The Mean is the second of the two coordinates of the Profile. The Motor names what orients an artist; the Mean, the constant in the realisation of the works. Neither follows from the other: one Motor can be served by very different Means.
In an artist at maturity, the three formally most dissimilar works still have something in common: their Mean. This constant is not read in appearance — video, performance, photography, painting, sculpture, installation — but at a level prior to the choice of medium: the regime of image or object, the mise-en-scène, the tempo, the relation established with the visitor.
This constant may vary at the beginning of a career; it tends to settle with maturity. An artist's Mean therefore becomes more precise as the body of work grows.
At the base of the Mean lies the nature of what the artist makes — one of three fundamental categories:
- Set: the work is neither an image nor an object, but the set formed by what the artist makes together with its exhibition context, its relation to the visitor, or the action whose traces it carries;
- Object: a thing with finite contours, individualised, with characteristics of its own, independent of its environment;
- Image: a two-dimensional presentation of visual information sufficient in itself, whether still or moving, handcrafted or produced through an automated intermediary.
Each category is then subdivided in two on three successive occasions, leading to the twenty-four types of Means, numbered 1 to 24. Like the Motors, they are detailed in a diagram, whose columns run from the fundamental category to the finest type: an artist's Mean is the path that crosses them.
An artist receives one of these twenty-four types: this is their canonical Mean. It is established from the works and from whatever comes from the artist: titles, writings, statements. Refinement and singularity specify it beyond the canonical.
Motor and Mean together compose the artist's Profile: in a Profile written 21;15, the Mean is 15.