< BACK
TEXTS
>SUBSTITUTION LOGIC
>LIMINAL FIGURES
>LETTER TO M.
>SOMETIMES
Staging is the only form of creativity that interests me. Since today the documentation of art and artistic contexts constitutes the primary condition for the construction of historical responsibility and for any retrospective reading of the artistic event, my practice takes shape as a continuous investigation into the mediation devices produced by these processes, as well as a critical examination of their modes of operation.
Images, videos, critical texts, and oral narratives do not merely describe the work; they determine its very existence. To intervene in these elements therefore means to act directly upon the work itself, constructing and articulating it without the need for material contact, nor for its presence as a physical object.
From this perspective, does exhibiting today not primarily mean exhibiting the image of the work, rather than the work as such?
Any attempt to withdraw from this media logic is bound to collapse, since it is the gaze itself that produces, at the perceptual level, the fundamental condition that, from here on, we will define as “IMAGE.”
—
A group of people arranges itself in a circle around an empty center.
At the center there is no object, and yet everyone behaves as if something were already there. The object is gradually defined through partial descriptions, hypotheses, disagreements, expectations. There is no shared form, but there is a common tension toward that center, which begins to organize the relationships among the participants.
Over time, it is not the object that gains substance, but the reactions it generates: positions taken, alliances, conflicts, rituals of approach or withdrawal. The center remains empty, yet it becomes functional. When, eventually, a material trace appears, it does not inaugurate the work; rather, it constitutes a residue, a belated consequence, a sediment of dynamics already fully operative.
—
The elimination of the object does not produce a void, but rather a redistribution of responsibility. What would normally be delegated to form—meaning, authority, stability—is taken on by the context and by the subjects who inhabit it. The work is no longer what is shown, but what is continuously negotiated.
The imaginary object at the center of the circle functions as a catalyst: it does not represent something, but activates a series of projections that make it operative while it remains absent. Its effectiveness does not depend on visibility, but on its capacity to organize a shared symbolic space. It is within this space that the work takes shape, in the form of relations, discourses, and expectations.
When a materialization occurs, it does not clarify the work, but reduces it. The physical form is not the origin of the process, but one of its possible outcomes, often the least relevant. Once it appears, the object occupies a position already defined, inheriting meanings that are not intrinsic to it, but retroactively assigned.
—
At this point, it becomes readily apparent that the exhibition assumes the form of a placeholder: a device that occupies a position and immediately activates its consequences. The placeholder, the object we choose to place, organizes the exhibition space as a field of relations, within which expectations, projections, and interpretations become operative.
The work emerges within this field as an effect of the interactions generated by the exhibition. The viewer participates in the construction of the experience through their gaze, their movements, and their interpretive decisions. The exhibition acts as a structure that renders this process visible.
Every exhibition element functions as a variable in an ongoing test. Texts, images, voids, and cues contribute to defining an open system in which the viewer’s reactions acquire formal value. The placeholder operates as a measuring instrument for the production of meaning. The exhibition experience coincides with the test itself, and its duration corresponds to the activation of the device. Within this space, the image takes shape as the result of a continuous negotiation between context and gaze.
The exhibition thus takes shape as a site of verification, in which the work manifests as a shared process in constant redefinition.
The combination of the angle of the path, as viewed from the high window, our melancholic general dissatisfaction with tedious reality, and the swaying/overlapping branches of the two willow trees,
often leads us, at least momentarily, to see figures that aren’t there. That is, on numerous occasions, particularly in dusky light, it seems as if someone is rounding our barn and then walking out of sight.
To be sure, we always go down, with flashlight in hand, never to find anything.
Before you cast us a person more apt to see phantoms than yourself, we ask you to consider the simple question: what is ever really there for us humans?
What isn’t a moiré of mood, temperament, memory, hope and expectation? Some kind of rhythm of preference or the irresistibly sweet path of personal logic? Just think what presumptive apparitions of
bias or predilection rise up as someone says “when young I was kidnapped” or “my grandfather was a close friend of Susan Sontag” or “Venice is sinking” or “she’s actually a singer” or “this was an ancient
burial site” or “you stand to make a lot of money” or “we’d like to offer you the job” or “the first stegosaurus skeleton was found in Colorado” or “I have a barn and some willow trees…”
On the slightest suggestion, something always materializes. But of course it is always wildly incomplete.
Dear M,
1. Have you ever tried staring at yourself in the mirror for more than half an hour? You start to see strange things.
2. This is just one of the principles of the act of observing.
Only when we are truly looking can we transform the reality in front of us. And now, in the persistence and obsession, we can find this principle of distortion amplified.
So, can you see anything? Because here, in the close-up view, objects have lost their contours.
