Object Oriented Ontology, Art and Art-Writing

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After The Passions: Object Oriented Ontology, Art and Art-writing

PRUE GIBSON DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES 2014 Originality Statement

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

Signed:

Dated:

i Acknowledgements

My supervisor Professor Stephen Muecke welcomed me into academic life and has supported me ever since. He introduced me to Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology and slowed my usual cracking pace to a more considered and cautious speed. Each time I felt I had discovered something new about writing, I realised Stephen had led me there. I have often tried to emulate his mentoring method for my own students: without judgement, enthusiastic and twinkle-eyed. Through the second half of the thesis process, my co-supervisor Professor Edward Scheer jumped in and demanded evidence, structured argument and accountability. This was the perfect timing for a rigorous edit. Thanks to you both, for evermore.

UNSW Senior Lecturers Michelle Langford and Sigi Jottkandt, respectively, offered me mentorship, and a generous and full-length thesis reading with exceptional feedback, when I was in dire need of their support. Thank you so much for such spirited collegiality. A wider thanks to UNSW for giving me a Dean’s Leadership Award in Creative and Performing Arts and for offering me the Teaching Fellowship in Creative Writing during the ﬁnal year of my studies. This Fellowship gave me the conﬁdence and support to believe I was in the right place, producing the right project.

Thanks to my fellow UNSW researchers Amy Ireland and Baylee Brits for the Aesthetics After Finitude reading group, for multiple conversations about Speculative Realism, for shared conference panel sessions and for great friendship. Thank you to Amy, Baylee and my two supervisors for the chance to co-organise the Xhums conference, Aesthetics After Finitude 2015, which has been a great opportunity to marry the ﬁelds of academia with art. Thanks to the journals MC, Antennae and Evental Aesthetics for peer-reviewing and accepting four chapters of my thesis, as journal articles. And thank you so much to the artists I was able to talk to and whose work I was able to re-purpose into ﬁction for this thesis: David Eastwood, Janet Laurence, Elena Knox, Petra Gemeinboeck, Jacque Drinkall, Rochelle Haley, Monika Behrens and Sam Leach, and to the remaining artists who permitted me to publish their images. I am grateful to these artists for their shared interest in Speculative Realism, trans-species life and art. So many conversations and so much shared research.

Thanks ﬁnally to my family. I dedicate this manuscript to my mother, in memory of my late father.

ii The research and writing of this thesis has inadvertently led me to my next ﬁeld of research: plants and bio-art. Robotany, plant intelligence, ﬂoral aesthetics of cure. So, the complex problems and paradoxes, enacted in this thesis, are informing future work. I only introduce this next research topic because it would never have manifested for me, as a funded project, without the chance to fully investigate OOO and SR concepts and art. I am hugely appreciative of the continued support I have been given by UNSW to complete the research and writing of this PhD.

iii Contents

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 2: The Equality of the Run ...... 46

CHAPTER 3: Art Theory/fiction as Hyperobject ..... 70

CHAPTER 4: Telepathy: Knowledge Zero ...... 97

CHAPTER 5: Magnetic Materiality ...... 115

CHAPTER 6: The Politics of Sorcery ...... 140

CHAPTER 7: The Disappearance ...... 164

CHAPTER 8: Machinic Interaction and Robot Love .186

CONCLUSION ...... 201

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 206

iv INTRODUCTION

ABSTRACT This thesis is located in a cross-over domain between art writing and art theory. Writing about art is a professional activity in which ‘theory’ can be more or less explicit, but significantly present. The specific thread of contemporary theory embraced is that of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), or Speculative Realism (SR), from which a number of principles are elaborated, and activated, in the relationship between writing and theory that the thesis enacts. This relationship is experimental, meaning the aim is to energise and repurpose art writing by sampling the theory. The thesis does not seek to be exhaustively theoretical, nor to make a contribution to the body of theory as such. Rather, the aim is to test certain of the theory’s propositions by writing with significant works of contemporary art, particularly focusing on video and performance work.

These artworks are selected, firstly, because they resonate with the body of theory. The second aim is to match or meet some trans-disciplinary developments in art with a corresponding development in art writing. This necessarily takes the shape of generic experimentation with form: fictionalisation (or fictioning), speculation and experiential fabulation. The wish is less to renew art writing for its own sake, and more to respond respectfully and imaginatively to the singularity of the object, whilst embracing the esoteric and speculative, the transmissive and machinic.

To date, the theoretical ﬁeld of OOO has only had a light impact on the art world. This thesis takes the relationship further and investigates whether key OOO concepts are helpful in engaging directly with the forceful and essential allure of contemporary art-things. At the cross- point of art writing and theory, it speculates on the mediatory role of art writing as one of many mediations among objects. The wager is that the sustained practice of an object-oriented art writing is the necessary basis for what some are calling Speculative Aesthetics.

PRELUDE The title, After the Passions, refers to modes of art writing that consider what might be outside a solely human experience. If ‘the passions’ are the gasps of transcendent awe, once the pipe organ starts, among the cathedral congregation, then this thesis argues for a turn away from an anthropocentric quasi-religious view, towards a more pluralised experience of contemporary art—one that allows an art writer’s imagination to bloom.

Introduction . 1 The discourse of a recent lecture by OOO theorist and Professor at the American University in Cairo, Graham Harman, hinged on the dismantling of conventional structures of human-centred philosophical hierarchy.1 Harman’s OOO theory focuses on everything (whether a chair, a wish, a split atom or a lament) as objects that all exist without privileging human consciousness of them and irrespective of human comprehension. I realised that this decentralisation of the subject would have a deeply perplexing effect on aesthetics. I suspected that the artists and art viewers, sitting alongside me in the audience, must be getting the cold sweats, desperate for a ﬁx of orderly formalist criticism and a well-constructed aggregate of systematic aesthetic criteria, which we’ve been taught or conditioned to mobilise whenever we consider an aesthetic thing. After all, art viewers are mostly humans who love socio- political structure. However, in fact, OOO does not eschew structure or formalism or aggregated systems. Even structures and systems are, inevitably, things, which have equal relevance in a ﬂat ontology. The attraction of Harman’s OOO is that it supports my discussion of art experiences as a mode of destabilising dominant forms of aesthetics, both subjective and hierarchical. The improbable, the uncertain, the non- concrete and stoic irreducibility are qualities I have gleaned from OOO to aid my art writing practice.

My question is: might there exist an art experience that is more than the human experience of a non-human thing, which is also an aesthetic event that is ontologically plural, as opposed to a restrictive, subjective viewer- artwork dualism? This would be an aggregate of living agents, even of those things that are not alive. This question refers to finding a way to apply OOO concepts to an art writing form that might be infused with both theory and fiction. It is a form that complies with a move away from a human-centred focus alone, by drawing on the esoteric and the imaginary. Well, there is definitely something about Sydney’s Carriageworks, a major performing art venue, that sings an atheistic hymn to OOO and to strange, active forms of existence. For a start, there is always, always, always, a gentle breeze when you descend the stairs from Wilson Street, Eveleigh. What most people don’t know is that it’s caused by the exhaling breath of a long caterpillar form. Modulated

1 At a University of Western Sydney conference on 3 December 2013, Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy, Harman spoke of the need to move away from an anthropomorphic and subjectivist approach to philosophy. He asserted that Object Oriented Ontology predates Speculative Realism by more than a decade.

Introduction . 2 sections of industrial brickwork span out to the right, shuddering and twitching in the baking sun. This is an old slug, an ancient beast, its manky exhalations smell of rusty iron. Built in the late 1880s, it may have emerged from the molten pits of industrial building materials during that decade, but I feel sure it must have dwelt far below, long before the beginning of the Anthropocene,2 in a rocky sandstone place where the Potkooroks lived and perhaps still do.3

The old railway workshop precinct still has the exposed metal tracks visible in the concrete interior and exterior ﬂoor areas. Gilbert Simondon, who wrote a letter to Jacques Derrida about the entelechy of technical architectural formwork, would have loved this place.4 The pressed metal and studded pulley systems, the stencil-numbered pylons, the huge sliding doors and the double-storey industrial spaces remain. These buildings aren’t ascribed agency and life. They already have them, even in our memories. Stories of indigenous pre-settlement experience displayed on story-boards out the front carry the weight of early tales of exploitation, violence and poverty—stories that snake up the pylons and disappear as spectral smoke behind a distant archway.

Carriageworks is a world object, rather than a thing. It characterises something material in front of us but it’s also something we live in and occupy. French theorist Michel Serres, whose writing on quasi-objects predates the OOO movement and from whose concepts object-oriented theorists, in part, develop, speaks of the way globalisation has changed the way people interact with objects, on both local and universal levels.5 World objects are, according to Serres, ‘tools with a dimension that is commensurable with one of the dimensions of the world. A satellite for speed, an atomic bomb for energy, the Internet for space, and nuclear waste for time...these are four examples of world objects.’6 He notes

2 The Anthropocene here refers to the beginning of environmental decay, during Industrialisation, and humanity’s morbid process of destruction, which is leaving a new layer of carbon upon the geographical surface of the earth. 3 Potkooroks are rock monsters that, in some versions of Aboriginal Dreamings, lived under rocky platforms and ate children wandering past. They are referred to in Patricia Wrightson, The Nargun and the Stars, (Brisbane: UQP,1973), 60. 4 Gilbert Simondon, “On Techno-Aesthetics,” Parrhesia 14 (2012): 1-8. 5 Michel Serres, “Revisiting The Natural Contract,” trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon, (paper presented at Institute of the Humanities, Simon Fraser University, Canada, 4 May 2006), accessed December 21, 2013, http://www.ctheory.net. 6 Ibid.

Introduction . 3 that, we ‘now live in those world-objects as we live in the world.’7 Serres’ object distribution might be the true and unacknowledged precursor to the OOO movement,8 especially in relation to hyper-objects. Many OOO writers draw on phenomenologists as their sources or antecedents. Ecology writer and OOO theorist, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University and food writer, Timothy Morton,9 notes the important inﬂuence of phenomenologist Alphonso Lingis (but not Serres) on his own writing.10 Graham Harman, who writes widely on phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and uses his tool analysis as the basis for OOO concepts, also studied under Lingis at Penn State University.11 While the lineage from phenomenology to OOO has been declared and is clear to read, there are strong intellectual connections between Serres’ world things and an Object Oriented Ontology of all things, too. In that case, how might I respond to Carriageworks as a site of history, as a changeable act, as a whole world-thing in itself?

If ever there was a world thing, it dwells amid the Carriageworks spaces. The monolithic caterpillar comes to mind from outside the arched wooden doorways of the industrial building, and the same undulating creature murmurs within. Its internal qualities complement its external properties. I take Serres’ world object to mean that we are part of the action (as in, the active object) rather than the controlling subject. We actively move about the art object, but without activating it, even though, often, we presume otherwise. We are not alone in our movement, either. The game is nothing without the entire team of players. This is the plurality of the team and the plurality of all things.

The idea of a plural experience is relevant to my excursion, this sweet summer day, to Carriageworks. I am the viewer but am nothing without the site, the environs, the weather, the cyclists and the helicopter whirring above. I seek the artwork, Christian Boltanksi’s Chance, but it

7 Ibid. 8 Douglas Kahn introduced me to Serres’ object concepts, as a theory elaborated prior to the object-oriented timeline. 9 Timothy Morton is author of Ecology Without Nature. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Realist Magic: objects, ontology, causality. (University of Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2013); The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 10 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, 6. 11 Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2007).

Introduction . 4 has already begun acting upon me before I see it. Boltanski, born 1944, is a French installation artist consumed by notions of time and probability, who came to Sydney to install Chance at Carriageworks in January 2014. Chance is the OOO object. I, too, am the OOO object. Carriageworks is the OOO object. So is the coffee I buy from the bar. And my notebook. And pencil. And the lovely scufﬁng sound of sharpened lead moving across paper. However, I haven’t even bought the coffee yet. I haven’t walked down the stairs yet. From up here, the high brick wall shields the building from the street. The plane trees drop their baubles; their serrated leaves ﬂicker in the quiet hiccups of afternoon air. Surely there could be no apocalypse, no aberrant weather, no anomalous climate patterns here? Please, no. Not today. But wait, oh, too bad. There it is, the inevitable end and whatever lies beyond it. The post-passion à cappella lament sings here, too. There is an ancient call from the past and from an indigenous people’s land, taken by force. It calls from the future, where there will be no reprieve and nothing left, only the static sounds from an abandoned drone’s black box.

So, the long railway workshop caterpillars alongside the length of the click-clacking train tracks. A multi-faceted creature, moving in harmony with the sum of its parts, its individual qualities aggregating to a whole. Bays of cranes, cast iron plugs and wrought iron casement windows, bolted doors and arched small-paned windows keep it company. The blacksmiths’ quarters and the old bay numbers stencilled on the concrete pillars: these ﬁx the place in and out of time and absorb me into the object of the ticking clock.

I don’t realise how relevant the altered time-space delirium is until I descend and enter the slithering beast, only to ﬁnd another cross-species moving in a giant, aggregated caterpillar-like way: the Chance installation work. The Boltanski material network (that is, its massive industrial scaffolding) is threaded with an unbroken pattern of images of newborn babies, moving in perpetual motion across rollers, like an old newspaper press. It is a roller coaster of birth and death. The clock is there, too, its digital numbers in huge red shapes endlessly ﬂicking over, high up on the end scaffolding, charting real-time birth and death statistics around the world. Here we are. All of us: objects.

The trouble with Boltanski’s Chance is the believability of chance. Alain Badiou is speciﬁcally interested in the chance encounter or event.12 Roland Barthes expands a concept of the word ‘punctum’ to include

12 Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), 28.

Introduction . 5 a wound, a tiny broken hole or… a roll of the dice—as an accident of aesthetics as it specifically relates to time.13 Most OOO theorists do not suffer the time-limited significance of chance, preferring the concept of contingency, where anything can change at any time for no reason: ‘Contingency expresses the fact that physical laws remain indifferent as to whether an event occurs or not—they allow an entity to emerge, to subsist, or to perish.’14 If Boltanski’s work is something we stand outside but also within, then we are already part of its life and death cycle. Our future does not rely on the aleatory roll of the dice. We are the dice and the roller and the accident. Chance—the concept as opposed to the artwork—is counter-intuitive to an OOO outlook, which prefers to understand systems of ontological existence where all things exist on an equal register. Instead, it suggests an explosive infraction on a specific timeline—a reason-based disruption of an existing law of nature. An OOO advocate would counter that changes are already firing off in every direction, across time and space, as part of a network or collective of pluralised things. Chance, randomly, suggests an absence of cause and effect, whereas in OOO there is a strong component of causation.15

Boltanski’s Chance 2014 is a non-human thing. It is widely distributed because it has been exhibited in various iterations and variations around the world, including at the Venice Biennale 2011; Foto Museum, Rotterdam in 2012; and Grossehamburger Strasse, Berlin in 2013. 16 It is an aggregate of parts, moving across Carriageworks—a monumental structure of metal scaffolding and monitors of monolithic scale. It interconnects with the rusted pylons of the old caterpillar building, slides amongst the hanging pulleys and the industrial tin light ﬁttings… without touching. The baby faces move with the relentlessness of ﬁnitude. There is constant change. But, I see no chance here. I experience no aleatory system, only the possibility of the necessity of time ticking over.

Chance seems to belong in Carriageworks, as though it were always there. The baby images on their moving ﬁlmstrip soothe and sadden: new life, old life. The cycles and the rhythms are familiar. They are the inner workings of a larger beast: the universe. Boltanski’s work has become the

13 Greg Hainge, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013),10. 14 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (New York: Continuum, 2008), 39. 15 Morton, Realist Magic. 16 Tim Morton’s hyperobjects are described as massively distributed in time and space: Morton, Hyperobjects, 1.

Introduction . 6 Christian Boltanksi Chance 2014 scaffold, mixed media Carriageworks, Sydney Courtesy Carriageworks and the artist

Introduction . 7 intestinal tract of the buildin—the microscopic physiological functions— whilst also pointing towards inﬁnitude, towards post-life recordings, towards the archive of life, left behind when nothing else remains.

With a final wave to Boltanksi’s Chance artwork before I go, I should note that Timothy Morton writes of the difference between weather and climate change as being the same as that between phenomenon and thing. He feels that the gap between phenomenon and thing,17 crucial to an OOO move away from phenomenology, is too huge. Morton says Immanuel Kant ‘shows at the inception of the Anthropocene, that things never coincide with their phenomena.’18 I have sometimes wondered what that phenomenon/thing gap might be,19 when applied to an artwork. I suspect it is not about the final achievement of the artwork but, rather, the desire that the finished artwork evokes. Perhaps, more specifically, the phenomenon/thing gap is the viewer’s inability to reduce each element of the object to its individual qualities, simultaneously. Each time we visit or re-experience a favourite artwork, it is different. Not only is the singularity of the thing ungraspable, but its elements (at any given time) and its familiarity are ungraspable, too. I understand the lack, the desire, the gap as an inability to comprehend, as the torture of the possibility of moving beyond human comprehension. Visual experience sits alongside the artwork, as another thing rather than an event alone. In this way, the visual experience has qualities as an action and as a world-thing in-itself; it has properties of an inside and an outside, both as a thing and as a phenomenon. This might suggest a dyad or a return to oppositional entities (such as the human/world vectors that the OOOs try to avoid); however, visual experience is something to see and something to be within, at the same time.

In Boltanski’s Chance, the Morton-like phenomenon/thing gap is not large but it is present. It resides in the installation’s monolithic scale. I can comprehend the monumental scaffolding and baby images, sourced from Polish newspaper birth announcements, as things, at the same time as experiencing the phenomenon of endless cycles of time and mortal life. In this example, the phenomenon is the industrial, scaffolded roller coaster of images and the thing is Boltanski’s inﬁnite ﬁnitude. Whether

17 Idem,12. 18 Idem,18. 19 Simondon also notes that the gap between two individuations is pre- individual, virtual and primordial. See Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual” in J.Crary and S .Kwinter, eds., Incorporations, (New York: Zone Books, 1992).

Introduction . 8 these two elements (phenomenon and thing) are coinciding or not, is still to be decided, but it is the simultaneity that seems to me to be at the centre of the efﬁcacy of an art experience.

CURATORIAL CONFUSION Art writing and curatorial practice sit beside artworks and move on an infinite cycle, without touching. The relevance or ontological status of curated exhibitions is equal to, and does not outrank, artworks and art writing. Artworks are lively and expressive… always already, before the human witness. They will not be dictated to by critics or curators! Within the growing field of OOO and art, there has been a couple of efforts to respond curatorially to its notions of collapsed hierarchies, its resistance to critical reduction and its emphasis on the vital, immanent energy of all objects. For example, in a 2013 exhibition The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, curated by artist Mark Leckey at the Hayward Gallery in London, art objects were selected alongside historical objects and displayed on green plinths against green walls, on wooden plinths against mural-painted walls and on the floor in front of stencilled diagrammatic drawings on walls. The exhibition promised, ‘It will present a kind of “techno-animism”, where the inanimate comes to life, returning us to an archaic state of being, to aboriginal landscapes of fabulous hybrid creatures, where images are endowed with divine powers, and even rocks and trees have names.’20 In this context, the curator spoke of his curatorial aim of presenting things that are ‘quasi-alive’ and of the exhibition as a ‘colossal, assembled body.’21

These are OOO-inspired new materialist terminologies and attributes; the terms and concepts have morphed (consciously or not) from OOO ideas of ﬂat ontology and the agency of things. The exhibition was cited during an academic paper at a recent AAANZ conference and it was then that it occurred to me that we, OOO-investigators, are playing a dangerous game.22 This mode of curating objects, as vitalist and agented things-in-themselves, can be troublesome, if the concepts are adopted too literally or too crudely. It is not feasible to create an environment where the only ‘change’ is our expectation of the art objects. It might not be best

20 Mark Leckey, quoted as curator in “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things,” Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, touring UK 2013, accessed July. 11, 2014, http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/ﬁnd/hayward-gallery-and-visual- arts/hayward-touring/future/the-universal-addressability-of-dumb-things. 21 Ibid. 22 Lizzy Muller, panel discussion, AAANZ conference, Melbourne, December 9, 2013.

Introduction . 9 practice to choose objects, tell the world they have spirit and agency, and leave it to the ‘list of things’ to do what we have said: they must be vital and alive and animistic, because the curator deems it so.

OOO should not be an excuse to make unrealistic demands of art. This would only serve to undermine the point of truly vital art things, as I see it, which is to allow the possibility of a stimulus for unexpected and imaginative thought. Such a curatorial position does no more than revert to human-oriented perceptions of what art should be, rather than adopting a true OOO position, which leaves aside overt critical judgement and allows all things to be ontologically unique, independently of the act of witnessing. They are what they are, not always what they are for us.

So, this is a gentle caution, to myself more than anyone else: it is not just art things that are objects in an OOO context. The viewers, the gallery spaces, the accompanying texts, the light switches and the myriad of substances and physiological components that make up the art and its environment are ALL objects, which, within the collective hybrid ecology, have the potential for vitality or animus, as this thesis investigates. An application of OOO to art and aesthetics is not meant to be a case for all force, animus and radiating energy to be ascribed by humans to non-human things. This would mark a return to the correlational dead-ends from which OOO seeks to escape.23 It is not our place to set up objects so that they have independent relations with one another. This would be too prescriptive. Also, it misses the point that things already have independent energy alongside one another, irrespective of the act of witnessing. The unexpected won’t occur if viewers stand about, breathlessly waiting for it to happen. It’s already happening… without us.

THE CARPENTRY OF SPECULATIVE THINGS Is it even possible to curate an exhibition of art things within an OOO framework? In June 2013, I collaborated with ﬁve artists and one other writer-theorist on The Carpentry of Speculative Things. We were all reading OOO and Speculative Realism theory. We had been conversing about the potential collapse of aesthetics in this object-oriented, anti- anthropocentric realm of thought. I asked the artists to submit an artwork for an exhibition at Alaska Project Space. We talked about what

23 Meillassoux, After Finitude.

Introduction . 10 those works would be and why they might enact a different aesthetic slant. The attraction was the participatory nature of the project—the retreat of the curator to the role of collaborator, rather than that of dictator. Also appealing was the site: the underground Kings Cross car park.

The space was crucial to this OOO project: its sweating sandstone walls, oil-stained concrete ﬂoors, the German tourists living in their vans nearby and bartering travel goods. It smelled bad; it echoed strangely. At the opening we had a mediocre acrobat dressed in an Occupy Sydney movement jumpsuit perform some balancing acts (not very well) and Melbourne academic Justin Clemens’ opening speech was a litany of never-ending expletives (I had to cover my small daughter’s ears), caused in part by his frustration with the anti-Kantianism of many SR/OOO theorists. The artworks were a giant UFO, a video of a drone surveillance camera, arche-fossil ancestral gem paintings, a post-ﬁnitude scale-model of Morandi’s studio and 3D, materialised poems.

If it was an OOO success, it was due to its participation with its space, viewers and local people, and its positioning outside natural art places and ways of viewing art things; that is, away from the usual political forces of public galleries and economic models. If it was a failure, it was due to the impossibility of creating an aesthetic experience. Our only hope was that the art things were witnesses too, watching us watch them.

A COSMIC ALTERNATIVE In his book The Natural Contract, Michel Serres writes of how what was once local is now global and that we should see ourselves as renters in the world.24 As Sydney academic Mary Zournazi says in a review of Serres’ 2014 book, Biogea, ‘no one can make a claim on behalf of the earth, our perception must be the object of no-thing.’25 I understand this to suggest humankind’s environmental self-sabotaging has been more than a destruction of resources and ecologies, it has also been an incapacity to understand humanity’s ‘place’ or status within the structure of being. Perhaps the heartache of our ecological demise has stimulated philosophical thought, which leads to a world-thinking and then a cosmos-thinking. If so, then, onwards, to the cosmic: a natural progression from the local to the global… to the ﬂat ontology of all

24 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1995), 3. 25 Mary Zournazi, “Cosmocracy: A Hymn for the World? Reﬂections on Michel Serres and the Natural World,” Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies 9, 2 (2012): 8.

Introduction . 11 things, including the cosmos, as a non-hierarchical system with multiple and different entities that have the same status.26

One trend, in adopting an OOO view of art and aesthetics, is the temptation to focus on the occulted, the cosmic supernatural and science ﬁction (see Chapter Three, ‘Theory-ﬁction as Hyperobject’). Writers, such as Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker (The New School, New York) as well as many other OOO advocates who write about literature and art, have incorporated notions of the monstrous and the trans- natural in the face of the likelihood of a post-human extinction future. The seminal book for Speculative Realism, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux,27 whose importance will be explained shortly, has functioned as a strong invocation for alternate methodologies (mathematical, philosophical and literary) to think of the planetary, geological nature of being.

Meillassoux is an important ﬁgure in OOO, as an off-shoot of Speculative Realism. He was present at the inaugural 2007 conference on Speculative Realism at Goldsmiths College, University of London. More importantly, as the author of After Finitude,28 he is a philosopher thankfully creating more problems for art and aesthetics than he solves, throwing up the challenge of moving outside conventional frames of comprehension, in a discipline that must inescapably do so. For this very reason, correlationism is an important doctrine to push up against. It conceptually reﬁgures the orthodoxy of subject-object correlations, and thus, anthropocentric views of existence. This was a primary driver for both OOO and this investigation. The most appealing part of his book, which functions as a mathematical and systematic defense against Kantian dyads, is its passion and philosophical enthusiasm for taking continental philosophy further and starting afresh, from ancestral things in the past to speculative things in the future.

26 ‘The term ‘flat ontology’ is, of course, derived from the work of Manuel DeLanda. In Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy DeLanda describes flat ontology thus: ‘while an ontology based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera), an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status’. For DeLanda, then, flat ontology signifies an ontology in which there is only one ontological ‘‘type’’: individuals.’ In “Flat Ontology,” Levi Bryant’s blog, Larval Subjects, accessed June 3, 2013, http:// larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/flat-ontology-2/. 27 Meillassoux, After Finitude. 28 Ibid.

Introduction . 12 As Meillassoux says, ‘Nothing would seem to be impossible, not even the unthinkable.’29 As part of his apparently open attitude to impossibilities, he explains hyper-chaos as,

If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power - something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realising every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the ﬁercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm... It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself, by bringing forth, perhaps forever, ﬁxity, stasis, and death.30

Passages such as this, on hyper-chaos, may have inﬁltrated and encouraged a turn towards those menacing powers inside and those monstrous absurdities outside: an absolute contingency, a nightmare billowing up in front of our eyes.

This occulted and speculative turn is an understandable instinct that fits into the ontological strangeness of a pluralised existence, where geo- critical theory, cosmopolitics and black holes are as significant as the moths flapping against my window pane or the snatches of lightning over the neighbouring roofs. Commentator on Speculative Realism Giorgio Cesarale asks, ‘The cosmos is, however, full of many different objects. How can one thus manage to reduce the complexity of the object-world and to inscribe it into some sort of unifying grid?’31 I am not sure of the answer to Cesarale’s question but it is no wonder, then, that these esoteric tangents emerge. Even Serres, in his essay The Natural Contract, writes about spacecraft Ariane casting off from its safe moorings, which functions as an invocation, as a metaphorical allusion to the future for humanity.32 An OOO interest in speculative alternatives is not, in any way, a return to religious faith or theological transcendence. This is not a reversion to mysticism as a Christian reality, even though Justin Clemens

29 Idem, 64. 30 Ibid. 31 Giorgio Cesarale, “The ‘Not’ of Speculative Realism,” Mute, 19 February 2014, accessed March 24, 2014, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/ articles/‘not’-speculative-realism. 32 Serres, The Natural Contract, 99.

Introduction . 13 does make a worthy point in his essay Vomit Apocalypse that Speculative Realism risks a return to hyper-Kantianism and idealism.33 Instead, speculative alternatives, in response to art, are meant as a tolerance for, (and even an indulgence in), the strange, the intergalactic, the implausible and the unknown, at a time when ecological disaster weighs heavily on our minds. Should science be shouldering all the responsibility for the crisis to come? Or can OOO encourage the coupling of the classical vocation of the artistic imagination with the scientiﬁc imagination of the yet-to-be-discovered? There is a strong connection between environmental changes, ontological theories of the OOOs and a shift in aesthetics that incorporates all art things, including the sounds of the earth or a cross-species beverage or herbal love potions concocted for humans and animals alike.34

Author and theorist associated with Speculative Realism, Reza Negarestani, wrote the theory/fiction text Cyclonopedia. A novel that raises the intensity of Speculative Realist theorising, it refers to immanent energy resources and political conspiracy theories that implicate the universe, as well as dwellers on earth. It is an experiment in writing form as well as being a Grimoire or Necronomicon, an ancient (fictional) text of knowledge. This text has caused a world-wide eruption of conjecture, conspiracy, theory and cryptography. It has influenced writers, such as Eugene Thacker (whose neo-nihilist book text has been re-purposed as HBO television series dialogue),35 Speculative Realist propagator and editor of Urbanomic Collapse, Robin Mackay, and horror theorist at Wesleyan College (Georgia, US) Melanie Doherty,36 not to mention two panels’ worth of papers at a recent AAANZ conference. For me, apart from the controversy and debates, there remains the emergent idea that his bizarre crypto-fiction might evolve as a new invention or genre. Negarestani’s book also reminded me in many ways of the inaugural

33 Justin Clemens, “Vomit Apocalypse; or Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude,” Parrhesia 18 (2013): 62. 34 Such as bio-artist Tom Zahuranec, accessed December 23, 2013, http:// www.psychobotany.com/projects/Tom%20Zahuranec.htm or http:// datagarden.org/tag/tom-zahuranec/; Pharmacy of Love and Hate, a performative workshop, MCA Artbar, Sydney, 7 October 2013. 35 Thacker’s cultural inﬂuence is noted in a Radiolab podcast, accessed 6 October 2014, http://www.radiolab.org/story/dust-planet/. 36 Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker, eds, Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedism Symposium, (New York: Punctum Books, 2012), accessed 2 June 2014, http://punctumbooks.com/titles/leper-creativity-cyclonopedia- symposium/.

Introduction . 14 Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764),37 due to its laughable rambling horror and its ironic black humour. A Negarestani-esque form might comprise essays and stories responding to a secret text. Although my thesis is not an attempt to chart crypto-ﬁction, nor to contribute to it as a future genre, it has been gently touched by the enthusiastic (and slightly cultish) Cyclonopedicised academic frisson.

As Harman says in his definition of OOO, hallucinations and fictions count as objects in this field of thought.38 With this in mind, I believe I can justify my excursions into critical fabulation, speculative digressions and strange fictions, in an era where these forms are taking shape. I also believe these explorations are in keeping with the doctrines of Object Oriented Ontology in their attempt to avoid human/world dualisms and an over-emphasis on subjective criticism and judgement. These elements in my thesis are experimental and prone to failure. They are an attempt to create an entity that equals the impetus; that is, the writing meets the art work, which meets the viewer, which meets the gallery space, which meets the air conditioning, which meets a raised eyebrow, which meets a phone ringing, which meets the art writing. One of the most exciting parts of this research has been the ‘day trip’ into more supernatural metaphors of aesthetics. In OOO, many theorists have para-interests in science fiction or the occult or horror.39 It is because of this excellent company that I have felt more than comfortable researching sorcery as states of social exchange and magical rituals,40 telepathy as an incomprehensible conundrum (except when David Mitchell masterfully writes about it in his new book, The Bone Clocks),41 magnetism as a metaphorical agential force and the voo doo powers of new technologies, such as robots.42 This slightly esoteric aesthetic functions well alongside a discipline that engages both serious art analysis, a dose of academic scepticism and experiments in fabulist incursions.

37 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, in Three Gothic Novels (London: Penguin, 1987). 38 Graham Harman, “Figure/Ground Communication,” October (2013): 2, accessed October 15, 2013, http://ﬁgureground.org/interview-with-graham- harman-2/. 39 Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Alresford: Zero Books, 2012); Edward Colless and Leon Marvell’s Cyclonopedism panel discussion 2013 AAANZ conference, accessed October 30, 2013, http:// aaanz.info/aaanz-home/conferences/; Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol 1 (Arlesford: Zero Books, 2011). 40 Isabelle Stengers and Stephen Muecke also write about sorcery and magic respectively. 41 David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (London: Random House, 2014). 42 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2012), 9.

Introduction . 15 The result of incorporating a transitive and experimental esoteric element in this thesis is also a call for scepticism as a worthy intellectual pursuit.43 The dubiety is not directed at the paranormal but at pre-given assumptions about ontology. Uncertainty, in this context, is wielded within a writing practice, as a mode of destabilising the dominant forms of aesthetic understanding, such as emphasising values of beauty or subjective sensory experience. A quest for concrete aesthetic interpretation is a trap, which this thesis avoids by honouring the irreducibility of artworks.

PERFORMATIVE ART WRITING AND ITS REASONING. Experimentation with various forms drives this thesis’s art writing. It is not meant as an undisciplined practice or as a prescriptive formula for one type of art writing, nor is it meant to be antagonistic towards academia, nor does it reject the multiple art writing formulations of the past (articulated as a book, for example, by art writer and academic at School of the Art Institute in Chicago, James Elkins, as seven options: catalogue essay, academic treatise, cultural criticism, conservative harangue, philosopher’s essay, descriptive art criticism and poetic art criticism).44 On the contrary, there is hope that establishing an art writing discipline that suffers experimentation and ﬁctive bursts might have as much legitimacy as the creative writing discipline, which has achieved independent university curriculum status since 2000.45 Is it permissible to swing between critical art writing and fabulist interventions? No one likes to be tricked.46 Instead, these interventions are offered as conversational confabulations, sincere and playful, discreet and mischievous. This kind of ﬁctive interference runs the risk of annoying the reader. So, is it really worth bothering with? Well, my only defence is that, in 2008, I saw an exhibition of American artist Enrique Martinez

43 By transitive, I mean that things may be greater or smaller than other things but their relevance is equal. 44 James Elkins, What happened to art criticism? (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). 45 See Paul Dawson, “Creative Writing and Postmodern Interdisciplinarity,” Text 12, 1(2008): 1. 46 Melbourne-based artist and writer Peter Hill has developed fiction in art through his Superfictions Wikipedia entry and his Museum of Contemporary Ideas, in motion since the early 1980s. An example is his 1994 Art Fair Murders, where he had documentary evidence of an art fair killer on the loose. He refers to philosophers Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper in this play with truth and reality, as evident via his web site, accessed November 8, 2013, http://www.superfictions.com/encyc/entries/hill.html.

Introduction . 16 Celaya’s works at Liverpool Street Gallery in Sydney .47 I looked at the spectral, philosophy-heavy paintings and then perused the catalogue essay. The latter was an interview between the artist and a man named Thomas Hoveling. I read the interview, re-read it, said ‘eh?’ and read it again. There was something funny about it. It was too writerly, too poetic. I asked the gallery attendant and, yes, Celaya had invented the interview. There was no such person as Thomas Hoveling, other than in the artist’s imagination. 48

I respected this quiet disruption of the average gallery-going, art-reading experience, just as I admired the audacious and cheeky (ﬁctional) newspaper pseudo-review of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory, published as an appendix titled, ‘On Conclusive Evidence’, and written by none other than the author.49 Professor of Philosophy at Goethe University, Christoph Menke,50 began his Documenta(13) 100 notes essay by re-creating the conversation-as-theatre dramaturgy of Alexander Kluge and Heiner Muller’s Theater der Finsternisse. This re-enactment of a performative re-enactment of an Adolph Hitler monologue, just prior to his death, helps confound or disrupt the way we believe art writing should unfold. Menke’s use of Muller’s re-enactment trope has been another inﬂuence on this thesis.

As just mentioned, Negarestani’s theory/fiction or hyperstition (fiction in a state of becoming real) is a new genre of theory infused with fictive elements that has influenced my progress. In turn, another impact on me has been academic, theorist and publisher of Punctum Books, Eileen Joy’s recent publication of collective writing group The Confraternity of Neoflagellants’ thN Lng folk2go, which articulates a weird frisson between theory and fiction:

47 Enrique Martinez Celaya, accessed September 1, 2014, www. martinezcelaya.com. 48 The Lovely Season: Enrique Martinez Celaya, Liverpool Street Gallery, 27 February - 27 March, 2008. 49 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory (London: Penguin, 2000), 238-251. 50 Christoph Menke, “Aesthetics of Equality,” Documenta(13) 100 Notes (Ostﬁldern: Hatje Cantz 2012), 5.

Introduction . 17 meets New World in an untimely assemblage (or, ‘Mall’) in which, in fact, all temporalities—futures, pasts, future-pasts, past-futures—are deployed, mashed up and then realigned so as to open, at last, a space for something different (this most cramped court allows us, at last, to breathe!)51

I have not emulated any of these texts but feel the security of their companionship, as they perch on my shoulder, watching me work.

WHAT? What, exactly, happens throughout the thesis, in terms of performative writing or experimental narration? It isn’t enough to say that the form of writing is multiple and varied. The forms used comprise recipe, trafﬁc report, prose poem, re-enactment, spell, pen-pal letter, witness document, love note, etc. However, this list only communicates their material form; it doesn’t explain how they become inculcated or why.

HOW? They occur as part of the narrative flow, as seamlessly as possible. They are a divergence into fictional territory in the context of academic/critical art writing. They are theory-fiction. They are Negarestani’s hyperstition (fiction becoming real). An example is when I talk about the Speculative Realist elements in Sydney artist David Eastwood’s work.52 His creative research focuses on the posthumous re-creation of Giorgio Morandi’s studio, and how this speculation comments on the past and the future, at once. As part of my discussion of Eastwood’s small-scale dioramic models of Morandi’s studio, I venture into a para-story of how Eastwood travelled to Italy to meet the great Morandi and what, fatally, occurred that day. This story is now part of my relationship with Eastwood, as we talk about what happened and how such a thing could (couldn’t) occur. The fiction has become an element in the aggregate of his real life story and mine… this is hyperstition—fiction becoming real.

WHY? Why do I divert along such strange paths of ﬁctionalised writing as part of writing about art? It’s probably not good enough to say that I

51 The Confraternity of Neoﬂagellants, thN Lng folk2go: Investigating Future Premoderns (New York: Punctum Books, 2013), i-v. 52 David Eastwood, artist web site, accessed September 1, 2014, http://www. davideastwood.com.au/art/art.html.

Introduction . 18 can’t help the compulsion. Is it enough to say, then, that the writing contingently morphs into ﬁction when bent by the force of things? That is the effect of OOO principles. I don’t think it is a coincidence that I have been drawn to this philosophical literature, to its equality, plurality and ‘live and let live’ attitude towards the unique, not-quite-knowable qualities of things. What does that mean? It means that I am most happy, staring out the window and imagining stories and allowing narratorial interruptions, as a necessity: this makes room for a greater number of intellectual, creative and experiential possibilities, whilst acknowledging that, sometimes, these ﬁctive possibilities become real.

THE CHAPTERS The chapters of this thesis cover various metaphysical mediations, such as running, telepathy, magnetism, magic spells, animal disappearances and robotic co-evolution. At first glance, these patterns of orienting art within a framework of aesthetic experience might seem diverse or random. However, firstly, randomness is an OOO quality and secondly, they are linked by a sincere wish to make sense of performative, interactive, electronic, video and Realtime art works. They are also connected by their fictioning, which is a term connoting the fictionalisation of an art writing practice. An intrinsic task is to write about unreasonable things, such as telepathy and sorcery, in a reasonable way. Some of these ideas have conventionally suffered the charge of invention, having been deemed irrational and non-rigorous and even considered leaning towards the insane. However, in an OOO realm, dyads of sane/insane and reason/ non-reason are discouraged. Instead, a positively charged cross-fertilising of imaginative possibilities is championed. Although not necessarily exhortative of OOO, the writings of French deconstruction philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-12004), Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (b 1949) and Australian cultural theorist Stephen Muecke (b1951) have abetted my stylistic dabbles in mischievous ideas. They have in common a skill for finding an experimental voice outside or beyond conventional subjective habits.

While there are, presently, many brilliant writers developing complex ideas about art,53 still, this is not a thesis of straight art criticism or

53 Prominent writers include Jacques Ranciere, Boris Groys, David Joselit, Claire Bishop, Nicolas Bourriaud, Rosalind Krauss, Elizabeth Grosz, Christov Menke, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, WJT Mitchell, not to mention the wealth of international curators, such as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Hans Ulrich Obrist, who are writing catalogue essays that engage with contemporary cultural concepts.

Introduction . 19 curatorial studies, nor an art history lesson either. The purpose is to develop methods and reflexivity of writing, specifically art writing. There is no possibility of writing myself into a corner, because there are no corners in a flat ontology. The artworks discussed are not limited to any genre, nationality, style, media, concept or time. They are artworks that have stimulated conjecture about the object oriented theories in which I have been absorbed over the past three years. Object Oriented Ontology is described by Graham Harman as,

a term I coined in the late 1990s, borrowed from computer science without being inspired by it… First, it initially implies a ﬂat ontology in which even hallucinations and ﬁctions count as objects, and in which composite objects such as machines and societies are objects no less than pillars of granite or tiny little quarks. In this respect object-oriented philosophy is an anti-reductionism. And here it is not altogether new, since a number of late nineteenth-century thinkers of the Austrian school were already moving in this direction, Husserl among them. Second, it entails that objects are something over and above the properties they carry. An object is not just a nickname for a bundle of qualities, and hence object-oriented philosophy is also an anti-empiricism: one that sides with phenomenology in taking the object to be prior to its concrete manifestations in various instants.54

In this thesis, certain OOO terms are developed and applied to contemporary art as methodological tools. The four OOO theorists I follow are Harman and Timothy Morton, along with Professor of Philosophy at Collin College, Dallas-Fort Worth, Levi Bryant,55 and video game designer and Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, Ian Bogost.56 Their writings are supported by a healthy dose of concepts from Speculative Realism (SR) theorist and lecturer at the Sorbonne, Quentin Meillassoux, in the Magnetism chapter. Associated new materialist theorist and Professor at John Hopkins University, Jane Bennett, along with feminist and quantum physicists Karen Barad and Isabelle Stengers have also become important leaders of my analysis.

The ﬁrst three chapters serve as slow-release literature review chapters. Chapter One, ‘Art in a Flat Ontology’, introduces key OOO concepts as

54 Harman, “Figure/Ground Communication.” 55 Levi Bryant,The Democracy of Objects (University of Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2011). 56 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology.

Introduction . 20 they complement contemporary art. Chapter Two, ‘The Equality of the Run’, covers the ‘run’ of art writing as an autonomous research-led form and Chapter Three, ‘Art Fiction as Hyperobject’, articulates how and why ﬁctive and fabulist elements are important in an exploration of art writing forms.

I then move to the ﬁnal ﬁve chapters, which are the main body of theoretical and writing engagement. These investigate the aesthetics of telepathy, magnetism, magical sorcery, eco-disappearance and machinic agency. They are linked by an endeavour to answer the two-pronged question of how a speculative or object-oriented approach might shake up aesthetics (and even generate a new discourse) and whether it is possible to enact a speculative art writing practice. These themes might seem as random as a Latourian litany,57 but they are connected by esoteric conjecture and their implied ‘narrative impossibilities’ feed into one another.

If I search for an aesthetic solution that evades the human/world correlate, or humanist duality (where we can only comprehend things through a human lens, which SR and OOO theorists seek to disrupt), then forms of engagement that have been sidelined, mocked or otherwise maligned need to be reinstated. They need to be reclaimed. Telepathy, magnetism, magic, eco-extinction and robotic intelligence are those ‘other’ characters haunting science and art. They are keys to a deeper ontological comprehension of aesthetics, however ﬂat the register may be. The connection from one chapter to another lies in a writing instinct to allow other voices to be heard. The sound of running feet, the clacking of insectoid monsters, the transmissions of the telepath, the hum of magnets, the howl of the disappearing wolves and the woeful dirge of the unloved robot: these are the voices that were already there. These voices emerge in a space where aesthetics has been dealt a painful blow by OOO and SR. How can aesthetics survive the post-human discourse? How can objects of art survive a ﬂat, unprivileged ontology? We shall soon see.

57 Ian Bogost “Latour Litanizer,” Ian Bogost blog, accessed July 14, 2014, http://bogost.com/writing/blog/latour_litanizer/.

Introduction . 21 CHAPTER 1: Art in a Flat Ontology ‘An obscure desire gradually becomes a deep passion.’ 58

As this investigation explores OOO theory, art and writing, how might it proceed, methodologically? What kind of form and process of this particular ‘speculative art writing as creative practice’ will emerge? Here, the course of action is an application of new OOO theory to the aesthetic domain and to the process of art writing, for a new inﬂection in the understanding of art experience. This is a thinking with the artwork, rather than standing in critical judgement of it. It follows a method of writing as an equivalent creative act to the genesis of the artwork in the ﬁrst place. The entelechy of the writing meets the same guiding vitality of the artwork.

OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY TERMS First, the basics. OOO, an off-shoot of Speculative Realism59 and a philosophical descendent of phenomenology and the more sociological field of Actor Network Theory,60 is a new and dynamic field of object theory.61 In OOO, the agency and equality of things (all things, including artworks) are massively expanded and democratised. 62 For instance, a trope in Graham Harman’s prose is the egalitarian and arbitrary list: ferris wheels, haunted boats, sleeping zebras, oil rigs and bridges,63 a trope that, rhetorically, seeks to underscore the lack of hierarchy in the flat ontology project. Harman was present at the seminal

58 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), 8. 59 In 2007, Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant participated in a conference entitled Speculative Realism, at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, April 2007. Meillassoux refers to himself as a Speculative Materialist. I will refer to Quentin Meillassoux and his book After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008). 60 As adapted by the sociologist readers of Bruno Latour: John Law, “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics” in Brian S Turner, ed., The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Chichester: Wiley and Blackwell, 2009), 141-158. 61 Graham Harman is the originator of OOO, having coined the term in his 1999 thesis on Heidegger, which was later published as Toolbeing: Heidegger and the metaphysics of objects 2002 Open Project. 62 The capacity of any entity, human or otherwise, to act in the world. In this thesis it is not moral agency or collective will, but a basic instinctual function of all beings, with the result of causing an effect, which is the creation of a new thing. 63 Graham Harman, Circus Philosophicus (Winchester: Zero, 2010).

Art in a Flat Ontology . 22 panel discussion, ‘Speculative Realism’, held at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, in 2007. Since then, he has written and lectured internationally, at a galloping pace, about OOO. He has encouraged the adoption of OOO by architecture and contemporary art discipline and facilitated the theory’s movement to expand, but without any direct discussion or deeply investigated engagement of OOO concepts to art. This leaves space for me to explore freely.

At a June 2014 sci-fi and art symposium at the University of New South Wales, The Conquest of Space, I gave a paper on Speculative Aesthetics. As a heart-starter, I asked the audience members if they would like a definition of Speculative Realism ‘in ten words or less.’ Relief mumbled and nudged through the audience; people poised pencils and opened notebooks. My quick definition of Speculative Realism was as follows: SR addresses philosophical problems of the limits of human comprehension. Ha! Time to break for tea and cake?

