The Border as Parergon

. . . every analytic of aesthetic judgment presupposes that we can rigorously distinguish between the intrinsic and the extrinsic. Aesthetic judgment must concern intrinsic beauty, and not the around and about. It is therefore necessary to know—this is the fundamental presupposition, the foundation—how to define the intrinsic, the framed, and what to exclude as frame and beyond the frame.

Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” October (Summer, 1979)

In his essay on Kant’s concept of the “parergon” or ornament Derrida famously interrogates the status of the aesthetic as the necessary mediator between pure and practical reason. Even as the aesthetic seeks to challenge the violence of instrumental reason, defined by the ontological bifurcation between individual consciousness and the external world, it carries forward its own form of monological closure. Thus, Kant struggles to differentiate those modes of experience that are “intrinsic” to the aesthetic and those which are merely accessory. In this manner, Derrida’s analysis gestures towards a series of interrelated divisions; between art and vernacular culture, between art and activism, and between the artist and the broader public. Inside and outside, purity and impurity, art and not-art have become defining oppositions across the broader history of modernism. The US/Mexico border crossing offers a cognate geopolitical expression of this binary system. The border crossing is a liminal zone; a zone of mediation between two rationalist systems. It is a space of containment and canalization; of passage and the denial of passage; of inspection and surveillance, of sudden movement and inexplicable delay. But it is also a site of provisional community; bound together by shared subordination to the spatial contingencies of the state. What does it mean to “intervene” in such a space, far from the comfortingly familiar constraints of the institutional art world against which an “ornamental” criticality is so often acted out?

EDT 3.0’s play Social Echologies is performed within and beyond the border crossing. In the final act, the “Palindrone” hovers in the air, linking the two sides of the border through movement and transmission. Beneath it a singer entertains the slowly moving line of cars, accompanied by a boom box. Not far away Annabel Turrado methodically shaves down a large block of ice, creating raspados in the hot sun. Here “ICE” is melted down into refreshment for thirsty travelers awaiting the crossing. The pun and the palindrome co-exist as forms of wordplay. While the pun is defined by a generative dilation of meaning, in which one referent shadows another, the palindrome is defined by repetition and mirroring, as meaning remains unchanged from either direction. It suggests an ontological dynamic of sameness that parallels echo-location, in which the searching voice, like narcissus, is in dialogue only with itself. Social Echologies speaks of our transformation from “a species with roots” to a “species with antennas,” from a self defined by reciprocal integration with the world around us, to an identity that passively receives transmissions from a broadcasting center. The border zone is predicated on the containerization and fixity of subjectivity, between Mexican and American, between legal and illegal, between one self and another. The work of Annabel Turrado and EDT 3.0 ask how we might recover our rootedness in a broader community of resistance, while retaining our autonomy from the petrified forms of identity imposed by the border itself.