Francesco De Prezzo operates within a radically liminal perceptual space, where experiencing the artwork is intimately tied to its apparent disappearance. Perception here is never a passive or linear act; instead, it involves a “derivative” engagement, unfolding through minimal traces, subtle clues, and intentional suggestions carefully constructed by the context encompassing the artwork, the observer, and the dynamic of the viewing experience itself. What the artist triggers is not merely an absence or an erasure but rather a subliminal and paradoxical presence that persists in the space between reality and simulation. Within this framework, the artwork is perceived even before it is rationally understood. It reveals itself most clearly when viewers experience unease or tension stemming from the uncertainty between what they see and what they are told, creating a perceptual friction that compels observers to inhabit an indefinite, uncertain space.
Consequently, the artwork assumes its definitive form through the cognitive process of the viewer, whose perception simultaneously actualizes and preserves it. The radical essence of Francesco De Prezzo's practice lies precisely in redefining the aesthetic experience as a collective mental event: the perception of the artwork is never separated from its surrounding documentation, nor from the narrative, oral, video, or photographic, that endures beyond the artwork’s apparent physical dissolution. Thus, the artist returns to perception the responsibility and power to continuously define, preserve, and shape what otherwise seems irretrievably elusive.
TEXTS
>LIMINAL FIGURES
>LETTER TO M.
>SOMETIMES
Images, videos, critical texts, and oral narratives do not merely describe the work; they determine its very existence. To intervene in these elements therefore means to act directly upon the work itself, constructing and articulating it without the need for material contact, nor for its presence as a physical object.
From this perspective, does exhibiting today not primarily mean exhibiting the image of the work, rather than the work as such?
Any attempt to withdraw from this media logic is bound to collapse, since it is the gaze itself that produces, at the perceptual level, the fundamental condition that, from here on, we will define as “IMAGE.”
—
A group of people arranges itself in a circle around an empty center.
At the center there is no object, and yet everyone behaves as if something were already there. The object is gradually defined through partial descriptions, hypotheses, disagreements, expectations. There is no shared form, but there is a common tension toward that center, which begins to organize the relationships among the participants.
Over time, it is not the object that gains substance, but the reactions it generates: positions taken, alliances, conflicts, rituals of approach or withdrawal. The center remains empty, yet it becomes functional. When, eventually, a material trace appears, it does not inaugurate the work; rather, it constitutes a residue, a belated consequence, a sediment of dynamics already fully operative.
—
The elimination of the object does not produce a void, but rather a redistribution of responsibility. What would normally be delegated to form—meaning, authority, stability—is taken on by the context and by the subjects who inhabit it. The work is no longer what is shown, but what is continuously negotiated.
The imaginary object at the center of the circle functions as a catalyst: it does not represent something, but activates a series of projections that make it operative while it remains absent. Its effectiveness does not depend on visibility, but on its capacity to organize a shared symbolic space. It is within this space that the work takes shape, in the form of relations, discourses, and expectations.
When a materialization occurs, it does not clarify the work, but reduces it. The physical form is not the origin of the process, but one of its possible outcomes, often the least relevant. Once it appears, the object occupies a position already defined, inheriting meanings that are not intrinsic to it, but retroactively assigned.
—
At this point, it becomes readily apparent that the exhibition assumes the form of a placeholder: a device that occupies a position and immediately activates its consequences. The placeholder, the object we choose to place, organizes the exhibition space as a field of relations, within which expectations, projections, and interpretations become operative.
The work emerges within this field as an effect of the interactions generated by the exhibition. The viewer participates in the construction of the experience through their gaze, their movements, and their interpretive decisions. The exhibition acts as a structure that renders this process visible.
Every exhibition element functions as a variable in an ongoing test. Texts, images, voids, and cues contribute to defining an open system in which the viewer’s reactions acquire formal value. The placeholder operates as a measuring instrument for the production of meaning. The exhibition experience coincides with the test itself, and its duration corresponds to the activation of the device. Within this space, the image takes shape as the result of a continuous negotiation between context and gaze.
The exhibition thus takes shape as a site of verification, in which the work manifests as a shared process in constant redefinition.
The combination of the angle of the path, as viewed from the high window, our melancholic general dissatisfaction with tedious reality, and the swaying/overlapping branches of the two willow trees,
often leads us, at least momentarily, to see figures that aren’t there. That is, on numerous occasions, particularly in dusky light, it seems as if someone is rounding our barn and then walking out of sight.
To be sure, we always go down, with flashlight in hand, never to find anything.
Before you cast us a person more apt to see phantoms than yourself, we ask you to consider the simple question: what is ever really there for us humans?
What isn’t a moiré of mood, temperament, memory, hope and expectation? Some kind of rhythm of preference or the irresistibly sweet path of personal logic? Just think what presumptive apparitions of
bias or predilection rise up as someone says “when young I was kidnapped” or “my grandfather was a close friend of Susan Sontag” or “Venice is sinking” or “she’s actually a singer” or “this was an ancient
burial site” or “you stand to make a lot of money” or “we’d like to offer you the job” or “the first stegosaurus skeleton was found in Colorado” or “I have a barn and some willow trees…”
On the slightest suggestion, something always materializes. But of course it is always wildly incomplete.
Dear M,
1. Have you ever tried staring at yourself in the mirror for more than half an hour? You start to see strange things.
2. This is just one of the principles of the act of observing.
Only when we are truly looking can we transform the reality in front of us. And now, in the persistence and obsession, we can find this principle of distortion amplified.
