Literature & Visual Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Seminar

Description

Paper presented entitled 'Sign, Object and (Punctuating) Space: An Emergence of the Indexical Symbol through Roni Horn's Pair Object III: For Two Rooms. Roni Horn’s Pair Object III: For Two Rooms is one configuration of Things Which Happen Again: a sculpture consisting of one set of paired, identical objects arranged in any of four spatial configurations. The artwork is documented in a catalogue that, published alongside an exhibition of Things Which Happen Again at Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach (1991), includes: a technical description of the artwork; Horn’s floor plans for each of its four spatial configurations; photographic documentation of the artwork’s installation in situ; and an interview with Horn. Without having a first-hand experience of the artwork, I engage specifically with Pair Object III: For Two Rooms through these various forms of documentation. In doing so, I consider Pair Object III: For Two Rooms as, in the words of art theorist and critic Mieke Bal, a ‘theoretical object’. Foregrounding theoretical thought and its visual articulation, this paper becomes a means of ‘doing’ theory through Horn’s practice; imagining the space between a viewer and two concrete objects in order to conceptualise their embodied and semiotic relation. Through this speculative approach, I look at how a sign, the indexical symbol, emerges from the spatial narrative of, first, an encounter with an unfamiliar object in one room and, second, an encounter with an identical object in another room (a different space and time).

Period	20 Mar 2013