Second order observation

In this text I undertake to show in Marcel Duchamp's readymade(s) and Ad Reinhardt's ultimate painting(s) the correlation between an internal and an external dimension to the artwork. The distinction between what is partaking of the internal acivity of the work and what is external to it corresponds to what I call first and second order observation. However different their works are, both artists present object-like entities that can be bracketed and apprehended instantaneously (there at once) and having (by condition) a degree of invariance from a mind to another while transferable in space and time. If only as a methodological option, second order observation is established by temporally bracketing the work and suspending its internal activity, so that it can be related to other things than itself, to the observer participant and the context. The solipsist closure of the object, far from making it univocally autonomous, demands, like any other artwork, a particular context in which to exist. The developments of post-object contextual art, which proceed largely from an institutional reading of the readymade, have been tremendous since the 1960s and have made us more and more sensitive to art's curatorial and social environment. But, unlike contextual works, in which components of the context enter the syntax, the disjunctive works we are examining each imply a complex distribution of selective correlative relations with an environment (the museum, the artworld). The object approach and second order observation offer a method in gaining access to this "other scene" which has remained liminal to the work and sunk in its erased background.