ASSEMBLAGE-BASED INSTALLATION: AFFECTS and INTERPRETATIONS Marian Tubbs

ASSEMBLAGE-BASED INSTALLATION: AFFECTS AND INTERPRETATIONS Marian Tubbs

AN EXEGESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS, IN THE SCHOOL OF ART, COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS, UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, AUGUST 2010

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ABSTRACT This exegesis aims to assess the communicative power of assemblage-based installation art. The body of research underlying this assessment provides tools for understanding experimental assemblage-based installation practices and their affective1 nature. The exegesis tracks discourses between contemporary assemblage- based practices and recent philosophy on aesthetics. It reviews mechanisms used by contemporary artists to engage the spectator that resist existing aesthetic structures and assert new communicative visual forms. Definitions of ‘the contemporary’ are employed to help situate the dialectic of forms. By way of applying some key concepts of philosopher Gilles Deleuze to methods of production, the assessment proposes a symbiotic relationship between Deleuzian philosophy and assemblage-based practices. Deleuze’s ‘affect’, ‘de- stratification’, ‘repetition’ and ‘assemblage’ are the main theories applied to this a posteriori relationship. This exegesis investigates artists’ methods of sign manipulation such as compositions of repetitions, rhythms and durations. The experience of the spectator is investigated from the key positions of three disciplines of thought. How the brain processes information when viewing art is examined by way of readings from commentator Jacques Ranciere, philosopher David Hume and neurologist Vilayanaur Ramachandran. This establishes a speculative foundation for the relationship between the spectator and ‘the sign’. In terms of linguistics and visual forms, a critical analysis is applied to ‘signs’ to analyse the practices of artists who challenge established form and narrative structures. Readings of Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ and Giorgio Agamben’s analogous ‘apparatus’ are used to articulate systems of communication and their compositions of elements. It is put forward that an artist’s assemblage of signs is the dispositif of their practice. This analysis posits that, asserting new and non-linear forms rather than following pre- existing models can be a powerful means for affective and lucid communication. Chapter IV of this exegesis presents a discussion of examples of my work completed as part of the research. This chapter is a more reflective expression of my motivations for creating assemblage-based installation focused on form and meaning.

1 For this exegesis, ‘affect’ will be used in the Deleuzian sense. Affects according to Deleuze, are not simple affections, they are independent from their subjects. Artists create affects and percepts. This is related to creativity to a greater degree than the definition belonging to psychology: ‘Affect is a key part of the process of an organism’s interaction with stimuli’ (Dictionary of Psychology, Washington, APA, 2010), p 26

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors Paula Dawson, Sylvia Ross and Bonita Ely. Their supervision provided invaluable support for the duration of this project. Bonita Ely in particular for her guidance in the conclusion of the project and encouragement of my professional development. I was fortunate to receive the support of an Australian Postgraduate Award and a residency at the College of Fine Arts’ Cite Internationale des Arts studio in Paris to complete this project. I would like to share my heartfelt thanks with Helen Hanford for a treasured friendship and for undertaking the unenviable task of proofreading this exegesis. Above all the loving support of my parents Julie and Tom Tubbs and sister Claire Tubbs.

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Table of Contents ABSTRACT...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER I: ESTABLISHING THE FRAMEWORK: ASSEMBLAGE AND RECENT CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY...... 3 I.1 Coming to terms with the term 'contemporary' ...... 3 I.2 A definition of assemblage in the context of installation art ...... 3 I.3 Culture assembled: the power of installation art...... 6 I.4 Repetition...... 8 I.6 Stratification, or bodies without organs ...... 10 I.5 Case study and summary of Chapter I - the art practice of Bianca Hester...... 12 CHAPTER II: THE BRAIN LOOKING AT ART ...... 15 II.1 The sign and the spectator...... 15 II.2 Second case study: interpreting the assemblage of signs in the practices of Rachel Harrison and Haegue Yang...... 17 II.3 Third case study: The human mind understanding art, theories from Vilayanur Ramachandran and David Hume applied to contemporary practices...... 20 II.4 Defining Deleuzian affect for installation art...... 23 II.5 The political and the affected: fourth case study Jacques Ranciere and Urban Encampment ...... 25 II.6 Poïesis as a summary to chapter II...... 27 CHAPTER III: THE LITERAL AND THE MATERIAL – ARTISTS’ EMPLOYMENT OF LANGUAGE-BASED SIGNS AND THE DISPOSITIF...... 31 III.1 Introduction to Chapter III ...... 31 III.2 Linguistics and language as utilities to analyse contemporary assemblage ...... 31 III.3 Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ and the material of art...... 33 III.4 Being literal to challenge form, the last case studies: Marcel Duchamp, Jason Rhoades, Paul McCarthy and Samuel Beckett...... 35 CHAPTER IV: ASSERTED FORMS AND FIGURATIONS IN TIME 2008-2010……...... 42 ARTIST PLATES……………………………………………………………………………………………...…. 43 IV.1 Lucid communications...... 46 IV.2 Preamble to the work...... 46 IV.3 The work...... 47 CONCLUSION ...... 52 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 53

iv INTRODUCTION This Master of Fine Arts research project aims to develop and record observations about significant if not systemic connections between concepts manifest in recent continental philosophy2 and assemblage-based installation practices. These observations are not concerned with art practices that are ancillary to philosophical concepts or that are, ‘philosofugal’3. Instead this project seeks to generate ideas about connections between recent philosophy and contemporary visual art practice that exist and that are available to come into existence. This research posits that the generation of such ideas is integral to the assemblage and the proliferation of new meaningful artistic forms. The exegesis element of this project is a multifarious study of ‘meaning’ in assemblage based installation art and the viewing experience. It posits that the affective power of assemblage depends on artists’ assertion of signs. The analysis discusses signs by examining the employment of materials, media and methodologies. As is the nature of an exegesis, the written output is brief in length but vast in scope; running parallel, as well as informing and intersecting with the studio practice component of the research project. The philosophical question of finding ‘meaning’ in art comes encumbered with a plethora of problematic bywords and clichés. By exploring this question as part of the project, I have set out to build relationships through writing, between selected readings from history, philosophy and science. I draw from these three different specialisations as they propose to inform us by the means of historical fact, philosophical theory and scientific laws. The exegesis develops case studies throughout by applying specific concepts as methods of both proliferating and understanding contemporary practices. It follows that already postulated definitions of the contemporary are investigated. Due to the particular focus of this research, my analysis of contemporary art is occupied specifically with installation practices that involve the assemblage of signs. Installation art has been defined as:

2 The contemporary use of this term refers to a range of thinkers outside the analytic movement, within a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. 3A term recently coined by Simon Critchley, whereby art is centred around philosophy, orbiting and illustrating philosophical ideas. Simon Crithley, ‘The Infinite Demand of Art’, Art and Research: Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, (Volume 3. No. 2. http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v3n2/critchley.php, Accessed 1/08/2010)

[…] art [that] differs from traditional media (sculpture, painting, photography, video) in that it addresses the viewer directly as a literal presence in the space, installation art presupposes an embodied viewer whose senses of touch, smell and sound are as heightened as their sense of vision.4

Arguably, the spectator is often subject to a greater stimulation of the senses compared to other visual art disciplines. Intersecting theories from Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Ranciere on ‘affect’ and ‘the spectator’ provide informative connections to this understanding about the communicative power of installation art. This research project positions assemblage-based installation within the art historical cannon as a continuation and expansion of conceptual art.5 In Chapters II and III key postulates of the exegesis unfold in discussion and case studies. Due to the project’s contemporary focus, case studies are made of art practices that involve methods of experimental or inventive assertion of signs. Theory of knowledge on the ‘sign' is traced back to semiotics and linguistics observing the significant shifting ushered through by post-modern philosophers. Nonlinear narratives are discussed and evaluated as communicative form. The nonlinear narrative is proposed to be integral to the employment of signs in installation. Chapter IV presents examples of the installations developed during the research project and extrapolates on the intentions behind making the work and reflections on the outcomes.

4 Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A critical history, (London, Tate, 2005), p 6 5 A definition from artist Sol LeWitt who according to artist Robert Smithson coined the term: ‘In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art’, (LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum, ed., Robert Smithson and Phil Lieder, Vol.5. No.10, 1967), pp 79-83

CHAPTER I: ESTABLISHING THE FRAMEWORK: ASSEMBLAGE AND RECENT CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

I.1 Coming to terms with the term ‘contemporary’ This project is a reflective engagement with possibilities for practising and understanding assemblage-based installation today. Necessary oscillations between different notions of ‘contemporary’ occur within the written project and practice. For this reason, I seek to establish a basic connective framework of some key philosophical postulates for the term ‘contemporary’. According to Friedrich Nietzsche ‘the contemporary is that which is untimely’6, that is, it is that which does not appear to belong to its time. To understand this better, it can be said that fashion, compared to the contemporary, suits its time. In contrast to the contemporary, fashion can be anticipated, it works with already established forms, its operations involve mimicry, predictability and cyclicality. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote that the true contemporary artist sheds light on the areas of darkness of their time by giving figuration to the locations of obscurity.7 A statement that shares similar gesture to Nietzsche’s, in so much as the terms ‘obscurity’ and ‘untimely’ are synonymous in this context. French philosopher, Michel Foucault, recorded the inescapability from one’s own time when he stated that his historical investigations of the past were only shadows cast by his theoretical interrogations of the present.8 This observation marks another way the contemporary may manifest itself. An artist may not specify the time in which they live as the subject of their work, they may work in the respective historical epoch without concurrent temporal representation within the artwork. The artist here has the ability to examine another time and place but due to the actual spatio-temporal moment of creation of the artwork, the artist will inadvertently depict issues of the contemporary.

I.2 A definition of assemblage in the context of installation art ‘Assemblage’ is a term often employed in this exegesis, denoting the assemblage of signs (visual, audio, historical, literary and so on). The term is also used by Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Ranciere to different ends, which will be defined in the course of

6 Roland Barthes summarizing Friedrich Nietzsche from ‘Untimely Meditations’ in a note from his lectures at the College de France cited by Giorgio Agamben in What is the Contemporary? (California, Stanford Press, 1994), p 40 7 Giorgio Agamben. What is the Contemporary?, (California, Stanford Press, 1994), p 37 8 Michel Foucault, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, (New York, Pantheon. 1980), pp 194-96

discussion of the writers’ relevant work. ‘Assemblage’ came into popular use in the visual art vernacular with the first emergence of conceptual art. An example of this is found with Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913). Duchamp demonstrated the idea at this early stage of assemblage that putting familiar objects together, a stool and a wheel, to make strange new forms could be a way of reinventing the viewing experience.

