[Re] Making Through Trace

Readymade. There is nothing readymade about the painter's blank canvas or the draftsman’s white sheet, even if we could say that each of those surfaces is already organized, already structured by the lattice through which perspective will map the coordinates of external space. For the smooth white surface of each is nonetheless the index of a kind of emptiness, a fundamental blankness which is that of the visual field itself understood as a field of projection. It stands, that is, for what is assumed to be the nature of vision's spontaneous opening onto the external world as a limitless beyond, an ever retreating horizon, a reserve assumed from the outset but never filled in advance. If in traditional perspective vanishing point and viewing point, horizon line and canvas surface, finally mirror one another in a complicitous reversibility, this is because they represent two funds of pure potentiality, two locations of the always-ever never-yet-filled: on the one hand, the horizon that vision probes, and on the other, the welling up of the glance.

Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 54, MIT press, 1994 - In a section where she is speaking of Max Ernst's The Master's Bedroom, 1920