Research: Surplus -
“Bruno Latour for whom every entity is simply
the sum of its actions, says in
Pandora's Hope 1999 an object, an actor,
is only whatever it transforms, modifies
perturbs or creates. In other words
there's no object hidden behind what
it's doing right now” [1]
Somewhere between nature and culture, society witnessed one of the largest ever results of actants transforming, modifying, a landscape that created an event that perturbed humanity to the point we wondered if we were witnessing the end of our own existence.
This image of the Trinity test in the desert was deemed to actual for the american public.
July 16 1945, 5:29:45 A.M. (Mountain War Time)
Trinity Site Zero, Alamogordo Test Range,
Jornada del Muerto desert. Image taken from <http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Trinity.html>
Being a child of the post cold war era, I was always used living as if the end was possible and, more disconcertingly, imminent. I am not saying that this is something that shows in my work or even if I want it too. But, what I am aware of is the potential of existence. Even if that shows as a destructive force.
“Analysis of discursive fields that need to be reconnected, and it’s a job for the art world to do that. You are the great bridge builders, and you can use bits of science and connected it to the bits of the political because you're allowed to” (Braidotti, 2015) [2]
I am interested in how Karen Barad forces me to confront and expose myself to the harsh reality of existence, not only as a being, but within place, site, and ground as a maker and artist. The agency of making, brings about an access to development and investigation.
One thing I have taken from Susan Sze’s work ‘Night into Day’, is what the viewer is being asked to consider. It is questions like this that I want to enmesh with my own body of work, whether that be sculpture, painting, moving image or photography.
When I question what work should do, what should it challenge, what does my work say? I am met with an overarching knowingness that sites my work deeply within a questioning of existence.
Through my own inner parallels that I identify relatively to collective destructive, disruptive yet explanatorily behaviors enacted by humanities, societies, and communities, I find my work makes connections to inner dialogues that otherwise would show themselves in muted capitulations of the self.
So, I find my work, firmly starting to site itself in a ‘Gap’. Immanuel Kant gave us this gap as a correlate to our perception of the object “given to us”.[3] Graham Harman recognises this gap as a '‘deep wedge” [4]between objects and their qualities, but how he draws a separation between himself and Kant is Harman wants to use a “flatter ontology'“, removing the Human/Object correlate which then grants an equal autonomy to all elements of “being” without privileging the determinate human perspective.
This is what I hope to uncover further in my work as I explore what I am calling ‘Object Positioning’ and ‘Spacial Tensions’, within this there will be the opportunity to uncover the potential becoming, as posited by Karen Barad.
This is another view of the same gap, but Barad terms it as an ‘Agental Cut’ with gives the potential within and not because of an external influence. The “givenness” of appearance, whether of a thing, being or perceptive field of influence, opens and generates meaning outside and inside understanding.
So, I am interested to see how I can embody this thinking into my practice. Exploring the surplus, overlap or gap that embodies the givenness of forms, not necessarily externally, but more so as a complicitness in discovery as opposed to a determinate exactitude of meaning pinned down by knowledge.
The best example I can draw on as an artwork that embodies my relational thinking is the work in Fig. (a)
Fig. (a) Cerith Wyn Evans, Folds…in shade (also light and shade) 5 leaves, 2020
Bronze and glass
67 13/16 × 137 3/16 × 16 3/8 in. (172.2 × 348.5 × 41.6 cm)
Folds..In Shade (2020), is demonstrative of the same entangled potential within. When I saw this in July 2020 at White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey, I was taken aback by my visual intelligence when peering upon the piece. We are treated to 3 manifestations of the same object in any one view point. The thing in itself, the reflection of the thing in itself within itself and the emergence of the shadows of the thing as a cause of its existence.
If any work best exemplifies the thinking of Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti (Fig. (b) seen here at 26:12secs) as a metaphor for potentiality within the discursive fields of a socio- political framework that adds to an unfolding development in time, this work embraces the potential not only of intention, but the disruption of now. The cracks are a ‘hommage’ to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), and the Cracks in the screen can be seen as ‘transversal visual trajectory.’
This, borrowing of an idea within an idea, that continues as a line of thought, a being in continuation, signposts my own developing practice as an indicator that using the surplus of a what has the potential of being fills me with enormous confidence to merge ideas and explore the space between the mind independent object and the appearance of the resultant forms.
[1] Graham Harman, Anthropocene Ontology, YouTube, 26 Feburary 2015 <youtube.com/watch?v=cR1A4ILPmjE> [accessed 27/03/2020], 06:15secs
[2] Rosi Braidotti, ‘Rosi Braidotti: Posthuman, All Too Human? A Cultural Political Cartography’, O2 Inhuman Symposium, YouTube, 25 May 2015, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNJPR78DptA> [accessed 23/03/2021] 26:13secs
[3] Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 59 (section §1)
[4] Harman, Graham, Object Orientated Ontology, (London: Penguin Random House, 2018), p.