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.9

Duchamp’s comment is not only useful for understanding assemblage, but also pertinent to the spectator’s role in interpretation. This role will be extrapolated upon in later chapters of the exegesis.10 In this research many ways that assemblage can be interpreted is examined but it is focussed on primarily as the act and consequence of placing information or signs into locations of new proximity. These proximities in their most general sense have time and space as their constants. For art this may be in an installation space, a gallery or in one, or a series of acts. Assemblages presented for discussion arrange signs into linear or non-linear visual narratives. Every sign is a symbol for an idea. That is why there is a fundamental linkage to language. Contemporary assemblages are contemporaneous multiplicities of signs. Concepts from post-modern philosophers shed light on these multiplicities, foreshadowing and running parallel to artistic practices.11 This study of installation art constructed from signs, propounds that the concepts of ‘heteroglossia’, ‘heterogeneity’ and ‘heterotopias’ all belong to the medium and its ‘potentia’12 for communication. These hetero concepts have been used by different philosophers and have separately been absorbed into the art commentary vernacular. The uses of each will be explicated in the course of the

9 Marcel Duchamp, Session on the Creative Act, (Lecture presented at the Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957) 10 See Chapter II, subsection ‘The sign and the spectator’, p 17 11 From the early 1960s onward post-modern commentary can be seen to explicitly parallel experimental practices. This includes the concepts such as ‘decentring’, ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘rupturing’ that questioned modes of traditional Western thought. Key philosophical figures included Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault. 12 This Aristotlean term is used in this exegesis often instead of the modern English derived ‘potential’ because ‘potentia’ is plural signifying a multiplicity of possible outcomes.

following chapters. But briefly, what the terms share in common is that they express multiplicities. They are, therefore, key to defining modes of contemporary practice involved in making complex element and assemblage-based structures. Jacques Ranciere summarises his concept of assemblage:

The employment of elements foreign to one another points to a greater fundamental co-belonging, to a world where elements are caught up in the same essential fabric and therefore always open to assemblage for a fraternity of a new metaphor.13

In this first chapter the foundation of the research project is established, that is the assemblage of signs in installation art. It is investigated how signs in installation are the communicators and have the potential to cause affect. It is made apparent that affect in installation can occur when assembled signs create meaning or narrative potential rather than didactic or linear narratives. Installation uses media to modify the way a space is experienced. It is significant that experience of the artwork defines the work itself. Installation is not concerned with isolated forms for exhibition but the viewer’s complete sensory experience. The art discipline has roots in conceptual art, in which the artist's intent is key to the finished work. This is also the case with installation, but in this discipline it is significant here that time and space are its meaningful constants. This is exemplified where site-specific installation is conceived for one particular environment. Form is also a sign, so the application of form to media is a determinant in the outcome of communicative power. An artist’s consideration and execution of form is where new potentia for communication lies. Ways of applying form and creating affect include the creation of rhythms, development of repetitions and other ways of re-mediating signs. Thomas Hirschhorn’s,14 monuments to philosophers are homages to the oeuvres of thinkers that re-imagine their works in public sculpture. The works constructed in admiration of Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza and Georges Bataille are made with cheap materials that are assembled with a quick and seemingly careless aesthetic that are not designed to last. The artist prioritises the idea and its power to

13 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, (London, The Tower Building, 2000), p 78 14 Thomas Hirschhorn, (born Bern 1957) Swiss artist lives and works in Paris. Hirschhorn was part of the group of communist graphic designers named Grapus after leaving he has gone on to create installations that are often site specific and exist out of gallery contexts.

communicate over the longevity of the sculpture. Hirschhorn’s mode of working is evident upon inspection of the outcomes, he prioritises the energy of the work rather than quality. This approach to materiality shows the artist harbours political interest in his mode of construction; his works are not easily transformed into market commodities. The forms in which his installations are presented propose to make accessible, schools of philosophical thought that can otherwise appear difficult to understand. By making work that is appealing or confronting to audiences, the artist succeeds in communicating something about areas of knowledge not necessarily previously embraced by those coming into contact with his public artworks. This is what makes for affecting art. The artist reinvents a mode of communication for signs of knowledge and presents them in a way that is contemporary, or in other words, new and confronting to the viewer.

I.3 Culture assembled: the power of installation art Russian installation artist, Ilya Kabakov15 says on the power of his medium,

Familiar circumstances and the contrived illusion carry the one who is wandering inside the installation away into his personal corridor of memory and evoke from that memory an approaching wave of associations which until this point had slept peacefully in its depths. The installation has merely bumped, awakened, touched his ‘depths’, this ‘deep memory’, and the recollections rushed up out of these depths, seizing the consciousness of the installation viewer from within.16

In this account immersion is the key to experience. Kabakov’s notion of installation situates the viewer in a dreamlike state, in which one groups together associations that are triggered in immersion to create a narrative. His account of these element-based affecting structures precisely locates the power of installation art. The artworks discussed in this exegesis involve cultural and politically loaded signs. So it follows that in the course of discussion the relationship between art and politics must be investigated. Commentators such as Elizabeth Grosz and Jacques Ranciere have advanced that art, philosophy and politics share parallel journeys.

15 Ilya Kabokov (born Russia 1933) Russian-American installation artist has worked in a wide range of disciplines but know widely for installations that evoke Soviet culture. 16 Ilya Kabokov, On the Total Installation, (Bonn, Cantz, 1995), p 256

Grosz has said that these areas are concerned with similar issues and even reflect on one another, but yet they cannot perform another’s role.17 The affect of art may not go beyond sensation, while philosophy cannot escape its own words and reasoning. In some cases philosophical objectives may share those of politics, yet in reality political practice cannot attain or sustain philosophical ideals.

The real of art is ideal […] impurity conceived through the immanent process of its purification. In other words, the raw material of art is determined by the contingent inception of a form. Art is the secondary formalisation of the advent of a hitherto formless form.18

Alain Badiou’s words show a palpable wrestling between language and philosophy by which, he makes apparent what form is to art. The strong link between philosophy and art is attested in this example. Linked is all they are however, for where poetry departs from logical thought, philosophy cannot fully rebel or be free in the same way. That is, whilst Badiou’s ideas in question are artful, philosophy is dictated by its own voice of reason. Philosophy is the location, in which words for love, art, politics find shape. It follows from Grosz’s proposition about these interdisciplinary relationships that the potential of ‘the power of art’ seem radically reduced. The powers of art are only sensations and affects thus groups of assembled signs under the label of ‘art’ cannot change societies. In reflection of these statements, exceptions spring to mind, such as the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and their cartoons depicting Muhammad that spawned rioting resulting in more than one hundred deaths, and death threats to the authors, as well as the Danish embassies of Syria, Lebanon and Iran being set alight19. The controversy also of Bill Henson’s 2007-2008 exhibition held at Roslyn Oxley gallery in May 2008. The circulation of the invitation to the show that lead to the artist being arrested and the Prime Minister at the time, Kevin

17 Elizabeth Grosz in conversation with Susan Best, (Gleebooks, Sydney, August 12, 2008). 18 Alain Badiou, Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art, (lecture at The Drawing Center, New York, December 4, 2003) 19 Cgh/ap/reuters, ‘Arson and Death Threats as Muhammad Caricature Controversy Escalates’ in Spiegel, (Spiegel Online, 2006, http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,399177,00.html, accessed 02/05/2010)

Rudd, condemning the work as ‘absolutely revolting’20. Ruptures occurred in these cases when parts of society refused the rights of artists to depict their subjects, and instead attempted to enforce censorship and punishment on the authors. These are cases where sections of societies have attempted to claim limitations on what can be represented. The changes temporarily produced here, such as riots and the pulling down of exhibitions show a resistance to change. They signify unshifting boundaries of what is acceptable expression. In these cases ruptures were caused when art met with viewers who refused to accept it. Many other viewing minds experienced these works without reactions that were violent or negative. It is possible that they may not have enjoyed or appreciated the works either. Whatever the spectator’s first opinion is, a person’s mind may change during or after experiencing works of a challenging nature. The spectator may allow new transgressions of their pre-existent boundaries for aesthetic experience. This supposition introduces an important question to the research project at hand: can an assemblage of signs in visual art produce changes in the viewing mind? This question will be addressed in chapter II where the sign and the spectator are examined.

I.4 Repetition In considering assemblage-based installation and the viewing experience, it is important to factor in the stylistic decisions made by an artist in assembling their chosen signs. It is also important to ask whether an artwork is actually a world meaningfully re-mediated or just a pantomime of empty signifiers. This subsection singles out and explores repetition as a stylistic motif. It examines how repetition as a sign, and repetition of signs, work in assemblage. An artist may use one sign repeatedly to create rhythms and give salience to familiar information. Gilles Deleuze has written most prolifically on this subject in regard to art. According to Deleuze there are transitioning modes of communication which are constantly becoming and therefore changing and modifying means of interpretation. Deleuze and Guattari write: Each various plane cuts chaos in a different way, through a different angle, which is why each is unique, irreplaceable and incommensurable with any

20 Josephine Tovey, Les Kennedy and Dylan Welch, ‘Art Obscenity Charges’, Sydney Morning Herald, (http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/henson-finds-support-over- photos/2008/05/23/1211183097197.html?page=2, accessed 30/05/2008)

other, yet why, in some sense, all the planes address similar problems, similar events, and similar forces.21

To trace back to the beginning of Deleuze’s scholarship on repetition in his first book Difference and Repetition22, he observes English philosopher David Hume:

And every repeat is a new experience. There is never a repeat in communication. Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind that contemplates it.23

