What You See, Unseen

Materiality
28
and finding the subjective sense of the thing. As
viewers we ask ourselves, does it please or displease
and why?
From the artist’s perspective, the experience of
making the work stands in contrast to the viewer’s
experience in the following ways. It is deliberate
and evolves over time. It is general in that
many forms could suffice. The artist funnels what
is amorphous and indeterminate into something
concrete with material form, the work of art. This
leads to the realization that the aesthetic experience,
grounded in works’ of art materiality, is the
meeting point of the viewer’s experience on one
pole and the artist’s experience on the other pole.
It is the point of relationship to employ a term of
Martin Buber. 14 As a construct represents the small,
definitive and limited sense of a thing whereas
Thou encompasses the largest and most infinite
interpretation whereby there can exist a sense of
transcendent interconnectivity, of divinity.
g
Performance art, as an immaterial form of visual
art, capitalizes on the idea of the viewer’s aesthetic
experience by positioning the viewer within the
work as it occurs. In no other form of visual art is
the audience more aware of its role in the completion
of the piece. The performance, temporal
and ephemeral by nature, inserts the viewer into