Untitled

Maja Clas
Germany 1996

From its first moment, the shape of the small box permitted several associations and possibilities, but the point was not to alter the object per se but to have it remain in its artificiality, a box-like structure with a cover, closed with a rubber band, which was handed to me.  Intuitively, I decided to confront this object with pictorial presentations that I had selected.  In this process I begin by thinking of some imaginary associations.

This lead directly to a comparison of three objects, one after another. (Where does the wooden object “belong,” what can it be, or mean?)  The pictures I have chosen in the frames are to be understood as an “offer,” which relates the different levels of representation to one another.  Thus, a space is produced in which things can be observed in terms of conception and content or else in terms of space and form.

The inside of the “box” projects itself visually upon the pictures as they are seen.  The concrete object serves as a “medium” of the continual transformation between things and pictures.  Understood in this way, the wooden object can be regarded, abstractly, as a picture, just as a picture can be understood as an object. The positioning of the two picture frames with the wooden box creates as a whole a model of one’s own perception or of the possibilities of perception, and the relational positioning or the relational viewing of things.