Practising with Deleuze Suzie Attiwil, Terri Bird, Andrea Eckersley
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Practising with Deleuze Suzie Attiwil, Terri Bird, Andrea Eckersley, Antonia Pont, Jon Roffe, and Philipa Rothfield [CH] Table of Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Co-Authors 1. Introduction, Gregory Flaxman 2. Philosophising Practice, Antonia Pont 3. Forming, Terri Bird 4. Framing – ?interior, Suzie Attiwill 5. Experience and its Others, Philipa Rothfield 6. Encountering surfaces, encountering spaces, encountering painting, Andrea Eckersley 7. Practising Philosophy, Jon Roffe 8. Bibliography 2 [CH] Acknowledgments This book developed out of a series of seminars initiated by Terri Bird and held in 2014 at West Space, an artist led organisation in Melbourne. These seminars, Practising: a series of seminars exploring the writing of Deleuze, aimed at unpacking some of the key ideas in the writings of Gilles Deleuze, and those written together with Félix Guattari, from the perspective of contemporary creative practices. Each seminar was a dialogue between a creative practitioner and Jon Roffe, focused on a particular aspect of practice: forming, framing, experiencing, encountering, practising. Each practitioner approached the topic from the perspective of their specific field: Terri Bird – sculpture, Suzie Attiwill - interior design, Philipa Rothfield – dance, Andrea Eckersley – painting, and Antonia Pont - creative writing. We would like to thank West Space for making the gallery available, for hosting and facilitating these seminars. In addition we’d like to acknowledge the significant role of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. The creative practitioners met while attending various courses given by Jon Roffe, on the philosophy of Deleuze, over the past ten years or so at the MSCP. The MSCP continues to make a major contribution to supporting a broad engagement with the work of a wide range of philosophers through its program of seminars, courses and events. We would also like to gratefully thank Gregory Flaxman for his Introduction. Images 3.1 Public Share, clay collection site at Wiri, Well-Connected Alliance worksite - Wednesday 26 November, 2014. (Photographer Public Share). 3 3.2 Smoko (Part 1), Morning tea break, Performing Mobilities Assembly, Federation Hall, University of Melbourne - Saturday 10 October, 2015. (Photographer Public Share). 3.3 Smoko (Part 2), Well Connected Alliance, Wiri site tearooms - Monday 13 June, 2016. (Photographer Public Share). 5.1 Photographer: Ron Fung. Trisha Brown Dance Company, Melbourne 2014. 5.2 Photographer: Ron Fung. Trisha Brown Dance Company, Melbourne 2014. 5.3 Photographer: Gregory Lorenzetti. Deborah Hay, Learning Curve, Dancehouse, Melbourne, 2014. 5.4 Photographer: Russell Dumas, dir. Dance Exchange. Dancers: Jonathon Sinatra, Nicole Jenvey. 6.1 Andrea Eckersley. Surface event #1. 2014. Oil acrylic enamel gesso and painted wood panel on wall. Dimensions variable. 6.2 Andrea Eckersley. Surface event #3. 2014. Oil, acrylic, gesso, gouache, wax, gloss and sanded back sections on wall. Dimensions variable. 6.3 Andrea Eckersley. Depth is as good as Range. 2014, Acrylic, gesso, gouache and sanded back sections on wall. Dimensions variable. 4 [CH] NOTES ON CO-AUTHORS SUZIE ATTIWILL Suzie Attiwill is Associate Professor, Interior Design and Deputy Dean of learning and teaching in the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Since 1991, her practice has involved exhibition design, curatorial work, writing and teaching. Projects pose questions of interior and interiority in relation to contemporary conditions of living, inhabitation, subjectivity, pedagogy and praxis. Her creative practice research is conducted through a practice of designing with a curatorial inflection attending to arrangements (and rearrangements) of spatial, temporal and material relations. Previous roles include Artistic Director, Craft Victoria; Chair, West Space Artist Led Initiative; Chair, IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association) and Executive Editor, IDEA Journal. TERRI BIRD Terri Bird is an artist, primarily practicing with the collaborative group Open Spatial Workshop, which includes Bianca Hester and Scott Mitchell. They were winners of the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture in 2005, instigated the west Brunswick Sculpture Triennial in 2009, and exhibited Converging in Time at MUMA in 2017. She is a senior lecturer in the Fine Art Department at Monash University, and completed her PhD in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University in 2007. ANDREA ECKERSLEY 5 Andrea Eckersley is a Lecturer in Fashion Design, at RMIT University. She was awarded a PhD in Fine Arts (Painting) from Monash University in 2016. Primarily