As part of my contribution to addressing the metaphysical problems of being restricted by our human-bound knowledge, I see a new Speculative Aesthetic, within which an OOO investigation of art and a speculative art writing methodology might bloom, functioning in two ways. Firstly, it creates inter-disciplinary interference or static between non- knowing (speculation) and modes of engaging with the world (via art and ﬁction). Secondly, it is a move away from critical, correlational (the human subject observes the art object) distance and overt humanism. In the case of my own writing practice, it engages with immanent and speculative art writing, as a mode of bridging the gap between being human and anticipating the post-human. It attempts to engage with the world, using an anthrodecentric methodology, without need for human witness. Speculative Aesthetics posits in favour of things and events occurring in arbitrary ways, without a singular cause, and they endorse a non-chronological and unbounded means of encountering all things, including aesthetic things, as objects in a system of multiplied information or manifold data.

There is a tiny artwork in my small, desk-top cabinet of curiosities which might excite an OOO application. This little artwork was made for me by Australian artist Michael Zavros,64 as thanks for including him

64 Australian artist Michael Zavros lives in Queensland, Australia; Michael Zavros, accessed September 19, 2014, www.michaelzavros.com.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 23 in my book The Rapture of Death.65 I should note here that it is not so surprising that my prior research investigation into rapturous deathly art should naturally lead to an enquiry into post-human aesthetics. This little Zavros artwork is a baked plaster black rose; its petals are tinged with blue and green paint, burnt by an unseasonable sun. Associated with enviro-decay and ecstasy, the black rose does not exist in nature. It is a dark copy. My cabinet, in which this rose sits, is painted black with a mirror-back. The cabinet is full of mordant things—some real, some fake—gathered while I was writing about death in art. The rose is one fake, among other natural things, such as a dried seahorse, a dead beetle and the vertebrae of a cat. If the seahorse, beetle and bones are natural objects (nature being conventionally associated with fallible experience), then the fake rose might be an articulation of something else, as a reminder that the real eludes us.

The issue of decay is important in an OOO sense because, while the rose might be abiotic and slower to decompose than a natural rose, still, it will decay. The materiality of all things enacts a uniform decaying of everything. From this continuous breaking down of all matter, new matter emerges. An aesthetic might accompany that newly emerged matter. If all things disintegrate as one and enact the creation of a new thing, then a new art writing form might emerge in a similar way. So, in an OOO model, where all art things are syncopated onto the same single register, new things can continually emerge.

Another decay-related question might be: could this rose-thing be a hyper-object due to its man-made plasticine materials (calcium salts, petroleum jelly and aliphatic acids), like Styrofoam as discussed by Tim Morton—a widely distributed material which might survive everything else on our planet, has non-locality and has viscosity?66 In an apocalyptic future, might there be a razed city, with only desert sands blowing about, along with plastic dolls’ heads, piles of computer junk, the odd cockcroach… and a ﬂickering screen displaying my writing about the black rose? We can only become conscious of a thing once it is pushed away, while, simultaneously, the distance is obliterated.

The idea of material longevity might ﬂag a small ﬂaw in Morton’s example, for Styrofoam as a hyperobject inescapably requires a human perception of longevity. OOO works towards a pre- or post-human

65 Prue Gibson, The Rapture of Death (Sydney: Boccalatte, 2010). 66 Morton, Hyperobjects.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 24 Michael Zavros, Black Rose 2010 plaster

Art in a Flat Ontology . 25 existence, where social/perceptual/consciousness constructs are not necessarily touched by a mortal view. Under this system, the rose does not need me to exult it as an object of beauty. The rose does not need me to look at it or write about it to make it real. It will be there, still, without anyone seeing it. It won’t turn to dust like its garden counterparts but will sit beside a ﬂint I picked up 500 kilometres outside Alice Springs, near a glass cicada one friend gave me and beside a stoppered perfume bottle another friend gave me. If it has allure, it is because it radiates uncertainty—a lack. Why? Because it reminds us of nature, but is a fake; it refers to the end of nature, but is unreliable as a signiﬁer of that end.

OOO AND ART EXHIBITIONS Before I define some major qualities of OOO theory, I will first establish the industry within which these ideas are being formulated. The assembly of OOO-tinged exhibitions is present and increasing. If nothing else, it provides evidence for the trend of OOO-ing art. These exhibitions register the theory’s steady accumulation. Exhibitions are assemblies of things but, in themselves, are flatly ontological things, too. For this reason, OOO concepts as articulated in curated exhibitions complement (and ground) a discussion of those same ideas as applied to art aesthetics and give weight to the suggestion that an OOO art writing could become an independent entity or aggregate of independent entities.

So, the academic absorption of OOO into theories of making and curating and writing about art has emerged in a number of international art exhibitions. The Real Thing, curated by British publisher and arts organisation, Urbanomic, was held at London’s Tate Gallery in 2010 and included work by UK video artist John Gerrard, German sound artist Florian Hecker and others. This exhibition concentrated on an experience that might exist independently—a reality that focuses on objects that exist in their own right, rather than existing only through our perception of them. Blog commentator and philosophy lecturer David Roden, who attended The Real Thing panel on 3 September 2010 at the Tate, admired the exhibition for its ability to explore ‘Speculative Realism as a problematic rather than a set of metaphysical commitments.’ He noted that one of the artists, Amanda Beech, had commented that art’s contribution to an SR discussion might be an understanding of ‘experience in relation to a recalcitrantly weird and indifferent universe.’67 An indifferent universe is a phrase aligned with Meillassoux’s indifferent

67 David Roden, “The Real Thing: Art and Speculative Realism,” Enemyindustry, accessed March 25, 2014, http://enemyindustry.net/blog.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 26 physical laws,68 and begs the question: is a place left for aesthetics or art experience in an indifferent material world?

There might be a way to interpret art and write about it that accepts indifference and relishes its own non-witnessing. And Another Thing, curated by Behar and Mikelson, was another OOO-motivated exhibition, held in October 2011 at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, with work by American artist Carl Andre, American sculptor and performance artist Bruce Nauman and others. As English philosopher Robert Jackson said, ‘And Another Thing is an exhibition catalogue chronicling how artists have used thingness to eschew the human subject’s privilege.’ This was a direct attempt to apply OOO concepts to the art exhibition domain. Where it might have been successful was in the artists’ attempts to ‘question the subject’s centrality.’ But where it failed was in its unfeasible and anthropomorphic expectations of artworks ‘not to treat humans as subjects.’69 Another point of failure for any exhibition of OOO is the demand that it exist outside human witnessing. The only road through this sticky area is to reclaim what ‘to witness’ might really mean. Perhaps these exhibitions prove that the immediate witness of art in an art exhibition is a falsehood: the experience lingers afterwards and is preceded by various speculative divinations. In other words, in true OOO and SR theory, exact time- space experience is punctured by a comprehension that chronological time is a human-made concept. The realisation that there may not be any need for a witness reminds us that aesthetics has been a construct that can be outstepped, by being an experience that lingers, is repeated/ presaged or that embellishes and is informed by other things.

2012’s Documenta13 curatorial essays, interviews and exhibition reviews revealed an underlying interest in Speculative Realism ideas. In fact, Graham Harman wrote an essay on Eddington’s third table.70 This was an exposition of Speculative Realism theory, but without any real application to OOO principles (such as allure/withdrawal and real/sensual objects) or any speciﬁcs (descriptive details or analysis of artworks) of Documenta13’s art, revealing to me the disjuncture, so far, between OOO theory and its particular execution within an art context.

68 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 39. 69 Robert Jackson, “Algorithm and Contingency,” Robert Jackson, accessed March 25, 2014, http://robertjackson.info/index/2012/11/and-another-thing-essay/. 70 Graham Harman, The Third Table, No 85, Documenta (13) 100 notes (Ostﬁldern: Hatje Cantz, 2012).

Art in a Flat Ontology . 27 Dutch electronic arts festival The Power of Things, held in 2012, was inspired by Jane Bennett’s book, Vibrant Matter.71 It focused on the anxiety surrounding art and design in the technological age, and how a new aesthetic could be problematic, as I see it, for being potentially more mundane, rather than provocative. Its focus on disruption and augmentation, however, influences Chapter 8, Machinic Interaction and Robot Love. OOO-inspired conference Performing Objects held in Falmouth, UK, in 2013, comprised scholarly papers, workshops, performances on puppetry, theatre and object oriented ontology, with a keynote address by Timothy Morton. For Weaponising Speculation, a March 2013 exhibition curated by Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought (DUST), the abstract read: ‘Speculation: to think the world of experience, beyond such experience. But how to seize this reality, how to speculate upon that which the academy and the art world has prohibited?’72 The curators described it as a ‘coreless experiment’ for speculative thought and art/theory. One of the artists, Teresa Gillespie, created an audio and spoken word work titled Restless tongues expending into rest 2013, for which she spliced or stole words from various writers, including Eugene Thacker, theatre theorist Antonin Artaud, Speculative Realist writer, playwright Samuel Beckett and German artist Kirt Schwitters.73 This aggregate of voices, a compilation of multiple strands of story, fits well into a Speculative Aesthetic, where concepts of the source, the origin and the authority are decentralised as qualities. In June 2014 in Beijing, Thingworld: International Triennial of New Media Art opened. Essays by Graham Harman and Timothy Morton positioned this title (at least) and its exhibition thematic as an exercise in engaging with art objects as ontological things that no longer fit neatly into a correlational model of ‘subject conjuring object’.

These SR exhibitions, combining theory and art, have in common an experimental and innovative nature and often mobilise sound as a deﬁning feature. However, the intent of adopting these concepts seems to

71 Jane Bennett,Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things (London: Duke University Press, 2010). Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Theory and Chair of the Department of Political Science at John Hopkins University and is known for her materialist theories on nature, ethics and affect, along with her interest in the immanent agency and vitality of all things. 72 Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought, commenting on speculation, accessed February 2, 2014, http://dublindust.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/ weaponising-speculation-exhibition/. 73 Teresa Gillespie, “Restless tongues expending into rest,” Teresa Gillespie comments, accessed June 14, 2014, http://dublindust.wordpress. com/2013/07/10/teresa-gillespie-restless-tongues-expending-into-rest-2013/.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 28 get lost in the physical translation of idea-into-object. For me, the success of an OOO exhibition lies in its capacity to avoid critical reduction, dismantle the inherent structures of aesthetic judgement (and replace them with a latitude of experiences) and trace further pathways for imaginative thought.

Nicolas Bourriaud (b. 1965), French art scholar and author of 1998 Relational Aesthetics, was recently announced as curator of the 2014 Taipei Biennial, The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene. In the media information he speaks of new contracts and networks between multiple species (life and non-life), directly referencing Speculative Realism:

In the theoretical field, Bruno Latour calls for a ‘parliament of things’, while a recent philosophical movement, ‘Speculative realism’, criticizes anthropocentrism and the notion of ‘human finitude’ so present in western thought: for those philosophers, thinking and being are not correlated, and the human individual does not have any preeminent position in the access to being. Quentin Meillassoux even rejects the necessity of all physical laws of nature, and Graham Harman considers everything as an object, whether physical, fictional, living or inert.74

This Biennial exhibition’s language overtly suggests his interest in exploring the middle ground between art and Speculative Realism, and preﬁgures further discussion and debate on an international level.

My own Alaska Projects exhibition, held in Sydney in July 2013, and entitled The Carpentry of Speculative Things75 included ﬁve artists’ and two writers’ responses to what OOO and Speculative Realism might mean for contemporary art. Finally, there was Encyclonospace Iranica, curated by Mohammed Salemy and held at Access Gallery, Vancouver, from September–October 2013. This exhibition was a direct response to Reza Negarestani’s reconceptualisation of knowledge, but also an investigation into the connection between computers, art, technology and speculative knowledge. The nine contributors were emerging Iranian artists. The ‘digital turn’ focus would have been interesting enough on

74 “Taipei Fine Arts Museum announced Nicolas Bourriaud as the curator of the Taipei Biennial 2014,” Biennial Foundation, 18 January 2014, accessed January 23, 2014, http://www.biennialfoundation.org/2014/01/taipei- ﬁne-arts-museum-announced-nicolas-bourriaud-as-the-curator-for-taipei- biennial-2014-the-9th-taipei-biennial-will-be-taken-place-sep-13-2014-to- jan-4-2015/. 75 Prue Gibson, The Carpentry of Speculative Things: An Art Experiment, Alaska Projects, Sydney, 2–7 July 2013.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 29 its own, without the added element of Negarestani’s political ﬁre at its base. This political content may have been absent from previous SR- and OOO-inspired exhibitions, but will be a part of Aesthetics After Finitude, a conference and exhibition scheduled for UNSW in January 2015.76

MAIN OOO TERMS There are several important key terms in OOO explored at length throughout this thesis. These comprise ﬂat ontology, allure/withdrawal and hyper-objects.

A. FLAT ONTOLOGY A ﬂat ontology proposes the equal status of all things, alongside a resistance to any over-reliance on relations or origins. It advocates an escape from an overly subjective or anthropocentric, hierarchical view of the world. It is an acknowledgement that things or objects differ from one another in terms of their distinguishing qualities, but not their status. Flat ontology is relevant to contemporary art’s cross-disciplinary methodologies and collective/collaborative creative practices. By allowing for the existence of multiple realities, a ﬂat ontology enables an aesthetic mode of existence that does not rely solely on interpretations of origin, authorship, history, context or value. Instead, art honours the ‘enduring units’ of all things.77 The philosophy provides an expanded experience of any artwork, at any given time, without condensing or minimising the singularity of that experience alone.

A flat ontology is difficult to grasp as a useful OOO tool because ‘flatness’ is a curious qualifier. How should I account for this term that has been used in different variations, as coined by Manuel DeLanda and particularised by OOO theorists Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant?78 It is an ontological strategy, encapsulated as a level and democratic plane of thought and being. However, it’s difficult not to keep tripping over the literal ‘flatness’ of object-oriented ontology. Why a flat ontology? Why not an expanded ontology or a material ontology?79

76 Aesthetics After Finitude is a blog run by a UNSW research group: accessed May 14, 2014, http://aestheticsafterﬁnitude.blogspot.com.au. 77 Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), 204. 78 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 21. 79 Levi Bryant develops ﬂat ontology into a machine-oriented ontology, where units exist at a variety of different scales and the ontology of machines can be understood by their operations; Levi Brant, Onto-cartography: an ontology of machines and media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 37-53.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 30 Would not unplumbed layers of subterranean non-linear knowledge be better? Although ‘flatness’ is, summarily, a de-privileging system that avoids distortions of relational connections, things are, nevertheless, allowed their functions of causality and their ability to affect other things. Relations between things are present, but cannot supplant the relevance of the things in themselves. Perhaps Harman deals best with this chosen descriptor of ontological ‘flatness’ by reiterating the importance of the ‘irreducible’ properties of objects. They can’t be reduced to anything else.80 In essence, a flat ontology tolerates all things, including the corporeal/non-corporeal, the referential, imagined, concrete and abstract, with a strong caveat that these things are discrete and cannot be diminished.

In The Democracy of Objects, Levi Brant elaborates four theses of flat ontology. Bryant clearly states that a flat ontology rejects transcendence or a privileging of one thing as origin of another.81 He also reminds us that Harman’s de-privileging of objects is, in fact, a de-privileging of subject-object and human-world relations. Bryant makes a case for the notion that there is no super-object, such as the universe, which encloses a single unity. This concept owes a degree of derivation to Serres’ quasi- objects. They have, in common, a conception of things as multiple, aggregated, inexhaustible and irreducible to their parts. In terms of ‘flatness’, Bryant says that all entities are on equal ontological footing and no entity ‘possesses greater ontological dignity than other objects.’82 Disregarding the humanist language of ‘dignity’, there is cohesion between Bogost, Harman and Bryant regarding the equal status of all things, in a flat register or on an equal plane.

For fellow OOO theorist Ian Bogost, flat ontology is not really flat, but one-dimensional, where all things might be scattered across a two- dimensional surface or collapsed into the ‘infinite density of a dot.’83 He says, ‘instead of the plane of flat ontology, I suggest the point of tiny ontology.’84 I would mention that collapsing things to the tiny dot of the infinite could be read as a version of truncating, reducing and minimising, which would be counterproductive to a Speculative Aesthetic.

80 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 138. 81 Bryant, Democracy of Objects, 245. 82 Idem, 246. 83 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 21. 84 Ibid.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 31 A democratic approach to all things and an equalising or de-privileging of any one thing on a plane in a single register have their appeal. A multiplicity of ontologies creates a useful aesthetic proposition when writing about art. An effort to remove authoritative arrogance from the art writing voice is supported by a flat ontology of art experience, where the voice of the artist, the writer and the viewers are all legitimate and non-specific. While the allure of the artwork is ever-present in a flat ontology, and the relevance of the art ‘thing’ has its place, it contains, within, a structure of multiple experiences as things. The ‘art thing’ is afforded its full weight, not as superior to other things, but as different from other things, though not reducible to its histories, its politics or its biographical modalities.

So, the utility of a ﬂat ontology is its ability to redress a human-centred hierarchy and destabilise correlated relations. A cautionary warning might be that a ﬂat ontology, in seeking to avoid reductive habits, could become, contrarily, too reductive, in that it shifts privilege from relations to things, but without creating a broader perspective. Simply relocating the ontological emphasis, within a structure of engaging with art things, for instance, may not allow greater access to experience or systems of knowledge at all. There is a danger we are zooming out, only to zoom back in to a different position. The focus is merely different, rather than expanded.

SPECULATIVE ART WRITING The main question then, for me, is how might a flat ontology be helpful (or enjoyable) as a framework for speculative art writing? Writing is a desire for the thing that has stimulated the will to write. Or does the thing (the artwork) have a desire to be written about? This idea of an impossible ‘writing,’ within the structure of human language, is a hard task to fulfil. The writing is impossible because it can never be anything other than a match or a version of the artwork. The writing won’t create access to greater knowledge or to deeper understanding, except that it might reveal the will of the writer. A flat ontology accepts (or allows) that art writing is not greater than the artwork, but equal to it in terms of a register or order of non-hierarchical things.

A ﬂattened speculative writing can be a multiple thing (an experience for many); it would be a discipline encompassing various forms and styles, voices and structures, where criticality is inherent or present, without being didactic. It would be where experiencing, thinking and writing about art is a state of decentralised aesthetic being, where each property is different and discrete, but no one is more ontologically relevant than

Art in a Flat Ontology . 32 another, nor can it be exhausted. It would allow stylistic experimentation and speculative manifestations. More particularly, for me, it would encourage variable characterisations, being both unreliable and divergent. These latter qualities are mobilised through ﬁction, providing further contingent possibilities, whilst also becoming its intrinsic symptoms or indicative qualities.

Through speculation, OOO is one of the few philosophies that can embrace fictive or fabulist elements to explore the artwork’s future potential—without the historical reduction of what it was (art criticism is a report in this case) and without the universal humanist reduction of what it is for any person—the usual subjective experience.85 Only fiction can speculate about what it might become. In other words, fiction might not be true, but it can be real. Often, there is nothing more real than the unreal, the imagined and/or the fictionalised, because fictional realities are not limited to the truth in a referential mode but are infinite and ‘weird’.86

One means of addressing the limits of human comprehension and moving into a post-human discussion of being is to write as an aggregated process. Speculative writing, therefore, encourages a different habitus of thought and a different accompanying mode of writing. So, in this thesis, there is an aggregate of writing voices, which interweave. There is: 1. the academic voice, which presents and argues content; 2. the anecdotal voice, which recounts art experiences; 3. the cheeky fictive voice that slips in when no one is looking; and 4. the metafiction or reflexive voice, which might question the sanity of such a project.

How will these four voices (can I call it schizo-ﬁctive writing?)87 cope with ﬂat ontology, allure and hyperobjects? The answer is: one thing at a time, please, and on an equal register.

B. ALLURE (AND WITHDRAWAL) Allure! Come hither, my ﬁrst OOO dilemma! A problem: the mysteries of allure could create fuel for critics of OOO. Isn’t this allure and withdrawal a phenomenological continuation of ‘the reveal’ or a reversion to mysticism, pulling away the veil to reveal the truth? Further, by

85 Also, there is the related semi-fiction of Speculative Realism such as the theory fiction of Reza Negarestani, the ficto-critical work of Graham Harman in Circus Philosophicus and his research on science fiction writer H.P.Lovecraft. The horror genre lends itself well to an OOO enquiry; see the writing of Eugene Thacker. 86 Harman, Weird Realism. 87 The Confraternity of Neoflagellants, thN Lng folk2go.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 33 discussing its unknown, mysterious qualities, which lie beneath, are we just reverting to sublime transcendence, where that which we cannot know belongs in the realm of a higher spiritual power? Graham Harman deﬁnes allure as that which, ‘occurs only in special experiences and seems to have something to do with separating the agent from its speciﬁc qualities.’88

I would argue that there are agential forces in nature (sexual, magnetic and meteorological) and in art that exacerbate the object-properties of allure and withdrawal, but are not related to mysticism, religiosity or theological faith. The idea that allure only happens, in Harman’s model, in special experiences is both troubling and sensible. It makes sense because we are not moved or touched by artworks every single time. We have never been moved or enthralled by every object that is an artwork. The condition of difference—a gap between what the artwork offers and what we need from it - has always been there, in the art objects. In Harman’s OOO scheme, all things have inherent allure, as independent, autonomous and vital things, irrespective of special experiences. The key seems to me to be… simultaneity. My interpretation is that, when the experience and the qualities’ agency occur at the same time, allure and withdrawal occur.

OOO’s philosophical return to a focus on objects, rather than their relations or networks alone, is timely, because the nature of pluralistic, multi-media art is changing. Relations, systems and networks are becoming ever more complex in this globalised digital age and there is a danger that they have usurped or eclipsed the relevance of the objects themselves. OOO restores an interest in the artwork as an independent, vital object, but without ascribing it deity status and without giving it transcendental capabilities.

In Guerilla Metaphysics, Harman says allure is the separation of an object from its qualities.89 Allure is a term referring to the manner in which the difference between an object’s unity and its plurality seems to fall away. The difference between the outside/inside or between the sum and its part disappears. This is a way of explaining that all objects have an inside and an outside reality. This is more than a perception of realities, but is an objective acknowledgement that these pluralities exist. The dynamic tension between two characteristics eludes the spectator’s

88 Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Illinois: Open Court Publishing, 2005), 142. 89 Idem, 153.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 34 grasp and is therefore attractive. Objects are drawn to one another when there is an element of curious mystery or an unbridgeable gap. Allure exists in all objects, Harman says, including all inanimate objects, and can be produced by such things as humour or charm.90 Allure splits its sensual qualities, but not its real qualities, as this would cause its destruction. The splitting of sensual elements generates the distant, real object signalling from beyond and the sensual becomes fragmented. This, Harman says, causes ‘almost radioactive intensity.’91

Aesthetic things are not utilities, despite having utilitarian qualities. This is where OOO concepts become difficult when applied to aesthetics. However, the term allure finds relevance, in the sense that the separation of the object from its qualities causes an attraction and new intensity is created by a splitting or fragmenting of its sensual elements, which still connect with its distant, real elements. The more allure an object/event has (which I take to mean, the more we are aware of its simultaneous plurality and specificity), the more desirable it seems. Is it merely a case of craving the ungraspable, like in Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, where the attraction is in the longing? Or is it a more complex and physical phenomena, where objects have a certain separated or doubled reality that is different from our experience of it? Some people crave to own an art object they find alluring. Some people crave the ability to make an art object they find alluring. They have, in common, an itch they cannot scratch: a reality they cannot reach.

Graham Harman notes that there are two types of objects—real and sensual—which are not reducible to each other and which do not exhaust their relations, so they remain independent of outside inﬂuences.92 Not only do an object’s unity and plurality fall away and cause attraction, but the object also withdraws. Harman believes that objects withdraw from one another, from us and from their relations. This concept is grounded in the phenomenologists’ interests in the veiled and concealed qualities of things. The implication is that objects withdraw and this is why we can never access or understand them. They exist only as they are and can be, irrespective of us. Harman says that the two kinds of objects cross over, but only within a third, real object. This means that objects can only connect vicariously.93

90 Idem, 142. 91 Idem, 244. 92 Idem,169. 93 Ibid.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 35 This withdrawal concept is difﬁcult to apply to art and art writing, other than through a development of physical withdrawal. Often, we are unsure how and why an artwork appeals to us. We have, conventionally, turned to critical experts for answers, rather than allowing our own interpretations of experience to direct our understanding. We are limited by the relations of the art experience: who is the artist? What art school are they associated with? How many shows have they had? Are they important? The attraction of withdrawal is to acknowledge that artworks withdraw from our analysis and will exist with or without us. This negation provides interesting fuel for experiments in writing.

There is no prescription and no formula to outline or explain the occurrence of aesthetic allure. It might occur when you hear the satisfying lid-pop of a new jar of honey or when your favourite song is remixed or sampled; it might occur when you hear your son whistle in the shower; it might occur when a new ‘hacked’ sound-synthesising artwork is performed at Carriageworks. It occurs when an object’s parts and unity are different (but the gap is not too great), when an experience is autonomous, when its relevance or status is equivalent, and when it functions in an indifferent context.

C. HYPEROBJECTS Timothy Morton coined the term ‘hyperobjects’, which are objects that might exist outside a life span and are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localisation, such as Styrofoam or climate change.94

This term expands on the idea of objects as more than concrete things, extending to all kinds of animate and inanimate things, like memories, banana skins or liquid mercury. Morton has defined five kinds of hyperobjects—viscous, molten, nonlocal, phased and interobjective—but they all have in common the idea that objects can outlast humanity, that they elude space-time fixtures and that their special nature gives them an almost spiritual quality. Morton’s formulation of hyperobjects aids my discussion of aesthetic things and experiences because he doesn’t claim to solve all aesthetic issues with his terms; he only refers to specially chosen artworks that particularly align with his OOO concepts.

Hyperobjects are otherworldly and beyond any 18th century natural sublime in their ability to move beyond the local. So much recent art falls into this category and hyperobjects are an interesting method of

94 Morton, Ecological Thought, 130; Morton, Hyperobjects.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 36 approaching art. As for art writing, there is a definite connection, for me, between hyperobjects and ‘hyperstition’, which is defined in Reza Negarastani’s Cyclonopedia as ‘fictional quantities that make themselves real.’95 Hyperstition also suggests a future existence based on an altering of this reality or an idea that an object has influence over its future outcome. This could be the realm of supernatural or speculative fictions, an idea developed through this thesis.

RELEVANCE OF FLAT ONTOLOGY TO AESTHETICS AND ART A development of a ﬂat ontology would be useful to the ﬁelds of contemporary aesthetic theory and art criticism, due to its acknowledgement of the multiple entities of the world, including, but not giving advantage to, relations and connections as equal things with immanence and vitality, along with their irreducibility.96 The removal of relations to a less privileged position than before is part of the OOO outlook. This is important because discussions of relations and inter-connections have been a strong element of art discourse over the last few decades. Nicolas Bourriaud, writer and director of the École National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, has written on theories of relational aesthetics.97 His participation in international art exhibitions has promoted an emphasis on relations, social media connections and cultural interactions. Perhaps this is a distraction from the multiple realities of art, its independence and its vitality.98 Therefore, a return to objects is welcome, as is the development of an aesthetic ontology.

One of the biggest problems for art, in a flat ontological scheme, as I see it, is the idea of the collective or the universal. Historically, art aesthetics has been a privileged system,99 in the sense that ‘a few’ dictate to ‘the many’ with regard to communal taste—a taste that has been suggested and then reaffirmed via different modes of critical enforcement of knowledge systems, such as critiques, monographs, newspapers, journal articles and catalogue essays. I am not, however, superimposing flat

95 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity With Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008), 19. 96 In the spirit of Bruno Latour’s ‘Principle of Irreduction’: L. Bryant, N. Srnicek and G. Harman, eds. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re-press, 2011), 276. 97 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses Du Reel, 1998). 98 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 58. 99 Even over the past one hundred and ﬁfty years, theorists who have braved art aesthetics, such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Theodor Adorno, Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss and Brian Massumi, just to name a few, have written from a position of expert knowledge.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 37 ontology on top of a traditionally hierarchical system. I am, instead, mobilising ﬂat ontology to chart the movement of an art engagement that has developed new qualities and new properties, even if there has not been enough time, yet, to decide upon their efﬁcacy.

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL Recently, I disembarked a small ferry and stepped onto the listing wharf of Cockatoo Island in the middle of Sydney Harbour. I pushed through the rain and wind, struggling to keep control of my ﬂimsy pink umbrella, and headed for a little house at the top of a hill. The house was a white weatherboard with banks of studio windows. From outside, it looked warm and inviting, well-lit and full of people just visible through the windows. There was a strong smell of ‘art’ as I sidestepped a man with a heavy Drizabone, in order to cross the threshold. The arty smell was wax, turpentine, paint and paper.

The house was an art work.100 The exhibition was a biennale. The island was the art site. Each room of the house told parts of a story. Strange rock-like relics, found in the caves of the island and at ﬁrst thought to be fossils, were exhibited around the house. The relics belonged to a ranger, Ted Wilson, who had fallen in love with the caretaker’s daughter. There were busts of her imagined, re-created body lying on work benches; a small room was full of wax models ready to be cast. There were x-rays of a necklace buried beneath an old oak tree outside the house. This, the evidence showed, was where the couple had to bury a talisman of their love because they were star-crossed and could not be together. There were maps and diagrams of where they met for their passionate rendezvous.

This house, this artwork, was an archaeological shrine to lost love, beckoning the visitors to create their own narratives. Even though the participants of the story and the ranger were no longer around, the house seemed to live on in a melancholic malaise. It still had a faint pulse. It was a research museum, persistent in its process of becoming and un-becoming. Dusty, old and full of curiosities, it was a cabinet. As spectators arrived and wandered from room to room, hearing half-stories from other spectators and an artwork warden, their imaginations were piqued. The ﬂoorboards creaked; the weatherboards sighed. The window panes whistled and the dripping taps cried. I had to resist a strong urge

100 Iris Haussler, He dreamed overtime. Cockatoo Island, Biennale of Sydney, 2012. Haussler (b.1962) is a German artist living in Toronto who exhibits major installation works at exhibitions and biennales around the world.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 38 Iris Haussler He dreamed overtime Cockatoo Island Biennale of Sydney, 2012

Art in a Flat Ontology . 39 Iris Haussler He dreamed overtime Cockatoo Island Biennale of Sydney, 2012

Art in a Flat Ontology . 40 to pat the door jamb in sympathy, so unhappy was this old, ugly, run- down house. It was a wrinkled old man of a house, a sickly reminder of unrealised love. A leathery, repulsive abandoned skin.

This house and artwork provided two contradictory motions that didn’t cancel each other out.101 In an OOO mode, human supremacy is cancelled out. Morton calls this a ‘double denial’, where we are correspondingly pushed and pulled towards and away from the thing, like a Hitchcock cinematic technique. This distorts our focus, and has the effect of a re-boot, causing us to start our aesthetic process again. For this house on the hill was a house-thing, ﬁrst and foremost, but our experience of it was as an artwork.

Where the major ﬂat ontology theorists may disagree on the intention and causality of the relations between objects,102 they seem to agree on the multiplicity and equality of objects. OOO, developed from Speculative Realism, revolves around the key word, ‘reality.’ For me, this is never deﬁned in direct application to art by any of the OOO theorists.103 Broadly speaking, reality in an OOO theory is the acknowledgement that it is timely to consider a wider, ‘outside’ view that takes multiple entities into account.

Harman refers to ontology as ‘a description of the basic structural features shared by all objects.’104 My major OOO players all concur on the concept of a ﬂat ontology,105 which is not the theory of knowledge (epistemology) but a theory of being and reality. This reality is not presence/transcendence nor is it nihilistic (or, at least, not as nihilistic as Speculative Realism philosopher Ray Brassier has it).106 Instead, it is a ﬂat ontology that allows for human perception and experience as phenomena, within a multitude of other phenomena, which are all things. There is no omniscient access and there is no locatable space.107

101 Morton, Hyperobjects, 19. 102 One example is Levi Bryant’s internal and external relations in a ﬂat ontology. Bryant et al., eds, Speculative Turn, 270. 103 Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism, IV June 2013 issue, accessed August 3, 2014, http://www.speculations-journal.org. 104 Graham Harman, “On Vicarious Causation,” Collapse Vol II Speculative Realism issue (2007): 204. 105 The term ‘ﬂat ontology’ was coined by Manuel DeLanda; Bryant et al., eds., The Speculative Turn, 269. 106 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 107 Bryant, Democracy of Objects, 265.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 41 Ontologies are not physical planes or fields; they are not literally flat. Instead, this discussion is more of an ontological Tardis because it is both experientially full of potential and moves across time, but is not limited by it.108 Ontology is my tool—my intergalactic ride. I was fond of my Tardis metaphor, until I recently heard Tim Morton say, ‘a weird thing is a Tardis bigger on the inside.’109 However, maybe I should just feel happy that OOO lovers are drawn to the same popular culture as me. He believes that, while objects may not be more important than relations, relations only exist as a small part of the object-related space.110 A phenomenon can be sensed, whereas a thing withdraws.111 Things withdraw from one another and they withdraw from themselves.112 Withdrawal is a concept that most OOOs have in common and refers to the way things connect without ever touching and posits that each appearance of an object doesn’t exhaust its potential or relations. Withdrawal suggests a movement away from reductive simplification— away from correlational dyads. If ontology refers to how all entities act and are, then their propensity to withdraw is important and will be slowly revealed (or faded-out) later. But I will keep to the forefront of my thinking the fact that reality, for this investigation, is in the shared, collective and infinite experience of art.

THE HOUSE’S PLURALITY The house on the hill provided a number of objects evoking OOO. There were the wax body parts, the room of curious collectibles and the casts abandoned in the bathroom: these were the upheavals of lost or star-crossed love. The story the house told me was about the past. It smelled of the past, but we were viewing it in the present. We were lulled into thinking it would continue to decay and fester in the future, because it appeared so arbitrary and believable. However, this was a ﬁction and the whole installation would be dismantled after the Biennale was over and would, thus, not be allowed its normal decline. It was ﬁxed in its viewing, but not in its conceptual reach.

Our perception is that the world acts upon us. What OOO develops

108 The Doctor’s transportation (bigger on the inside than the outside) in Doctor Who, BBC TV show. 109 Timothy Morton, Weird embodiment, talk uploaded on web site Ecology Without Nature 10 May 2013, accessed May 12, 2013, http:// ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.au 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Idem, 265.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 42 further is that the world acts upon us, but also acts independently of us or despite us, with or without us.113 By exposing and reacting against Kantian correlational limits—our particularly human thinking of any object—speculative philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has caused damage to aesthetics. Correlation refers to the limitations of thinking and being as always connected.114 This is the position from which Meillassoux wishes to awaken us, by ﬁnding a new necessity for ‘contingency.’115

THE STRANGE HOUSE AS AN INDEPENDENT ENTITY As I was leaving the Biennale artwork that soaking day, I watched a woman in front of me standing by the entrance. Her red hair ﬂamed beneath a felt hat; a green woollen dress clung to hips and breasts. Not old, she wasn’t young either, and a rash of freckles reminded me of my own long, summer afternoons playing on a white beach, decades ago. She had dangly earrings, shaped like crosses and inlaid with bone. As she pulled her raincoat over her dress, she arched her back to facilitate the movement, but it was unavoidably sexual, a mannerism that made me ashamed for her. For us all: that we are nothing, if not beasts of art desire.

Before she set off into the precipitation, Clarice Eckhardt paused for some refreshment. She held a plastic punnet of baby tomatoes (known as moon-squirters, by some) and was methodically popping one after the other into her mouth. Another art viewer stopped by her side, considering the wetness beyond the door. As she bit into a particularly juicy tomato, a spurt of seeds shot out and landed on the man’s lapel. Clarice stopped chewing, frozen with the alarm of messing the man’s clothes with her food. He glanced at his lapel, turned to her and said, ‘Juicy, aren’t they? Those slippery little suckers.’ Then he left.

She put the punnet back in her bag and shook open her umbrella, while her coat ﬂapped open with each surge of wind. As she ﬁnally conquered her wet weather gear, I saw a sheet of paper fall from her pocket. Even though I called out, she didn’t hear, so heavy was the drumming rain by

113 Even then, there is still room for the human. Lingis’ idea of instrumental connections relates to Timothy Morton’s causality as aesthetics, of the act of the event or happening as creating an effect. Morton sees aesthetics as a place of real illusions. This is to acknowledge the mystifying nature of things and also to understand the reality of cause and effect as bound up with this. Morton, in Realist Magic, sees regular events as aesthetics. He sees the motion of a saw through wood and a worm oozing out of wet soil, in fact any action, as an aesthetic dimension that is the causal dimension. 114 Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 1-5. 115 Meillassoux, After Finitude.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 43 this stage. There was something about this woman that deeply bothered me. She could have been a daughter, a sister, a mother, a lover. All her passions were invisibly coiled around her neck. I could see them, though, and they seemed to transform her into a monster of yearning, not necessarily for a person: a man. No, this desire I recognised and it was for thought and things, for ideas and inspiration, for intellectual stimulus… and art.

Was it the tomatoes or the man’s simple response to her that scared me? I stuffed the paper in my pocket, thinking I might catch her to return the paper, once I’d gathered my belongings. But the truth is that I knew I wouldn’t, because she’d trotted down the hill on an elegant pair of purple and green high-heeled brogue Mary Jane shoes with side buckle. Straight onto a ferry she stepped, bound for the city, even before I had managed to extract my own pink umbrella from the messy pile outside the door.

Eventually I, too, stepped off the porch and moved away from the house. I had to walk hard against a sucking feeling from behind. A malevolent draught of wind? A strangely speciﬁc gust? I was soon safely under the wharf shelter about ten minutes later, waiting for the next ferry to arrive. Only then did I pull the piece of slightly wet, lined paper from my pocket. It was some kind of prose poem and it read:

Hysteresis dampens the day, with mouldy patches of tea-coloured moisture. Stains of past darkness edge to where those red-eyed ﬁends are always watching me. How can I smell the dankness when I have no nose, no sense of reality? If a tin roof echoes the falling rain and the drum of reverberations travels up through my skin, will you still love me, you beautiful art thing? Anger storms and passion rages; it will force the thing to me. But I can’t wait forever and the pain in my side is too sharp. The forces of inter-connected possibilities tie me to you and your walls and stone foundations. We are not free. Experiment starts in the future and ends in the past. Cross that threshold of queasy fear and take the chance you’ve always wanted. Failure is certain but success is no friend either. Fly to a fabulist place where all are the same and everything is different. It’s better not to question the contingencies of change, for they are weaker than the wind and stranger than the rustling leaves. I can see the ﬂuttering colours of the more-than-human and wonder what Starhawk sings when she casts her political spells. We are all automata of the state but there are new counter-actions. The forces were always there, anterior to human time, but if we harness the power of the thing, there may be a way.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 44 In the bottom right-hand corner, was a name and title, the end of a letterhead. It read: Clarice Eckhardt, Curator of Medieval Art, Museum of Earthly Delights. I folded the page neatly and tucked it into my zippered money purse, a place where I keep all my special things, including a Chinese zodiac goat amulet, an old guitar pick and a dried ﬂower from a friend’s installation. I jumped on board the next tiny ferry and bobbed along, nose-diving and scaling the waves, all the way back to Circular Quay, wishing I knew more of the woman.

Clarice may have been no more than another ‘thing’ in this story. Even though localised on the island, she held a metaphorically aesthetic role, as an embodiment of the house, the artwork and my externalised experience: a daemon spirit. She was an incarnation of all the ideas I hope, wracked with worry, to extrapolate. She was a participant, but she was also part of the house and she was also an element in the world. She could easily not have been there, and might have been no more than an allegorical ﬁgure representing allure/withdrawal. She was a character, not a witness. In other words, the woman in this story, sticky as she was with Timothy Morton’s hyper-objective viscosity,116 was both in the story, of the story and outside the story—necessary and unnecessary in equal measure.

The concept of the fictional art story needs to be elaborated, but not before I investigate what an art writing discipline might be. If speculative aesthetics is a branch of theory that creates inter-disciplinary interference or static between not-knowing (speculation) and a move away from critical correlational distance and overt humanism, then speculative art writing might be an enactment of theory and fiction and art experience. This might sound like hard work—a long and sweaty run—but I feel like some challenging exercise. I’m ready to get my heart racing. In the end, a speculative art writing practice is not only legitimate, it is also necessary. One caveat must be stated here: fictional elements are never to be trusted. And nor am I.

116 Morton, Hyperobjects, 35.

Art in a Flat Ontology . 45 CHAPTER 2: The Equality of the Run

‘A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.’117

OOO may be helpful in applying new terminologies (allure, flat ontology, hyperobjects) to experiences of art, in order to make sense of a pluralised and expanded world. That methodology, however, does not address the question of where or how an ‘art writing’ practice might sit in an OOO environment. An art writing practice is work, is an endurance run. Does it run alone, as its own independent discipline? Does it run in a pack with other runners, such as the schools of science or engineering? Does an art writing practice share OOO qualities and properties, as both unity and aggregate of pluralities (with the difference between the two comprising the allure)? Why do OOO theorists rarely speak of objects in terms of overt movement? OOO things exist with equal status; they have agency, and real and sensual qualities, but they don’t tend to be described as moving across great distances. Movement might help resist the space/ time fixed point, in order to allow for massive expansion into systems/ sequences as alternatives. So move, run with steady and repetitive steps. Then, perhaps, a new pattern of data-things can be visualised, while their aesthetic flows and movements become part of an aggregated and experiential art writing practice.

THE ART EXCURSION Recently I arrived at the UNSW Art & Design school where I teach ‘art writing’ to post graduates. The course runs from 6-9pm on a Wednesday night. It’s tough: the students have to listen to my lectures on aesthetics, critical theory, critical curatorial concepts, history of art criticism, writing techniques and editing. Then I make them do lots of tricky writing exercises. Most of the students have day jobs and are weary by that hour. So, last week, I put down my folder and said: ‘Who feels like an excursion?’ They whooped and jumped up from their desks, asking: where we were going, why and were we allowed to just leave without permission? (Probably not.)

The plan: to stride through Darlinghurst, past the Kings Cross water

117 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 2.

The Equality of the Run . 46 fountain, beside the police station to the Kings Cross car park, where artist run space Alaska was hosting a performance by American artist Sal Randolph. Off we walked. I led the way, feeling like Mary Poppins, wishing I had a spoonful of sugar, because one of the students, pacing alongside me, divulged she had received a double lung transplant six months before. A successful operation, but the anti-rejection drugs had caused renal failure and she was now on dialysis for twenty hours per week, awaiting a kidney transplant.

Being stuck in hospitals changes people, shifts their focus from looking out, to looking in. It becomes a visceral experience of bodily functions going wrong, and outside, non-human elements interfering with inside spaces. Back when my eldest son had his three heart procedures at age six, then age nine and then age thirteen, we spent lots of time in hospitals. Check-ups, emergency visits, overnight stays, consultations, tests. I used to list in my head (I now see I was conducting an OOO litany) all the sayings about hearts, to stave off boredom, for example:

Home is where the heart is. Have a heart. Cold hands, warm heart. Distance makes the heart grow stronger. This is the heart of the matter. Straight from the heart. Eat your heart out. I have a heavy heart.

The heart that pumps also runs electrical currents. It is a complex system of blood and impulses, stimulating action. A bloody movement was needed to run corpuscles through my son’s veins. Run, run, run, little boy. The surgeon had to burn the tissue in his heart to stop the electrical faults, which were causing acute arrhythmia, with 230 beats per minute becoming dangerous. Does my son miss those bits of tissue, all burned away? Do I? The perfect child I made, physiologically changed by medicine… saved by it, so he can laugh and talk and kiss… and run. I distinctly remember going for a run around my neighbourhood streets, in the thick of his recurring illness, and being suddenly overwhelmed by paralysis. One minute I was running, then suddenly I wasn’t able to take another step, another breath. Immobilised by fear. I was past cutting deals (take my life not his), empty of anger (why him?). I simply couldn’t move my legs any more.

The Equality of the Run . 47 When unexpected events change the way we comprehend objects, subjects and other things, it is good to grab them and hold them tight, in a material embrace. If OOO shows me how to expand thought, towards a massive view of multiple things, which run together but never touch, then I need to absorb that into writing. If I now see that art writing could be a discipline that is research-led and independent of other creative writing, then I need to follow that thread. During an interview with Bruno Latour, Francis Halsall noted that there is a ‘newly emergent character that is the artist researcher; that is, the artist whose practice is research.’118 I am advocating for a similar emergence in the art writer— the writer whose practice is research, whose interests might slip over into other disciplines, such as bio-science, such as ﬁction.

This kind of emerging convergence of disciplines is in keeping with a multiple state of being. Latour, in this interview on the interdisciplinary nature of the laboratory, explains that multiplicity of disciplines is a result of another helpful event—that of the breakdown of the divide between nature and culture, between mono-naturalism and multi-culturalism.119 It is not new to desire a way of thinking outside the subject/object, nature/culture divide in philosophy, and to expand outwards to the vast expanse of time. The OOO difference is finding a view that is transdisciplinary and has flat register and alienality (a neologism meaning difference, without any god-like aura). If my run was physically stopped by the reality of death, of motherly futility and of human irrelevance, then a new run, a different direction and an alternate route might afford me something I didn’t expect. An expanded subterranean experience, perhaps? Even something small, like an art-induced smile or pleasure- goosebumps, can be an aesthetic event worth writing about. This suggests the potentiality for aesthetic experience in everything. As Graham Harman claims, ‘Aesthetics may be a first philosophy.’120 However, it is important to remember that it is potential only, as distinct from aesthetic experiences occurring with all artworks, every time.

When the students descended the echoing stairs of the Kings Cross carpark, leaping over puddles of piss (someone had mistaken the stairwell for a toilet) with giggles rather than disgust, I realised they had been in

118 Francis Halsall, “An Aesthetics of Proof: a conversation between Bruno Latour and Francis Halsall on art and inquiry,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30, (2012): 965. 119 Idem, 964. 120 Idem, 965.

The Equality of the Run . 48 deep need of a rounder, plumper latitudinal view. They skipped across level two to the huddle of coolly spectacled and bearded art people (think of Bondi hipsters), clustered around a table of white books, sipping scotch from plastic cups. Sal Randolph’s work is participatory. She invites audiences to write in her white bound books (which have snippets of text on every page) and create sentences from them in order to suggest new pathways for her future creative practice (or theirs). The social work we were visiting was text-based and book-based, and the room buzzed with energy and goodwill. The far wall of the artist-run space sweated, as usual, with sandstone sap, with trickling water leading to a crevice cutting to the ﬂoor below. The ticket booth was blocked by the ARI director, who was lugging a new cut glass decanter of scotch out to the retro bar-on-wheels. Rumblings from cars on the ﬂoor above shook plaster dust from the ceiling, which snowed onto the students’ heads.

Was this an art ontological experience that ignited allure? Or just a regular art experience? It sat outside usual systems of art viewing, because of the carpark’s petrol fumes and its industrial and utility-type purpose. However, that might merely make the experience surreal. But it wasn’t surreal at all. It was vivid, alive and immediate. It was real, because it couldn’t be reduced to a thing or relations. There wasn’t any tangible art thing, anyway, and the relations were bouncing off the pillars, like rubber balls, too many to count. The carpark was my favourite art monster; the artist was another monster; the viewers were implicit in the monstrousness of disrupting order and convention. Why monsters? Because they are part-human and part-speculative horror. The properties and qualities of the space, the artist, the viewers, the scotch and the puddles of piss were the same as the artwork. This was not a viewing experience, not immediately aesthetic at all, so the OOO concept of non-witnessing was evident. The political, social and economic elements were there, but only as a subtle presence. The student’s story of her illness and her wish to make art despite her obstacles reﬂected a deep and substantial aesthetic craving that inﬁltrates systems, which include but are not exclusive to humans. I believe part of the OOO success of this excursion was its unreliable nature, its resistance to reduction and its inherent suggestion that it was just part of a larger conglomeration of uncontrollable, disorderly and disobedient things.

