The Nomad Worm or The Nomadological Turn in Contemporary Art
This is a treatise on nomadology. Yet, often more than this it is a treatise on
the rhizomatic influence Gilles Deleuze has had on contemporary art and – on a
much wider scale – Western culture in general.
It is only reasonable, then, that its structure should be nomadic in
nature, fashioned as such more as a tool to illustrate this often problematic
Deleuzian concept than as a homage to A
Thousand Plateaus[1],
his and Felix Guattari’s magnum opus.
Ours is an age when linearity is a matter of both personal
interpretation and artist’s prerogative: from meta referentiality, disruptions
in a given narrative order, prosopopoeia or a more time-honoured allegory. During the course of this dissertation I
shall be using many of these devices, yet the most notable will be prosopopoeia
in the form of Harry Irene, a fictitious art critic who will on occasion
resemble Clement Greenberg, will sometimes reflect the mannerisms of John
Berger or even unashamedly ape Brian Sewell.
Never affected with malice, this gestalt interpretation merely serves to
reflect on the typically modernist attitude which was the hallmark of
mid-Twentieth Century criticism. We can imagine pince nez, and furnish Irene
with them accordingly. Yet, If Irene is
a virtual gestalt of Twentieth Century art criticism, then this of little
significance. Art critics have always
necessarily been spectres at the feast of invention: they help to mould style
by trimming away excess, adding (sometimes) rich commentary and narrative to
artworks and exponentially increasing the culturally affective clout of
same. Conversely, their function can
also serve to stifle and stunt cultural growth.
Perhaps one can say that the text can also be read as an affectionate
lampooning of that profession, although one must therefore remember at all
times that this would merely be subtext.
A lighthearted subtext, certainly, but subtext all the same.
As an artist I have constantly been
nomadic in my practice: this goes hand-in-hand with a mind which is constantly
flitting from one concept to the next, considering the commonalities which
unite otherwise disparate issues and allowing one sole constant throughout my
body of work – myself. From themes such
as father/son relationships, mental health, hauntology, Althusser’s interpellation,
cinema, memory, identity and even the work of Deleuze himself, I have never
remained lingering on any one topic for long, nor has the materiality of the
work remained static. When a viewer once
commented that my work consisted of “everything but the kitchen sink,” I
briefly entertained the idea of sourcing that very item and, early on in my
career when lamenting my own lack of style or idiosyncratic visual coding, a
tutor responded with “you know what?
It’s overrated.”
This dissertation does not seek out the
specific times and places of any nomadological departures per se, and certainly
the aim is not to traipse once more through Twentieth Century art history in an
attempt to temporally tick the boxes which support my thesis. What it will do, however, is suggest artists
whose spirit has either prompted or perpetuated nomadic art practices. Again, this is by no means a left-to-right
recounting of the past as it meets the present for to do so would run counter
to the very phenomena discussed. It will
remain atemporal throughout, much like the indexical numbered lines of flight
detailing specific instances of events which, in one way or another, are
nomadic. It is important that this work
be allowed to stop and start at its own pace, according to its own nature, that
it reads like a Deleuzian plateau.
Oyvind Fahlström, Eddie (Silvie's
Brother)in the Desert, 1966, silkscreen on paper, 17 1/4 x 22 in.
- .
Harry Irene[2], much like other similarly
flamboyant modernists of the day, espoused formalism and unity as the hallmarks
of “good art.” With six years’ boarding
school behind him and an impeccable grasp of Latin, for a while Irene was
considered the Philosopher King of art criticism. The spokes on his bicycle would resonate
machine-like as the art critic weaved his way throughout the London streets
from one gallery to the next.
Good-natured and sympathetic to all, with the notable exception of
artists. By and large, he openly
despised them. His beloved Willem de
Kooning set the benchmark, if one were to ask him, of painterly
excellence. Robert Rauschenberg, on the
other hand, he considered the scourge of the art world – if one were to ask
him, Irene would lay the blame of aesthetic decline almost squarely on
Rauschenberg’s shoulders, and was particularly scolding towards any artist who
appeared to ally themselves with the American.
