ABSTRACT
A simulacrum of life, art enacts dramas of expression in the presence of constraint – temporal, spatial, personal. The verbal arts are limited by the formal resources of language and syntax. In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce sought to push language beyond its usual boundaries, but what he accomplished in the outcome was as much a demonstration of what language could not do at its limit as a demonstration of what it could. In the plastic arts, the constraints are those of materiality, dimensionality and scale; subject to ordinary rules of engineering, these arts sometimes enact the frustrated hope of overcoming rules, most famously perhaps in the great Hellenistic marble of ‘Laocoön and his Sons’. In the visual arts, no matter how big the canvas, the image runs up against its frame or its limit, and drama happens at the moment when the artist has to come to terms with finitude, sometimes in a spirit of acquiescence, sometimes implying a life and world beyond the frame that are impervious to boundaries.