WRITING, AS CREATIVE DISCIPLINE Might these disobedient experiences engage a new question: is an art writing ontology an academic research discipline, a creative practice,

The Equality of the Run . 49 an experiential event… or all of these and more? Has the absorption of creative writing into university curricula changed the way we see creative research practice?

Goldsmiths College, University of London, set up an MFA in Art Writing in 2007, which was the first of its kind in the world. In comparison, it is interesting to note the first PhD in creative writing was offered at the School of Letters, University of Iowa, in 1931.121 The concept of art writing as a creative practice or research-led area of study is relatively new. The theory of an art writing practice that encourages fictional qualities is an unexplored field, despite there being several writers who have cross-over practices such as novelists Siri Hustvedt and Jeanette Winterson, who also write about art,122 and despite there being writers on art and culture who make good use of fictional elements, such as Michael Taussig, Rosalind Krauss, Stephen Muecke and Edward Colless.

First, the research discipline of ‘art writing’ needs to be contextualised. In a recent article in Art Monthly UK, poet John Millar wrote, ‘The result is that the influence of experimental and avant-garde fiction waxes in the world of art while it wanes in the world of publishing… Equally ‘art writing’ is now becoming institutionalised through academic acceptance.’ He also quipped that, ‘Perhaps this tendency is not yet categorised. It remains a mutant form and perhaps that is to be celebrated, but it is hard to see why some of this splurge of words has to have the word ‘art’ tagged onto it at all. Why is it ‘art’ writing and not just writing?’123 At the risk of being obvious, art writing is different from general writing because it is a specific object-oriented activity… focusing on art.

There are writers who are currently doing warm-up exercises in ‘art writing as practice.’ At the coal-face of literature and visual studies, certain people can be found. At the Victoria College of Arts, Edward Colless has been an actor in the genesis of a new art writing methodology, which absorbs literary poetics (language devices used in ﬁction and poetry) and art criticism.124 Justin Clemens has used ﬁctional/

121 Paul Dawson, “Creative Writing and Postmodern Interdisciplinarity.” 122 Siri Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). Her new novel follows an artist’s life, via ﬁctionalised nonﬁction documentation: The Blazing World, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014); Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, (London: Jonathon Cape, 1995). 123 John Douglas Millar, “Art/Writing,” Art Monthly 349, September (2011). 124 Edward Colless, The Error of My Ways, (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1995).

The Equality of the Run . 50 creative devices in an art critical/literary context.125 For instance, his book, Black River is a collaboration with artist Helen Johnson, whilst also fulﬁlling the mantra of publisher Re.press’ Anomaly series, in that it ‘differs from the norm and is difﬁcult to classify.’126

From farther shores, recently-retired Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, Adrian Rifkin, gave a lecture,127 chaired by his fellow Professor of Art Writing, Michael Newman, and spoke about taking Jacques Ranciere’s concept of an ‘aesthetic regime of art’ to explore possibilities of an aesthetic regime of art writing on art, and the consequences of art writing for other practices.128 In a 2012 article on their art writing MFA at Goldsmiths, Adrian Rifkin, Michael Newman, Maria Fusco and Yve Lomax collectively wrote, ‘Art Writing does not take modalities of writing as given, rather it tends to, and experiments with, non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativity’ and that it was ‘an anthology of examples.’129 Goldsmiths academic Jonathon Koestle-Cate writes about the importance of the singularity of the work of art in order to privilege the agency, but without expanding on implications of the multiplicity of units within a written text.130 Art writing as an emerging, experimental and trans-disciplinary genre might beneﬁt from a speculative aesthetic reading.

Among the universities, there are mushrooming projects and centres under the direction of people such as Professor Jen Webb of Creative Practice, Faculty of Art and Design, University of Canberra, who is working on creative practice as a contribution to knowledge. She regularly collaborates with Professor of Creative Industries at Central Queensland University, Donna Lee Brien. These new births are not just research, not just theory, not just practice. They are an absorption of all three. Within these scholarly crucibles, constructive arguments are germinating regarding practice-led research or research-led practice. In

125 Justin Clemens, Black River, (Melbourne: re.press, 2007). 126 Ibid. 127 Adrian Rifkin, “From an Obstructed viewpoint, art-writing-image,” Institute of International Visual Arts, 8 October 2012, accessed July 16, 2014, http:// www.iniva.org/events/2012/1_adrian_rifkin_from_an_obstructed_viewpoint_ art_writing_image. 128 Ibid. 129 Maria Fusco, Michael Newman, Adrian Rifkin, Yve Lomax, “11 Statements Around Art Writing,” Frieze, 10 October 2011, accessed December 22, 2013, http://blog.frieze.com/11-statements-around-art-writing. 130 Jonathon Koestle-Cate, “Singularity and Speciﬁcity: writing on art,” Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 5, 1 (2012): 107-123.

The Equality of the Run . 51 noting that the status of creative writing within the academy still needs to be acknowledged, Paul Dawson, UNSW, points out, ‘that funding is the most important marker of institutional status within the modern university, operating as both the generator and the reward for research.’131 Despite the lagging of funding, creative writing is increasingly seen as new research and an original contribution to knowledge. Processes of writing (and practices of art writing are implicated in this) are being written for and against, with academic force and accompanying reﬂexivity. If art writing can be a form of experiment, then Stephen Muecke has a suggestion for how that could be:

Experimental writing, for me, would be writing that necessarily participates in the world rather than a writing constituted as a report on realities seen from the other side of an illusory gap of representation...the experimental writing I envisage is not about breaking free of convention, but is actively engaged in creating assemblages or compositions as it goes along. This engagement may be with different registers of reality, because ‘the world’ is not seen as bifurcated, with the ‘text’ mediating the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’, as in older communication models.132

Here we have scholarly support for embracing the uncertain, the experimental and the speculative. This is inquiry rather than didactic expertise: inquiry as the driving force of new discoveries. If we cleave apart the creative and exegetical components of research, we see the horrible taut sinews, the ugly striations of fat and the exuding blood. Better to allow the theoretical and creative elements, in all writing, to interweave and connect.

Finally, how does this shift perceptions and scholarly outcomes of creative art writing and how do they affect students? Associate Professor of Writing at Swinburne University, Dominique Hecq, advocates a model of creative writing and theory without credentials and urges us ‘to explore the nature of writing, to help students articulate their bond to writing by experimenting with narratives, structure, character, point of view and voice.’133

131 Paul Dawson, “Creative Writing.” 132 Stephen Muecke, “Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism Without Judgement,” Cultural Studies Review, 18, 1 (2012): 42. 133 Dominic Hecq, “Creative writing and theory: Theory without credentials,” Research Methods in Creative Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 186.

The Equality of the Run . 52 In summary, as well as being decentralised and unreliable, an art writing ontology might also be transdisciplinary and research-driven. It might be enhanced by movement or enchanted by a subterranean visit to a gallery space. Research (as manifold experience, and as OOO theory) can become a methodological writing practice, which is more than an incorporation of research into the method; it is also an understanding that writing is part of the research task. There are risks, however, such as creativity becoming eclipsed by the skills of research. Or vice versa.

WRITING AS RUNNING AND CARPENTRY In this chapter, I focus on the ‘practice of writing’ as an OOO working process and investigate how writing becomes another object in a ﬂat ontology. I refer to this art writing process as ‘the run’ because of the effort, determination and endurance of research and writing. ‘The run’ complements the OOO ﬂat ontology of a multi-populated, non-subjective reality. Many non-human things run. When you run, you lose yourself and become part of the environment—the massive ecology of the city or bush. The running action is real and irreducible, as the writing act can be.

Running is a utility (it gets you from one place to another) and it also has distinctly real qualities that can’t be exhausted. It is, therefore, difficult to locate and hold: it withdraws. Graham Harman said, ‘The real is something that cannot be known, only loved.’134 I would add that we love, hopelessly, to try to know reality. In his essay The Third Table, Harman explains that neither an everyday utility of a table nor the scientific materiality of a table is real. His idea of a third table is one that sits between utility and irreducibility. The third table, in application to an idea of an OOO art writing might be one that sits between descriptive commentary and creative experimentation. The third table has emergent qualities and withdraws: ‘Our third table emerges as something distinct from its own components and also withdraws behind all its external effects.’135 By this, Harman refers to indirect connections, which an art writing text achieves when it creates avenues for speculative possibilities. Harman understands that reality, like objects, is difficult to catch. Reality withdraws. This explains why art writing is both an end (an object) and a means (an act of vital performativity).

As I try to write about art in an emergent way, pushing against an overemphasis on didactic critique, I am inﬂuenced by relations (though

134 Harman, The Third Table. 135 Ibid.

The Equality of the Run . 53 perhaps they never directly touch me, which is how both Harman and Levi Bryant explain it) 136 and by ideas that are taking form via an action. If art writing is an act, then a question must be asked: is this act real? Justin Clemens writes in his novella, ‘You must know that those who act, act as the puppets for those who cannot speak or show, they must bear the glory, as well as the shame for the bond, the bond in its rupture at the heart of us all, a broken knot slipped around the unrestrainable.’137 The bond between actor and audience, or writer and readers, cannot be restrained. Like Harman’s concepts of withdrawal, the act of writing is as elusive, and as capable of withdrawal, as the artwork itself, especially when it ﬂirts with ﬁction.

Ian Bogost refers to the work of writing as ‘carpentry.’ Carpentry is not just the idea of the skilful working of wood or words, but it ‘seeks to capture and characterize an experience it can never fully understand, offering a rendering satisfactory enough to allow the artifact’s operator to gain some insight into an alien thing’s experience.’138 This is related to Harman’s version of Heidegger’s tool-being, where we only notice a thing when it is broken, but when we do, we gain a new insight.

Art writing does not exist in a vacuum: it is a live, creative practice. There are art writers whose work I admire, but who are not part of the OOO movement. While this text deals exclusively with the application of the ideas of OOO theorists to art and the development of creative writing,there are four art writers I admire: Jacques Ranciere,139 Claire

136 Bryant, Democracy of Objects. 137 Clemens, Black River, 21. 138 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 100. 139 Ranciere is an art writer, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris. His ideas inform my text, without subscribing to OOO arguments. He believes art works must prove themselves by proposing formulas of power, without normative (relative) judgement4. He believes art developed most effectively at the end of the eighteenth century, at the same time as the birth of modern politics5. His views are interesting to a OOO approach because he believes that aesthetics after Kant became less hierarchical, deﬁnitions of taste were overthrown and all subjects began to share an equal status. This was about breaking with distinctions and hierarchies of sensory distribution. It is relevant to OOO that Ranciere saw this occurring directly after Kant, whereas those of us interested in a OOO application now, are working towards similar democracies of experience, similar overthrowing of social and political hierarchies, to focus on what the object, independently, can offer. Another aspect of Ranciere’s writing that complements OOO is the equality of intelligence, the equality of sensory experience and of politics. For Ranciere, there cannot be an aesthetic experience that is not a political experience and our experience is

The Equality of the Run . 54 Bishop,140 Slavoj Žižek141 and Boris Groys.142 It would be remiss not to

autonomous rather than the work is autonomous.6 His is an effort to remove the single judge, the great determining voice. He disrupts the legitimacy of this judging individual. In his concept of art as politically motivated and politically defined, he says, ‘Art becomes a specific reality when the objective criteria defining the inclusion of a given practice within a defined art form, or enabling the assessment of the quality of works pertaining to this art form, disappear.’7 For me, this is close to the OOO aim of removing relations from a privileged position and focusing on the reality of the qualities of the art works as individual things, without false hierarchies. 140 Bishop is an Associate Professor in the History of Art department at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Her book, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship 2012, is an investigation into the importance of the spectator in the experience of art. She stands apart from relational aesthetics and proffers an advanced account of art as politics, protest and social engagement. Bishop extends participation to an evaluation of a ‘return to the social, part of an ongoing history of attempts to rethink art collectively.’5 This is not necessarily a charting of social activist art but a commentary on the way collaborative and participatory art creates new social structures by moving beyond the conventional passive spectating roles. It is interesting to me that Bishop distances herself from Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, in her introduction.6 In this text, I too hope to distance myself from an over-emphasis on relations. Participation, for me, is the quality of a thing, rather than an object worth discussing at greater length here. Bishop’s theory of participatory presence, as opposed to participatory production, is important in this chapter which deals with the work of writing, the process of writing, the run of writing. Is it enough to be there, as witness, or do we have to act (make or carpent or write)? 141 Zizek is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Professor at the European Graduate School. He writes about art and is known for his lectures on art, its multiplicity, the socialist fantasy at art’s real core. He develops an idea of reality as political resistance and has a love of detective novels (who doesn’t?). All of these elements, while not being OOO axioms, could be absorbed into the discussion. However, I don’t want to manoeuvre his ideas into OOO, when he has not stated an alliance. Zizek, however, does discuss pre-ontological reality. His main concept is that the universe is unfinished. Realism is that we can experience the world phenomenologically and see that there is a certain stature of reality, but there is also a pre-ontological non-reality because the world is incomplete and certain chaos also exists. He says, ‘reality is not fully ontologically constructed...the world is not fully out there.’ 6 To me, this sits well with OOO ideas of allure and withdrawal, where we can only understand the world through a limited perspective. Zizek has also said that modern politics gradually deprives us of our humanity. This is an interesting reversal of OOO: rather than trying to move outside the human view, Zizek sees the systems of politics as stripping our humanity, despite us. 142 Groys, who is distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Karsruhe University of Arts and Design, Germany writes of the way democracy (in socio-politics and in the way art is made) has meant that art has become boring and tasteless. Groys is influential because he believes history has little to do with his art analysis.7 He has said, ‘the driving force of art is philosophical.’8 He is known for reacting against individual nationalisms in art (the exploring or developing of national identity). Instead he draws attention to universal, international utopian aspirations of Communism or ‘reinterpreting Communism as a project of modernisation.’9

The Equality of the Run . 55 mention them and explain how their writing inﬂuences, or is different from, my OOO applications to art, at least in the footnotes.

THE RUN OF REFLEXIVE WRITING Each piece of writing has its own set of agencies and qualities—its own collective and instrumental connections, such as structure/form, motivation/antagonism, language/poetics, story/discourse. Writing could be dismissed in a correlational funk in an OOO context (because it is only humans who write), but perhaps it should be liberated from its previous role as either tangential appendix or, conversely, as voice of authority, by being placed at the nexus of cross-discipline and by being infused/overlaid with theory and art, rather than being placed in opposition to these practices. The writing is just another (hyper) object, but it might be as legitimate as any other aggregated system of independent parts.

Writing requires physical endurance, through the phenomenological, sensory and embodied experience of art via the spectator’s point of view,143 but with an awareness of the performative spaces on multiple sides and spaces within and around an artwork. In an OOO environment, in an attempt to outwit correlational limits, it becomes the gaps that are truly real things.144 Like Harman’s third table, art writing is accessible but only indirectly.145

The issue of aesthetic access relates to the proximity between thinking about art, researching art, making art and writing about art. These activities or workings (connections between thinking and being) are closely linked but don’t seem to directly interact; rather, they are interleaving one another, like soft tissue or rice paper. To establish this difference is important, as it avoids emphasis on the representation and symbolic value or meaning of art things. Then, we can do away with

So this political view creates his socialist aesthetics. It, in turn, becomes a new myth. He is only relevant to this text as one of several key art writers who are contributing fresh ideas to the way we experience art. His views are not OOO-related. If anything, his views against democracy might sit uncomfortably with the moderate (almost apolitic) politics of OOO. 143 The phenomenologists I have followed and who have most inﬂuenced my interpretation of phenomenology are Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau Ponty and especially Alphonso Lingis. However, Graham Harman and Ian Bogost (and to a lesser extent Timothy Morton) draw strongly on concepts of Heidegger’s phenomenology in their OOO writings. 144 Ben Crothers, curator of Strange Loop 2-25 May 2013 at Golden Thread Gallery Belfast is ambivalent about the idea of production as a cure of correlates or viewer/artwork dyads. His curated exhibitions can be seen here, accessed May 14, 2013, http://issuu.com/critbastards/docs/issue_9. 145 Harman, The Third Table, 12.

The Equality of the Run . 56 mnemonic signifying reductions.

THE ACT OF THE ACTION AND THE ACT OF THE RESPONSE What about an art object that acts through action, like an oil pumpjack? Is such an industrial contraption important, without being especially signiﬁcant or more signiﬁcant than any other art thing? Urbanomic curators of The Real Thing, an exhibition of Speculative Realism art held at the Tate Britain in 2010, might have said an oil pumpjack was necessarily contingent.146 In a Speculative Realist model, speculative contingency refers to existing beyond the realm of certainty or beyond our capacity to comprehend. Might it also mean unreliability? Can we rely on every art object having aesthetic qualities or every piece of art writing as having relevance? In his book on Quentin Meillassoux, Harman says there is a, ‘surprising doctrine of a hyper-chaotic world, devoid of all necessity, in which the laws of nature can change at any moment for no reason whatever, and in which both ethics and politics hinge on a virtual God who has never existed but might exist in the future.’147

3D realtime computer graphics were used in Irish artist John Gerrard’s 2010 pumpjack, Lufkin.148 Only later pointed out to me as having obvious sexual connotations, Lufkin has an embedded theory, research and/or practical interlayering, which might also be factors or properties of art writing. It is an image we recognise, as industry, as resource, as human dominance over environment… and, of course, a subsequent and humbling ecological demise. The swing motion of the pendulum is mesmerising. It has Gilbert Simondon’s techno-aesthetic qualities, while the industrial action or mechanical function of the thing is its aesthetic power.149 The oil pumpjack rotates, shaving the ground and thumping skywards, the rush of wind against metal, the hefty swing of its weight. Pumping litres of oil, another beleaguered natural commodity, a resource that might be alive.150

146 The subtitle of Meillassoux, After Finitude. 147 Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 7. 148 John Gerrard (b. 1974) is a major international artist who uses Realtime computer graphics. He exhibits with Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Simon Preston Gallery, New York. 149 Simondon, “On Techno-Aesthetics,” 1-8. 150 Reza Negarastani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008).

The Equality of the Run . 57 John Gerrard Lufkin 2012, video. Courtesy the artist

The Equality of the Run . 58 In Circus Philosophicus, Harman writes about the turning motion of the ferris wheel.151 That great lumbering arc, up and down, up and down. This is the perception when you are on the ride: up and down. There is no sense of it making a full circle. Harman explains the profound, agented effect that the independent objects on the ride have on the crowds watching. Each component has a potential impact on each crowd member, as the immanence of the objects causes a reactive effect. Yet some objects strike different people in different ways.152

Running, in comparison, is parallel to the earth’s surface. The extremes of the sensory environment are related directly to the body’s sensations, in terms of sweat, heart palpitations, hair clinging to forehead, thighs burning, stomach churning. You can’t have the experience without the sensation. You can’t have multiplicities without the individuated specifics, or gaps of knowledge, without flat ontologies. Simondon explains the gap between two individuations as an immanence or real infinity—a conjunction of form and matter.153 Running parallel to the earth creates a connection between two forms and two matters, and this might accentuate the gap between. The potential space is metastisised and, therefore, the allure or immanent energy is increased, too. This might account for the compulsion to run, both literally and metaphorically. The running becomes an agented thing.

As the jack rotates in Lufkin, the camera view rotates. We are the moon; the pump is the earth. The intergalactic explosion of colour is, in this work, an empty and isolated landscape, devoid of humanity’s crooked touch. As I watched this video work one day in a gallery nearby, I noticed a young woman in her early twenties watching it, too. I asked if I could interview her about her experience of the artwork. Why, she said, I’m nobody special? Well, I replied, it is always interesting to hear what other people think and I have to write a review. She said, well that sounds like a recipe for disaster.

RECIPE FOR DISASTER Take the spin of one tessellated cog, and two tablespoons of memory’s chain. Mix in the recollection of where I was born on the clifftops, where the shrill of hungry swallows remains. Stir in the strain of the wind-turned monster, dipping and spilling

151 Harman, Circus Philosophicus, 4. 152 Ibid. 153 Simondon, “The Genesis.”

The Equality of the Run . 59 until there is no more? Don’t leave the mixture in the corner of doubt, where the only solution is bleak and the only hope is magic. Wait until the draught of the pendulum swing has melted, then pour into the syncopated place of the fraudulent hand and ﬂy to the distant hill where no long-haired man treads and holds out his tablets of ridicule. Leave it to stand for three hours or until the hoax and his sophistic temperament have tricked multiple millennia. Poor fools we are. We are no better than the mapping trees or the lumbering pumpjack. Bake in a hot oven while you and I and all of them are caught up in the webof everything. Wait until the complex inter-weavings of time and space tap and spill over. I feel the rhythm of the cycle of the bake and the oil and the endless movement around and down. Serve with a generous dollop of self-deprecating laughter.

RUNNING CANNOT EXHAUST ITSELF Back to the theory/art writing run. I pull on my joggers and tighten the laces to go for this epic activity. My body becomes structured by the apparel. If I wear tight shorts and ﬁtted t-shirt, my limbs are free to move. No loose material ﬂaps about in the breeze: I am aerodynamic. Arms pump, legs kick. iPod is connected to arm, its steady rhythms connect to the beating of my heart. Even though I move, I exist independently of other people and other things. My run takes on a life of its own. Even though I might shift pace or change course, the run is still an enclosed object. It is irreducible and that is its reality. OOOs might say there is a part of all things that cannot be touched or contacted.

An art writing apparatus might cry out that it’s not over until the runner stops—that the run is an aggregate of footpath, rustling trees, pounding heart, humming to music, thinking of how to explain an art writing ontology and movement, in a thesis. Language, vocabulary, beats, endurance and the odd ﬂash of insight (or was it just some crazy endorphins): these are the tools of the art-writing run. A run is hard to maintain over a long period of time. There is fatigue, apathy, thirst and the likelihood, if I go a long distance, of crushing boredom. Remind you of anything? Will the apparatus of my body in motion beat the rotation of the earth to the sundown ﬁnish line? Is this a surface learning or a deep comprehension? Contrary to popular pedagogy that favours deep learning, I am also partial to the idea of surface learning because it allows unrestricted movement, a Bower bird approach. Harman has said objects cannot exhaust their relations. This is a helpful seasoning for the meal

The Equality of the Run . 60 of art writing, as it allows art writers the potentiality of inexhaustibility. For me, this means the structural, tonal, experiential and experimental properties of art writing cannot be exhausted, either.

One shoe is phenomenological experience and the other is OOO. As Heidegger said of Van Gogh’s boots: ‘In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth.’154 The speciﬁcs of phenomenology, such as perception, embodiment and experience, are an explosion of sensory affects, but they must be pushed further. Phenomenology has, historically, been humanist, anthropocentric and correlational;155 however, its basic tenets of conscious and sensational experience are intrinsic components of analysis and experiences of art. This is where a fundamentalist OOO approach would not be adequate on its own. The subjective response is legitimate, but it is only one among many; it is part of a multiplied system of other things of the same status. This is also why Bogost and Harman have retained humanist, and particularly phenomenological, tendencies in their OOO theories—to allow for physical sensations, too. Both have been deeply immersed in the writings of Martin Heidegger.156 Writing on art is more than a single mediating hinge between the spectator and the artwork—a ‘representational medium lying between subject and object.’157 Instead, this is writing, not as only one kind of mediation, but as a run of work.

At the risk of interpreting the run of work, literally, in art, I must mention Daniel Crooks’ Man running,158 shown at Anna Schwartz Gallery in 2012 and also exhibited in Felicity Fenner’s ISEA exhibition, Running the City 2013.159 The work deals with the state of living in cities and the range of people who inhabit the world. OOO is important to Crooks’ video because the artwork confounds chronological time: it loops in and out of itself, disrupting the habitual ways we see. It creates a strange hyper-reality, a world of objects we know and which are familiar,

154 Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 57. 155 This summary is based on the theories of the major players of my Phenomenology reading: Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Alphonso Lingis. 156 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology; Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics. 157 Stephen Muecke, “The Writing Laboratory,” Angelaki 14, 2 (2010): 16. 158 Artist Daniel Crooks exhibits at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney and Melbourne. 159 Anecdote: Felicity Fenner stopped at my house for a drink of water, when running the City to Surf fourteen kilometre race, with her son George, the day after I wrote this chapter. Our house is at the two-thirds mark and my son George gave them the water.

The Equality of the Run . 61 Daniel Crooks Static no.11 (Man running) 2008, video. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

The Equality of the Run . 62 but are taken out of context, to be seen anew. Surely this is how OOO can help art, to show us objects anew!

There is carpentry in Crooks’ method. He uses computational software to achieve an unusual view. The scenes are recorded in real time, but manipulated to slowed time, using digital variations of form, a pixel at a time, a liquid melt, horizontally. They move, they snake, the filmic frames stagger and stammer from left to right, right to left. Crooks’ figures, which are usually one figure morphed and aggregated into multiple stills or frames, are often symbols of abandonment to poverty, to homelessness, to inane life. This is a social reality; there is a conscience, an awareness of inequality.

The runner seeks to stop, to be calm, to be still, but Crooks’ machine goes on and on. Until the electricity runs out. Isn’t this the process of research and writing? To write is to become obsessed, compelled and made slightly mad. Perhaps, some time in the future, it will end. Not on this loop, on this video screen, which plays over and over again. It seems unlikely that stillness will ever be achieved. The poor jogger moves towards the end, only to ﬁnd time has slowed to a sliver of pixel ﬁlm footage and he will never reach his destination. Meditative? No, not really. More like slow torture.

Timothy Morton has said that time lapse photography makes things that seem natural reveal something monstrous or artiﬁcial—an uncanny morphing ﬂow.160 He could have been describing Crooks’ videos. This draws upon the idea of the object receding from touch, in a Harman-esque sense of withdrawal, and upon the way familiarity can become ghastly and unfamiliar: the old ‘uncanny’ chestnut. A running man is a simple image, but, when his normal spatio-temporal frame is removed and replaced by endlessness, it can be perceived as repellent. Although the subject is human, he is an everyman, a representation of a whole species: a unity and a conglomerate of parts. When he is on the running machine, he also becomes part-mechanical, part-automaton: machinic hybrid.

When I was in Anna Schwartz’s Gallery to see Crooks’ video, an attendant called me over. ‘Look at this weird comment, just got posted on Facebook,’ he said. ‘It’s a message on this Daniel Crooks event, here in our gallery. I reckon it’s some kooky artist guy who comes in here, from Bondi. He must have decided to write this.’ I strolled behind

160 Morton, Ecological Thought, 43.

The Equality of the Run . 63 the desk and read over the attendant’s shoulder. As I did so, I had that discomforting feeling of déjà vu. Afterwards, I asked him to print it out for me. It read:

The black box distances itself from the white formations of seeing. Take the northern road and continue the run. The move and the revealing is a slurring smear of time. If there is congestion, then sprint past Edgecliff Station, across spaces of hazing pasts and futures. Don’t limit your position to a thousand plateaus but move with the rhythms of implosion and pain. The extended running hours have caused congestion on the inner city exits, so limit your route to the knowledge tree. How can we reach for the future if the past has no conclusion and the roadways are so busy? I must find the fixed point and make my mark of darkness, both the fulfilled and the restrained and the hazardous.

The muscles of your legs see me. Gather the acorns of lost memories, only to fall among a stampede of colour and form. If you ride past the small beaches, then over the cliff you go, falling to the ravine below.

No, it’s not a memory but a moment in future time, where no trees stretch across the headland, no people shout and laugh. This could be a place where no-one runs any more. No humans to go hunting in such a post-apocalyptic place, a landscape of empty farms and dry earth.

Watch out for the drones on the military road, an agent of politics that sees you, watches now. There are speeding police southbound but here, there is nothing left to see. Stay right there on your running machine, a different kind of drone, a thumping place of fake movement and fraudulent ease. A running machine to become a heart machine, to become a love machine. I’m really ready for a swim now.

I took the printed copy and folded it twice and put it in the side pocket of my bag. When I got home, I found the water-damaged piece of writing that the woman on Cockatoo Island had dropped. I opened a new exercise book, already covered in collaged images I loved (Morandi, Goya, Bill Viola, AES&F), and pasted the pieces of paper in, along with the recipe for disaster.

THE WARM DOWN After a long run, it’s good to slow to a walk. The heart beat slackens, the sweat cools on the skin. Walking, or tramping, is as good as a run. OOO

The Equality of the Run . 64 theory lends itself to the task of a walk too. The connections between things sometimes expose themselves at a slower speed. Interspecies observations are a pragmatic, if esoteric, iteration of OOO and are helpful in an interpretation of Aboriginal artist Nyapanyapa Yunupingu’s paintings and videos.161 Her paintings trip the rhythms of the heart and suggest (immediately) a connection with ‘more than things’ and ‘more than human things.’ There is trickery and deceit dancing across the surface of her work, but it is a rancorous humour, a tinkling bell of laughter that you catch on the breeze of her painted lines and in the rustling leaves of her naturally corrugated bark.

‘Let us stop admiring our heads for a moment and consider our feet,’162 said Bataille, and Lingis said, ‘When we move, we look outside. We scan the environment for open and possible pathways, for objectives in the distance, catching sight of moving obstacles; our gaze plunges into the misty horizons and upward into the skies. It is the most fundamental structure of our kind of organism.’163 To walk across the surface of Australia, with sand between our toes and the smell of eucalyptus leaves in our nostrils, is to face the tiny place of humanity on the biological tree-diagram.

Napanyapa Yunupingu (b. circa 1945) travels on foot, finding pieces of bark that mimic folds of land. She sees the patterns and cross-hatching marks of nature and impresses these visions onto bark in natural, white earth pigments. She also applies white paint to clear acetate, which has, at various times, been hung or mounted on black board and finally filmed as videos.164 The artist responds to the Yirrkala region in North East Arnhem Land. She sees the natural life of animals, like water buffalo (one of which savaged her many years ago), and the ever-turning cycles of the earth. She paints illusionistic geometrical paintings on undulating bark that tease the eye and play with visual perception. Complex cadences: the works sing with a gentle hum of life. To see, we have to move. Soaring, drifting, tugging, washing, dragging, running and rustling: these are the movements of nature. This is Lingis’ proposition in his essay Outside, that to love is to stand outside and to move and, so, to look: ‘Our minds no longer grasp, appropriate, collect, legislate; they become rushes and rhythms and flows.’

161 Yunupingu (b. 1945) exhibits at Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney, and was represented in the 2012 Biennale of Sydney. 162 Alphonso Lingis, “Outside,” Social Text 29, 1, 106 (2011): 39. 163 Idem, 40. 164 For the 2012 Biennale of Sydney, her work was displayed as a video at the MCA site.

The Equality of the Run . 65 Napanyapa Yunupingu Trees White 2011 natural earth pigments on bark Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

The Equality of the Run . 66 Nyapanyapa Yunupingu Leaves and Circles 2011 natural earth pigments on bark Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

The Equality of the Run . 67 She listens for the whispering leaves, the movement of wind across water, the whooshing of animals as they sit down in the dirt. She smells the pungent sourness of the earth’s mouldy surface and reminds us of it. These phenomenological perceptive experiences are difficult to make sense of in an OOO context. They don’t at first appear to belong to a discourse about non-subjectivity and ontological flatness. Except, that being in the bush is already non-hierarchical. Mankind does not sit at the pinnacle of life out there, nor is the human more important than any other species, nor are the rocks and trees without agented anima.

The artist once joked (according to her representative gallery, Nomad Gallery) that these works were ‘mayilimiriw’, which translates as ‘meaningless’. This meaninglessness ﬁts well with the fundamental concepts of OOO. Less symbolism/consciousness, and more story. Her paintings, made from movement, made from work, are a carpentry of travel/collecting/mark-making. Her work also makes me wonder about the place of cycles and repetitive movements within a ﬂat ontology or an ontology that doesn’t produce or operate (in a Levi Bryant version of OOO)165 but which circles around, in time, on an endless loop.

FINAL STRETCH In a ﬂat ontology of art aesthetics, movement, effort and toil (running and walking function as analogous examples) are ways of becoming more conscious of an aggregated or compound view of things, including art writing things. Research has changed creative writing, so that the movement and toil of accumulating information, in anticipation of the writing task, also become the task itself. They are no longer separate, but interactive and interlaid. Research preceding writing has become research as writing. Research, in this case, includes the investigation of numerous forms of writing structure.

Napanyapa walks, Gerrard’s pump rotates and Crooks’ jogger relentlessly jogs. With each step and each rotation, a practice ﬁnds its rhythm. What remains constant is the desire to touch, the wish to see, the capacity to long for art. A phenomenologist might call that kind of aesthetic entanglement ‘seductive desire’ (Lingis),166 a Speculative Realist might call it ‘object allure’ (Harman)167 and a materialist might call it ‘vital

165 Levi Bryant, Onto-cartography. 166 Alphonso Lingis, “Seduction,” Aplinkkeliai, accessed May 22, 2011, http:// aplinkkeliai.lt. 167 Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics, 142.

The Equality of the Run . 68 matter’ (Jane Bennett).168 Perhaps there is one thing I could say with certainty, and that is, no matter how far I run, what I desire will always be just up ahead.

I have run through an ecology of art writing as an independent research- led practice. Next, I apply the OOO concept of hyperobjects to art and to my art writing practice, wherein I have made a pact with that monstrous creature—the devil you don’t know—otherwise known as Mother Fiction. I have a bad feeling I will have to cough up a payment at the end of this, one I cannot necessarily afford.

The running ecology has, however, helped me tighten up my methodological muscles. Having run this far, I now see that a Speculative Aesthetics form has speciﬁc qualities. These qualities or properties emerge from an OOO/ SR investigation. I aim to develop these new speculative aesthetic speculative aesthetic writing criteria throughout this text. They are:

1. an anthrodecentric methodology 2. writing with or without human witness 3. an expanded reality of multiple outcomes 4. things occurring in arbitrary ways, for no reason 5. objects in a system of manifold data 6. non-chronological and unbounded.

And…the speculative writing properties:

1. Fictioning or fictionality. 2. Art as distributed experience. 3. Art as fictive and experiential event. 4. Sci fi art as speculative alternative. 5. A speculative or immanent art writing practice, where the writing runs parallel to the artwork, as a similar vital organism.

These concepts will be explicated in the following chapter, ‘Art/theory Fiction as Hyperobject’.

168 Bennett, Vibrant Matter.

The Equality of the Run . 69 CHAPTER 3: Art Theory/fiction as Hyperobject

THE HYPER FLY French artist Hubert Duprat is a naturalist, whose interests extend to creating man-made atomic reconstructions of crystals and caddisﬂy larvae.169 Duprat carefully collects the caddisﬂies and transports them to his lab, where he separates them from their aquatic larvae cases. He places them in an aquarium, alongside small nuggets of gold and semi-precious stones. Soon, these versatile creatures construct new sheaths out of the introduced materials.

This ability to self-generate, using unconventional materials and by creating elaborate casings, reminds me of Timothy Morton’s concept of the ‘hyperobject’, as a thing that exists outside chronological time, that is not fully visible for certain periods of time (like the moon) and that won’t decay as undistributed, local matter does. A hyperobject, in this instance, functions as a uniﬁed but unconstrained object with inter-objective relations to other things and also as a pluralised object with skills of adaptation and multiple, expansive applications.

The caddisfly’s capacity for cross-material change, for experimental modification and for acclimatisation to a new environment relates to some of these general qualities of hyperobjects, as expounded by Morton. The fly creates a mutant home (ever so monstrous in its glitziness), having lost its former, shabby incarnation. It is not limited by this locality, because we are bound by our distinctly human apprehension of what locality might mean and hyperobjects exist beyond that apprehension.

In terms of specific hyperobject qualities, the caddisfly is ‘viscous’ because it sticks to other materials: it is pervasive. The caddisfly is not just in front of me; it is attached to me; it is around me; it is me. It is ‘nonlocal’ because the insect can thrive in a natural and unnatural environment at the same time; it can be both anatomically conventional but also synthetically aggregated, at once. Even its existence in a localised sense is not directly its only quality. Stephen Muecke discusses the hyperobject’s ‘phased’ nature in a review of Morton’s book. He says that Morton’s

169 Jeffrey Kastner, “Artist Project Trichopterae: Hubert Duprat,” Cabinet Magazine, 25 (2007), accessed July 17, 2014, http://www.cabinetmagazine. org/issues/25/duprat.php.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 70 hyperobjects act simultaneously, but with time/space existing within them, rather than as an external event, and that this is their viscosity, because they display a lack of discreteness.170 So, they are not individually separated but are, instead, mutually attached.

Finally, the caddisfly conforms to Morton’s definition of a hyperobject, due to its ‘interobjective’ and vicarious connections with other objects. Also, it exists in shared space, not so much in space-time, but as space- time.171 For the caddisfly, this means that Duprat’s interruption of time and causation (with his scientific experimentation, his disciplinary regime and his laboratory discretions) is not acting upon the caddisfly to precipitate change. Instead, the caddisfly has already been changing, simultaneously, in its relation to all other things.

So, I am attracted to the little caddisfly, because it is a hyperobject and adapts well to a new situation, without being compromised (despite the potential peril of too much bling.) I would like to apply the readiness to reorganise contextual structures of the caddislfy and the hyperobject to fictive art writing, in an attempt to extend the metaphor of versatility. However, narrative fiction is a tricky beast, as its process requires working backwards, and using omissions and metaphors to generate narrative threads. Nothing can be explicitly stated or told in fiction: it must be shown through characterisation, dialogue and imagery. In contrast, academic writing, especially the PhD thesis, requires an expositional mode of outlining, confirming and supporting—a chronological movement of argument from proposition to conclusion. These genres seem to work against each other. The challenge is to infuse the one with the other and to create a dialectic regarding their interobjective relation.

HYPEROBJECTIVE FAILURE My only criticism of the hyperobject model (and it is a criticism informed by a particular fiction-writing praxis of building story through language) is that, occasionally, the definitions of hyperobjects seem to revert to phenomenological expositions that are experiential and sublime. This marks a failure, whereby the limits of human language and human experience can never open up the task of the hyperobject, which supposedly exists outside these confines. By arguing that fiction,

170 Stephen Muecke, “Global Warming and other Hyperobjects,” LA Review of Books February 20, 2014, accessed May 15, 2014, http://lareviewofbooks. org/review/hyperobjects. 171 Morton, Hyperobjects, 81.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 71 Hubert Duprat Caddisﬂy Sourced 15 October 2014 http://modaetica.com.br/?p=7059

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 72 mobilised within an art writing discipline, might be a hyperobject, I could be falling into the same trap of never achieving limitlessness. Where Morton seeks the limitlessness of things, I seek the limitlessness of art writing. But we both suffer the very locality and ﬁnitude that we seek to escape. This is the inexorable nature of aesthetics, often accounted for via transcendental or poetic language.

What I mean by this is that Morton’s hyperobject properties of viscous, phased, non-local and interobjective are examples of deeply and inherently metaphoric language. Using abstracted concepts to avoid the concrete limitations of things might undermine the OOO or Speculative Realist aims or intentions. This is because, merely wishing to move beyond experience, beyond the sublime, beyond the local and beyond the visible does not make it so. Using metaphoric language to bridge the gap between human knowledge and para-human knowledge might create no more than a circuitous route back to the starting line, as metaphors are no more than a correlational or human/world relation. Morton might (rightly) counter that, ‘some metaphors are better than others.’172

This failure can be extended to OOO theorists’ use of lists or taxonomies of ‘things’ as examples of randomness. Graham Harman used the list of unrelated things (taking a leaf from Latour’s book)173 to enact the arbitrary concepts of reality, as being limited to human experience. However, the random list can only work once. If it is repeated by theorists (as it has been within OOO circles) to expound the speculative nature of ontological being, then it enacts no more than itself, thereby diffusing the arbitrariness it hoped to enable or express. In other words, you can’t create a random pattern of things: it is no longer random if we actively choose listed things.

ART THEORY/FICTION AS A HYPEROBJECT CROSS-DISCIPLINE This chapter develops, via research-led praxis, a narrated idea of how a fiction-infused art writing might be considered an adaptive cross-disciplinary critical practice. Secondly, it follows the trend, in contemporary art, of incorporating fiction, particularly science fiction, into art practice, including the practice of art writing. I propose that this can best be discussed/analysed through OOO theories and especially through Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects, with which I began.

172 Morton, Hyperobjects, 4. 173 Muecke, “Global Warming.”

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 73 In his review of Morton’s Hyperobjects, Stephen Muecke wrote:

The pressing reality of hyperobjects now has the effect of destroying this critical distance, of making it impossible to separate causality from art (as if art were mere decoration on top of the ‘real workings’), and of forcing us to abandon the modern habit of redemptively imaging a better future, for now we have to hesitate in front of what hyperobjects are placing right in front of us: that we are not in charge of the future anymore, because it might well be without us.

Muecke illustrates how hyperobjects afford a wider space (outside human existence) to be more than inert and sonorous sentinels, watching time. Instead, their activity, enactment, actuality and action are liberated. This is potentially exciting for analyses of art as aesthetic things. The disciplines, environmental ecology and art aesthetics might be different, but the ‘real workings’ that Muecke mentions are a reminder of foreclosing the foolish habit of hopeful faith and admitting humanity’s microscopic agency.

I subsequently pose, hereafter, that ﬁctive art writing is, itself, a hyperobject (which seems logical, since language itself is probably hyperobjective), due to its uncanny knack of superimposing or simultaneously engaging two things at once. Morton writes of the difference between climate change and global warming as the difference between thing and phenomenon; however, he yields to an update of the distinctions by saying they are a package rather than choices.174 In application to ﬁctive art writing, the hyperobjectivity of this concept lies in the packaging of the two, alongside a third, whereby the ‘story’ is a phenomenon, the ‘narration’ is a thing and the art is the discourse.

We feel the story as a mood, as a voice, as some kind of tale that affects us, materially and corporeally. The narration is an aggregate of literary elements: techniques and crafts used to build the text (via dialogue, description and omission). There is a gap between the phenomenon and the thing (and, therefore, between the story and the narration), as with all OOO objects, but Morton writes, ‘There is a gap, but I can’t ﬁnd it. The best term for this is nothingness, by which I mean meontic nothing.175 He argues that meontic nothing is not absolutely nothing

174 Morton, Hyperobjects, 8. 175 Timothy Morton, “Same As It Ever Was,” Libre 35, (2014): 21, accessed April 17, 2014, https://www.academia.edu/3200652/Biosynthesis_Same_as_ It_Ever_Was.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 74 at all, but a flickering distortion, a quality of nothing.176 If fictive art writing can be termed a hyperobject, then this quality of nothing (but not absolutely nothing) becomes important and relates to the cosmic, the esoteric, the speculative, the horrifying nothing, the black matter of intergalactic space and how it is manifested in science fiction… and increasingly, in contemporary art.

I will more fully argue my way through Morton’s list of hyperobjective qualities, constructively applying them to the concept of fictive art writing (and, by association, fiction in art). These qualities are viscous, nonlocal, interobjective and phased. However, first I need to briefly contextualise the place of fiction in creative practices of writing and in contemporary art praxis. Examples of a direct cross-over or trans- fertilisation between art writing and fiction are limited, but there has been some recent discussion. For instance, a debate regarding the fictionalisation of history extending to art history was evident at a 2010 Clark Institute conference titled Fictions of Art History. Its line-up of speakers included the likes of novelist and inter-disciplinary theorist Marina Warner. However, the main tenets of the conference addressed art history as a fictional problematic, similar to the way in which history proper has grappled with interpretation, point of view and the balance between facts and a developing or congealing narrative.

Rather than encouraging the absorption of fictional devices in the story-telling of art, the essays discuss the need to resist them; there is an overall unwillingness to blur the genres or to test the crossing of disciplines. Editor of the book “Fictions of Art History” and Director of Sydney University’s Power Institute, Mark Ledbury, does concede in his introduction that, ‘Untrustworthy but deeply illuminating, then, fiction is also… potentially rich in its insights into works of art.’ He argues that we should ‘consider the place and value of fiction in the writing of art history, and address the fictions that circulate in the wider world,’ and, finally, claims that ‘the expanded field of art history that, dare we say, now must include the complex realm of historical fiction and the many spaces outside academia where art history is made, from museums to microblogs, from television to artists’ collectives, from Google art projects to volumes of verse.’177 Though a number of essays in the collection dare to include a discussion about fictional elements in art

176 Ibid. 177 Mark Ledbury, ed., Fictions of Art History (Massachusetts: Clark Art Institute, 2013), ix.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 75 history, none attempts combining the two in the manner proposed here.

Closer to adopting my method are two essays by research fellow in writing and art at Chelsea School in London and Senior lecturer at University of Brighton, Mary Anne Francis, whose research explores the limits of art writing as explanation and suggests ﬁctional writing in response to art as a good solution to the bounded use of descriptive writing without additional layers of experimentation.178 In her essay Here and There she writes a one-act dramatic monologue, which is, in effect, not an experimental art writing mode, but seems more like a dramatisation of a conventional lecture. In other words, it is a written lecture, created via a self-aware narrative modality and with a few stage directions. However, despite its limitation as a ﬁctional enterprise, it does address key points surrounding an ‘art writing aesthetic’, with close associations to my own art-writing concerns.

Francis approaches the topic of art writing as an independent form, but from the specific perspective of an artist. Using artist and narratologist Mieke Bal’s art-sensitive discussions of narratology as aesthetic as starting point, Francis identifies some issues regarding the relations between art, the artist and the art writer… then switches the conventional models, to suit her claims for an artist-written form of art writing as an aesthetic turn.179 She writes, ‘I would like to propose that an artist’s writing should aspire to the condition of, well, yes, art. This is writing as an artist. Writing thus regarded as writing as aesthetic practice, which takes the very attribute that distinguishes art from its secondary texts as its defining feature.’180

Francis well understands the manner in which art writing has been contaminated as an ontological form by a continual focus on its origins/ sources as engaging with objects alone. This restricts the discussion to a subject-object dyad and she argues that within art education where creative practitioners are forced to adopt the genre of thesis-writing, rather than creative writing, ‘a better ﬁt of form to content would disperse this paradox and tension… the congruence of form and content becomes an ethical project.’181 I am a little ambivalent about undergraduates using creative writing to argue the intellectual and conceptual basis of their studio work. Instead, I am talking about an

178 Mary Anne Francis, “Here and There: an Artist’s Writing as Aesthetic Form,” Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 3, 2 (2011). 179 Mary Anne Francis, “Here and There,” 101. 180 Idem, 102. 181 Idem, 105.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 76 art writing discipline that exists as an independent practice (only after the basic skills of creative writing and art criticism/theory have been mastered), rather than a new pedagogic tool.

I applaud Francis’ position in that she joins a critique of the social division of labour between art and art writing.182 I would add that the intellectual or cognitive division between the two tasks needs addressing. She writes, ‘from art to writing, where refracted, it returns to art.’183

Francis also refers to ‘situational fiction’184 in the space of an art writing practice. In a discussion paper session at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London, she positions situational fiction as a possible response to art, as ‘seeming to dispel the problem of reductionism in explanatory discourse.’185 The reduction of art to descriptive or evaluative explanation is truly a limiting problem for art and art writing. Representative writing flattens the vitality of the work and the energy of the experience.

