see the object as in Itself it really is

exhibition publication with Karen Rubado, for George Fraser Gallery, 2017

1. see the object…

“The sort of objectification that takes place during those operations that produce use value, sign value, cultural capital will never produce a thing. Producing a thing – effecting thingness – depends, instead, on a fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation, on an irregular if not unreasonable reobjectification of the object that dislodges it from the circuits through which it typically is.”                 Bill Brown, Other Things. University of Chicago Press, 2015, p51.

The object world lies semi-dormant all around us. Its animate vitality is concealed, its uncanny life withheld. The thing becomes apparent only when we encounter the object – when we experience it. It comes into view as the result of the subject-object interaction. Thingness thus emerges into the space between subject-body and object-matter, ergo the dislocation or dysfunction of the object must affect its formation. Once the object is either abstracted from its function, or removed from its place, it is experienced by the subject in a substantively different manner.

Brown refers to this trait as misuse value – a dislocation of the object from habitualised objectification allows for a more sensuous, tactile appreciation of the object-being.[1] We have the opportunity to somehow inadvertently see the object anew. This instability of object-ness becomes apparent when something is subversively utilised in an ‘unauthorised’ way, prompting a different kind of attention.

In see the object as in itself it really is, the structures of pole dance are disconcertingly familiar, yet the seemingly functional devices are made purposeless, flickering between the mundane and the magical. Whether evocative of needles with thread, clothes line props, or stays and guy ropes, the elongated steel elements balance in space as ambiguous figures foregrounded by empty white walls. They exist in suspended animation, teetering on the brink of total collapse.

Where one of the pole dance components touches another has been highly considered, and even fetishized. Simple quotidian elements and materials should no longer be taken for granted – they demand care and close attention. Don’t just use me – see me. Dysfunction brings into view the strangeness that was always latent within everyday objects, highlighting their double nature as equipment and thing.[2]

Displacement similarly re-presents, or re-orientates the object. Do objects have a place, or do we create the place for the object?[3] Within Rubado’s work a multitude of found discarded objects are removed from their transmigratory locations by the artist (or donated by associates). They are disassembled, reassembled, and united with others. The past and present of many objects from many people become intertwined with the trace of human action, to form a new entity.

 The weaving and rope works are each an individual collection, or archive, storing memory, experience and friendship in a ‘diary’ form. The textiles appear to operate as a scrapbook of mementos which can be relived, each thread telling the story of a place, a time, or a person. Together they form an accumulated memory experience.

The viewer, without access to the backstory of these components, is still able to recognise their non-uniformity, to see that the whole has been constructed from disparate parts. Sentimental value is hinted at by the traces of obsolete objects and signs of former selves.  These damaged and discarded things no longer had use or exchange value, but they have been rescued from the detritus of life, and vouchsafed time and care. They have been pulled back into the life-cycle of material things by virtue of being collected and gathered together.

In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin described the collector as detaching the object from its original function, in order to bring it into a close relationship with others of similar typology.[4] Patrick Pound’s Knife blocks are such a case in point.[5] Denied their knives, and gathered together in all their variety, they are readdressed as curiosity and pure form. Jean Baudrillard developed the philosophy of collecting further in The System of Objects:

“A utensil is never possessed, because a utensil refers one to the world; what is possessed is always an object abstracted from its function and thus brought into relationship with the subject…

“Every object thus has two functions – to be put to use and to be possessed… At one extreme, the strictly practical object acquires a social status: this is the case with the machine. At the opposite extreme, the pure object, devoid of any function or completely abstracted from its use, takes on a strictly subjective status: it becomes part of a collection. It ceases to be a carpet, a table, a compass or a knick-knack and becomes an object in the sense in which a collector will say `a beautiful object' rather than specifying it, for example, as `a beautiful statuette'. An object no longer specified by its function is defined by the subject, but in the passionate abstractness of possession all objects are equivalent. And just one object no longer suffices: the fulfilment of the project of possession always means a succession or even a complete series of objects.”[6]

Both artists obliquely address this idea of possession, either by way of ambiguous utility (functionality/abstraction), or by gathering material to form part of a greater whole (collection). In both cases the fungible object has fallen out of the commodity loop into a new life as possessed object, which takes part in a direct relationship with the subject-viewer. The objects have been denied their function, or rather they have been assigned a new purpose as a thing.

Robyn Walton

Footnotes:

[1] Brown, Bill, Other Things. University of Chicago Press, 2015, p51.

[2] Schwenger, Peter. The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects, University of Minnesota, 2006.

[3] Cross, Jennifer E. “What is Sense of Place?” (paper presented at the 12th Headwaters Conference, Colorado, 2-4 November, 2001).


[4] Benjamin, Walter. “H (The Collector).” The Arcades Project, Harvard University 1999, p204.

[5] Pound, Patrick. Knife blocks 1999-2017. The collection shelves 1999-2017, The Great Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017.

[6] Baudrillard, Jean. “A Marginal System: Collecting,” The System of Objects. (Verso, New York, NY, 1996). p86. 

