Stephen Zepke & Simon O'Sullivan
The artist hoards his treasures in order to create an instant explosion.
Deleuze and Guattari, "Anti-Oedipus"
Interweaving vs. Relationship
Deleuze, Guattari and contemporary art. Our emphasis falls squarely on "conjunction," on what it might mean and what power it might have. How do we interpret, or even detonate, this "interweaving" now and in the future? The key is to put Deleuze and Guattari's logic of "and" into practice; it is a practice in action, a pragmatism that is not a "local relation from one thing to another and back again" but a "lateral movement that sweeps both away, a torrent with no beginning and no end, which washes its own banks and accelerates in the middle" (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 28). Along this "flood" that erodes its own banks, we cannot imagine that this relationship, this "and", can be illuminated by "philosophy" or "art", at least in their traditional forms. As many of the essays in this book argue, contemporary art is a field that seems to attack the very foundations of this ancient distinction. Indeed, perhaps contemporary art is a (we might say, a future) field of production that ignores the line that Deleuze and Guattari draw between concept and perception.
In this sense, therefore, this book offers a cross-section of Deleuze and Guattari's encounter with contemporary art, an encounter that might illuminate our "nows" with a "twilight light" of an "and" in which they become blurred. Under these conditions, the fluid quality of the "coming" emerges in an eruption of an atemporal and atemporal contemporary...Gathered here is a series of transversal experiments with the "and" between art (in its contemporary and visual forms) and Deleuze-Guattari philosophy. In fact, we do not believe that contemporary art must always be visual art, but perhaps due to the laws of the market, many of our articles are related to the latter. However, other articles in our collection explore the iconography of music, software art, the life of "scenes," or more strictly philosophical "images of thought," whereas those concerned with Guattari's "aesthetic paradigm" clearly include all forms of artistic activity.
We have also endeavored to include authors from outside the Anglo-American world, as well as those who work primarily as artists rather than scholars. In this regard, we hope that this collection of essays will be like a breath of fresh air into the often stale and closed halls of the academy and its rather insular 'discourse'.
But before we get blown away, let's take a breath and get back into our own intellectual graces... Clearly, neither Deleuze nor contemporary art needs the other, and given that Deleuze and Guattari don't talk much about contemporary artists beyond the occasional mention, their relationship isn't particularly obvious. However, the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century might be called "Deleuzian" if associated with the contemporary art world. So why this increasingly common conjunction: Deleuze and contemporary art?
We don't want to be too cynical about the art world's fashion economy and its voracious appetite for ever-novel theoretical "products," but the astonishing proliferation of "rhizomatic," "nomadic," and certainly "relational" artists and artworks that have flooded the art world recently is perhaps symptomatic of a broader shift that is not unique to art but certainly includes the latter as a willing partner. Globalization and the accompanying explosion of information technology have created a ubiquitous internationalism in which local discourses and styles are often reduced to "colors" that justify a seemingly endless stream of biennales, triennials, art fairs, and other such "mega-events." Contemporary art and theory span the globe, but often express only a global homogeneity.
In this sense, both contemporary art and the philosophy of "D&G" face the same problem, which is to avoid what Guattari calls the "propaganda operation" of the (art) world and the "fashions" it constantly creates to sustain itself through propaganda (Guattari 1996: 109). Here, art and philosophy have become sadly content with their "success" in the cultural industrial market. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly condemn this commodification of art: "There is no such thing as commercial art. It is a contradiction in terms" (Deleuze 2006: 288). "The art market corrupts aesthetic creation" (Guattari 1996: 265).