The first repetition occurs when an artist selects information from the world and replicates it into form, thereby pronouncing it art. The repetition has occurred in the artist’s pronouncement, the spectator recognises the signified information in the artwork and may or may not connect with this as meaningful. The spectator looks at the work again or over a duration of time and these repetitions lead to a difference and change in the viewing mind whilst contemplating the work. I will elaborate on these ideas by way of drawing on Roland Barthes almost analogous theories on photography. For Barthes photographs contain the ‘studium’ and the ‘punctum’, terms that are used to define opposing elements in a photograph. The photograph itself is an assemblage of elements. The studium denotes the familiar systematised cultural, political and linguistic codes within a photograph. The punctum signifies the wounding, personal elements that communicate and form a relationship with the viewer. The studium signifies the already known, that which can be viewed and forgotten. The punctum is the element that calls the viewer into Hume’s relationship of durational repetition. For Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, there is repetition in any relationship. In his multilayered narrative Repetition, from the 19th century, an engaged young man is frightened of the responsibility to repeatedly love his betrothed for the rest of his life, and so instead of marrying her, he chooses to break the

21 Elizabeth Grosz quoting Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Chaos, Territory, Art, (NY, Columbia University Press), p 28 22 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1994) 23 David Hume in Deleuze, 1994a, p 90

engagement to remember their love in alienation. He sees that his love is safer within a memory as it will not change but be under his control always. Kierkegaard again critiques the idealisation of memory in another way, when another of his characters tries to recreate an exact experience of visiting the Berlin Opera. The character is disappointed after failing to take into account all the random elements occurring in everyday life that would hinder a precise recreation. Kierkegaard’s affirmation is that life is a beautiful repetition, essential to an engaged experience in one’s present and future, whereas recollection is bound up in the past.24 Kierkegaard’s philosophical position is that every repetition in life is new. Similarly according to Deleuze, each repetition, however close, is never an exact replication but instead a new and different entity. The replication when situated in a space commands its own presence, as much as it falls into a newly created pattern. Infinity is present in the first repetition as the viewer is confronted with the question, why is there one repetition at all? In a work of art replication signifies the infinite, where there is one reproduction there could also be an infinite number. Further, the infinite is present when the artist first sets out to make a work of art as becomes apparent on examination of the innumerable choices that may be made. This point leads to the discussion of creative difference and the other important coordinates that make up assemblages.

I.6 Stratification, or bodies without organs To examine the production of creative difference I will discuss modes of composition and Deleuze’s concept of ‘bodies without organs’.

The work of art must mark seconds, tenths and hundreds of seconds. Pure relation of speed and slowness between particles imply an enterprise of de- subjectification.25

How does this statement correlate with difference? The familiar concept of ‘the shock of the new’ is relevant because of the term ‘de-subjectification’. Deleuze and Guattari indicate that the artist’s invented execution of the relation/s of timings between the elements in an artwork generates communicative power. To furnish this assertion I

24 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/ Repetition: Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. 6, (Princeton, New Jersey, 1983) 25 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (London, Continuum, 1988), p 276

will examine different approaches to building compositions. Stratification is a classic mode of constructing music and in the wider arts where an organised layering of signs takes place. ‘Strata’, a term mostly used in geology denotes the layering of minerals in a patterned, often repetitive, fashion, (see figure 1). ‘Strata-housing’ refers to houses that share a likeness, that may be designed and built to repeat each other and create a whole. In the arts, this mode harmonic of composition gives rise often to predictability, melodies and rhythms of colour that are comfortable for the senses because they are expected. Friedrich Nietszche criticized Richard Wagner’s compositions for reusing too much harmonic form rather than inventing new forms. In a piece of sheet music taken from Wagner’s ‘Wedding March’ or ‘Treulich geführ’, from the opera Lohengrin, (figure 2) it can be seen that the same notes and rhythms are repeated and returned to rhythmically. If de- stratification takes place along a line of creativity, however, the composition does not pre-empt itself or its own potentia. The ‘becomings’ themselves are that which compose the creative work, and so cannot be anticipated. Deleuze calls this process the ‘body without organs’ the realisation of which may allow for existence within a ‘plane of immanence’. The body functioning without its usual requirements is an unlikely concept. It challenges previously accepted knowledge, and for that it is a transgression. The ‘body without organs’ travels beyond borders that established systems of understanding are willing to accept. Because of this, ‘the body’, or in this case, the artist engaged in their practice may exist within a ‘plane of immanence’, this is typified by a real immersion, an anti-Cartesian transcendence. The plane of immanence is the place in which concepts are created, this for Deleuze and Guattari is the grounds for real philosophy.26 To apply Deleuzian theory to analysis of art in this exegesis, the philosophy should be honestly and historically situated. It must be acknowledged that Deleuze did not appear to like or pay attention to any of the conceptual art of his time.27 It cannot be ignored, however, that much of his oeuvre aligns with conceptual and installation practice. The artists discussed in this exegesis work to dismantle previous conceptions of viewing by finding new ways to assert forms and assemble signs.

26 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York, Columbia University Press, 1994), p 49 27 Elizabeth Grosz in conversation with Susan Best, (49 Upstairs, Gleebooks, Sydney, August 12, 2008)

In Deleuzian terms, they take part in the act of travelling Deleuze’s ‘lines of flight’ in that, during practice their materials change in nature and engage with other multiplicities. A line of flight is a mutation and a creative de-territorialisation. The multiplicities belonging to the territory may be transformed in a line of flight.28 In explaining the creative line of flight I will use ‘assemblage’ in the Deleuzian sense. Deleuze’s assemblage is a territory, including all its defining connections. It is also composed of lines of deterritorialisation that run through it and set it apart from its overall form. A visual explanation for an assemblage could be that it is the composition of both a grid and the lines that run through it. The grid is a useful metaphor used to convey the significance of lines of flight. The composite lines on a grid may run through and connect to points of conflict, that are dangerous or out of control.29 Chance is a part of any practice but it is heightened in experimental practice. In experimental practice the artist does not have a clear end point in mind. The work is not a pre-designed commodity determined for the marketplace. Instead, the artist’s aim is to expand on the axiomatic theoretical and physical structures of art.

I.5 Case study and summary of Chapter I - the art practice of Bianca Hester Australian artist Bianca Hester’s sculptural practice composes many of the elements that have been discussed in the first chapter. Her praxis is one of complex materiality where upon sculpture signifies an intimate proximity with proliferating events. The materiality and use of ‘props’ are key to understanding her modus operandi. An example from a recent exhibition Projectsprojects (2008) can be seen in figure four. Familiar ‘do it yourself’ materials (lamps, boards, buckets, stools, ropes and bricks) that come together energetically here to form the assemblage. The artist also notes the important role repetition plays in the process of making new work:

Repetition is employed to develop processes, objects and constructions. Repetition is a method used to activate a process of proliferation by

28 The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions. (Deleuze, Guattari, 1988), pp 9-10 29 This statement signals the idea’s importance to Deleuze and Guattari’s political theory, that, other than its crossings with the political art discussed cannot be discussed in this project due to limitations of scope.

reabsorbing objects into new processes for generation, differentiation and re- articulation.30

Her explanation of the employment of repetition, sheds light on the modes in which Hester conducts her practice. Her art is the production of work itself, the collaboration and the assemblage. It is seen in figure three, that the production poster is an assemblage document of a collaborative event to construct the installation. In her practice Hester extends and challenges notions of aesthetic and communicative form and conducts a Deleuzian line of flight. An anticipated or resolved form is not available to the artist before she sets out to make her work. The artist’s playing between disciplines elasticises form in her practice as compared with traditional sculptural practices. Hester’s work features a potential energy of an event that relies on a signifying assemblage of signs. This case study elucidates a central proposition of the exegesis; by the selection and assertion of signs artists decide how and what they communicate to the spectator determining the affective power of their work.

30 Bianca Hester, Material Adventures, Spatial Productions: Manoeuvring Sculpture Towards a Proliferating Event, (PhD exegesis, RMIT University, 2007), p 111

Figure 1: Stratification found in granite rock | Figure 2: Richard Wagner | Sheet music from ‘Treulich geführ’ | Lonhengrin |1850

CHAPTER II: THE BRAIN LOOKING AT ART

II.1 The sign and the spectator

There are no facts only interpretations.31

This chapter will examine modes of engagement between the spectator and sign. Definitions of the ‘sign’ will be outlined and substantiated by case studies of theories on assemblage-based installation practices and the viewing experience. The application of theories from differing specialised areas to art practices, forms an evaluation and understanding of their effectiveness. Deleuze’s reading of Spinozian affect is reviewed to gain a greater idea of the spectator experience as it relates to assemblage-based installation. Recent commentary from Jacques Ranciere that contributes significantly to understanding affect in the context of political art is also reviewed. This chapter will thus set out the project’s formative interpretations of affective viewing experiences. The meaning of the word ‘sign’ shifts with the independent definitions for its variety of uses. Most generally a sign is a conduit for a message, it is an entity that indicates another entity. In semiotics, a sign is something that stands for something to someone in some capacity32. I will use the example of mass media communication to extrapolate on the nature of signs further. Roland Barthes stated more than thirty years ago that his world was one of mass communications,33 and certainly it is fair to maintain this is so with revolutions in communication technologies ushered in through the turn of the century. Visual media designed for mass consumption uses signs common to cultural experience, they are loaded with meaning/s for subscribing viewers. It is important to examine the role/s of the spectator to investigate affectivity of signs. Commentator on art and politics, Jacques Ranciere, has said the spectator makes their own poem with the one that is performed in front of them. They participate, empowered to tell their own story alongside the one shown.34 From this

31 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York, Vintage Books, 1968), p 267 32 Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron, Analyzing Cultures, (Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1999), p 366 33 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, Image, Music, Text, (New York, Hill and Wang, 1977), p 38 34Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator, (London, Verso, 2009), p 13

engaged platform they may psychically undo the performance and hence negate the corporeal narrative otherwise conveyed, transforming it into a mere image, aligning it with something they have experienced before. He has written on this notion further in The Emancipated Spectator:

It is the power of associating and dissociating that the emancipation of the spectator consists – that is to say, the emancipation of each of us the spectator. Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity. It is a normal situation. We also learn and teach, act and know, as spectators who all the time link what we see to what we have seen, have said, done and dreamed.35

In the essay Rhetoric of the Image, Barthes argues that the image, and its symbolic meaning is contingent upon language. Language-based signs must provide support for the visual. While Barthes says that the image or the text can come first, without the text, the visual alone is too ambiguous36. Signs are read for locating situation and gaining direction. While reading is something that has been done for thousands of years, conventionally with words, in the current epoch concerned with art, to ‘read’ a painting or an installation is an equally apt use of the verb. In assemblage-based installation, the employment of signs can be read in every sense, boundaries for this exist only with the limitations of an artist’s vernacular. Artists assert ways of communicating through familiar signs, and they may also define their own dictions or dialectics. This is a reason why certain assemblage-based installation can be affecting to some viewers and limp in meaning to others. Richard Prince, an artist who makes conceptual paintings, photographs and sculptures, is an example of an artist who has developed an idiosyncratic diction. Writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud has described Prince’s methods as ‘inventing modes of coding and protocols for using signs.’37 Prince’s first ‘nurse’ painting had particular signs assembled to create meaning for the viewer, but he invented a new dialectic through the continuation of this series. The signs are repeated and change

35 Ibid., p 17 36 Barthes, 1987., p 38 37 Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, (Santa Monica, Ram Publications, 2008), p 32

with each painting creating a discourse unique to the series. This invention of a particular diction is also apparent in the work of contemporary artist Charles Avery, who over his career has built an alternative world through drawing and sculptures belonging to idiosyncratic laws, characters and languages. His work invites the viewer into this alternative world in which they will learn how to use the signs that have been assembled for them.

