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outsider, endowed or enburdened with a thought-riddled nature, is committed to truth, just like the saint. Both Camus’ Meursault and the Christian saints are martyrs for the sake of truth – saint and existentialist outsider are unable to live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what they see and touch as reality. Thus, both seek salvation in extremes, finding it difficult to see bourgeois grey anywhere, joining Norbert Francis Attard in an ideal, existentialist Place called Paradise. Either one or the other extreme alludes to the other or to the one. Taking the most extreme of extremes, life and death, it is only the latter which is the clue to authentic living. Both birth in life and death are mutual conditions of the other. This is the kind of extremity Freud stated when he invoked the pleasure principle and the death instinct simultaneously. Each extreme is a thauma to the other, a moment or a sense of wonder and recognition that impels philosophisation and creation of any form of art, including that of installation. Installation art in all its guises explores the notion that space and time are, in and of themselves, fodder for artistic consumption. An artist takes over an installation space like a temporary squatter whose clutter of possessions challenges boundaries and sparks dialogue between the space itself and its contents. Dialogue because the being of an installation is not a matter of sole location, but an engagement with spatial conditions of time, light, weather. Thus a site-specific installation is created, beholded, and then dismantled, the actual process showing the two extremes of man who is bent both on creation and destruction, continuity and death. It comes as no surprise that Beuys utters the words ‘death’ and ‘Continuum’ in the same artistic breath. In some of Attard’s installations, the space itself is a religious context and in most of them, the dialogue is a reflective one – both in form, content and meaning. The extremes on which Attard’s installations are based are each reflected and refracted to a different density, yet never Clone(d), be it the waters of the Noosa River, the upper and lower layers of an Earth Temple, a shallow basin of water in a church, even the projection itself of AND SMUFF2603. And though reflected and refracted, these extremes stay contained in themselves and never tint to create a middle distance on touching. In essence, the red and green cloth in Beyond Conflict twist and turn in each other, like the blue and red pannolenci in Paola Pezzi’s 2002 Vortice, yet they remain separate and never copulate in a blue haze. If there is a middle distance, then it is an abstract layer, like the water between the extremes of heaven and hell in Palestrina and Hell or that in Attard’s Taiwan installation Container 21st Century, which despite carrying Richard Wilson’s industrial overtones, manages to regenerate and connect continental extremes through a waterfall. Reflection in itself is a eulogy of repetition, an existential preoccupation with time. Reflection is continuation, not that eternal and flawless fabrication of cardboard boxes on the production line but rather, the erweiterte Produktion of Beuys’s multiples and editions. Such is eternal recurrence, a salvation and renewal for man, the eternal lack of telos