The Edge

What part of an artwork do you spend the longest time looking at?

It’s a simple question, but I think it opens onto something larger, about attention, and about where meaning actually sits. Not always in the obvious place.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the edges of paintings. This happened because I accidentally set off the warning alarm at Tate Britain. I’d managed to get too close to a painting, not because I wanted a better view of the image, but because I was trying to look at the edge of the canvas.

In galleries there’s an accepted distance between ourselves and a work, a point before we overstep the mark. I hadn’t realised I’d crossed that boundary until the alarm sounded, but it made me laugh because I know I do this all the time, not just with paintings.

I found myself wondering why.

Perhaps it goes back to something much earlier. It reminded me of Freud’s description of the fort/da game, where a child repeatedly throws away and retrieves a toy. Freud suggested that the game helped children negotiate absence and return, rehearsing the experience of losing and recovering someone or something important. Whether or not he’s right, I’ve always been interested in the idea that we sometimes revisit boundaries in order to reassure ourselves.

I wonder if that’s, part of what I’m doing.

Even though I know the painted image isn’t the thing itself, I still seem to want to look at where the image ends. I find myself checking its physical reality, looking at the side of the canvas, its thickness, the point where illusion gives way to object.

That’s the place that draws me.

When you stand slightly to one side of a painting, it stops being only an image. It becomes an object with weight and depth. You begin to see the evidence of its making: the canvas wrapped around the stretcher, the paint on its edge, perhaps even something of the artist’s decisions. The work shifts from representation to construction.

I think that transition, from image to object, from surface to thing, is where my attention often settles, especially when I’m looking at work that really interests me.

Perhaps that’s because I’m interested in thresholds: the places where one state becomes another.

It makes me wonder how much of what we experience in art isn’t in the main event, but just beside it.

What we catch out of the corner of our eye.

What we notice when we’re not trying to.

si sapsford