Framing is all we can do. Framing is all we do anyway. We cannot not frame things. Our minds cannot perceive of reality without framing. Is framing a way of limiting the reality to a more digestible dosage?

Yoko Ono 1995

This is the script for a performance – part of an ongoing project examining the politics of space from Brian O’Doherty’s essay ‘Notes on a Gallery Space’ Inside the White Cube 1975 to Peter Weibel’s Ctrl [space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother 2007.

A frame is a sign, translating an ever expanding visual field into manageable, bite-size chunks. Technological advancements have expanded our frame of vision while paradoxically making us less aware of the frame’s existence at all.

The transitory nature of the frame places its subject in a transitory value system. Before a mark has been applied to the page work is invested with a specific temporal belief system. Contemporary framing systems are perhaps more dangerous for this transparency. We live our lives as apathetic acceptors of controlling structures.

· (Greetings) Can everyone please leave their bags outside, turn their phones off and sign the attendance register before entering the space. Warning – electrical hazards (I have to warn you all as we’ve had a few technical difficulties but they seem to have all been ironed out)

· Brian O’Doherty’s essay ‘Notes on a Gallery Space’ Inside the White Cube 1975

· The first time the gallery is discussed in terms of the white cube gallery cell, “the ultimate Modernist frame”

· “Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique theatre of aesthetics.”

· “The outside world must not come in – walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes a source of light. The wooded floor is polished so that you click along clinically.”

· The work frames the space OR “context becomes content”, “the disease of the Modernist cube”.

Perhaps it is this very space, a hangover from Modernism that has created my work aesthetic.