“Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” – Paul Valéry

The marginal and invisible are imbued with kaleidoscopic possibilities. Objects are decreed, while things are less structural. Surrealism may be understood better as a set of tactics than as an aesthetic turning objects back in on themselves. The paintings of Dali are projected onto the walls of the museum’s vacated contemporary art floor. Animated interpolations of paintings by past “masters” are presented as experiential environments. The objects are abandoned. It is a vacant celebration of the missing, an orgy of motion graphic PowerPoint as eulogy. 

I was closing some tabs in my browser, as they say. 

Note to self: Build a concept around paramateriality without getting lost in the discourse that multiplies unfettered. By establishing absence as a thing, we can talk about it as a creative activity instead of merely a destruction or negation. It roots absence with thing-ness so that we can speak of it not as an untethered concept but as an actant both in form and as tool.

Benjamin’s claim of the loss of aura (or its sacrifice to apparatus) in the age of mechanical reproduction is counter-argued by art’s provision as a surrogate (even if placebic) for the ancient human rhythms and rituals that supported communities’ emotional health through identity-building, interpersonal communication, and cross-cultural exchange. Thingness is deflated by sensationalized objectness. Instead, we turn the dynamism that is looking and listening toward that which is not commodified or explicitly expressed.

We animate objects into things by paying slightly more attention. These new things become public, and in so doing, forces and hidden truths are uncovered. We seek to loosen subject from object, tactical erasure—Aristotle’s accidental is essential enough. Form and function tumble in and out of each other, the vibrant matter of the non-human and non-organic actors. A ghost is a memory with a form between and separate from two defined states.