interested in the way the body interacts with abstract shapes, Andrea’s work investigates the material aspects of painting with a particular focus on its surface. Andrea is the art editor at the Deleuze Studies Journal and exhibits regularly in Australia. ANTONIA PONT Antonia Pont is a poet, yoga practitioner and scholar. After early training in dance and gymnastics, she began studies in yoga and Zen that have been ongoing since 1995. She is Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia. In 2009 she established the Australian school of Vijnana Yoga, where she teaches and practises. PHILIPA ROTHFIELD Philipa Rothfield is Adjunct Professor in Philosophy of the Body and Dance at the University of Southern Denmark. She is also an honorary staff member in Philosophy and Politics at La Trobe University. She has been dancing, on and off, for 30 odd years, occasionally performing, mainly rolling around the studio floor. Her mentors and teachers include Margaret Lasica (dir. Modern Dance Ensemble), Russell Dumas (dir.Dance Exchange) and Alice Cummins (dir. Footfall). She also reviews dance for RealTime magazine and is Creative Advisor for Dancehouse, Australia. She is co-editor, with Thomas F. Defrantz, of Choreography and Corporeality, Relay in Motion, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). JON ROFFE 6 Jon Roffe is Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales. An editor of a number of book on recent and contemporary French philosophy, he is the author of Badiou’s Deleuze (EUP 2012), Abstract Market Theory (Palgrave 2015), Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (EUP 2016), and Lacan Deleuze Badiou (EUP 2015) with AJ Bartlett and Justin Clemens. Jon is also the author of the collection of aphorisms Muttering for the Sake of Stars (surpllus 2012). 7 [CH] PHILOSOPHISING PRACTICE Antonia Pont [EXT]Discipline, when it is not the learning of a skill, is an enraged impatience about people's salutary unwillingness to comply. Adam Phillips, One Way and Another, p. 358 Practice and those labelled practitioners tend to be associated with a certain idea of discipline. Practitioners can be people on whom others (non-practitioners?) regularly project the quality of being-disciplined, thereby activating a raft of assumptions to flesh out popular conceptions of this term. At the same time, practitioners can be people who mistake their own activity for discipline at one level, but who – if they are consistent and serious – might over time find themselves confronted by a methodological or experiential undermining of received ideas about this. I propose that practising can be understood as (constituting) a context in which ideas about intention, activity, action, desire and 'discipline' are tested, unsettled and clarified. This chapter argues that this mode of doing – as an articulate and articulable body of lived knowledge – can be joyously accompanied by Deleuzian conceptual rigour and inventiveness. The latter provides a precise vocabulary for the robust and established methodologies of the former, to which the enthusiastic engagement with Deleuze's oeuvre by arts practitioners in general might attest. 8 But even if one were to indulge some version of the notion that practising involves being very disciplined, what – we could ask – might be uncovered about disipline, as well as its associated notions of intention, acting, agency, and so on, over the course of a sincere and sustained engagement with practising per se via any of its various modes? Hiking, cooking, painting, dancing, singing, listening, reading, prayer, life-drawing, golf, swimming, gardening, movement practices, cleaning, sculpture, meditating, drawing, climbing, sewing, and so on. Phillips' quote confronts us with two readings of what discipline might be. His binary invites us to disambiguate it, to be precise about what we mean in order to clarify what we might have, in the absence of rigour or lucid curiosity, assumed. One way to enter into some of the preoccupations of this volume is to ask, equipped with Phillips' provocation: in what ways would practising be, or not be, about discipline? If indeed it is about discipline, then what ilk of the latter might this be? What does practising, in other words, help us to understand better about actions, intention, agency, capacity and change? I'd propose that practice, as many meet and live it, has unproblematically much to do with the first limb of Phillips' definition. It is – among other things – a skill that one learns. Arguably, however, it has less to do with the second limb of his definition. I will invite the reader to approach practising as having a wholly subtractive relationship with both impatience and compliance. A subtractive relation, if we follow Badiou on the notion, involves a negation that isn't destructive, or