In 1967 Irene wrote on Conceptual Art “the ill-deserved revival of the
redundant French buffoon.” Typically
dismissive of anything which eschewed the aforementioned two values of
formalism and unity, Irene said this in 1962 of Öyvind Fahlström’s solo
exhibition at Paris’ Galerie Daniel Cordier:
“The
novelty of in-patient logic combined with a flagrant disregard for context
notwithstanding, the Cordier has delivered a flat, jejune show. The painterly has been reduced to the wax
crayon, and Rauschenberg apparently loves it.
The exhibition brochure features the blushing artist rejoicing that
there are like-minded souls in the world.
All structure, such as it is, is purely virtual – blending the political
with the fantastical and presenting the result in works that are only ever two
steps at best above an adolescent’s boredom-breaker may appeal to the radical,
but should not be encouraged if art hopes to maintain its plateau. Cartoon politics and beatnik affectations belong
to the pulps, not the Cordiers.”[3]
The plateau alluded to would be – in 1962
– one more singular and hierarchical than a plateau suggested by Deleuze and
Guattari. Theirs was one of a reciprocal
multitude, while Irene’s was still very much in the nature of the sermon on the
mount.
In 1980, The Fall paid tribute to Harry
Irene in the lyrics to How I Wrote
Elastic Man:
Life
should be full of strangeness
Like
a rich painting[4]
The above couplet, whether Mark E. Smith
at the time realised it or not, also succinctly outlines what Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari referred to as “lines of flight,” and implies by its
imperative that life is only worth living if it encounters strangeness. Analogous to the becoming outlined in the two
volumes which comprise Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose that it is through the
encounter that consciousness and subjectivity are defined. The various and infinite forces which our
universe (that non-transcendental state which the authors refer to as the plane
of immanence) is governed by are always in flux, connecting and passing through
other forces at random and in so doing creating new perceptions and systems of
thought. “Strangeness,” then in this
context should be read as an encounter (be they subjective or objective)
between two disparate forces. Simply
put, the subjective force of an art work upon the viewer only opens up
possibilities for discourse if that art work is unfamiliar, strange or in many
cases ugly, to that viewer. This makes
possible and likely new ways of perception, new modes of thought and new
creative possibilities (for the strangeness perceived by the viewer should, if
interpreted correctly, inspire fresh creative forces which pass through the
viewer-becoming-artist). These
phenomena are not restricted to any cultural discipline (or, as Deleuze and
Guattari would have it, “captured”), but are instead multi-disciplinary in
nature. In this respect, lines of flight
can be traced between contemporary art, cinema, literature or – as the above
lyrical example attests – music. Art is never purely a process of subjectivity:
rather it is emancipatory in the sense that it opens up potentiality. Abstraction becomes a plane of immanence on
which the virtual is perceived as utopian potentialities.
Among Deleuze & Guattaris’ more
crucial themes – in terms of contemporary art-world parlance – is that of
nomadology, which has gradually over recent years become a dominant
practice. The nomadic artist will jump
from materials, themes, ideas and strategies in an ostensibly random manner,
whilst retaining a core constant (on the plane of consistency, staying with
Deleuze) which is more often than not the artist him or herself. This text should therefore focus on nomadic
practices, their origins and their implications, the central idea that art
should retain a chaotic sensibility in order to remain relevant in a chaotic
word. More than this, though, is the
sense that while a given artist superficially seeks to create order from chaos,
there is also a strong element of the opposite: to create a chaotic linguistic
framework from a pre-existing order, and then to reassemble the elements taken
apart into a seemingly chaotic bricolage, which is in itself deceptively
ordered.
To place this phenomenon into an
historical context, it is perhaps useful to go back to Post-Conceptual Art,
that 1970s movement which not only reintroduced materiality to conceptual
practice, it added new and emergent materials in order to expand the
potentiality of same. John Baldessari is
often credited with creating both Post-Conceptual practice and its taxonomic
during his tenure at the California Institute of the Arts, although one could
also argue that the basis for Post-Conceptualism was already put in place by
the Fluxus movement. Certainly,
Happenings bore all the extra-material hallmarks of Post-Conceptual art, though
artists who were the product of Fluxus were already exhibiting nomadic traits
as far back as the 1960s. Yet
Baldessari, in 1973, was using strategies of games in his work Throwing Four Balls in the Air to Get a
Square (best of 36)[5]
which mirrored those of Swedish multimedia artist Öyvind Fahlström. Fahlström can be said to be a forerunner of
nomadic practices.
