Gregory Minissale
Needless to say, an artwork can contract and expand, speed up or slacken molecular multiplicities of any kind whatsoever, and in its own peculiar way. And single artworks can loosely hang together in groups creating a general relativity. The following artworks can be combined or distributed in any fashion.
Marcus Harvey: Molecularizing Black Holes
Let us imagine that affects are pre-individual, subpersonal waves of intensity which, when snagged by a self-reflecting organism, contract into identifiable emotional strata that âpossessâ me or you as we âpossessâ them, that is, through the identification of emotions we acquire identitiesâa pincer movement of possession and being possessed.
Is it possible to go beyond possessions?
Marcus Harveyâs Myra Hindley, 1995, depicts Myra Hindley, the British serial child killer, and is a huge portrait based on her criminal mug shot. It has been described as âsickâ and âdisgustingâ with various protests staged against its display at the Royal Academy in London, and the painting itself was vandalised. Many thought the painting was headline-grabbing and exploitative, and some even thought that the painting glorified or glamorised the subject. From a distance, one is struck by its huge starkness, which seems confrontational. Hindleyâs enormous âblack holeâ eyes loom over the gallery space in a hard, cold, fixed stare, creating somewhat of a chill. Closer up, however, the picture becomes pixelated with a mottled, molecularised effect and, even closer, one begins to recognise that the component parts of the painting are childrenâs handsâor hand printsâthe kind one would see in childrenâs paintings in nurseries. In fact, they were made with a plaster cast of a childâs hand, one of them stamping the black pupil of the eye, so that it appears that the hand is reflected on the pupil suggesting the Hindley has a childâs hand in sight. The eye/hand contrast creates an impact where the murdererâs gaze seems focussed, but at the same time blinded by the hand. The two regimes, hand, face create a continuous convulsion.
Apprehension, unease, anger, are emotions premised on the first encounter with the image that vary over the course of the encounter with the artwork. Yet even these already quite complex emotions begin to disaggregate when more information is gleaned from the image. Just as a distanced view of the image brings together its component parts, inviting strong emotional coherence, the close-up view begins to disintegrate the easy identification of both the subject matter and any unitary emotions attached to it.
Some viewers walked away with bitterness (if press reports on the subject are to be believed), either partly to do with closeness and familiarity with the details of Hindleyâs role in the murders (some viewers were even amongst victimsâ families), or to do with a general contempt in the British media for contemporary art. The sight of the little handprints in Marcus Harveyâs painting, at least for some, wield a significant power. They help to flatten attention spikes of alarm and disgust into waves of sadness. For the childrenâs handprints signal the presence of the dead children, and the effect is strangely quietening. The close-up view of childrenâs hands, stubbornly accusing, are in conflict with the looming presence of Myra Hindley. Each handprint is a small yet powerful presence (each one a punctum, as Barthes would have it). There is a kind of binocular rivalry, more accurately, a cognitive-emotional rivalryâa strife in the work of art that exists between the fragmented details of the handprints and the optical mixture of the Moors Murderer. At the same time, there is an uneasy alliance where the individual identity of each handprint seems in danger of being lost in the overcrowding of details. Each handprint appears as a kind of document, an indelible presence which points to the simple fact that Harveyâs painting is not a monument to Myra Hindley but to her victims.
Harveyâs work questions the obvious, the molar, inviting us to reflect on our initial emotional identification, and with the fragmentation of the image on closer inspection, the initial, strong emotional response fragments. The unstable visual effect is caused by the contracted molar image: two black hole eyes, versus the expanded molecular image of little fluttering hands. This unstable duration is folded into an unstable emotional duration: the strong emotion/black hole of trauma, versus molecularised affect, the fluttering of a line of flight.
This allows one to avoid the notion that the correct way to read the painting is by relying on habitual, molar image identification (by which we gauge our own identities). We do not have to follow grief in a circular way as an emotional state, en abyme, when it is clear that the artist is able to create fluctuations in a magnetic field that flow through such blockages and fixed spatial coordinates. The encounter with the image is intensively spatial, psychological, material, affective and temporal in a way we can say is a duration of a multiplicity, the duration and flow of matter no longer witnessed through the fixed point of a single observer but through many observers and observed.