So, can you see anything? Because here, in the close-up view, objects have lost their contours.
Francesco De Prezzo operates within a radically liminal perceptual space, where experiencing the artwork is intimately tied to its apparent disappearance. Perception here is never a passive or linear act; instead, it involves a “derivative” engagement, unfolding through minimal traces, subtle clues, and intentional suggestions carefully constructed by the context encompassing the artwork, the observer, and the dynamic of the viewing experience itself. What the artist triggers is not merely an absence or an erasure but rather a subliminal and paradoxical presence that persists in the space between reality and simulation. Within this framework, the artwork is perceived even before it is rationally understood. It reveals itself most clearly when viewers experience unease or tension stemming from the uncertainty between what they see and what they are told, creating a perceptual friction that compels observers to inhabit an indefinite, uncertain space.
Consequently, the artwork assumes its definitive form through the cognitive process of the viewer, whose perception simultaneously actualizes and preserves it. The radical essence of Francesco De Prezzo's practice lies precisely in redefining the aesthetic experience as a collective mental event: the perception of the artwork is never separated from its surrounding documentation, nor from the narrative, oral, video, or photographic, that endures beyond the artwork’s apparent physical dissolution. Thus, the artist returns to perception the responsibility and power to continuously define, preserve, and shape what otherwise seems irretrievably elusive.
>SUBSTITUTION LOGIC
Perhaps this work will be recognised only by those who, in their own way, have already passed through the visions it embodies, or at least through kindred apparitions. It is not, therefore, a representation. It would attain its fullest realisation if it were to engage even a single viewer willing, in the act of looking, to be duplicated by it.
You see, dear M., creation confronts the tensions inherent in the image-as-simulacrum and reveals, or so I would suggest, that these tensions arise from the gap between the presence of the object and the copy that takes its place. The entire force of creation might be condensed into the following proposition: whatever is capable of appearing may manifest itself as a figure; whereas, before that which no longer possesses an origin, one must linger within the staging, a staging that we will later discover to be equivalent to the thing itself.”
From this emerges the threshold at which the work of art confronts its own simulacrum. Generated by the work’s own image, the simulacrum becomes, as so often happens, the most accessible of the visible presences that the work allows to circulate in the world.
Creation is, in fact, a necessary threshold for anyone wishing to move beyond the aesthetics of the unique copy and towards an encounter with “the image”: the image that profoundly unsettles those who pursue a reality behind autonomous forms, both on the perceptual plane and on the ontological one.
The ensemble is accompanied by the remaining non-derivative material production, by studies from the phase coinciding with the birth of the simulacrum, and by a closely knit constellation of replicas orbiting the original artistic event.
It may be said that the simulacrum already occupies the visual space opened up by the absent work. The substitute image establishes a perceptual field distinct from that of the vanished matrix. The duplicated image, in fact, brings a sensible dimension into being through the figurative trace of the original, defining itself as a surface that extends beyond it.
The fact that the same copy can itself be reproduced reveals that what is being replicated is already an autonomous presence, rather than merely a preparatory stage on the way towards a creation.
This is all the more evident because every creation possesses both a presence and an appearance. We arrive at a vision of absolute appearance when we disregard the material substance of the various figures and traces, insofar as those figures and traces retain autonomous identities. In other words, this occurs when the stable elements of the work are replaced by mutable replicas.
The compositional principles that governed the stable elements must therefore govern the mutable replicas as well. By configuration, in this expanded sense of the term, I mean the principles that identify the only relations within which a figure acquires presence, thereby excluding illusory juxtapositions. The ordering of everyday experience, as is often the case, is not entirely adequate to this task. It does not, under all circumstances, prevent the production of deceptive simulacra: apparitions such as “the shadow is more solid than the body,” or “the copy, although deprived of an origin, must nevertheless succeed in transforming itself into a presence,” and so forth.
When we attempt to examine any given images, we generally find that they consist of figurative superimpositions, perceptual interweavings, or further mimetic variations of more elementary images. Yet, if pursued deeply enough, our observation must necessarily arrive at visual configurations that are not themselves composed of other visual configurations.
I call primary simulacra those images that reveal the originary relation between presences. Such images constitute the point of departure for every representation, because they preserve the concrete and sensible component from which all other images derive.
To understand the true force of images, therefore, one must study these primary simulacra. Aesthetics, I believe, must learn to recognise them and to understand how they are formed through bodies and surfaces. This is, however, an exceedingly complex field of inquiry, one that art theory has only recently begun to address through the proliferation of artistic documentation.
Where appearance overlays and conceals material presence; where it enables autonomous copies to emerge; where it deploys the same figure indiscriminately across innumerable divergent embodiments, at that point, we must replace ordinary vision with a representational apparatus capable of granting us a lucid experience of the sensible texture, rejecting illusory copies, and employing figures without indeterminacy.
