The Labour of Watching
Presentation is as vexed a conception as concealment. The placement of objects within a space defines particular relations that will, of necessity, intervene in the cognitive environment of a viewer. In establishing a presence in the viewer’s cognitive geography, the objects assert a kind of agency which bears the traces of the intentionality that arranged them. Such agency is by definition artificial, but the relations it gives rise to are no less real for this fact. As in the world of fiction, nonreal structures can give rise to real world consequences and emotions; the unreal present informs the prereal future. This was Edmund Husserl’s basic point in his formulation of the conception of the modern understanding of intentionality: minds can have real relationships with nonreal, or perhaps “transreal” is a better term, objects, structures and concepts. The exhibition is a celebration of this dynamic; indeed, it is often even an appeal to the expectations of such immaterial potentialities. Inherent in this notion, however, is an acceptance of the vagaries of individual perception, an understanding that simply because minds experience the same data, their experience of that data will not necessarily be the same or even similar.