The switch from molar view of the face of the killer, which fixes us as she is fixed, to the vibrant molecularisation of this singular faciality (face-ism/fasces/fascism) and thence into monism=pluralismâthis is none other than switching from Bohrâs waves and thence to particles: they are both different aspects of the real:
[I]f we consider the plane of consistency we note that the most disparate of things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter… There is no âlikeâ here, we are not saying âlike an electron,â âlike an interaction,â etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual organites, authentic sign sequences. Itâs just that they have been uprooted from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialized, and that is what makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency possible. A silent dance (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 69)
Keep in mind the troubled gestalt of particles and waves, molecular and molar, a duration in which visual, material, spatial and temporal flows fluctuate as a field of one=many.
Mona Hatoum: Particles-Signs
Mona Hatoumâs Hanging Garden consists of bags of soil in jute sacks, loose collections of particles of earth, a flow of matter one can follow to the molecular. The soil is put into sandbags usually employed for warfare or civil disobedience. The artist intended for the work to reference the war in Iraq:
This work can be seen as an oblique reference to the continued state of war in Iraq. Sand bags are a very familiar site in the Middle-East. They are supposed to be temporary structures used in times of war. The implication here is that they have been around for so long that plants started taking root in them. It is a poetic piece. There is something hopeful about life sprouting in the most inhospitable environment.â Correspondence with the artist, 18/04/2012.
Through the bags, grasses grow. There is an eerie sense that the place has been abandoned and lost in time or that nature is reclaiming the soil in the present and future. There is a sense of arrested time, things âhangingâ in the balance, the âthickness of timeâ which is physis or entropy, part of the artworkâs molecular processes. Hanging Garden immediately brings to mind army checkpoints designed to halt the flow of peoples, cultures, goods and time by producing a blockage, a territory; it is molar and stratified, disrupting a nomadic smooth space. But one can listen to, intuit the grasses: they pull apart the strata, separate the soil particles and convert its nutrients into extension and duration. At the same time, a smooth, green plane of molecular chlorophyll photosynthesizes folding photons into life.
The rhizome-grasses photosynthesize as durations breaking through territorialization. The grass growing is part of non-human time, a play of primitive forces in which we all take part. Hatoum arranges a three-dimensional space and a material facticity: earth and grass, making the artwork a continuous variation, the sandbags create a stratified territory we can walk in or around, a freedom denied to others. And while it is a territorial marker there is a growth that passes through it to deny its authority. The grass seems to defy the territories we artificially carve up between us and them, and human and non-human. It is a kind of multiplicity that brings together past, present and future and also memory, pain, sober realism. It is a kind of keeping of accounts that are uncountable, while the grasses point in all directions to the future.
The grasses pushing through the sandbags reflect and absorb light energy in the world, the sandbags create shadows, deflect and absorb light, and both together the grid of the sandbags and the irregular growth of the grasses model wavelengths and deflections of light with their various surfaces. This gridded pattern of light energy is received through my eye into my body, my brain. Photoreceptors here turn these wavelengths of light energy into electrical signals and aggregates of sensation. These diffracted sensations are further processed by perceptions, and concepts, further contractions of the flow of matter. Reading this explanation requires that we create connections between functions, sensations and concepts, another galaxy. Words on a page also play with the light. The distribution of the sensible, formal and relational aggregates involved in encountering Hanging Garden is complex, especially because this multiplicity of durations takes time, is time-as-heterogenesis. My own aging is a flow and part of the encounter with the artwork. And reasoning takes time, sensations flow as time, light passes over the artwork and seems to change its configurations. These various flows are material changes, aggregates, dissipations, resistances against larger contexts of force at the imperceptible level of particle physics. Â The molecular, then, is both technical and general, the material universe of imperceptible attractions and repulsions which science attempts to count but which for art are qualitative events that cannot be measured. What is the molecular configuration of justice? And will it ever happen again in the same light?