This replacement of today’s unstable mode of representation with a lucid appearance is possible only by observing the presences we wish to show, so as to grasp their perceptual variety. In other words, an authentic reading can be attained only through what might be called the visual exploration of those presences themselves, that is, from a certain perspective, through experience rather than by imagining configurations that precede the act of looking.
There is often an impulse to ask in advance: What might the possible configurations of primary simulacra be? One might answer, for example: images grounded in the body; images constructed through the relation between two or more presences; and perhaps images capable of interweaving qualities and relations, and so forth. Yet to proceed in this way is, in my view, merely to manipulate appearances. An originary configuration cannot be anticipated. It would indeed be strange if concrete presences had nothing further to reveal to us about the manner of their own manifestation.
Let us imagine two parallel surfaces, A and B. A number of presences are arranged on surface A, let us suppose curved bodies and angular volumes, differing in material and scale, and our task is to generate simulacra of those presences on surface B.
To this end, we may devise, among other possibilities, two distinct procedures. In the first, we establish a principle of reproduction, for example, the principle of photographic copying, or any other principle, and then begin transferring all the presences from A to B in accordance with it.
Alternatively, in the second procedure, we might establish the convention that every curved body on surface A must appear on surface B as a smooth icon, while every angular volume on surface A must appear on surface B as a regular image.
This second figurative procedure may prove advantageous if, for some particular reason, we wish to display on surface B only smooth icons and regular images. Clearly, however, the precise configuration of the original presences on surface A cannot be inferred directly from these simulacra. All that can be inferred is that the matrix was either a curved body or an angular volume.
To identify the exact configuration of the matrix in any individual case, we would need to know the specific procedure by which, for example, a particular curved body was transformed into the smooth icon now before me.
The situation is entirely analogous in the case of the artistic image. If the presences within the work are the curved bodies and angular volumes on surface A, then the aspects of the original and those of the replica correspond to the smooth icons and regular images on surface B. These aspects constitute the conventions of our particular figurative system, within which we transfer numerous and differing sensible structures according to a wide range of divergent procedures.
For this reason, no conclusions, except of the most approximate kind, can be drawn from the use of such conventions concerning the concrete perceptual configuration of the presences represented. Apparitions such as “This canvas repels the gaze,” “The copy appears to be alive,” and “I become a reflection”, apparitions that share no common substance, are all manifested as images of matrix and duplication; that is, as images that appear to possess the same configuration.
If we now attempt to arrive at an authentic reading, we will encounter perceptual configurations that bear only the faintest resemblance to the conventions of habitual vision. We encounter the dimensions of presence and absence, together with the full variety of bodily imprints and reflected apparitions, glimmers, shadows, and so forth, with their varying intensities, their imperceptible shifts, and their superimpositions in differing proportions: phenomena that cannot be grasped through the customary instruments of representation.
At this point, I wish to formulate my first concluding observation concerning the aesthetic investigation of concrete presences: for such presences to manifest themselves, measures, both finite and indeterminate, must enter into the very texture of the primary simulacra.
You see, dear M., creation confronts the tensions inherent in the image-as-simulacrum and reveals, or so I would suggest, that these tensions arise from the gap between the presence of the object and the copy that takes its place. The entire force of creation might be condensed into the following proposition: whatever is capable of appearing may manifest itself as a figure; whereas, before that which no longer possesses an origin, one must linger within the staging, a staging that we will later discover to be equivalent to the thing itself.”
From this emerges the threshold at which the work of art confronts its own simulacrum. Generated by the work’s own image, the simulacrum becomes, as so often happens, the most accessible of the visible presences that the work allows to circulate in the world.
Creation is, in fact, a necessary threshold for anyone wishing to move beyond the aesthetics of the unique copy and towards an encounter with “the image”: the image that profoundly unsettles those who pursue a reality behind autonomous forms, both on the perceptual plane and on the ontological one.
The ensemble is accompanied by the remaining non-derivative material production, by studies from the phase coinciding with the birth of the simulacrum, and by a closely knit constellation of replicas orbiting the original artistic event.
It may be said that the simulacrum already occupies the visual space opened up by the absent work. The substitute image establishes a perceptual field distinct from that of the vanished matrix. The duplicated image, in fact, brings a sensible dimension into being through the figurative trace of the original, defining itself as a surface that extends beyond it.
The fact that the same copy can itself be reproduced reveals that what is being replicated is already an autonomous presence, rather than merely a preparatory stage on the way towards a creation.
This is all the more evident because every creation possesses both a presence and an appearance. We arrive at a vision of absolute appearance when we disregard the material substance of the various figures and traces, insofar as those figures and traces retain autonomous identities. In other words, this occurs when the stable elements of the work are replaced by mutable replicas.
The compositional principles that governed the stable elements must therefore govern the mutable replicas as well. By configuration, in this expanded sense of the term, I mean the principles that identify the only relations within which a figure acquires presence, thereby excluding illusory juxtapositions. The ordering of everyday experience, as is often the case, is not entirely adequate to this task. It does not, under all circumstances, prevent the production of deceptive simulacra: apparitions such as “the shadow is more solid than the body,” or “the copy, although deprived of an origin, must nevertheless succeed in transforming itself into a presence,” and so forth.