II.2 Second case study: interpreting the assemblage of signs in the practices of Rachel Harrison and Haegue Yang Rachel Harrison38 and Haegue Yang39 are sculptural and installation artists whose work is based on careful assemblage of elements. Their installations refuse to convey clear metaphoric messages but instead show constant narrative potential. By narrative potential I mean that the signs in their work can share meaningful connections rather than present obvious or didactic metaphors. Their structures contain signs placed in proximity with one another that do not resemble anything specific as a whole. The form and complexity of Yang and Harrison’s work, however, communicates individual artistic diction and ‘poïesis.’40 The artists employ signs in their installations, and with the mechanisms of assemblage heighten or transform their meaning. Harrison’s work is a critique on viewing art as much as it about the signs themselves. She is interested in constructing sculptures that audiences have to walk around to experience. That is, every side of a sculptural piece has different information that adds to the complexity of work as a whole. Her installations contain formal considerations involving a wide range of elements informed by the art history cannon, contemporary news and pop culture. Centerpiece (2009) is an assemblage- based installation made from plaster, foam, plinths holding up a sculptural assemblage of a lobster and a tabloid snapshot of a misbehaving Christmas Santa. Glamour Wig (2005, figure 5) is a ladder on top of which sit a plaster block and a glittery wig. This employment of forms, such as ladders and plinths that belong to galleries for their utility purposes, demonstrates a playfulness with signs. This in turn references other art practices that have included humourous ready-mades such as, Marcel Duchamp

38 Rachel Harrison, (born 1966), American sculptor and installation artist works in New York. 39 Haegue Yang, (born 1971), Korean installation artist works in Paris. 40 See definition of poïesis Chapter II, subsection: ‘The political and the affected: fourth case study Jacques Ranciere and Urban Encampment’, p 28

and Fischli and Weiss41. The artist relies on the loaded meaning in her objects as part of the already existing art cannon and then adds elements signifying events of the contemporary world. The style with which Harrison executes her installation appears casual. Like a skilled tightrope walker, she allows the complexity of the work to look easy. The viewer who does not look closely might see it as a shambolic juxtaposition of objects. Her work can inspire the familiar problematic issues that have been raised since the beginnings of conceptual assemblage. These issues contemporaneously concerning exclusivity of ideas and the lack of skill associated with conceptual art. The notion of exclusivity stems from the involvement of self-reflexivity and ‘in jokes’ in the work. The observance of lack of skill arises because contemporary artists appear to create works without traditional employment of skills, such that any ‘artless’ member of society could achieve these works and affects. Contemporary artists like Harrison make their work conscious of such issues and absorb them into the dialectics of the medium. The titles of her work such as Posh Floored as Ali G Tackles Becks, (2003, figure 6) are also signs themselves that give pathways into understanding comedic aspects of the artist’s oeuvre. Artists such as Harrison remind the viewer of the limitlessness of art, that all topics and elements of the world can be placed into the art cannon. Because of the language and reference-heavy content included in her work, Harrison actually works to negate the aforementioned issue that installation art may be exclusive or just a forum for empty signifiers lost on its viewers. Her installations work on multiple levels so that the viewer can read the many pieces of information and construe them into metaphors or narratives of their own. The other contemporary artist working with the assemblage of signs in installation to be discussed is Haegue Yang. Yang is a Korean born artist who has worked for many years in Germany and is now based in Paris. Themes of Yang’s work come from her personal experience of travel and feelings of displacement. Her work considers the fragile elements and remnants of daily life as she rearranges these in installation to create to new environments.

Yang spells out an entire poetics based on misreadings and the limits of translation. It's not just about the meaning of words; it's about the predicament

41 Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Wiess (born 1946) Swiss collaborative interdisciplinary artists working in Switzerland.

of living between languages.42

Yang makes environments and assemblages involving familiar and forgotten elements belonging to daily life. By doing so she creates spaces of meaning that would not have otherwise existed, and thereby generates form from the formless. This is a mode of creative production engaged in a line of flight as it is realised out of experimentation rather than repeating form. The artist is able to create affect for the viewer by her re-contextualisation of the signs she employs. It is not cultural displacement she deals with as much as a living between spaces. She selects objects that usually collect together to furnish a home, but assembles them in an abstract formation which highlights the emptiness of spaces they occupy. Her work entitled Series of Vulnerable Arrangements – Shadows Voice Over Three (2008, figure 7) brings together pieces that do not alone form a home but invoke in the viewer, sentiments and personal questions of what makes a home. The feelings evoked in me when I experience her work include that of homeliness, but also a sense of magic because of Yang’s poetic abstraction of objects that are usually considered purely functional. Having moved a lot throughout my life, I feel the affective nature of Yang’s work particularly. Within the space I feel nostalgic and at the same time mystified by this invented domestic non-place. The domestic non-space is a type of space that humans are already familiar with such as the car, the office or the changing room in shopping centers. The arrangements of coloured lights and mirrors lift her installation spaces out of being ordinary and into the magical. The elements of her installation include coloured venetian blinds, hanging lights off stands or loose reels of tape. These assemblages signify half-furnished houses, specific to times of relocating and half-forgotten memories. Yang’s installations can be affecting to audiences who are not already familiar with the discourses specific her work. This is unlike Prince’s employment of idiosyncratic diction, which requires the audience to travel conceptually over to the artist to decipher his narratives. Yang’s assemblages however are still limited in their communicative potentia by the signs she employs. Her assembled signs may convey meaning to viewers from the developed world. This is where audiences are associated

42 Daniel Birnbaum, ‘Daniel Birnbaum on Haegue Yang - First Take’, ArtForum, (Artforum International Magazine, Inc., January 2003, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_5_41/ai_96223226/ accessed 3/07/2010)

or knowledgeable about the sign she uses in her work. To viewers from tribal or nomadic cultures, perhaps none of the signifiers would communicate meaning. Arguably this could be true for a lot of contemporary installation artists, generally making their work only to communicate to audiences in the developed world. This occurs without the artist necessarily making a conscious decision to communicate to certain audiences and exclude others. It is more reflective of the postulate that artists employ signs according to those that contain meaning for them. It is unlikely that a nomadic tribeswoman, unexposed to globalized consumerism of house furnishings (such as the venetian blinds and designer lights) will harbour meaningful knowledge about the signs in Yang’s installation. The subtle narrative potentia otherwise conveyed therefore cannot be communicated to her. The tribeswoman may however make very potent use of the lights or venetian blinds from the perspective of her different paradigm.

II.3 Third case study: The human mind understanding art, theories from Vilayanur Ramachandran and David Hume applied to contemporary practices This case study of theories on how human minds understand art is to establish reasoned speculation as to why artists include signs in their work. David Hume’s Enquiry into a Human Understanding and Vilayanur Ramachandran’s essays and seminars on the human mind are the theoretical bases for the analysis. Ramachandran, one of the world’s most well known neuroscientists believes that particular signals are sent to parts of the brain when certain signs and patterns in art are presented. It is possible from a reading of The Science of Art - A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience to find correspondence with his theories and the artworks featured in this discussion. Firstly, Ramachandran applies the ‘peak-shift’ rule to art. The peak-shift is commonly used for understanding animal learning. It describes how a rat can learn to identify a plain square and then subsequently learn how to read multiple rectangular dimensions. Ramachandran applies this to art that titillates the viewing mind by producing heightened activity in a single dimension. This can be understood also with the inspection of the term Rasa, which in Hindi means the essence of, or primary evocation. This occurs when an artist is able to consciously or unconsciously activate the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object. The receptive brain according to Ramachandran experiences what could be described as caricature, that is figurative signs that are reduced in detail but have certain

characteristics enhanced. For instance, as is apparent in a nude sketch where the female body is depicted as more curvaceous and less blemished than a regular human woman. It can also be employed to talk about artists making homages, signifying the past or using assemblage techniques of signs that invoke original forms. In The Science of Art, Ramachandran describes how different pleasures are produced when we see repetitions of signs, especially when these are represented on the visual plane as closed rather than open forms. This would suggest that the brain enjoys the stimulation of repetition not in an open-ended form, but rather one that has a narrative that appears visually resolved. While Ramachandran himself is not specialised in any art historical period or discipline and shows open disdain to art not to his personal taste, his ideas can be still be applied to artists that are making work currently. Contemporary artist Thomas Hirschhorn works with repetition and difference in his installations that display repetetive signs about the current confused state of the world (see figure 8). The repetition in his work activates a viewing mind to consider the inane and familiar content that is being displayed by way of a jarring re- mediation. His repetitive use of cheap and disposable materials, such as duct tape and aluminium foil allows the viewer a new pleasure in seeing these materials that are usually dull in a world of capitalist glamour. Such an assemblage goes beyond its material and creates new potentia for communication. Francis Alys’ practice of repetition also commissions new potentia: simply using walking he realises new construction of lines. In the Deleuzian understanding of repetition, the line itself is a continuum of repetition and difference. Sometimes doing something poetic can become political, sometimes doing something political can become poetic (2005, figure 9) is a film in collaboration with Julien Devaux. The film features the artist creating a consistent painted line with a leak in a green paint can, along the armistice boundary that Moshe Dayan marked on a map with green pencil after Israel’s War of Independence ended. The green line on the road is created by the artist as a soldier looks on. This poignant and simple work has much greater implications than the green line itself. The piece questions the physicality and cultural relevance of the green line, its function as a social and spiritual division in the city of Jerusalem, and its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The signifier of this work is the paint dripping and leaking into the signified loaded political landscape. The paint tin creates a trace of recent political events and makes homage to the history of abstract

