In 1976, in Beyond the White Cube, the late Brian O'Doherty asked the question, Where did the frame go? Now we know. Christopher J Dennistoun brings into new focus the aesthetic implications of the forces that evicted illusionism and idealism from the picture, translating illusionistic space into surface tension, and surface tension into real presence.
His concern is the aesthetic and ideological potency not of the blank or shaped canvas but of the frame previously enclosing it; what used to go on on the painted surface now goes on on the frame that subsumes it: no longer pinning a subject in an illusionistic space, the painted frame pins the viewer in their subjective space, a space simultaneously abstract and real, fixing the viewer in their space and time.
Unlike a picture hanging on a wall the empty frame energises the wall defining the space that frames the viewer and the work. Whereas before the flat picture was physically and illusionistically continuous with the wall on which it hung, the painted frame colonises the space it invades and creates, the space of the viewer.
Once a mere spectator, onlooker or beholder the viewer is reframed as simultaneously self-reflective actor and audience, the work not to be looked at but experienced from within.
Channelling the Salon Cubists' definition of the work of art as a passage between two subjective spaces - that of the artist and that of the viewer - in a tradition descending ultimately from Seurat's aestheticisation of the picture frame, Chris Dennistoun puts the viewer in charge of the point of view of his - or rather their - work.
About Me
