Jacques Aswad: white blind

The blind woman in Meyer Schapiro’s famed defense of abstract art, to whom the art historian appeals to teach us how to see, is a symbol for what (artistic, scientific, political, philosophic) thought is in need of closing down and entombing for it to form its own image.  There is a heuristic facet to the exclusionary gesture inseparable from every innovative ambition (and I propose two examples: abstraction and conceptual art): a search for a (last/final?) place for art, its field (or the one of its own self-image) blunting, only apparently, the forms of its transitivity.