Hatoumâs Hanging Garden is monism=pluralism, a thing that is segmented and stratified and yet which succeeds in becoming a duration and flow through the strata turning the inanimate earth into the animate world, a strife the artwork delays so that the dualism no longer seems to hold. The âlarger pictureâ, the coarse-grained picture is âgrowthâ; âflowâ, âphysisâ as a duration, which is also shared by the viewer who is not separate from such energy, growth and dynamism. The image of the wall suggests arrested development and territory, yet the persistence of the rhizome grasses breaks down worldly affairs dominated by the segmentation of the earth with the promise of time and fecundity. This is not just a metaphor but identifies very real tendencies and territories actualised by the art object or rather, âslackenedâ by the artwork for the duration of creative energies to occur. âEnergy is an aestheticâ Bachelard says.
There is something deeper here: the creative energies of growth of the grasses that work through the obstacles of the intellectual world is not just a metaphor for the creative energy that allows intuition to arise in the viewer. Both kinds of creative energy are the same in one respect: the growth and nourishment of the grass is survival and the creative intuition of artwork for the viewer is personal growth, expansion of horizons and survival (even in the rather particular form of neural plasticity). The artwork feeds the conatus shared with the artist, a conatus intricately wound up with affect beyond mere subjectification. In âloweringâ herself to the ground, to the earth, to imagine the slowing down of time measured by the growth of the grasses, the viewer is lowering the intellect and raising up intuition, an intuition that follows the flow of matter.
The grasses conserve energy, sensorimotor energy is expended walking around it, and energy is conserved as we are forced to wait when viewing the artwork as a barrier or wall, we can become immobile, like plants. We can realise our own materiality differently, a stillness arises, or perhaps, even, our own bodies appear foreign to us as we shed the customary anthropocentric and subjective frames by which we understand objects around us. This duration is a thickening of time, the time it takes for things to grow from the inorganic to the organic, waiting and being patient; understanding time allocentrically is a kind of warping of time. This duration is a molecularisation of time into many durations and micro-movements.
Jan Fabre: Swarming Molecules
In 2004 the artist Jan Fabre decorated the ceiling of the Royal Palace in Brussels with a sculpture in the shape of a chandelier. Entitled, Heaven of Delight, it was made out of one million six hundred thousand jewel-scarab wing cases. A million swarming insects seem to gravitate to a single point, a source of light, a vortex of heliotropic desire shimmering in green lustre, reviving the myth of the scarab beetle, Scarabaeus sacer, sacred in the eyes of the ancient Egyptians. The head of Scarabaeus sacer has an array of six projections, resembling rays. It collects particles of soil and mud, dung and straw to make dung balls, rolling them across the ground; the Egyptians imagined the sun was rolled across the sky by a cosmic scarab beetle. The balls are buried underground and lays an egg in it which feeds on the ball. In this artwork all we are left with are the empty shells of the scarab beetles, each a moment of life, together a species, together a duration of a multiplicity. The work suggests growth, physis and rebirth through art, a swarming creativity and vitalism that rises above the hollow shell of the single organism and its entropy.
Entomology (from the Greek entomos, âthat which is cut in pieces or engraved/segmentedâ) already suggests the composite, machine like elements of the body of the insect. The discipline of entomology segments by measuring or naming its component parts, and this is part of a mechanical view of the natural world, that its vital flows and flexible, organic structures can be divided and subdivided, stratified and displayed into smaller component parts, named and given their place in a hierarchical order of the cosmos. But Fabreâs molecular swarming suggests a heterogenesis that threatens to destabilise the exactions of (âRoyalâ) mechanical science.
Fabreâs desire seems to be to build up colonies-signs. The Greek analogue (ana=up and logue=word), suggests raising up to abstract levels, to think analogically, anagogically; but science works to dissect, separate and to grind down, the Greek is katalogue (kata=down logue=word), to catalogue individual parts and to keep account of concrete things, without the expenditure (dĂ©pense) or loss that art and desire can bring into a general economy, according to Bataille.
Fabre literally raises up the insects into larger wholes, on ceilings, on chandeliers and on a large/minute scale depending on the focus, and this is important: the focus of a macro-animal or a micro-insect. How far is the hinge back and forth from detail to general concept human, I wonder. They swarm around a magnetic pole, condensing energy as mass, but importantly, the artwork also suggests that insects can take a line of flight molecularising the molar chandelier as object, art, mass grave spreading particles into the atmosphere, expanding, spatialising the power of the imagination.