John Baldessari: Throwing Four Balls in the Air to Get a Square (best of 36).
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Line
of Flight #1: “Everyone is an artist,”[6] Joseph Beuys once famously
said. Rather than a trite throwaway
statement, Beuys perfectly sums up the Deleuzian concept. Where nomadology and the rhizome resonate
most profoundly is in the biological, rather than the linguistic (although we
may reason that the two are not mutually exclusive). If everything is in a perpetual state of
becoming (desire, as Deleuze would have it), then everything is subject to
affect: one body affects another to varying degrees of intensity. What Beuys proposes is that the substance of
art (whatever form this may take) increases the intensity of the affect. A person who spends their entire life without
once putting brush to canvas, without moulding clay or taking any photographs
is still an artist in the affective sense, in that their very existence will
resonate with another living thing. Art,
as Wittgenstein once said, is a semiotic triangle – a thing is art if it
“arts,” thus affecting the receiver.
Human beings, by their very linguistic nature, are artists due to
communication.
Irene had already dismissed Fluxus the
previous decade as “Flatus.” Having met
Joseph Beuys in Germany, he had advised the artist to purchase for himself a
proper pair of trousers.
Irene would later – in 1978 – reverse his
opinion of Fahlström somewhat, citing the “latent and intersticial nature” of
his work. In accordance with the
paradigm shift brought about by Baldessari’s post-conceptual departure, Irene
was but one of a number of critics who began to realise the potential of the
idea as opposed to the finished work. If
Fluxus began to erode the material norms of art practice, then post-conceptualism
re-assembled art practice in a way which, for commentators such as Harry Irene,
was perhaps too much of a shock to traditional values to at first work in the
same manner as previous decades.
Rather than pertaining to actual nomadic
people, nomadology is simply an illustrative tool to suggest that we may think
and write without reference to hierarchical, arborescent models. Favouring the rhizomatic at all times,
Deleuze and Guattari propose a means of production which is emancipated from
any pre-established linguistic framework.
The painter should paint without reference to other painters, the
playwright (like Beckett) should write according to their own haecceity and to
the flames with Shakespearian orthodoxy.
Line
of Flight #2: in 1966, Tom Phillips purchases a
second-hand copy of W.H. Mallock’s obscure Victorian novel A Human Document[7]
whilst in a furniture repository with painter R.B. Kitaj. He sets himself the task of reworking every
page in the book, by inking over, deleting and otherwise mutating the story
into an entirely new and rhizomatic narrative interpretation. Completed in 1973 and exhibited that same
year, Phillips’ A Human Document Redux,
now retitled A Humament[8],
was published in its new incarnation in 1980.
Since then the novel has mutated even further, with Phillips re-working
his interpretation and developing this into an opera. According to Phillips, “Once I got my prize
home I found that page after randomly opened page revealed that I had stumbled
upon a treasure. Darting eagerly here and there I somehow omitted to read the
novel as an ordered story. Though in some sense I almost know the whole of it
by heart, I have to this day never read it properly from beginning to end.”[9] This is precisely how Deleuze and Guattari
propose that the reader approach A Thousand
Plateaus, ignoring the left-to-right linearity of a book in any traditional
sense.
Nomadology is subject to lines of flight,
and the biunivocal relations between bodies which occasion these lines of
flight. The nomadic artist flags vectors
and creates other lines of flight towards new vectors. Consider the work of Ken + Julia Yonetani,
which “explores the interaction between
humans, nature, science and the spiritual realm in the contemporary age,
unearthing and visualizing hidden connections between people and their
environment.”[10]
This self-assessment, courtesy of
the duo’s website, already sounds nomadic yet, when we consider any
collaborative venture we may conceive of two (already nomadic) vectors meeting
to create a further (two-fold) nomadic vector.
This vector, then, contains an exponentially greater potentiality. This phenomenon bases itself on the concept
of the smooth and striated space.
Striated space being hierarchical and of the state (that which can be
counted and occupied in sedentary steps), whilst the smooth is rhizomatic,
multitudinous and decidedly more democratic.
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Tom Phillips: a graphic score from the
opera Irma, adapted from A Humament.