When we attempt to examine any given images, we generally find that they consist of figurative superimpositions, perceptual interweavings, or further mimetic variations of more elementary images. Yet, if pursued deeply enough, our observation must necessarily arrive at visual configurations that are not themselves composed of other visual configurations.
I call primary simulacra those images that reveal the originary relation between presences. Such images constitute the point of departure for every representation, because they preserve the concrete and sensible component from which all other images derive.
To understand the true force of images, therefore, one must study these primary simulacra. Aesthetics, I believe, must learn to recognise them and to understand how they are formed through bodies and surfaces. This is, however, an exceedingly complex field of inquiry, one that art theory has only recently begun to address through the proliferation of artistic documentation.
Where appearance overlays and conceals material presence; where it enables autonomous copies to emerge; where it deploys the same figure indiscriminately across innumerable divergent embodiments, at that point, we must replace ordinary vision with a representational apparatus capable of granting us a lucid experience of the sensible texture, rejecting illusory copies, and employing figures without indeterminacy.
This replacement of today’s unstable mode of representation with a lucid appearance is possible only by observing the presences we wish to show, so as to grasp their perceptual variety. In other words, an authentic reading can be attained only through what might be called the visual exploration of those presences themselves, that is, from a certain perspective, through experience rather than by imagining configurations that precede the act of looking.
There is often an impulse to ask in advance: What might the possible configurations of primary simulacra be? One might answer, for example: images grounded in the body; images constructed through the relation between two or more presences; and perhaps images capable of interweaving qualities and relations, and so forth. Yet to proceed in this way is, in my view, merely to manipulate appearances. An originary configuration cannot be anticipated. It would indeed be strange if concrete presences had nothing further to reveal to us about the manner of their own manifestation.
Let us imagine two parallel surfaces, A and B. A number of presences are arranged on surface A, let us suppose curved bodies and angular volumes, differing in material and scale, and our task is to generate simulacra of those presences on surface B.
To this end, we may devise, among other possibilities, two distinct procedures. In the first, we establish a principle of reproduction, for example, the principle of photographic copying, or any other principle, and then begin transferring all the presences from A to B in accordance with it.
Alternatively, in the second procedure, we might establish the convention that every curved body on surface A must appear on surface B as a smooth icon, while every angular volume on surface A must appear on surface B as a regular image.
This second figurative procedure may prove advantageous if, for some particular reason, we wish to display on surface B only smooth icons and regular images. Clearly, however, the precise configuration of the original presences on surface A cannot be inferred directly from these simulacra. All that can be inferred is that the matrix was either a curved body or an angular volume.
To identify the exact configuration of the matrix in any individual case, we would need to know the specific procedure by which, for example, a particular curved body was transformed into the smooth icon now before me.
The situation is entirely analogous in the case of the artistic image. If the presences within the work are the curved bodies and angular volumes on surface A, then the aspects of the original and those of the replica correspond to the smooth icons and regular images on surface B. These aspects constitute the conventions of our particular figurative system, within which we transfer numerous and differing sensible structures according to a wide range of divergent procedures.
For this reason, no conclusions, except of the most approximate kind, can be drawn from the use of such conventions concerning the concrete perceptual configuration of the presences represented. Apparitions such as “This canvas repels the gaze,” “The copy appears to be alive,” and “I become a reflection”, apparitions that share no common substance, are all manifested as images of matrix and duplication; that is, as images that appear to possess the same configuration.
If we now attempt to arrive at an authentic reading, we will encounter perceptual configurations that bear only the faintest resemblance to the conventions of habitual vision. We encounter the dimensions of presence and absence, together with the full variety of bodily imprints and reflected apparitions, glimmers, shadows, and so forth, with their varying intensities, their imperceptible shifts, and their superimpositions in differing proportions: phenomena that cannot be grasped through the customary instruments of representation.
At this point, I wish to formulate my first concluding observation concerning the aesthetic investigation of concrete presences: for such presences to manifest themselves, measures, both finite and indeterminate, must enter into the very texture of the primary simulacra.
>The Artwork Beyond Its Own Body
The idea that a work of art coincides with a clearly bounded object is far less self-evident than museum conventions would have us believe. A painting appears to reside in its painted surface, a sculpture in the mass it occupies in space, a photograph in the image it preserves. Yet each of these identifications depends on a series of prior operations: someone has established a boundary, organized a distance, and determined a particular mode of viewing as relevant. No artwork is simply presented to the gaze. Rather, a complex set of conditions allows it to emerge as a unified entity. To interrogate an artwork, then, is not merely to describe its properties, but to reconstruct the apparatus through which it comes to present itself as a distinct identity.
The eye is not a transparent instrument that passively registers an already complete presence. It operates within systems of codes, interruptions, automatisms, and expectations. Artistic modernity, therefore, does not unfold as a progressive liberation of pure vision. On the contrary, it reveals the extent to which vision is permeated by forces beyond its control. Once observation ceases to guarantee a stable object, the artwork also loses its privileged status as something that can be fully disclosed to the viewer. It becomes the site where a particular organization of seeing is produced and, at times, disrupted.
