Embodied Act of Framing

Lisa van Sorge's (2025) signature concept and the constructive thesis of her synthesis of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida for a contemporary phenomenological aesthetics. Embodied act of framing names painting reread as the embodied subject's two-register decision — the material act of proposing a frame (Grosse) and framing as a critical manner of configuring sense (Sillman) — both governed by the *parergon*'s undecidability. The concept's distinctive contribution: framing is not a fact about the work but an act by the painter, for which they are responsible, even though no rule determines in advance where the work begins and ends.

Key Points

  • Two registers of framing:
    • The material act of proposing a frame — physical decisions on the work's borders (where the spray-paint stops; whether the wall is part of the work; whether furniture is incorporated). Paradigm: Katharina Grosse's Mumbling Mud (K11 Shanghai 2018–19), Das Bett (2004), The Bedroom (2023).
    • Framing as a critical manner of configuring sense — decisions over visibility/invisibility, what comes to attention, what is foregrounded and backgrounded. Paradigm: Amy Sillman's Temporary Object (Naples 2023), Thirteen Possible Futures (Tate London 2012); process-as-work, no "final" painting.
  • Embodied: the framing-decision is made by a particular subject with a particular body, sedimented habits, and a particular lifeworld — not by a disembodied artistic intelligence. Hence the socio-political register: framing decisions reflect and reproduce orientations and exclusions (Ahmed 2006).
  • Act: framing is something the painter does, not a property the work has. This converts the question of medium-essence into the question of artistic responsibility.
  • Of framing: the operative figure is the *parergon* — the inside/outside-undecidable boundary. Without parergon's deconstructive logic, "framing" would be a banal description.
  • Anti-Greenbergian, anti-arbitrary: contemporary painting is "beside itself" (Joselit 2009) — open-ended yet still painting, since the embracing (not abandoning) of the ambiguous essence is what lets it remain a practice.
  • Ongoing, not finished: every painting is "abortive effort to say something which still remains to be said" (MP "Indirect Language" 79); the framing-decision is repeated each time a new work is undertaken.

What the Concept Does

Embodied act of framing performs three distinguishable kinds of work:

  1. It synthesizes MP's expression-theory with Derrida's parergon-logic, where prior commentaries had treated MP and Derrida as polemical partners (especially after Derrida's 2000 critique of MP's flesh; see jacques-derrida). Van Sorge's contribution is to identify the Cézanne-shared-anchor as the bridge: both philosophers read Cézanne, MP focusing on the working process and Derrida on the unfulfilled promise, and the synthesis is built at this shared site.

  2. It transforms framing from a fact about the work into an act by the artist, embodying responsibility under undecidability. This is what differentiates embodied act of framing from the bare parergon: the parergon names the structure of the boundary; embodied act of framing names the subject-side of working at that boundary. Without the embodied subject, the parergon would describe the work's inside/outside undecidability without anchoring it in a particular life, body, and history.

  3. It opens the socio-political register from within phenomenological aesthetics, by routing the parergon-decision through the embodied subject's "particular manner of being embodied and situated." If the painter's framing-decision determines what is rendered visible and what is rendered invisible (by being placed outside the frame), then framing is implicated in the politics of attention — what counts, what doesn't, who decides — and Ahmed's queer phenomenology becomes a natural extension rather than an external supplement.

What It Rejects

  • Greenbergian medium-specificity (Greenberg 1965): the painting's essence as flatness-plus-paint-on-canvas. Embodied act of framing dissolves medium-essence by making the boundary itself a site of decision.
  • Pure / disembodied Derridean deconstruction of the frame: Derrida's Truth in Painting lacks a robust subject (van Sorge §4); without the embodied subject, the parergon-decision floats free of the body that makes it.
  • MP's painterly "rendering visible" rhetoric where it slides toward universal accessibility (CD 20: "claim on every possible mind"; IL 51: "uttered and accessible"): the embodied act of framing is partial, not universally accessible; what each painter renders visible is co-constituted by what they cannot ask, see, or expose. See van Sorge §6 and the candidate claim at claims#mp-painting-account-too-presence-bound.
  • Calculative or pre-determined artistic choice: the framing-decision is genuine decision precisely because no rule determines it in advance.
  • Arbitrariness: contemporary painting is "beside itself," not anything-goes. The parergon's undecidability is not pluralism but constitutive non-identity — the practice is open-ended because the framing-decision must be made each time, not because anything could count.
  • Aestheticism that abstracts painting from the lifeworld: the embodied act of framing is socio-politically saturated via Ahmed; phenomenological aesthetics is here continuous with a politics of orientation and attention.

