…With the body spatialized and the gallery (the "place") turned into a socialized "body," what role do objects play? Goblets, mirrors, a scale, sheep's wool, wood, screen like spaces, things, in Cypis' project, become animated. Things are presented as always already intimately interdependent on the people and spaces that enliven them. The mirror is meaningless without the bodies/spaces that it projects; the scale pointless without the bodies to weigh it down; the video lens empty but for those people and spaces that cross its purview; the screen activated only with the representational splash of animation directed onto it by a video projector. These are not mute things that seem to rest within themselves, holding their significance immanently within their forms. They are things that are open to the world, taking their meaning from its (and our) mutating presence. Among them, we become things. Among them, we are spatialized, made part of a world of objects.

If language and thought (as well as art making and viewing) project us outward into intersubjective relations with other people in the social field, these arrays of objects engage us in an interobjective relationship with the world. As film theorist Vivian Sobchack has articulated this phenomenological conception, interobjectivity has an ethical component. We experience ourselves as viewing subjects (the privileged position allotted by the conventional art/viewer relation) but also as objects of embodied situations. As I engage with it here, Cypis's Angel of Histories parallels what Sobchack identifies as "the dual structure of passion and the subjectively-grounded reversibility of body and world" that necessarily entails politicized subjects -- subjects who acknowledge their own immanence, their own capacity for being objectified in relation to the world.