It is exciting to have discovered the work of Francis, not only for its advocacy against descriptive/explanatory art text but also for her suggestion of situational fiction as an alternative response. Situational fiction, for Francis, is specific to the artist’s environment; and is the use of writing within an artist’s practice. For me, this is penetrating in the sense that, for an art writing practice, similar situational or experiential modes of writing are enacted.

In addition to the situation of art-specific writing, Francis designates fiction, in this case, as not being false beliefs or simple fabrication (though fabrication is seldom simple). ‘Rather we are advocating ‘fiction’ in its complex sense as ‘literal lie for abstract truth.’ Or ‘true lies minus facts.’ This is ‘fiction’ in its novelistic sense, but ‘fiction’ that is more than novels.’186 A body of writing as part of an artist’s practice that is novelistic might be an enormous challenge. For an art writing practice, however, that thrives on ‘fictioning’ and OOO concepts of moving beyond

182 Idem, 106. 183 Idem, 105. 184 Mary Anne Francis, ‘‘On the Value of ‘Situational Fiction’ for an Artist’s Writing,’’ Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2, 2 (2009). 185 Mary Anne Francis, “Discussion paper from the Working Group on ‘Situational Fiction,’ Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of Arts London: On the value of ‘Situational Fiction’ for an artist’s writing,” Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 2, 2 (2009): 151. 186 Ibid.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 77 foundational techniques of critique, this deﬁnition of situational ﬁction is apt as a noteworthy complement.

THE PARTICULAR ALLURE OF FICTION AND SCI-FI IN ART We have seen the repurposing of fiction in art writing and art, for example, as manifested by writer, art critic and curator Peter Hill’s 2014 exhibition, Faux Novel.187 The curators were Peter Hill and Annabelle Lacroix. ‘By focusing on signs in images, Hill and Lacroix play on objectivity and explore text and fictional storytelling as an art and exhibition making strategy.’188 Likewise, fiction has experienced an observable increase in the sub-genre of science fiction in art. Australian artists for whom science fiction has become increasingly attractive include Sydney artist collaboration Soda_Jerk who have written about their love of science fiction, such as William Burrough’s Nova Trilogy.189 Their filmic and performance work have been influenced by various sci fi techniques, formats and narrative threads; for example, Astro Black: Destination Planet Rock (2007)190 maps an intergalactic story merging hip hop and sci fi futurism. Retro 1970s television vibe mixes with turntable footage in a spooky, futuristic blend.

Another collaborative Sydney art duo, Ms and Mr,191 have incorporated J.G Ballard’s 1973 story Crash into their artwork.192 In their Occult to do list exhibition at Alaska Projects in 2012, they exhibited an installation in which imagery (digitally cut polystyrene letters) of a car crash was intended as sexual fetish. Ms and Mr use old family movie footage and recreate a watercolour version of Ballard’s book, lighting it up with a car’s headlight. The cumulative effect, as with all of Ms and Mr’s video works, which use old video footage and science ﬁction cross-overs, was slightly speculative and utilised ﬁctive elements such as suspense, characterisation and narration.

187 Faux Novel was an exhibition at RMIT Galleries, Melbourne, held as part of the Fringe Festival between 26 September—23 October 2014. Australian and international artists were included. 188 Ibid. 189 Amelia Barikin and Helen Hughes, Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction (Melbourne: Surpllus, 2013), 270-78. 190 Soda_Jerk, Astro Black: Destination Planet Rock 2007, accessed July 17, 2014, http://www.sodajerk.com.au/video_work.php?v=20120921063726. 191 Ms and Mr are a Sydney-based husband and wife artist team, Richard and Stephanie Nova Milne. They have exhibited at the AGNSW, Splendour, Artspace and Alaska. 192 Crash was exhibited at Alaska Projects in May, 2013.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 78 Likewise, Pia Van Gelder’s major work, Psychic Synth, exhibited at Carriageworks in August 2014, spoke to theosophy, science fiction and hacking old technology, not in the sense of thieving information, but to repurpose and interrupt space-time. In Making Worlds, more than twenty artists and academics wrote essays on the links between art and science fiction. For instance, Andrew Frost wrote a chapter on Ms and Mr’s aforementioned artwork Crash in the context of changing perceptions of video technology.193 Frost explains that artists using screen technologies and science fiction aesthetics create ‘an aesthetic zone between the SF genre proper (and its manifestations in cinema and literature) and the edges of contemporary art practice.’194 By this, I infer him to mean the staging of the stage—the reenactment of the sci-fi reenactment. I mention these examples as evidence of the effects of speculative sci-fi theories on critical developments in art.

The allure of sci-fi is its ability to experiment with the correlational deadlock of human/world dynamics. When a monster of pre- consciousness threatens madness and suggests existence outside human comprehension, we are firmly in speculative aesthetics territory. Is the sci-fi explosion in visual art a continuation of the 18th century Gothic horror novel’s preoccupations with investigating sanity? In 1972 art house sci-fi film, Solaris, scientists aboard space station Prometheus are compromised by alien activity after investigating planet Solaris. Gibrarian leaves a video message before committing suicide, in which he speaks of amorality outside the human experience—of being, not mad, but heavy with conscience. Coagulated forms appearing via the atmosphere—the weather and the surface of the ocean—represent a material change in phenomena. Apart from forecasting strange weather formations before climate change became widely known, the film dabbles with the Gothic concepts that madness might be a blessing—that rationality is a dubious motivation for knowledge. For the reasons that are practised or staged in Solaris, hyperobjectivity, anthrodecentrism and a dismantling of confining structures of thinking in sci fi are a worthy articulation of Speculative Aesthetics and a speculative art writing ontology.

THEORY/FICTION’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH SCI FI A corresponding mushrooming of pseudo-science and ﬁctional concepts

193 Frost also organised a symposium, The Conquest of Space, held in June 2014 at College of Fine Art, UNSW, which deals with sci-ﬁ and art and was convened by Sydney art critic Andrew Frost. 194 Barikin and Hughes, 21.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 79 has also occurred in theory fiction, examples being Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia and the Confraternity of Neoflagellant’s thN Lng folk2go.195 In the latter, we find the following statement,

What follows is a schizo-comic ﬁctioning that lays bare the connections between our hyper-modernity and a medieval-ism that is its appropriate accompaniment and frame of ref-erence (this being precisely, neomedievalism, or, in short, the laying out of a ‘Medieval-Tech®’as the only adequate frame of reference for these Troubled Times). Old World meets New World in an untimely assemblage (or, ‘Mall’) in which, in fact, all temporalities—futures, pasts, future-pasts, past-futures—are deployed, mashed up and then realigned so as to open, at last, a space for something different (this most cramped court allows us, at last, to breathe!)196

Shizo-comic ﬁctioning, in this second text, is a ﬁctionalisation of rigorous discussion regarding the neo-medievalist systems of disorder and disobedience as a result of eroded sovereignty and the massive distribution of digital media imagery and information. No longer are we so slavishly dependent on facts, as distinct from social structures and conventions. If our lives have become de-centralised and de-temporalised, no longer can we follow chronological story-telling formats. This suits a thesis that delves into structures and modes of writing that follow these same disruptions.

Future Premoderns is a psychotic experiment in writing. The ﬁrst chapter, L’Amerique Souterraine, is an unruly excursion in to the subterranean kingdom of RESO, a network of tunnels, a non- sovereigned frontier of sub-level life, densely populated with heathens and artisans. This below-ground series of galleries and tunnels stretch from America to China. The story starts by locating the beginning point or number one site of the L’Amerique Souterraine pilgrimage, a place that exists directly below an old vintage store. Chaos and disorder prevail but a post-modern series of mini-Middle Ages cohorts have sprung up. These are independent groups who are as consumed by wealth, labels, fast-food, the usual kinds of capitalist horror, the global world as we know it, gone ever more feral.

195 Negarastani, Cyclonopedia; The Confraternity of Neoﬂagellants , thN Lng folk2go, i-v. 196 Ibid.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 80 It’s a familiar world, but not quite right, not quite human. First, it’s subterranean. It feels slightly para-human, para-political. The anarchy is the non-anarchy. It’s mad and psychotic rather than dangerous. Malice or fear is internalized rather than manifested as violence or death. Every paragraph leads the reader astray. Just when you think you have a handle on the character, action or political undertone, it shifts. It is as though the authors are following some constructed guiding system of writing to which we have no access. Aleatory. There is subterfuge, politico- economic undercurrents, satire, detective-style intrigue, sci-ﬁ speculation.

Antonio Gambini is the first character we meet in this weird book, a leader among the transcontinental labyrinth during its heyday, a double agent who worked for terranean and subterranean workers, created a scripture, podcasts of ill-repute that have become the source of L’Amerique Souterraine’s impressive 400 year history, Gambini narrates the first chapter of the book, structured in five sagas. This narrator is not just unreliable, he is insane. The tale is madness, the structure extreme. The tone of this tome is one of medieval futurism, the language is cyberpunk, the point of view is shifting and the narratorial presence is mildly intrusive.

In the preface to the collectively written book, Simon O’Sullivan describes their seven writerly logics as fictioning, acceleration, geopolitics, the spectacle, scenes, gifts and things. To this thesis, an active articulation of fictive and novelistic elements in a theoretical treatise that is also subsumed with experiential art passages (fictioning) is most relevant. In an excursion close to the aims of this thesis, O’Sullivan charts the group’s movement through ideas of neo-medievalism and art and subject and ontology, looping around to Medieval times to explain speculative thought. It is interesting, in light of OOO and Speculative Realism, that ‘fictioning’ plays a substantial role. It reflects the re-introduction of fictive elements and narratorial qualities in various forms of literary writing.

Other writers whose work is consumed by sci-fi are Graham Harman, who has written books on H.P.Lovecraft, as well as the semi-fictionalised Circus Philsophicus)197 and Ian Bogost, who has a specialist interest in creative non-fiction, as demonstrated in the OOO theory-infused Object Lessons.198 Quentin Meillassoux, in a paper titled Fiction Beyond

197 Harman, Weird Realism. 198 Ian Bogost, Object Lessons, blog, accessed October 31, 2013, http://www. bogost.com/blog/announcing_object_lessons.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 81 Science,199 announces a prototype for this kind of sci-fi related fiction, which draws on science but pits it against conscience. He speaks of fiction after science as having fictive qualities whereby things happen for no logical reason. This is a quality already in evidence in sci-fi, but which is also part of the mantra for attaining a Speculative Real.

Before I go on, I should mention a recent visit I made to an artist-cum- academic, working with sci-ﬁ.

SAM LEACH: INTERGALACTICA This artist, whose work investigates the effects of an OOO event, is Melbourne-based Sam Leach. His artwork incorporates strange science ﬁctions as subject matter. His recent Sullivan Strumpf Gallery exhibition was a series of paintings and objects hung on a hand-crafted or carpented wooden rack, which sat out from the wall and curved past the corner.200 Several paintings had small shelves jutting from their bases, upon which geological specimens sat. Leach has used archery imagery before (as references to illusionism and the extinction of animals; that is, targets), and the concentric circles were evident in this body of work, too.

However, the reason my heart skipped a beat when I saw the exhibition was its other-worldly, supernatural elements. The works incorporated evolutionary biology, the Anthropocene and sci-ﬁ speculation, all at once. The rocks, like H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic rocks, were alive. In his story The Colour Out of Space, the town of Arkham slowly rots and decays to dust, due to the strange arrival of a galactic meteor, which slowly and malevolently poisons all life forms.201 Leach’s rocks, too, vibrated with vital, malevolent energy. The paintings and rock specimens were immanent.

A large mapped painting by Leach, structured in triangular shapes (utilising the method of opening out or ﬂattening the globe into an isocohedron), charted a strange ecological crisis. Apes, skulls, and geometric imaging of utopian landscapes formed an overall artistic vision of disaster and a desire ‘to see’ with a fresh, mapped and uniﬁed perspective.

199 Quentin Meillassoux, “Fiction Beyond Science,” Purple Fashion Magazine, 18, (2012), accessed July 17, 2014, http://purple.fr/magazine/f-w-2012- issue-18/440. 200 Sam Leach exhibits with Sullivan Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney. His exhibition Dymaxion was held in April 2013. 201 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space,” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2002), 170-199.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 82 University of Plymouth academic Robert Jackson,202 in writing about Leach’s 2010 Present-a-Hand exhibition, which clearly refers to Heidegger, cited the artist’s work as ﬁtting into an Object-oriented aesthetic. And for his 2012 exhibition, Leach wrote:

When we use an axe, we do not theorise about it. It is ready to hand, as Heidegger says, ready to be used for chopping. But while we are actually using it, the axe itself cannot be at the forefront of our minds. It becomes less visible. When we stop using the axe, when it ceases to be functional, it becomes more visible - it is present at hand. If it is only non- functioning tools that can be present at hand, then something is always missing in these present at hand entities.203

Leach is referring to Harman’s books and papers on Heidegger’s ready-to- hand, present-at-hand concepts. Harman points out that this latency is true of all entities, not just tools, and that they withdraw, not just from human attention, but from each other’s attention, as well.204 Even in the realm of the non- or pre-human, unfathomable space, the deep sea, the sub-microscopic places where no human sees, objects interact without being fully revealed to each other. When a wave laps against a rock, both the rock and the wave see only part of each other—a caricature.205 For an art writing ontology and for a writing practice that seeks to escape description and explanation, an enactment of writing using a meta-fictive voice (divested of expert authority) fits into this latent philosophy of being. My computer is my tool, but I frequently forget to position it into my practice and theory of writing. For, surely, the computer, my scribe, has applications, networks and systems of knowledge well beyond the finitude or limits of my writing.

For Timothy Morton, causation is aesthetics.206 The artwork does not exist is a superposition upon the world. It was made, worked, thought. It is not distinct from its causes or the process of its becoming. It is one thing in a multitude of things. In Morton’s aesthetics as causation model, any action effecting a change is causation (think again of Heidegger’s tool

202 Robert Jackson, “The Anxiousness of Objects and Artworks: Michael Fried, Object Oriented Ontology and Aesthetic Absorption,” Speculations II (2011). 203 Sam Leach, artist statement, exhibition page, Sullivan Strumpf gallery web site, Present To Hand 2010, accessed July 9, 2013, www.sullivanstrumpf. com/exhibitions/90/intro/. 204 Harman, Heidegger Explained, 64. 205 Leach, Present To Hand. 206 Morton, Realist Magic,10.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 83 analysis, where we only notice something when it is broken)207 and this functions as an aesthetic because the sensational act is the object, which has qualities. Morton believes that hyperobjects inhabit a causal system ‘in which association, correlation and probability are the only things we have to go on, for now’… and it is not ‘objective versus subjective impressions, nor a human reality versus non-human reality. Rather, it’s a matter of different levels of causality.’208 On Sam Leach’s turning rack, paintings and rocks sit as an investigation into non-human worlds where ancient beasts might roam but may equally be visiting from the future.

I met Leach in his Melbourne studio, shortly after his Dymaxion show, to talk OOO theory, science ﬁction and cosmic enterprises. Leach’s house sits on a wide suburban street, lined with large plane trees and reminded me of being a child, of piling out of clammy car seats as an indistinct triad of three kids, to visit my parents’ friends in similarly leafy streets, in quiet friendly suburbs, during the late seventies and early eighties. Except, on this occasion, I was on foot, and far removed from childish ways and the intolerable nature of family-style pack-mentality social outings. Leach’s house had vegetable garden beds, topped with hay, bordered with hardwood, raised above higgledy piggledy bricks. The entrance was down a side path, where small people’s clothes ﬂapped on a line.

I dodged a pink sparkly dress and knocked on the glass paned door, which was covered in specks of mis-applied white paint. Sam Leach answered the door and we stood awkwardly, like primary school students, incapable of making small talk. ‘Shall I come in?’ I ﬁnally suggested. He opened the door wider, but I suspected ambivalence. Even once I was inside the entry hall, he blocked my way and seemed hesitant to lead me further back, further in. It’s not uncommon for artists to feel equivocal about showing an art writer where they work, how they practise. I had experienced such irresolution a hundred times before.

Leach’s studio was a sunny room in his home, with white-painted ﬂoorboards, walls and ceilings creating a white cube. Half-ﬁnished works hung on a far wall. His wife and two daughters were not home, but their shadows lingered in the mess of children’s toys poking out of doors, shoes of various sizes scattered about, drawings stuck on fridge and door jambs. Leach paused in the kitchen, almost offered me a coffee, but then led me straight out through the back playroom, which the pots of paint, piles of

207 Harman, Heidegger Explained, 63. 208 Morton, Hyperobjects, 39.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 84 Sam Leach Dymaxion Mars 2013 oil and resin on board Courtesy artist & Sullivan Strumpf

Sam Leach Van Dalem in Dymaxion: waiting for the fall 2013 oil and resin on board Courtesy artist & Sullivan Strumpf

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 85 kids’ drawing paper and a light dusting of glitter managed to brighten. Onwards, to an outside shed.

There, in a room smelling of wet blankets, a projector was set up and directed towards a bare wall. Movie night? In the morning? As I looked around the dark room, which had only one bubble glass window, I noticed some of Leach’s earlier works on the walls. These were very small paintings, without the usual resin surface. They were illusionistic. The concentric circular forms began to dazzle and warp my vision, like a fairground funhouse. There were eight small paintings, which began to move and tilt, recede and shimmer in sickening syncopation. ‘This is where Dymaxion started,’ said Leach, breaking the nauseating spell. ‘It began with this documentary and I think it will help you understand my paintings. It’s an illegal copy. From the military, in the US.’ I decided not to ask how Leach came to have this illicit ﬁlm and instead hoped he might make popcorn.

So, the movie started. No popcorn, but there were three punnets of baby tomatoes piled up on a side table next to the chair Sam directed me into. It was a little confusing at first. It was real footage of the interior of a confined space. A simulator? A space craft? The camera angles were shaky, suggesting the film was not a formal documentation but a home-job. It functioned like a Sensecam, those small camera devices that hang around your neck to aid memory and emotive experience, and take images every thirty seconds. In other words, it was a stuttering and unsophisticated sequence of images, rather than a film. Difficult to watch but compelling, it had been edited too, because there were gaps and glitchy interruptions of natural time.

That was the form of the ﬁlm. The content was something else entirely. I never saw the face of the protagonist wearing the Sensecam but he (or his camera, rather) had recorded an oral narrative at the same time as the photographic sequence. ‘What is this?’ I asked Leach but he only shook his head and pointed to the wall, indicating I should keep watching. ‘US military. Space personnel,’ he said, tightly. So I watched, from inside the craft’s small space, which had limited views to the outside. There were no clues as to the name of the project or the other two passengers in the craft. However, there was the commentary.

‘We are close to the destination,’ the Sensecam guy said. ‘Johnno reckoned we were going to take much longer on this mission. He’s got a thousand bucks that says we will be back by Thursday but I reckon

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 86 he’s overestimated. We’ll be back on Wednesday. So that means a tidy little sum for me to spend on my girl friend’ (laughter). The ﬁlm showed Johnno looking pissed off, or maybe just sulky, while attending to several computer screens and what looked like cables running everywhere. ‘Johnno doesn’t like to lose a bet, even out here’ (more laughter). Indeed, Johnno looked increasingly irritated by the owner of the Sensecam.

The film (loosely termed) flickered and glitched for a few seconds, but Leach tapped my hand and mouthed ‘just wait.’ Sure enough, the sequence started again, for the third time. It was unclear how much time the film covered, overall. This time there was no narration for a few minutes. The images showed Johnno being slowly fascinated by a light that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Like a Tinkerbell glow, the light hovered near Johnno’s ear—a tiny fairy. It trembled and emanated energy as though it might spontaneously combust.

It didn’t. Instead, it expanded to twice its size, soon as big as a plum. Then it aggregated into a million tiny self-replicated glowing lights and moved towards Johnno. In a nanosecond, Johnno was fragmented into atomic dust particles. One minute there, the next gone. A second later, the view from the Sensacam fell to the floor. ‘I don’t understand, Sam,’ I said to Leach. ‘What is this? Some kind of mockumentary?’ He pulled out his laptop and clicked onto a Nanotechnia software site, pulled across a still from the film (exactly when the glows seemed to fragment poor Johnno into a constellation) and zoomed closer and closer. ‘Look at that?’ said Sam. ‘Just look.’ We peered at the screen and I found it difficult to make sense of what I saw. At the nano-level, the organisms were clearly biotic.209 A blossoming of tiny moving creatures, with wriggling legs and mercury-like bodies. Leach explained that there were two fatalities on a recent mission to take light and sound readings on the far side of the moon. The mission’s grim end was not evident in the media, or not that I had heard of.

‘Did you tell anyone about this, Sam?’ I asked. ‘Did you report it?’ He told me he wouldn’t be reporting it; it wasn’t his business and it wasn’t my place to get involved either. He had only shown it to me to elaborate on the relevance and importance of his recent body of artwork, Dymaxion. This was something I needed to know if I insisted on writing on his work. I was disturbed by Leach’s ﬁlm. Perhaps I was overreacting,

209 This element is highly inﬂuenced by: Wil McCarthy, Bloom (New York: Del Rey, 1999).

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 87 but it seemed incomprehensible that this story was now known to me, and a small group of other individuals, but not known by the world at large. It was also an unusual and bleak source of his creativity.

There was the sound of a wheelie bin being dragged along Sam’s path, outside the back shed. The wet blanket smell was churning my stomach again, but not enough to miss the look of fear on Sam’s face. ‘Are you okay Sam?’ He jumped up and snatched a folder from the side table and thrust it at me. ‘You have to sign this agreement. To say you won’t divulge what I’ve shown you.’

My mouth was open. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I glanced at the folder, which had a contract with my name, all ready for the signing. Perhaps it was that Sam had prepared the document before I came, or it was the overbearing stink of wet wool, but I resisted signing. Just as I prepared to tell him I wouldn’t be able to do as he’d asked, I noticed a silhouette move outside the opaque shed window. Then another. I saw Sam see the shadows, too. ‘Hurry, do it now,’ he said, ‘Then, head off.’ It may have been his family returning home? A friend, come to visit? Or something else. Sam stood and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, wiped his hands on his jeans and looked at his watch. So I scribbled my name, thrust the paper at his chest and strode back through his front door. Glancing down each end of the street, I took off up the footpath, fast as I could.

FICTION ART/THEORY In art, the inferences of ﬁction and speculation create an added element, a harbouring of esoteric implications, a further hyperobjective layer of experience. The question is posed: should the lines be blurred between the disciplines? Are we allowed to muck about with established genres like this?

In this vein of ﬁctional interlayering, Donna Haraway wrote an essay as part of 2012 Documenta(13)’s 100 Notes. Titled, ‘Sf: Speculative Fabulation and String Figures,’ it contained a manifesto for Terrapolis (an earth city) as a multi-species, multi-temporal, multi-material equation: fabulism or ﬁctive speculations, as a means of becoming more aware of all things. Each line led from the preceding one. Haraway preferred the term ‘companion species’ to ‘post-human’ and cited her interpretation of Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitics as ‘playing cat’s cradle,’ a complex and addictive game of web-like manipulations of wool, usually requiring another person as collaborator. Haraway is yet another international

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 88 theorist contributing to an experimentation with cosmic alternatives, within transdisciplinary literature, speciﬁc to art.

For Haraway, ‘Sf’ is speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, science fantasy and string figures. She says, ‘In looping threads and relays of patterning, this sf practice is a model for worldling.’210 She also sees it as an opening up of what is yet to come. This conjecture and contingent possibility are complementary to an OOO view of the flat ontology of things and of actions that transgress normal chronology. Things can loop back or spiral together—in play or in competition. One art thing does not lead to the next and the next, even though art history may have lulled us into thinking it is so. Incorporating fiction into art writing might be seen as a type of contingent worldling, a sophisticated cosmopolitanism, in the sense that fiction shifts time away from the present alone, and incorporates hyper- time, where chronology is halted and sometimes even slowed down or sped up. Fiction sits outside human time, and, in this way, fits into the model of a hyperobject. For me, ‘fiction as a hyperobject’ reinforces being as beyond the wordlings and outwards to the universelings.

The strange thing is that, as I left Sam Leach’s house that day, feeling as though I had lost all authority, all voice, all modes of influence, I realised this was exactly the re-booted mode of OOO theory. It was time to remove the ‘experienced art writer’ from the writing fold, and allow contingent possibilities to emerge. One of the emergences was the way I brushed past a woman who seemed to be waiting on the street outside Sam’s house. I’d seen her before. She wore the same bone-inlaid cross earrings. On this occasion, even though I was flustered and fleeing, I noticed she had her fiery hair piled up in a bun, above her pixie face, and was wearing grey suede stilettoes, not precariously high but pointy-toed. Her sky blue dress was cinched with a sparkled belt and she wore two scarves—one cream and one grey—woven together around her neck. She was leaning against Sam’s fence, eating M&Ms from a packet and I am pretty sure she said, ‘You didn’t witness anything, it would have happened without you, so run,’ as I strode past.

Only days later did I think back on the disrupting time spent at Leach’s house. It must have been one of my odd imaginative exploits, known as day dreams to some. The woman: I remembered her name was Clarice

210 Donna Haraway, “SF: Speculative fabulation and string ﬁgures,” Documenta (13) 100 notes (Ostﬁldern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 4.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 89 Eckhardt and that she was a Medievalist curator at a museum I didn’t know. I’d seen her before, on Cockatoo Island all those months before, and she was correct. I was no witness. I may have seen the video footage, but I had no right to comprehend it. There was no space traveller, there was no source, no nano-particles. Or rather, those elements were there and they were true, but I had no authority to talk about them. All the qualities of that day were real, but they didn’t need me to recount them.

When I remembered Clarice, with the bone-inlaid earrings, I pulled out my scrapbook and looked at the prose poem she had dropped, alongside the recipe for disaster and the traffic report I had pasted in there. There was an arbitrariness to them, which seemed to make them fit together. They weren’t connected; they had no origin; they had no real author. Yet, still, they seemed to fit together like parts of a puzzle.

ART FICTION/THEORY = HYPEROBJECT Timothy Morton terms hyperobject as an object oriented expression that comprises a complex list of deﬁnitive qualities.211 It was a consistent term in his early books, such as Realist Magic and The Ecological Thought,212 and was fully articulated in his latest book, Hyperobjects.213 Hyperobjects, for Morton, are things that are massively distributed and that move beyond time and space.214 He says climate change and Styrofoam are examples of hyperobjects, which can be seen or which emerge when there is an ecological crisis.215

If a hyperobject transcends time and space, and emerges during a crisis, then art theory/fictions could be added to Morton’s list of examples. When there is a blurring between reality, alternate reality and virtual reality, then we are left with emergent entities, which might comprise the first principles of fiction. Morton cites the types of hyperobjects, in The Ecologocial Thought, and elaborates them finally in Hyperobjects as Viscosity, Nonlocality, Temporal undulation, Phasing and Interobjectivity.216

211 Morton, Ecological Thought. 212 Morton, Realist Magic; Morton, Ecological Thought. 213 Morton, Hyperobjects. 214 Idem,1. 215 Ibid. 216 Idem, 27-99.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 90 VISCOSITY AND TEMPORAL UNDULATION An example of a hyperobject is Einstein’s space-time.217 Hyperobjects beckon us with their familiarity: we know it’s getting hotter, a condition preceding climate change. Morton says that, as we approach objects, more and more objects emerge.218 Fiction might fit that category due to its removal from usual chronology, which is disallowed outside fictional realms. Fiction, as storytelling, is massively distributed and endlessly familiar, in the sense that narratorial activities are multiplied across generations and cultures… and species. Stories have transdisciplinary modes of operation, structure, characters and complications. Take, for example, the spin of the atom. The spin momentum is a quantum phenomenon that has implications for theory as well as industry/science. It also has implications for preserving, processing and recovering data. The history of the spin makes a good story, but its qualities (as a human- told story) already are elements of a story. It changes and is affected by various environments but is, ultimately, a tale told by humans while existing without them too, in the sense that they will still exist, anyway. So, do the atoms start the story? Or are they the story? Stories stick with us, creating the strange familiarity of temporal undulation. They are pervasive: ‘Viscosity is a feature of the way in which time emanates from objects, rather than being a continuum in which they float.’219

It is not just humans who, upon waking, begin the narrative of the day. All creatures have consciousness that is connected to what we term the inner monologue, or stream of consciousness, or self-organising qualities. By this I mean that the principles of fiction are deeply embedded in humans and other creatures alike, thereby sticking or adhering to everything. This is an important explanation of how fiction operates as a hyperobject, because, as Morton says, ‘Hyperobjects overrule ironic distance.’220 I think this is specifically important for an ‘art theory infused with fiction’ approach. Ironic distance is overruled. Overt criticality is deflected. Dogmatic authority is evaded. As OOO hyperobject theory avoids ironic distance (and therefore relinquishes authorial claims), so too, does the task of this thesis—to create a cross-disciplinary mix of art writing, theory and fiction—achieve a state of intimate, sticky and viscous stream of consciousness, but without any direct contact.

217 Idem, 61. 218 Idem, 55. 219 Morton, Hyperobject, 33. 220 Timothy Morton, “Hyperobjects are Viscous,” Ecology Without Nature, accessed September 15, 2011, http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.au.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 91 PHASED Hyperobjects are deﬁned as being phased, in that we can’t see them in three dimensions all the time. If we see a waxing and waning moon, then we are experiencing the relationship between the earth and the moon and all their contributing factors, including time and cycles and rhythms of existence. If Morton says, ‘a phase space is the set of all the possible states of a system,’ we can wax back to ﬁction again.221

We don’t feel the hyperobject global warming and we can’t see it in any human-oriented three-dimensional way, but we feel the tsunami. Likewise, we don’t feel the narrative (the structure in place to make it happen), we feel the story (the quality). The multitudinous nature of ﬁction, its millions of threads, its abundant iterations, its never-ending variations, lead me to think that it would comply with hyperobjects’ multidimensional state.

INTEROBJECTIVE Interobjectivity is an interesting hyperobjective property to align with art theory/fiction. Transdisciplinary by nature, interobjective relations between various elements also leave a footprint on other kinds of objects, as information.222 This means that a cross-over between art writing, theory and fiction is formed by its various individual parts. However, it is made apparent through the sequence of symptoms, such as the sci-fi– laden artworks I have mentioned in this chapter so far, academic interest in writing and talking about fiction in art and, finally, science fiction in art. Fiction is the hyperobject that leaves its imprint on these other disciplines at the point where they meet. The point where they meet, for me, is the act of writing this thesis.

Morton uses the words ‘uncanny’ and ‘familiar strangeness’ to explain his theory, whereby, as we approach an object, more objects appear and seem to taper away from us. This is because, for Morton, we cannot see the end or ﬁnitude of an object, as we are limited by human physical qualities. This is Harman’s ‘withdrawal’,223 where our sight of something is always occluded or limited: this is its ‘non-locality’. Morton refers to Levi Bryant’s example of a hyperobject as a swimming pool,224 in which we are immersed and which caresses our bodies but from which

221 Morton, Hyperobjects, 71. 222 Ibid. 223 Idem, 56. 224 Idem, 55.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 92 we remain separate. Not all immersive environments are hyperobjects, though, because they must exhibit the other hyperobject qualities, such as phasing in and out of human consciousness, viscous stickiness or pervasiveness and time undulations, which elude ﬁxedness. Morton uses the analogy of running towards the moon, hoping to get closer to it, forgetting we are on the surface of the earth.225 This draws a connection to the limits and qualities of embodied phenomenological perception.

NON-LOCAL Think of nuclear radiation, invisible to the human eye until its symptoms are visible on other objects. Radiation leaks, global warming and nicotine addictions are not here in the palm of my hand, yet they are more than abstract nouns. They are undeniably things, with concrete evidence in their manifestations. ‘Non-locality’ is a term borrowed from quantum theory. In an OOO context, things are irreducible and indivisible. Two entangled electrons can communicate across a distance. Simultaneously. This simultaneity is of recurring relevance to OOO.

Fiction or the fictioning act is non-local/phased in that certain qualities will always be obscured from our view and it eludes our real grasp. It has temporal undulation in the sense that stories are suspended along with our disbelief and we experience them as disconnected from reality. Stories are phased because they pass through so many sieves of belief and disbelief, emerging as new information at the end. 226 Finally fiction discloses interobjectivity, which is a kind of abyss that floats between objects. Like Morton’s mesh, which has links and gaps, fiction has story and non-story. Fiction is this criss-crossing of strands—both positive and negative.227

A DARKER AESTHETIC ECOLOGY Speaking of dark realities, in the process of researching this thesis, particularly the work of Hubert Duprat, I heard an interesting story about the artist’s past. This is strictly confidential and deeply illegitimate but it turns out that he spent many weeks collecting his caddisflies. They were located in water environments—streams in the mountains, creeks in the hills. These small creatures were hard to find, being so small. However, Duprat had perfected the skills required to find them and capture them. His scientific methodology was pre-eminent, respected across Europe; his ability to process his experiments according to OHS

225 Ibid. 226 Idem, 77. 227 Idem, 83.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 93 and contamination rules was without question; it was only his sense of dress that sat outside accepted standards.

Duprat was an average sized man. He has been described as dead-sexy, with an arbitrary ability to look appealing whilst simultaneously choosing quite inappropriate garments. For instance, his favoured apparel for his caddisfly jaunts comprised leather jacket, suit pants, flip flop sandals and a silk singlet. This silky sheath looked a little unusual, being conventionally a feminine piece of clothing; however, Duprat’s reason was that the fabric felt soft against his skin, and he frequently experienced nipple rash… so he apparently had good cause. Despite the assorted combination of fashion styles, he managed to elicit from women many admiring looks. Those who were usually well-mannered and self-composed, found themselves glancing at his groin. Women, who prided themselves on their modesty and discretion, allowed their eyes to linger over his heavy brow and gentle eyes. His legs were muscled from cycling and his hair was tinged blond by the sun, though pleasantly greyed in patches.

The point is that Duprat was a women’s man. He wasn’t interested in men or their rugby or their choice of superannuation funds. It was women he sought. This caused trouble at the lab, where he occupied a booth. Firstly, he was unwelcome for compromising the other lab workers’ science status, by introducing art to their cluster. Secondly, women could not resist him. Sara had pulled his body against hers in the adjacent photocopy room. Genevieve had cornered him in the change rooms and pulled her clothes off, before he could take a side-step. Hannah had followed him home one night and strapped on some leather apparatus and killer stilettos, providing the artist with a series of memory frames for many moons afterwards.

On a different sensual level, Duprat enjoyed salami and soda bread, with unsalted butter. He preferred red wine to beer. He liked to sleep fully clothed and his favourite song was Abba’s ‘Fernando’. This was the man who wandered into the woods high on a pass in southern France, to retrieve some caddisflies for his experiments. He asked a jeweller to turn a nugget of gold into tiny specks as small as ‘hundreds and thousands’ candy and provided these new things to the aquarium when he got his new caddisflies there. The soil was muddy from overnight rain and Duprat revelled in and reviled the feeling of that earthy substance oozing between his toes (his flip flop sandals exposed his feet to the elements). Some woodpeckers were knocking on the trees in pleasing syncopation and an occasional breeze scattered leafy water drops all around him.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 94 When he found the stream bend he sought, where he had found the caddisﬂies before, he noticed an unusual sound. Like plastic sheets rubbing together, interrupted by an unearthly clacking sound, like no natural specimen Duprat had ever known. Some kid using a computer in the woods, he wondered? Unlikely. But the noises certainly sounded like a computer game—for instance, Minecraft. Duprat decided he must be a little weary, having begun a relationship with a beautiful woman, Elise, who harboured an endless sensual appetite. A petite and sweet- tempered woman, she also liked to cook his favourite coq au vin, using hand-picked ﬁeld mushrooms from her home town (she had her mother freight them to make this dish exceptional, exhibiting a thoughtfulness Duprat deeply appreciated), though he had not yet worked out how she knew coq au vin was his chosen evening meal.

As he unloaded his sterile bottles and sealed containers from his pack, he saw a cluster of caddisﬂies beside a mossgreen rock. His job, that day, would be quick. No more than a few minutes. He smiled at his good fortune. But as he knelt by the side of the trickling water, which he occasionally splashed on his face for refreshment, an enormous shape reared up from behind the rock, blocking the sunlight. The rock was about one metre high, but this thing rose higher and higher, its shadow casting across poor Duprat’s silk singlet.

It was a horrifying spectacle. An enormous caddisfly rose up to three metres high, its antennae clacking together: the source of the fearful clacking noise Duprat had heard. This fly was not like the regular species Duprat collected. It had morphed into the casings, which his experiments had divined. Somehow, his specimens must have become contaminated. This fly had not created a casing from gold, but had formed into a monstrous form, grotesquely expanded into a giant creature.

Although it did no more than appear, in all its horrifying and symptomatic ghastliness, Duprat ran. He did not collect his provisions (bottles and jars), but ran back to his vehicle and skidded back to town, back to Elise, feeling shocked and looking white. Elise asked no questions but uncorked a lovely bottle of red and served him a plate of soft brie and baguette. Strange, he supposed, that she did not notice his distress; however, it soothed him to adjust to his home environment in peace and to wonder if it had been no more than sleep deprivation or low blood sugar levels. A conjured spectre of his imagination.

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 95 Later that night, as Duprat scuttled into Elise’s ready body, his face buried in her soft blonde hair, he thought he heard a very distant, very faint sound coming from Elise’s lips. He fell back against his pillows and soon welcomed the beginning of sleep, for his exhaustion had irrationally made him think it was a clacking noise, accompanied by the rubbing of plastic against plastic. Enjoying the silky feel of the pillows, he allowed the allure of sleep to overwhelm him, not understanding this was the worst thing that he could possibly do.

CONCLUSION Morton expounds that hyperobjects become visible during eco-crises but are also a signal or symptom of that crisis. Infusing ecological issues into art and art writing via sci-fi and fictioning methodologies draws attention to the horrors of ecological, technological and psychological demise. His hyperobject theory makes sense of the way humans tend to document and explore crises through tangential or metaphoric modes. Art, art writing, theory and fiction are phased so that it is difficult to identify them within any given text simultaneously. The elements of this thesis are viscous as they pervade critical art analysis, the experiential art-writer’s anecdotes, OOO theory and an attitude of meta-fictive self-awareness. For these reasons, theory/fiction looks good in the meshed red lace dress of the hyperobject.

If theory/fiction, heavy with sci-fi elements, can scrub up well in a cocktail dress, then how might telepathy stand at the drinks party? Perhaps in green silk shift with a long amber bead necklace and pumpkin Jimmy Choo shoes: yes, Madame Telepathy would have to be elegant and stylish, I think. Telepathy is the sound of a system we recognise, but still it sounds a little strange. This familiarity might be memory, or madness, but I hope to argue that it is a crucial transmission in the network of Speculative Aesthetics. The telepath, a novelistic character interrogated in the next chapter, may be a charlatan, but how can we align the doctor with the charlatan, the art expert with the fake, the art writer with the sophistic poser? Perhaps, instead of always being in diametric opposition, they simultaneously inhabit the characters of the infinite and the zero limit?

Art Theory/Fiction as Hyperobject . 96 CHAPTER 4: Telepathy: Knowledge Zero

TELEPATHY AS A FICTIONING This chapter utilises a ‘fictioning’ mode as its writing form.228 Fictioning is a term introduced in a book by the Confraterntiy of Neoflagellants. Their use of fictioning is as a future pre-modern, theory/fiction mode of writing, focusing on dark relations in a post-human global community.229 Fictioning differs from fictionality (the study of fictional qualities) or fictionalisation (the transforming of story into fiction). 230 Instead, for me, fictioning is the speculative act of engaging with, and experimenting with, fictional possibilities. These possibilities comprise unexpected outcomes and variable narratives. In this case, it is an absorption of several fictional voices into the narrative and an experimentation with impossible scenarios and implausible moments in time-space. These fictional possibilities make welcome interferences from outside—static radio waves of electromagnetism from unknown sources. That is, telepathy.

TELEPATHY AS A SPECULATIVE AESTHETIC There is a relationship between telepathy, ﬁctioning and the work of Australian artist Jaquelene Drinkall. She explores psycho-sensual transmissions of data by building UFOs and enacting live performances where she encourages audiences to contribute telepathic messages, by writing with marker pens on the inside walls of her spaceship. She uses telepathic headdresses to navigate natural environments, in performative video works. She sends and receives transmitted data by weaving computer cables into balaclavas and setting off into underwater environments to make contact with other humans, pre-humans, and post-humans, thereby inviting multiple speculative perspectives. 231

Telepathy, here, encourages fictioning, as a means of multiplying information and allowing contingent possibilities to flourish. Telepathy is a cause of fictioning but is also a symptom of it, so it becomes an analytical quality as well as an active entity. Although telepathy has no standardised proof, some humans sense its attendance, the experience of

228 The Confraternity of Neoﬂagellants, Investigating Future Premoderns. 229 Ibid. 230 Richard Walsh, The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007). 231 Jacquelene Drinkall (b. 1973) is a Sydney-based artist who exhibits in artist- run spaces, such as Artspace, Alaska and Firstdraft etc. She completed her 2006 PhD in telepathy and art.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 97 it as a system of transmitted information, that sits outside conventional sensory experience (seeing, hearing etc). In this way, telepathy can be understood as a mode beyond human comprehension. If ﬁnitude is the limit of knowledge, then telepathy punctures that limit and extends along a frequency of endlessness. The allure of art functions as a reminder of our bound condition as humans responding to the world—we are limited by our human cognition of the world—but telepathy acts as an abruption to that restraint. We reach for the knowledge beyond our grasp; we strain to hear the signal, only to be interrupted by a jumble of static thoughts. However, if we allow the possibility of an intensive aggregate of multiple frequencies, then we have enacted telepathy and repurposed it as an aesthetic application to an art experience that breaks through human/world duality limits.

Before exploring Drinkall’s work in depth, I need to articulate the role of the telepath. In an art context, telepathy is a system of signals used to make art. Telepathy is the content or subject matter of the artworks discussed and it also functions as a guiding mode to analyze or “experience” the artworks. It is a system of transmitted information that sits alongside conventional sensory experience, without exhausting the discretion of human sensations. Telepathy can be understood as a para-human aesthetic theme. It is a sensory activity of the mind, among many activities, rather than of the standard five body functions (sight, smell etc), and therefore constitutes artistic enquiries that venture beyond concrete cultural constructs. For this reason it does not fit easily into traditional disciplines of knowledge. Likewise, if telepathy is a mode of being hyper-aware of more than one kind of fixed art experience, with multiple possibilities or outcomes, then aesthetics might evolve beyond the subject-object relationship that typically characterises the starting point of aesthetic experience.

A telepathic mode is hyper-sensitive to all the different elements of aesthetic experience, such as the art space, the artwork narrative, materiality, temporality, the socio-historical contexts and the multiple reactions of animate and inanimate things to the artwork (and emanating from it). However those elements are of discrete and of equal importance, in a speculative mode of aesthetics. Contingency, uncertainty, the improbable and even the possibility of catastrophe are qualities of this kind of Speculative Aesthetics. These are also qualities of a telepathic thematic in art, due to the scepticism towards a “sense” that is impossible to measure and lacks recorded evidence.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 98 Telepathy’s relevance to aesthetics is its capacity to be receptive to information that can’t be understood via conventional scientiﬁc constructs and the potential to participate in an ecology of speculation. The telepath is outsider, adventurer and acts with arbitrary (open to possibility) or undetermined (likely to change for no reason) functions of communication. The telepath sabotages the subject-object dyads of aesthetic criticism, by participating, repurposing, interrupting and transmitting the energy of the artwork, rather than merely conveying its meaning.

The telepath may, conventionally, be known as one of the powerful protagonists of arcane narratives. The telepath is understood as one who hears something the rest of a given society cannot hear, who perceives something the rest of a given society cannot perceive, who knows something the rest of a given society cannot know. This setting-apart of the telepath from others could be seen as a means of establishing her/ him as expert, but also as the excluded one. In other words, the telepath is both leader and outcast. The telepath is one among many and practises interception of transmissions, as a discipline that exists in tandem with the supernatural, rather than as an overt advocate of the occult.

Science philosopher Isabelle Stengers writes about the ‘charlatan’ as a maligned identity in medical history and this relates well to the concept of the telepath.232 When Stengers says, ‘the cure proves nothing,’ she is discussing the notion of a medical charlatan, whose experiments cannot be reduced to the results.233 In the eyes of the elected commission or the legislated assembly or the government body, the curing of a doctor’s patients might prove nothing, the cures being explained away as a placebo effect. In the same way, it is difﬁcult to prove the value of the telepath’s remedies. Anecdotal evidence of interrupted signals proves nothing, and yet the telepathic experience amongst artist, video- documenter, art writer, viewer, gallery space, locations and media (such as computer cables) remains the same. Telepathy is understood as extant, despite its lack of proof.

Writing speculatively about art, in this instance the work of Jacquelene Drinkall, becomes an intervention. This intervention comprises a series of telepathic transmissions, enabled to reach a state of engagement with

232 Isabelle Stengers, ‘The Doctor and the Charlatan,’ Cultural Studies Review 9, 2, (2003): 11-36. 233 Idem, 14.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 99 art, without resorting to critical dyads and subjective limitations. The telepath is artist, the art writer, the viewer or any other entity. My chapter proposes: what can telepathy enact for writing ‘with’ the artwork, rather than ‘from’?

1. TELEPATHIC ART TRANSMISSIONS As part of a pre- and post-human aesthetic, telepathic transmissions are thoughts; the thoughts are radio waves. A problem arises that if telepathy is distinguished by its supernatural non-human otherness, how can man- made transmission systems of data and information, such as radio, be telepathic? The answer is less a process of elusion and more a matter of listening closely to the information at hand, without being conﬁned by what we think we know. To access telepathic information is an abruption, a break or interruption of the signal. If I engage with the artwork of Jacquelene Drinkall, I have experienced an abruption in the aesthetic value of her video work, wherein she dons a jumpsuit, headdress and navigates a natural environment.

What happens when you tune in to a second, third or fourth (and so on) radio frequency? Is it confusing to allow multiple transmissions at once and how can those strands of story be organised into a palatable aesthetic pattern? Aesthetics, here, means making sense of objects, in terms of their engagement and as experiential stimuli. The result of tuning into multiple frequencies is that there will be more than one narratorial or author-voice stream.

Normative values are less relevant in a Speculative Aesthetic, hinged on telepathy, because the systems of experience are already outside the usual structures of societal patterning. Telepathy allows for different social systems. For me, telepathy is the faint sound of ‘another’ voice and ‘another’ voice and ‘another’, piping up behind the more obvious ones. Are they the voices of the dead, of our own inner consciousness or from another realm we can never comprehend, or all three? I will soon show whether a Speculative Aesthetic is robust enough to support such faintly heard voices, and how it ﬁts into an expanded system of information that assists an art writing form.

JACQUES DERRIDA’S SECRET Jacques Derrida, one of the few theorists who have written about telepathy, points out that non-telepathy is harder to believe than telepathy.234 His iteration of telepathy refers to a series of hallucinations

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 100 and receptions, without fear. Theories of science have kept telepathy at bay, argues Derrida, ‘to render unthinkable what earlier science pushed back into the darkness of occultism.’235 There are turbulences and shadowy shades of mistrust when we start to speak about the occult, the supernatural, the paranormal and the telepathic… and there is an equivalent level of mistrust when we start to speak about Speculative Aesthetics and an art writing ontology. This is the reason they dovetail so well.

