Abstract

Jacques Rancière has defined the 'distribution of the sensible' as the effect of a type of aesthetico-political decision making that creates a partitioning of the realm of the perceivable in relation to both art and society. The artworld itself constructs its own particular types of curatorial partitioning: between art and non-art, between 'dominant, residual and emergent', and between mainstream and periphery. This essay examines certain 'boundary effects' that come into being as a result of the act of the partitioning itself, and makes a close examination of what are arguably two new categories in contemporary art, defined as either 'crossover' or 'interventionist.' Both these categories have a certain relationship to a culturally constructed boundary or partition. In the former case, we see a type of artwork emerge that is the result of the overdetermination of the partition itself. In the latter case, artworks appear that are antinomically situated at both sides of a partition simultaneously.