The Mystery of the Excluded Middle

Artists have been capitalized for economic harvest; The labor, the burnout, and the process are excluded. The figure of the successful artist is the synthetic reality of the market—a vitrine of the few who "made it." Creativity, diversity, artistic freedom, and opportunity have been replaced by market rules: taste-making, trends, and the logic of supply and demand. This research looks practically at what the artist goes through and how they use subversive affirmation as a tool for critique.

The study unfolds as a meta-discursive essay that interrogates the space between being and non-being, using examples of performance and cannibalism to refer to the "in-betweens" of law, logic, and ethics. The figure of the cannibal, born from the impact of colonialism and extractivism, is here as a metaphor and a horizon to examine the endangered mechanisms of the art world. This artistic research holds the "Law of the Excluded Middle"—the third law of thought and the logical principle that a proposition must be either true or false—as a core framework to address binary thinking and its violence against the "in-betweens" of identity, trauma, ethics, and performing bodies.

The research identifies the "Excluded Middle" as a fertile site of "clandestine existence." Drawing on Aristotle’s metaphysics, Derrida’s différance, and the radical agency/surrender in Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, I argue that the contemporary subject—specifically the "migrant" or the "artist-as-other"—is forced into a paralyzing binary.