Art + Australia. Issue 7 (56.1): Event Horizon

ISSN 0004-301 X
141 pages | Softcover | B&W and colour images 
August 2020

Editor: Edward Colless
Authors: Edward Colless, Tom Melick, Thomas Moran, James Tunks, Katie Paine, Damien Rudd, Suzanne Fraser, Chantelle Mitchell, Jaxon Waterhouse, Janet Inyika, Matt Dickson, Camile Roulière, Ursula de Leeuw, Diego Ramirez, Andrew Brooks, Vincent Le, Lynette Smith

The horizon is the sum of all vanishing points, at least all those within the span or range of any fixed perspective onto the world. That sum is a monument of infinite scale, no matter how narrow the viewpoint, how partial or limited its focus is. Any small segment of the horizon line will contain an infinitude of vanishing points equal to the infinitude of points in the entire 360 degree sweep of the world’s circumference. The horizon says: that difference doesn’t matter. From this angle, the horizon is an arc of values that could be written in a trivial—because it is ultimately meaningless or of little value—sigma notation: the sum of all points on or any segment of the horizon, 1 to n, will be equal to the sum 1 to n±1. (Infinity plus or minus 1 still equals infinity.) Less trivially, because the horizon is also the border, orbit or compass of a viewpoint, it’s also the last appearance of the world before it drops out of view. The last appearance of something, whether at the scale of the world or of a vista onto it, indexes its disappearance. But because, in this perspectival topography, the horizon itself never disappears no matter how far and fast you move toward or away from it, this horizon could also be written in calculus as the function of a limit condition. An exponentiation rather than a sum. Either way you look at it, the horizon—crucial to any perspectival rendering and thus to any sense of proportion and ratio or linearity or law to the world, and crucial to any outlook, community, dynasty, enclosure, haven or empire—cannot be observed as an image but only as a diagram of something otherwise imperceptible and inaccessible.