painting. This work contains at least a double peak-shift where the signifiers point to the original political event, and also to the history of painting. Further, the artist is dealing with a current state or event, making a type of assemblage by virtue of an artistic line of flight. Along with the event, a painted line and drawings are created to assemble the piece. David Hume’s Enquiry into Human Understanding was published in 1748, this and his other texts remain influential still on contemporary philosophy today. With his meditations on human understanding Hume deciphers how ideas are connected in every human communication. He says that should even, ‘the loosest and freest conversation […] be transcribed, there would immediately be observed something which connected in all its transitions.’43 In other words he is saying all narratives linear or non-linear can be made sense of by the sentient mind. He identifies three principles of connection: resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and cause and effect. I will extrapolate from Hume’s points. By resemblance he means that a picture copy of something reminds us of the original. By contiguity, Hume indicates things in proximity to one another that reference each other, for instance apartment buildings in a housing complex. By cause and effect it is meant that pain will remind us of the original injury. Hume proposes even when a change of subject occurs in conversation, if the interlocutor who changes the topic investigates the lineage of their train of thought, they could find a commonality connecting one topic to the other. Even though Hume recorded these theories two and a half centuries ago they can be found to be pertinent in understanding the modes of constructing the assemblage-based installation of contemporary artist Jason Rhoades. Rhoades’ installations of excess that are overflowing doughnut machines, invent spaces beyond those in which they are situated. His depictions of American industrialised food and consumerism are calculated to be chaotic. The installations’ chaotic nature embody the subject of American fast-food culture, so not only are the signs which are included in the assemblage part of the narrative, but they are part of the space which they define also. Rhoades’ installations through an assemblage of signifiers depict settings and situations of meaning pertinent to the contemporary viewing public. Rhoades’ neon signs, music stands, rugs and chaotic spaces in Black Pussy (2006, figure 10) convey messages of contemporary heterotopias. His

43 David Hume, ‘Of the Association of Ideas’, An Enquiry into Human Understanding, (NY, Dover Publications, 2004), p 13

installations convey utopian and chaotic spaces of nightclubs and live music venues. They allow anyone venturing into the installation to travel to a fantasy world of intensities. The installations of these faux nightclubs are full of signage but no performative events of duration, which would usually be the case in an actual nightclub. Hence the viewer’s own imagination is called upon to connect the signs or ideas to a narrative. This corresponds with Hume’s theories of resemblance and contiguity. Where instead of a conversation between speaking persons it is the communication from the artist’s assembled signs to the spectator. The spectator thus engages in affect, contemplating the ideas involved in the artwork, but also becoming subject to its points of abstraction and the signified heterotopias.

II.4 Defining Deleuzian affect for installation art

The affect is the ‘new’ and new affects are ceaselessly created, notably by the work of art.44

What is ‘affect’? In this subsection I will make a closer study of this term that I have employed throughout the exegesis in explaining the communicative power of assemblage-based installation. Gilles Deleuze brought attention to the term in 20th Century philosophy with a lecture on Spinozian affect, his writing on the ‘affection- image’ in Cinema 1. The Movement-Image45 and later writing on affects with Felix Guattari in What is Philosophy?46 According to Deleuze:

Affect is an entity, that is Power or Quality. It is something expressed: the affect does not exist independently of something which expresses it, although it is completely distinct from it.47

It is a non-representational mode of thought, that is, what the mind experiences other than ‘ideas’.

Art does not have opinions. Art undoes the triple organisation of perceptions,

44 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p 99 45 Deleuze., 1986 46 Deleuze and Guattari., 1994b 47 Deleuze., 1986, p 97

affections and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects, and blocs of sensations that take the place of language. The writer uses words, but by creating a language that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry or even sing: this is the style, the ‘tone’, the language of sensations, or the foreign language within language that summons forth a people to come.48

To clarify what Deleuze means about creativity and affect I will present a physical example. I have an idea of the Sun when I see the Sun, but by basking in the Sun I feel its warmth and this is when I experience the affect rather than the idea.49 Affect is the point of departure from ideas, it is an interesting notion to investigate in terms of experiencing art. Deleuze conceives artists as the creators of percepts and affects, or ‘space-blocks of time’ that is, an affect is an actual thing, potentially meaningful, that can be experienced. For Spinoza, affect is the point of departure from an idea, it is also a moment of empowerment, not merely a change but a moment of alteration.

What Spinoza really wants to do is to define the essence of someone in an intensive fashion as an intensive quantity. As long as you don't know your intensities you risk the bad encounter and you will have to say, it's beautiful, both the excess and the immoderation, advices for overdoses. This is precisely the phenomenon of the power of being affected which is exceeded in a total destruction.50

For art it is between the idea of the artwork and its connection to the viewing mind. For an installation artist, the ability to create affect is often paramount to one’s practice. With the act of setting up and controlling in some way or other an environment for a spectator, it follows that some receptive affectation should take place. The affecting work of Olafur Elliason’s Weather Project (2003, figure 11) installed at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall will be examined. The highly visited exhibition recreated the Sun rising and falling daily. Viewers enjoyed basking in the

48 Deleuze and Guattari., 1994b, p 176 49 This example is inspired by Olafur Elliason’s Weather Project (2003) that is described below. 50 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza’s Of Affect, (Lecture transcript, Cours Vincennes, January, 21/04/1978)

simulated sunlight, they walked around, sat or spent hours even picnicking and reading, treating the installation as a place of recreation. With a simple use of signs, this installation had a great affective nature. In the experience of the work, an unconscious decision passes through the spectator who enjoys basking in the sun more so than just viewing it as a simulated idea. Another example of an installation art that is contrasting in tone and affect, Thomas Hirschhorn’s overt assemblages create terrifying simulations of the real world. His work The Subjecters (2009) is made up of bleeding styrofoam globes and nailed mannequins assembled next to internet disseminated photographs depicting atrocities of current wars. These two examples confront the viewing mind in a similar way even though the affect may be greatly different. They both deal with employing signs that have great impact on human beings living in the world that is, the Sun, war, representations of ourselves and representations of the earth. These two works have a quintessentially Spinozian affect.

II.5 The political and the affected: fourth case study Jacques Ranciere and Urban Encampment

Art is the art of affect more than representation, a system of dynamised and impacting forces rather than a system of unique images that function under the regime of signs51

The proposition that ‘affect has long been not what it used to be’, may seem prima facie unintelligible but it is meaningful. After the dissolution of belief in the documentary photograph, so with it, the affective ability of contrived information was changed. Jean Baudrillard’s comments on the Gulf War existing only as a ‘virtual’ war still echo.52 It is apparent that with every turn in representation, viewing audiences learn to see beyond the media delivering information. With this is mind the exposition of the communicative power of art is continued. It has been established that communication can be achieved through the production of affect in an audience. Political art is germane to the discussion, for politics by definition is influential in any society organised around a political

51 Grosz., 2008, p 3 52 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War did not take place, (IN, Indiana University Press, 1995)

structure. A posteriori to this statement, art that gives life to issues within the political sphere is likely to produce an affecting response in the spectator that resides within the realm of political influence. This is why, as a practitioner interested in communication and the aestheticisation of politics, political art must play a role in my work. Political artwork that communicates well to an audience is not easily reduced to a formula. Further, defining political art is a fraught exercise that demands a greater volume of discussion than the length of this exegesis will allow. Observations are made from examples of art works in order to expand on this topic. It is posited that political art can be that which displays a resistance to forms either of economic, political or ideological domination. This resistance creates the potential to affect the spectator because of its difference or newness, embodied in form. This tentative definition will be elaborated upon by way of a case study on I and Us (Paris, 2006, figure 12) by the French group Urban Campment (Campement Urbain), taking notes from Jacques Ranciere’s essay Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. 53 Looking specifically at this work through Ranciere’s lens and examining its assemblage I will flesh out the model of political art for the purpose of discussing affect. Ranciere has written widely on political and relational art.54 In his discourse on the aesthetics of politics he has often employed the idea of assemblage as a woven fabric of signs. He posits that there is a constant potentia of new metaphors to be created by signs.55 In 2006 Urban Encampment made a booth self-described as an, ‘extremely useless, fragile and non-productive’ non-space. The booth was placed in an outer suburban area near the Charles de Gaulle airport, similar to Clichy-sous-Bois where the Paris riots took place in 2005. Citizens of the area, predominantly new migrants were welcome to come and choose a t-shirt, which featured a line of text in French and its English translation. The participants allowed themselves to become part of the artwork, giving rise to a collective and documented identity. This group of new citizens otherwise politically voiceless in a society organised not to assimilate

53 Jacques Ranciere, ‘Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community, Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art’ Art &Research, A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods Volume 2, (No. 2 Summer 2008, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/ranciere.html, accessed 1/012010) 54 ‘Relational art’ coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics, (Paris, Les Press Du Reel, 1998) 55 See Chapter I, subsection, ‘A definition of assemblage when involved in installation art’, p 8

migrants into the privileged French social system. This piece entails a re- territorialisation regarding identity and culture. The mixing of location, the signs of the t-shirts and citizens’ voices into this documented event is an assemblage. It is a new mixing of information that goes beyond documentary or reportage. Politically voiceless migrants are given voices and speak confidentially in the booth. In Ranciere’s essay he reconciles this work with a classic impressionist painting of Parisian bathers, Bathers at Asnières (1884) by George Seurat. By way of this comparison, Ranciere demonstrates changes in milieus depicted by French artists through the historical canon. Urban Encampment is not an art collective that aligns itself with current French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ideal of a stagnant national identity. Sarkozy’s France is one where he can repeat the rhetoric of right wing journalists that ‘France has no place for the burqa’56 as he did on 22 June 2009. These statements, and the ensuing controversial drafted legislation,57 have occurred despite France being home to Europe’s biggest Muslim minority. Such displays signal a crisis in the resistance to a changing national identity, Sarkozy specifying in his speech ‘we are an old country anchored in a certain idea of how we live together.’58 In his essay Ranciere quotes Mallarme using a meaningful parallel adage: ‘Separés on est ensemble’.59 The work by Urban Encampment is a reconstructed artistic depiction of a French social milieu. The work is a social sculpture and yet it is also a place constructed for solitude, where citizens enjoy separation.