Chapter
Two: In Which Style is Forsaken in Favour of a Globalised Non-System of Signs
Can art be traced on a map with any degree
of exactitude? By this, we may imagine a
vast chart which historically positions movements, artists, themes and media,
imagining further that these can be connected according to commonalities: which
themes link two otherwise seemingly disparate art practices? Certainly, we can draw inferences from social
and political issues, in that prevalent societal factors in the 1950s, for
instance, can still be attributed to the contemporary work – societal factors
are never purely tied to one particular epoch.
Line of Flight #3: 2013. Raqs Media Collective bring their multimedia
project The Last International to New York’s Performa 13 biennial. From the germ of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels' idea to move the Council General of the First International Working Men's Association to New York City in
1872, the exhibition develops into “a deep sea dive, head-first, into the
future, and into infinity” which “stages debates, a wine-drinking symposium on
time, involves a runaway rhinoceros, a time travelling bicycle, a conversation
between a yaksha and a yakshi, as it turns mathematics and botany into poetry
and creates a ruckus out of concepts, questions, symbols and totems.”[11] Raqs transcend linear time and geographical
space, imagining temporalities and realms which might be considered
hauntological. Jacques Derrida
postulated that Marxism would haunt Western society from beyond the grave in an
omnipresent, miasmic manner neither alive nor dead.[12] Raqs do not indulge in prosaic nostalgia:
they re-imagine the past as a precursor to a present that never was.
Beyond that which is immediate in art,
past issues of form, colour and content, lies a subtle, reflexive
mechanism. Shadows present themselves in
the varying distances between the machinic apparatuses of the work and the eye;
the eye and the brain. These shadows are
interpreted in tandem with the more tangible, visual stimuli to make up a
process of affect (the ability to affect and be affected) which may or may not
immediately be perceived by the subject.
Often, the encounter is the essence of art, a trend which has persisted
throughout the latter half of the Twentieth-Century and has found its own
milieu in Relational Aesthetics (for what else could we term this affective
discourse if not “relational”?). Relational
Aesthetics is now a central fixture of an art market which has long celebrated
the rhizomatic, the nomadic and the affective yet can more throroughly be
traced back to Fluxus.
We
take the view that Deleuze and Guattari’s prodigious invention of concepts
should be understood as an attempt to create a new set of coordinates for
thinking that can and should be modified to suit new circumstances and new
questions. [13] (Buchanen & Collins,
2014, P. 2)
Art history has proven time and again that
political and social entropy leads to multiple points of departure in art
practice orthodoxy: Dada owes its
inception to the First World War, the decidedly nomadic catalogue of Ilya
Kabakov is a by-product of Social Realism.
It is perhaps churlish to expect an artist’s milieu to remain the same
in a world in a constant state of flux.
In an age of rebranding, rebooting, re-shuffling and profound
uncertainty, art which rigidly adheres to an aesthetic model is now more often
than not seen as a trifle old hat.
We can observe here that nomadology had
already been a practice and attitude within the art world long before Deleuze
and Guattari had coined the term, and had indicated a shift towards the virtual
and latent which has since become standard vernacular. Artists, like writers, are involuntary
narcissists. Both fabricate worlds in which said artist’s ego has the dominant
ideology, and both dictate life and death according to their whims. Every
writer and every artist is God to their individual micro-disciplinary practice,
a practice which we can perceive as a world, or sphere. If we were to create a
model of the seemingly endless practices being engaged at any one time, we
would see an actual world filled with these spheres orbiting one another,
feeding off of a shared, reciprocal energy. To begin any kind of creative
endeavour is to feed from and absorb the energies flowing from these
multiplicitous bodies, and to negotiate the regulations governing these. The
artist borrows and re-conditions: nothing is purely genius. In this sense art
is always a collaborative process, allowing multiple voices to be heard to
varying degrees of intensity. This process has previously been referred to as a
constellation, though art practice in the 21st Century has become a thing decidedly
more immanent, allowing literal connections, juxtapositions and collaborations
to occur. The artist, we can argue, who does not engage culturally, socially or
creatively with the spheres in orbit around them must either be an artist of
the most profound genius, or no artist at all. We may also think of the artist
as the zeitgeist of their particular field, in that an artist cannot help but
be a vector in a specific chain of semiotic connections starting with
obsessions and inspirations, contemporary osmosis and going on to include those
works which the artist has necessarily inspired. Naturally, the number of
“inspirational” vectors both before and after the artist’s own vector can be
nigh-on infinite, and each prone to mutation – for the flow of creative energy
goes backwards as well as forwards. We retrospectively attribute aspects culled
from other sources to a piece of work after we have encountered the second
pieces of work, altering and mutating the meanings and semiotic representations
to both primary and secondary sources. Indeed, in this respect are there any
longer primary or secondary pieces of work? The present is irreducible to any
singularity. This is what Bergsonism[14] teaches us, and what
common sense forces us not to forget. The present can only ever exist in any
quantifiable measure as a memory, in which case it is imbued with attributes
gleaned from the fanciful whims of subjective recollection (an object observed
by many people five minutes ago is already undergoing an erosion of reality
whereby the individual recollections of these many people have themselves
trailed off into the unstable areas of perception, association and
interpretation).
Öyvind Fahlström connected the semiotic
schemata of Fluxus with the lexicon of popular culture in a way which has now
become familiar within galleries and biennials: understanding the simple maxim
that society and culture are in a perpetual symbiotic loop with one another and
adjusting the linguistic framework of his art accordingly. Five decades later, Franck Scurti is doing
much the same thing, albeit from a decidedly altermodernist perspective. Compare Fahlström’s appropriation of Robert
Crumb’s Meatball cartoon for his 1969 sculptural assemblage Meatball Curtain (for R. Crumb)[15] with Scurti’s hand-drawn
comic insert for his 2002 exhibition at Switzerland’s Kunsthaus Baselland. Both employ the semiotic tactics of Marcel
Broodthaers in their playful linguistic displacement. Consider 1974’s Les Animaux de la Ferme (The Farm Animals)[16]: illustrations of multiple breeds of cow with
their actual taxonomies replaced by car manufacturers. A tactic derived from Magritte, certainly,
yet altogether more playful and with a more cynical eye. This is among Broodthaers’ more renowned
pieces, and serves to throw the observer into a nonsensical black hole.
This practice is today lauded among the
echelons of criticism, unlike in Fahlström’s time, which suffered from a
modernist reactionary backlash. Franck
Scurti enjoys higher praise from contemporary critics such as Nicolas
Bourriaud:
It
is through his writing that Scurti distinguishes himself among the great French
artists of his generation, including Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Dominque
Gonzalez-Foerster and Xavier Veilhan.
Yet for all that he does not stand out because of a formal trademark, a
formula that can be infinitely repeated.
His “style,” if that term must be employed, lies rather in a movement
toward assemblage, a personal phrasing, not in some visual code bar that is easily
spotted among a thousand others. He
seems to make it a point of honor (sic) never to repeat the same figures, even
to change his working principle with each new show.
[17]
(Bourriaud, 2002, P. 19)
Scurti’s offbeat milieu is to direct idea
into already-present social matter, to transmute the semantic drift of signs
and apply a meaning that is certainly rhizomatic. For 2000’s video installation Colors, Scurti observed a football match
between Ireland and France held in Dublin where various corporate sponsors had
ill-advisedly painted their corporate logos upon the pitch. As the rain started to fall, the paint
diluted and became tacky, covering the players in these corporate,
interpellative primaries. There are
several ways in which we can read this: one interpretation would be of a
capitalist spillage, whereby the economic machine becomes jammed with its
subjects; another reading would be the cross-cultural accident of a sporting
event resembling an art “happening.”[18] The following year, a gallery in Lyon was
temporarily taken over by a clothing manufacturer making cheap t-shirts. Each day a different cartoon was printed on
the shirts reflecting on the day’s practices.
In 2013, Scurti put his own spin on Broodthaers’ series of mussel pots
by filling a snakeskin suitcase with popcorn, while an interview given to
Blouin Art (with the headline “Duchamp
Prize Nominee Franck Scurti on Being an Artist Without a Style”) Scurti
said “I really think that things are happening elsewhere today. Don’t you kind
of feel as if you’ve seen everything? The phrasing is more important than the
style, I believe.”[19]
The artist without a style, while
immediately striking the reader as a pejorative, is perhaps one of the more
fundamental elements of nomadology. To
forsake geographic restrictions, ontological categerisation or indeed to eschew
any sedentary restrictions is to take full responsibility for one’s own
freedom: to discard the State we must truly discard the State, and in this we
cannot expect to retain a State-defined, repeatable identity.
Chapter
Three: Harry Plays Go!
Line of Flight #4: In 1980, Peter Greenaway delivers The Falls, a feature-length absurdist
narrative concerning the mysterious Violent Unknown Event (VUE). Formerly a student at Walthamstow College of
Art, Greenaway then begins a film career which retains many of his art school
traits.[20] Throughout his career, Greenaway references
his cultural background and persistently returns to the prosopopoeial character
Tulse Luper, who lingers on the narrative edge of much of Greenaway’s films.
Line of Flight #5: Prior to his death in
1986, Harry Irene delivers a two-hour lecture which is itself essentially
nomadological. Beginning with Irene
singing the praises of Nam June Paik (much to the bewilderment of those in the
audience who are familiar with Irene’s previous writings) and comparing the
Korean’s work to that of Auguste Rodin.
With a full appreciation of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to his credit, Irene postulates that the smooth
sculptures of Rodin have, Via Paik, been re-interpreted as striated and found a
new smoothness in the artist’s appropriations of television sets and radios,
and particularly focuses on Paik’s robotic assemblages:
“The
robot in this instance is nothing less than a self-contained monad. It is a haecceity as much as it is synecdoche
– the thing is the body and the bodies form the thing. Perhaps our emerging media works best in
unity, or perhaps the sum of its parts it entirely irrelevant. This is of no consequence given that our
world is inescapably built of this technological fabric, as intransigent and
unmoveable as Rodin’s marble.”
Irene then goes on to postulate that the
cinematic output of David Lynch proved the futility of Freudian interpretation,
citing the director’s latest Blue Velvet[21]
as an attack on modern psychoanalysis because the entire film is bookended by
the camera going both inside the human ear and passing out of the ear. Irene theorises that the film therefore only
exists inside the subconscious and refuses to extricate itself from the same
until it becomes convenient for the director to do so. Few present in the audience can see the logic
in this, though they are more than satisfied that Irene has become that most
miraculous of things: the State Machine which has become the War Machine. Typically the nomadic, eventually, becomes
the sedentary. The War Machine becomes
the State Machine as it attempts to preserve its own order. The champions of Abstract Expressionism
eventually became its protectors – bulwarks against the oncoming storm of
postmodernism. So, for Harry Irene to
become an exemplar of this phenomenon in reverse is something startlingly
unique. Irene, a lifelong proponent of
chess, and the occasional school champion of same, has recently taken up the
game of Wei Chi. Whereas chess is fixed and rigid, Wei Chi (or
Go, as is its Western nomenclature) is ever-expansive (infinite, even),
observes a few simple rules and allows for a fluid competition. The game is only over when one or both
players decide that enough is enough.
One imagines that if Max von Sydow had challenged Death to Wei Chi
rather than chess, the film would still be playing out today.[22]
“Chess
pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from
which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities;
a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a
subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative
powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the
game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple
arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person
function. “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an
elephant… But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither
confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess
is a semiology.”[23]
(Deleuze
& Guattari, 1986, P. 4-5)[24]
How can we take this passage and apply it
to art practices? Key words such as
“coded” and “Semiology” can here be read as hallmarks of a closed and distinct
practice (i.e. that of painting), whereas in Go the authors describe a
“springing up at any point,” and “movements not from one point to
another…without aim or destination.” We
can understand this last as being of the rhizome.
Deleuze and machinery are somewhat
synonymous. The War Machine, the State
Machine, etc. The State Machine is
static and sedentary. We can look upon
this is the machine of bureaucracy, that thing which has become fixed and
immobile due to its own inability to expand and mutate – bureaucracy stunts
growth, as it were. The State apparatus
apportions and distributes territory and marks out borders. The War Machine, however, is subject to
change. It plots its own territory according
to its own arbitrations. It affects, is in a constant state of becoming and is
by its very nature nomadic. The mirrored
affect in contemporary art is primarily an intellectual one, in that the
artist, when once would be disciplined and produce according to history and
contemporary tutelage, now pays little mind to the historical regime of
artistic discipline. Codings and
de-codings no longer function in the same way, thanks also to the capitalist
and – perhaps more so – neo-liberal paradigm shifts within our very language.
