-Where is the reader/observer, how is it inscribed/embedded/located? Usually hidden, as ground, not figure, but sometimes foregrounded, that is, thematized. We can liken its status to the theatrical fourth wall. In the visual arts, we can recall perspective, play of depth, light, volume, angles, color, trompe-l'oeil, or all ways by which the readerly gaze is embedded as an operation of looking. Until there is no more form or depth, and the vision stops short before the materiality of its medium.
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Matthew Sepielli, Little Light, 2019 (artsy.net). Haze effects, hue or color contrast, and frame elevation combine to triangulate an implied range, depth, and viewpoint. |
- This illusionism is replaced by the idiom of bodies, textures, pure surfaces, and materials as the aesthetic language of attention. The illusion of a window looking out folds back and extends toward the other direction to redefine the readerly space until, as if, finally, they inhabit the same topography where the act of looking itself is generated. Sometimes, in action painting for example, the readerly space expands (Expressionism) to become the whole record of its nonlinear motions. Artefacts of looking may or may not accommodate the space for the reader/observer; they may, partly or fully, demand or deny the observer's space.
-Not often is this aspect thematized, or this tendency follows historical modulations. Or, the ontology of the object is the extension of the readerly stage, spliced off and then displaced outward to satisfy the age's rhetoric of discursive authority (positivism). In literature as early as the epics, the narrator function being given to the figure who takes over the narrative is a reader in disguise, where performance intersects and becomes part of the ontological space of fiction (metalepsis). Media within media, the readerly stage is the site of the modulation of the poles of emergent aesthetic objects and the motions that map them for perceptual salience.
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