II.6 Poïesis as a summary to chapter II Throughout the case studies made in this chapter, the underlying proposition is that new assertions of form come from negotiations, experimentation with and resistance to pre-existing forms. To discuss the production of the new as a type of aesthetics of resistance, it is helpful to consider the terms ‘poïesis’ and ‘mimesis’. Poïesis, (that became ‘poetry’ in modern English) is the Ancient Greek word ‘to make’. It is a term that describes creative invention, where as ‘mimesis’, also a Greek term, is used for

56 ‘Sarkozy says burqas are ‘not welcome’ in France’, Breitbart, (http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D98VP85G1&show_article=1, Associated Press, June, 2009, accessed 01/01/2010) 57‘France MPs' report backs Muslim face veil ban’, BBC News, (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8480161.stm, January, 2010 accessed 30/06/2010) 58‘Sarkozy Committed to Ban on Burqa’, Guardian News and Media (http://www.smh.com.au/world/sarkozy-committed-to-ban-on-burqa-20100520-vpcz.html, May, 2010 accessed 30/05/2010) 59 English translation: ‘Apart we are together’ from Stephane Mallarme’s prose poem The White Waterlily, 1885.

imitation, representation and mimicry. It can be said these two concepts are rarely, if ever, not seen in combination or in ‘anthesis’, the third fold of these analogous terms that denotes a time when something is in full bloom. It is worthwhile, nevertheless, to examine the elements in isolation and see how they contribute to assertions of the new. To close the chapter and as a pathway to the next, Deleuze and Guattari’s statement on signs and creation of the new provides an appropriate pivot.

[…] none of these elements can appear without the other being still to come, still indeterminate or unknown. Each created element on a plane calls on other heterogeneous elements, which are still to be created on other planes thought as heterogenesis. It is true that these culminating points contain two extreme dangers: either leading us back to the opinion from which we wanted to escape or precipitating us into the chaos that we wanted to confront.60

60 Deleuze and Guattari, 1994b, p 199

CHAPTER III: THE LITERAL AND THE MATERIAL – ARTISTS’ EMPLOYMENT OF LANGUAGE-BASED SIGNS AND THE DISPOSITIF

III.1 Introduction to Chapter III This chapter will analyse the amalgamation of visual and literal signs in contemporary assemblage-based installation practice. The definition of ‘the sign’ established up until this point will be further developed with the countenance of structural linguistics and post-structuralist philosophy. Theories from Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida are briefly outlined to forge a contemporary understanding of ‘the sign’ in relation to linguistics. To contextualise signs within ‘language’, a definition of language is put forward by way of a rubric of creative propositions. The discussion of literal and language-based signs invites the concepts of Michel Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘apparatus’ to be used to examine how artists employ systems for communication. The examination will include an exploration of practices that comprise assemblages of literal and textual signs. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is the key introductory example, given that it signalled a shift toward the inclusion of literal signs in the art history cannon. The case studies in this chapter serve not only to address the philosophical concepts outlined above but also to educe the underlying postulations of this exegesis. The exposition will reinstate definitions of ‘the contemporary’ and discuss the importance of a resistance of established forms to create the new.

III.2 Linguistics and language as utilities to analyse contemporary assemblage Ferdinand de Saussure was a structural linguist who stated that signs are constituted by their differences from one another.61 Saussure asserted that the definition of a sign could be qualified by its linguistic relational position within the greater network of signs. In Saussure’s system, signs have fixed relations to one another. This definition places signs in a closed and unmoving system. Saussure’s theory experienced significant ruptures with new scholarship on signs from post-modern philosophers. Jacques Derrida, the post-structuralist philosopher, believed Saussure’s system to be correct, but that it was impossible for relations between signs to exist without considerations of temporal shifting. Derrida propounded that with every relation

61 Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘The Concrete Entities of Language’, Course in General Linguistics, (Geneva, McGraw-Hill, 1915), pp 102-105

between signs there is displacement that occurs as a result of temporality. This is an acknowledgement of a constant destabilisation, expanding and shifting of meaning.62 This typifies Derridean ‘deconstruction’, that is, the reading of signs by way of heterogeneous approaches. These theories for reading and asserting signs are pertinent to the consideration of any work of art and its communication with the spectator. The temporality of a sign’s meaning is another key to finding what may create affect for one spectator at one time and not another at a different time. These theories are instrumental in the following discussion about artists’ practices that employ language- based and literal signs to build assemblages for communication. It was Ludwig Wittgenstein who famously said:

The limits of language mean the limits of my world.63

This statement could yield an interpretation that the philosopher cannot comprehend a world beyond the boundaries of his language. For this analysis, centred on the communicative power of installation, a creative definition of language is necessarily more flexible than this standard definition from the Oxford dictionary: ‘a method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way’.64 To creatively find the limits of different language systems that may be used by art, the following contemplation is made. Is music a language? Is it unlike spoken dialects, instead a type of universal language? If music is a language is it one that communicates only by affect? Does that mean colour is a language too? When driving we read the coloured traffic lights and take action to respond accordingly, placing our lives in the hands of their instructive signs. Wounds then are language too, if I feel my ankle is broken I will not try to walk on it, if I feel pain I will try to appease it. Desire then is part of dialectic with restraint as I try not to obey its messages but abide my codes of restraint. For this chapter language is a structural system by which signs are manipulated for the purpose of communication. In the following subsection Giorgio

62 Andrea Leon-Montero, Levinas and Derida, (lecture, Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, 6/06/2010) 63 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). Proposition 5.6 64 Oxford dictionaries, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0456750#m_en_gb0456750, accessed 1/03/2010)

Agamben states language itself is the oldest apparatus.65

III.3 Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ and the material of art Other than the literal signs and the stylistic decisions made in the production of assemblage, the actual selection of materials must be considered. The material element is a conduit itself, for the material contemporaneously controls minor and major ways of how messages are conveyed. This is demonstrated in the following discussion of the analogous terms ‘dispositif’ and ‘apparatus’. The dispositif is a Foucauldian term for a heterogeneous regime of elements that define systems. Dispositifs belong to discourses, institutions, critical decisions, architectural forms, laws and other systemised structures. The combination of all dispositifs formulate the greater dispositif of human society.66 The concept was broadened and brought forward in time by Agamben with his definition of the apparatus. An apparatus is any definable system that has an impact on ways that human beings live in the world. So in addition to the aforementioned elements, Agamben’s concept encompasses the use of mobile phones, the internet, cigarettes, new technologies such as ipads or facebook and language itself as the oldest apparatus. I posit that an assemblage can be an artist’s selection of dispositifs and the complete installation environment is the apparatus. Within the structure of the work of art, the elements that are chosen lead to a communication and also a mode/s of communication. For examples of this I will look at works of Indian artist Ashok Sukumaran67 and Christo and Jeanne-Claude.68 In his work Glow Positioning System (Kabutakharna Chowk69), (2005, figure 13) Sukumaran devised a way of illuminating a circular city meeting point. The system that he set up in this work empowered anyone with the ability to create a moving line of light around the populated square (the chowk). To execute this impact, the artist involved the businesses and citizens of the area by either getting their cooperation to take part in creating the work or simply by illuminating their buildings. Turning a crank device in the middle of the Kabutakharna activated the work. Anybody from the street could join the line to take

65 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is an Apparatus?’, What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009), p 14 66 Michel Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’ interview, Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings, (ed. Colin Gordon, London, Harvester, 1980), pp 194-22 67 Ashok Sukumaran (1974) born Japan works in India, an interdisciplinary artist interested in public and private space. 68 Christo (1935) Bulgarian and Jeanne-Claude (1935 - 2009) French, were a married couple who created environmental works of art, Christo is still active as an artist. 69 Chowk is Hindi-Urdu for a place where paths connect.

turn at controlling the crank, so that the work became a symbolic demonstration of a democratic system. Glow Positioning System is a powerful work because although the Indian subcontinent is a democracy, the caste system still survives. This system socially stratifies and restricts citizens defined by hereditary groups. In Glow Positioning System the apparatus can be identified as the crank, the light, the chowk and the system that pulls them together. These elements of the work control the spectator’s experiential communication with the other people of the square. It is the symbolic system or the dispositifs that creates the affective power of this work. The material with which an artist chooses to construct their work evidently is a key part of the signifying process. As it has been shown, Thomas Hirschhorn only uses cheap materials such as packaging tape, aluminium foil, cardboard and magazines. His works are for the most part ephemeral and resist easy commodification into the art market. This is part of Hirschhorn’s own complex diction of which he has said ‘I do not make political art, I make art politically’70. A consistent avoidance of the market is something that requires continued invention, this is because the market has a practice of consuming the new as soon as it can identify and understand it and generate profit. The materials used are also signs of the artist’s ethical approach to art making. Is the material from an installation recyclable or biodegradable? Does the work use a lot of energy or electricity to power? How is this justified, if at all? Many of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works have gone through periods of uncertainty before being allowed to go ahead for concerns regarding their political or environmental implications and consequences. Surrounded Islands (1980- 83, figure 14) took three years to confirm as to whether it would be realised for political and environmental reasons. Instead of causing environmental disaster however upon starting the work forty tonnes of rubbish were removed from the waters surrounding the islands. The region’s economy was also stimulated with four hundred and thirty jobs created for marine biologists, engineers and seamstresses. The work, bright flamingo pink inspired by the natural environment was beneficial to the area bringing cultural tourism and generating dialogue. Had surrounding these islands not been considered as thoughtfully however, each of the eleven islands with two hundred

70 Thomas Hirschhorn, Thomas Hirschhorn, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Interview by Alison M. Gingeras, (Phaidon Press, 2004) p 120. For further reading regarding this statement Hirschhorn has written a manifesto on the subject that can be found at Art and Research: Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v3n1/fullap01.html, (2008, Accessed 2/07/2010)

feet of fabric on their perimeter could have been disastrous to the wildlife and fauna of the waters.