Where considered unreasonable and scientiﬁcally unsupportable, the idea of telepathy has been subject to devoted scepticism and deliberate mischief, much like the charlatan. It was hard for Jacques Derrida to believe there could be a place for the unconscious in accepted psychology and yet still no place for theories of telepathy. This either denigrates the concept of the subconscious or elevates the status of telepathy. ‘Some draw authority from sciences that they do not understand to anaesthetise into credulity, to extract hypnotic effects from knowledge.’236 Freud was fearful of the potential ‘poor reception’ of his ideas on telepathy. He was aware of the ‘link between two psychic acts, the immediate warning one individual can seem to give another, the signal or psychic transfer can be a physical phenomenon.’237 He was circumspect regarding his interest in telepathy, like he was hiding a naughty little hobby: ‘the conversion to telepathy is my private affair like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking…’238

Thankfully, I am not singular or alone in my telepathic interests. So Jacques Derrida wrote an important and imaginative essay on telepathy,239 and on Freud’s secret interests in telepathy, too.240 Both were sheepish about their curiosity. Freud proved this through his decision not to publish his telepathy lectures during his lifetime.241 Such speculative inquiries have long been met with disdain, yet Freud’s interest was based in a psycho-analytical investigation of the unconscious and dreaming, areas of thought that were worthy of investigation and have had a large impact on psychotherapy since.242

234 Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 237. 235 Idem, 238. 236 Idem, 241. 237 Idem, 241-2. 238 Idem, 256. 239 Idem, 239. 240 Jan Campbell and Steve Pile, “Telepathy and its vicissitudes: Freud, thought transference and the hidden lives of the (repressed and non-repressed) unconscious,” Subjectivity 3, 4, (2010): 403–425. 241 Ibid. 242 Ibid.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 101 Derrida approached the question of scientific legitimacy by deconstructing and fictionalising his major telepathy text.243 His essays on telepathy are a series of letters dated 9-15 July, 1979. Derrida begins in the first person, as himself writing to us; then as Freud writing to his wife, Marthes; then as Wilhelm Fliess (friend of Freud and fellow- inventor of psychoanalysis) writing to his wife, Marie; then as Gustave Flaubert writing to his lover Louise; and then as Plato writing to Socrates or vice versa. So, Derrida is not just impersonating or channelling Freud, but using a cast of related characters. A multitude.

His essay is punctuated with pronouncements of passion: it is a love letter. Derrida wrote, ‘It is because there would be telepathy that a postcard can not always arrive at its destination.’244 When Derrida discusses transference and telepoetics, he is talking to me. I’ve seen Derrida, by the way. He was standing by the curb, across the road from my house. He stood small in his thick, heavy coat, next to the red mail box. His white hair was all messy, his collar turned up against the wind. With stooped back, he held an addressed letter, without a stamp. Just as he reached out to push the letter through the post box slot, a gust of ocean wind whipped it out of his hand and sent it up in the air. I saw it, spinning in the gust, and so I sprinted across the street and jumped up to grasp the letter. I caught it, but when I turned back to Derrida, he was gone. As I looked down at the letter, I saw it was addressed… to me. But there are many other people across the planet who had the same experience, received the same postcard. I am only one among many, a point on a spherical map with many pins stuck here and there.

Derrida’s telepathy essay is rife with references to premonitions, foreseeing, fateful visions, the seeing of his own double as an omen of death and projections into the past and the future. Was this missive, this SOS, this postcard meant to reach me in the future, a speculative arche- fossil?245 What if I received a telepathic message from Derrida, from the past? All forms of ‘descriptive assault’ and non-critical critique should be cast aside in the appreciation of good art. 246 I will always prefer Derrida’s

243 Derrida, Psyche, 239. 244 Ibid, 239. 245 An arche-fossil is an object that proves an existence anterior and posterior to terrestrial life. It is referenced in Meillassoux, After Finitude, 16-18. 246 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 238.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 102 ‘pure pleasure’247 to Kant’s ‘pure judgement.’248 Having said that, in the ﬁeld of criticism, the message of art deserves more than poetic celebration or unevaluated valuations or unreﬂective contemplation.249

Derrida’s essay is a complex entwining of Freud’s curiosity about telepathy and Derrida’s ﬁctive discovery of a library book that launched his appropriation and imagining of a ‘postcard’ between Plato and Socrates.250 I have read the essay a number of times, only to feel more unsure about who is speaking. Derrida or Freud? Plato or Socrates? Writer Michael Naas writes an entire chapter about this in his book on Derrida.251 Who comes ﬁrst, who lingers still?

A defense of the unknown is more difﬁcult than a defense of the unseen. As Isabelle Stengers points out, ‘Perhaps it is slightly less normal, a hair less predictable, that while using a classical approach, a philosopher would be willing to accept the challenge of adopting a deliberately uncritical standpoint, of exploring a terrain actively stripped of what allows philosophy to judge and disqualify. In short, the challenge of ‘thinking with’ unknowns.’252 Systems of ‘unknown’ transmitted information between things are difﬁcult to record, but create curiosity and fuel narrative possibilities. ‘Did you hear that?’ This is a question offering multiple possible narrative strands, within a story, but one that immediately collapses once it is asked, because what is heard is unknown.

Telepathic systems suffer the same frustrations of standardisation, being limited to sensory thoughts and to the fact that they don’t emit measurable data. As soon as we discuss telepathy, it withdraws from quantiﬁable evidence, despite its prevalence in the realm of art.253 Rather than investigate telepathy as a neurological pathology in cognitive psychology for instance, I am interested in it as a Speculative Aesthetic in art, with a concomitant embrace of occultism. This means that

247 Idem, 43. 248 Emmanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (New York: Prometheus Books, 2000), 72. 249 Elkins, What happened to art criticism? 63. 250 Derrida, Psyche, 233. 251 Michael Naas, Taking on the tradition: Jacques Derrida and the legacies of deconstruction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 76-90. 252 Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitcs I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 72. 253 For instance Robert Barry’s 1969 Telepathic piece, accessed June 21, 2014, http://www.janmot.com/newspaper/barry_monk.php; and Steiner Haga Christensen’s ongoing work, accessed June 21, 2014, http://www.cac.lt/en/ exhibitions/future/7235.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 103 there are avenues for complex thought-systems to exist outside human comprehension, beyond mortal abilities, after ﬁnitude.

A singular artwork is dematerialised or subordinated to the distributed systems of studios, factories, artist spaces and galleries, and to the complex elements of the artwork itself.254 This relates to Graham Harman’s ideas that all things occur together in a ﬂattened ontology, where allure exists at the point where the difference between a thing’s plurality and unity falls away and a thing’s qualities never exhaust their entirety or relations.255 Francis Halsall draws attention not only to the dematerialisation of the artwork, once it is viewed as part of a greater aggregated beast. What is left, after all this dematerialisation and withdrawal? Only the faintly recorded transmission, the quiet voice from the other end of the line, from the outside. All that matters is the system of transmissions between all things; that is, telepathy. This is telepathy, meant as various objects’ sensing of each other, without obvious forms of communication, without direct contact.

Sound art historian Douglas Kahn’s latest book, Earth Sound Earth Signal,256 charts the development of transmitted sound, from eco-writer and transcendentalist Henry Thoreau’s anecdotes of hearing the sound of telegraph lines to the natural sounds of wireless radio. This is a claim for natural/unnatural sources and global energies. Kahn is no stranger to telesthesia and is as comfortable writing on brain waves as on the history of electromagnetic waves.257 The sound leakages from radio, telegraph, telephone and other transmitted waves are concrete forms of alien transmission. Kahn and collaborator Frances Dyson curated and collectively wrote an exhibition on telesthesia. They wrote threads of conversation for a catalogue text and created an installation and video work, dealing with voices outside life and as a contemplation of cross-life distance-sensing.

There are several other academic actants contributing to a multi-strand of narratorial telepathic threads, where radio transmissions, speculative writing and sensory experiments are undertaken. Edward Colless

254 Francis Halsall, Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 191. 255 See p. 31 of this thesis. 256 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 257 Frances Dyson and Douglas Kahn, Telesthesia, Walter McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, 6 June-13 July, 1991.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 104 embraces an inter-disciplinary approach in his art writing practice. His articles and conference papers suggest a tolerance of occultism and sound a warning, instead, against phantasms of criticality (posers and fakers). This is his ‘in-discipline of academe’, where bad behaviour should be encouraged.258

The drift of the ‘transdisciplinary’ is fugue-like, amnesiac and lapsing: signalled in the treacherous negation entailed in the preﬁx ‘un-’ as the sinister persistence of a remainder beyond the deprivation of that thing’s essential qualities or properties. A remnant and revenant of a discipline that involves its disappearance like the cat into a grinning unnaturalism, and the dispossession of its own corpus or body of knowledge. In this fugue-like drift could not aesthetics become an occult science, or (in no way symmetrically or commensurately) could science become an occult aesthetics?259

I am interested in this rejection of authoritative, authorial voices and expert critical opinions in an art aesthetical writing context. Telepathy allows aesthetics to drift towards a science-infused occulted realm, as Colless seems to suggest here. This extra-disciplinary drift supports the concept of telepathic systems as a support structure for a speculative art writing form. Graham Harman, too, is no stranger to the uncanny deliberations of para-academia. His studious work on H.P. Lovecraft attests to this.260 Stengers has been known to call upon the witch goddess, Starhawk,261 to create her complex iterations of capture and spells of production in a capitalist society. These telepathically-sensitive views, with a subtle hint of esotericism, support an anti-authoritative and un-authored voice. They are re-assemblages of experience—a reclaimed investigation into (un)natural forces.

2. JACQUE DRINKALL’S TELEPATHIC ARTWORK AS EXPERIENCE When I met Jacque in Sydney, she was building a bespoke see-through Perspex UFO. The UFO was the shape of a conventional spinning ﬂying saucer, big enough to ﬁt four humans at once. Titled ‘Weatherman

258 Edward Colless, “Transdisciplinary Aesthetics: An Occultation and Occultism,” Transdisciplinary Arts Research: at the intersection between art, science and culture, accessed October 23, 2013, http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/tiic/. 259 Ibid. 260 Harman, Weird Realism. 261 Isabelle Stengers, “Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism,” Subjectivity, 22, (2008): 48.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 105 UFOlogy’262 it was made during an art residency. Some of her explanations of the work are:

UFO as ‘irregular shelter’ of utopian counterculture and emergency DIY activism, such as hex and geodesic domes, UFO as centripetal surveillance aesthetics, UFO as visuality through transparent exo-skeleton, reﬂective surface and light-diffusion, exploring optics like it is a giant distorted contact-lens and UFO as a ‘mother wheel’, using a term of Louis Farakhan which connects the UFO to the idea of a large breast.263

Aside from the political preoccupations that underlie all of Drinkall’s work, it is the word geodesic that arrests my attention. The shortest line between two points across a dome? This might be telepathic geometry, not as conversation or communication, but as information moving between and along a criss-crossing mesh of geodesics. Drinkall creates telepathic materials (headwear, video footage, UFOs as metaphoric telepathic travel capsules), despite telepathy’s conventional association with the immaterial. There is more to Jacquelene than ﬁrst meets the eye: she appears materialised, but there is an insouciant quality to her physical nature, which is difﬁcult to navigate. There is only a small gap between her unity and plurality (which, when it falls away, creates allure). She smiles, is friendly. She giggles a lot and regularly stares off into space. Don’t fall for her fey ways, though, because her razor-sharp eye is assessing, inventing and aggregating. The books on her shelf zigzag across Brian Massumi and Tiziana Terranova. She writes and creates computer games and her avatars experience virtual Occupy protests, in unknown urban lanes and city streets like no other.

I stand by her side, this artist, Jacquelene Drinkall. I am happy to write data on her UFO walls and schlepp her cripplingly heavy formwork around a carpark. I am drawn to her curious nature, her lack of self- consciousness. And so, it is hardly surprising that one day, I found myself next to her, at the edge of icy water. The rocks were slippery with algae and three turtles paddled past. It was intermittently overcast and the creek water rushed past in a hazardous manner.

Jacque pulled a balaclava out of her high-res bicycle saddle-bag and placed it gently on her head. It was not an ordinary knitted-

262 Artists Jaquelene Drinkall’s work can be seen via the Cementa exhibition 2013, accessed July 21, 2014, http://cementa13.com/2013/03/23/ cementa_13-artist-report-jacqueline-drinkall/. 263 Ibid.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 106 black balaclava, but a pixie-style headdress of crocheted plastic telecommunication cables. She would have looked like a kindly elf, if she hadn’t been wearing a Guantanamo Bay orange jumpsuit, which conjured simultaneous emotions of fear, futility, oppression and pity. ‘Can you read my mind?’ I mouthed. She smiled at my lameness: ‘You’re only asking if I can lip-read, not whether I can receive a telepathic message.’

I was implicated in her telepathy experiment, and a speculative art writing mode was spawned, one that moved in a parallel motion to the artist’s experiment, rather than sitting in opposition to it. Despite the invalidation or the condescending tag of histrionic outsider, as telepaths we both became integral to the scientiﬁc process of presenting an aim, method, result, discussion and conclusion.

This chapter is a reclaiming of ‘voice’ as one among many, rather than a rejection of alternative occulted discourse. Alphonso Lingis wrote in his essay, Professional Dishonour, ‘Those whose practice is not ordered by the established discourse bring dishonour to the profession,’ but ‘the established discourse and the code of professional conduct can limit and even dislodge our experience of what is important and urgent.’264 Telepathy as a Speculative Aesthetic is urgent.

So I urgently shoved Jacque in the lower back and into the cool water she dived, because it was, and is, important to move beyond habitual writing practices. Deep, deeper into the green emptiness, but still her orange Guantanamo Bay-style jumpsuit was easy to see.265 Mossy rocks and river carp, the sound of moving water made me hum a tune. An occasional kick from Jacque’s feet was all I soon saw. If a group of jellyﬁsh is called a smack,266 then the pack of us that allows for the possible capacity of telepathy to afford something else might be called a ‘knock-out’. Soon enough, Jacque exploded up through the surface and surged ahead with strong strokes, divining a course across the waterhole.

About an hour later, she swam back. Her cheeks were ﬂushed red from the exertion and the cold. She wriggled free of her jumpsuit, carefully put away her balaclava and pulled on a warm ﬂeece and leggings, accepting

264 Alphonso Lingis,The First Person Singular (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 123. 265 Jacquelene Drinkall, Weather Underwater performance, Blindside 2010, accessed December 3, 2013http://www.blindside.org.au/2010/weather- underwater.html. 266 Lingis, “Outside,” 38.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 107 the ﬂask of hot coffee with gratitude.

‘I saw him.’ she said. ‘Who?’ I asked, handing her a muesli bar. ‘Julian Assange. He was up-stream, standing under a rocky overhang. He must be camping up there. Had a tent, a fire going, a rifle.’ ‘A rifle?’ ‘Yep,’ she continued. ‘It was definitely him.’ ‘Are you sure it wasn’t a trick of the eye? An illusion?’ ‘Maybe,’ said Jacque. ‘He said to watch out for the gaming trolls and to be wary of Barak Obama’s wily charms.’

I urged Jacque to drink some more hot coffee and eat some mixed nuts.

The ‘result’ of this telepathic experiment was two-fold. Firstly, there was the concrete material Drinkall would use as exhibition video footage and photographs. Secondly, there was the chance to experience her artwork as a pillion passenger rather than a hyper-critical correlated art expert. Correlationism is the limit of being restricted by human/world dyads.267 Graham Harman says the wish to escape correlationism is a wish to escape idealism.268 Escaping correlationism does not mean escaping humanism. Likewise, allowing for the possibility of telepathy does not mean allowing for all trickery, deceit and illusionism.

Which brings me back to Jacque. What was she looking for that day in the creek? She was looking for her fellow cultists. The antenna on her balaclava had twitched, causing her search, which functioned as an aesthetic preamble.

Weather Underwater: Once the escapee is reunited with fellow cult members, the cult collaborates in an underwater mission to gather evidence of The Disappeared. The cult was ambiguously associated with Weather Underground during the VHS era, and more recently with the Earth

Liberation Front (ELF) during the HD era, resulting in many disappearances from the media. Mainstream media does not report many recent and very real acts of sabotage by ELF upon power stations and other environmental hazards.

267 Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, 199. 268 Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 127.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 108 Jacquelene Drinkall Weather Underwater 2011 Courtesy the artist.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 109 Underwater cult magic—consisting of mutant telecommunication wiring, alternative power dressing, and ﬁsh dancing rituals— raises disappeared skeletons from amongst the dead coral.269

Jacquelene’s search for her fellow friends was made via a system of shared data or information. Managing information is the greatest preoccupation of our Western lives, and this artist deals with it via a carefully laboured process of writing, making art and connecting with others in a digital sphere. There is an element of algorithmic knowledge, once programs are designed, that takes over manual searches or alternatively interrupts searches. This independent element, a sensory action we still don’t know what to call (glitch/hack/AI), is manifested in Drinkall’s work as telepathy. Telepathy, in this instance, is the wiring of the brain, the synapses between all creatures, as the ﬁring of information. Material and atomic in nature, telepathy is a series of actions, triggered by events in the future and the past but always occurring in the present.

Drinkall’s favourite book is Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book: Technology - Schizophrenia - Electric Speech.270 This is a text disrupted by interjecting voices, a typographical switchboard of competing sounds, vibrations of electricity along the telecommunication wires. Ronell’s ideas have clearly inﬂuenced Drinkall’s interests in wires, as metaphorical allusions to their function of static, and interference in noise frequencies. In an academic paper for Monash University’s Colloquy journal, Drinkall asserts, ‘The words telepathy and telesthesia were coined simultaneously when Frederic Myers founded the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882. However, telepathy names an experience of distance (tele) feeling (pathos) or ideas (thesia) found in all cultures.’271 Drinkall boldly extends the parameters of telepathy to her non-human artist friends and colleagues, such as ghosts, animals and virtual avatars.

According to Drinkall, techlepathy was coined by David Porush, who writes about robots, and is synthetic telepathy or psychotronics.272 It is a term used to describe the process in brain-computer interfaces by which thought (as electromagnetic radiation) is intercepted and processed by

269 Jacquelene Drinkall, Weather Underwater. 270 Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology - Schizophrenia - Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 271 Jacquelene Drinkall, “Human and non-human telepathic collaborations from ﬂuxus to now,” Colloquy, 22, (2011): 1. 272 David Porush’s phrase as quoted to me by Jaquelene Drinkall during an interview with the artists at Artspace Sydney, 12 December 2011.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 110 computer, generating a return signal generated that is perceptible by the human brain. This, then, is an aggregated and computational version of the desire to interrupt and intercept other things.

3. TELEPATHY AS SPECULATIVE AESTHETIC: ISABELLE STENGERS’ CHARLATAN AND JACQUES DERRIDA’S TELEPATHY Following Isabelle Stengers’ scientiﬁc models of investigation, the conclusion I can draw from this writing ‘with’ telepathic artist Drinkall, rather than from her work, is that the telepath suffers the same fate as the charlatan. The problem is that the power has lain with the telepath, the sorcerer and the charlatan in the past, in terms of social history. However, history and society are not relevant in a Speculative Aesthetic. Powerful positions of authority are not relevant in a Speculative Aesthetic. These expert voices are smothered, drowned out by the static of multiple transmissions in a telepathic system of information.

How can we write about art in a coherent way, without enacting a singular voice? Telepathic transmissions are more reliable than the author, the narrator or the scholarly researcher. As such, the telepath must be reclaimed as a legitimate member of culture, as someone who transmits information within a larger framework of data. The reliability of any individual narrator is always in question. Isabelle Stengers has written several papers addressing the issue of disciplinary specialty and the professional expert. Dismantling this authority or disrupting our perceptions of it is an OOO activity, in keeping with a ﬂat ontology of objects of equal status. Medicine or science as rational practice is an area of interest that Stengers has vigorously argued, debated and illustrated through various principles of knowledge. In an article on the charlatan, she follows the ‘charlatan’ object and the transformation of the charlatan’s identity. For the telepath, this delineation between the object of transmitted information, and the human and non-human subjects who send/receive signals, is an easy one to breach. The membrane is thin and liable to puncture.

Writing is interruptive work; telepathic experiences can inform a different and more multiplied mode of art writing. Writing work can be a cure that heals multiple entities through its aggregation of shared information—the artwork, the Facebook announcement, the artist, the energy from the electricity grid, the viewer, the ﬂoor, the opening night recorded on Instagram. If aesthetics is the telepathic electromagnetic current, if we substitute collective imagination for the

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 111 multi-channel telepathic transmission, will we change the outcome of the aesthetic response; that is, the art writing? Stengers cautions us, stating, ‘Imagination is not a true variable because the experimenter is not free to control the variations.’273

How can I defend the experimenter, when I don’t know who he is? Is he the liar, the art stager, the performer, the actor, the ﬁction writer, ‘a being of scientiﬁc allure?’274 In a Speculative Aesthetics model, all these characters would be experimenters, alongside the lie, the performance, the play, the novel and the experiment. But it wouldn’t end there: the list would go on and on. The lab, where all experimentation takes place, is part of a system, not a venue for humans to establish themselves as authors.

SPECULATIVE AESTHETICS A spectral trail is a sensual machine of experience that leaves a trace. Jane Bennett says that her ‘thing power’ refers to when man-made objects exceed their status and ‘manifest traces of independence and aliveness, constituting the outside of our experience.’275 This is how spectral trails work: as funnelled patterns of generated and distant experience, as radiating ripples of removal and autonomy. A watery wake of what has gone before. Is it death? No, a spectral trail is the exhaust of the object; it is the unexplainable force left behind. It cannot be mourned, but the spectral trail isn’t just behind an artist such as Jacque Drinkall, it also glows around her. Is this Meillassoux’s immanence at work?276 As the artist stands, listening, looking, waiting for the balaclava message to load, the spectral trail hovers and becomes an aura, from thoughts she has already had, from experiences she has already sensed, in the future.

Telepathy must be reciprocal and causal. It also reveals the energy and multiplicity of elements in objects that speak and hear, listen and talk, as aggregates or systems of information. The endlessly pragmatic philosopher Graham Harman points out that there are different scales and sizes of objects and that they exist in different ontological layers. Harman believes objects are less than the sum of their parts,277 and that

273 Stengers, Charlatan, 24. 274 Idem, 19. 275 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvi. 276 Reza Negarestani, “Instrumental Spectrality and Meillassoux’s catoptric controversies,” in lecture “Not Human,” Franklin Humanities Institute, February 28, (2009), 1-11. 277 Speculative Realist lecture, Center for the Humanities, CUNY, New York, 15 September 2011, accessed October 31, 2013, http://vimeo.com/48817465.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 112 withdrawal is the idea there are aspects of things that are not strictly knowable.

The strengths of Speculative Realism are its rejection of dogma, of dyads, of critique, of human habit, of singularity, of background and of faith. Its conclusions lie in the independent reality (object-related and systemically-networked) of the world. Telepathy is an entity that can be sensed outside the ﬁve senses. It is the entity between various actants, despite its casting as a charlatan’s mode of thought. It is the irreducible. Telepathy has had a fair bit of bad press.278 However, it is a materially immaterial experience. It is the kind of object that exists in the heteroverse of which Levi Bryant writes.279 As a non-concrete entity, telepathy is a diverse and outwardly broadcast thing.

Telepathy was a ‘dispatch’ for Derrida, ‘a connection between two psychic acts’ for Freud and ‘synchronicity’ for Carl Jung.280 For me, telepathy is a Speculative Aesthetic that helps me make sense of the allure of art, when the rug has been pulled from beneath my feet, and ‘reality’ seems more elusive than ever. How can I approach art if the subject is no longer more relevant than the object? Only through a shared experience, only through a new structure that no longer privileges some things (the author, the viewer) over others.

I see telepathy as a movement beyond ﬁnitude, a relationship across space, across time. It links many, rather than only two. It can be sensed, phenomeno-speculatively, but is beyond our ﬁve usual modes. Telepathy sits well in the realm of art, where the intuitive, the in-between and the unknown are explored, by virtue of its attempts to respond and create, simultaneously. As Drinkall explains through her video work, the extremes of contemporary communication need to be investigated. Simply place her cabled elf balaclava upon your head and you have access to multiple connections and cross-currents of thought. This makes space for memories, the hum of static, the conversations along the telecommunication wires and cables. Listen closely; the message might be for you. Consider what Derrida says, ‘Life is already threatened by the

278 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1, 1 (1976): 43-64; Rosalind Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); Lisa Blackman, “Embody Affect: Voice Hearing, Telepathy, Suggestion and Modeling the Non-conscious.” Body and Society, 16, (2010): 163-192. 279 Bryant, The Democracy, 286-7. 280 Genevieve David, “Moments of magic in the therapeutic relationship,” The Self in Conversation VI (2007): 128.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 113 origin of the memory which constitutes it, and by the breaching which it resists.’ 281

Telepathy sits in the black hole of not-knowing. In a seminar series at the University of Dance and Circus in Sweden, Robin Mackay explained that metaphysicians use reason to ask the meaning of laws of nature, for reality.282 In After Finitude, Meillassoux deduced that the laws governing nature could change at any time.283 This absolute fulﬁls a very human desire for order, while leaving open possibilities and capacities… for further thought, for imagination, for coming to terms with a reality beyond ﬁnitude and speculating on what might come next. I’ll wait for my telepathic message.

Can I write about telepathy and art using a sensible, academic modality, in order to mobilise a speculative art writing form that sits beside the artwork and allows for multiple narrative possibilities? Yes, but only if the transmitted signals keep moving and the systems of data information continue to loop and feedback, and are broadcast to a multitude rather than an audience of one. Telepathy enables an interventionist, speculative mode of art writing. A Speculative Aesthetic is an aggregate of telepathic transmissions. So, telepathy and its various manifestations as content, methodology, framework, object, subject and conceptual repurpose, are the performance of a speculative art writing form.

This acknowledgement of unknown patterns of transmitted information naturally leads me to wonder about material formations of electromagnetic energy and whether they might be absorbed into a speculative aesthetic discussion. From the unknown to the known. From one aesthetic sensing to another. Magnetism is an event of attraction/ repulsion. Magnetism is a drawing together of elements and the physical self-organisation of those elements. My question expands from the unknown to known matter: can magnetism complement an OOO post- human approach and can it enact a ﬁctive approach to art? Or will this sureness in the materiality of magnetism prove as elusive as telepathy, or as ﬁction?

281 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), 202. 282 Robin Mackay, Introduction to Speculative Realism Conference, 19 May 2011, accessed May 3, 2013, http://vimeo.com/dochlectures.. 283 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 2.

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 114 CHAPTER 5: Magnetic Materiality

TEA AND SCONES ‘Come for afternoon tea?’ a friend recently offered. He’s an academic at Art and Design, UNSW, and is a passionate science enthusiast, particularly when it comes to quantum physics and nanotechnology. He lives in a perfectly proportioned house in Balmain, with white tiled floors and two beautiful, pale daughters, floating through the rooms like Pre- raphaelite muses. I’d only met his wife briefly before: an artist, she knits and composes with retrieved fabrics from op-shops, sewing them into abstract expressionist ‘painting’ forms.

I knew I would be writing about magnetism as an art/writing aesthetic the following week, taking three days to work at a miniature beach house in Currarong, to ‘break the back of the thesis.’ Such a strange expression. Kill it quickly, then deal with the cadaver later? I didn’t really want to have to bury a stinking corpse, but I needed to get over a re-writing hump. ‘How should I start my magnetism chapter?’ I asked Paul, as we sipped tea, ate scones. ‘I have the material but not the story. No wait, I have the story but not the material. No wait, I have the story and the material but not the secret energy.’ As an answer, he pulled out his phone and showed me Sachiko Kodama’s ferroﬂuid work. I nodded happily, deciding this woman’s sculptures were indeed a good introductory start to the wily subject of magnetism, as a conducting element of aesthetic attraction, and as a literal iteration of OOO allure.

As we were leaving the charming afternoon tea party, with lashings of jam and piles of whipped cream, my friend’s wife embraced me. I admired Christina’s green silk singlet and her cascading white blonde hair as she said, ‘Come and see me, on your own, one day. I want to do a reading of you.’ ‘A reading?’ I asked (I didn’t have time to join a reading group). ‘I do psychic readings. I’d like to read you.’ I’d not been asked that before and was curious enough to try it out. So, I promised myself that, as soon as I ﬁnished writing this section, I’d meet Christina to have her ‘read’ me. I will recount my psychic reading (surely an accessing of magnetic ﬁelds of force, of knowledge, of intuition) in the close of this chapter.

First, to Kodama’s ferroﬂuid works. Ferro means to combine form (and containing iron), according to my MacBook Air dictionary. Combining form and directing forces has always been a favourite pastime of mine, especially domestic political forces. ‘Don’t dob on your brothers,’ I

Magnetic Materiality . 115 repeatedly tell my daughter. ‘You’re on the same side. It’s you three against the world.’ My sons tease me for trying to draw them into being an alliance of three, saying they’re immune from any of my lame, parentally persuasive language. And yet, despite their supposed inoculations, the three of them stick together. I would like the various parts of this project to stick together: the scholarship, the anecdotes, the ﬁction and the reﬂexivity. Combine form: strands that run closely parallel, almost but not quite touching. Was I wrong to impose these strands upon one another, in this thesis, just as I tried to push my three kids together? There are no recipes for good parenting or good thesis writing. It’s a messy matter of trial and error.

The concept of running made sense in the second chapter, as a means of intellectual and ontological movement. Hyperobjects interobjectively set art writing fictions apart, as a speculative real, in the third chapter. Telepathy was a means of transmitting my esoteric interests in a multiplied and distributed OOO way. Their mobilisation, as a method and a metaphor for moving outside the human-world dyad limits, seemed reasonable to me. But why magnetism? Well, magnetism is a manifestation of foundational aesthetic engagement. Why do we cry when we finally see Monet’s Lilies (at age thirteen, in Paris, with my father, on a cold winter’s day, for the second time that day, by special request)? Or feeling the first tug of a story, aged fourteen, when I saw an elegantly groomed man with walking cane hop across all the white tiles of a black and white marble hotel foyer floor? How can those experiences, so fleeting, so binding and so inaccessible, become important throughout a lifetime? For me, the magnetic attraction of art and all its aggregated qualities are like Graham Harman’s allure (where the gap between unity and plurality falls away) but with additional material properties and with extra forces of magnetic desire.

How do I create a speculative art writing aesthetic that harnesses magnetism and magnetic attraction? I look to the invisible bands of magnetised energy within which we live to seek ontologies that are possibly not reducible to Newtonian objectivity.284 There, in the vibrations of the earth, the elusive repulsions of like poles, the wild attractions of unlike poles, I might ﬁnd a means of moving away from the central human coordinate and into the mesmerising sea of art’s mysterious modes of animal attraction.

284 Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Qui Parle 19, 2 (2011): 121-158.

Magnetic Materiality . 116 FERROFLUID The magnetic materiality of ferrofluid is viscous (yes, one of the qualities of hyperobjects) and shape-shifting. Invented in the 1960s as part of the Apollo NASA program,285 it has a gooey and mercurial texture and is bewitching to watch. In terms of matter, ferrofluid comprises dissolved nanoscale ferromagnetic particles in a solvent, such as water or oil. Despite its condition of fluidity, the particles are still highly magnetic and responsive to changes, shape-shifting along magnetic lines. ‘When the magnetic surface force exceeds the stabilising effect of the fluid weight and surface tension,’286 the ferrofluid makes these spiked patterns. Ferrofluid shapes are reminiscent of iron filing shapes, magnetised by north and south poles. Remember those experiments from year three at primary school? The same circular spikes, the same fuzzy triangular points.

Kodama makes sculptures from ferrofluid by using ‘one electromagnet… with an extended iron core sculpted into a particular shape. The ferrofluid covers the sculpted surface of the three-dimensional iron shape. The movement of the spikes in the fluid is controlled dynamically on the surface by adjusting the power of the electromagnet.’287 Alongside its industrial applications, the ferrofluid form is a compelling structural thing. Kodama’s Morpho Tower 2006 is part-pagoda and part-monstrous human-killing plant life; its teeth-like protuberances appear malevolent. The spiral cone spins, causing the ferrofluid to rise up, like a liquid beast.

The disquietude of these counter-intuitive artworks (contrary, because the liquid rises up like an ocean swell) is offset by the certainty of technology. Gravity is defied and yet the sculptures make clear how weak gravity really is. Things levitate or float in the air all the time, persisting in resisting the gravitational pull of the earth. OOO theory is a little like a dove feather, floating on an airstream for hours at a time, resting back on an earthy surface, only to be tugged back up into the immediate atmosphere for another eternity. Are OOO theorists not like the dove feather, resisting the pull of foundational philosophy, denying and being denied the heaviness of background, foreground, historical weight, religiosity, futile hopes, singular intent? Never resting for long.

285 Staff writer, “Sachiko Kodama: The Art and Science of Ferroﬂuid,” Body Pixel: Art, Science, Technology January 4, 2010, accessed July 20, 2014, http://www.body-pixel.com/2010/04/01/sachiko-kodama-the-art-and- science-of-ferroﬂuid/. 286 Ibid. 287 Ibid.

Magnetic Materiality . 117 Sachiko Kodama Morpho Tower 2006, ferroﬂuid Courtesy the artist

Magnetic Materiality . 118 The attraction of ferrofluid and other magnetic materialities is the polar oppositions. Push-pull, together-apart, sum-parts. This ability to be two things at once, the capacity to swing from one position to another, is compelling. It is the lack of stasis, the constant potential for change, that is a complementary OOO attribute. Within the structure of narratives, from life and from imagination (usually both), constant change is crucial to drive the tale forwards, to compel us to keep reading. How do we do that? By complicating, by testing and by creating obstacles for our characters. Later in this chapter, I follow the story of an artist I know quite well, David Eastwood. His story is one of magnetic attraction; it is locatable as the kernel of a story but not as a thing. Stories start in real time/place but their retelling and their variable possibilities are non- locatable because they are so expanded and multiplied. The event in Eastwood’s story is confined or restricted because it is the first time it has been told.

SUBJECTILE FORCE AND OOO MAGNETISM Force is a geo-affect, unleashed when an object acts. Things act, despite human agency or witnessing, whilst not denying that witnessing. So, human agency is welcome but not necessary. If an object can be anything, from a computer terminal to an artwork to a lovely afternoon’s day dream, then the spectrum of forces is broad. The point at which projected force is mobilised from the object towards the subject is the subjectile force. Recast experimentally by Antonin Artaud,288 and de-constructively deﬁned by Jacques Derrida,289 this term ‘subjectile’ is a useful means of discussing the force of things, in particular, the force of art things (artwork matter, viewing experience, response). For me, allure occurs only when subjectile force is activated. It is not limited to two participants, however, but is a surge that exists between all things, not unlike magnetism.

New materialist Jane Bennett’s exposition of force covers the negative and positive power of objects in her writings and vibrant matter, which is ‘an active, earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness.’290 Her case for active matter hinges on all things as actors, rather than inactive entities. Bennett’s use of force is also relevant due to her reference to vital things

288 Edward Scheer, ed.Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 126-36. 289 Jacques Derrida, “Maddening the Subjectile,” Yale French Studies 84 (1994): 154. 290 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 3.

Magnetic Materiality . 119 as characters in a speculative onto-story.291 In fact, Bennett’s writing style is narrative-driven, with strong ﬁctive techniques, such as pace, tension, narrative voice. She even starts one chapter, ‘A Life of Metal’, by analysing a short story by Kafka, in which an ape becomes socialised to the point of delivering a lecture to academics. The story satirises humanity’s victorious and arrogant sense of its own self-importance within the biological schema. Bennett then asks: what of inanimate matter, in this same logical structure?292

In an OOO reading, these subjectiles must be both terrestrial and extra- terrestrial forces. They occur in the world, of the world and around the world. Where the object meets the subject, force is unleashed and that force becomes an object, rendering the subject an object too. Force is an energetic and lively element, in flux, and it is dependent on movement. Where might a hybrid magnetoid fit into this model of charged forces, humming across the surface or deep into the crust of the earth? A little monster, powered by battery currents. Independent but not singular. Aggregated, but its sum no more important than its parts. Interobjective, but not reliant upon other things, for its agency. The idea of magnets as interruptive power sources that exist off-grid is compelling for an eco-conscious OOO attitude. If OOO began as philosophy seminars, other domains have become increasingly attracted to it: environmental, biopolitical, and fictional/aesthetic, each being able to find a handhold in the ontological plurality espoused.

Speaking of magnetoids and little monsters, my second son was given a battery-run car when he was small. This car was his pride and joy. He slept with it and played with it constantly… well, for three days. The toy, though, had a habit of ignoring his remote console’s instructions and veering towards massive magnetic metal objects, such as the fridge. Or the washing machine. On the fourth day, when he was manoeuvring his toy along the footpath outside our house, a huge removalist truck rumbled by. In slow motion, I watched that little car veer off the path and race directly towards the enormous vehicle. My son’s eyes were wide with horror, as his little fingers triggered the off switch, then desperately tried to steer the car back. But the toy’s agency was in flux; it defied control and drove itself straight underneath the massive wheels of the truck. Hope, hoping… hopeless: splat, that car was flattened. Flattened into an OOO ontology of metal bits.

291 Jane Bennett,The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001). 292 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 52.

Magnetic Materiality . 120 MAGNETIC AESTHETICS Keeping the death-wish of the toy car in mind, might magnetic forces be no different from varieties of sympathetic attunements to the world: careful ears and mindful eyes? Perhaps, but magnetic force’s difference occurs when the object collides with the subjects, rather than always emanating from the anthropocentric position: ‘… and the stones bewitched, can see: The lost hours and into the past.’293 Did these bewitching forces pre-exist our enactment or interpretation of them? Isabelle Stengers believes such forces already and always existed.294 Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action,295 where things come together/ apart simultaneously, refers to actors not preceding the acting. These ontological speciﬁcities lead to the importance of forceful magnetic action and of primordial events and to an awareness that we are of this world, rather than in it.296

Harman’s objects never exhaust their relations. Harman explains that there are real objects that withdraw and are deprived of causal links and there are sensual (intentional) objects, which are inclined to interact but never do.297 This is perplexing as he wonders, consequently, if things are capable of ever really interacting.298 Surely, we all cry, things do interact in networked and meshed ways! He does counter this by stating, ‘the only place in the cosmos sensual objects do interact is in the sensual, phenomenal realm.’299

Might magnetism enact a potentially sensual realm within the cosmos, set apart from the real? Matching north-north magnetic poles repel. The charged particles resist touching, and so, this would complement a Harman-like withdrawal. Yet, opposite north-south poles rush together, in a ﬁt of mad ecstasy. In a lecture delivered at the University of Western Sydney on 5 December, 2013, Harman said that objects withdraw, like

293 Laura Kasischke, “Rain,” in Space, in Chains (Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2011), 27. 294 Isabelle Stengers, “Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism,” Subjectivity 22 (2008): 38-59. 295 Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Qui Parle 19, 2 (2011): 123. 296 Donna Haraway, “Interlooping Endnotes: Gifts and Debts,” in “SF: Speculative Fabulation and String Figures,” Documenta (13): 100 notes (Ostﬁldern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 9. 297 Graham Harman, “Time, Space, Essence, and Eidos: A new theory of Causation,” Cosmos and History 6, 1 (2010): 9. 298 Ibid. 299 Graham Harman, “On Vicarious Causation,” Collapse II Speculative Realism Issue (2007): 195.

Magnetic Materiality . 121 magnets resisting.300 But… what about magnets that attract? Magnetic vibration occurs in all things. Vibration is the source of noise and a symptom of magnetic energy, too. Vibration is discussed by Jane Bennett,301 whom we know is OOO-friendly, and also by Greg Hainge, academic at University of Queensland. He writes, ‘the transmission of all communicational signals contains noise.’302 Every reverberation between thing and event, every noise between particle and wave, hints at the motion of charged energy that is… magnetism.

A MAGNETIC HISTORY Magnetism has had a troubled history, plagued by connotations of anti-empirical beliefs and fantastical and unfounded assertions. Think of the great Anton Mesmer, a nineteenth century quack, who conducted experiments on patients made to sit in large wooden tubs. The tubs had extruding bottles, were scattered with iron filings and had a small amount of water. 303 This, apparently, was meant to cure them, via their magnetised blood.304 As Isabelle Stengers points out, ‘In the nineteenth century, magnetism provoked a passionate interest that blurred the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Nature was made mysterious, and supernature was populated by messengers bringing news from elsewhere to mediums in a magnetic trance - a very disordered situation that understandably invited the hostility of both scientific and church institutions.’305 Stengers charts Mesmer’s trial by a commission of medical experts. He was vilified as a quack but not before he became celebrated for his collective curative sessions, and ‘mesmerise’ remains in our vocabulary. For a fictive recreation of these events, see my short story in the anthology, Blood.306

Timothy Morton writes, ‘The magnet is a suggestive image of ambient poetics. The “divine power” exerts a force we now call a magnetic ﬁeld, in which things become charged with energy. Poetic power emanates from beyond the subject.’307 Jane Bennett is also interested in the inherent

300 Graham Harman, Keynote Address, Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy, University of Western Sydney 5 December 2013. 301 Bennett, Vibrant Matter. 302 Hainge, Noise Matters, 3. 303 John C Hughes, The World’s Greatest Hypnotists (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996), 35. 304 Gibson, Rapture of Death. 305 Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” E-Flux Journal, 36, July (2012): 4. 306 Prue Gibson, “Mesmer’s Clinic,” in Suzanne Boccalatte and Meredith Jones eds., Blood (Sydney: Boccalatte: 2013): 315. 307 Morton, Ecology without nature, 55.

Magnetic Materiality . 122 immanence of things, their power and ﬁelds of force. When we think of magnetic attraction, do we muse on animal magnetism, that unavoidable and irrepressible urge to copulate? Bennett says, ‘The “sex appeal” of the inorganic, like a life, is another way to give voice to what I think of as shimmering, potentially violent, vitality intrinsic to matter.’308 Bennett is here talking about metal, a material that is subject to changes in nature and also at the hands of humankind. We use metals for a myriad of cultural reasons, not least of which is the humble compass. The magnetic orientation of the compass, in an OOO model, might lead us out of ourselves, out of the world and to the outside of nature, to other speculative space-times beyond.

Jane Bennett talks about metals and vitality, which fuels my notion of a metallic-like magnetism between artworks and their relations. The energy between objects can change, but the object itself remains stable, apart from the vibrant agency within, which can affect and respond to other entities’ innerness, even without contact. This is an OOO/new materialist interpretation of artworks and their immanence. In an OOO schemata, time does not hold a position of supremacy over space: they work in tandem, like lovers, like magnets. Recently a friend of mine, the artist David Eastwood, told me a story about travelling to Italy to meet his hero and artistic inspiration, Giorgio Morandi. David simply could not resist the allure of the trip. There is a magnetic connection between the time and space of this story, and its aggregate of current events.

MORANDI’S ROOF Like all unrealistic expectations, the front of Giorgio Morandi’s house in Bologna was not as my friend David had imagined. It had low eaves and double wooden doors, which were arched with heavy iron handles shaped like artichokes. David, a man of neat proportions with an athletic frame, was surprised. He had researched the master painter’s house, had made diagrams, created maps and scaled plans. He had built studio maquettes and architectural models of the house and studio. Yet still, he was taken aback by the reality—so different from his perception of it. A ﬁeld of magnetic repulsion kept him from touching the hanging bell on the front door.

David wasn’t sure if it was the clanging beat of a nearby metalworker, shaping pewter plates in a barn, or the fuggy haze across his retinas, that was causing discomfort. Perhaps it was the energy the great artist

308 Bennett,Vibrant Matter, 61.

Magnetic Materiality . 123 emanated from behind those doors that triggered David’s tachycardic ordeal. What if Giorgio found him too simple, too plain? Fear escalated David’s heart beat to 190, with an arrhythmic hiccup every four beats, a cadence that could not be sustained for much longer. He had tried to escape his physical limitations many times before, but an artist’s life is unfailingly real, unavoidably personal.

Fortunately, a small woman, wearing a black wrap-around daycoat with a wisp of grey hair stuck to her bottom lip, stepped through the doors. She beckoned meekly and with a tug on his sheeps’ wool jacket, led him inside the artist’s house. ‘Va bene,’ she whispered, in a hoarse voice that suggested all was not as well as she wished. The main entry of the house was an expanse of cobbled terracotta tiles, with rugs baring their warped weaves and heavy rosewood furniture lining the edges. David caught sight of a side room, which was ﬁlled with computers ﬂoating on a sea of snaky cables, a three dimensional printer, a music-mixing table and a stop-motion camera angled awkwardly on a tripod. ‘He is mad about computers,’ muttered the old woman, following his gaze. ‘He makes videos and sound installations, things to show people on his phone.’

Sconces lit the mud brick walls and tables creaked as David was ushered to the patio beyond. He was left to wait for the master, with a panoramic view of the hilly district to keep him company. The scenery, at least, slowed his heartfelt excitement and he prepared what he would say to the man whose paintings, of vials and vessels, of multiple energetic autonomies, had wooed him away from Sydney and into the miniature scale of the Italian hills.

David told me this last minute of waiting was the most excruciating. Giorgio’s steps were a thumping announcement: self-aware greatness, self-conscious status. He was considered a modest and humble working artist by the international art community, but few had actually met the man, flesh to flesh. Even fewer knew his true capacities, the reality of his voluminous brand of anthropocentrism: Giorgiocentrism. Perhaps if dear David, sweet acolyte and tender idolator, had known the extent of his revered messianic master’s sense of self-worth, he might not have traipsed up those steep winding hills that appeared like a children’s playground, past the heavy-boughed fig trees and the charming corralled goats, ready to be stewed. Up to Giorgio’s home, which reminded him of a dwelling on a mini-golf course.

Magnetic Materiality . 124 Luckily, David was some kind of man himself. His fresh complexion, buzz-cut red-tinged head, topped with a tartan cap, engaged the aesthete’s eye, but there was more to David than an appealing cranium. His sculptures, live objects of inﬁnite essence, were an homage to Giorgio’s paintings, but to a seasoned art connoisseur, whose taste had developed beyond false logic, staid simulations of judgement and fraudulent critical analysis, they surpassed the master. Why, how was this possible? Well, where Giorgio’s paintings trapped passionate wonder, David’s sculptures metamorphosed into three dimensionality and virtual autonomy, without losing that retention of dramatic passion. Giorgio had only seen David’s work online, but sensed that the youth had captured the enigma of unfulﬁlled desire that marked the human condition, and had locked it in his studio scale models. This knowledge aggravated the Goliathian Giorgio into a great rage, but he was a man able to conceal truth with a well-controlled mask. This deceitful trait was there in his paintings for anyone to see, but few did.

‘Ah you have arrived. You have been given a drink?’ ‘Well, no,’ David smiled. ‘But I must say what a great honour it is to meet you.’

David’s extended hand was seen, shaken and released, but David remained compromised by the captivating lure of the older man, manifesting as a wish to please, a plaintive hope that David would be liked. The anxiety sucked at his chest, pulling, tugging. Giorgio’s stature was not just ﬁgurative but resided in his ﬁgure, which was broad- shouldered, paunch-stomached and muscle-thighed. But he was tiny, only rising up to just below David’s shoulder. He wore a knee-length camel coat and seemed ready to leave the house.