Indeed, as Eric Allez points out here, Guattari's philosophy has been instrumentalized by the contemporary art market in the form of "relational aesthetics." This art "movement" was named by curator and art critic Nicholas Bourriaud and has become ubiquitous. It presents a precise instance of the problem: asserting, in Guattari's name, a contemporary political efficacy for "an art form based on intersubjectivity and with co-existence as its central theme" (Bourriaud 2002: 15). However, Alez asks whether this "intersubjective basis" actually represents a break with contemporary forms of subjectivity, or does it simply produce a "populism of the masses, or rather a populism in which the masses will become (post)aesthetic subjects and "reconsidered" The object of "aesthetic"? In this kind of populism, the aestheticization of dissent will become a post-political form, used to demonstrate a postmodern consensus that affirms its "open" and "relational" qualities, self-affirming its joyful value beyond confrontation and radicalism. In today's "relational" culture, the aesthetics of "co-presence" turn "militancy" into "trivial service" (Bourriaud 2002: 36). What we are dealing with is a contemporary art that aspires to group discussions about what Burialaud calls the "relational structure" of "human interaction" (36, 17).
Against this depressing vision of artistic practice we raise Nietzsche's flag: "Art, nothing else but art! It is the essential means of making life possible, the great seduction of life, the great stimulant of life" (Nietzsche 1967: 452). Contemporary art is a social "probe" that creates micro-political mutations and inhuman emergence in contemporary subjectivity. It is an "existential event" that opens up new possibilities in life. Artists and art, Guattari tells us, offer us the most advanced modes of "chaotic leaps into sense-materials" and thus "constitute the final line along which the original existential question is folded... How will sounds and forms be arranged so that the subjectivity adjacent to them remains in motion, and truly alive?" (Guattari 1995: 90, 133).
politics
The articles in this book answer this question in a variety of ways. Some understand the "life" at stake here in directly political terms. For example, Gustavo Chirolla believes that "the relationship between modern art and the people has changed, and artists no longer regard the people as a 'constitutive force' to appeal to or inspire." The same goes for contemporary art, unless appeals to the people are seen as replicating consensus. In Clemencia Echeverri's video installation Treno (2007), Chirolla hears a "scream" lamenting the "enforced disappearances" taking place in Colombia. A collective voice sang the names of the dead who had been thrown into the Cauca River, and in so doing defiantly summoned the people who were to come.
Likewise, Huey Rolnick enters Sildo Meirelles's installation Red Shift (1967-84), in which "the pervasive and pervasive experience of oppression became visible and audible as a way of survival in an environment where the barbaric acts of state terrorism triggered voluntary blindness, deafness, and aphasic responses." Set against the backdrop of the Brazilian dictatorship (1964-85), Rolnick argues, the work shows how the sensuous "event" of oppression made politics and poetics "absolutely inseparable" in a dense illustration of the precise formation of a single gesture and its incendiary potential. Like Chirolla, Rolnick sees the artistic act as a micropolitical burst of life that escapes what Chirolla (following Agamben) calls the "politics of death." Both Chirolla and Rolnik firmly adhere to the position of the "artist," despite, or even because of, the artist's autonomy, which allows aesthetic "gestures" to enter political "life" and make real changes. In this respect, their work follows Deleuze's assertion that "there is no aesthetic problem other than the integration of art into everyday life" (Deleuze 1994: 293).
But there are other ways to understand this assertion, and we have recently seen the rise of more engaged forms of aesthetic production that turn a revitalized institutional critique toward the global commodification of "art." Gerald Raunig, for example, has argued that the "insertion" of contemporary art into social production processes requires its removal from "art" in the institutional sense. This manipulation allowed artists to develop "aesthetic" strategies of intervention and organization within the radical zz movement. Raunig sees this aesthetic activism in the video works of Marcelo Exposito, which "draw a line of demarcation from traditional documentary practices (historiography, art, and activism), while also being an intervention in those political practices that have abandoned the old oppositional images and the separation of politics and aesthetics." This kind of artistic activism would merge politics and aesthetics in the production of radical sensibilities.
