Matthew Fuller Duchamp, M
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
r-- I 44 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Cabanne, P. (1971), Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. R Padgett. New York: Da Capo Press. Camnitzer, L. (2007), Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation. Chapter 5 Austin: University of Texas Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum. Art Methodologies in Media Ecology Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994), "What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. BurchelL New York: Columbia University Press. Matthew Fuller Duchamp, M. (1973), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson. New York: Da Capo Press. Guattari, F. (1988), 'Jean:Jacques Lebel, Painter of Transversality,' Globe E, 8, trans. M. McMahon, online at http://www.artdes.monash.edu.au/globe/#issue8 (accessed on 12 May 2008). Art is no longer only art. Its methods are recapitulated, ooze out and become Guattari, F. (1995), Chaosmosis, an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Baines and feral in combination with other forms of life. Art methodologies convey art's 1- Pefanis. Sydney: Power publications. capacities to enact a live process in the world, launching sensorial particles and Guattari, F. (1996), The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko. Oxford: BlackwelL other conjunctions in ways and combinations that renew their powers of distur- Katzenstein,!' (ed.) (2004), Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the bance and vision. Art methodologies are a range of ways of sensing, doing and Avant-Garde. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. knowing generated in art that are now circulating more haphazardly, perhaps Oiticica, H. (1999), 'Position and Program' (1966) and 'General Scheme of the less systematically, and requiring of a renewed form of understanding in order New Objectivity' (1967), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. A. Alberro and to trace and develop them. Art methodologies are cultural entities, embodied B. Stimson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. in speech, texts, sounds, behaviours and the modes of connection between Piper, A. (1996a), Out of Order, Out of Sight Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art things that share and develop, work on, art's capacity of disturbance and the 1968-1992. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Piper, A. (1996b), Out of Order, Out of Sight Volume 2: Selected Writings in Art Criticism multi-scalar engorgement of perception. 1967-1992. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. As art systems proliferate, sometimes clenching into magnificently puckered Wall,1- (1999 (1985)), 'Dan Graham's Kammerspiel,' in Conceptual Art: A Critical dots, at other times unraveling into torrents of work and of life, art methodolo- llnthology, eds. A. Alberro and B. Stimson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. gies shuttle back and forth between entities in art systems and other domains with a certain range of freedoms, encountering and staging constraints. The generation and circulation of art methodologies invokes a formation of art that is not a conservative system pushing a named, trimmed and dealt with few up the heights of a pyramid built on the mangled achievements of many others, the classic paradigm, but a system that condenses and spews out moments of relationality. This happens with no necessary connection to named entities such as author, piece, project, owner, artist, provenance. Art methodologies circulate, gain traction, shift, die off, amongst a more gen- eral flocculation of ideas, styles and modes of inflection. A diffusion is occurring in which art methodologies can pop up unexpectedly, not even recognizing themselves as art, indeed possibly not even having that filiation in a genealogi- cal sense, but connecting to it by means of arrival via a different phylogenetic route, or move in a way for which the idea of such a tracking is ludicrous. Such an understanding of art methodologies relies on an understanding of cultures as living processes involving stability and diversification that assemble circula- tion vectors, hot, cooling and intermixing, driven by invention and mutation, that act as pulsional zones for the circulation and invocation of signs and dynamics. That is, art methodologies may exist at this scale, they might drive cultures or be sucked along in their wake. I 46 Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New Art Methodologies in Media Ecology 47 Cultures, media ecologies mixed in with and passing through them, are con- In this way art methodologies as an idea is too fragile, or its scope too veyors of heat, materials and intelligence that at once provide a means, with their small, to conform to the totalizing ambitions of movements demanding own particular rhythms, for the mix and conservation of modes and the multi- the complete subsumption of everyday life by art as characterized by, amongst scalar conveyance of potentially mutational effects and dynamics, that themselves others, the later Situationist InternationaL What is