‘We will talk brieﬂy in my studio and then we walk to town for lunch.’

David nodded. His rapture and excitement was a vital connection, an attracting force, but one which withdrew, as soon as it emanated. So he followed the great man through the back door, down ten winding stairs and into a small self-contained room with an angled roof of brushwood and walls as thick as a giant’s forearm. This small studio was lit by an opening in the brush roof. David gazed with surprise at this hole, open to the violent natural elements. Surely the great artist would not allow his paintings, his bottles and his vessels of various sage greens and honeyed whites (at least this was the palette arranged on a high central table— shoulder height—on the day he visited) to be wrecked by the great outdoors.

Magnetic Materiality . 125 ‘How do you seal the opening, Giorgio? At night, do you close it off somehow?’

Giorgio followed David’s gaze with carefully concealed irritation. The Italian shook off the rising rancour of this visiting ordeal, and ﬁnally turned a bare-toothed grin onto the Australian man.

‘This is my secret, David. This is the truth that only you will know. The elements. The outside. The beyond. This is the key to my success.’

It was the hearty laugh, the wonderful tear-streaked guffaw that really made David at ease, who didn’t notice that the laugh ended before it began. As he stared up through the hole, he realised the view was not limited by the sky but seemed to go beyond an aurora borealis swathe of colour and onwards into another realm of darkness, punctured by specks of tiny lights. It took a few minutes for David to see they weren’t lights but a flock of migratory birds, lit up by the reflection of the sun. The birds weren’t flying in a band parallel to the earth’s curved surface. They were flying vertically. The magnetic force field was not horizontal and mildly curved but perpendicular. It had a vertiginous quality that David could not possibly know at that moment was a foretelling sign.

All David’s earlier nerves were absorbed by the presence of the great artist. The vital rhythms in his paintings were the perfect foil, as they sat on three easels near the central table. The paintings had an absence of materiality but with a multitude of energetic entities waiting to explode their mischief on the viewing world beyond the picture plane. David was, in fact, so excited that he longed to whoop and yell, to toss up his jaunty hat and watch it somersault back to earth.

He yearned to grab Giorgio by the shoulders and dance him about the room in a silly jig. Hopefully, their shared meal, still to come, would garner such camaraderie and mutual delight. After all, it isn’t easy to ﬁnd soul mates with conﬂations of ideas, those new friends whose synchronous traits are so similar as to be a mirror image, whose rigorous intellect is strong enough to see all patterns of thoughts and ideas, whose sensibilities are so similar that they can see beyond the complexities and reach the lion at the centre of the labyrinth.

BENNETT PUTS THE PEDAL TO THE METAL The presence of eternity and the evidence of an unusual band of vertical magnetism, was a strange and volatile mix, one David had never been

Magnetic Materiality . 126 David Eastwood Morandi’s studio 2013 Courtesy the artist and Robin Gibson Gallery.

Magnetic Materiality . 127 aware of before. This was a case of magnetism, expanded and altered in an endless direction, rather than bound by the limits of the earth. David’s research had included Google maps and floor plans, but he had not counted on this extra dimension beyond the earth’s magnetic fields. When he stared out through the hole, he imagined he could see a cluster of electro-magnetic atoms forming a pathway, a yellow brick road, directly from Giorgio’s house and way up into the furthest place, far away in time, a place that doesn’t exist. Jane Bennett explains that metal is a micro-cluster of irregularly shaped crystals that do not form a seamless whole. What, however, would she have made of the accelerating speed of magnetism stretching from Bologna to who knows where? The elements of this story do not, at first, seem to add up to a seamless entirety, yet each segment or fictive quality makes rational sense. It is only when cast together in a conglomerate of crystalised particles that another thing emerges. I honestly cannot explain what that final emergent thing is.

As discussed earlier in this thesis, it is difﬁcult to see three-dimensional space all at once with the naked human eye. We can’t see in-the-round. Technological tools have assisted us in this respect: think of those weird four-dimensional in-vetero baby scans. This is Morton’s hyperobject phasing. My friend David was experiencing Morandi’s life, his studio, his work… but outside time, outside corporeal dimensionality. As Jane Bennett says, ‘”objects” appear as such because their becoming proceeds at a speed or a level below the threshold of human discernment.’309 Bennett’s materiality ‘not reducible to extension in space’ might refer, in this story, to Morandi as a real thing in David’s mind, as a sensual/ real thing in my story and as a magnetic thing in this thesis. Morandi is not locatable (except as a ﬁction) and he is not alive (any more), but his vibrancy lingers; his narrative has the capacity for change.

Morandi’s pots of porcelain or clay, transposed to paint on board or canvas, were only to be re-made and re-constructed by David in his architectural scaled model, made from historic photographs of Morandi’s studio. This becomes a wave of forces and ﬂows, a monstrous amalgamation of energies and ﬂuid particles, waving and soaring like Kodama’s sculptures. These energies seem natural but might not be. In Plato’s Symposium, the wise woman Diotima speaks of daemons, which are spirit creatures that serve as consciences, manifested outside the human body. They are undeniably corporeal elements of the human

309 Bennett,Vibrant Matter, 58.

Magnetic Materiality . 128 mind. Spirit creatures act as souls of the human. They, too, sit outside the human form and take the shape of various animal or bird creatures. If the human is separated from their daemon spirit, the result is extreme discomfort and pain. By contrast, Jane Bennett writes her metal chapter, ‘to see just how far it can be pulled away from its mooring in the physiological and organic.’310 Stories, too, must be tethered to the organic, to life ﬂows. Otherwise, there is nothing to resist and no metallic vitality to notice.

BACK TO MORANDI’S NEXT ACT David explained to me that it was magnetism that caused his next act, which was a fact. A reverberating animal attraction, as he described it. A need too strong to resist. A corporeal compulsion, a wicked desire, a perverse carnal need. Sex, you are thinking? Certainly not. No. This was a more intense desire than mere physical coupling. As I understand it, this was a compulsive urge to connect with the forces between David and Giorgio. Dragging his heels to slow the tug of energy would have been useless. Clinging to a door jamb would have been futile. While Giorgio scrabbled around in a desk drawer, looking for a purse of money for lunch, David had no control and was pushed in an inexorable drive towards a particular bottle, sitting on the high shelf of Giorgio’s studio.

This bottle, let’s call it a Turkish stoppered jar, because bottle sounds too pedestrian… this Turkish stoppered jar was made of green glass. In the midday light of the Italian hills, so much more gentle than the blinding light of Sydney (always made more sparkly due to the harbour), the little stoppered jar shone. Iridescent, incandescent, immanent. David’s body moved as though a puppeteer were at the strings. A clumsy step-over-step, with not enough arch. A wonky hand, with a tremour, reaching out to the stoppered jar, like a sleepwalker, a robot, a mother-seeking wailing infant.

SNATCHED. POCKETED. PATTED. Giorgio turned and stared at David, but the old artist had seen nothing, had witnessed even less. He mumbled in Italian and, although David spoke not a word of the language, he could see that the artist was bothered, perhaps by having a visitor in his studio. David knew only too well how discomforting it is to have people poking their noses into one’s work and was also anxious when others gazed at his work bench and sneaked peeks at his unﬁnished paintings and models. Few artists would

310 Idem, 53.

Magnetic Materiality . 129 be insensitive to this kind of protection of work-in-progress.

‘So, would you say you are a realist, Giorgio?’ he asked, hoping to divert the great master’s attention away from any sense of intrusion.

‘A realist? There is no such an artist. The real is unachievable. The real is the moment that has just gone. Slipped away before we grasp it. Realism is the yearning for that which we can never reach or touch or perceive, so it becomes a ﬁction. The real becomes the unreal because we cannot quantify it. It becomes so distant that all we can do is speculate and ﬁll the gaps. We, as artists, are the speculators.’

‘But…’ said David. ‘Surely, we as artists are the perfect people to bridge the gap between what we know and what we don’t know. Isn’t it “real” to say that we can never know anything as a true essence because it is always mediated by our culture, our education, politics…’

‘That sounds very fashionable,’ interrupted Giorgio. ‘But artists are not gods. We cannot make the real. We cannot sell the real. We cannot eat the real. However… we can walk to the village for lunch.’

It wasn’t long before Giorgio was cracking a pace down a goat track, through the dense cypress trees on the descent to the village below. It had taken David forty minutes to climb the snaking road to Giorgio’s hamlet but he was assured the reverse trip, straight down the hill, would take no more than ten minutes. The bulbous roots of low-growing olive trees and the odd cooing sound among the shaking leaves above unnerved David as he rushed to keep pace with the master painter. Only once did Giorgio glance back over his shoulder to make sure his guest had not been impaled by a low, sharpened branch.

‘No need to hold your heart,’ Giorgio called. ‘It will beat its own rhythm whether you like it or not.’

David had, in fact, been clutching the breast pocket of his jacket, making sure the Turkish stoppered jar, immanent with its own power, its own magnetic electricity, did not fall out, during this violent declination. At the base of the hill, there was a sudden edge, a drop of ten feet to the road below. Giorgio, of course, knew to stop abruptly when he reached this precarious spot, knowing there was a ﬂight of stairs nearby, where a road-crossing would be safe. David, however, was not aware such danger was imminent. So, when he came upon Giorgio’s halted body, there was little time for him to stop his momentum forwards. And so he collided

Magnetic Materiality . 130 with Giorgio, sending the older but smaller man ﬂying off the edge of the hill base and directly into the path of a fast-approaching goat truck. David was never sure if the cries he heard were Giorgio’s last gasps or the herd of bleating goats in the truck-tray. He was, however, certain he heard the crack of glass as the Turkish stoppered jar ﬂew from his jacket pocket and smashed, centimetres away from Giorgio’s outstretched hand.

THE IMMANENCE This story was relayed to me at a crucial point in my thesis research, at a moment when the force of the project was pulling me forwards, with an agented will of its own, despite my anxiety about the risks of fiction in theory: academia and anecdote, argument and augmentation. In Graham Harman’s vicarious causation,311 there are real, emerging objects and then there are intentional objects. Both kinds of objects are split between their unity and the plurality of their traits,312 and both are present in David’s story. There was the attracting force field that encouraged, no, demanded that David fly thousands of kilometres to the Italian hills. There were the immanence and vitality of the Turkish stoppered jar. There was also the unexpected connection through the roof hole, between this reality and another. Finally, there was the contingency in the law of nature, which extended to a change for no reason at all.313. . which was that David was not aware of the sudden edge of the hill and could not stop the effect or physics of his momentum downwards. This was an extra element of magnetic force: gravity.

But the objects are the real key to the causality of this experience. Harman asks how causal connections work and how they occur in the space where inanimate objects exist.314 So that even though David, the human actant, has told the story to me, there is an inherent causal connection between the Turkish stoppered jar, the paintings of the jars (and bottles and urns and tins) and the stealing of the jar.

THE ART CAUSALITY Following Harman’s causality, if there is a causal connection between two things (such as David’s wish to meet the master and his subsequent accidental manslaughter of him), it is distorted and in a kind of translation. To be aware of David’s motives for travel, for stealing and for

311 Harman, “On Vicarious Causation.” 312 Graham Harman, “Time, Space, Essence, and Eidos: A new theory of Causation,” Cosmos and History, 6, 1 (2010): 1. 313 Meillassoux, After Finitude. 314 Harman, “Time, Space, Essence,” 1.

Magnetic Materiality . 131 murdering, does not really make those qualities more real, especially as ﬁctioning.

Harman’s vicarious causality pivots on the question of how objects can interact if they do not exhaust their relations. Since it is a knee-jerk reaction to cry out that objects do interact, Harman says ‘more concisely: we have the problem of non-relating objects that somehow relate. Since no causation between them can be direct, it clearly can only be vicarious, taking place by means of some unspeciﬁed intermediary. Whatever this third term may be, it already seems clear that it has something to do with the shower of loose qualities that captured the interest of the carnal phenomenologists.’315

Harman urges us to remember that causation is not just about creating an effect (another object) but is the reality of the ﬁrst object that cannot be reduced.316 ‘I have claimed that absorption with intentional objects occurs only on the interior of some object, with one of that object’s real pieces confronting intentional caricatures of one or more others.’317 Harman’s use of the word absorption is interesting as it is part of a phenomenological language, a physical, almost heady, engagement with sensation. Absorption318 with an artwork is necessarily reverberating and forceful—an interactive space of pulsating energies and particles.

Vicarious causation is local, inherent and in everything in the cosmos, including the inanimate or non-human. So, no longer is there a division between the sensing person and the objective world. If two magnets are drawn together by their force ﬁelds of magnetic energy (even if they touch), they are still independent and real, and their causation is exerted within the framework of their own unity and out to the framework of other unities. Change occurs. Harman says the vicarious ‘indicates that relations never directly encounter the autonomous reality of their components.’319 His intention is to save us from nature as a construct and return us to the essences (magnetic forces) of the inanimate world.

MEILLASSOUX’S NON-CAUSAL WORLDS After Finitude’s Quentin Meillassoux is connected with the creation of art, as well as with creating a particular brand of unforgiving philosophy.

315 Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics, 91. 316 Harman, “Time, Space, Essence,” 13. 317 Idem, 15. 318 It has also been used by art critic Michael Fried. 319 Harman, “On Vicarious Causation,” 189.

Magnetic Materiality . 132 He has collaborated with sound artist Florian Hecker.320 He also wrote a paper, ‘Metaphysics and fictions about the worlds beyond science’, in which he positions ‘fiction beyond science’ (FBS) as a different entity from science fiction. He sees the latter as an imagining of a fictitious future of science, whereas the former is a construction of a world without scientific knowledge or scientific deployment.321 A world without science can be seen as one without any gaps between reality and phenomenon, where the difference endlessly falls away. Harman has spoken about that gap as allure, and here Meillassoux seems to be saying that, if we remove science as a framing knowledge or as a deployment of facts, it might exist as an arbitrary and speculative encounter, where the fictitious future of science, instead, imagines us. The future affects events in the present or the past. Could this arbitrary realm be the ‘real’ at which Speculative Realists are grasping? A real, that exists outside human comprehension (and therefore outside human time, human agency, human imagination)?

The reason his paper is relevant to magnetic aesthetics and a ﬁctioning of art theory, is that Meillassoux directs us to a world (beyond science) that cannot be limited as an object of natural science. He says, ‘These worlds allow for events seemingly without cause, but whose application is too rare, too ‘spasmodic’ to endanger science as conscience: these events would consist of observable causal breaks, which are impossible to re-create in a regular fashion.’322 David Eastwood’s story is an observable causal break. The death of Morandi seems not to have cause, other than through a fracturing of time, via a ﬁctional interruption. Science, as a kind of truth, cannot be observed or deployed in this story: the nonsense seems to make sense.

Meillassoux explains that science fiction stays as science fiction and stays as a part of real science, whereas his concept of ‘fiction beyond science’ allows for events to occur seemingly without cause. I like Meillassoux’s model as he allows for a building upon ‘reasonable action of the real, but we would never exclude an absurd action of nature.’ Morandi’s death might be absurd nature, taking its course, but without cause and without abolishing conscience. These ‘fiction beyond science’ ideas are an enactment of his ‘after finitude’ theories. In his paper, Meillassoux notices that the ‘arbitrary’ is usually banned from narration. David’s story (my imagining of it) allows the arbitrary. Then Meillassoux gives two criteria for a ‘fiction beyond science.’ They are, firstly, that things happen with

320 321 Quentin Meillassoux, “Metaphysics and ﬁctions,” 3. 322 Ibid.

Magnetic Materiality . 133 no logical explanation, and, secondly, that science is present but in a mostly negative perspective. My particular brand of ﬁctive theory writing is synergistic with Meillassoux’s model—being illogical and ambivalent towards science’s laws.

THIS IS ALIVE Within ﬁelds of magnetic force, particles align and pulse in all things. The pose and posture of the spectator are performative elements of magnetic art attraction. We enchant and repel one another and all other things. We move towards and away from the artwork, its folds of colour, its lines, its movement, its expression, its sounds. Electromagnetic currents might be invisible to the naked eye but are embodied by our faces,323 and gestures, within a spatial relation.324 I can see the currents of attraction in your eyes. You see the dip of my head, in slow thought. I see you rub your hand over your face to hide the emotion of the exchange, to shield the surprise of the engagement. This is individual causation (the art work is an event that causes an event, which is my reaction, which becomes a written form) but each individual is the same as the next and makes up a massively expanded realm of multiple individuations.

Hylozoism is the view that all matter, even inanimate matter, is alive.325 Meillassoux is wary of the idea ‘that life and thought lies dormant in all matter.’326 Harman quotes Meillasssoux from Divine Existence: ‘But for Meillassoux matter is purely lifeless, with no incipient life harbored in its depths,’ and this fact ‘imposes a pure discontinuity between matter and vital content.’327 Meillassoux laments that the mysteries of the emergence of sentient qualities from matter are often explained away through religion, as the only alternative to algebraic rationality. Meillassoux prefers a ‘contingent immanence’ where matter, life and thought cannot be qualitatively reduced.328 An immanent or speculative art writing practice adopts that contingency, that wish to avoid reduction.

There are artworks that have a life force at their heart, both literally and ﬁguratively, in the matter, in the material and in the magnetic exchange.

323 Alphonso Lingis, Sensations: Intelligibility in Sensibility (New York: Humanity Books, 1996), 67. 324 Maurice Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 112. 325 Diderot’s ‘hylozoism’ is a belief in universal sentience in all matter: Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 182. 326 Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 95. 327 Ibid. 328 Idem, 96.

Magnetic Materiality . 134 For instance, for Marina Abromovic’s MOMA exhibition The Artist is Present (2010),329 she sat on a chair, facing another chair for seven hours a day, over the course of three months. Audiences queued for hours or slept outside the front of the New York museum, just for the chance to ‘magnetically connect’ with the performance artist. They sat in the free chair and cried or grinned or touched their hearts or sobbed. All the while, Abromovic kept her attention fully on them, staring deeply into their eyes, giving them everything in her heart. Was this divine forgiveness, a priestly absolution of sins? Was this pure mother love or an empathy on a rare, spiritual, innate level? Collective love or ﬁrst-principle ritual? Or was it an exercise in magnetic eye contact: a heartfelt will to connect, as a social experiment.

The energy of magnetic attraction in Abromovic’s MOMA exhibition space for those months was palpable. Connections between strangers affected others in wider, concentric metastases. This has always been Marina Abromovic’s concern—to use her body as a tool of intimacy, violence and intersubjectivity. With her lover and twelve- year collaborator Ulay, Abromovic experimented with thought- transference (Relation in Time 1977), perceptions of public/private space (Imponderabilia 1977) and magnetic forces of attraction (Point of Contact 1980). If ever there were a connection between art, violence, embodiment and love it would be at the pulsing heart of the labyrinth of the Ulay/Abromovic collaborations

LOVE AS DEMOCRACY-FREE MAGNETISM For love or attraction to progress, a mutuality of qualities is needed to achieve plausible and even short-term endurance. Objects need to meet, within another third object. This is Abromovic’s weakness and her strength, her compulsion and her vulnerability: to be effective as art, she requires the total attention of her viewers. And she reciprocates that attention. This is how her magnetic attraction works. Positive to negative. When love is mutual or requited, there are elements of repulsion working against that reciprocity, at any given time. Love is not equal, even if it is mutual. Give and take. Mine and yours. ‘One is born with forces that one did not contrive.’330

329 Marina Abromovic (b. 1946) is a world-acclaimed performance artist, often referred to as ‘the grandmother of performance art,’ accessed December 4, 2013, http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/ marinaabramovic/.

Magnetic Materiality . 135 Marina Abromovic Point of Contact, 1980 performance Sourced 15 October 2014. http://bit.ly/1yBbYmo

Telepathy: Knowledge Zero . 136 Abromovic’s work Point of Contact (1980) was shown as part of a documentary film that charted the intense, collaborative and acrimonious end to the love affair between her and Ulay.331 In its many performances, there was an original and palpable resistance in the attraction between the two. They stood with the forefinger of the left hand of one, pointing but not touching the forefinger of the right hand of the other, for hours. While maintaining eye contact.

Jane Bennett might call upon the idea that the virtue and stakes of mysterious objects are more relevant than their relations.332 In other words, my discussion of ‘art things’ engaging with or without human witness becomes less important, as a connection, than the mystery and allure of the object itself, its irreducible materiality. A key point to consider, articulated in Levi Bryant’s chapter on regimes of attraction,333 is that objects are only selectively open to their environments in their local manifestations (as opposed to their virtual proper being). This might help explain the slippage of an art aesthetic in an OOO ﬁeld into ﬁction. If objects are selectively open, there is a disruption to the democratic order, as well as an evasion of the necessity of hierarchy, which privileges one thing over another.

THE FINAL PSYCHIC READING Necessity. This is a word an academic colleague mentioned to me recently. Necessity: Meillassoux’s necessity of contingency, which refers to the restrictions of possibility that occur when we are limited to subject/object or human/world dyads. Necessity, for me, is as much about the demands of the questions addressed in this thesis as it is about a compulsion to try and answer them. It is arguable that a thesis, which applies OOO concepts of ﬂat ontology and allure to art, is a futile project. Why futile? Well, to defend aesthetics, in an OOO framework, which threatens to collapse the subjective aesthetic view, is self-sabotaging. Yet, why am I so sure that aesthetics can survive such a framework? Because it’s not just the OOO concepts that are moving us towards a post-human model. Other disciplines are talking about such a shift away from the anthropocentric, towards a more ethical and equalised model of all things. Post-humanism is a burgeoning concept, as

330 Lingis, Sensation, 5. 331 Marina Abromovic, The Artist is Present, video documentary, 2012, Sydney Film Festival 2011. 332 Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 226. 333 Bryant, Democracy of Objects, 193-244.

Magnetic Materiality . 137 ﬁery tempers proved at Affective Habitus, an Environmental Humanities conference in 2014 held in Canberra.334 Certain humanities academics and scientists were accused of replacing the centrality of humans with the centrality of plants or animals. In these models, the hierarchical and privileged structure is the same, but with a different species in the apical position. My argument, in light of these humanities frictions, is that art will survive a post-OOO world because it has always existed at a point of cross-over between different ﬁelds.

The concept of a flat ontology is more palatable than a hierarchy where a small group of self-important experts reign supreme. Art survives and adapts, despite its unrelenting precariousness, because it thrives on and demands an enactment of anarchy on the margins, and of the subversion of authority. Art does not create the allure of the art thing. The art thing’s allure necessitates my writing. My writing, as an action, is an enactment of the allure. This is my answer to the conundrum of aesthetics after finitude, or art in a post-human, non-subjective, flat ontology world. To write. To run. To imagine (fictional hyperobjects). To transmit (telepathically). To create magnetic vibrations that cause and are caused by the art and the writing. These elements, discussed in the chapters so far, are an attempt to solve OOO’s aesthetic problems… by writing.

This brings me to the promised psychic reading by new friend Christina. I know you only schlepped through this magnetism chapter, to hear what the psychic said! So… she ‘read me.’ She said she saw a maypole with brightly coloured streamers. She said she saw two parallel lives, one a well-protected secret existence. She said she saw flowers/Italy/a family celebration, which could only be from the future. Hearing these clues, to my life, in an interpretation of how I seem to others, in a guessing of stories behind the face and body, is problematic. Do I apply the images she saw and find links or connections with how I perceive my life? This seems to be very close to the way I write fiction. I see or hear something small… and then elaborate a story around that. Sounds dangerous to do such a thing in real life.

334 Affective Habitus (conference), Environmental Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra 19 June 2014.

Magnetic Materiality . 138 I have been told a maypole is a fertility symbol, the dancing with ribbons intended as a pagan rite. Perhaps this thesis and its research is my maypole? If I take more than two ribbons, maybe four, and intertwine them as I dance, I might be fulfilling an aggregated OOO-like ontology of things, which also functions as a fecund future thing. The ribbons would be my narrative voices—the academic, anecdotal, fictive and reflexive. I think, in fact, Christina was picking up on my playful witchiness and on the necessity of writing as a remedy and as a potential cure. Or more likely, it was just a game of imagining.

In the next chapter, I focus on a particular group within the human species, across time. A cult? No not at all. A coven? Hmm, now we’re getting closer. A hammer of witches probably comes closest of all. How can magic and sorcery redeem our cavalier market-driven economic ways? How can it solve our human-centric habits? How can spells and potions reclaim the trickery and deceit that comprise the neo-liberal, economically-motivated political ecology we call life? We shall see.

Magnetic Materiality . 139 CHAPTER 6: The Politics of Sorcery

SPELLS AND POTIONS ‘Hyperobjects are the taboos, the demonic inversion of the sacred substances of religion.’335

WRITING A CURE The concept of magic here refers to the sorcerer’s bag of tricks, in which secret tools and devices for restoring good aesthetics are kept. If I look beyond the limits of human knowledge, I find myself in esoteric territory. Like those of sci-fi, telepathy and magnetism, the protagonists of these alternative magic views are vilified as crooks, quacks, charlatans and hoodwinkers. However, there is great artfulness in the performances of these characters. Art that performs these kinds of rogue activities avoids the singular structures of duality aesthetics and moves into a para-human aesthetic, where speculation is key and fiction is the only way ahead, being more fertile with possibilities. More importantly, the artful act of magic is a continuation of the efforts of this thesis to work and to enact the labour of running and story-telling, listening and writing—to get outside the limits of human comprehension before they catch up and bite my heels.

The sorcerer is the researcher, the art writer, the ﬁctioner. In this chapter, I focus on artists who dabble in magic. The three discussed are Monika Behrens, Rochelle Haley and Leah Fraser.336 They play with witchcraft, potions or bottles for herb tinctures. These are research-based erotic works, libidinous in nature and effect, which challenge or disrupt structures of male power and authority.

My writing response to their work inhabits the space of a consultation visit. My consulting rooms would be dark, but inviting. Heavy blood- red curtains, wooden furniture and table lamps with tasselled shades. Flocked wallpaper in green and black, large armchairs upholstered in ﬂoral purple, thick silk rugs, books (mostly grimoires), taxidermy, jars,

335 Morton,The Ecological Thought, 132. 336 Monika Behrens and Rochelle Haley are Sydney-based collaborative artists, with independent practices. Haley is represented by Pom Pom Gallery Sydney and Behrens is represented by Breenspace, Sydney. They have collaborated with me on two curated events. Leah Fraser is a Sydney-based emerging painter and ceramicist. She is represented by Arthouse, Sydney.

The Politics of Sorcery . 140 ﬂasks, a chandelier, a heavy card catalogue cabinet, oval mirrors in ornate gold frames and hanging tapestries of Medieval scenes. The sorcerer’s motivation is to heal and there would be an area to one side of the large room, where my patients could sit with me and describe their woes. These woes would be cross-species and might include damage to the environment, overuse of resources, neoliberal erasure of care and the threats of extinction. Although the woes might be general, they have implications for aesthetics and art. Art is nothing, if not an expression of universal fear. The sorcerer (is she someone else or me?), listens to the ailment, prescribes a remedy and hopes for a cure. As a metaphor for the remedies of art, writing is both a panacea and a performance.

My interpretation of sorcery is one whereby the world is a construct of magic,337 an occulture, where exchanges are ritualistic and loaded with trickery, deceit and deliberate mischief. Politics, economies and ecologies are part of our society and are also rich with elements of magical sorcery. This chapter delves into systems of alternative knowledge and the necessity of a suspension of disbelief (or limitless possibilities), when engaging with art. As part of my efforts, without that access being reductive and without relying on human-centric relations, I have again turned to philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers for assistance. Stengers’ appeal is her interest in the outsiders—the charlatan, the witch, the animistic other. She sees capitalism as a trap of capture and notes that we are under its spell. For such evil witchcraft, we need to break the spell to match sorcery with sorcery as non-violetn action, by reclaiming the sorcerers.338 Jacques Derrida’s pharmakon and Isabelle Stengers’ discussion of pharmakon and the charlatan are important texts for evaluating art that deals in the darker arts. The artworks I discuss, which dabble in magical occulture, are joined by Antonin Artaud’s hand-made spells and my own experiments in the art of spell-casting.

One of the finest sorcerers (by this term I mean a woman of specialist magic or with occulted skills) is Professor Clarice Eckhardt. Since a visit to Cockatoo Island, during which I first saw her (incidentally, I still have a prose poem she dropped), and following glimpses of her on several occasions since, I’ve done a little research. I’ve discovered that as a curator whose expertise is Medieval art, she has written several peer-reviewed papers on Neo-medievalist objects, on the fictionalisation of knights,

337 Michael Taussig,The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997). 338 Isabelle Stengers and Phillipe Pignarre, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 135.

The Politics of Sorcery . 141 their arms and armory through historical texts and on genetically modiﬁed food as Speculative Aesthetic. Only recently I read an essay she’d written on ancient love potions of Persia.

Clarice Eckhardt rides a bicycle to the museum where she works each day. Hers is a woman’s bike with low cross-bar and handle basket. In her basket she tends to transport her lunch, an umbrella in case of inclement weather and a pack of Codral in case she feels the need for speed (however, she is hoping to kick this ugly habit very shortly). Her reputation is for Medieval decorative arts and her expertise is Medieval sorcery and witches’ potions. This area of speciﬁc study opened up for her many years earlier, when she was still an emerging curator. It happened like this. She arrived at the museum one morning, when the clouds were chasing a fugitive air pocket across the sky. She spiralled down the central marble stairwell of the Museum of Earthly Delights, disliking the huge and heavy, slow-moving and grinding ‘collections’ lift, all the way to the catacomb-like corridors of the sub-basement. Sensor lights ﬂickered on as she strode along in high-heeled boots, resisting the urge to whimper, being chronically fearful of dark places.

She arrived at the mesh-caged room, where all documentation of Medieval Necronomicons was kept. Swiping her card, and tugging the iron door open, she moved inside. She was researching an automaton that had been gifted to the museum in the early 1930s. A funny gadget, it was a kind of insectoid or robot cicada, with an elaborate wind-up key system and a habit of moving its wings, even when unwound—an uncanny fault in the engineering. She had just discovered that it was made by Jacques de Vaucanson, inventor of the famous mechanical duck that digested and excreted. Soon after completing this, De Vaucanson began a project, c1740, to make an artiﬁcial man, a humanoid.339

The card catalogue had not been fully transferred to the museum’s web catalogue system, so Clarice wrestled with the old wooden drawers to find the history cards, which would perhaps add to her new information. In her forceful yanking, she upset a small book, which must have been left on top of the seven-foot cabinet. It fell to the floor, one page gliding out across the floor, causing a skid of rising dust.

339 Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 51.

The Politics of Sorcery . 142 What Clarice found in the pages, fortuitously discovered, she never shared with her museum colleagues. The book had not been entered into the registration system, as far as her searches yielded, and had not been documented in the card catalogue, nor was there any photographic evidence of it. The little book of spells remained in Clarice’s possession and was used to excellent effect on many occasions. Although she was known for her research and lively practice in Medieval sorcery and magic potions, the book never appeared in her bibliographies, nor was it referenced or cited in any of her papers. Unscrupulous? Perhaps, but who are we to stand in judgement or to comment, as secret witnesses to Clarice’s secret weakness? We are no more important than the dust-mites and flour-bugs the museum conservators fought so hard to keep at bay. There was an imminent event that changed Clarice’s attitude towards magic, which would have ramifications for how she would comprehend her care of Medieval objects in the future. But first, I should explain and diagnose the magic artworks I have seen.

THE AILMENT In an economy-driven, neo-capitalist world, art is another commodity. Art is part of the demand for things. This political environment reeks of the sorcerer’s stinky boiling herbs, but some practitioners are better than others. A small number of humans hold the power and the skills to translate what is incanted. Those who have the skills, have the power. Who incants the policy, prescribes the political solutions? Can we resist the charm and allure of the capitalist marketplace, where good money is spent to create the most alluring baubles? This is an ambivalent ‘capture’,340 where we are fooled by the allure of social things, but where we are also fooled by the enchantment process. Can we cast some counter-charm spells, to relinquish the desperate hold? The ailment is a commodity-driven society. The desultory prognosis demands immediate treatment: performative action. Art-writing spells are the remedy, the cure, the aesthetics of care.

Art functions as a series of ritualistic exchanges, as independent and vital objects, as a ﬁctive, withdrawing of truth: this is the alluring and metaphoric connection between art and magic. Michael Taussig says, Nietzsche made the point that metaphor constitutes the human world by being forgotten, absorbed in the cultural reality it forms as literal truth.341

340 Stengers, “Capitalist Sorcery,” 42-43. 341 Taussig, (The Magic of the State), 35.

The Politics of Sorcery . 143 In 2013, I conjured a collaborative and participatory theory/art workshop as part of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s Artbar. The MCA Artbar is a regularly curated event, which features art lectures, art installations, performance, ﬁlm and workshops. Our performative workshop, The Pharmacy of Love and Hate, included a re-enactment of various old spells, and related texts, discovered through research. Potions were made and given, in glass test tubes, to audience members but only to those willing to engage with the magic, by giving something in return. A secret.

In the lead-up to The Pharmacy of Love and Hate, I made a test batch of love potion perfumes. These were a mixture of naturopathic oils (amarinthe, forget-me-not, rosemary, gingko and some secret aphrodisiacs I’m not prepared to divulge) with a splash of blood-red dye for effect. I ﬁlled small cut-glass bottles with my potion. I also made lucky charms. These were cork-stoppered glass vials ﬁlled with objects that are traditionally representative of good luck, such as animal bones, dice, parchment with bespoke initials, tiny stones from a sacred site, miniature shells and dried clover. My small daughter and I cast a witchy spell over these independent and agented things, then bottled and stoppered them.

I gave the potions and charms away to artist friends, to my PhD supervisor, to writing colleagues, to family members and to an emergency plumber, for whom I felt a sudden rush of gratitude. Most received their strange gifts graciously. However, the mother of one of my son’s friends returned her good luck charm to me, three months after I’d given it. It was her Pentecostal background,342 she explained, her ﬁrm Christian faith and her disapproval of worshipping false idols that caused her distaste. But why keep it so long? Why not throw it out with the rubbish? Why give it back, unless she believed in its immanent power and wanted to deactivate it, by reversing the exchange? Far from being disheartened by this very typical social faux-pas, I realised the magic stakes needed to be raised: I learned that the ritual had to be a more intense exchange, rather than a one-sided gift.343 Paradoxically, magic shows us that the immaterial

342 Where speaking in tongues and baptism are considered gifts from God. 343 For The Pharmacy of Love and Hate, we documented our research, re- created some of Antonin Artaud’s dark spells and some basic magic potion/ spell texts (such as Isaac Newton’s essay on chronology and magic, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, The Hammer of Witches and Malleus Maleﬁcarum) and built a laboratory—a pharmacy of dispensing good and bad fortunes. In return for our elixirs and potions, we required a token of good faith—a confession of love or hate, written on paper. The

The Politics of Sorcery . 144 world might not be outside, but within,344 placing a greater emphasis on the reception of the magic thing, rather than the intention of the giving. This is magic as remedy and cure, rather than as source.

In terms of an ailment, the MCA Artbar event was the ﬁrst sign that all is not well in the kingdom of Sydney. Nevertheless, the customers arriving to receive a love or hate potion had to give me something in return for the ritual to make sense. So, each patient told us his/her ailments; we listened, prescribed a potion and incanted a spell over it, before handing it him/her. In return, the patient had to write a secret on a piece of paper, put it in a sealed brown envelope and place it in my wooden box. Only weeks later did I read the secrets. Examples are as follows: ‘I’m scared no one will come to my funeral’, ‘I like being neutral’, ‘I ate my ﬂat mates’ apricots’, ‘I masturbate too often’ and ‘I was suicidal in kindergarten’. Many were about love: ‘He doesn’t love me’, ‘I love him’, ‘Why doesn’t she love me?’ But by far the worst one was, ‘The only person I hate is my mother, hence I hate myself.’ Oh dear. Such terrible ailments! So many remedies to prescribe!

LEAH FRASER’S MAGIC BOTTLES: THE FIRST REMEDY A spell for research, recited in my head but potent nevertheless, lured me to ﬁnd a young woman, new to exhibiting her work. This emergent artist, Leah Fraser, lives in an elegant Victorian terrace in a cul-de-sac in Surry Hills. Her living rooms have boudoir elegance and her bathroom a claw-foot freestanding bath. Complementing the Romantic charm and dark grace of her living quarters, she is a magician. An artist residency in Oxaca and Pueblo, Mexico, introduced her to a dynamic mix of conservative Catholicism and supernatural occultism: magic.345

Mexico is a culture of worshippers; they are mostly creatures of Christian awareness, who believe that evil spirits should be exorcised, bad luck purged and good wishes and blessings prayed for. Idols, virgins and saints are left gifts and attended to regularly. In churches, Leah Fraser found Virgin Mary statues with holes on their reverse side, where small gifts (such as ﬂowers, coins and tiny dolls) could be left. This apparent clash

experiment investigated the contiguity of the magic exchange. These results were used to create future art writing spells. Questions posed: Who will love and who will hate? Who will mock and who will embrace? Who steps into the magic circle? 344 Both Morton and Harman have written about the collisions between real and sensual things as being within the objects themselves. 345 Leah Fraser was awarded an artist residency, the Arquetopia Residency, in the lead up to her exhibition, accessed June 5, 2013, http://www. arquetopia.org.

The Politics of Sorcery . 145 between false idols and the worship of the church creates a heady mix, which liberated Fraser and inspired her recent body of work.

While her paintings are Magic Realist incantations of spiritedness, her ceramics are more erotic and earthy interpretations of the same concepts: pre-Columbian culture, folk mythology, phallic form meets the clash of kitsch, the connection being the slight disruption of social norms and acceptable faiths. The shaman is her mystical and mythological pneuma, her animating principle. My daemon spirit (meant here as a guardian creature) is a sparrow and my birth stone is an amethyst. By no coincidence, in front of me, on my desk, is a magic bottle made by Leah Fraser that incorporates both sparrow and amethyst. Her ceramic bottles are erotica. She doesn’t contradict me when I say so, but only smiles. This could be seen as the trait of a witchy magician: to lure, to enchant, to seduce. Indeed, Fraser tells me she wanted to be a witch from the age of ten. The witches of old, with their powerful sexualized potions were deemed a threat to men. Does Leah hold that same demonic menace? It’s hard to imagine her in a role of malevolence. Leah Fraser may be no more capable of casting ill-fortune than anyone but the preoccupations are there in her work. This is the allure of the ritual, the intrigue of the sacramental rite. Her strange bottles are familiar; the implied exchange is primitive and recognisable.

Fraser’s magic vessels are empty but their shapes suggest potency. Spiritedness, virility and prophecy are inferred/entreated through her application of birds, shaman ﬁgures and semi-precious stones and crystals onto bottles. In his book Realist Magic Timothy Morton discusses the ‘transducer’ as an object that mediates between one object and another. Spells are transducers, as are Fraser’s magic bottles. He writes, ‘Input into the transducer is treated as information, which gives the energy in the transducer a speciﬁc form.’346 So can Fraser’s bottles be seen as potent remedies, their making intended as spirited daemon-like companionship, the act of their creation meant as an offering of a cure? The bottle’s shape comforts us, reminding us of ancient and primitive forms (prehuman imaginings). The potions inside—whether real or simply implied—give us a placebo feeling of solace. The aesthetic allure of their materiality gives succour, as earthenware, as products of work made from the ground, as labouring for a purpose.

346 Morton, Realist Magic, (no page numbers for online version) chapter on ‘Magic Life.’

The Politics of Sorcery . 146 Leah Fraser Magic Bottle 2013 Courtesy the artist & The Arthouse Gallery.

The Politics of Sorcery . 147 DERRIDA’S PHARMACY In this context of work (writing spells and making magic potions) as a remedy, Jacques Derrida wrote Plato’s pharmacy and understood the dilemma for the writer, when questions of truth and untruth arise.347 The drug may be seductive, the witch’s remedy may be sought, but the truth or veracity of their effects (as cure) is continually questioned, with scepticism. This is a lack of faith in causality. If Morton says causality is aesthetics,348 there still needs to be an audience who believes it to be true, for it to be real. It requires more than concrete science. Likewise, the writers, the scribes and the theorists are constantly suspected of telling lies—of being sophists. They won’t be attended to, unless faith is restored.

In 1968 Derrida wrote about Plato’s The Phaedrus as a kind of pharmacy. He sought to present writing as remedy, a tonic for lost souls. The trace is the residue of knowledge that writing pretends to provide.349 The concept, in Plato’s text, is that writing is no more than a trace of memory and not to be trusted, because it is no more than an illusion of knowledge. This reliance on writing relates to my discussion of magic and of dispensing traces/tinctures/elixirs of magic as a form or experiment in art.

Derrida’s ‘pharmakon’ is a word for writing as medicine, but also as the ‘truth/untruth’ of writing. Writing is a seduction, art is a seduction and magic is a seduction. These three points form a triangle within the magic circle. A gift? A curse? Both. Derrida describes writing as remedy but it might also be a curse. If magic is a gift, it might also be an imprecation, bringing misfortune and trouble.

So, Derrida is speaking about writing as an act, as an untruth, as a gift:

the truth—the original truth—about writing as a pharmakon will at ﬁrst be left up to a myth…Writing (or if you will, the pharmakon) is thus presented to the King. Presented: like a kind of present offered

347 In Plato’s Pharmacy, Lysias’ text of love has lured Socrates out of the city by Phaedrus to hear about love, under a shady tree. The story ends up as a discussion of speech-making and writing. This is writing as a pharmakon or remedy, in order to remember things better. Alternatively, writing as pharmacy dissolves memory because, by relying on writing, we are only allowed an illusion of wisdom: Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ Dissemination trans. Barbara Johnson, (London: The Athlone Press, 1981). 348 Morton, Realist Magic. 349 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 64.

The Politics of Sorcery . 148 up in homage by a vassal to his Lord…This artefactum is an art. But the value of this gift is still uncertain.350

Like Derrida’s pharmakon, art writing and the gift of magic in art could be interpreted as types of artefactum. Their economic and social value as gifts remains uncertain, unless the receiver offers up a confession or commits a contribution (perhaps a lock of hair or a nail clipping) in return. The contractual terms of the ritual are crucial; the equality of the exchange must be evident. This is in line with the ontology of independent and vital things because one entity is not privileged over another. There should be no authority, not even that of a Phaedrus-like king or lord).

ART WRITING AS AN INCANTED SPELL: THE OLD TEXTS At the MCA Artbar, we incanted spells over the potions before giving them to the patients. The language of the incantatory spell becomes politicised by its spell-binding use. There is inherent power and psychological penetration in the spoken word. Poetry, prayer, spell: these literary structures are speech. If I utter my spells out loud, they transmute the agency of material objects and transpose energy and will, through the act of spell-casting.

Crucial to the magic spells and potions are the secret, sacred texts and ancient manuscripts upon which they are based. Without the script (even if it is ﬁctitious), there can be no magic ritual. Without the ritual, there can be no causation. Without the causation, there can be no aesthetics. In this sense, the art spell must be an interpretive, performative act. My art spells are inspired by such texts as Malleus Maleﬁcarum (Hammer of Witches) by Heinrich Kramer,351 the sleeping and poison potion tragedy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet love mishap, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde,352 Donizetti’s opera The Elixir of Love,353 and Daemonologie, written by King James 1 of England.354

For the MCA Artbar potion workshop, our references were formed

350 Ibid. 351 Kramer, Malleus Maleﬁcarum, (Germany: Speyer, 1487). 352 Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde 1857-59, opera premiered Munich, Germany 1865. 353 Gaetano Donizetti, Elixir of Love 1838-48, comic opera premiered in Milan Italy 1832. 354 Daemonologie is a wide-ranging discussion of witchcraft, necromancy, possession, demons, were-wolves, fairies and ghosts, in the form of a Socratic dialogue.

The Politics of Sorcery . 149 through re-interpretations or re-writings of Antonin Artaud’s magic spells (to be expanded on later in this chapter),355 Isaac Newton’s Treatise on Prophecy,356 some excerpts from Malleus Maleﬁcarum and an adaptation of text from Negarastani’s Cyclonopedia.357 The process of art magic demands literary texts as sources of knowledge, as weighty materialities. Many of these texts were persecutory in nature. For instance, historian Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330-391) wrote about witch-hunts in The Chronicles of Events. This text covers the reign of co-emperors Valens and Valentinian, when paranoia (and mischief) about witches was prevalent. Servants were bribed to plant parchment of incantations in the homes of Antioch merchants, to dishonour them.358

Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, published in 1604, is a well- thumbed book on my shelf. Faustus made a pact with Mephistopheles, signing away his soul for inﬁnite knowledge. Faustus rejected conventional religion and said,

These metaphysics of magicians And necromantic books are heavenly; Lines, circles, letters, and characters... A sound magician is a demi-god.359

His was a common seventeenth century alchemical fascination, which was again revived in the nineteenth century with the rise of occultism, the idea being that the discovery of ancient scripts and texts might hold the key to inﬁnite life.

Isaac Newton was intrigued with the idea of discovering the Elixir of Life, the secret to immortality. His working papers were splattered with alchemical mixtures that suggested he was experimenting to ﬁnd the Elixir of Life, the magical potion of inﬁnity.360 According to

355 My collaborators were artists and academics Rochelle Haley and Monika Behrens. 356 Isaac Newton, Two Incomplete Treatises on Prophecy, Keynes Ms. 5, King’s College, Cambridge UK, accessed August 10, 2013, www.newtonproject. sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/diplomatic/THEM00005. 357 Negarastani, Cyclonopedia. 358 Ammianus Marcellinus, “Witch-hunt,” a chapter in “Magic Shows,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Summer (2012), accessed August 12, 2013, http:// www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/wb-yeats-magus. 359 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 9. 360 Jamie James, “W.B.Yeats: Magus,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Summer (2012), accessed August 12, 2013, http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/wb-yeats- magus.

The Politics of Sorcery . 150 Jamie James, Newton was an occultist at the turn of the century. James suggests he studied ‘the fragments of magical books attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, and translated one of them, The Emerald Tablet. A basic text of alchemy…’361 Newton worked on two treatises on prophecy,362 in which he interpreted parts of the Bible and the hieroglyphic language of the Egyptians, as prophecies to lead him forwards. In an attempt to make sense of heaven and earth, sun and moon, ﬁre and meteors, animals and minerals, man and beast, he came to mystical qualities, prophets and what must have been a bewildering concern that chasing the philosopher’s stone might be seen as a blasphemous act.

My alchemical and remedial spell, based on his treatise on prophecy and used for the Pharmacy of Love and Hate, reads:

SPELL FOR POLITICAL SUCCESS The horny head of militant men and the hairs of beasts and prey. The leadership qualities of future circumstances will hold ﬁrm. ‘A sentence of absolution by a white stone’ can only harbour New life, resisting humiliation by sackcloth, the attire of adulterers.

Fiends who plague the lands with their mischief will fall. A cup of purple wine, a goblet of scarlet juices. Now drink, and witness a new testimony, where one man stands. Purged through heat, and mixed over nature’s ﬁre, You will be redeemed and given new strength and broad wings.363

This is a spell for those who wish to lead, those who wish to achieve political success and associated power. Like all spells, there are risks involved. The careful-what-you-wish-for clause is evident. With power comes responsibility. Isaac Newton was not the only highly respected academic who dabbled in darker visions. Nobel Laureate poet W.B Yeats in 1892 said,

Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me ‘weak’ or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or ﬁve years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life…If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book [The Works of William Blake, with Edwin Ellis, 1893], nor would The Countess

361 Ibid. 362 Newton,Two Incomplete Treatises. 363 This is my poetic/prophecy interpretation of Newton’s incomplete treatise.