Another way to approach the politics of our "and" is to explore and expand Deleuze and Guattari's own writing on art and aesthetics into the realm of contemporary art. This would extend Deleuze's interest, and one might also say persistence, in color as a medium of aesthetic sign-power. This approach, while affirming the necessity of contemporary art to introduce radical heterogeneity into the machine of subject production, also looks for these ruptures in existing artistic traditions, in the sense of already trying to experiment with an intimate, non-human "outside." Stephen Zepke, for example, explores the work of Anita Fricek as a "critical" practice in the Nietzschean sense that uses painting to "re-evaluate" the institutionalized forces-feelings-that circulate in a "symbolic economy." Zepke argues that this "extends Deleuze's rejection of Kant's transcendental conditions of experience to Greenberg's account of modernist abstraction and develops a sense of painting whose real conditions (as individuation) transcend the 'aesthetic' and become directly 'political'… It would be to 'paint with a hammer', to engage with (institutional) forces so that their value is created through critical evaluation. Here we enter a realm of critical feeling in which it acquires a value high or low, noble or abject". Flicek's paintings, as she puts it, "reboot" our institutional conditions.
aesthetic paradigm
Indeed, we might wonder whether Deleuze and Guattari themselves would argue for the disappearance of "art" into "life," given that their texts are filled with references to painters, writers, musicians, and filmmakers from the Western canon. As we have already mentioned, the lack of direct references to contemporary artistic practice, the strict separation of philosophical concepts from artistic sensations, and their lack of reference in What is Philosophy? The rejection of conceptual art in The Art of Modern Art allows Deleuze and Guattari to be absorbed into contemporary art, seemingly beyond their own intentions. "Concept" is now clearly one of the tools of contemporary art, and indeed art today cannot be called "contemporary" without some kind of theoretical reference, either explicit or implicit. Therefore, in our view, Deleuze and Guattari's insistence on sensation as the ontological domain within which art operates is one of the fundamental "questions" raised by their conjunction with contemporary art.
Nonetheless, Guattari commented in a 1992 interview that "Conceptual art produces the most deterritorialized feeling possible... It does not work with painting, color, sound, but with a material, the concept. But it is not a concept born to create concepts, but a concept that creates feelings" (Guattari 1994: 53), which seems to provide some room for maneuver. Along these lines, which also clearly apply to the way in which "concepts" operate through "emotional industries," we could say that contemporary art constitutes a new "expanded field" that exploits and critiques the sensations produced by the "immaterial labor" of cognition. Maurizio Lazzarato holds this view, arguing that this expanded field offers new political opportunities for an "immanent critique" of contemporary capitalism, since the aesthetic constitution of material and immaterial production is the common basis of art and politics. Lazzarato believes that in this sense, contemporary art "does not mean the disappearance of manual or physical labour, but the constitution of another assemblage in which manual and intellectual labour, 'material' and 'immaterial' labor are all involved in a 'machine' process that can be found not only in the 'actions' of the wider 'public', but also in art institutions, the state, businesses, local collectives, criticism and the media". Lazzarato considers this invented "event" Duchamp's readymade, the moment when the artwork dissolves into the "act of creation." In these machine processes, in which "neither time nor space dominate," it is possible to "question and experiment with the modes of constitution of works of art (and artists) and commodities (and workers) by examining the forces, principles, and configurations that establish and solidify them as values." Contemporary art's use of readymade strategies is a red thread that leads us from "art" to the unconscious of capital.
Many of the essays in this volume attempt to assess the achievements and potential of contemporary art within the "expanded realm" of this "aesthetic paradigm." Yossi Parrikar, for example, pays special attention to the new information machines that increasingly run our lives, focusing on issues of coding in recent software art. Such work, he argues, departs from dominant signifier regimes and constrained economies in two ways. First, "software is not (merely) visual and representational, but operates through a logic of translation" and "what is translated (or transformed) is not the content but the intensity, the information that individuates and shapes agency". Secondly, "Software art is often not even considered 'art' but is defined more as a social and cultural practice that is difficult to pin down". Here, the intangibility and virality of code embody new aesthetic paradigms, a politics of practice that can only operate, as Parrikar points out, through "experiments oriented toward the unexpected and the imperceptible."