2. Maker’s Pace

As artists, our material research takes the form of a personal engagement with objects or matter which possess their own spirit, nature, preferences, and potentialities. Philosopher Jane Bennett has referred to this vital materialism, or agency, as ‘Thing-Power.’ In her view physical matter is not passively awaiting the imprint of the human hand; things cannot be bent to our will without expressing some hidden agenda of their own.[1]

Andrew Pickering, in The Mangle of Practice, states that this material agency is temporally emergent in practice. “The contours of material agency are never decisively known in advance, scientists continually have to explore them in their work, problems always arise and have to be solved in the development of, say, new machines.”[2] Pickering’s concept could equally be applied to artistic labour.

Creative making practice involves engaging a curious mind – utilising exploration, experimentation, improvisation, trial and error – and a process of serial testing. Art practitioners collaborate with material to generate work. If I do this what happens? If I change this what happens to that? If the end result is known in advance, then why make it? How would practice be extended, what could possibly be learnt, and what knowledge would be generated? When we don’t write off interesting “failures,” and instead embrace the unknown, unexpected results become opportunities. In his book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Tim Ingold writes:

“I want to think of making… as a process of growth. This is to place the maker from the outset as a participant in amongst a world of active materials. These materials are what he has to work with, and in the process of making he ‘joins forces’ with them, …adding his own impetus to the forces and energies in play.”[3]

Pickering terms this performative dialogue between maker and material the “Dance of Agency,” with power or control alternating between the two actors – human and non-human.[4] Within the creative workshop, however, we introduce a third player – in the form of the machine or tool. So is the making process still a dance of artist and material, with machine as a mere extension of human agency? Or, alternatively, is the machine an active participant which brings its own machinic agency to bear?

If the former, the tool is essentially a prosthesis, adding extra capability to the artist’s hand. Machine and operator together form a “composite human/ nonhuman agent, a cyborg…”[5] In The Intangibilities of Form, John Roberts refers to this as the technical extension of authorship.[6] The de-manualised hand develops into hand-at-a-distance, similar conceptually to the use of surrogate workers to enact productive labour on behalf of the artist.[7]

I would argue that there is more at play here than the extended human however – we should regard the machine itself an active agent. While offering increased power and opportunity to the hand, potential variables can also be restricted. The limits and parameters of each machine establish the rules, or framework, for the work. Consider the loom for example, with its attendant restrictions on output dimensions. So we must factor in all three strands, and how together they interact to generate the work:

human agent + material agency + machinic agency.

Ingold asks “Does the potter dance with the wheel or with the clay, or with both at once?”[8] According to Ingold, Pickering’s term dance of agency implies a straightforward side by side interaction between participants.[9] Ingold therefore favours the term “Dance of Animacy,” by which he implies an ongoing correspondence, an inter-twining of actors joined as if into one, to generate an evolving creative practice. The machine becomes the mediator between sentient maker and ‘active’ material; it enables the correspondence which for Ingold is the very essence of making.

“In the dance of animacy, cello, toggle, kite and wheel are all examples of what we could call transducers. That is to say, they convert the ductus – the kinetic quality of the gesture, its flow or movement – from one register, of bodily kinaesthesia, to another, of material flux.”[10]

The machines we use become “tools of subjective transformation,”[11] to borrow Roberts’ phrase, converting activity from maker to material. However, while we can allow tools a certain transformative agency, they cannot be considered artists. To a limited extent machines can be programmed to learn, but they are reliant on their programmer to establish their operational parameters. As scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett has said, they may be intelligent tools but they are not colleagues.[12] In Roberts’ words, “Artificial intelligence is unable to replicate the labour-cognitive feedback mechanisms of genuine creativity in human culture.”[13] Machines have no praxis.

Artist-makers are always looking, responding to what has gone before, considering the next move, the next action or decision. The work then becomes a living thing making demands of its author, in which each step is a response to the previous outcome. An artist directly engaged in this flow of material making can be empowered by the process. They are no longer hampered by the delays inherent in a traditional manufacturing system – a logistics chain which can involve visualisation/ communication/ fabrication/ delivery/ testing/ assessment/ and evolution.

By enabling direct engagement with physical matter and technical skill as an emancipation of practice, our studios and workshops operate as Ingold’s transducer - helping to convert activity from maker to material. The fluid response of the maker is possible at every stage of the process: it’s an instant creative feedback loop.

Robyn Walton

Footnotes:

[1] Bennett, Jane. “The Force of Things.” Ch 1 (pp1-19). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham [N.C.]: Duke UP, 2010. p2.

[2] Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995. p14.

[3] Ingold, Tim. MAKING: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge, London, 2013. p21.

[4] Pickering, p21

[5] Pickering, p158-159

[6] Roberts, John. The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade. Verso, London, 2007. p197.

[7] Roberts, p104

[8] Ingold, p99

[9] Ingold, p107

[10] Ingold, p102

[11] Roberts, p197

[12] Dennett, Daniel. “Lunch with the FT: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on AI, robots and religion.” Financial Times, FT.com. March 3 2017.

[13] Roberts, p109.