The Concept of Conceptual Art:
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Phenomenologically, however, performance is always necessary for art.
This is because the aesthetic object is never exhausted by our experience of it.
The same could be said to be true of any object, but for aesthetic objects it is
even more the case.
Figure 4. Detail ofThe Human Genome Projection. Photograph by John W. Sisson
For objects in general, the reason we have a sense of things being
“outside” of us has little to do with spatiality and the limits of our bodies. It is
not the case that we have a sense of an extemality to objects because they are
“beyond” our flesh. We are not inside our flesh, peeking out at the world like
voyeurs. Instead, we are in the world, and our consciousness is in the world,
spreading out and into everything around us. The “outsideness” of objects is,
rather, a manifestation of the way in which they always necessarily exceed our
conscious grasp. Since the being of an object is found in all of the ways in which
it can possibly appear, and since those ways are innumerably infinite (because
there are infinitely many ways in which we can experience something), we can
never fully know—never possess or constrict or own or overcome—an object.
There will always be some profile that is hidden, some way in which it could be