If there is any genuine knowledge at all, there must be knowledge which I do not reach by way of some other knowledge, but through which alone all other knowledge is knowledge… If we know anything at all, we must be sure of at least one item of knowledge which we cannot reach through some other and which contains the real ground of all our knowledge.

- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge, 1795¹

Every now and then - not too often, of course, but luckily also not that seldom - an exhibition takes place somewhere that succeeds (more or less thoroughly) in dislocating and disorienting my viewing habits, in subverting, with varying degrees of benign force, the general pattern of expectations that I have come to inhabit as a professional art viewer - that is, someone who goes to museums, kunsthalles, galleries and various other art spaces because he or she, in some sense or other, 'has' to, and perhaps far less often than because he or she wants to. (Already here 'desire' establishes itself as a problem in and of the art world.) Foremost among these expectations ranks the delusory will to comprehension - the presumed ability to grasp the meaning of the art on display, even if (or especially if) it takes a lot of explaining, say, on the part of a willing gallery attendant, for it is assumed that such hard-won comprehension or insight - the sudden, all-illuminating flash of understanding, the 'genuine knowledge' referred to in the Schelling quotation above - will eventually also open our