Exploring the Curatorial as Creative Act Part II: The Artist as Found System Edith Doove transtechnology research openaccess papers | i Executive Editor Prof. dr Michael Punt Editors-in-Chief Dr Martha Blassnigg Dr Hannah Drayson Managing Editors Amanda Egbe Martyn Woodward Associate Editors Rita Cachão Edith Doove Joanna Griffin Claudy Op den Kamp Jacqui Knight Marcio Rocha Production and Design Amanda Egbe, Martyn Woodward Please contact the original authors and /or copyright holders for permission to reproduce these materials. Transtechnology Research • Reader 2012/13 Plymouth University Portland Square, Drake Circus Plymouth PL4 8AA United Kingdom © 2013 Transtechnology Research ISBN 978-0-9538332-3-8 ii | Doove•TheArtistasFoundSystem Exploring the Curatorial as Creative Act Part II: The Artist as Found System Edith Doove [email protected] Abstract This paper is intended as a thought experiment around the idea of the artist as found system, open-ended and in constant becoming, as an alternative and more flexible solution for the usual art historic conceptualizing of artists. Inspired by Daumal’s Mount Analogue and the island of Mandelbrot it makes use of a pataphysical, pragmatist approach, exploring the realm between fiction and reality, and tries to apply Duchamp’s infra-mince in order to develop a system(atic) thinking about the artist(ic). The individual always interests me, more than possible.” (2008, p. 17) However porous these movements which simply serve to group to- frameworks may be, what they cannot do, and gether young people.(Marcel Duchamp)1 in a way also refuse to do, is to deal with the overlap, the transit zone, the unpredictable The Artist and its frameworks and unknowable. The infinitesimal smallness of this zone recalls Duchamp’s ‘infra-mince’, a Without wanting to dismiss the whole of art concept that he could only describe through history, it has a tendency to confine art and art- examples or equivalences, all of which were in- ists in neat, grid-like movements. Although this hibited by a certain friction, as in, for example, was initially helpful in describing the history of the marriage between breath and smoke when art when the discipline itself first emerged, one smoking, the warmth of a chair that is about to can question whether today such historic labels be left, but also just “the possible” (Duchamp, as ‘expressionism’ or ‘conceptual art’, to name 1999, p. 10). It is this kind of openness to pos- just two, really give an accurate view of real- sible and maybe unusual solutions that this ity or whether they mainly serve various other paper explores. means, such as nationalism or marketing. Although relatively recent developments in The act of confining, boxing in, ‘gridding’ the world of art studies seem to take a more in, is typically used when we are confronted open approach, the focus stays mainly on the with something wild, ungraspable, that we artefact, which is still framed, albeit now in want to contain, understand and research. As wider contexts. This becomes especially prob- Grosz (2008, p. 11) indicates, this seems to lematic when discussing the artist, the one that be intrinsic to the arts: “The emergence of the makes art, the producer, who is inadvertently ‘frame’ is the condition of all the arts and is put into boxes where she does not necessarily the particular contribution of architecture to belong. In order to overcome this problem, the taming of the virtual, the territorialisation this paper looks at the possibility of seeing art- of the uncontrollable forces of the earth.” She ists as ‘found systems’, taking the island as a continues: “Framing is how chaos becomes ter- metaphor, connecting it to the role islands play ritory. Framing is the means by which objects in the work of Benoît Mandelbrot, how this are delimited, qualities unleashed and art made can be connected with art and ‘pataphysics’ (a | 1 transtechnology research openaccess papers 2013 science of imaginary solutions in which every- islands and found systems might seem far- thing is equivalent), and finally how out of all fetched, it is well worth starting this investi- this we can distil the idea of the found system gation with an exploration of the latter two. as a way to deal with the artist(ic). This could Quite early on in the development of his potentially contribute to the field of art stud- fractal landscapes, Mandelbrot makes the ies, especially where it fails, for the time being, somewhat surprising connection between to address the issue of the individual, contem- these (and their mountainous landscapes) and porary and lesser-known artist. the science-fiction world of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896: 2012), thus al- A way of approaching this issue is through cy- luding to a connection between the fictitious bernetics, the