If we consider the social factors
contributing to the late-Twentieth Century nomadological turn in art, then the
most obvious event would be the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in
1989. Before this, countries were
silenced – the suppression of artistic freedom was a la mode for a regime which
allied itself with More’s Utopia. East
Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria had literally no presence on the
global art scene whilst the Berlin Wall stood.
Borders, both literal and metaphorical, were dropped overnight. That same year Centre Georges Pompidou hosted Magiciens
de la Terre, billed as the world’s first truly global art exhibition, it
sought to sought to correct the problem of “one hundred percent of exhibitions
ignoring 80 percent of the earth.”[25] It would be churlish to assume that these two
were events were not connected: Communism is a literal State Machine, and its
dissolution here literally gives was to the nomadic.
We shall conclude with a reverential mention
of Michael Haneke’s 1997 TV film Das
Schloß (The Castle),[26]
in which the director explicitly acknowledges Franz Kafka’s original,
unfinished text[27]. The film ends with sheer abruptness, as Kafka
wrote (or, indeed did not write it), with K traipsing through the snow. He never gains entrance to the castle, nor is
the bureaucracy in place to prevent this given any resolution. It is problematic to offer any absolute
conclusion on the topic of nomadology, for it is both an ongoing phenomenon
and, in many ways, has always been there on the horizon of our society and
culture. If the fall of communism led to
a nomadic rupture, then the same can be said for each time capitalism gives way
under pressure. The War Machine exists
on the border of the State, and can be said to be the very thing which applies
pressure to the apparatus. Kafka is
synonymous with the bureaucratic machine, so the novel’s abrupt ending – though
technically an unfinished work – is the most profound way for it to
finish. Haneke reflects on this, and
pays homage to its nomadic nature by allowing his film to just…stop. I, in turn, pay homage to both Kafka and
Haneke by following suit.
[1]
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. and Massumi, B. (1993). A Thousand Plateaus.
Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
2 Smith, M., Scanlan, C.,
Hanley, S. and Hanley, P. (1980). How I
Wrote Elastic Man. [vinyl] Manchester: Rough Trade.
3 Baldessari, J.
(1974). Throwing Four Balls in the Air to Get a Square (best of 36).
[8 color photographs] Not exhibited.
4 Mallock, W.
(2005). A Human Document. United States: Elibron Classics.
5 Phillips, T. and
Mallock, W. (2005). A Humument. New York, N.Y.: Thames &
Hudson.
6 Tomphillips.co.uk.
(2018). Tom Phillips - Tom Phillips's Introduction to the 6th Edition,
2016. [online] Available at:
http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument/introduction [Accessed 16 Nov. 2017].
7 Kenandjuliayonetani.com.
(2018). Ken + Julia Yonetani 米谷健＋ジュリア – collaborative artists.
[online] Available at: https://kenandjuliayonetani.com/en/ [Accessed 2 Jan.
2018].
8 Raqsmediacollective.net.
(2018). .:: Raqs Media Collective ::.. [online] Available at:
http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/works.aspx# [Accessed 8 Jan. 2018].
9 Derrida, J.
(2012). Specters of Marx. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
10 Buchanen, I &
Collins, L (eds) (2014), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art
(Schizoanalytic Applications). London:
Bloomsbury
11 Fahlström, Ö.
(1969). Meatball Curtain (for R. Crumb). [Enamel on metal,
plexiglas and magnets] Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
(MACBA).
12 Broodthaers, M.
(1974). Les Animaux de la Ferme (The Farm Animals). [Lithograph on
paper (edition of 100)] Various: Various.
13 Bourriaud, N.,
Sans, J. and Durand, R. (2002). Franck Scurti. Paris: Palais de Tokyo.
14 Scurti, F.
(2000). Colors. [Video Installation (3 Screens), Master Betacam]
Angoulême: La collection du FRAC Poitou-Charentes.
15
www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/831686/duchamp-prize-nominee-franck-scurti-on-being-an-artist-without
[Accessed 18 Nov. 2017].
16 The Falls.
(1980). [film] Directed by P. Greenaway. Gwynedd, Wales: British Film Institute
(BFI).
