This performance: A passing thought
When they are introduced to a new paddock, sheep and cattle explore it. Initially they move around the boundaries and follow this by moving further into the paddock. In a small flat paddock which allows clear vision of all parts, sheep will rapidly start to use all of the area. However, physical or visual constraints may mean that several days or weeks pass before they have explored and started to move through most areas of the paddock.
Arnold/Dudzinski, Ethology of Free Ranging Domestic Animals.
The installation is prefaced with the observation, "Something like a theatre set." it's an apt preface considering the relation of this work to so called minimal sculpture of the '60s. We can return (via this reference) to the observations on 'literalist art' by Michael Fried in 1967 in Art and Objecthood. In considering what characterises the work of the period, Fried identifies the works' theatricality. It is as if these works become purer in the absence of any material ; as if they consist only in situ, as theatre, which implies an aesthetic outside of the object which is not contained within it. Which is to say an aesthetic including the object but only as a part of a larger whole.
The phenomenology of this elaborate set design is given in Shakespeare's famous verse:
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage ...
The sentiment imbues all life-including art-with a futile theatricality which culminates, as we all know, in an empty signification! 1t was precisely this existential crisis which minimalism intended to precipitate by reducing human endeavour to the mere relation inhering between forms