The Politics of Sorcery . 151 Kathleen [stage play, 1892] have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.364

By 1890, Yeats was a friend of the infamous occultist Madame Blavatsky, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.365 He also participated in rituals of magic, joining an occult group run by MacGregor Mathers, which included the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker. Yeats’ final work, A Vision, matched psychology with poetic, cosmic astrology, as a direct result of these occultist interests. It would be neglectful not to mention Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) an occultist, Western esoteric, magician and founder of religious/philosophical group, Thelema. Describing him as having an enormous influence on esoteric and new religious movements of the twentieth century, University of Amsterdam’s Marco Pasi also argued that Crowley’s writing renews and reinterprets the meaning of occult practices in a modern framework.’366 Crowley was active at a time when scientific naturalism encouraged the investigation of occultist beliefs and enacted on the periphery. His was a version of magic that was experiential and empirical, opening his pursuits up to scrutiny. Like Anton Mesmer working a hundred years earlier, Crowley elicited disdain, contempt and fear. His magic was reputed to have been attempts to gain wealth, sexual success, etc. Pasi explains that there was a trend to naturalise supernatural (magic) discourses as part of a cultural effort in England at the turn of the twentieth century. Crowley ended up being a counter-culture ‘60s icon, due to his experiments with illicit drugs; he also introduced Aldous Huxley to these substances.367

Crowley was acquainted with the activities and members of the Society for Psychical Research at Trinity College in Cambridge University and was understood to have a harmonious curiosity in many religious faiths, extending even to yoga.368 Crowley’s magical enthusiasms were theoretical and connected to his beliefs that each human individual’s will was a spiritual path. He set up Thelema Abbey, where magic’s theory and practice could be enacted.369 Crowley describes magic as ‘the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm.’370

364 James, “W.B.Yeats: Magus.” 365 Ibid. 366 Marco Pasi, “Varieties of Magical Experience: Aleister Crowley’s views on Occult Practice,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 6, 2, (2011): 123-62. 367 Ibid, 129. 368 Ibid, 130. 369 Ibid, 145. 370 Ibid, 147.

The Politics of Sorcery . 152 Finally I arrive at a more contemporary magical Necronomicon text, a source within Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. A Necronomicon is a ﬁctional textbook of rites and forbidden lore: a grimoire. The attraction for me of a Necronomicon, text of the Old Ones, is the notion of the blurring between ﬁction and reality. Jonathon McCalmont discusses H.P. Lovecraft’s incorporation of the Necronomicon (in his story, The Hound, he refers to it as being written by a mad Arab)371 and Negarestani’s use of it in Cyclonopedia:

Part of what makes the Necronomicon such a fascinating literary artefact are the ways in which Lovecraft and other authors use it to play with our attitudes towards the truth or falsity of what is contained in books. Indeed, on the one hand, we might be tempted to think that the Necronomicon and its content are true because:

1. It has survived for hundreds of years in a way that many period manuscripts have not. 2. It has been repeatedly translated by well-known scholars such as the Elizabethan magus John Dee. 3. It appears in the work of a number of different authors. 4. It has spawned numerous real-world imitations. 5.It is not only described as containing truths but people have killed to obtain these truths.

Taken together, these different elements suggest that a) the Necronomicon might very well be real and b) that we should take its contents seriously as they may include some previously overlooked truths about the world. However, on the other hand, we might be justiﬁed in not only dismissing the Necronomicon as a ﬁctional book but also as a book that could not possibly contain any elements of truth.372

A text that nurtures the play between ﬁction and reality? This must be a reference for further play, and that spirited play is mine:

SPELL FOR WITCHING Jade pendant swings on a string of barbed envy, But the pages are too heavy to turn alone.

371 H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and other Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 1999), 84. 372 Jonathon McCalmont, “Cyclonopedia (2008) by Reza Negarastani - Madness, Theory, Truth, Nonsense,” 1 April (2011), accessed August 17, 2013, http://ruthlessculture.com.

The Politics of Sorcery . 153 Help me ﬁnd the spell we need to forge alliances, We three witches will fulﬁll the prophecy of thereafter. Drink the putrid juices of time until the taste turns sweet, The clouds will clear and the mud will dry, Six coin tosses and a draught of sickly sugar. Stay. Leave. It all comes down to love.

This is a spell for those of us interested in the practice of witchcraft, as a metaphor for art’s experience and as a collective, collegiate and collaborative practice. Art that deals with devil-pacts, witchy brews of the erotic and conferrals of good fortune, from one being to another, becomes an investigation into the aesthetic experience of visual art. Reza Negarestani uses ancient languages, theories of sentient fossil fuels across the Middle East,373 demon cults (think of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu)374 and various occult forms to create a madness of theory ﬁction, in Cyclonopedia. The only thing missing from this crazy text are potent magic spells. So, here is a spell for the great Negarestani…

SPELL FOR SENTIENCE Daemon-spirit of schizo-fictive creation rises up With sparrow’s wings. The flight of Negarstani’s petro-punk clears the crowds, But listen to the laughter beneath the hyperstition, Your work finds its own patterns among the stars, Its own road in the sands. Piranesiesque structures spiral up and its gyres spiral down,375 The shape of this writing will bring vital life.376

Magical art creations, especially spells, leave a grimoiresque musty smell in the air. There is an uncanny slippage between ﬁction’s reality and what we perceive as true. The art writing (spells) and artwork never touch or supersede one another, but are in a perpetually causal relationship.

THE POLITICS OF HALEY AND BEHRENS: THE SECOND REMEDY What kind of remedy might art fulﬁl? Art is a remedy to cure ills but also functions as consolation, as sympathy and kindness when we are ailing. Art writing (or spell-incanting) also has potential as a cure, and also as a

373 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia. 374 Ibid. 375 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, xvii. 376 Ibid.

The Politics of Sorcery . 154 consolation. We read to feel connected, to stave off the alienation. These are aesthetic acts, as remedy, becoming spirited by a connection to magic.

In his paper ‘On Magical Language,’ Stephen Muecke outlines four utterances of magical speech. Firstly, there is the exorcism, where bad objects disappear. Secondly, there is the imprecation where a bad object appears. Thirdly, there is the curse of commination (the threat of divine vengeance) where a good object disappears. Last is the blessing or conjuration where a good object appears. As he says of his adaptation of Todorov’s 1978 Le Discours de la Magie, ‘this classiﬁcation helps us distinguish between two opposed forms of magical language: the spell and the prayer.’377

The spell, like the prayer, is a powerful force. It is a device of suggestive language with an intention to change a relationship through the vitality of an object. It is a summoning of force. The vital object might be a good luck charm. Alternatively, there might be a turn away from goodness, by using voodoo or a poisonous potion. The spell can invoke a positive or negative incantation. Anthropologist Michael Taussig refers to the impure sacred, the idea of primitive religion working against the goodness of the church. He tells of how the ‘forces conjured by the sorcerer, and the blood issuing from the genital organs of women… inspired men with fear.’378 The use of objects to create change is necessary. This might also be parchment with the language of the spell written upon it. Or it might be the herbs used for potions.

For their 2011 residency at Artspace and consequent MOP exhibition, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, artists Rochelle Haley and Monika Behrens researched witch hunts and trials during the 15th and 16th century. They investigated the practice of potions, the use of herbs such as hemlock, deadly nightshade, mandrake, henbane and monk’s wood, along with other rhapsodic and hallucinatory plants. Naturally, their research led them to The Hammer of Witches,379 the 1487 handbook in which witches were described as ‘stealing men’s virile members and hiding them in birds’ nests.’380 Eugene Thacker writes, ‘the strange effects of certain herbs or

377 Stephen Muecke, ‘On Magical Language; Multimodality and the Power to Change Things,’ in Margit Bock and Norbert Pachler, eds., Multimodlity and Social Semiosis: Communication, Meaning-Making, and Learning in the Work of Gunther Kress (New York: Routledge, 2013), 91. 378 Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 114. 379 Kramer, Malleus Maleﬁcarum. 380 Prue Gibson, Bedknobs and Broomsticks: Monika Behrens and Rochelle

The Politics of Sorcery . 155 minerals, anomalies in the sky or the stars, the practice of necromancy or geomancy, even the existence of magic itself—all these are evidence of aspects of the world that refuse to reveal themselves, that remain hidden or occulted.’381

The artists’ ﬁnely executed watercolours created a paradoxical antidote to the fearful dread of their sorcery. Exquisitely beautiful, these delicate paintings of various herbs were situated in a sweet garden landscape where dildos rose up, powerful and subversive, independent and autonomous. This was a female world, a political ﬁeld of nature and sexuality. In this magical ecology, witchy women were to be feared and respected. Haley and Behrens’ watercolours of dildos and plants with aphrodisiacal, hallucinatory and sedative powers create a sense of wonder, of feminine force and of future shifts in authority, away from staid hierarchies and cutting across conventional medicine or science. This provides a remedy to social ills that remain now, more than ever, where passions and loves compromise purpose and function.

Abjection, in their watercolours, is a source of pride. What could be more abject than a witch purported to have made aphrodisiacs and hallucinatory lubricants, such as ﬂying ointments made of toad skin, hash, belladonna, poppies and mushrooms, which they then applied to their broom stick ends and inserted into their vaginas?382 It is this abject element, the demands of a change to social structures inherent in this work that cause a re-distribution of power, a reclamation of the witch as equal to all others.

This subtle political strategy, or perhaps it is political play, creates the attraction. Magic, spells and potions, especially in Haley’s and Behrens’ watercolours, conjure the possibility of transformation, the ritualistic process of potential change. This might be moral change, economic change, social change and personal change.

QUEER MAGIC Mischievous magic is sometimes met with moral indignation, as an act against the norm. In her essay Queer Performativity,383 Karen Barad explores acts of nature as acts against nature and seeing ourselves as always part of nature. If I read ‘nature’ as the world, and the actor as the

Haley, MOP projects, Sydney 2011, 2. 381 Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 51. 382 Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (London: Random House, 2001), cited in Prue Gibson, Bedknobs and Broomsticks: Monika Behrens and Rochelle Haley, MOP projects, Sydney 2011, 2. 383 Barad, “Queer Performativity,” 121-158.

The Politics of Sorcery . 156 Rochelle Haley & Monika Behrens Witch’s Hammer 2011 watercolour Courtesy the artists

The Politics of Sorcery . 157 speciﬁcally human actor, then magic might be seen as a ‘queer act,’ an act against inequality. Barad writes of Nazi SS elite henchman Heinrich Himmler’s delousing campaign. Jews were deemed unclean and the genocide was human against non-human.384 The early witch-hunts operated in a similar way.385 Witches were non-human and, therefore, to be exterminated. Barad writes, ‘the ‘posthumanist’ point is not to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman… but rather to understand the materialising effects of particular ways of drawing boundaries between human and nonhumans.’ She ﬁgures that agency and abjection come into play when performative accounts are made of the nonhuman.386

The political act of dispensing magic spells, charms and potions is a weighty responsibility. By giving Shakespeare’s Juliet the sleeping potion to feign death, Friar Lawrence causes a series of unfortunate events, not to mention his mobilising of political and personal tragedy. Relying so heavily upon faith and mutual respect, the causal act of potion and charm-giving has a multitude of dangers and potentially negative reactions: misinterpretation, disappointment, anger. The worst must be the burden of accountability: what happens if an audience member or receiver takes action as a result of the stimulus of the potion or charm, which was not expected or is harmful to the receiver or others?

In his book The Magic of the State, Michael Taussig created a ficto-critical tale of fieldwork in the mountains of Venezuela, where pilgrims came and were possessed by spirits.387 The rituals of magic and spirit possession were meant as an elaborate metaphor for the authority of the state, its hierarchy and stratification. ‘This is an anthropology not of the poor and powerless, but of the state as a reified entity, lusting in its spirited magnificence, hungry for soul stuff,’ he writes.388 The dramatisation of the spirit possession act and other sorcery was as constructed as the pomp and ceremony of public political events and the official authorial voice.

In this way, Taussig is interested in the difference between the reality of the state and its impure and untruthful mask. In other words, the state is a false idol and not the sum of its parts. Instead, it is a conglomeration of parts, which give the appearance of a united authority. He referred to Philip

384 Idem, 122. 385 Kramer, Malleus Maleﬁcarum. 386 Barad, “Queer Performativity,” 123-124. 387 Taussig, The Magic of the State. 388 Levi Strauss, “Interview with Michael Taussig; The Magic of the State,” Cabinet magazine, 18, Summer (2005), 3.

The Politics of Sorcery . 158 Abrams’ concept of the State as being, not the reality behind the mask of politics, but the mask that prevents us from seeing political reality.389 It is phenomenology that seeks to remove the mask, pull away the veil and uncover the reality behind the surface or the face. OOO acknowledges this pursuit of the more-than and extends it to the more-than-human.

Where do art and magic sit in this incognito of masks and realities? The artist and the potion-maker are the mask too. We prevent the audience from seeing political, social realities. However, we (I refer to the artists in this chapter and my own art and magic writing) are different from the State, in that our efforts to conceal are not to purposefully obscure but to protect and offer imaginative alternatives. This is not the fetishism of the state but the fetishism of the act of art.

Stephen Muecke refers to a cult on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, where the communities pray for St Expédit, creating shrines all over the island and leaving cloth, threads and notes for the saint. He calls this, ‘generalised social eroticism’ as a powerful force, a narrative that is the economy.390 By this, he is deﬁning the actions of the capitalist economies as sorcery, and bemoans the difﬁculty of applying Isabelle Stengers’ counter-spells as means of resistance.391 Haley and Behrens’ watercolours of witchy sorcery, potent herbs and various dildo erotica function as a counter-spell. They have the subversive power that, though it might work slowly and quietly, causes an effect of transformation of social expectations.

ARTAUD’S SPELLS These contemporary Australian artists are not the ﬁrst to dabble in the sorcerer’s art. Actor, playwright and theatre theorist Antonin Artaud’s compelling spells are written as drawings: inky, painted, blotched, soiled and burned. ‘My drawings are not drawings but documents and one must look at and understand what is deep inside them,’ said Artaud.392 In performance theorist Edward Scheer’s assessment Artaud’s sketch The machine of being, Scheer explains the viewer is not meant to accept it as an art object but as ‘a document of the failed forms it represents and which collapsed around the idea which they could only betray as they entered the atmosphere of the subjectile.’393

389 Taussig, The Nervous System, 113. 390 Muecke, “On Magical Language,” 96. 391 Stengers and Pignarre, Capitalist Sorcery, 128. 392 Edward Scheer (ed),100 years of cruelty: essays on Artaud (Sydney: Power and Artspace 2000), 57. 393 Idem, 64.

The Politics of Sorcery . 159 This might also apply to Artaud’s drawn spells. The atmosphere of the subjectile, the fusing of object with subject, might well fail and be betrayed by viewers; however, it is an interesting way to approach the spells. Interesting, because they bind the giver and the receiver and the given. This pact, this ritualistic exchange, is non-contiguous, subject to changes and destined to fail. Yet, in every failure is a new birth, and that might equally be a prophecy of some new form.

In the case of Artaud’s 1937 Spell for Lise Deharme, which belonged to the collection of André Breton, let’s hope not. It reads: ‘I will have a red hot iron cross rammed into your stinking Jewess’s hole and then trample all over your dead body to prove to you that GODS STILL EXIST!’ Artaud, playwright, actor and poet, theorised a concept of cruelty, as an explanation for the necessity of seeing that which we fear.394 There are match burns in the paper, gridded in bluish lines, in Artaud’s spells. They comprise purple and yellow blotchy shapes and elusive marks, scribbled- out shapes and crude stars, arcs, ellipses and diamonds. Frightening and alluring, these spells, some of which were written during his time incarcerated in an insane asylum, demand attention as objects of art. They offer insanity as a quality, rather than an illness.

Stephen Barber explains Artaud’s dark practice:

Artaud produced a new set of the ‘spells’ which he had sent as threats and protections from Dublin in September 1937. (The letter from Sainte Anne which Roger Blin described as blood-splattered and burned may also have been a ‘spell.’) These new spells had a much more intricate design, and Artaud’s doctors put different coloured inks at his disposal. The ‘Spells’ were meticulously constructed, using drawings of signs and layers of colour. A violent element of chance was then put to work; Artaud inﬂicted cigarette burns upon the paper of the ‘spell,’ which serve as an intermediary for the body of the person who was under attack. The text of the ‘spell’ was often burned almost to the point of obliteration. Artaud gave one spell to the house-doctor Leon Fouks as a protection…395

It is reassuring that at least one spell, to Dr Fouks, was intended as a positive, protective spell (a blessing of sorts). The element of chance

394 Margit Rowell, Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997). 395 Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 103.

The Politics of Sorcery . 160 that Barber mentions is important to a re-creation and re-enactment of Artaud’s spells. Rather than being subject to chance, art as spells and spells as art are subject to changes, without the certainty of patterns of probabilities. This is unpredictability rather than fate or chance.

Turning back to Speculative philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, he noted that, ‘physical laws remain indifferent as to whether an event occurs or not—they allow an entity to emerge, to subsist, or to perish.’ This, he says, is contingency.396 Artaud’s spells emerge, subsist and are perishable. Were they intended as events that would create change and whose outcome might be conjectured? Were they meant as causal stimuli, as a means of making a change and causing an effect in the future? Probably, as Artaud’s spells were mailed out to the addressees.

THE CURE Magic, as a cure, acts as empowerment without any need for dualities of good and bad, terror and false hope. This is an alternative medicinal activism that holds no hostages and makes no proﬁts. The question to be asked is: what is at stake? The stakes are high. The world is under threat of ecological devastation and human extinction. But, more generally, philosophy is under threat of becoming redundant unless it moves outside the human-centred vortex. OOO works to move outside that sucking hole of hubris, by both ﬂattening and expanding reality.

In that vein, spells are intended as counter-actions against simplistic dualities; spells are meant as a drawing-in to the spiritedness of art things. Isabelle Stengers speaks of uttering the word ‘magic’ as an act of magic,397 as a non-violent action that resists capture. She sees capitalism as a system of sorcery without sorcerers and argues, ‘It is because today’s activist witches have learned this art (or craft) of transformation that they matter to us.’ Spells as remedies, then, matter very much. Here they are. Use them wisely:

SPELL FOR A HALF LOVE Langorous hours, on untouched sheets, No promises mean a thousand questions. Hands enfold while no pride’s lost, An awful happiness hollows down. Those eyes, those thighs, arms to hold tight,

396 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 39. 397 Stengers and Pignarre, Capitalist Sorcery, 134.

The Politics of Sorcery . 161 Illuminated within as heat ﬂows across skin. If you open the door to one life, And empty the pockets of sadness, You will feel. But the price is that it will never be yours. Spell to Denounce Love To exorcise the curse of unwanted affection: Live in the suffering of the rotten plains,

Leave the realm of light. Stop, with pointed ﬁnger, the ascending and descending, The spirit of slavish adoration will be denied. Everlasting gloom upon you and all that you are, Perforated, burned and crushed, your will ends. This spell will act instantly,398 it will not be recalled or deferred.

SPELL FOR HATE Torments of needles, pricks of doubt, Questions of errors and mistakes played out. Horrifying burdens and sickening thuds, These will be yours until the doomsday comes. Agitated fears and screaming dreams, Endless worries and storms of sick spleens. Don’t waste my time, as I have wasted thine. It all ends now.

Were our spells effective, as cures? Stengers warns us against the cure as proof and I have no access to those customers who received a potion and drank it and to any knowledge of whether or not their ‘love or hate’ circumstances were transformed.399 All I have is their secrets, in my wooden box. What will I do with those secrets? Perhaps I’ll just keep them and let their immanence take effect without interaction, without causation, without human witness.

OOO and SR have led me to concerns that are seasoned with post- human deliberations. This habit of reclaiming magic, telepathy or animal magnetism, as explanation for the gap, lack or allure that is so invested in the aesthetic act, is endemic to a cultural environment in which the goal-

398 Parts of this spell are taken from Artaud’s Spell for Sonia Mosse, in which he wishes her dead and curses her with the ‘Force of Death,’ in Rowell, Works on Paper, 149. 399 Stengers, “The Doctor and the Charlatan,” 14.

The Politics of Sorcery . 162 posts keep shifting. If our circumstances have changed (due to global warming, unregulated economies and massive disparities between rich and poor), then so too must our art ideologies. No longer can we inhabit a human-centred space of ‘looking.’ This realm of the more-than-human is deeply relevant to the coming discussion of Janet Laurence’s artwork, where we ﬁnd concepts of disappearance and ruination at the core of an environmental aesthetic outlook.

The Politics of Sorcery . 163 CHAPTER 7: The Disappearance

As yet, I haven’t adequately explained what happened to Professor Clarice Eckhardt soon after she found the Necronomicon book of spells in the Museum of Earthly Delights’ sub-basement. It was an event that changed her attitude to academic scholarship. Throughout her life, Clarice had managed to conceal a small problem she had… a problem with authority. It wasn’t that she disrespected others; on the contrary, she was always polite and solicitous, but she found it difﬁcult to recognise established hierarchies. Why must she listen to the fat, uniformed policeman sipping coca cola? Or to the snobby woman dripping with jewels, who liked to brag about her banker son, forever pushing into the queues at Coles? Why must she heed the deputy director of the museum who never brushed the dandruff from his collar and was ignorant of the museum’s collection? Or the Minister for the Arts who abhorred creativity? It made no sense to her.

This inability to respect authority, just for the sake of it, had always been a bother. Others, she chided herself, seemed untroubled by listening to pointless people in positions of power. Even thinking about it made her arch her back with a habitual mutiny that had begun when she was made to wear a back-brace for scoliosis, aged twelve. Those ‘tweenage’ weeks (six months’ worth) of forced rigidity fulfilled an uncomfortable straightening of her spine. Worse, they also unleashed a chemical of defiance in her brain that continued to be sporadically released, ever since. Either way, the discovery she made, as a result of finding the book of spells, would prove the irrelevance of hierarchical social and political structures. This discovery, though, soon made her wish for the old days, when aggrandising, entitled people (and a short-term incarceration in a benign back-brace) were her only sources of mere irritation.

It must have been two weeks after she ﬁrst began experimenting with the spells within her necronomicon’s musty pages that she tried the future-sight spell. This precognitive divination was alluring, particularly as Clarice was inclined to be interested in Speculative Realism and the concept of archefossils, which might exist a priori in pre-human times and in post-human times or might be like hyperobjects, which are non-localised in terms of chronological life-span or speciﬁc time-place locations. Precognition, Clarice felt, might give her a tempting insight into how things and people could be comprehended in a distant future.

The Disappearance . 164 So, one evening in her Betty Bay apartment, where the moored yacht masts tinkled near the shoreline, and other weathered witches lurked close by, she enacted one of the book’s spells: ‘For Future-Sight.’ She knelt on the floor, at her coffee table, lit one candle and incanted the spell. The simple text only ran for two lines: ‘Show me the future, But return me to now.’ Little did Clarice immediately comprehend how lucky she had been to have not chosen a far more dangerous foresight spell near the back of the grimoire/necronomicon. Suffice to say, a small hazy portal appeared about a metre in front of her eyes. In it, she saw Betty Bay, little changed from how it is today. This might have meant what she saw was not too far in the future. And yet… as the view opened wider (not dissimilar to the Google Earth zoom in/out function), not a single human came into view. The light suggested the glaring heat of the middle of the day, but the streets were empty and forlorn. Even without experience in these matters, it seemed to her as though time had sped up. In this vision, the leaves of trees, seemingly burnt to a crisp, moved in the breaths of wind, but with significant momentum, though it was clearly not a faster speed. A plastic bag floated by, but with unusual swiftness. A dog moved along the footpath, not at a jog but with a nervous alacrity. A wayward, horizontally-challenged crab scuttled up a mooring rope. In short, there was an accelerated quality to the scene but in real time.

With fearful loathing, and not knowing how to cease the spell’s chimera, Clarice blew out the candle and the future vision snapped shut. From that moment on, she kept these visual secrets close to her breast, beside her aching love for a clever man and alongside an adoration of her small niece who laughed with delight at the smallest things, which would take another entire volume to adequately recount. It’s enough to say here that she knew that extinction and accelerated time were properties of life to come and her overall demeanour changed accordingly.

THE EXTINCTION ISSUE In this age of ecological vulnerability, where carbon taxes are enforced then rescinded in a game of ‘snap’, and emissions trading schemes are tossed about like wedding confetti, Clarice’s vision may or may not have been true. It’s correct that she’d been experiencing occasional bouts of disassociated hallucination, brought on by exhaustion, or so her GP said, and an ongoing inability to delineate between the real and the unreal. Despite the uncertainty of the vision she had seen, the fact remains that, when climate change becomes a real threat to multiple species, as it now has, a collective human hubris seems like too little, too late.

The Disappearance . 165 We must be overdue for putting away false pride and reconsidering conventional views of the world. I’ve thought about Clarice’s strange tale, not as anything other than a cautionary story… and yet, its message lingers, leaving a spectral aroma of ash. If human authority is toppled and replaced by ontological equality and multiple agencies, where would eco-art ﬁt into this re-purposed model? Perhaps under the umbrella of an aesthetics of care, which would help to slow down the galloping rate of the disappearing act (extinction) of non-human and human species.400

The question is not whether extinction is imminent but, instead, how are our human to non-human relationships changed by that threat, and how might we make further changes towards universal sympathies? Are animal/plant politics and their agencies affected by the threat of an end? How do artists make art and writers write about aesthetics under these changed ontological conditions? In some respects, art made as an aesthetics of cautionary care is an extension of memento mori, a historical art term popular in 16th and 17th century European painting, which utilised imagery such as half-burned candles or human skulls, to remind viewers that mortal life will surely end. However, a new aesthetics of care moves beyond the centralised view and acknowledges all non- human species.

This point of aesthetic care occurs where many species might meet and agency might become an expanded enactment.401 This is a reference to the way we can re-interpret ontologies of being, where all species and all things appear as having a ﬂat status and agency is multiplied outwards and emanates from everything. Agency here refers to the ability and intention to act, change, transform. In Australian artist Janet Laurence’s eco-art installation Fugitive,402 this immanent and agented energy, and capacity to change, is mobilised by her simultaneous and proximate use of taxidermy (dead) animals, live footage from wildlife enclosures, animal foetuses in specimen jars and photographs taken from trap cameras in Aceh, Sumatra. She does this to bring attention to all things having

400 “Aesthetics of Care” was the title of a symposium at the University of Western Australia, as part of Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth 2002. 401 Karen Barad, interview. In Rick Dolphijn and Iris Van der Tuin “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers: Interview with Karen Barad,” New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. (University of Michigan: Open Humanities Press 2012), 6. 402 Janet Laurence’s art installation Fugitive 2013 was exhibited in Animate/ Inanimate, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, curated by Victoria Lynn, 29 June-6 October 2013.

The Disappearance . 166 equal relevance, and to contribute to a wide ecology of art and nature. As Laurence says, her work is based on a ‘place of healing, hope, breeding and care for our native animals. This ecological crisis demands us to shift our focus to a broader multi-species approach, for how else are we to live ethically and ﬁnd our place in this world.’403

Laurence’s Fugitive is a collection of human/non-human objects and life/ non-life elements or actions. It is part museology, part ecology; it is an alchemical disappearing act, whereby things disappear and re-emerge as a performative act of extinction, memory and creation. By gathering these multiple elements together, it participates in discourses of non-human agency and realities outside a singular human experience by considering the point of view of animals, even in death. Fugitive shines a light on problems of anthropocentric points-of-view, eco-politics, conceptual (and real) capture and systems of archiving nature in art, which will be elaborated in this chapter. An eco-art aesthetics of care, realised in Fugitive, might reject judgement, in favour of a reappearance of life, through art. Laurence says, ‘The genesis for Fugitive 2013 started with my Sherman Art Foundation project After Eden 2012. This was a type of Wunderkammer based on the idea of a natural history museum in our time of ecological crisis, paying particular attention to the plight of animals and their loss of habitat.’404

SOUNDS OF SILENCE Nowhere else is there such a cacophony of rowdiness as in the bush. Many people relish the idea of getting away from the noise and pollution of the city, and escaping to the peace and quiet of isolated nature. However, it’s a noisy racket out there: squawks and shrieks, mewing and bawling, clicking and thrashing. All those sounds, of supposed silence, are an important element of a human experience of nature. What is really meant by a longing for the quiet of the bush (or forest or mountain) is the absence of human-made sound.

This yearning for noisy silence is two-fold. It establishes that human industry and commercialisation are contrived sounds. There is a paradoxical quality to the way it is the humans who seek to escape the human sounds. It also establishes an implicit desire to hear the voices of others, of allowing space for the noises of different species. There

403 Janet Laurence, artist statement. Animate/Inanimate, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, 2013. 404 Ibid.

The Disappearance . 167 Janet Laurence Fugitive, 2013 Courtesy the artist & Tarrawarra Museum

The Disappearance . 168 Janet Laurence Fugitive, 2013 Courtesy the artist & Tarrawarra Museum

The Disappearance . 169 has been recent interest in works of art that incorporate the sounds of animals, insects,405 the wind,406 plants,407 manure,408 birds409 and geo- sounds. This is nature-noise, as art aesthetic. Laurence’s Fugitive is a participant in this growing movement of umvelt sounds: noises from the habitat. She has several video components in her large-scale multiple installation. One is a dingo howling in slowed time. The result is operatic: a lament. Laurence asks: how can we hear voices that are not human, and, what would sound be like when there is nothing and no one left to listen?410 Laurence’s instincts are logical: to ease the pace, to decelerate the progress towards extinction. She intuits the necessity for a future dirge.

These, then, are efforts to record the sounds of (not so quiet) silence, to give a voice to non-human species, some who thrive and others who are now endangered. This, too, falls under the category of an aesthetic of care. Laurence acknowledges the importance of nature’s sounds: ‘Nature itself is musical, composed of material notes. They play their melody augmented and transformed through the melodies of other living and non-living things. Music becomes a model by which nature can be understood by dynamic polyphony.’411

ELUSIVE ALLURE AND ITS DISAPPEARANCE Janet Laurence’s work incorporates environmental sound but is not exclusive to it. The sounds of her wolves howling in slow time forms a critical art voice, a narrative tone that charts a different aesthetic message. Laurence’s message is a caution. Her installation results from a gathering of objects, sourced from nature, public museums and her private collection, then installed alongside transparent imaged glass sheets and perceptual art-documentation from her various ﬁeld trips. Representation has conventionally been associated with a loss of the real. However, this

405 Miya Masaoka, artist web site, accessed December 27, 2013, http://www. miyamasaoka.com. 406 Stephen Vitello, artist statement on John Kaldor web site, accessed December 27, 2013, http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/project-archive/stephen- vitiello-2010. 407 Tom Zahuranec, artist web site, accessed December 27, 2013, http://www. psychobotany.com/projects/Tom%20Zahuranec. 408 Martin Howse, artist statement on “1010,” accessed December 27, 2013, http://1010.co.uk/newinfo. 409 Perdita Phillips, artist, web site, accessed December 27, 2013, http://www. perditaphillips.com/gallery/sound/. 410 Interview with Janet Laurence, Sydney, 27 November 2013. 411 Janet Laurence, Vanishing in the Umvelt.

The Disappearance . 170 chapter is an argument for a remediation of the multiple real (memory and experience, real objects and sensual objects,412 emergent life forces), through the enactment of art. The allure of aesthetic engagement causes a loss, which we grasp (despite a OOO sense of withdrawal, despite a OOO denial of duality) until the grasping for the elusive allure is replaced by the reality of the impulse, the drive to experience. Our grasping is a material event or encounter, a thing like all others.

The allure, ﬂat status and magnetic attraction of everything remain the central foci of aesthetics in this thesis—this is not so much what is worth considering in aesthetics, but how it is performed or enacted. Is aesthetics the attraction, the reception, the trail/trace, the message, the interaction, the assimilation, the stimuli, the experience, the connection, the access to reality, the sensual phenomena or the intellectual cognition? Is it memory, magic or death? Which is it, and how? How do potential extinction, and an accelerated movement towards it, change the way we experience art, as a multitude or aggregate of elements?

In this chapter I explore the concept of disappearance, as a symptom of ecological devastation and as an explanation of the allure of art. In a recent paper, Lacanian academic Sigi Jottkandt drew a fascinating thread regarding ‘lack’ through an unravelling of the representative mode in Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas, through Lacan’s visual mapping of that painting as a ghost story and onwards to her application of the connections with Henry James’ ghost tale ‘The Jolly Corner.’ This complex and sophisticated argument expanded a narrative interpretation, via James’ tale, of how the ﬁgures in Velasquez’s painting might return our gaze, via multiple vanishing points. Perhaps most relevant to a discussion of disappearance as an aesthetic development is Jottkandt’s description of the vanishing act via her reading of Lacan. This is where the objectivity of modern science, as a world-view, paradoxically causes the object to disappear.413

Jottkandt draws attention to the human comprehension of the object as Lacan’s ‘amputated knowledge.’ The object is a lack or, as Jottkandt says, ‘a hole in our understanding of the world.’414 Through art and geometry,

412 Real and sensual objects are discussed in Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics, 169-264. 413 Sigi Jottkandt, “The Cornered Object of Psychoanalysis: Las Meninas, Jacques Lacan and Henry James,” Continental Philosophy Review 46, (2013): 291-309. 414 Ibid, 292.

The Disappearance . 171 Lacan’s task is to make the object appear from its vanished place. Jottkandt speaks of this retrieval of the vanished thing as the something that might be nothing or a lack.415 Fantasy might be the solution for conjuring the thing that has been lost. Fantasy is Lacan’s desiring scene; he speaks of desire as the difference separating need from demand, once need is subtracted from demand.416 So demand minus need equals fantasy’s desiring act. Does this mathematical equation strip the action from the thing? The object will always fail our urge for satisfaction. We could read the scenario as already existing. The art object, our urge for satisfaction and a new conjured something all already were there. We fail to see them at once, but are conﬁned by our limited view, limited by time, limited by life span, limited by visual constraints and limited by our human register.

Of course, within an aesthetic of disappearance or extinction, this failure makes sense. The object of allure fails. The object of desire fails. The object of extant life fails. Lacan hopes to make the object appear. This might be an emergence of a new object from the embers of the failed object. From a lack, from a hole, from a nothing, ‘something’ emerges. For Jottkandt this might be the ghost of the thing. For Lacan, ‘an angel has passed.’417

JANET LAURENCE’S DISAPPEARING ANIMALS Within this discussion of a lack or loss, the old chestnut, things are born and then die, has to be replaced by, things emerge and then disappear, only to emerge in a new form. This is not an occasion where two oppositional vectors collide in a correlational funk (human/world, good/bad, life/non- life). As Deleuze said, ‘Aesthetics suffers from an agonising dualism.’418 Instead, it is an instance of cause and effect, where something must happen, before we become conscious of it. We are most aware of life, once it is taken away.

The ‘disappearing act’ elements of Laurence’s work refer to the mode of things appearing from the heart of any given object, rather than from its legacy or source, its relations or its progenitors. A reappearance of a thing is a disruption in time (and a rejection of chronological time). It is a momentary lapse in consciousness, a sudden and unexpected vision

415 Ibid. 416 Ibid, 300. 417 Jottkandt, The Cornered Object, 307. 418 Gilles Deleuze and Rosalind Krauss (trans.) “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October, Vol. 27 (Winter, 1983): 51.

The Disappearance . 172 of its real qualities.419 Rather than a focus on presence, as posterior to absence, the reappearance is the act of transformation, from non- consciousness to consciousness. This might be more than a recovery of presence as a truth, in Deleuze’s Plato and Simulacrum. Deleuze’s instinct is to differentiate the thing from its image, to remove the essence from the presence.420 However, this chapter is, instead, a focus on the essence of the performative act of reappearing.

In relation to Laurence’s Fugitive, it is important to stress the artist’s act of ﬁlming, photographing, recording, gathering and then bumping-in to the gallery, installing the elements and creating an exhibition experience… as an act of reappearance. This particular kind of reappearance is an experience of a time lapse, where the audience becomes aware there are ramiﬁcations in the past (memory) and the future (imagination) simultaneously. The experience is one where we are conscious of loss and renewal at the same time, in the gallery space.

CHASING THE FUGITIVE Fugitive is not a straightforward science nor is it straightforward museology. It is an artistic interpretation of both. It allows multiple equalised elements to act as one, but it is the yearning for what’s lost, at its heart, that creates the allure. Laurence says, ‘Within the gallery space I want to bring us into contact with the life-world. With a focus on the animals and their loss, I think about the loneliness of the last one of a species. What was their death? I wonder about the umvelt, the unique world in which each species lives.’421 Fugitive works as a re-performance of original being, a conscious and tender iteration of the fragility of primordial life, through a memorialisation of non-life. It is a form of psycho-geophysics in that it explores the effects of the geographical place on the individual and extends those physical properties to spectral ecologies.422 The artist’s use of shadows and veils, which hang around smaller, enclosed sub-areas of the exhibition are a reminder of phenomenological perceptions of phantom or illusory appearances.423 The actors (both human and non-human) generate a spectral trail, which is a deathly reminder of lives once lived.

419 OOO Harman qualities are real and sensual things intersecting within a real thing. Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics, 169-264. 420 Deleuze and Krauss (trans), “Plato and the Simulacrum,” 45-56. 421 Janet Laurence, artist statement. Animate/Inanimate. 422 Deﬁnition of “pyschogeophysics” by artist Martin Howse on the “1010” web site, accessed December 27, 2013, http://1010.co.uk/newinfo. 423 Lingis, Sensations, 32.

The Disappearance . 173 If Laurence’s work addresses the ﬁght or ﬂight problematic of compromised ecologies, a collective grief related to environmental devastation since the genesis of the Anthropocene, and a longing to re-connect with extinct species and past utopias, then she renders us all fugitives. Through her gentle touch, her melancholic arrangement of things, projections of wildlife footage and animal imagery, we are all implicated in the earth’s decline and we all yearn to hide from the horror we have reaped. In this way, she joins Isabelle Stengers in her wish to give the world the power to ‘force’ our thinking.424

ELUDING THE SUBJECTIVE Cooling in the breeze of recent Speculative Realist and Object Oriented Ontology arguments, regarding post-ﬁnitude and the dualist separation of human from the world, thinkers such as sociologist Bruno Latour and quantum physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad are producing a non-Cartesian ontology, whereby the human/world relation is removed from its central position. This is beneﬁcial to a discussion of Laurence’s work because nature/culture divides only serve to distance the two entities from one another and disallow a speculative view of being, from outside the anthropocentric.

If it is a mistake to see humans and the world as exclusive from one another, then it follows that it is a mistake to create distance between humans and non-humans too. Laurence’s multiple elements, such as live documentary footage, sometimes in negative format, and camera trap photographs of nocturnal animals, alongside emblems of past life such as museum-documented birds, create a merging of life and death, a mix of human interaction with the non-human. She says, her ‘swollen, cellular forms which house various groups of objects and specimens including forensic glass lenses, images in transparent layers and ﬁlms from both hidden cameras and from my research in wildlife sanctuaries. These ﬁlm projections are altered and slowed and are juxtaposed with lighting and subsequent shadows. I want to bring us into intimacy with these animals and to reveal our interconnection.’425

Yet, is this interpretation of her work a return to distancing dyads? Is it no more than a reversion to correlationism, which Meillassoux warns us has become the dominant way of thinking since Kant? 426 Well, Laurence

424 Stengers, “Experimenting with Refrains,” 57. 425 Janet Laurence, artist statement. Animate/Inanimate. 426 Meillassoux, After Finitude.

The Disappearance . 174 avoids subjective authority or ﬁnitude, by creating a realm in between life and non-life, in between human and non-human. Whilst blurring the classiﬁcations or species might not, in itself, be helpful to achieve philosophical solutions,427 it is helpful in disrupting our conventions of thought and raising new questions.

A question that comes to mind when thinking about Fugitive is this: if we must try to escape subjective anthropocentrism, how can we approach aesthetics at all? Aesthetics, rising up from the physical world, have tended to rely on perception to deliver normative or critical judgement on a given thing. However, art such as Laurence’s has the capacity to make a deep cut in the impossibility of non-human aesthetics. She does this through a subtle shifting away from the limits of what we know (the agony of finite extinction), and by alluding to that which we can never understand. Her dead birds, skulls and taxidermy owls function as morbid and purgatorial reminders of finitude and beyond. This is not just deathly finitude, but also the finite ability of humans to comprehend the world.

How can we maintain a place for art things, as more special than other things? Is this not what art is—a separation from un-artful things? But perhaps art was never separated from other things, in the ﬁrst place. OOO helps me to see that the artful thing is not set apart from the human but is an expanded abstract concept of experience. The artfulness of the thing loves us, rather than the reverse. It loves our potential for further change. The art ‘thing’ experiences everything else, including the viewer. This is not reversing the agency but allowing the agency to plump outwards and inwards in a spatial way, rather than relying on the temporal chance of wandering past a gallery and seeing an artwork.

SUBJECTIVE CAPTURE On this issue of evading subjectivism, Isabelle Stengers warns against the grand refrain of hailing scientific ‘objectivity’ as though it were a general norm, rather than a variant of subjectivity. She writes of ‘those scientists who struggle against the undue authority of the objectivity argument but would not wish to become hostage of a debunking, ironist view that would demand that they (reflexively) accept that any scientific achievement is only a “human construction.”’428 So, we can deduce that objectivity is compromised by the ‘human culture’ touch,

427 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 123. 428 Stengers, “Experimenting with Refrains,” 47.

The Disappearance . 175 and subjectivity is compromised by a need to consider the non-human view. What do we want? We want a view from outside the dyad. We want Laurence’s creative, perceptual view.

Another phrase Stengers uses is ‘resisting capture.’429 Capture refers to the capitalist hold or thrall of production over the populace.430 To speak of economic capture or capitalist exploitation as sorcery is a clever invention by Stengers, as it suggests the force of production and its associated allure. However, it also positions sorcery (as forces of technology that mimic ancient forms of magic) as a force to be resisted. While Stengers’ usage is as potential capitalist malevolence, there might be another outcome: by placing the sorcerers back in the realm of sorcery, we might be able to resist the ‘capture.’ A resistance to sorcery, of which capture would be a symptom, might mean a spell of protection, a hope for transformation. So, this is not a rejection of the demonic qualities of sorcery, as a power to subvert goodness by urging us to buy, buy, buy. Instead, Stengers is suggesting a re-usage of sorcery, for the purpose of defying capitalist exploitations, that might ultimately capitulate further ecological decline.

We might resist the allure of economic production, but can we resist the seduction of art? In the case of Laurence’s installation, a magical resistance could be a protective caution or warning against the thunderous claps of nature’s exploitation. A version of capitalist exploitation, the misuse of nature since the beginning of the Anthropocene (during industrialist late nineteenth century), marks a proﬁteering at the expense of the environment. This might ﬁt into Stengers’ model of capitalist woes.

Janet Laurence’s work extends the signiﬁcance of the word ‘capture.’ As well as illuminating the exploitation of the environment (and associated capitalist causes, such as razing forests for palm oil and disrupting bio- habitats), capture also refers to the ambiguous role of wildlife sanctuaries, where Laurence takes much of her footage. Further to the irony of keeping endangered species in unnatural natural environments, in order to protect them, there are the equal efforts of artists to ‘capture’ these animals in their work. Capture is a term used by Deleuze and Guattari

429 Stengers and Pignarre, Capitalist Sorcery, 42-43. 430 Jay Murphy, “Reviews: Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spells,” Culture Machine March 2012, accessed November 14, 2013, www.culturemachine. netp1.

The Disappearance . 176 in A Thousand Plateaus and refers to the state as having two poles: the magic-emperor and the jurist-priest-king. Capture has three apparatus, under the Deleuze/Guattari model: rent, proﬁt and taxation.431 I imagine our misuse and appropriation of the land is an example of capture. The violence and loss of species that have resulted from being ‘bad renters’ of the planet is inherent in Janet Laurence’s work.

Unlike the violence of Deleuze/Guattari’s state of capture or Stengers’ sorcery of capture, where capitalism is the threat, Laurence’s artistic capture is transformed into an enactment of retrieval and renewal. Hers is a sincere and tender absorption. She has visited wildlife sanctuaries and threatened habitats in Australia, Aceh, Sumatra, Chapas in Mexico, Kimberley three sites in Tasmania and the Barrier Reef. If Stengers warns against a grand refrain, where science is held up in a lofty and objective position, then art could beneﬁt from the same cautionary warning. In other words, where science expects objectivity to be the norm, art as aesthetic makes a claim for subjectivity as a norm. Both suffer the blows of being painfully and arrogantly anthropocentric. Stengers notes the difﬁculty of disentangling productions of subjectivity and says, ‘If productions of subjectivity cannot be disentangled from their milieu, ecology proposes that we do not think in terms of determination but in terms of entangling speculative questions.’432

This, of course, is Janet Laurence’s raison d’etre: to speculate upon, and question, the world, in a context of post-humanity. This is experienced through her reversed or ‘negative’ photographic footage, her method of re-creating and re-performing as legacy, rather than complaint— memorial rather than dogma. Her use of slowed video sound also works intuitively. Slowness of art experience might decelerate production and therefore might slow the decline of the ecology, the decay of the fragile ecosystems, the loss of the species. By creating margins of life, where species interact and engage in a ﬂat ontology of being, she also counters our habits of happy ignorance. This is Laurence’s strength, her quiet spell. Her incantatory art is a hymn of despair and mourning.

A RUINATION Art, particularly an aesthetic of care, can be a remediation of the ruined. This is part of the reappearance enactment. Ruin is here meant as a

431 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 442. 432 Stengers, “Experimenting with Refrains,” 48.

The Disappearance . 177 reference to the physical decay of nature, the interruption to cycles wrought by the Anthropocene. Ruination also speculates upon abstract failures or defeats, such as the ability to create a new force or energetic creative object, out of the collapsed debris: ‘Human and non-human life also persists in active sites of ruination.’433 Out of hopelessness comes hope. From the impossible emerges the possible. Still, the dogged question remains: how does Laurence create a restoration of life? At what time, at what place and how? What we mourn or what we nostalgically yearn for might not exist. Nevertheless, we long for it, for that lost something.

A cautionary point here is that it is a mistake to use spatial distance to increase a gap between human and world, as that only exacerbates the ﬁnitude or human/world split. Instead, the idea of an increased (but simultaneously eliminated) distance might be useful to see more clearly, like a long-sighted myopic who needs to step back, so that objects shift into focus.

It is only when plants, species and habitats disappear that we notice those things are worth remembering and coveting, even though it is too late. Humans are plagued by their fears of loss, ﬁnitude, death. We are comforted by reminders of lost things, aware that they might persevere, at least in memory. In her shrouded medical tents, within her life-sized, light-cast specimen jars, Laurence places and projects animals and insects, skulls and foetuses, a litany of deathly life, which emerges from our collective memories and appears as things that have new agential force and affect.

