Katve-Kaisa Kontturi Ways of Following Immediations Series Editor: SenseLab “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains” – A.N. Whitehead The aim of the Immediations book series is to prolong the wonder sustaining philosophic thought into transdisciplinary encounters. Its premise is that concepts are for the enacting: they must be experienced. Thought is lived, else it expires. It is most intensely lived at the crossroads of practices, and in the in-between of individuals and their singular endeavors: enlivened in the weave of a relational fabric. Co-composition. “The smile spreads over the face, as the face fits itself onto the smile” – A. N. Whitehead Which practices enter into co-composition will be left an open question, to be answered by the Series authors. Art practice, aesthetic theory, political theory, movement practice, media theory, maker culture, science studies, architecture, philosophy … the range is free. We invite you to roam it. Ways of Following Art, Materiality, Collaboration Katve-Kaisa Kontturi OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London 2018 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2018 Copyright © Katve-Kaisa Kontturi 2018 This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Cover Art, figures, text, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restrictions. Cover Illustration © 2018 Leslie Plumb Cover Design by Leslie Plumb Typeset in Open Sans, an open font. Print ISBN 978-1-78542-059-7 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-060-3 Freely available online at: http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ways-of-following/ OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org Contents Introduction: … With … 7 Encounters 1. Breathing and Dancing 26 2. Work of Painting 47 Co-workings 3. Impersonal Connections 70 4. Autonomy of Process 82 5. Manual Labour 97 6. Zigzagging Art and Life 117 Sensations Prelude: An Oral Triptych 130 7. The Grimacing Mouth 136 8. The Preaching Mouth 154 9. The Screaming Mouth 176 A Follow-Up: Three Propositions 191 Notes 203 Acknowledgements 234 References 238 Index 259 Introduction: … With … To follow this book’s ethos and focus, let us begin … with art. There are two women at an unidentified urban train station. They wait, and discuss a work of art in the making. They are both involved; a collaboration is in process. One is in front of the camera, the other out of its scope. The voice outside the frame suggests that this is not an ordinary documentary: ‘There is no storyboard … it is not planned’ – instead, the project is open to elements of surprise. The woman on camera agrees: yes, it is ‘a lot more organic’ – implying that this video is true to the event as it unfolds. This excerpt is from the video Following Amie: The Artist at Work (2015) that documents the daily life of Amie Anderson, an art- worker who, among her other jobs, co-directs the artist-run initiative ‘Food Court’ in Melbourne’s Docklands. The video follows Amie through her diverse engagements, starting in a wintery dawn in her bedroom, where she packs her bags for the day. The collaborator shooting the video and following Amie is artist-researcher Maria Miranda [Figure 0.1]. As attested by the conversation at the train station, the video follows Amie’s day as it evolves. Capturing the sense of unrolling – the non-scripted unfolding of Amie’s day – requires reciprocity from the participants. Maria is not a director-follower in control of the situation, nor is Amie accounting for her day as she knows it. She is on the cusp of experience, facing what is to come. Here, following is not about tracing an already-happened 8 Introduction: … With … Figure 0.1. Maria Miranda (left) and Amie Anderson (right) in Following Amie: The Artist at Work (2015) by Maria Miranda and Amie Anderson – a video filmed with a smartphone on a selfie stick. story or experience. It is about entering a wave of life unfurling; about being taken up in its motion, moving with it – ‘“getting into something” instead of being the origin of the effort’, as philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1995, 121) puts it.1 In the video, this sense of following is created through images and sounds recorded by the mobile phone on a selfie stick. ‘Being taken up’ in the wave of Amie’s day is actualised in videographic movement that is ‘parallel to’ rather than ‘a step behind’: the two women often walk side by side. This parallel movement is enabled by the selfie stick; the camera is a step ahead of the women walking – it is, then, less a point of leverage between the follower and the followee than an ‘intercessor’ in attunement.2 An intercessor, according to Deleuze (1995, 125), is more than a mediator: it has creative powers as it enters into Introduction: … With … 9 what is happening and opens up be(com)ings to a new mutual movement – making the event more than it was. In the video, the selfie stick’s mobile point of view loosens the positionalities of the follower and the followee, engaging them in a movement where their roles are not fixed, and the story is still in the making. This is evident, for example, in Miranda adapting her actions according to the conditions of the day, even moving outside her director’s role to become Amie’s driver when public transport fails them. This way of following is not about shadowing a few steps behind, but about opening oneself up to a movement that exceeds the position one holds, the experiences one has had, or the knowledge one possesses. In the video, we see Amie listening attentively to her art students, being inspired by them; we hear her laughing with them, and note the encouraging hand gestures that also enter into her own art- making. We also sense the time it takes her to travel to earn extra money from cleaning. In short, we experience art in the making as it unfolds in its multiple relations. *** This book is about following art in movement, about being attentive to art in the making. It approaches a set of contemporary paintings, photographs, and installations as lively and shifting. The book shows that although paintings and photographs are often approached in their still finality, they are nevertheless imbued with perpetual movement: brushstrokes have their rhythm, paint cracks quietly, photographic stills wave gently in the air, and a model’s body tries to stay still by moving minutely. It is crucial to acknowledge art’s perpetual movement because it is in this movement and in the connections it fosters that, as this book claims, the singularity of any work of art persists: its potential to make a difference, to challenge habitual ways of being, thinking, and feeling. 10 Introduction: … With … Grasping this often-subtle movement necessitates multiple ways of following. First, the book steps into the processes by which art emerges in studios and exhibitions. It follows artists working and audiences encountering art. Looking, listening, discussing, modelling, and dancing are some of the modalities of following with which the book engages. The motivation for approaching art in this way is to value the intricate processes of making and sensing – their capacity to open even the stiffest of materials and figures beyond their seeming stillness. To follow, then, is to embrace the ‘work’ of art, its material, affective, and relational doings that push it beyond the representational function, offering something new instead of what is already known. Following Barbara Bolt’s practice-based, materialist- phenomenological postulation in Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image (2004a; see also 2004b; 2014), the emphasis here is on the intensities of the ‘work’ of art, on what art can do rather than on what art means or refers to. Erin Manning’s process philosophical practice is equally insightful in attending not to the artwork as such but to ‘how the work works’, how it opens, troubles, complicates, nuances, and emboldens (new) fields of experience (2013, 102; 2016, 84–85). Second, the foregrounding of art’s processual emergence through following is inseparable from the practice of writing. As noted above, this book argues that art’s ability to suggest new ways of living and being is embodied in its processual movement. This is the domain of intensities and flows that trickle up in the cracks of signification and representation. Writing is the practice through which these intensities can be harnessed and passed on. In a way, writing, too, is an intercessor in attuning to the unfolding event that is art. At its best, it can enhance the intensity of the event and relay its potential to the reader. At its worst, it can block the intensity of unfolding and impede the work from moving onwards. This book, then, is an experiment in writing as interceding with art, where language is used to enter into the swell of art in the making. Introduction: … With … 11 Writing with … … processes and flows The aim of following is to overcome the kind of analysis that detaches art from its processes of production.