After The Passions: Object Oriented Ontology, Art and Art-writing PRUE GIBSON DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES 2014 Originality Statement I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged. Signed: Dated: i Acknowledgements My supervisor Professor Stephen Muecke welcomed me into academic life and has supported me ever since. He introduced me to Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology and slowed my usual cracking pace to a more considered and cautious speed. Each time I felt I had discovered something new about writing, I realised Stephen had led me there. I have often tried to emulate his mentoring method for my own students: without judgement, enthusiastic and twinkle-eyed. Through the second half of the thesis process, my co-supervisor Professor Edward Scheer jumped in and demanded evidence, structured argument and accountability. This was the perfect timing for a rigorous edit. Thanks to you both, for evermore. UNSW Senior Lecturers Michelle Langford and Sigi Jottkandt, respectively, offered me mentorship, and a generous and full-length thesis reading with exceptional feedback, when I was in dire need of their support. Thank you so much for such spirited collegiality. A wider thanks to UNSW for giving me a Dean’s Leadership Award in Creative and Performing Arts and for offering me the Teaching Fellowship in Creative Writing during the final year of my studies. This Fellowship gave me the confidence and support to believe I was in the right place, producing the right project. Thanks to my fellow UNSW researchers Amy Ireland and Baylee Brits for the Aesthetics After Finitude reading group, for multiple conversations about Speculative Realism, for shared conference panel sessions and for great friendship. Thank you to Amy, Baylee and my two supervisors for the chance to co-organise the Xhums conference, Aesthetics After Finitude 2015, which has been a great opportunity to marry the fields of academia with art. Thanks to the journals MC, Antennae and Evental Aesthetics for peer-reviewing and accepting four chapters of my thesis, as journal articles. And thank you so much to the artists I was able to talk to and whose work I was able to re-purpose into fiction for this thesis: David Eastwood, Janet Laurence, Elena Knox, Petra Gemeinboeck, Jacque Drinkall, Rochelle Haley, Monika Behrens and Sam Leach, and to the remaining artists who permitted me to publish their images. I am grateful to these artists for their shared interest in Speculative Realism, trans-species life and art. So many conversations and so much shared research. Thanks finally to my family. I dedicate this manuscript to my mother, in memory of my late father. ii The research and writing of this thesis has inadvertently led me to my next field of research: plants and bio-art. Robotany, plant intelligence, floral aesthetics of cure. So, the complex problems and paradoxes, enacted in this thesis, are informing future work. I only introduce this next research topic because it would never have manifested for me, as a funded project, without the chance to fully investigate OOO and SR concepts and art. I am hugely appreciative of the continued support I have been given by UNSW to complete the research and writing of this PhD. iii Contents INTRODUCTION ............................ 1 CHAPTER 2: The Equality of the Run ............ 46 CHAPTER 3: Art Theory/fiction as Hyperobject ..... 70 CHAPTER 4: Telepathy: Knowledge Zero ......... 97 CHAPTER 5: Magnetic Materiality ............. 115 CHAPTER 6: The Politics of Sorcery . 140 CHAPTER 7: The Disappearance .............. 164 CHAPTER 8: Machinic Interaction and Robot Love .186 CONCLUSION ........................... 201 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................... 206 iv INTRODUCTION ABSTRACT This thesis is located in a cross-over domain between art writing and art theory. Writing about art is a professional activity in which ‘theory’ can be more or less explicit, but significantly present. The specific thread of contemporary theory embraced is that of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), or Speculative Realism (SR), from which a number of principles are elaborated, and activated, in the relationship between writing and theory that the thesis enacts. This relationship is experimental, meaning the aim is to energise and repurpose art writing by sampling the theory. The thesis does not seek to be exhaustively theoretical, nor to make a contribution to the body of theory as such. Rather, the aim is to test certain of the theory’s propositions by writing with significant works of contemporary art, particularly focusing on video and performance work. These artworks are selected, firstly, because they resonate with the body of theory. The second aim is to match or