described here is not a intermingle, block, and replicate dimensions of relationality, congealing as classic takeover bid but a shifting and opening of the permutational matrix of events, medial entities and processes of subjectivation. They certainly exist in influences and possibilities between intersecting fields, the registration of an and as the classically defined sense of media as systems for storage, processing apparent torsion in cultural dynamics releasing the expressiveness of s and distribution of cultural material, but also pass along without them. insubordination. Indeed, the proliferation of art methodologies into other forms oflife cannot simply be understood to be good, democratic, enabling or humane in the way Context that everything is supposed to be participatorily dressed up nowadays; or simply grindingly joyful and Christian in the mode of a 'don't worry be happy' brand Some context is useful for describing this shift. One aspect might simply be the of Spinozism. Art methodologies share part of the wider question of knowledge massification of art education undergone in some parts of the world since the stemming from their contribution to the curse fingered by Paul Rabinow when middle of the twentieth century. To take the British Isles, ifwe assume that most he says, of the 'anthropological problem', that, 'anthropos is that being who graduates from art schools since the 1960s are largely still alive that means suffers from too many logoi' (2003: 6). (This is to place surplus consciousness that there are several tens of thousands of people around with some kind of art as a foundational condition, not as a calculable excess figured as emancipatory training. Clearly not all of them are now artists or designers in a way that is rec- from or compensatory to social position.) Art is a means of alienation, a pre- ognized by art systems. What then happens to the ideas, ways of seeing the cious source ofself-mutilation. Anthropos is a residue and shaper of evolutionary world and doing things that art allows for and entrains? I am not interested forces, and one of its subcategories is man. Man, is a pathological animal, here in making an account of so-called 'transferable skills', but more in how (Nietzsche) a sick animal, (Burroughs) a plague (Margulis) that is also traversed, accretions of cultural reflexes and modes of intensification moving through used as a nutrient sac of protein-bearing pus or as a breeding ground for numer- populations, at microscopic or larger scales, invent their own means of circula- ous other sicknesses, language and culture being virulent amongst them. To tion, mutation and alliance.1 speak of art methodologies requires a way of recognizing culture that is beyond Another contributing current is the context of art as popular culture. One man. We should be attentive to its particular traits and capacities but not get aspect would be the more systematic celebritization of art, but another, more stuck in its skin. interesting instance would be the TV series Jackass, mixing the precisely trau- In his discussions of Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze sets up the term 'Method' for matic end of art with bodies (i.e. that of Chris Burden), with skate culture, and particular attention (Deleuze, 1988; 1992). Method is the means by which the time-rhythm of TV comedy. A more simple example, the migration of art Spinoza fabricates a machine capable of travelling across the universe and at methodologies into pop music is reasonably well charted, and more interest- the same time, dig into or suffuse microcosmic scalar realities, allowing them to ingly remains a serious zone of contention, but to account for the phenomena be composable, alienable from common sense, into the realm of geometry and it is necessary to do more than recognize the mapping of ideas and means from love. Methods are procedures, regimes, tricks on the self, which allow us to get one relatively stable cultural domain into another. What are described here as beyond everyday perception and the rule of the commonplace. possible contextualizing dynamics, are perhaps more adequately also under- What is Philosophy? expands this vocabulary of method by describing the stood as symptoms. three modes, variations, variables and varieties that the book's three planes, or Equally, the circulation of art methodologies can be seen as intersecting 'daughters of chaos' philosophy, science and art produce as they cut, each in with and feeding off a more general reflexivity, self-observation woven into the their different way, through the arcs of life, of chaos (Deleuze and Guattari, actions of the self. Here the entity functioning as a self may range from a pro- 1994: 208). Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on sensual perception in art is duction process, a dance move and its stability and variation, the repertoire of immensely productive as one parameter of a fine speculative matrix, but it an erotic subculture at sizes scalable from the sub-individual to massifying level misses out many other kinds of dynamics running through both contemporary or a cybernetically self-monitoring national corpus or a personal fitness regime.