This gives rise to a first form of substitution. A painting need not be physically removed from the wall for something else to take its place. It is enough for attention to shift from the object itself to the rules that make it perceptible. The artwork does not disappear; its status changes. What once seemed contained within the object is revealed to be distributed across medium, position, time, memory, convention, and viewer. Substitution is not an exchange between two equivalent entities. It is a transformation of the question itself. Rather than asking what the artwork is, we begin to ask through which operations it becomes capable of functioning as art.
Duchamp’s work makes this transformation particularly apparent. The object is never merely a presence to be contemplated. It is often a mechanism that dictates a viewing position, introduces a delay, or generates a short circuit between what is seen and what is known. The apparatus forces us to distinguish appearance from its underlying cause. The visible may be meticulously constructed and yet remain fundamentally insufficient. Within this insufficiency emerges a crucial problem: if the artwork depends on conditions that do not coincide with its material substance, where does it begin and where does it end? Do the frame, the aperture, the movement of the body, the description, and the expectation belong to the artwork itself, or do they merely constitute its environment?
The question cannot be resolved by indiscriminately expanding the definition of the artwork. To declare that everything is art would be an overly convenient way of erasing meaningful distinctions. What is required instead is an examination of which relationships are essential, which are incidental, and which can be altered without compromising the specificity of the experience. A relational theory of the artwork is not simply a generalized celebration of context. It demands a process of critical differentiation: identifying the threshold at which an external element becomes constitutive. Replacing the object with the system is not a poetic metaphor, but an analytical test of the conditions through which artistic identity is established.
The consequence is paradoxical. The more we attempt to establish the autonomy of the artwork, the more dependencies we uncover. Yet these dependencies do not necessarily diminish its strength. They may be precisely what sustains it. An artwork can exist because it never fully coincides with any single one of its material manifestations. Its body becomes a temporary configuration of relationships rather than an invulnerable core. The object remains significant, but it ceases to exercise absolute sovereignty over meaning. This marks the first step toward a theory of the artwork as a structure inherently open to substitution.
The eye is not a transparent instrument that passively registers an already complete presence. It operates within systems of codes, interruptions, automatisms, and expectations. Artistic modernity, therefore, does not unfold as a progressive liberation of pure vision. On the contrary, it reveals the extent to which vision is permeated by forces beyond its control. Once observation ceases to guarantee a stable object, the artwork also loses its privileged status as something that can be fully disclosed to the viewer. It becomes the site where a particular organization of seeing is produced and, at times, disrupted.
This gives rise to a first form of substitution. A painting need not be physically removed from the wall for something else to take its place. It is enough for attention to shift from the object itself to the rules that make it perceptible. The artwork does not disappear; its status changes. What once seemed contained within the object is revealed to be distributed across medium, position, time, memory, convention, and viewer. Substitution is not an exchange between two equivalent entities. It is a transformation of the question itself. Rather than asking what the artwork is, we begin to ask through which operations it becomes capable of functioning as art.
Duchamp’s work makes this transformation particularly apparent. The object is never merely a presence to be contemplated. It is often a mechanism that dictates a viewing position, introduces a delay, or generates a short circuit between what is seen and what is known. The apparatus forces us to distinguish appearance from its underlying cause. The visible may be meticulously constructed and yet remain fundamentally insufficient. Within this insufficiency emerges a crucial problem: if the artwork depends on conditions that do not coincide with its material substance, where does it begin and where does it end? Do the frame, the aperture, the movement of the body, the description, and the expectation belong to the artwork itself, or do they merely constitute its environment?
The question cannot be resolved by indiscriminately expanding the definition of the artwork. To declare that everything is art would be an overly convenient way of erasing meaningful distinctions. What is required instead is an examination of which relationships are essential, which are incidental, and which can be altered without compromising the specificity of the experience. A relational theory of the artwork is not simply a generalized celebration of context. It demands a process of critical differentiation: identifying the threshold at which an external element becomes constitutive. Replacing the object with the system is not a poetic metaphor, but an analytical test of the conditions through which artistic identity is established.
The consequence is paradoxical. The more we attempt to establish the autonomy of the artwork, the more dependencies we uncover. Yet these dependencies do not necessarily diminish its strength. They may be precisely what sustains it. An artwork can exist because it never fully coincides with any single one of its material manifestations. Its body becomes a temporary configuration of relationships rather than an invulnerable core. The object remains significant, but it ceases to exercise absolute sovereignty over meaning. This marks the first step toward a theory of the artwork as a structure inherently open to substitution.
>The Machinery of Dependencies
To speak of a system of relationships is to abandon the convenience of a single center. Every artwork emerges at the intersection of different operations: a medium preserves a trace; a procedure produces it; a code makes it recognizable; an institution safeguards it; a viewer activates certain possibilities within it. None of these operations, taken in isolation, can fully account for the artwork. Yet their connection is not simply an accumulation of elements. What distinguishes a system from a collection is that altering one component changes the function of the others. Shifting the point of view, modifying a sequence, or interrupting repetition can fundamentally transform what was previously understood as identical.
