The Parergon: from the Periphery to the Center

Abstract

This text seeks to explain the concept of parergon and its evolution within the visual arts. For this, we refer to Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), where the German philosopher refers to ornaments (parerga) as what does not belong intrinsically to the work of art, that which does not integrate the representation. However, it is an external accessory that collaborates in increasing taste's pleasure only through its form. Next, it addresses Derrida's postulates in Truth in Painting (1978), where he deconstructs the Kantian aesthetic proposal, questioning concepts such as the outside and the inside in the work of art, using precisely the concept of parergon, that Kant had marginalized. Later we see Víctor I. Stoichita with his book on The Invention of Painting (1993); there, he seeks to establish a genealogy of the parergon, taking as a starting point the 16th century in the Netherlands, where still lifes arise. Stoichita studies the meta-pictorial phenomenon that he calls "split paintings," where the space of the painting opens up beyond the frame, through the trompe l'oeil resource and the relationship between the sacred (ergon) and the profane (parergon), and how still lifes emancipate themselves from their place of parergon and become ergon. Finally, we see how the poststructuralists and postmodernists displace the author and the work from the center of their theoretical reflections and put institutional frameworks in their place, promoting the cracking of all limits, frames, and frameworks in art, physical and conceptual. For example, I return to work at Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971, by Hans Haacke, where the artist links the work with its surroundings by bringing the outside of the museum inside the work.