GRcade

It could be proposed that the artist devises an institution or installation, employing appropriations of the above. One that “purports” or perhaps even bluffs the audience to invoke in their receipt of the apparatus, possibly unconsciously, and even in dispersed manner, certain “behaviours, gestures and thoughts”.

Such a proposition is highly conceptual, and one that Sol LeWitt might rally with, and it is not as if such apparatus are scantily available. Agamben excitably attacks his least favourite apparatus of the mobile phone: “He who lets himself be captured by the ‘cellular telephone’ apparatus [...] cannot acquire a new subjectivity, but only a number through which he can, eventually, be controlled” (Agamben, 2009: 21), but that is not the only example: “today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals in not modeled [sic], contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.” (Agamben, 2009:15) One could suggest the supermarket one strolls into is an apparatus which denotes and ultimately controls one’s choice of diet; the apparatus of application, enrolment and progression through any school in which some particular schema, dogma or doctrine is inevitable; the apparatus of the bus stop and the specific locations via and toward which one might converse with other individuals or a further apparatus, or the floor plan of the gallery predicating the audience’s movement through space: this world view is infinite, and so certainly one which the artist might intercept, intervene and, to some extent, make theirs.