study of systems, that emerged and the real. As Samuel (2012, p. 24) points in the 1940s in the work of Norbert Wiener, out, “(t)he fictional Dr. Moreau had tried to amongst others. Much scholarly work has al- create a new world with man-animal hybrids, ready been done on the connection between and it was for similar purposes that Dr. Man- so-called ‘second-order’ cybernetics and art, delbrot was using those mathematical hybrids especially in the 1960s. Such work, however, from the nineteenth century”.2 With the help has tended to comprise a history of cybernetic of his fractals, Mandelbrot was indeed capable art, focusing on objects and installations made of creating completely plausible islands, just as from a cybernetic point of view (Shanken, ‘monstrous’ as the nineteenth century math- 2002, pp. 255-277). Although there is much in ematician and philosopher of science Jules this approach that moves the focus away from Henri Poincaré had indicated the new math- the object and towards process, the emphasis ematical functions to be (Samuel, 2012, p. 24). is still largely on the art produced and less on This was mainly due to the fact that an island the artist herself. In looking at the possibility of is, so to speak, a fairly simple system, as is de- the artist as a found system, Stafford Beer’s no- scribed below. tion of an “exceedingly complex system” that is “not fully knowable or adequately predictable” Daumal (1952: 2010, p. 32), in his pataphysi- seems to be of better use (cited in Pickering, cal, unfinished novel Mount Analogue, an ac- 2010, pp. 222-223). According to Beer, these count of a voyage to an imaginary island, says: systems can only have probabilistic forms. As “For a mountain to play the role of Mount examples he gives the economy, the brain and Analogue, its summit must be inaccessible, but the company, a combination of which seems its base accessible to human beings as nature to fit the concept of the artist excellently. Con- made them. It must be unique and it must ex- necting systems theory with art history is in ist geographically. The gateway to the invisible itself not new. For instance, Halsall (2008), in- must be visible.” In Wells’s book, the island is fluenced by the work of Luhmann (2000), has clearly host to the invisible, or the preferably extensively explored this connection. Halsall not-to-be-seen, the monstrous. And possibly also makes use of the concept of the complex that was also one of the factors that Mandel- system in order to make a connection to the art brot alluded to as his fractals were/are both vis- world. As in the world of art studies, however, ible and invisible. there is no room for the artist, only for the art- work, with the focus on its merits as a means of As with many islands that harbour some un- communication.1 fathomable secret, Wells’s island, just like Daumal’s, is situated somewhere in the Pacific. On the importance of islands as found systems Thus, although it is fictitious, it exists geo- Although the connection between artists, graphically. 2 | Doove•TheArtistasFoundSystem and writers associated with the Symbolists and The island, which was of irregular outline and hence with Jarry’s life in Paris”, and among lay low upon the wide sea, had a total area, I “(t)hese miraculous lands, to be found amid suppose, of seven or eight square miles. It was the streets of the capital” was, for instance, the volcanic in origin, and was now fringed on Isle of Bara, a reference to the Rue Bara, the ad- three sides by coral reefs. Some fumaroles to dress of Jarry’s friend Gaston Danville in Paris the northward, and a hot spring, were the only (Brotchie, 2011, p. 227). Faustroll’s collection vestiges of the forces that had long since origi- of books, not surprisingly, contained The Od- nated it. Now and then a faint quiver of earth- yssey and Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Centre of quake would be sensible, and sometimes the the Earth (the entrance to which is famously ascent of the spire of smoke would be rendered located on Iceland). Amongst the “miraculous tumultuous by gusts of steam. But that was all lands” that the Faustroll expedition visits are (Wells, 1896: 2012, p. 80).3 various islands: the Amorphous Isle, the Fra- grant Isle, the Isle of Ptyx, the Isle of Her, As for Daumal’s island, this seems to have en- the Isle of Cyril and the Ringing Isle. At the tered reality from the fictional and back again, beginning of the voyage, Faustroll indicates, with the recent find and subsequent ‘undis- although maybe not very favourably for the covery’ of the so-called ‘Google’s Phantom general proposition of this paper, that… Island’, a non-existent island that somehow slipped into Google maps, images of which … this dead body is not only an island but have more than a close resemblance to some a man ….