Proscenia of quotidian circumstance : theatre of everyday life

Everyone performs, everyday ... The frame of the camera always presents proscenia for everyday life to enter, displaced and perfectly positioned in a new aesthetic. When Duchamp upended a urinal on a pedestal, titled it 'fountain' and painted r. mutt on the side of it, the nature of art shifted from the condition of the ideal to immersion in wonder. The phenomenological process of setting aside names, 'all existing knowledge', creates the potential for everything and anything to become the object of sculptural scrutiny and art- a matter of perception. The camera was always prescient of theatre and it is no coincidence that photography developed in the same way and at the same pace that performance or 'staging' as we know it, became emphatically a matter of perception. Before the advent of camera obscura there was no rigid, quadrilateral framing of scene, whilst cardage parodied the arched or triptych window. The original apparatus of camera opened up the development of two proscenia: projection inwards as camera obscura and outwards as magic lantern. Geometric calculation enabled portable application of the screened compression of three to two dimensions and the flat image, projection and theatre set re-ordered as fore, middle and background. Prior to the lens, all visual representation appears sharp and the scale of one figure relative to another was a matter cultural and hierarchical significance, not physical distance. The photographic apparatus is, in its integral fashion, always inscripting and describing something, event or process in diegetic and ex-diegetic narrative, mapping closer to chaos, nature or quotidian circumstance than any other form of representation. Thereafter, the secular, rectangular, square compression of dimension and embalming of time creates a theatre of perception, everywhere and everyday