As Orange As An Orange

As Orange As An Orange is a photograph purchased from the Getty Images image bank of a black box juxtaposed with the technical description Getty supplies with the image. Rather than explaining the contents of the black box, the text comprises technical information about the two-dimensional image and functions as a set of parameters determining the work’s usage, size, location, display period and territory. In the first instance the work can be read as a metaphor for the impossibility of extracting objective content from artworks. What is important here, however, is not so much the secret of the contents of the black box or the ‘objective’ technical description of the two-dimensional image, but rather the tension between the different components, the interspace in the work as a whole, which is circular and paradoxical in character. Likewise the title doesn’t actually say anything about the nature of the ‘orange’ as a fruit or about the colour ‘orange’ , but comes up with an inescapable tautology that suggests an inconceivable and transcendent ‘real’ domain beyond language and image.