The concept of the apparatus is particularly useful because it describes something more than a neutral container. An apparatus organizes: it assigns positions, regulates access, enables certain movements, and restricts others. In optical and para-optical art, the apparatus makes this organizing power especially apparent. The viewer does not enter into an unrestricted relationship with an already complete object, but becomes part of an architecture of possibilities. Vision is the outcome of a constructed arrangement. Its apparent immediacy conceals the complexity of its production. Through her examination of the fractures within modernist vision, Krauss allows us to understand this construction not as an accidental limitation, but as a productive condition in its own right.
Yet a crucial misunderstanding must be avoided: the system is not an immaterial substitute, somehow purer than the object itself. It, too, depends on material supports, durations, and resistances. Relationships do not float freely in the realm of ideas. An aperture has a diameter; a surface reflects or absorbs light; a mechanism can stop functioning; a body must occupy a specific position. Any analysis of the system must remain sufficiently grounded to account for these constraints. To overlook them is to reduce the artwork to an abstract formula, losing precisely what made it necessary in the first place: the fact that thought takes shape through sensory experience.
The first critical operation, then, is to distinguish the medium from its function. The medium is what carries or records; the function is what that medium makes possible within a particular organization. The same function may migrate across different media, but such a transition is never entirely without consequence. As materials change, so do thresholds of attention, duration, scale, and the authority of the trace. To speak of substitution therefore requires an account of both continuity and loss. If an artwork can be reconstructed, replicated, or transferred, which conditions must remain stable? And which transformations should instead be understood as part of its ongoing existence?
The second operation involves recognizing the viewer’s position as an internal variable. The audience does not simply impose an interpretation upon a silent object. Bodily distance, the time required to perceive, and the interplay between perception and memory all participate in shaping the experience. This does not mean that every subjective interpretation becomes equally valid. The apparatus may guide without completely determining; it may prescribe a particular posture while simultaneously generating something that escapes its control. The tension between prescription and deviation is precisely where the artwork reveals that its meaning can never be entirely closed.
The third operation concerns persistence. A system of relationships can sustain an artwork only insofar as it is capable of enduring absences, interruptions, and transformations. Museums preserve objects, but they also preserve instructions, attributions, images, testimonies, and exhibition conditions. The survival of an artwork is therefore an ongoing negotiation between materials and protocols. Some protocols protect, while others impose rigidity; some enable reactivation, while others replace the experience with its documentation. The artwork endures not because it remains unchanged, but because a series of differences continues to be recognized as meaningful.
The concept of the apparatus is particularly useful because it describes something more than a neutral container. An apparatus organizes: it assigns positions, regulates access, enables certain movements, and restricts others. In optical and para-optical art, the apparatus makes this organizing power especially apparent. The viewer does not enter into an unrestricted relationship with an already complete object, but becomes part of an architecture of possibilities. Vision is the outcome of a constructed arrangement. Its apparent immediacy conceals the complexity of its production. Through her examination of the fractures within modernist vision, Krauss allows us to understand this construction not as an accidental limitation, but as a productive condition in its own right.
Yet a crucial misunderstanding must be avoided: the system is not an immaterial substitute, somehow purer than the object itself. It, too, depends on material supports, durations, and resistances. Relationships do not float freely in the realm of ideas. An aperture has a diameter; a surface reflects or absorbs light; a mechanism can stop functioning; a body must occupy a specific position. Any analysis of the system must remain sufficiently grounded to account for these constraints. To overlook them is to reduce the artwork to an abstract formula, losing precisely what made it necessary in the first place: the fact that thought takes shape through sensory experience.
The first critical operation, then, is to distinguish the medium from its function. The medium is what carries or records; the function is what that medium makes possible within a particular organization. The same function may migrate across different media, but such a transition is never entirely without consequence. As materials change, so do thresholds of attention, duration, scale, and the authority of the trace. To speak of substitution therefore requires an account of both continuity and loss. If an artwork can be reconstructed, replicated, or transferred, which conditions must remain stable? And which transformations should instead be understood as part of its ongoing existence?
The second operation involves recognizing the viewer’s position as an internal variable. The audience does not simply impose an interpretation upon a silent object. Bodily distance, the time required to perceive, and the interplay between perception and memory all participate in shaping the experience. This does not mean that every subjective interpretation becomes equally valid. The apparatus may guide without completely determining; it may prescribe a particular posture while simultaneously generating something that escapes its control. The tension between prescription and deviation is precisely where the artwork reveals that its meaning can never be entirely closed.
The third operation concerns persistence. A system of relationships can sustain an artwork only insofar as it is capable of enduring absences, interruptions, and transformations. Museums preserve objects, but they also preserve instructions, attributions, images, testimonies, and exhibition conditions. The survival of an artwork is therefore an ongoing negotiation between materials and protocols. Some protocols protect, while others impose rigidity; some enable reactivation, while others replace the experience with its documentation. The artwork endures not because it remains unchanged, but because a series of differences continues to be recognized as meaningful.
