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But the very fact of their being regarded as art-products involves an immediate recognition that their shape is attributed to some purpose or other and to a definite end. For this is reason there is no immediate delight whatever in their contemplation. A flower, on the other hand, such as a tulip, is regarded as beautiful, because we meet with a certain finality in its perception, which, in our estimate of it, is not referred to any end whatever.
I. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Oxford, 1928, In. p. 80
Decorative and pleasing flower paintings are not today an obvious vehicle for high art practice. Sally Cox's exhibition puts into play and exploits a tension between simple pleasures of viewing and reference to a broad set of issues prevalent in contemporary theory. Contemporary art practice being what it is, Cox's problem is almost the complement and obverse of Kant's attempts to cut questions of beauty from allied questions of use, meaning, and technical perfection. Artists today must virtually overwrite works into discursive contexts, into theory, so that 'delight' in vision can itself be bracketed, become a quotation, conceptually cut from any retrograde humanist account of art. Dis/locations is most productively viewed as opening these issues of the relation of art to the ornamental and to 'theory': to questions of the proper and improper uses of art. But Cox's strategy is to begin with an explosive