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Cut and Place
by Donelle Woolford

A longer version of this text was first published in Octopus, the catalogue for an exhibition of site-specific art that took place in Bruges, Belgium, in 2002.

Obvious facts tend to remain invisible. In order to make them more "visible," we must suspend our usual concern with what they separate and focus instead on the process by which we cut up the world and create meaningful entities. In short, we must examine how we actually separate entities from one another, whether it be humans from animals, work from hobby, official from unofficial, or vulgar from refined.
–Eviatar Zarubavel, The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life,
New York: The Free Press, 1991.

Cutting is an act of distinction. Think of a carpenter cutting wood for a window frame, a surgeon transplanting an organ, or a kindergarten teacher dividing the day into activities, each with its instructive task and place. In each case, a certain amount of time or material is removed from one continuum and placed in another for the purpose of a particular use. Cutting, then, is a kind of authorship, a designation that alters the boundaries between things, surfaces, moments, rooms.

Such "authorships" ordinarily leave a scar unless they are accompanied by the art of placing. Whether closing a wound, laying tile, or installing objects in vitrines, the art of placing strives to alleviate the pain of cutting. Skillfully done, placing minimizes the subconscious anxiety that any dismembered object gives us, creating instead a sense of reconstituted wholeness and relief. The ability to create this sense of relief is what we generally refer to as craftsmanship.

If we can say that the physical goal of craftsmanship is to make objects excised from their original surroundings as comfortable as possible in their new ones (and vice versa), then the psychological purpose of craftsmanship is to smooth out the many acts of violence we perform on a daily basis by making them flush again with the world. Whether this smoothness is accomplished through a montage of differing materials (as in architecture) or through a succession of the same material (as in film) makes no difference, since smoothness occurs in a variety of learned skills, or pre-cisions. Precision is not limited to the manual skill of cutting and placing but also occurs in technical innovation, as in the invention of mortar to make field stones better fit together and, in turn, the invention of bricks to make better use of mortar; in grammar, as in the use of conjunctions and prepositional phrases; and in logic, as in the invention of classification systems designed to rationalize the gaps between disparate materials and things.

In the 20th century, a new kind of precision developed in the cinema for the purpose of reconciling the rupture of time that occurs between one still photograph and the next. Before cinema, the pinnacle of craftsmanship was anything that scrupulously maintained the distinction of its component parts in the same instant that they were totally uniform and smooth, as in the surfaces of Islamic architecture or GuttenbergÁs movable type. Cinema marks the moment when the components that make up a uniform object or surface begin to become indistinguishable. Through the process of editing film, the sensation of smoothness–and by association our sense of craftsmanship, and the craftsman himself–reached such a degree of perfection as to be rendered invisible. Because the act of cutting and placing in film is embedded in the continuum of film, the physical evidence of cutting and placing is buried in filmÁs narrative structure and the transparency of the material itself. And although the editing in many French New Wave films was meant to challenge these illusions–meant to exaggerate our spatial disorientation or to emphasize the "making" side of film making–it was still the uniformity of celluloid that made such deconstructions possible. Film editing accomplished degrees of smoothness and perfection previously not possible in the physical world. Thus, regardless of its content, seamless illusion rather than fact is filmÁs ultimate trait.

In the same way, the things we see while walking down the street on any given day display no evidence of the violence necessary to bringing them into view. A pair of shoes, an action movie, a banana–it doesnÁt matter. There they are, before our eyes like magic, produced without any trace of disturbance. Presto! Violence without consequences.

This stunning achievement has greatly altered how we regard the world around us, particularly those distinctions upon which the physical world is based. Art has not been exempt from this wholesale reappraisal. As Carl Andre presciently observed: "Up to a certain time I was cutting into things. Then I realized that the thing I was cutting was the cut. Rather than cutting into the material, I now use the material as the cut in space." Indeed.