On the other hand, a work such as Seemingly Humble reconstitutes the dehumanized, in two ways. Whilst this work stands as a sign of something all but unsignifiable (walls are often symbolic rather than physical constraints, and thereby virtual), there is a scenario being acted out amongst the tiny figuration in the contained cranial shape (itself a contained containment). Perhaps this is the last trace of Masi's earlier expositions of a micro-polemics of power, where stuffed animals were the inert, but curiously threating elements in the theatre of confrontation. The contained figuration is also offset against the band of mirror at eye level, which forces complicity on the part of the viewer. It is an opening into, and beyond, the work; a possible suggestion that the reflection is more occlusive than it appears. Glass may appear, from the always 'other' side, to be a mirror, reflecting nothing but the perceiver's self.

Accordingly, boundaries are constructed in the abstract, but are self-regenerating, self-justifying mechanisms of their own. Felix Guattari suggests that there is a politics to 'normative' behaviour in the individual, which is itself as territorially rooted as, say, the battle for Kuwait:

"There is no moment when we are not encircled by power formations. In our societies people must not gesticulate overmuch; we must each stay in our proper place, sign on the dotted line, recognize the signals we are given - and any failure may land us up in prison or hospital." 2

We learn to operate within these delineated bounds of behaviour. Aberrance must be treated and cured. But there is a stage beyond Guattari's scenario, where we turn to an inner, or written morality, a belief in an abstract irreducible, which moderates (but does not justify) our behaviour. That, in itself, is a border, the bounds of which should not he crossed. If such a crossing does take place, the reversion is problematic. What has been done cannot be undone. Redemption, at times, appears not to be enough. What has been known, cannot be actively unknown. Therein lies an acute degree of responsibility, where liberty cannot be the single determinant.

The description of Guattari's potential schizophrenic is uncannily close to the part-faltering, part-blustering egos of the much vaunted New World Order. There were times, during the last weeks of Gulf crisis, when that Order seemed ready to go on ice once again. Significantly enough, however, we know that the second freeze would not, and will not, take place, at the centre of the Superpowers' political systems, but on the borderlines of their theatre of operations.

That which we perceive is not necessarily the object of offence, rather it always stands in the place of the object. It is not, therefore, merely a question of wall works, but an enactment of walls' work.

Andrew Renton

March 1991

NOTES

1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan,

reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p. 168.

2. Felix Guattari, "Meaning and Power", Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans.

Rosemary Sheed, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p. 172.