In perhaps the most philosophically oriented article in our collection, Johnny Goldin elaborates on this new aesthetic realm in relation to philosophy. Here Hegel, but also Heidegger (among others) is used as a perhaps unexpected resource for reconstructing a non-dialectical, complex Deleuzian aesthetics in which the contemporary - the "here and now" - is crucial. As Goldin points out, Deleuze and Guattari thus "engage in a strange but profound reorientation of 'becoming-x', of philosophy itself", that is, "the algorithmic encoding of zeros and ones, stripped from the usual shell of binary either-or, fashioned into a rhizome-like body without organs on the one hand, and a refrain on the other". Goldin calls this "fractal philosophy" or, following Deleuze, simply "the task of art": an "algorithmic listening, a kind of learning how to 'take notes'". Beyond tracing different philosophical positions, Goldin's implicit thesis is to argue for a certain practice-a "media-art-philosophy"-that is both equal to, and yet resistant to, the contemporary era in which we live.
Scenes and encounters
Many contemporary artists and art theorists use all of Deleuze's writings-whether about art or not-to confront new materials and logics of contemporary practice beyond painting. The writings of Deleuze and Guattari call for this pragmatic construction, and as such they may well be understood as artist-philosophers. Certainly, their conceptual invention, coupled with affirmative and affective intensity, especially in the project "Capitalism and Schizophrenia", make Deleuze and Guattari an attractive "resource" for those working in the field of contemporary art. David Burrows, for example, imaginatively draws on Deleuze's Foucault to explore what is visible and sayable in the "logic of scene" of the art world. Burrows argues that the art scene, and more specifically the recent London art scene, should be understood diagrammatically, that is, as "movements that produce statements of variability and the basis for practices in art and life." For Burrows, a scene was defined not so much by its scale (indeed, a person might be a scene) but by its "durational quality" of "emotional and intense encounters," demonstrating that a non-dialectical avant-garde remained the creative impetus for artistic production.
Robert Garnett focuses on a more specific moment in London in the early 1990s, which he defines as a "buzz" or "atmosphere" of the virtual and the real, a "feeling that permeates the air" that constitutes the intensity of energy that the "scene" contained in its generation. Garnett draws on Deleuze's account of humour, contrasting this emerging phenomenon with the more ironic artistic practices that remain dominant in today's art world. Here, the logic of contemporary art is seen as a joke, a subversive emotional expression rather than an ironic comment. Simon O'Sullivan starts from a specific contemporary art practice, in which he identifies a new attitude, which is no longer the "critique of originality and authenticity" that dominates "postmodernism" (which, as Guattari pointedly puts it, has led to art "reducing itself to the prostitute of the most reactionary neoliberal values" [Guattari 1996: 110]), but rather a revival of "the modern impulse," which O'Sullivan describes as "the desire and creation of the new." Following Deleuze, O'Sullivan discovers a "future-oriented" logic in contemporary art that runs counter to the "linguistic turn" of postmodernism. As he points out: "The field of operation of these practices is the future", where artists play the role of "a kind of prophet, especially a renegade prophet (betraying the established affective/signifier mechanism)". Perhaps these traitorous prophets are offering up the object of their rebellion?
O'Sullivan is not the only one to draw a clear line between postmodern allegorical practices and artistic discourses and more contemporary practices that go beyond critiques of representation. Edgar Schmitz's essay constructs a Deleuzian logic of entrapment around Andreas Slominsky's sculptures, embodying a desire to explore the abstract machinery of art without regard to meaning. Slominski's work captures an "ambient" mode of contemporary art in which, as Schmitz puts it, "the encounter with the object takes place under ambiguous conditions, since any possible critical distance makes way for an engagement in which the form is completely permeable: pitfalls include the elimination of transitions, blurring the boundaries between different realms, so that it is almost impossible to specify the inside and outside in relation to them". Here, Schmitz begins to draw on (as does Garnett) Deleuze's Logic of Meaning to rethink art's operative logic to suggest an art that is superficially and non-discursively humorous.