Deleuze and Guattari write that from molecular to molar and back again,
there is no fixed order, and one stratum can serve directly as a substratum for another without the intermediaries one would expect there to be from the standpoint of stages and degrees (for example, microphysical sectors can serve as an immediate substratum for organic phenomena). Or the apparent order can be reversed, with cultural or technical phenomena providing a fertile soil, a good soup, for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even particles. The industrial age defined as the age of insects (A Thousand Plateaus, 69).
The artwork, made of a million beetlesâ bodies, is a machinic assemblage transforming matter into a swarming, buzzing cacophony of one=many. Again, it is Deleuze and Guattari who take another leap forward into the domain of music:
[T]he reign of birds seems to have been replaced by the age of insects, with its much more molecular vibrations, chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching, and scraping. Birds are vocal, but insects are instrumental: drums and violins, guitars and cymbals. A becoming-insect has replaced becoming-bird, or forms a block with it. The insect is closer, better able to make audible the truth that all becomings are molecularâŠThe molecular has the capacity to make the elementary communicate with the cosmic: precisely because it effects a dissolution of form that connects the most diverse longitudes and latitudes, the most varied speeds and slownesses, which guarantees a continuum by stretching variation far beyond its formal limits. Rediscover Mozart, and that the âthemeâ was a variation from the start. Varese explains that the sound molecule (the block) separates into elements arranged in different ways according to variable relations of speed, but also into so many waves or flows of a sonic energy irradiating the entire universe, a headlong line of flight. That is how he populated the Gobi desert with insects and stars constituting a becoming-music of the world, or a diagonal for a cosmos (A Thousand Plateaus, 308-309).
Focusing on the molecular in this passage, I note that it suggests the capacity to âmake the elementary communicate with the cosmic: precisely because it effects a dissolution of form that connects the most diverse longitudes and latitudes, the most varied speeds and slownesses.â Fabreâs work also dissolves form, each individual beetle shell is screwed or rotated into the larger rhythms of the chandelier, while the chandelier dissolves into moments of death. Whether in the direction of entropy or creation, one or many, the artwork brings together a fluctuating field. In coming together âaround the lightâ, not only do we imagine the time it takes for insects to settle and cluster, for their wings to shed all uncountable vibrations lying still, we also glimpse a sense of their gathering rapidity and their erratic flight becoming music, mythical time, the time of something countless again, the time it takes to count the many which is not enough. There is a surplus, something does not compute in this mechanical world of elementary forces, mathematics and infinity: the sound of the violins is intricately bitter-sweet.
Gonzalez-Torres: Waves and Particles of Desire
The artist Gonzalez-Torres created a pile of sweets the same weight as his lover Ross who had died of AIDS. It was a kind of portrait, embodiment, monument, channeling of desire, a general field of affect contracted into an emotional spasm in one corner of the gallery. Visitors are invited to take away a sweet; the heap reduces, the sweets circulate in the world; some sweets are undoubtedly eaten where they pass into wider systems of energy, ecological systems, fuelling desire, memory, delaying death, and some sweets are undoubtedly redistributed as gifts or preserved as mementoes, passed into a whole network of different speeds, slownesses and relations. In all strata there is exchange, expenditure, loss and dispersal. And the sweets are replaced at the end of the day to begin the cycle again. This is just one cycle in one place. Imagine many cycles in many different places (a recent curatorial innovation at Monash University, Reinventing the Wheel, used Baciâkisses). This work has been staged many times with differing weights, depending on whether the work combines the artistâs own weight with his loverâs, an aggregate or conatus that gains affective power knowing that the artist himself passed away only a few years after Ross. The work endures as a multiplicity of gatherings and dispersals swarming into the networks and relations of many circulatory systems in the world. It is a material time of affect expanding outwards in waves and contracting inwards into emotions and identities back into a general economy, riddled with unaccountable acts of love.
Some sections on Mona Hatoum and Marcus Harvey are adapted from Gregory Minissale, The Psychology of Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Gregory Minissale is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at the University of Auckland.