The split between a neurotic and a pervert is, in a nutshell, that the pervert has the capacity to enjoy the outward expression of their symptom while the neurotic prefers its retention. In different ways, this exhibit contends with a modern realization that an object cannot provide its own context nor can a context be defined without a subject.
A granular, almost forensic, attunement to traditions that focus on the semiotic imperatives of framing, may abstract intersubjective discourse to the brink of sadomasochism (as an extraction of consent) between artist and viewer. But even in the act of chewing a thought into spit, an egg arrives, conducted by compulsion and bearing odd codings.
Bits of shell that partially defy the conceits of language slip out between the speaker’s teeth. Like a performance of Zeno’s paradox, the neurotic describes the details that proclaim an impossibility of movement. One cannot cross the room because they must first cross half of it, and before this, half of that and so on, infinitely. In this formulation, everything remains exactly where it was and where it is at every stage, frozen within an endless present.
Alternately, the internalization of such an absence that drives the neurotic to hysterical ontological litigation, produces a site that isn’t for nothing but for a non-thing. The pervert opens the possibility of movement between vacuums, synthesizing display and reception. It’s a negative conception that delivers strange produce; a social antimatter with an imaging system that isn’t simply for a viewer or of the viewer, but somehow from the viewer. From in form. A non-thing might seem to say, there is non-thing inside me, is there non-thing inside you?
–James Krone