meet some trans-disciplinary developments in art with a corresponding development in art writing. This necessarily takes the shape of generic experimentation with form: fictionalisation (or fictioning), speculation and experiential fabulation. The wish is less to renew art writing for its own sake, and more to respond respectfully and imaginatively to the singularity of the object, whilst embracing the esoteric and speculative, the transmissive and machinic. To date, the theoretical field of OOO has only had a light impact on the art world. This thesis takes the relationship further and investigates whether key OOO concepts are helpful in engaging directly with the forceful and essential allure of contemporary art-things. At the cross- point of art writing and theory, it speculates on the mediatory role of art writing as one of many mediations among objects. The wager is that the sustained practice of an object-oriented art writing is the necessary basis for what some are calling Speculative Aesthetics. PRELUDE The title, After the Passions, refers to modes of art writing that consider what might be outside a solely human experience. If ‘the passions’ are the gasps of transcendent awe, once the pipe organ starts, among the cathedral congregation, then this thesis argues for a turn away from an anthropocentric quasi-religious view, towards a more pluralised experience of contemporary art—one that allows an art writer’s imagination to bloom. Introduction . 1 The discourse of a recent lecture by OOO theorist and Professor at the American University in Cairo, Graham Harman, hinged on the dismantling of conventional structures of human-centred philosophical hierarchy.1 Harman’s OOO theory focuses on everything (whether a chair, a wish, a split atom or a lament) as objects that all exist without privileging human consciousness of them and irrespective of human comprehension. I realised that this decentralisation of the subject would have a deeply perplexing effect on aesthetics. I suspected that the artists and art viewers, sitting alongside me in the audience, must be getting the cold sweats, desperate for a fix of orderly formalist criticism and a well-constructed aggregate of systematic aesthetic criteria, which we’ve been taught or conditioned to mobilise whenever we consider an aesthetic thing. After all, art viewers are mostly humans who love socio- political structure. However, in fact, OOO does not eschew structure or formalism or aggregated systems. Even structures and systems are, inevitably, things, which have equal relevance in a flat ontology. The attraction of Harman’s OOO is that it supports my discussion of art experiences as a mode of destabilising dominant forms of aesthetics, both subjective and hierarchical. The improbable, the uncertain, the non- concrete and stoic irreducibility are qualities I have gleaned from OOO to aid my art writing practice. My question is: might there exist an art experience that is more than the human experience of a non-human thing, which is also an aesthetic event that is ontologically plural, as opposed to a restrictive, subjective viewer- artwork dualism? This would be an aggregate of living agents, even of those things that are not alive. This question refers to finding a way to apply OOO concepts to an art writing form that might be infused with both theory and fiction. It is a form that complies with a move away from a human-centred focus alone, by drawing on the esoteric and the imaginary. Well, there is definitely something about Sydney’s Carriageworks, a major performing art venue, that sings an atheistic hymn to OOO and to strange, active forms of existence. For a start, there is always, always, always, a gentle breeze when you descend the stairs from Wilson Street, Eveleigh. What most people don’t know is that it’s caused by the exhaling breath of a long caterpillar form. Modulated 1 At a University of Western Sydney conference on 3 December 2013, Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy, Harman spoke of the need to move away from an anthropomorphic and subjectivist approach to philosophy. He asserted that Object Oriented Ontology predates Speculative Realism by more than a decade. Introduction . 2 sections of industrial brickwork span out to the right, shuddering and twitching in the baking sun. This is an old slug, an ancient beast, its manky exhalations smell of rusty iron. Built in the late 1880s, it may have emerged from the molten pits of industrial building materials during that decade, but I feel sure it must have dwelt far below, long before the beginning of the Anthropocene,2 in a rocky sandstone place where the Potkooroks lived and perhaps still do.3 The old railway workshop precinct still has the exposed metal tracks visible in the concrete interior and exterior floor areas.