| 'Structures of agency' takes as its model the expanding cone of simultaneous pathways the photon travels through as it propagates through space. That image, together with the expanding cones of Richard Serra's Clara-Clara (1983) provides a framework from which a discourse on form, spectatorship, geometry and mathematics expands. Clara-Clara produces two sets of contradictory views: the conflicting apperceptions never intersect but rather propagate through the force of their conflict. In so doing, they forge a cognitive structure that is parallel. A review of the history of parallelism yields a multiplied reading of the sculpture itself and the cognitive structure it produces. Finally, the notion of contradiction as paradox reveals how formal systems---aesthetic or mathematic---give rise to alternative propositions that extend beyond the system that created them. Conscious experience recognizes, develops, these extensions even as the systems that created them break down in the emergence. |
