Time——as the creator
A set of rules based on physical geography and natural cognition. In a sense, the notion of time is the results of human experience and understanding of the effect of time on people. For other living beings, the experience of our one day might equal to one second for them. Accordingly, there are more than one possibilities of the regulation of time.
Artifacts are given time meaning by the producer in the process of making, on the contrary, the man-made as a medium able to be time guidance.
The Clock (Christian Marclay) related time themes and images in an intuitive way to connect with the visual time.
La Monte Young used the sound as a medium to do a performance lasted more than five minutes with three notes played by cello, violin and viola. The statement via sound for more than five minutes drew audience attention to the essence of time----go through. Furthermore, it is a resistance of conventional thinking about performance by musical instrument replaced of transmitting the idea. The writing by Henry Flynt can explain the rationality of this work as conceptual art that ‘concept art is first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of music is sound. Since concepts are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.’
People/ Intervention----Another medium
Artists began to try to get rid of artists' dependence on object media to be present as idea itself.
Richard long’s work through pure interaction and involvement in nature
’We can escape from alienation and false consciousness: by a willful act we can be wholly in the world-reconnected.’
Through participation to establish a connection without individual emotions ‘the work is presented as a proposition -what you see is what you make of it.’
in some case Duchamip’s work also can be looked as a behavioural art which can be briefly described that moving the object to the place where it ‘should not belonging to’, and via the
Imagination/reality
Playing a Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio 1967-1968
Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk)1968
In a way, when artists present their idea into a concrete form, the work became a concrete/real boundary in between----the relatively limited side (artist’s view) and the relatively infinite side (audience’s view).
Non-text media seems offer greater possibilities, that somewhat freed works from the limitations of a single language and the audience seems to be wider. Linkages between works and audiences can be established across language constraints.
Although in a certain range of audiences have similar backgrounds（cultural or political）, the blurred boundaries of non-text still provide numerous possibilities for interpretation, what the work will face is unpredictable.
Nauman brings another topic with his work that‘the connection, or disconnection, between thought and body.’, the dislocation is not only arising from thought and body, which also will create between the communication of two minds / from the transformation of ideas into concrete forms. However, it is also because of the difference that produce gap or collide, then germinate new ideas.
‘the concrete object could no longer say all that was required of it’, if the idea can be seen as a transmission medium, the work would be the way deliver（entrust）imagination or thinking. The openness of works can extend their ideas as the limitations of expression.
These might be the reason to say, ‘If the imagination could grasp something, perhaps mind, body, even one's society, could follow’, the society will be built by both sides.
SPACE/Liminality
Liminal used to describe the space (tangible) or state (intangible).
The space created by interacting of objects, squeezing and pulling by interaction among the objects which is not been occupied but fugitive.
The relationship between things and things is revealed in constantly changing space, and vice versa, the relationship between things also reveals their changes.
In eastern philosophy, ‘the matter is empty and the empty is matter’, the emptiness is a kind of state which always contacts with material phenomena, that is keep changing as its instability.
Liminality is both a process and a state. On the one hand, such a transition can be a change in state brought about by thought. On the other hand, the threshold can be regard as a turning point of ideology through ‘rites’ held for changing in location, status, social status, and age, that is, the liminality caused by actual form promotion.
Back to plane
Vija Celmins
‘We know the joys and sorrows to be found in a gateway, a street corner, a room, on the surface of a table, between the sides of a box... An astronomy of things is established by the perfect knowledge of the space an object should be occupying in a picture, and of the space that separates one object from another...’
(Giorgio de Chirico, ‘A Metaphysical Aesthetic’)
Still life to diffuse the ‘silence’. A big part of Vija Celmins’ works were regarding the 'process’ that a lot of real time was compressed into pictures——enormous power of silence produced in time. Calm observation of the facts and absolute respect, then almost completely depict the objective existence to make the ‘pictures of fact’. At the same time, when daily necessities were singled out from the reality that also brings another ‘possibility of movement’.
Another part involved in Celmins’ work is the boundary blurred of visual illusion and reality. Different to photographs she isolated the object without reality background and put it in a vacuum, emptiness place that “removed the spatial dimension of the photo”. In the meanwhile, the narrative connection among things in real life was eliminated, the space becomes infinite, boundless and unmeasurable in the picture after rebuilding.
The content of works recorded, the facts piled up by time, figurative presence of the objective things and an emerging space which open to the viewers’ unconscious.
Images as a relative single way to explain and present the thought triggered by vision itself.
The fact that we see again will fix and construct via visual language, 'it reminds us of the infinite complexity of simple things, the truth about the dual nature of images, the silence of language allows to cross the limits in the name of vision'.