III.4 Being literal to challenge form, the last case studies: Marcel Duchamp, Jason Rhoades, Paul McCarthy and Samuel Beckett This subsection will unpack this chapter’s propositions by building case studies on artists’ works specifically involved with the assemblage of signs that are literal or language-based. An essential historical consideration for this subsection is the work of Marcel Duchamp. A shift occurred when Duchamp began placing into the art canon a literal use of signs that were derived from a manmade world of signifiers. In 1917, under a made up pseudonym, Richard Mutt the artist submitted a urinal titled Fountain (1917) to a sculpture exhibition.71 The submission was discarded as it was perceived as vulgar and immoral, as well as a piece of plagiarism of a piece of plain plumbing.72 To this the artist replied:

Now Mr. Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bath tub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' show windows. Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object. As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.73

Following Duchamp’s Fountain, the development of Western art history showed a greater presence and appreciation for literal and language-based signs. A contemporary example of this is made with Jason Rhoades’74 Black Pussy (2006, figure 10), an installation completed shortly before the artist’s death and exhibited posthumously. The work sprawled 3000 square feet, included a stage, 185 neon signs of slang terms for vagina, 89 beaver felt cowboy hats and colourful rugs. The work is the aftermath of the ‘Black Pussy Soirees’ held in the artist’s studio, at

71 The urinal was submitted to the jury free ‘Society of Independents’ exhibition in New York, but suppressed by the hanging committee. This exhibition was meant to be an unselected show as a rebuke to the censorship of experimental work that occurred at that time. 72 Beatrice Wood, H.P. RochŽ and/or Marcel Duchamp, ‘The Richard Mutt Case’ The Blind Man 2 (May 1917, http://www.iaaa.nl/cursusAA&AI/duchamp.html, accessed 12/06/2010) 73 Ibid 74 Jason Rhoades, (1965-2006) American installation artist.

which guests added to the work by participating in the parties, eating, drinking and making a mess. Rhoades’ scattered assemblage shows an intersection with post- modern scholarship on signs. The assemblage-based presentation typifies a decentred positioning that represents a pluralistic culture rather than one of meta-narratives. Another installation My Brother/ Brancusi (1995) included a working donut machine and mechanical repair shop installed in the gallery. The artist made parodies of the manmade signs that already existed in our world of representation. The title of the work is also a sign using the significance of the words to make an artistic pun. The artist references the modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi who worked with the reduction and purity of the material in his work. Rhoades’ aesthetic is opposite to Brancusi’s and so referencing the artist signals the historical lineage and changes that have occurred within the discipline. Rhoades’ installations are chaotic, ribald and superficially glamorous. The sensation aspect of Rhoades’ work is chaotic, focused on the over consumptive tendencies of the Western world. The themes of Rhoades’ work echo Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘human all too human’.

Deleuze sees Nietzsche's ‘human all to human’ as being a danger for a human and even more an artist to live only in the small provincial world of humanity. Non-human expressivity [that is] once we become unable to be affected, we loose something very important, if we become obsessed with that which is all too human we loose a connection to otherness, geology, biology, chemistry.75

The influence of this concept is key to analytically approaching the oeuvres of artist Paul McCarthy and playwright Samuel Beckett whose work respectively challenges established uses of communicative form. Their work contains transgressions, repetitions and non-sequiturs. Subjected to their work, the spectator is pushed to engage in dismantling the content. To dismantle ideas for a spectator is itself a confrontation that challenges and asks of one’s imagination. The Garden (1992, figure 15) by Paul McCarthy features a mechanical mannequin attempting to have sexual intercourse with a tree. It is a repetitive kinetic sculpture with a subject that may repulse or provide jarring comedic relief. His Painter (1995) features the artist dressed in an art smock and large fake nose, he has

75 Manuel Delanda, Deleuze and the History of Philosophy, (lecture at the European Graduate School, Switzerland, 2006)

in his studio massively oversized paint tubes and mayonnaise jars. The artist attacks the canvas and spins around in circles parodying and undermining the notion of the mystical genius painter, particularly associated with the Abstract Expressionists. In this performative video, the painters’ behaviour is disgusting and thus works to confront also assumed definitions of ‘fine art’. McCarthy’s critical acclaim as a contemporary artist is due to his oeuvre mastering ugly or ridiculous themes. The artist utilises signs from zones of social sensitivity that affect the spectator’s visual constitution. At times McCarthy appears to work against the market, making art that is not only specifically ephemeral or not saleable, additionally he has self-proclaimed certain projects as ‘complete failures’76. McCarthy illuminates the obscure areas of our culture, which according to Agamben’s theory, discussed earlier77, confirms McCarthy as a truly ‘contemporary’ artist The work of playwright Samuel Beckett also illuminated the ‘obscure’ by way of his assertion of signs. The nonlinear narratives produced in Beckett’s oeuvre have had significant influence across many artistic disciplines. Beckett wrote poetry during the climate of post World War II tension when philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno stated such attempts would be barbaric.78 Beckett did not write in established narrative structures however, his poetry, prose and plays arranged the written word in forms that had not appeared before. His works are nonlinear, repetitive, elliptical and full of non-sequiturs. This employment of form allows information to be revealed through the duration of pieces. Beckett’s work confronts themes such as death, prison camps and loneliness. These subjects are met with not only by thematic focus but also by the writer’s jarring presentation of language. In the experience of Beckett’s plays the spectator is confronted by form as much as they are by the subjects depicted. Beckett’s form embodies his subject.79 The writer’s inventive assertion of form has been highly influential on installation art. This is evident with Bruce Nauman’s video Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), (1968, figure 16), a work in which repetition and boredom are the subjects. The performer and spectator contemplate the fruitless aspects of the work of pantomime. What is being achieved here? Why does the

76 Paul McCarthy, in Peter Paul Chocolate Factory Maccarone Gallery, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm9iLNmHPhs&feature=related, accessed 12/06/2010) 77 See subsection I.1, page 3 78 Theodor Adorno, 'Cultural Criticism and Society,' in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1967), p 19 79 See Chapter IV.3 discussion of the video of the Samuel Beckett’s play Not I, completed for the research project, p 47

spectator go through the discerning process to contemplate it? It is action removed from action, it is only about pointlessness and duration itself. That nothing seems to happen maybe signifies that nothingness is able to provide answers to questions not able to be augmented otherwise. Adorno intended to dedicate his magnum opus Aesthetic Theory80 to the work of Beckett, he found the playwright’s written forms so appealing. The following words that record Adorno’s position on political aesthetics provide a thoughtful reflection on Nauman’s piece and the work and influence of Beckett:

Under the conditions of late capitalism, the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored.81

To find a conclusion to this analysis of the communicative power of signs assembled and presented as form, art as ‘ridiculous’ is reviewed. Experimenting with and changing a communicative form can appear to be ill conceived prima facie. It is not a very enlightened action to change systems that already work. It is a main postulate of this analysis however that the invention of a new assemblage of signs can make for the most pellucid of communications. Samuel Beckett construed his serious content in difficult forms and with this made his communications impenetrable to clichés. When McCarthy blew up a huge black inflatable square with an oversized nose outside the Tate Modern Gallery and titled it Blockhead (2003) it was humourous. The signs of the inflatable indicate a ridiculous approach to aesthetics and the spectator is surprised that it is ‘allowed’ to be a prominent work of art. If it had been placed elsewhere it would not have this affect but outside the Tate Gallery the work has a surprising and commanding presence. Thomas Hirschhorn’s rough juxtaposing collages of war and porn are immediate in their affecting quality, their ability to shock confirms the strength of his communication.

Even if the material lasts only for a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that so exists with this short duration. So long as the material lasts, the sensation enjoys an eternity in those

80 Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, (London, Routledge, 1984) 81 Lambert Zuiderva, ‘Theodor W. Adorno’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta ed. (Stanford University, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/adorno/ 2008)

very moments. Sensation realised in the material without the material passing completely in to the sensation, into the percept or affect.82

These lines from Deleuze and Guattari make sense of the nature of materiality, space, and the durations of sensation. The affective agency of installation can be understood with these words when one considers the immersive environment that is produced by way of an artist’s intentional assemblage. An artist’s employment of signs in their creation of an environment, brings the audience into a space of sensory experience. Over the time spent engaged in the installation the spectator undergoes a transformation. This affect lasts as long as the sensation commands it. The duration itself is a repetition, it is a length of being, an experience of time passing.

82 Deleuze and Guattari, 1994b, pp 166-167

CHAPTER IV: ASSERTED FORMS AND FIGURATIONS OF TIME 2008-2010

ARTIST PLATES

Figure 17: Marian Tubbs | Not I | Stills from HD video 16:9 16 minutes | 2009 |

Figure 24: Marian Tubbs | Gypsy Grillz | digital assemblage | 2010 |

Figure 29: Marian Tubbs | Contingent 4: Derrr Brain | studio view | 2010 |

IV.1 Lucid communications The previous chapters presented the philosophy on aesthetics that has driven my practice over the last two years and underpinned my Master of Fine Arts project. During this time, I have broadened and re-learnt ways of understanding assemblage- based installation and developed my own practice through combinations of reading, writing and practice. The written research of part one documents the sources that helped me formulate ideas for creative experiments, failures, open-ended and finished works. I have dismantled previously held ideas whilst contemporaneously building new ones as the body of research took shape in a parallel process. While philosophy drives the main bulk of words in this exegesis, this project has been balanced equally by practice-based research. This can be seen with the examples of work and the reflections that follow.

IV.2 Preamble to the work It is to my mind that, philosophical thought can be exacted in words, though art cannot. These sentiments are key to the structure of the written element of this project. The following pertinent reflections have been made by Bruce Nauman and Thomas Hirschhorn respectively.

I think that the point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the same edge where poetry and art occur.83

As an artist I am often surprised by effortless, inexact and empty terms or notions used in order to ‘explain’ an artwork. I am astonished by the repeated and thoughtless use of terms in art critique.84

There are discrepancies between an idea as it exists; in art, in philosophy and art writing. I dwell on this point because the understanding, execution and

83 Bruce Nauman, exh cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1986, p 55 84 Thomas Hirschhorn in ‘The Headless Artist: An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn on the Friendship Between Art and Philosophy, Precarious Theatre and the Bijlmer Spinoza-festival’ Art & Research, A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods (Volume 3. No. 1. 2009/10, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v3n1/hirschhorn2.html, accessed12/06/2010)

communication of form and language underpin this research project. Following are personal reflections on my work, prefixed by relevant hesitations and difficulties with the art writing as a genre. A potential problem in making communicative description about my own work in this exegesis is that often I experience aesthetic difficulty with ‘art writing’. Key problematic instances of the genre will be briefly addressed. The contrived vocabulary that constitutes a lot of art writing I feel more often than not fails art, and instead works more for the market, commercial galleries dealers and buyers. Describing artwork may help those who cannot see it, but invented words such as ‘slippage/s’ (now used globally, including the French translation ‘glissement’) only serve to confuse the reader and mask over-simplifications. This word as used in art writing means the ‘something’ in between meanings, or the ‘thing’ that cannot be described. Too often I have read in a magazine or catalogue essay that an artist’s practice is wholly about ‘slippages’. The use of terms such as this is a sign of lazy writing that does not delve properly into artist’s work. It should be clear from the way I have approached the exegetic discussion about communication that I do not believe that there are singular meanings to artworks. This is a reason why I will avoid ascribing a singular meaning to my own.

