Locating the tympanum in the work of Judith Wright
Judith Wright’s art is simple, elemental, abstract. The human form is central to it, appearing and appearing within carefully commanded, highly charged fields of space. The works contain only that which is absolutely necessary. Although perhaps informed by minimalism, they are not primarily concerned with a material formalism. Rather, they are content driven. The central representation of the human form within a minimalist space, describes and inscribes the fundamental and essential questions of being: namely those questions surrounding concepts of absence and presence, of self and other. Judith Wright’s work inhabits the space of philosophy. Such an artistic occupation mobilises not only a philosophical questioning but also an interrogation of philosophical space in and of itself. In this way, there is revealed within Wright’s work, the limit or margin of philosophical space – that which Derrida has called “the tympan’.
In his essay “tympan” (the opening essay in the book Margins of Philosophy in which he introduces his ideas of deconstruction, Derrida plays upon the double meaning of the word tympan: firstly as an argument (an arcane meaning) central to philosophical thought, and secondly as the membrane within the inner ear, the ear drum, which vibrates with sonic resonance. Thus for Derrida the space of the ear becomes the container or invisible structure for the philosophical word or text. Philosophy, Derrida says, is the only discourse that has ever intended to receive its name only from itself. In this way philosophy speak its own limit and has mastery over it. It believes that it thinks its other. (And perhaps the same can be said of art, insofar as art also intends/pretends to these essential questions of being.) However, Derrida goes... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline