Guide
introduction
“Imaging Metaphysics” must be thought of as an ongoing experiment that will not reach completion with this project. The project began with a formal set of instructions. The aim of these instructions was to filter Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics and Deleuze’s The Logic of Sensation through a heuretic approach.
The first portion of the project stops at the point of departure; it only points to what is occurring here. This Guide serves as a supplement to the first portion of the project. They must be thought of in conjunction with one another. In short, Heidegger points us to a way to construct a metaphysics and Deleuze shows us through Francis Bacon how this process can be enacted with his logic of sensation—an affective logic that guides via inference.
The inference system works as a furthering of the logical maneuvers that literacy establishes since Aristotle forwards. It is a method of moving through the information-world by affect and association—by feeling.
artistic template
Linda Weintraub’s In The Making provides a category system that acts as my relay point. Artists are broken down into the categories below and express how this category relates to their work.
In creating this project I became most impacted by the strategies deployed by William Kentridge. It should be noted that my interest went beyond the work presented by Weintraub and also stemmed from his recent work, Automatic Writing (2005).
To use this category system as a relay, and to assist it in forming my self as a category system, when approaching the artist’s responses I must always insert an important caveat: What does this mean for me in my current situation?
i) audience
Rirkrit Tiravanija provides the form for the audience to take. While many of his works rely on a relational aesthetic, what I gain from them is the ability to make something appear from the relationships formed while pursing the work.
Tiravanija’s audience are the people involved during the relational event (the preparers and consumers of the food, the people involved in the interactive event, etc.). If I turn this notion towards myself, I come to the conclusion that I am my own audience.
While the larger audience might be the Discipline (or for Tiravanija, Art), the local takes priority over the global in this case. To project yourself as an image category, you should begin to understand how your body is a filter for the world. If you are your own audience, what appears will be an authentic emergence from your self (that only you can make appear). It will be you who speaks to your audience.
ii) inspiration (internal & external)
William Kentridge shows us that a personal memory—finding a photograph of a woman shot from behind in his father’s Kodak box—creates a “residue” to be followed throughout his work. Kentridge pursues the notion of the residue in his work by putting the concept of the index at constant play. While the works are “animations” they delimit the typical ideals of the medium by using few images that show the process of the work.
For example, Kentridge may have only five images in a work, but each image is manipulated hundreds of times. Each manipulation is shown, its residue left on the paper by the charcoal additions or subtractions.
What this tells me is that when I go out into the image-world of the spectacle, rather than attempting to coordinate myself within the swarm of images, I may choose particular images that relate to my personal affect. It is not a matter of simplicity, but rather of a complex movement showing constant processing and alteration.
| Note: My personal memory is a fictitious crab. In going out into the image world, I make the immediate link to astrology through this primary figure. |
The project demonstrates how one image The original constellation image repeated throughout the project, but never shown in this original form. , a constellation of the Zodiac Cancer, is processed through image manipulations incessantly to create maps, constellations, forms, and cluster zooms. If paid close attention to, one will notice the pattern of the constellation forming in all aspects of the project (from refraction to a processed building effect). |
Kentridge also shows how the residue of apartheid becomes an external source of inspiration. Following this, I turned the idea inward and related a textual source of inspiration found in Barthes Camera Lucida.
The book becomes entwined in the project for two reasons: I was teaching the text during the time of this project’s creation and the pattern created by the initial memory node would not let me escape the associations that Barthes draws with his mother in the text’s narrative.
iii) artistic self & attitude
Kentridge creates his artistic self by, literally, modeling himself. Rather than go find a model for the figures in his works, he simply walks to the bathroom mirror, adjusts his body accordingly, and makes free sketches. The two main figures in his works thus become manifestations of his self.
His artistic self and attitude is highly informed by the political situation he is involved in within South Africa’s present and past. What is key is that Kentridge takes past events from memory and then follows an “automatic” pathway via affect. As he summarily says, it is as if a diagram forms during a contractual negotiation between his arm and his hand while his conscious self goes off for a cup of coffee. Once more, these pathways are left bare with their indexical signification left fully intact; one can literally follow the paths he creates through the trail to be followed.
The importance for this in my case is the notion of using found objects (reservoir of memories and the images scattered throughout the info-sphere) as a means of expressing my own attitude. The gathering of the images and their manipulation shows my approach to the world within my present situation—one dominated by a single event that I cannot escape:
Kentridge : apartheid :: Patrick : mother
I also attempt to show the process to be the most important function of the project as the intersection of Tiravanija and Kentridge highlight. This processing of information is shown through the incrimental image manipulations.
| Note: In the project I am aiming to follow a sort of automatic associations. Some will give me structural concepts (nebula as “formation”), while others will steer me into unexpected zones of convergence (the sculpture matching the Cancer constellation as well as adding a supplementary mood that I wished to engage beyond Barthes’ “love”). |
iv) mission & success
Switching away from Kentridge, China Adams pronounces the hallmark of success for my project: Make visible an intangible affect. This closely corresponds to what Heidegger formulates in terms of metaphysics and the originary inception of Being: he gives us back our ability to question (the heart of knowing) ourselves in relation to our situation. He reinjects a desire to know—a knowing grounded firmly in the act of questioning. The model for this method is Greek poetry (art).
If the logic of sensation is followed, then something must be activated in my body that was not there before, namely a new affective category in which the world can be organized.
The success of my procedure will make that intangible affective sensation “appear.” I attempt to make a new category of knowledge, without having contact with directly in the Real, to be apprehended.
The notion of the constellation pursued throughout the project aims towards this effect: I can only sketch a representation of the affective dimension in question. I can only provide its form since the content must remain allusive. However, this does not mean that the experience will be satisfactory if it reaches a null standpoint.
Following the clustering of information, both internally (emotionally) and within the larger info-sphere, shows how knowledge is grouped simultaneously with several logics. However, I think that the representation of the constellation shows how the disparate and relatively “logicless” items may be inferred to have an affective relationship. Hence the main “map” of a constellation will always be “zoomed” in upon to show its internal makeup.