Deconstructing the Frame: Spacing, Trace and the Phenomenological Ontology of Post-Conceptual Art

Abstract

What emerges when contemporary art is read—not as a historical period but as a post-conceptual condition—through Derrida’s concepts of spacing and trace? Drawing on George Bondor’s interpretation of Derridean spacing within a post-foundational hermeneutic ontology, I argue that post-conceptual art literally deconstructs the frame, displacing the artwork from the regime of pure presence, objecthood and representational logic toward a relational field of traces, intervals, and historical forces. Read through the lens of the parergon, the image no longer appears as a self-identical object, but as a site of contamination between inside and outside, text and context, memory and its erasures. In this sense, the aesthetic relation becomes a practice of spacing that unsettles fixed meanings, institutionalized memory, and totalizing narratives.

Keywords: Derrida, spacing, trace, hermeneutic ontology, post-conceptual art