Technology
It is well known that Guattari and Deleuze were fascinated by machines. Their work continually invokes a technological "plane of immanence" that constitutes the organic and inorganic, material and immaterial, real and virtual realms of our "operating system". In their procedural complexity, these machines have a special connection with aesthetic procedures, in that they construct sensation and are constructed by sensation. "The machine is an affective state," Deleuze and Guattari argue. "It would be a mistake to say that modern machines possess sentience or memory; the machine itself only possesses affective states" (Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 128). Art machines explode into our contemporary "mechanosphere" as creative escape routes emerging from the schizophrenic unconscious of capitalism. In this way, the work of Deleuze and Guattari not only articulates our contemporary cybernetic reality, but also provides an ethical and aesthetic mechanism that might influence the ongoing production of our collective subjectivity. As they write: "All these machines already exist; we are constantly producing them, making them, making them work, because they are desires, desires themselves - albeit requiring artists to realize their autonomous presentation" (Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 137, italics in the original). Some of our contributors refer specifically to this technology of desire, and its artistic operation within the "aesthetic paradigm." Claudia Monini's essay on the composer Anistis Logoseitis offers a precise mapping of the musical machine that draws not only on the work of Deleuze but also of Gilbert Simondon. Monini explores Logosetis's compositional techniques and experimental musical notation as an "aesthetic and implicit ethical-political engagement, [which] consists in the creation of individuated refrains: complex human and non-human assemblages defined not by the sum of the people, symbols or devices involved, but by the simultaneous and sequential interplay of affective forces capable of individuating and forming an ephemeral plurality". Monini believed that artworks like Logosetis were cybernetic and improvisational "music scores" for collective experimentation. In such a "machine," Guattari says, subjectivity remains "truly alive," transcending the form of the subject in a process of emergent subjectification.
Elisabeth von Samsonoff interprets the concepts of machine and artist in a completely different way, presenting us with the image of "becoming a girl" as the "anti-Electra" of post-Freudian feminism. She convincingly argues that the girl "possesses the logos of creation" because she controls the human species' own means of production, "whether we are talking about the imagination of birth or the potential for artistic production." In this sense, Girl makes use of a unique schizophrenic technology consisting of what von Samsonov calls "Daedalus-like objects"; "sculptural things with the quality of a living machine". Of particular interest here are the girl's "gadgets," her mobile phone, laptop, and other devices, which express and construct (they "conceive," in von Samsonoff's vocabulary) "a preoedipal schizophrenic quadrant." Von Samsonov believes that "online" is "the girl's production logo", which is "completely consistent with the ideals of contemporary art".
Barbara Bolt offers a different perspective on issues of technology and artistic production. Bolt is a painter, or rather she is part of a "painting machine", as Deleuze and Guattari say, "the mechanic is the most deterritorialized part" (Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 135). In this sense, Bolt describes his practice as a "materialist philosophy of painting, [which] no longer places the artist at the center, as someone who exhibits technical mastery in handling material means, but instead attributes a special status to matter". She believes that through color and the materiality of its medium, "art is able to wrest perception from perception and emotion from emotion." In her view, the flowing liquid paint in painting is only the end point of her practice, which is an inorganic movement, a "performance" that constitutes a "complex combination of forces" that ultimately produces a "real life" that transcends representation.
Finally, in perhaps the most experimental combination of our series, artists Neil Chapman and Ola Starr offer us a poetic fiction that dramatizes a number of Deleuzean concepts brought "alive" by the conceptual characters they create. Chapman and Starr's work brings together art and philosophy, sensation and concept, in a pragmatic experiment that calls out for a new earth and new people. No other essay in this collection captures so well the unsettling, anachronistic yet abstract beauty of true crossover creation. In this way, Chapman and Starr highlight the heterogeneity of the world and the need to actively construct it. They offer us a kind of schizophrenic art, a poetic-delirium-separation-union: "BLOODCRYSTALPOLLENSTAR," in which our "and" ends up becoming a "center of variation."
The article was translated in "Deleuze and Contemporary Art"
All chapters in the book will be translated in the future
（ Deleuze and Contemporary Art ）
If you need the English version, you can ask the captain to get it.