Laurence’s studio, in Sydney, is light-washed, diffused by gauzy curtains, and crammed full of beakers, old taxidermy (mostly birds), test tubes, sheets of painted/printed glass, cabinets, plant specimens, perspex boxes with boiling ﬂasks, medicinal apparatus and bowls full of tiny bottles. There are hundreds of glass vials and shelves full of medicine equipment and plant clippings. Parts of older works, such as a hospital for sick plants, still linger in corners or on tables. This is the place where a crossing-over of human/non-human species takes place, added to by her fertile imagination and her action (enactment) of creative spirit. The force of her actions starts in the studio but then takes effect in the gallery space. By active force, I am not just talking about intent or purpose of

433 J. Marie Griggs, “Failed Aesthetics: Life as a Rupturing Narrative,” Evental Aesthetics October (2013): 66.

The Disappearance . 178 art. I am also talking about the agential force unleashed by the thing made, activated by the other entities that become part of the aggregate, such as the white walls of the space, the sounds from the video (and other works in the exhibition) and the visitors wandering here and there.

TOGETHER/APART The past emerges in the future. The idea of things coming together and apart, mentioned by Karen Barad in her essay on ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity,’434 is connected to the way atoms are split but also to the way time plays perceptive tricks on us and to the way we can become easily confused by events occurring at the same time. We are limited by our human inability to see multiple things at once. Just think of Timothy Morton’s hyperobject ‘phasing’ where we are limited by what we can see. This marks an interesting change in a discussion of contemporary aesthetics because Laurence’s art is multi-sensory, immersive and experiential. Our perceptive experience, in that case, must be matched by an appropriate aesthetic response that takes into account these multiple elements.

The reason Karen Barad is so helpful in a discussion of Laurence’s artwork, which deals with human ruination of nature and re- performances that might create a new emergent force, is that she warns against simply inverting humanism, in order to avoid anthropocentrism. She warns against blurring boundaries between human and non-human in an effort to equalise ontology.435 These cautions are also iterated by Donna Haraway’s discussions of leaky distinctions between human, animal and machine. Haraway writes, ‘Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture...the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us.’436

What is it that Barad is speaking of, with these cuts or distinctions? It is the force created from a cutting of things together-apart.437 This is Barad’s intra-action. This is matter, not just as outcome or effective product. but as an agential factor.438 The matter is there in the forceful enactment. The reason Barad’s concept of intra-action is so exciting is because her

434 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 125. 435 Idem, 123. 436 Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (New York, Routledge 2004), 10-11. 437 Idem, 125. 438 Idem, 125.

The Disappearance . 179 quantum physics expertise develops into an exploratory elaboration of this idea into the realm of phenomenology. She sees phenomena as quantumly entangled. These are not individual entities becoming entangled but intra-acting components being inseparable or indivisible. Perhaps the entities don’t come together and become entangled, perhaps they already were entangled primordially.

This pre-existence of the elements or phenomena, which are cut together and apart, is important when thinking of Laurence’s human and non- human relations and her ecologically sensitive approach to art. By using objects that had a previous life, alongside footage of life occurring now, Laurence creates an intra-action of forceful enactment. These concepts are linked by a paradoxical perception, whereby our comprehension of a temporal reality is dependent on spatiality. Peter Sloterdijk addresses the way Heidegger’s spatiality has been given only cursory attention and that it explains Dasein’s embeddedness in the world.439 He uses the phrase ‘making-room’ of space and this is a useful interpretation when thinking about Laurence’s work because of the conﬁned making-rooms she places within the gallery space. All things are in ﬂux, constantly changing states. We rely on Laurence’s creation of space for our temporal reality to be affected.

In referring to science history (including old laboratory glassware such as beakers, petri dishes and ﬂasks) and museology (including bone matter and labelled birds), Laurence adheres to an art methodology of documentary memory and time in-between. Laurence works to create a tension between life and afterlife, being and non-being. Her shrouds or veils become the slender spaces between. She says, ‘These specimens exist somewhere between the living and the dead. They have this incredible presence and yet they are long past. I’m intrigued by the tiny space between life and death, when the concept is inﬁnite.’440

THE DISAPPEARING ACT In his book Becoming Animal, David Abram speaks of allowing perceptive phenomenological experience in nature to facilitate a fully human mode of being.441 He writes of humans as ‘becoming a two-legged animal, entirely a part of the animate world whose life swells within and unfolds

439 Peter Sloterdijk, “Nearness and Da-sein: The Spatiality of Being and Time,” Theory, Culture and Society. 29, 4-5 (2012): 36-42. 440 Laurence, artist statement. Animate/Inanimate. 441 David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage, 2011), 3.

The Disappearance . 180 all around us;’ this, he says, is ‘interbeing.’442 The sincere approach of this writer, whose language reminds me of transcendentalists Walt Whitman or Henry David Thoreau, emerges from a desire to re-connect with nature; he longs for meaningful encounters with other species as a means of becoming more real and to avoid the, ‘habitual tendency to view the sensuous earth as a subordinate space.’443

The reason Abram is mentioned here is threefold. First, Janet Laurence has been affected by his writings. Secondly, Isabelle Stengers mentions him in her ‘Reclaiming Animism’ paper.444 Thirdly, his thesis attests to a desire to be reabsorbed by the natural environment, to disappear into it. So, if things can only appear to us, once they have disappeared, then it follows that a performativity within nature might assist the ability to see.

Performativity is essential to art enactments. If we use the concept of disappearance as a way of reconciling nature’s fragile changes, then Janet Laurence’s response to life and death, by recording, memorialising and re-performing its elements in nature, are a participation in that process of disappearing and reappearing. Her life’s work has been a recreation of ecologies, with taxidermy, mazes for sick specimens, habitats for endangered species such as carnivorous quolls, or marsupial foetuses in specimen jars.

This disappearance marks loss, a memory that must be later recalled. Performance theorist Peggy Phelan, in her book Unmarked writes on the unreproducible nature of performance, and says, ‘The document of a performance then is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.’445 Is art (particularly that which comprises memorialisations of life) no more and no less than a spur to memory? Or more likely, is art writing no more than its reminder? In the case of Laurence’s work, perhaps our linked aim is to reproduce and re- record the habitats she recreates. Laurence documents nature’s loss and this paper is a documentation of her documentation. This series of memorialisations removes us from nature, with each step, but calls forth a new force, a new energy. That new force is the memory, but it is no more than a sleight-of-hand, because the system of nostalgia is ﬂawed and the system of exploitation is unavoidable.

442 Ibid. 443 Idem, 6. 444 Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” 1. 445 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked (London: Routledge 2006), 146.

The Disappearance . 181 How can we be saved from this accusation of recorders, memorialisers and commentators? Laurence is acquitted from any blame, due to her creative ability to coax out the subtleties and the in-between agency of things made. She doesn’t pretend to preserve or save, only to draw attention to the fragility of Dasein, its tragic inability to comprehend and to the heart-braking act of watching the environment decline. As Phelan says, ‘the act of writing towards disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of objectivity itself.’446

PICNOLEPSY Cultural theorist Paul Virilio, who writes about the erasure of the Holocaust and the philosophy of speed (dromology), also writes about picnolepsy, which are moments of panicked lapses in consciousness.447 He questions the illusion of speed, within time, and discusses production of time and technological production of appearance. Virilio’s ideas act as a caution to any slippage into describing ‘the disappearing act’ as a means of conjuring a false image, out of thin air. A discussion of Janet Laurence’s work as a reappearance is not meant as a slippery trick but as an awareness of disrupted and accelerated time and as a consciousness of the selective way we perceive the world.

Virilio’s writings have been described as, ‘the panic aesthetics of real time… Virilio foregrounds speed to extract the metaphoric potential of media technology, blurring materiality into engines of appearance and delirium.’448 Delirium is an apt noun because there is a sense of histrionic urgency to Virilio’s writings. Time speeding up and time slowing down. Edward Scheer mentions Virilio when writing about artist Mike Parr’s work. Parr makes work that could be described as durational aesthetics, where exhibition spaces are inhabited for lengths of time and perforated with moments of violence or shock. Scheer explains that this manipulation of time is achieved through black-outs, such as sleep, loss of consciousness and disappearance of the body.449 This is the disappearance of modes of embodiment, which, of course, are dependent on memory and expectation.

446 Idem, 148. 447 Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (US: Semiotext (E), 2009), 19. 448 Sandy Baldwin, “On Speed and Ecstasy: Paul Virilio’s ‘Aesthetics of Disappearance and the Rhetoric of Media,” Conﬁgurations 10, 1, (2002): 129-48. 449 Edward Scheer, The Inﬁnity Machine: Mike Parr’s Performance Art 1971- 2005 (Melbourne: Schwarz City 2009), 59.

The Disappearance . 182 In relation to Janet Laurence’s work, the systems of embodiment have shifted too. Plants and animal ecologies are broken or slowed down. We become conscious of time through her work’s ability to veil and simultaneously reveal. This is Merleau Ponty’s visible/invisible act.450 Whilst an object-oriented theorist would seek to avoid these limiting dyads or oppositions, it makes sense to side-step these concepts as oppositional arguments and offer them back up as causational effects. For things to be visible, they must first be invisible; for things to make sense, we must first embrace nonsense (or fiction or madness).

HUMAN/ANIMAL INTER-CHANGEABILITY The idea of extinction leads to the paradoxical relations we have with animals. The hierarchy, whereby humanity sits at the apical centre of the life kingdom, has been criticised as dubious. Ethics and morality have shifted towards a ﬂat object-oriented ontology of equality, where all species might exist together. This is not an advocation of removing difference or blurring boundaries. It is merely a reminder that, as our ecologies and environments change at devastating rates, we take pause to wonder at our human-centred hubris, our anthropocentric sense of self- importance.

By incorporating animals into art, thereby redressing the imbalance or inequality between humans and animals, the issue of duty of care becomes part of Laurence’s vision. This is not prescriptive preservation, even though there is an inherent commentary on the idea of care, but, rather, there is an issue of interchangeability. Is it strange that we only see other beings as versions of humanity, through that inescapable anthropocentric lens? Karen Barad talks of the way that we see ourselves, not as part of nature, but in nature. This, she says, is a claim to save ecologies and environments and animal agencies but might it be just another act of demonising and erasing? By seeing ourselves in nature, are we doing no more than anthropomorphising animals and other wildlife? She explains how Heinrich Himmler, Nazi SS ofﬁcer, believed Jews to be lice, an infestation to be exterminated.451 When considering this attitude of erasure, Barad asks. who has the power to erase?

Timothy Morton writes of a way of being that might exist outside the anthropcentric. He strives for more concreteness of being and says nature

450 Maurice Merleau Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 451 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 122.

The Disappearance . 183 gets in the way of proper ecological forms of philosophy, culture and art. When he asserts a need for an ecology without nature, we should read a mode of being, without humans at its core. ‘Art is not so much a space of positive qualities (eros), but of negative ones because it stops us from destroying things, if only for a moment.’452

THE CURTAIN FALLS When a performance is over, the actor disappears, without a trace. This antagonism between the presence (energy, immanence, agency, autonomy, vitality) of the recreated ‘art thing’ and the disappearance of physical animals and material habitats is what creates the artistic tension and attraction. There is a new force or power in the re-enacted or reappearing act of the artwork that addresses lost life. However, if we see ‘life’ as a lively performance of being, does it lessen that life to try to record or reproduce it? Is the artwork a simulcrum or a copy and less important than the original? Or has the artist, acting as mediator, transformed the original entity into a spell-binding new magic act, a sorcerer’s conjuration?

This is a question of the ethics of documentation. If art functions as a documenting camera, how does the new form of art come alive? The arts have become increasingly drawn to performance, and this deepens our understanding of the problems of duration and disappearance. Rather than an ephemeral act, new media technologies such as iPhones and other recording devices relegate a new moving image life span for all forms of art. Janet Laurence uses camera traps for three to six months, during which she buries the cameras and they take photos, based on sensory movement, into the night. In her Umvelt ﬁlms, where certain video scenes are shot in negative format, there is a shift towards the slippery slope of the after life. These images become phantoms, spectral trails and they remind us of new life, even if it is non-life, even if it is after-life or after-ﬁnitude.453

Rather than the performance or reappearance being inferior to the original, it is not difﬁcult to argue that certain re-creations become so palpable they have a stronger relative force. As animals disappear, they can be re-enacted in a way that creates a new kind of vitality or immanence. This marks the trace of the disappearance. So, inherent in work such as Laurence’s is the cause and the effect simultaneously.

452 Morton,The Ecological Thought , 25. 453 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 1-30.

The Disappearance . 184 This Janus-faced view complements an OOO vision, where ancestral or ancient things might provide speculations for the future, as well as referring to life anterior to humanity.454

Perhaps a reappearance is powerful because it is an ongoing act, escaping the death of normal performative, temporal structures. Sometimes we need a recreation, a re-enactment, so we can see the original. Disappearance becomes that re-enactment. These movements in and out of consciousness and in and out of being are ontological but smack of perception, which is a deeply correlational mode of thought. However, Barad’s writings draw attention to the similarities between science and conventional philosophy. We are drawn to things phasing in and out. It might be clear that there is slippage away from the qualities of OOO (no relations, no origins, no authorship, no touching) but aesthetics in an OOO framework might be defended via this OOO acknowledgement that things are hyper-objectively phased and non-local, have allure and exist in a ﬂat ontology. This is because the perception and consciousness of them is incomplete. This property of incompletion creates space for an OOO reading.

For Janet Laurence the colliding force is the wish to hear the voices of other species: plants, birds, insects and animals, past and present. She named her Fugitive installation for several reasons, one of which was the word’s etymology of colours fading.455 If a colour is fugitive it will not last. Rather than being a word to summon an escape or running away, then, Fugitive is an acknowledgement of disappearance. She may slow us down, at least for a short while, so that we can hear the voices of other species, trying to call out a warning.

454 Ibid. 455 Author’s interview with artist Janet Laurence, Sydney, 27 November 2013.

The Disappearance . 185 CHAPTER 8: Machinic Interaction and Robot Love

THE HUMANOID POINT OF VIEW When fears of multi-species extinction rear up, it is compelling to consequently think about non-human and post-human being, as sitting alongside a speculative future without science, without literature and without criticism. Might that mean, consequently, without love? This would be a world without the necessary presence of human cultural constructs. If I have, so far, strained to hear the high-pitched sci-ﬁ squeal, the telepathic voice, the magnetic buzz, and the howl of the warning wolf in this thesis, then how will I be able to discern future robots’ chatter? If human life will no longer be extant, can we re-purpose its attendant qualities for a speculative humanoid future, with or without love?

Neo-medieval literature scholar Eileen Joy writes, ‘a speculative reading practice might pay more attention to the ways in which any given unit of a text has its own propensities and relations that might pull against the system and open it to productive errancy (literally ‘rambling,’ ‘wandering’ - moments of becoming stray).’456 Joy’s concept of errancy, highlighted through a speculative reading, might also chart the wandering moments of new emergent writing, where art writing tends to criss-cross with ﬁctional elements. It would tolerate the stories that the robots tell. When artists create robots, they create narratives, yet these robots defy those tales and instead hypnotise us with their own.

This form of errant art-making, or ‘fictioning’ of a response, is an alternative real. Like Reza Negarestani’s hyperstition, where fiction becomes real, the differential is the difference between the real and the unreal—the factual and the fictive—as a point of distinction but also as a vanishing point or a lack.457 In her discussion of information aesthetics and new media art, theorist Anna Munster writes of the ‘differential’ and that the ‘engagement [between body and computer] indicates that interfaces remain the domain of an irresolvable relationship between material and incorporeal forces.’ The differential, in this sense, is similar

456 Eileen Joy, “Weird Reading,” Speculations IV, (2013): 29. 457 Sigi Jottkandt, “The Cornered Object of Psychoanalysis: Las Meninas, Jacques Lacan and Henry James,” Continental Philosophy Review 46, 2013): 291-309.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 186 to Harman’s allure, where the difference between a thing’s unity and plurality falls away. There is an irresolvable relationship between material and immaterial forces. But what, I wonder, if the differential or alluring differences were resolved by our hybridising of both body and computer? This is not a matter of bringing the human body into a closer absorptive interface with computers and then gasping with glee at the ‘fold’458 or unsettled lack that forever exists between the two. Rather, this is a suggestion that the difference, the gap or the lack does not lie in between the body and the computer, but within the body and within the computer. This might be an apt introduction to the concept of computer agency.

GEMINOID F: A NEW GIRL Step away from the robot. Do not touch her face. Watch out for the robot’s ball feet. Refrain from pinning back her hair. Do not attempt to take off her clothes. And so… Let her swing from the chandelier. Show her some good loving. Give her a cheese sandwich. Brush her hair, for tomorrow doesn’t exist. Robot girls can’t feel the love.

The ﬁrst verse of these messages was scribbled on paper and stuck with sticky-tape to a wall behind the new humanoid robot at a recent UNSW Creative Robotics Lab opening.459 The scrawled iterative directives only made me want to touch the robot’s face. In fact I hadn’t thought to touch her face until I saw the sign. I owned a wide-eyed doll as a child, which had a rubbery latex-like skin, loosely covering a plastic skeleton. I enjoyed tugging the skin out and watching it slowly morph back into position, like touching a Mac screen. I felt sure Geminoid F’s face would feel like that too. I should add, as a disclaimer, that I had no compulsion to undress the robot, but the statement suggested someone, at some stage, had thought about it.

At this new robotics lab at UNSW’s Art & Design, research is being undertaken in collaboration with international scientists and

458 Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Lebanon: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 120. 459 Launched at then COFA, UNSW, September 11, 2013.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 187 psychologists regarding how we interact and perceive robots. The questions asked are not What does the robot feel? but How do we feel about robots? 460 Well, mostly positive, based on the opening night of the lab, where people peered at the young Japanese female robot, Geminoid F,461 smiled at her and spoke kindly, delighted to see her pseudo-ﬂeshy mouth make rhubarb-rhubarb-rhubarb replies.

Geminoid F is more a robotics tool of research than interactive toy. However, this desire to ‘play’ with robots charts a residue of our screen culture to date: the wish for a little robot friend, like Will Robinson’s robot in the 1970s television show Lost in Space. Despite this almost crude, naive desire for a reliable and willing friend, experimental interfaces are the real objective of the UNSW Creative Robotics Lab (CRL) work; it is an environment to test and invent, to assess and evaluate robotics—via artificial skin, interactive wallpapers, etc. Theorist Donna Haraway writes about the human in a post-humanist landscape but this was a post-human in a humanist landscape. She says of cyborgs, ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism… a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind.’462

LIVE LIKE TOMORROW DOESN’T EXIST: ELENA KNOX’S ART In keeping with a political environment of continual reinvention, Geminoid F was given a ‘brand new day.’ This new day, a reprieve from the gruelling experiments, was given to her by new media artist and UNSW’s CRL researcher Elena Knox. In line with our nostalgic desire to ‘play’ with robots, Knox has created several video works, where Geminoid F takes on new characteristics and alternative roles. Her lovely, slightly cocked head is superimposed on Wagyu cows on a grassy paddock, in video work Lamassu Kentaurosu Wagyu 2014, where Gem F’s hair moves in the gentle breeze and, as a cyborg cow, she seems to enjoy the innocence of pre-slaughter life.

As Haraway says of cyborgs: ‘This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science ﬁction and social reality is an optical

460 The Sydney team comprises Mari Velonaki, David Silvera-Tawil, Elena Knox and others. 461 Professor Yoshio Matsumoto (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan). 462 Haraway, Haraway Reader, 7.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 188 Elena Knox, Canny, 2014 video Courtesy of the artist

Elena Knox, Pathetic Fallacy, 2014 video Courtesy of the artist

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 189 illusion.’463 Knox’s Gem F cow, as a social reality, is a commentary on the enormous environmental cost of raising cattle for beef, no matter how mouth-wateringly delicious it might be. Is her hybridisation a solution, post-catastrophe and post-apocalypse or another political, cautionary warning to stop breeding cattle for food before we are all cyborgised? Perhaps both, in a speculative sense of being a pre- and post-extinction issue. Will we eat this mutant animal or, based on its strange knees upon which are morphed cow noses and tongues, will it eat itself? Knox does not settle for obvious suppositions but yanks away paradox after paradox, until we are reeling. Those knees look hungry! Will this be the ﬁnal catastrophe: a mass species exodus by autophagy?

Knox has created another video work, Pathetic Fallacy 2014, using Gem F in her starring role as robot daughter to an elderly woman. Gem F’s provenance is clearly speculative and non-human; yet, I see the familial connections as part of the artist-created interior space (within the CRL). Within a very tight time frame, Knox transformed the lab, with heavy curtains, a mirrored dressing table and warm light. The grey-haired woman stands behind Gem F as she sits at a dressing table mirror, having her hair brushed. As they enact this domestic mother-daughter scene of affective behaviour, Gem F talks to the wiser woman, and reassures her she will never grow old. The older woman, in turn, warns Gem F that all young people believe they are invincible but that she is sure to grow old too, like everyone else. The paradoxical anthropomorphosis of a non-human robot marks a social reality ‘error’ or a ‘glitch.’ For Knox, the human/non-human character interaction is ‘a more futuristic mentor/ mentoree relation or what a family might become.’464

This scene subverts human perceptions of both robotic life spans and humanoids as being more human than human. There is a suggestion of insanity in this narrative work, too: a future gone mad, a future where nostalgic relationships become discomposed. Whom do we trust? The woman who believes the robot to be human? Or the robot that participates in the make-believe? Here, the concept of robot as enemy, as fearful article of artiﬁcial intelligence, as mad threat to humankind, as robotic replacement of human, is switched. Donna Haraway asks, ‘Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the

463 Haraway,Haraway Reader, 8. 464 Elena Knox, email conversation between author and artist, 16 July 2014.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 190 Enemy.’465 Name the enemy? Is Gem F or the old human woman the more dangerous?

Knox’s attention to the means by which robots are gender-encoded is evident in Canny (2013), in which the gloriﬁed mental arithmetic ‘freak show hostess’ sits in the corridor of a Google data centre, reciting mathematical calculations, peppered with pornography. For this work, Knox internet-searched for material on game show hostesses. Speciﬁcally, she trawled for calculations performed by Carol Vorderman and Rachel Riley on Britain’s Countdown and by Lily Serna on Australian show Numbers and Letters. Dressed in fascinator and emblematic red dress (the whore), Actroid (a transformed Gem F) vocalises the results (some sleazy and sexist), verbatim, from the web. The phrases form part of a complex formula.

The idea of a woman doing mathematics (that is, having the intellectual capacity to do so) is an anomaly, and therefore, is fodder for a freak show. Knox’s politics are not limited to a redressing of gender stereotypes, for, in Radical Hospitality 2014, Gem F dons a pillbox hat and uniform and is seated in an empty entry hall (again, Knox makes use of the brief three days at the CRL to complete this impressive array of new video work). This radical form of (nation-wide) hospitality makes use of Knox’s own recorded voice, which is more humanistic and less roboticised than the Gem F computer. Perhaps, but we are struck/lured/hypnotised by her repeated statement: ‘welcome.’ A sinister national anthem plays in the background, as Gem F opens her arm out in a beneﬁcent gesture. With all the empty space contrarily behind her, she interrupts her repetition of ‘welcome’ only to chime ‘I’m sorry, we’re full.’ This is in succinct recognition of the politico-moral disparity in immigration processes.

The perceived malevolence of robots is only ever an equivalent mnemonic device for human malignance. Anna Munster says, ‘Computers join the human taxonomy, only in the form of a less socially evolved class of life, as distributed delegates.’466 New robotic artworks, such as Elena Knox’s repurposing of the Geminoid F humanoid, are less an evocation of humanistic advocacy or delegation and more an ironic, paradoxical and humorous speculation on the status of robots (and their human counterparts as secondary citizens) in a contemporary ontology. In addition, worse than giving robots human characteristics is

465 Haraway,The Haraway Reader, 8. 466 Munster, Materializing New Media, 125.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 191 not recognising the co-evolutionary properties of this roboticised culture. The humanoid robot, in this instance Actroid, becomes slave to Knox’s scripts. For me, rather than being a malevolent threat, these humanoids suggest an ontology that exists beyond criticism.

I see an implication that robots and humanoids are blameless ingénues, and therefore beyond criticism. They have agency, but have no greater status than any other thing. This complements an evocation of theory that absolves individuals as independents, and instead implicates everything. The demarcations have collapsed. By mentioning this, I am drawing the argument back to the basic tenet of this thesis: the ﬂat ontology of things of equal status. Here, in the realm of the post- apocalyptic humanoid, we can clearly see a role for the characters that roam within a single register of aesthetic importance.

It is also worth noting, though, the critical voice of Elena Knox in each robotic video work. She recreates dialogue, she programs dialogue in six different languages and she records her own voice, becoming one with Gem F. Knox uses Gem F as ‘machine functioning as translator.’ This is the Babelistic babble of the globalised world, where borders are breached, gender becomes a political vexation for both the human and the non- human alike and robotic reenactments highlight the perversities and hypnotic inﬂuences of competing hyper-capitalistic sovereignties.

ACCOMPLICE, A ROBOTIC-CONSPIRATOR Within this discourse of beings without origin, without context, without history and beyond critique, some cheeky little robots are mercilessly hammering away. Artist Petra Gemeinboeck (and collaborator Rob Saunders) devise qualities, strategise properties and program the performative actions of their small robots, which have the proportions of a remote-controlled toy car. Replete with lights and hammers, the robots are secreted behind false walls, where they move along tracks and slowly bang holes into the gallery space, unseen by spectators… at ﬁrst.467 As the devastation of plasterboard ensues, the robots respond to each other and their collective activity: this is intra-action, where an object’s force emerges, where agency is an enactment,468 and where object and subject

467 Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Accomplice 2 May–16 June 2013, Artspace, Sydney. 468 Rick Dolphijn and Van Der Tuin. “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers: interview with Karen Barad,” New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (2013): 4.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 192 Petra Gemeinboeck/Rob Saunders Accomplice 2013 Courtesy the artists and Artspace, Sydney.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 193 are cut together/apart.469 In other words, the robots are materially and atomically alive.

Gemeinboeck and Saunders build unstable environments for their robots.470 These are systems where machine agents perform as embodied inhabitants.471 Although the robots are programmed, theirs is not a prescriptive control. Data is entered, then the robots respond to one another’s proximity and devastation, and become more visible to the audience over time. From the immaterial, virtual realm of robotic programming comes a new materiality, which is unstable, unpredictable and on the verge of becoming other. This is a collaboration, not just between Gemeinboeck and Saunders, but between the programmers and their little robots… and includes the new forces that might unexpectedly be created. Sites of intra-species crossings might be places or spaces where a new reality and a new ﬁguration of enchantment occur.472 This re- enchantment might be the way visitors respond to the robots, and how the robots actions are then changed.

THE LOST ONES Despite their effective hammering on the walls, the ontological being of these robots is under threat in a human-centred world environment. Firstly, they are threatened by the human habit of reducing them to anthropomorphic characteristics: we see them as cute little versions of us, for us. Secondly, they are threatened by our perception that they are under the control of the programmers. Both points are arguable: these robots are undoubtedly non-human, and there are unexpected and unplanned outcomes once they are activated.

As I’ve said, Gemeinboeck’s robotic creatures, with their apparent work/ play and civil disobedience, appeared to exhibit human traits. However, an OOO approach would discourage these anthropomorphic tendencies: by seeing human qualities in inanimate objects, we are only falling back into correlational habits, where nature and culture are separate dyads and can never comprehend each other, and where humankind is mistakenly

469 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 125. 470 Gemeinboeck and Saunders are collaborative robotic artists, based in Sydney. Gemeinboeck lectures at Art & Design, UNSW and Saunders at the University of Sydney. 471 Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, “Other Ways of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete,” Fibreculture Journal 18, (2011): 2. 472 Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, 161.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 194 privileged over all other entities.473 This only serves to inhibit any access to a reality of being. This kind of objectivity, where we see ourselves as nature, does no more than hold up a mirror to our inescapably human selves.474

In an object-oriented approach, the unpredictable outcomes of the robots’ performance are brought to attention. Ian Bogost writes, ‘computers are plastic and metal corpses with voo doo powers’475. This is a non-life description, hovering in the liminal space between being and not being. Bogost’s view is that a strange world stirs within machinic devices.476 He says, ‘I have wondered what goes on in that secret universe, just as I have wondered at the disappearing worlds of the African elephant or Acropora coral. What’s it like to be a computer, or a microprocessor, or a ribbon cable?’477 This strange world occurring within machines might explain the agency of all things but also adds to a discussion of the gap or fold occurring within machines (or robots), rather than between them and humans.

I would ask, in that case: what’s it like to be a robot? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere between what it does and how we see it. It is difﬁcult not to think of Heidegger’s tool analysis theory when writing of Gemeinboeck/Saunders’s work because he uses the hammer as his paradigmatic tool. In his analysis, things are only present-at-hand (consciously perceived without utility) once they break. However, Accomplice straddles Heidegger’s dual present-at-hand and ready-at- hand (the utility of the thing) because art raises the possibility that we might experience these divergent qualities of the robotic entities, simultaneously. The augmented robot, existing in its performative exhibition ecology, is the bridge between sentient life and utility.

ROBOTIC AGENCY With regard to the agency of robots, Bogost refers to the ‘Tableau Machine’, which was a nonhuman actor system created by researchers at Georgia Tech in 1998.478 It was a house ﬁtted with cameras, screens, interfaces and sensors. This was an experimental investigation into computational and ambient intelligence. The researchers’ term for the computational agency was ‘alien presence.’ The data-collator sensed and

473 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5. 474 Dolphijn and Van Der Tuin, “Matter feels, converses,” 3. 475 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 9. 476 Idem. 477 Idem. 478 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 106.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 195 interpreted the house and its occupants, and re-created the recorded data as abstract art, by projecting images on its own plasma screens. The implication was that the home was alive, vital and autonomously active.

We can see this kind of vital presence in the Accomplice robots. Their agency becomes materialised, as they violate the polite gallery-viewing world. Karen Barad’s concept of agency works within a relational ontology. Agency resists being granted, but rather is an enactment and creates new possibilities.479 Agency is entangled amongst ‘intra- acting human and non-human practices.’480 In Toward an Enchanted Materialism, Jane Bennett describes primordia (atoms) as ‘not animate with divine spirit, and yet they are quite animated - this matter is not dead at all.’481 This, then, is an agency and spiritedness that is not spiritual, nor is there any divine purpose. It is a matter of material force, a subversive action performed by robotic entities, not for any greater good, in fact, for no reason at all. This unpredictability is OOO contingency, whereby physical laws remain indifferent to whether an event occurs or not.482

THE POST-HUMAN OOO advocate Bogost endorses attempts to collapse the hierarchical model of being and to convert conventional academic writing.483 His views complement an escape from the limiting object/subject dyads and of only comprehending things through a human lens. He says, ‘for the computers to operate at all for us ﬁrst requires a wealth of interactions to take place for itself. As operators or engineers, we may be able to describe how such objects and assemblages work. But what do they experience?’484 This view is complementary to an OOO view of anti-subjectivity and an awareness of things that might exist irrespective of human life, from both inside and outside the mind.485

In addition to her views on human/non-human agency, Karen Barad also develops a parallel argument for materiality. She says, ‘matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.’ Barad’s agential realism is predicated on an awareness of the immanence of matter, with

479 Dolphijn and Van Der Tuin. “Matter feels, converses,” 4. 480 Idem, 6. 481 Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, 81. 482 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 39. 483 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 89. 484 Idem,10. 485 Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics,143.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 196 materiality that subverts conventions of transcendence. She says, ‘On my agential realist account, all bodies, not merely human bodies, come to matter through the world’s performativity - its iterative intra-activity.’486 Barad sees matter—all matter—as entangled parts of phenomena that extend across time and space.487

Accomplice artists speak about their work: ‘transductions, transmaterial flows and transversal relations are at play… whether emerging from or propelling the interplay between internal dynamics and external forces, the enactment of agencies (human and non-human) or the performative relationship unfolding over time.’488 When new energetic force is created and the artwork takes on new life, the audience’s imaginative thought is stimulated. This might cause an effect of trans-fictional flow.

For instance, whilst in the exhibition gallery space, witnessing Accomplice, I decided to write a note to one of the robots. I could see it, just visible beyond the violently hammered hole in the wall. Broken plaster dusted my shoes and as I peered into the darker outside space, I saw it whizz past on its way to bang another hole, in harmony with its other robotic friends. So I scribbled a note on a plain white piece of paper, folded it neatly and poked it through the hole:

Dear robot, do you get sick of augmenting human lives? Do you get on well with your robotic friends? Yours sincerely, Prue.

I waited a few minutes and then my very same piece of paper was thrust back through the hole. It was not folded but was crumpled up. I opened it and noticed a smudged mark in the corner. It looked like an ancient symbol, a strange elliptical script of rounded shapes, but was too small to read. An intergalactic message, a signal from an alien presence perhaps? So I borrowed a magnifying glass from the Artspace gallery attendant. It read:

I love opera. Robot Two must die.

This was unexpected! As I pondered the robot’s reply, I noticed the robots did indeed make strange bird-like noises to one another; their tapping was like rhythmic woodpeckers. Their hammering was a kind of operatic symphony; it was not far-fetched that these robots were

486 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 125. 487 Ibid. 488 Gemeinboeck and Saunders, “Other Ways of Knowing,” 3.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 197 appreciative of the sound patterns they made. They clearly had agency beyond the immaterial computational programming their creators had embedded. It wasn’t difﬁcult to suspend disbelief to allow the possibility that interaction between the robots might occur, or that one might have gone rogue, if engaged by a separate entity, such as me.

An acceptance of the possibility of inter-agency would allow the fantastical reality of becoming short-term pen-pals with an augmented machine. Karen Barad might endorse such an intra-action act. She discourages critique as ‘a tool that keeps getting used out of habit.’489 Art writing, in an OOO environment, is speculative invention, imaginative materiality and suspended disbelief.490

CO-EVOLUTION Artists Gemeinboeck and Saunders are also scholarly researchers investigating new notions of co-evolution. If we ascribe human characteristics to robots, might they ascribe machinic properties to us? It is possible to argue that co-evolution is already apparent in the world. Titanium knees, artiﬁcial arteries, plastic hips, pacemakers, metallic vertebrae pins: human medicine is a step ahead. Gemeinboeck and Saunders, in turn, make a claim for the evolving desires of their robots.491 Oh, to become one. Barad asks us not to presume what the distinctions are between human and non-human and not to make post-humanist blurrings, but to understand the materialising effects of the boundaries between humans and nonhumans.492 As co-evolution occurs, new distinctions are made.

Ian Bogost begins his Alien Phenomenology by analysing Alan Turing’s essay, Computing Machinery and Intelligence and deduces that it is an approach inextricably linked to human understanding.493 Bogost seeks to avoid distinctions between things or a slippage into an over- determination of systems operations and, instead, he adopts an OOO view, in which all things are treated equally, even cheeky little robots.494 This draws the argument back to Anna Munster’s discussion of differentials as the gap where the interface between human and computer hovers and as a fold that is unresolvable. As both human and non-

489 Dolphijn and Van Der Tuin, “Matter feels, converses,” 1. 490 Idem, 2. 491 Gemeinboeck and Saunders, “Other Ways of Knowing,” 11. 492 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 123. 493 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 14. 494 Idem, 17.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 198 human become co-evolved, hybridised and co-existent, the irresolvable gap (which has similarities to Harman’s allure, described in chapter one, becomes less problematic. The question remains, though, as to whether new allure might be created, as irresolvable as ever. I prefer Bogost’s approach, in which over-determination is to be avoided. This does not mean that distinctions and differences are to be blurred, as Barad warns. Instead, perhaps, the taxonomy needs to be expanded to allow for more categories on the lengthening list of life/non-life beings.

Computers, robots, humanoids and re-purposed humanoid artworks are here. If virtuality—an aesthetic of being that grew from technology, information and digital advancements—meant that the body was left or abandoned for an immaterial space, then robots and robotic artwork are a means of re-inhabiting the body in a re-materialised mode.495 This new body, electronic and robotic in nature, might be mastered by a human hand (computer programming) but its new agency is one shared between human and non-human. Barad has warned against a basic inversion of humanism.496 Co-evolution should not be the removal of the human, only to place the non-human robot in its apical place on the hierarchical summit.

THE FINAL STORY Artists Gemeinboeck and Saunders say the space where their robots perform is a questionable one: ‘the ﬁdelity of the space as a shared experience is thus brought into question: how can a shared virtual experience be trusted when it is constructed from such intangible and malleable stuff as streams of binary digits.’497 The answer might be that it is not to be trusted, particularly in an OOO aesthetic approach that allows divergent and contingent ﬁctive possibilities.

Indeed, thinking about the ﬁdelity of the space, I noticed there was something about the narrow access point in the Accomplice exhibition space, between the false gallery wall and the cavity where the robots moved on their track. It beckoned me. I glanced over my shoulder to check that the Artspace attendant wasn’t watching and slipped behind the wall. I took a few tentative steps, not wanting to get knocked on the nose by a zooming robot. I saw that one robot had turned away from the wall and was attacking another with its hammer. By the time I arrived,

495 Munster, Materializing New Media, 86. 496 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 126. 497 Gemeinboeck and Saunders, “Other Ways of Knowing,” 7.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 199 the second robot (could it be Robot Two?) had been badly pummelled. Not only did Robot One attack Robot Two but I witnessed it using its extended hammer to absorb metal parts: the light and the hammer. It was adapting, like Philip K. Dick’s robots in his short story ‘Preserving Machine.’498 It was becoming more augmented. It now had two lights and two hammers and seemed to move at double speed.

My observance of this scene might be explained by Gemeinboeck and Saunders’ comment regarding Philip K Dick-style interference and instability, which they apply to their own work. They say, ‘The ‘gremlins’ of our works are the slipping logics of nonlinear systems or distributed agential forces of colliding materials.’499 An audience response is a colliding material. A fictional aside is a colliding material. A suspension of disbelief must also be considered a colliding material. This is the politics of the para-human, where regulations and policies are in their infancy. Fears of artificial intelligence seem absurd, when we consider how startled we become when the boundaries between fiction/truth are made as flimsy and slippery as the boundaries between human/ non-human. After all, reality, especially a co-evolutionary and inter- agented one, is inescapably indeterminable. Art writing that resists truth complements Gemeinboeck and Saunders’ point that, ‘different agential forces not only co-evolve but perform together.’500

Donna Haraway celebrates the cyber female as a worthy reality in her writing.501 But what happens when the cyber female goes feral, like Philip K Dick’s naughty cannibalistic music robots in Preserving Machine?502 The ‘what if’… is the question all ﬁction writers (even the feral ones amongst us) ask and is the mandatory speculative beginning, the stare- out-the-window necessity of creative writing, with humanoids by our side, rather than in opposition to them. The next step, no doubt, is trans-species, co-evolution, a hybridisation of huamns with other beings in order to ﬁnd succour and solace, in order to evolve in a more sophisticated way than we have before. It is the only alternative to a future apocalypse, in an era of critical climate change. Where will art and aesthetics be, in this future vision? Where will the speculative art writer be? She will be in the lab, the new domain of the art-witch.

498 Nathan Gray, “L’object sonore undead,” in Barikin and Hughes, Making Worlds,, 228-233. 499 Idem, 18. 500 Gemeinboeck and Saunders, “Other Ways of Knowing,” 18. 501 Haraway,Haraway Reader, 502 Barikin and Hughes, Making Worlds, 228.

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 200 CONCLUSION

In this thesis, I have addressed two questions: How can OOO inform a discussion of art? How can I write in a way that matches those concepts and might generate a mode of speculative art writing?

I began this project with the feeling that contemporary art discourse and concomitant forms of experimental art writing might well beneﬁt from such a contribution to this ﬁeld of research, so I have worked with these basic aims throughout:

1. To discuss contemporary art within the framework of speculative aesthetic theory. 2. To deploy concepts from Object-Oriented Ontology as a means of theorizing art. 3. To formulate, and experiment with, ﬁctive elements in a speculative art writing mode. 4. To infuse these above efforts with multi-species, post-human, eco- conscious themes to widen and ecologise the world of art writing. Increasingly, these para-human themes are starting to have spin-off effects in curating and art writing.

I did this through an application of OOO themes to contemporary video and performance art. I chose work that elaborated aesthetic themes of telepathy, magnetism, sorcery/magic, eco-demise and cross-species robotics. But did I mention how amazing the Curator of Curious Objects Professor Clarice Eckhardt’s shoes were? First, I mentioned the pink and green brogue Mary Janes with side buckle and high heel. Then there was the pointy-toed, grey suede pair with modest two-inch stiletto heel. She also had a pair of pale, sandy-hued boots with square toe, ﬁrm around the ankle and rising to mid-calf. These boots were her all-time favourites, which inspired her oft-said phrase: boots maketh the woman. But it was the Mary Jane brogues in pink and green that constituted hyperstition. So in love with them was I (as creator of them), that I asked fellow research mates to watch out for a live-world pair for me. This was ﬁction becoming real: hyperstition.

Hyperstition, schizofiction, theory-fiction, fictioning. These have been my theoretical/creative experiments. Risky, perhaps, but four voices (academic, anecdotal, fictive, reflexive) are better than one. The scales were tipped in favour of the academic voice towards the beginning. Consequently, as the chapters developed, the memoir/anecdotal and

Machinic Interaction and Robot Love . 201 ﬁctive voices became more prevalent. This was dictated less by me than by the necessities of a PhD genre form, which begins with review material. As the voices shifted, so, too, did the power of the artworks I began to discuss. Was it they whose agency afforded a more ﬁctive voice? Visits to artists’ studios are such strange experiences because the stakes are high and vulnerability levels are even higher. The artist is desperate to control the tone, the mode and the descriptive experience of his or her creative domain. The writer is desperate to do the artist justice—to do his or her work service. Not as a slave but as a collegiate equal. Respectful but engendering writing that has its own agency. The writing must break free and offer multiple possibilities. For me, that freedom was offered as a speculative mode of art writing, allowing excursions away from referenced reality.

In the first three chapters, I argued for an application of OOO concepts (allure, flat ontology and hyperobjects) to contemporary art, despite the theory’s limitations as an aesthetic tool. It was only through an investigative method of discussing art in this OOO context that I have concluded that there are major conceptual problems for a deeper understanding of art aesthetics. Probably Timothy Morton’s notions of causality and hyperobjects are most useful to take forward in my future research and writing. The flat ontology, however attractive it is as an equalising or democratising gesture, as a means of toppling hierarchies of authority, created new problems, such as the inability to praise or privilege one thing over others in a single register. This becomes deeply difficult for a mode of aesthetic thinking.

Allure, too, has its inherent troubles. I investigated allure as a telepathic attraction and a magnetic attraction, as a means of explaining the desire we have towards artworks. This was an effective process; however, OOO theory posits that things can never touch, can never have direct relations. This is too vast an obstacle to generate into future discourses, despite being a helpful model within this thesis.

Was I able to solve the dilemma of a potential collapse of contemporary aesthetics (caused by a shift away from human-centredness in a discipline that is dependent on the human)? Did reclaiming objects really unravel the constraints of human/world dyads and will speculation truly be able to avoid a return to quasi-religious awe? All I can say is that I have attended to the conundrums of these aesthetic issues and have highlighted their relevance as metaphysical revivalist theory for the twenty ﬁrst century, with, I believe, ongoing ramiﬁcations for

Conclusion . 202 environmental humanities, such as bio-art, which addresses such issues as plant intelligence and slime mould sentience).503

In summary, my first chapter engaged OOO concepts as an art theoretical tool and introduced the fledgling idea of fictional interactions with art works. This was an effort to create an ecosphere of art writing, where any form is welcomed, so long as it sits on a level field of flat ontology, without prejudice or bias. My running chapter was an elucidation of the need for philosophical movement and a review of the kinds of experimental art writing forms that have been undertaken so far. This summation revealed there is more room for experimental cross- disciplinary writing, which engages with both theory and fiction.

The ‘theory-fiction as hyperobject’ chapter was a discussion of fictioning as an art writing concept and a reader’s guiding principle. This marked the exciting start of a performative enactment of the concepts that had been introduced. It also incorporated a review of the field of sci-fi, as art theme and as writing theme. Telepathy proved the argumentative point that art is a series of transmissions. Interactions of voices and information systems are regularly broadcast, if we care to tune in. Telepathy is an esoteric approach to the sensual process of engaging with art. It makes theoretical sense to incorporate such themes, in the context of a discussion of the limits of human capacity to comprehend the world, other than through a human lens.

Likewise, magnetism and magic were an evocation of this para-human discourse. Through the hum and reverberation of magnetic energy ﬁelds, we can better understand the materialist position whereby humans are not the central focus or coordinate. All things are. Magic allows for a counter-spell in our human-constructed worlds of mega-capitalist extravagances. The allure or capture of economics and our voracious appetite for experiences that compromise resources is a means of drawing attention to our dire earth circumstances, via art.

The disappearing trick of Janet Laurence’s work gives breathing space to the increasingly para-human stance of this thesis. Here I came to fully understand the central issue of my research. This is that, once we have removed the human from its apical position and comprehend all things as existing in a ﬂat ontology, we can see that decay, despair and

503 Michael Marder, “For a Phytocentrism to come,” Environmental Philosophy (2014): 2.

Conclusion . 203 possible extinctions remain. This realisation led me to my final chapter on robots, as a key feature of a post-human future. This final chapter was also intended as a humorous foil for the troubles ahead, in terms of its fictional interventions and its focus on machinic agency and created/ intelligent autonomy.

Therefore, I have begun a discussion of contemporary art and art exhibitions and art writing, within an OOO framework, that addresses being and future being. Hopefully others will continue to build on this discourse. I started this thesis with the wager that ‘the sustained practice of an object-oriented art writing is the necessary basis for what some are calling Speculative Aesthetics and I hope I have demonstrated that the particular research and writing I have undertaken has shown that imaginative experimentation with the art writing form has its own real force. In starting a new conversation about speculative art writing, as an independent entity, which sits alongside the artwork as a theoretical companion, I have emphasised the importance of research-led innovation in writing. Others might want to debate with me or join me in this project, in the near future. In fact, I have teamed up with a number of other art writers to start a group called ‘The Bureau of Word-Witches,’ 504 dedicated to developing platforms for speculative and immanent art writing.

Alongside this advocacy for a speculative aesthetic and art writing genre is the idea of engaging with fiction or fictional elements as part of that art writing discipline. As suggested in my ‘running’ chapter, the act, action and enactment of the labour of writing mark an effective mode of research and writing, as one. A fictional trajectory was always going to be difficult to incorporate into a PhD genre format. However, I was able to weave effectively the fictional asides into the theoretical discussions, by grabbing onto humour as a pillion passenger. The only way I was able to seamlessly include fiction or fictioning was to establish four narrative voices. There was the academic treatise voice, where theory and content were presented, argued and supported. There was the anecdotal or memoir voice, where experiential travels and tangents into real-life events were enacted. There was the slippage into fictional stories, tales which might be true but probably weren’t (due to temporal impossibilities or more obvious excursion away from non-fiction realities) and required a suspension of disbelief. Finally, there was the gently parodic and deconstructive manner of discussing the fragmentation of ‘work,’ so that

504 First appearance will be at AAANZ conference, Tasmania, December 2014, with a paper on the art writing hack.

Conclusion . 204 the reader was included in the ‘behind-the-scenes’ process of writing in different voices.

I believe the emergence of ﬁction, as a theme in visual art, as a modality within the structure of much contemporary work and as a means of writing in response to visual art, will develop further. More work needs to be done to explore why and how this is happening, in the context of art journal output and the emergent interest in creative or experimental elements of writing within art colleges, such as UNSW Art & Design. The ﬁeld is too young to fully chart its trajectory. Perhaps others will continue this line of inquiry over the coming years.

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