Stakes

If the embodied act of framing is accepted as the structure of contemporary painting:

  • Cases like Grosse and Sillman are no longer exceptions to a stable category but exemplifications of what was already in MP's reading of Cézanne's hesitations and multiple outlines (van Sorge §3, §5). The "contemporary" is then a thematization of structures that operated tacitly in modernism.
  • Phenomenological aesthetics becomes contextual: the work is read in its lifeworld, not as a self-sufficient object. Joselit's "transitive painting" (October 130, 2009) and Ahmed's queer phenomenology (2006) become natural extensions.
  • MP's painting essays must be tightened by his own perception theory: the rhetoric of universal accessibility (CD 20) is read against the rhetoric of limited perspective (WoP 53) and the punctum caecum (May 1960 working note, see visible-invisible). This generates a corrective interpretive thesis (live; see claims#mp-painting-account-too-presence-bound (live)).
  • The painter's responsibility enters the artwork: not just for what is in the work but for where it begins and ends. This is a novel ethical site within aesthetics, derived not from the artwork's content but from the framing-decision's structure.

Problem-Space

The concept addresses the recurring problem: how does an artwork have determinate identity if its boundary is undecidable? See parergon#Problem-Space for the broader recurrence. Embodied act of framing is the subject-side of this problem-space — the question of who decides, with what body, in what lifeworld. The other inhabitations of the problem-space (chiasm, ineinander, arche-screen, the expanded field) address different sides of the same problem.

Connections

  • was developed by van Sorge 2025 — wiki's only source for this concept; the page is novel, single-source.
  • is a synthesis of parergon (Derrida's deconstructive component) and motor-intentionality / primordial-expression (MP's embodied component)
  • grounds the corrective at claims#mp-painting-account-too-presence-bound (live) — the framing-decision necessarily renders something invisible while rendering something visible, so MP's "uttered and accessible" rhetoric cannot stand without qualification
  • applies parergon to primordial-expression — MP's "process of expressing" (CD 17) becomes, under the parergon, an act of framing
  • contextualizes paul-cezanne's working process — Cézanne's "multiple outlines" (CD 15; EM 143–145) are reread as embodied framing-decisions rather than realist hesitations
  • complements visible-invisible — the embodied act of framing supplies the agent-side of the visibility/invisibility structure, bringing the painter's body and lifeworld into the figure-ground dynamic
  • opens onto sara-ahmed — embodied habits "make certain things available to us, and make other things appear out of our reach"; framing-decisions reflect and reproduce orientations
  • is structurally distinct from coherent-deformation — both are MP-inflected concepts of artistic working; coherent deformation is the style register (universal index of expressive operation), while embodied act of framing is the boundary register (inside/outside decision)
  • is structurally parallel to interactive-ontology (Faul 2024) — both van Sorge and Faul are recent MP-secondary commentators on painting who correct MP's "rendering visible" rhetoric where it slides toward universal accessibility. Both use a contemporary woman painter as case study (van Sorge: Grosse, Sillman; Faul: Rothenberg). Both insist the painter's act has structural rather than imposed character. The corrections converge at "painting is partial / non-totalizing / responsibility under undecidability" but diverge at the operative figure: van Sorge routes the correction through the embodied subject's framing-decision under *parergon*; Faul routes it through the perceptual world's openness under institution / coherent-deformation. The parergon is a boundary concept (inside/outside undecidability); institution is a temporal-developmental concept (sense-by-divergence). The two are not in conflict but engage different aspects of the painter's act. See claims for the candidate cross-source structural-parallel.
  • false-friend caution against "the frame as cultural-historical given" — the embodied act of framing is not a sociological fact about how cultures-have-bordered-paintings but a structural feature of artistic decision under undecidability

Open Questions

  • Is "embodied act of framing" the same concept under two registers (material + configuring sense), or two related concepts sharing a name? Van Sorge presents them as one, but the registers are conceptually distinct: the material register is about physical edges, the configuring register is about visibility-decisions. A future paper or ingest may need to differentiate.
  • How does the embodied-framing-decision relate to MP's *I can*? Is the framing-decision a special case of I can, or a structurally different kind of act? Van Sorge gestures toward the connection (§5) but does not develop it.
  • The MP-internal corrective is the paper's most distinctive contribution but also its most contested premise. If MP's "lining of invisibility" passages (EM 147; VI 136) actually do the work van Sorge wants them to do, then MP needs no correction — only completion. Is the embodied act of framing a correction of MP or a completion of him?
  • Can the concept be extended beyond painting? Sculpture (where Derrida's drapery example originates), photography, performance, and installation art all involve framing-decisions. Van Sorge restricts herself to painting, but the structure should generalize.
  • What is the relation to institution / stiftung? Van Sorge's footnote 77 acknowledges the connection without developing it: MP's I&P 41 brings painting's expressive ongoingness to Stiftung as an ongoing event. If framing is an Urstiftung of the work's boundary, then every new painting is also a Nachstiftung and Endstiftung of the framing-decision the painter has institutionalized in their oeuvre. Future ingest may develop this.

Sources

  • vansorge-2025-painting-as-framing — the source's signature thesis. §1 introduction (3); §3 Grosse case (5–7); §5 reading MP via Derrida (10–13); §6 Sillman case + the MP-internal corrective (13–17); §7 conclusion (17–18). Read closely for this page; all citations in this concept page anchor to specific sections.
  • Single-source page: this is a novel concept developed by one source on the wiki. The page should not be cited on other pages as if it were a settled concept; treat it as a live thesis (concept-page analogue of a live claim).