square of microcosm as synecdoche for world, is that of trope for sacred space. To return to Mircea Eliade:

The center, then, is pre-eminently the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute reality. Similarly, all the other symbols of absolute reality (trees of life and immortality, Fountain of Youth, etc.) are also situated at a center.
. . .
If the act of Creation realizes the passage from the nonmanifest to the manifest or, to speak cosmologically, from chaos to cosmos; if the Creation took place from a center; if, consequently, all the varieties of being, from the inanimate to the living, can attain existence only in an area dominantly sacred-all this beautifully illuminates for us the symbolism of sacred cities (centers of the world), the geomantic theories that govern the foundation of towns, the conceptions that justify the rites accompanying their building. 10

the reality and enduringness of a construction are assured not only by the transformation of profane space into a transcendent space (the center) but also by the transformation of concrete time into mythical time. 12

The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically, or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall.
. . .
Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial-the space is devoted to the technology of esthetics. Works of art are mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. Art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is a lot of period . . . , there is no time.13

Fahimeh Vahdat received the Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University. A former adjunct faculty member at Brookhaven College, she is Associate Professor of Art at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

Brian Carlson received the Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University. A former adjunct faculty member at Brookhaven college, he is an artist living in Milwaukee.

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1787 2nd ed.], trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's, 1965). Kant posits the a priori synthetic transcendental forms of space and time as not derived from sense data, but prior to the particulars which appear within space and time. Return
2. For recent usage of the concept, see Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). Return
3. Literally, 'formless space' and having the sense, in Hesiod, Theogony, of the first of beings (line 116). Return
4. Martin Heidegger, "The Thing," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 165-182. Return
5. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), pp. 20-21. Return
6. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Return
7. By 'becoming-object', Andrew Benjamin refers to that which is proper to the being of art works: the "modality of becoming, linked necessarily to the centrality of giving, is a way of accounting for the life of the object in which what is given can never be coextensive or identical with any one instance of its being given." Andrew Benjamin, Object - Painting (London: Academy Editions, 1994), esp. pp. 7-37. I am broadly indebted to Benjamin's thought, in its insistence on materiality and philosophical rigor in his treatment of the working of artworks. Return
8. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, 1977), p. 62. Return
9. Svetlana Alpers, "The Museum as a Way of Seeing," in eds. Ivan Karp, Steven D. Levine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 25-32. Return
10. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 17-18. Cf. Rudolf Arnheim, The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Return
11. See Etienne Gilson, Painting and Reality (New York: Meridian, 1959), p. 266. Return
12. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 20-21. Return
13. Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1986), p. 15. [Initial publication in Artforum, 1976.] Return