>The Work of Disappearance
Disappearance is often described as the ultimate gesture of the avant-garde: after questioning representation, the artist would go on to question the object itself, eventually eliminating it. This linear narrative is appealing but insufficient. An artwork can withdraw from sight while leaving intact the relationships of authority that guarantee its existence. It can be materially absent yet strongly present in documents, descriptions, and expectations. Conversely, a perfectly visible object can work against its own unity, bringing dispersion, gravity, accident, and process to the surface. Erasure, therefore, cannot be measured solely by the amount of material removed.
Reflections on Anti-Form are crucial because they challenge the primacy of a form that precedes execution and entirely governs the material. Allowing weight, collapse, accumulation, and contingency to act means removing part of the artwork from the control of a governing design. This is not the triumph of absence, but a redistribution of agency. Material ceases to be a passive medium and participates in the configuration of the work. Form does not disappear altogether: it loses its claim to being a law already established before its encounter with the world.
Krauss allows us to situate this tension within a critique of vision as a form of domination. The painterly gesture, the trace, and the surface are not merely elements to be organized into a harmonious whole. They can resist synthesis, evoke the body, and make automatism and resistance perceptible. In the discussion of Pollock, the question is not simply about a painter's style, but about how a practice can be brought back under an ideal of mastery or, conversely, understood through what that ideal cannot absorb. It is upon this friction that a theory of the erasure of the unified artwork can be constructed.
Erasure can operate on at least three levels. At the material level, it removes, covers, fragments, or disperses the support. At the perceptual level, it prevents the image from coming together as a single, readily available figure. At the institutional level, it challenges the criteria by which something is identified, preserved, and exchanged as an artwork. These three levels do not coincide. A destroyed surface can become a museum fetish; an immaterial practice can depend on an extremely rigid certificate; an apparently intact figure can profoundly destabilize the act of seeing. Analysis must keep these differences open.
It follows that an erased artwork is not necessarily an artwork that has come to an end. Negation can produce a new infrastructure of existence. Photographs, testimonies, accounts, instructions, and remnants can take the place of the absent object, but not without transforming it. The risk is that the document may be mistaken for a perfect equivalent: the evidence is preserved while the situation is lost. The problem is not to choose dogmatically between presence and archive, but to understand what kind of experience each makes possible. Even emptiness must be staged, named, maintained, and interpreted.
Finally, disappearance has a temporal dimension. What is no longer visible can continue to guide the gaze; what has been erased can determine the meaning of what remains. Absence is not simply the opposite of presence. It is a relationship that operates in the present through a loss. For this reason, an artwork can be all the more active the less it appears as something that can be possessed. Its power does not lie in the miracle of absolute dematerialization, but in its capacity to make perceptible the conditions on which every appearance depends.
Reflections on Anti-Form are crucial because they challenge the primacy of a form that precedes execution and entirely governs the material. Allowing weight, collapse, accumulation, and contingency to act means removing part of the artwork from the control of a governing design. This is not the triumph of absence, but a redistribution of agency. Material ceases to be a passive medium and participates in the configuration of the work. Form does not disappear altogether: it loses its claim to being a law already established before its encounter with the world.
Krauss allows us to situate this tension within a critique of vision as a form of domination. The painterly gesture, the trace, and the surface are not merely elements to be organized into a harmonious whole. They can resist synthesis, evoke the body, and make automatism and resistance perceptible. In the discussion of Pollock, the question is not simply about a painter's style, but about how a practice can be brought back under an ideal of mastery or, conversely, understood through what that ideal cannot absorb. It is upon this friction that a theory of the erasure of the unified artwork can be constructed.
Erasure can operate on at least three levels. At the material level, it removes, covers, fragments, or disperses the support. At the perceptual level, it prevents the image from coming together as a single, readily available figure. At the institutional level, it challenges the criteria by which something is identified, preserved, and exchanged as an artwork. These three levels do not coincide. A destroyed surface can become a museum fetish; an immaterial practice can depend on an extremely rigid certificate; an apparently intact figure can profoundly destabilize the act of seeing. Analysis must keep these differences open.
It follows that an erased artwork is not necessarily an artwork that has come to an end. Negation can produce a new infrastructure of existence. Photographs, testimonies, accounts, instructions, and remnants can take the place of the absent object, but not without transforming it. The risk is that the document may be mistaken for a perfect equivalent: the evidence is preserved while the situation is lost. The problem is not to choose dogmatically between presence and archive, but to understand what kind of experience each makes possible. Even emptiness must be staged, named, maintained, and interpreted.
Finally, disappearance has a temporal dimension. What is no longer visible can continue to guide the gaze; what has been erased can determine the meaning of what remains. Absence is not simply the opposite of presence. It is a relationship that operates in the present through a loss. For this reason, an artwork can be all the more active the less it appears as something that can be possessed. Its power does not lie in the miracle of absolute dematerialization, but in its capacity to make perceptible the conditions on which every appearance depends.