IV.3 The work The installation and sculptural works that I have assembled during this research have been concerned with testing and extending my own boundaries of asserting signs and materiality in installation. This has been driven by experimentation with repetition, rhythm and re-mediation of the signs I’ve employed. Along with these processes, less abstract signs come into play depending on the media, materials or topical issues influencing my ideas at the time. I incorporate aesthetic fashions and trends from visual commercial industries into my work. This, coupled with the experimental realisation of forms adds complexity to a recalcitrant approach toward asserting forms within the visual art cannon. This is a way to engage in a thoughtful rebellion against established forms and aim at asserting the new. The dispositifs of my practice are inspired by a study of visual and narrative structures already existing and loaded with meanings. The exhibition titled Assembly of Phantasms at Serial Space that represents this project is a phantasm and a heterotopia, it is a created location of assembled

signs. I will explain some of my motivations for creating the elements belonging to this assemblage-based installation. The video piece I produced of the Samuel Beckett play Not I (2009, figure 18), was an exercise in adapting Beckett’s text into the field of video art. It is a 16 minute play driven by one character, ‘Mouth’. The elliptical and evocative text is emotive and intellectually rigorous. To achieve the real-time run of the original play the actor, Catherine Terracini, had to keep a speed that is so fast it is difficult for the spectator to follow the non-linear narrative. The stylistic tools of repetition and rhythm in the text however, works to reveal meaning. The play was easily adapted to video because of Beckett’s simple stage direction. The video lens captures only the mouth, no other information is given regarding the character’s appearance. The work was shot on high definition video with an output ratio of 16:9 in a green screen studio. Three cameras were used to capture the work in one continuous performance; the recordings were edited together in postproduction. Additionally during postproduction the speeds and colours were manipulated. The forms of her expressions are not sentences but ramblings and occasional screams. The work is a study on language and how information can be revealed through form. The neon creations and signs are the result of ideas that have stayed with me over a period of time, and for varying reasons manifested themselves as neon. The neon chandelier was created due to an interest in the critique of signs of ‘quality’ in art and design objects. The neon chandelier was conceived so that it would be installed in accompaniment with a hand-made chandelier making Chandelier/ A Chandelier (2009 figure 19). The second chandelier is put together from a range of salvaged materials made by the artist not a factory; this would normally hold the greater value as the uniquely crafted object. However, it is ugly to look at and is held together with a variety of non-cohesive materials that make the object appear as if it may fall apart at any moment. The two objects when paired together are an assemblage because of the dialectic they create in juxtaposition. The other neon works I have made have been the text signs; Aura after Benjamin (2008, figure 20) and Shelter (2008). Both of these have been part of assemblage-based installations, and although I made these with initial intentions that they would be read in a certain way, I have found that employing them in different assemblages works also. This is part of the experimentation that is involved in the practice. I am not interested in reaching one resolved end point in my work, but the

chance of multiple interpretations and affects that can be derived from assembled signs. During my time of residency at the COFA UNSW Cite Internationale des Arts studio in Paris I created an experimental assemblage of signs. The porn of philosophy in Paris (2009, figures 20 and 21) was a means of exploring a connectedness in signs present in pornography, advertising and philosophy magazines. This was an experimental work, I placed images and signs within proximity with one another to see what new information could be formed. I also loosened up the process by drawing and painting into the assemblage, animating philosophers and images from magazines. By means of a similar approach the digital collages Gypsy Grillz, Hot Grillz and Donuts for Nurses (2010, figures 22, 23 and 24) were realised. The concerns here were to bring together signs that create tensions. Gypsy Grillz for instance has its tension as a literal assertion of the stigmatising of Romani Gypsy people. In Europe the migration of this group of people is fraught with controversy because of issues of racism and tendencies of this group to be more likely participate in begging and swindling people for money. I am interested in creating problematic tensions because this presents questions and reveals something about the spectator’s relation to the subject as well as inserting contemporary politics into the art canon. Donuts for Nurses is another example, where I have collaged onto the work of Richard Prince. This is of topical interest to me as the artist himself is currently involved in a copyright infringement lawsuit for taking and modifying the work of anthropological photographer Patrick Cariou.85 The project’s critique of signs has further developed within the exhibition where forms such as storage shelves are placed in the gallery purely for visual contemplation. The form and repetition of these storage shelves reference the aesthetics of minimalists such as Donald Judd. A self-referential dialogue is set up when the form is repeated again but its functional utility is exploited, holding together another element of the work, the data projector producing the images of the video work. Such use breaks from the artwork being purely aesthetic instead giving back its function and making the artwork convenient. It is convenient for the artist to exploit the signs in the work whether for their utilitarian purpose or minimalist sculptural forms.

85 Andrew Goldstein, ‘Lawsuit filed against Richard Prince, Images of Rastafarians under dispute by photographer Patrick Cariou’, The Art Newspaper, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=16821, 21/01/09 accessed 01/01/10)

One shelf Contingent 1: Fat (2010, figure 25) is filled with hardened expandable foam, producing an abject aesthetic of what looks like giant wasteful sludge. It is a big sign of emptiness, of purchased, expandable emptiness. The product can be sprayed on to commercial merchandise to protect it but the use of the material here rejects the function of the product. Another shelving unit is used to assemble literature on self-improvement. Two works have been selected that were written centuries apart: Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics and Neuro-Linguistics for Dummies. The literature shares the proposal to inform the reader of ways to live a better life. Another unit, Contingent 2: Eco Trendz (2010, figure 26) contains fake plants, cheap solar garden lights and disco balls. This is an inclusion of the current dialectic on sustainability. Sustainability in art practices (as well as other fields such as design, architecture, town planning and politics) has recently become incredibly popular. While this is undoubtedly an important and good thing, there is also a fashion of superficial engagement that has made a parallel arrival. The signs that accord themselves with this can be termed ‘ecobling’, that which places importance on the visibility of the ecologically friendly features of a product rather its actual efficiency. I find this humorous to explore in my practice as well as interesting, because assemblage art has incorporated recycled materials since its conception. Contingent 3: The House Holdings (2010, figure 27), contains cheap kitsch house decorations, hanging glass dolphins, wind chimes and door frame decorations. I find these have ironic affective quality, because of their cheap mass production the objects work to be the opposite of ‘homely’. My Deleuzian Phantasm (2010, figure 28) is the juxtaposition of three signs, a circular piece of salvaged brown paper with a whole in it, the written words, ‘Deleuzian Phantasm’ and a microphone stand. The words signify the concept of a ‘Deleuzian Phantasm’, which is a personal ‘thought-event’, where one’s mind departs from society and experiences an event in their ‘deeper’ unconscious86. The microphone stand signifies the possibility of an event, the spectator can imagine an event or imagine their own phantasm. The last example Contingent 4: Derrr Brain (2010, figure 29) is an assemblage of pure silly joy for me. The colloquial expression used in my childhood for someone behaving in an idiotic manner, ‘Derrr Brain’. The shelf unit painted in vibrant colours and the literal sign of the brain organ model, together produce instant affect.

86 David Musselwhite, ‘Deleuze goes to Xanadu’, in Deleuze Studies, Volume 1, (GB, University of Essex, 2007), p 100

The affect that my work produces does not lead to the spectator being ‘activated’. It is neither, relational or interactive work, in that the spectator is required to push buttons to trigger the work to function. The assemblages of signs as created environments, however do aim to convey meaning/s. These are not designed to disseminate information didactically however, even when literal or language-based signs are used. Language-based signs allow for different readable aspects into the artworks but they are present to add complexity rather than explain precise meanings. It is unlikely that each singular intention for the inclusion of a sign will be communicated to the spectator. It is clear from the case studies made in the exegesis, this is not a case that is unique to my practice. I work with my vernacular of signs to challenge pre-existing assertions of form in the art canon as I know it. The associations, connections or metaphors that the spectator experiences when viewing my work may intersect with my intentions but are ultimately beyond my control.

CONCLUSION This project has been a study of contemporary thought and practice using the relationship between recent philosophical concepts and assemblage-based installation. Assemblages have been defined as potential fabrics, always already to be weaved, bounded by an artist’s language of signs. Signs for this exegesis are not limited to the visual, a sign can be anything that is a conduit for a message. Other signs may include for instance; elements of language, geographical spaces and moments in time. The case studies made additionally featured practices that generate their own regimes of signs and therefore idiosyncratic dictions. The project is a researched acknowledgement of some of the multiplicities that are involved in artistic assemblage. It has been conveyed through a range of case studies that art practices can include an employment and manipulation of signs to produce affects. Deleuze’s theories have played a crucial role in the examination of the stylistic tools used by artists and their potentia for communication. The exposition of philosophical approaches to ‘repetition’ shed light on ways that histories of aesthetics may define the present, as well as presenting a mechanism for how artists may create the ‘new’. This exegesis works to understand complex contemporary practices that critique culture by manner of asserting form. According to the key postulates surveyed, to produce artwork that can be defined as ‘contemporary’ an artist may show an awareness of, or ability to traverse temporal gradients. In other words contemporary practices can be realised by pondering the future, examining the past and making meditations on the present. True signs of the contemporary are not found in fashions but instead in an artist’s active practice to expose issues that are otherwise not visible. This is why contemporary work is more likely to be realised by way of experimental practice. When an artist engages in experimental practice they engage in a Deleuzian ‘line of flight’ for the duration of which the destination cannot be predicted. The artist is well placed to reinvent and reassert signs of information to create new forms. By weaving together the unexpected through experimental devices, or inserting new signs into already existing modes of practice, the contemporary artist can communicate affectively to audiences that are responsive to the signs employed.

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