The viewer and the image become like actors in Worringer’s art, in the way that Bruno Latour describes it in his network-actor theory. If you perceive space as a whole, and then realize that relationships are formed between the objects within it, you’ll quickly notice that Worringer’s paintings aren’t merely showplaces. They form a model world consisting of separate spaces, and are semantically connoted in different ways, depending upon the observer’s standpoint.
Worringer’s works of art need to be hung so that the relationship between the paintings and the space is taken into consideration. To do this, Worringer orients himself toward Juri M. Lotman’s theory of spatial semantics. In this theory, the spatial order—and hence the way the observer positions himself in space within this construct—visually expresses relationships that can’t be experienced. Individual elements in a painting determine not only the connotative structure, but also the relationships between the individual works, the movements of viewers in the space, and their relationship to the painting.