The Sensible Openness of Space in the Works of Daniele Del Giudice, Peter Handke and Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Abstract

During the Renaissance, Alberti’s concept of total visibility and, more specifically, the rediscovery of perspective as an artificial instrument of space construction led to an analytical representation of spatiality. Since then, our understanding of the subject’s perception has changed, both in nature and in function, as a consequence of a progressive anthropogenetic deconstruction. The subject’s gaze used to focus on physical elements, and thus on functional elements, that fill space rather than perceiving space as such. Consequently, visibility has been structured by solid shapes. However, in the works of Daniele del Giudice, Peter Handke, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint, the subject overcomes perspective as a symbolic form that structures its relationship to the outside world by opening the subject’s perception beyond any conceptual form. According to Maldiney’s phenomenological approach, the genesis of space is prior to the constitution of the emerging reality as an object. In fact, he states that space contains a dynamic that eludes any positivist psychology concerned with existential questions in terms of representation or objectifying causality. Visibility figures as an open semantic signification that does not claim to ground itself as truth in the objective world of perception and science. Therefore, art is not the expression of an artistic ideal that precedes its existence, and that could be represented outside and before it; rather, it emerges and unfolds as it appears. I intend to show that space does not serve as a background for the representation of material objects, but instead becomes the constitutive principle of form. When ‘form’ evolves within a flow of spatiotemporal continuity, it forms itself while forming the space in which it forms. The emergence of form implies the opening of a space-creating surface that embeds the artwork in a process of becoming.