#60
 
 

BOUNDARY-BLURRING

by Marcus Steinweg

Art “refuses definition,” writes Theodor W. Adorno, but it equally calls for one. Art hardly exists other than as the work on its concept, the work of determining what art is and ought to be. In opening up toward what it has long been embedded in, the dimension of constituted certainties and valencies, art urges toward the boundaries of the space of fact as much as that of its own concept and its previous manifestations. Part and parcel of art is a dynamism of its bringing itself forth through the works, the ongoing redefinition of what its concept encompasses. Art expands the concept of art by blurring the boundaries that separate it from its other, from what delimits it. Every work of art is a form of boundary-blurring, an excess directed at its implicit inconsistency; an excess that marks the blurring of its boundary toward its boundary, its being-open to the formlessness whose medium it remains. Art is an assertion of form that engenders itself in an opening toward the formless. Be such formlessness that of society, as an excessively complex and internally contradictory space of fact—the zone of socio-historico-symbolic evidence—be it the point of inconsistency of this domain, the incommensurability commensurable to it.

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