The Rectangle and the Round

A baseball is exactly like an orange except one gets crushed and the other squeezed and the one is filed with cork and the other with pulp but otherwise they are identical in size and shape and every other way except for the rind in the orange and the yarn in the other covered in cowhide and stitched and if you threw the orange to a batter you'd get juiced, pulped and pitted and I don't imagine the orange would curve or sink or flutter like a knuckleball but otherwise they are indistinguishable in the dusk with the light behind them.

If you stick a band-aid on the orange it might fetch triple figures and become a museum piece as a decontextualized construction demonstrating the use of two disparate objects in juxtaposition causing a shift in our way of seeing and our conception of space.

The distinction between art and life has been closed. Pause is music. Sitting in a chair can be a dance and a clothesline is sculpture. Baseballs and oranges have a kind of beauty but beautiful is no longer the operative word in Art. We are suspicious of prettified images. Poetry is criticized for being too poetic. The pendulum has long since swung away from ornamental, classical forms. Museums might as well remove their walls.. Chris Burden's installation of Urban Lights adorn the entrance to the L.A. County Museum of Art and in the rear is a 340 ton boulder, Levitated Mass.

It is enough to have our perceptions rattled. A bandaged orange forces us to see the imagined wound, the confluence of round and rectangle shapes and the natural  and man-made incongruities. After being saturated with objects online, in magazines and on our tables every waking hour the effect is to grab us by the collar and LOOK  but look with different eyes. The art is in the experience of looking. For a brief moment the orange and the viewer may be transformed.

Better yet consider a blue orange and red Band-Aid. Or if the orange were a rectangle  and the Band-Aid round it would alter our senses even further. If you showed a straw coming out of an orange-colored baseball as a source of Vitamin C it could also take its place on a gallery wall in exhibition and shift our perceptions and maybe that's the name of the game.