17 Blue Velvet.
(1986). [film] Directed by D. Lynch. North Carolina: De Laurentiis Entertainment
Group.
18 The Seventh
Seal. (1957). [film] Directed by I. Bergman. Filmstaden studios, Sweden: AB
Svensk Filmindustri.
19 Deleuze, G. and
Guattari, F. (1986). Nomadology. New York, NY, USA: Semiotext(e).
20 Steeds, L. and
Lafuente, P. (2013). Making art global. London: Afterall.
21 Das Schloß
(The Castle). (1997). [film] Directed by M. Haneke. Germany; Austria:
Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF); Wega Film; Arte; Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR).
[1] Deleuze,
G., Guattari, F. and Massumi, B. (1993). A thousand Plateaus.
Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
[2] Whilst
the character of Harry Irene is fictional, it should be mentioned that this
author has named him after a song from Captain Beefheart’s 1978 album Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller),
for no greater reason than whimsey.
[4] Smith,
M., Scanlan, C., Hanley, S. and Hanley, P. (1980). How I Wrote Elastic Man.
[vinyl] Manchester: Rough Trade.
[5] Baldessari,
J. (1974). Throwing Four Balls in the Air to Get a Square (best of 36).
[8 color photographs] Not exhibited.
[6]
The quote, whilst attributed to Beuys, appears to have no source of
origin. It is perhaps useful to think of
this as something mentioned in passing.
[7] Mallock,
W. (2005). A human document. United States: Elibron Classics.
[8] Phillips,
T. and Mallock, W. (2005). A humument. New York, N.Y.: Thames &
Hudson.
[9] Tomphillips.co.uk.
(2018). Tom Phillips - Tom Phillips's Introduction to the 6th Edition,
2016. [online] Available at: http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument/introduction
[Accessed 8 Jan. 2018].
[10] Kenandjuliayonetani.com.
(2018). Ken + Julia Yonetani 米谷健＋ジュリア – collaborative
artists. [online] Available at: https://kenandjuliayonetani.com/en/
[Accessed 8 Jan. 2018].
[11] Raqsmediacollective.net.
(2018). .:: Raqs Media Collective ::.. [online] Available at:
http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/works.aspx# [Accessed 8 Jan. 2018].
[12] Derrida,
J. (2012). Specters of Marx. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
[13] Buchanen,
I & Collins, L (eds) (2014), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art
(Schizoanalytic Applications). London:
Bloomsbury
[14]
Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher whose works Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter
and Memory (1896) were hugely influential for Deleuze.
[15] Fahlström,
Ö. (1969). Meatball Curtain (for R. Crumb). [Enamel on metal,
plexiglas and magnets] Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
(MACBA).
[16] Broodthaers,
M. (1974). Les Animaux de la Ferme (The Farm Animals). [Lithograph
on paper (edition of 100)] Various: Various.
[17] Bourriaud,
N., Sans, J. and Durand, R. (2002). Franck Scurti. Paris: Palais de Tokyo.
[18] Scurti,
F. (2000). Colors. [Video Installation (3 Screens), Master Betacam]
Angoulême: La collection du FRAC Poitou-Charentes.
[19] www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/831686/duchamp-prize-nominee-franck-scurti-on-being-an-artist-without
[Accessed 8 Jan. 2018].
[20] The
Falls. (1980). [film] Directed by P. Greenaway. Gwynedd, Wales: British
Film Institute (BFI).
[21] Blue
Velvet. (1986). [film] Directed by D. Lynch. North Carolina: De Laurentiis
Entertainment Group.
[22] The
Seventh Seal. (1957). [film] Directed by I. Bergman. Filmstaden studios,
Sweden: AB Svensk Filmindustri.
[23] Deleuze,
G. and Guattari, F. (1986). Nomadology. New York, NY, USA:
Semiotext(e).
[24]
It is worth noting that although Nomadology:
The War Machine was its own plateau in A
Thousand Plateaus, the chapter was later published in its own right. Given the importance of the plateau to this
dissertation, I have chosen to cite directly from the latter publication.
[25] Steeds,
L. and Lafuente, P. (2013). Making art global. London: Afterall.
[26] Das
Schloß (The Castle). (1997). [film] Directed by M. Haneke. Germany;
Austria: Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF); Wega Film; Arte; Bayerischer Rundfunk
(BR).
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