Closing Thoughts

One of John Baldessari's famous pieces, Subject Matter, succinctly captures the essence of our rumination on the boundaries created by the museum visitors' gazes-- with black letters printed on a light green background, Baldessari suggests: "Look at the subject as if you have never seen it before. Examine it from every side. Draw its outline with your eyes or in the air with your hands. And saturate yourself with it."

In Subject Matter, Baldessari asks the viewer to "saturate yourself" with the subject, implying perhaps that the viewer is the object in the subject/object dichotomy, but it really doesn't matter, because the object is saturated with the subject, the two are indistinguishable.  Prior to this blurring of subject and object distinction, though, the viewer must first outline the subject.

            
The collapsed binaries we have selected to explore are only a few of many. When we stepped into the Metropolitan Museum of Art amongst thousands of fellow museum visitors, we held the same assumptions as they did and maybe still do-- that there is a distinguishable separation between public and private, art and life, absence and presence (subject and object...etc). However, as we examine the various ways in which museum visitors establish a relationship to the museum exhibit through their gazes, we realized that these separations are like Baldessari's outlines drawn with eyes in the air-- they are not real entities that can be maintained or torn down. Instead, these separations are intellectual strategies demarcating a boundary separating two ends of a spectrum. Because museums emphasize these boundaries, we are actually liberated from the need to maintain them and thus are free to explore the spectrum, allowing ourselves to be saturated with subject matter. Foucault says that a heterotopia is a place where relations between various sites in a culture is put under spot light for examination and challenge. While museums serve as a heterotopia of time in Foucault's paper, perhaps it would not be too big of a stretch to say that because museums provided such clearly demarcated boundaries around public, art, and presence, (and by implication their opposites, private, life, and absence), they become a heterotopia of boundaries by allowing museum visitors to blur these boundaries.