This week we talked a bit about Simondon's press molding, and the history and uses of casts of sculptures (and a bit about Chomsky's deep systems of language). This reminded me of the Brian Massumi talks about force, and I've included a small pdf of a relevant section from Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia below.
Our discussion on casts and press molds seemed for me to revolve around each cast ~through its material and proximity to the mold ~ being somehow close to or even equal to the sculpture from which the mold is taken. In that sense, the mold inscribes meaning onto the material, but as pointed out by Simondon there is this other thing, which could be equally IMO, called force or gesture.
Chris, in ‘The pleasure of the holder: media art, museum collections and paper money’ points out that plaster has "little personality of its own" and its hard to disagree with that. Plaster seems something like a void, or a filler, with its only mildly active quality being its capacity to such in liquids, even from human skin. But, I think it still has some personality to it, some grit that stops it being a pure void. Just the same as the clay pushed into the press mold, no matter how perfectly mixed and how clever the pug mill, it will always be a little different from that last bag, that last handful. I've been taught at least 3 radically different ways of mixing plaster correctly, from three different casting experts, because there is a knack to it, and that knack is about reading the material, rather than a reliance on ratios. Hence the beautifully loose analogue of "single cream" (something all the methods have in common as a way of recognizing the end point).
Anyway force isn't something that happens in isolation, it has its feedback. Even something submitting to the most extreme dominance gives up some resistance, simply by its presence. This is the Massumi thoughts on that encounter;
"The encounter is between two substance/form complexes, one of which overpowers the other. The forces of one are captured by the forces of the other and are subsumed by them, contained by them. The value of something is the hierarchy of forces which are expressed in it as a complex phenomenon. One side of the encounter has the value of a content, the other of an expression. But content and expression are distinguished only functionally, as the overpowered and overpowering. Content is not the sign, and it is not a referent or signified. It is what the sign envelops, a whole world of forces. Content is formed substance considered as a dominated force-field.
Not only functional, it is relative and reversible. Seen from the perspective of the dominating tool the wood is a content. But from the perspective of the forces that went into it, it is an expression, of the water, sunlight. and carbon dioxide it captured and contains, of the genetic potential it did or did not pass on. The craftsman with hand to tool is an agent or expression, but from another angle he is the content of an institution , of the apprenticeship system or technical school that trained him. A content in one situation is an expression In another. The same thing can be both at different times or simultaneously. depending on which encounter is in question and from what angle" (Massumi 1992)
Finally, right at the end of last week we were talk about the complex issue of working in a studio which is also part of an institution. The need to make something new, but also to meet criteria set by that institution. At the time I mentioned that this sounded like Deleuze and Guattari's conception of "Minor Literature", a literature which turns against itself. "A minor literature doesn't come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986). This seems to resonate strongly within an art institution's studio. To some degree, the we need to transgress existing structures, whilst still being beholden to some of them.
I'm going to end with a quote from a piece of art critcism that's saved my practice on numerous occasions.
"In retrospect, however, I am less intrigued by the play itself than by the joy attendant upon Erving’s making it, because it was well nigh universal. Everyone who cares about basketball knows this play, has seen it replayed a thousand times, and marveled at it. Everyone who writes about basketball has written about it. At the time, the crowd went completely berserk. Even Kareem, after the game, remarked that he would pay to see Doctor J make that play against someone else. Kareem’s remark clouds the issue, however, because the play was as much his as it was Erving’s, since it was Kareem’s perfect defense that made Erving’s instantaneous, pluperfect response to it both necessary and possible—thus the joy, because everyone behaved perfectly, eloquently, with mutual respect, and something magic happened—thus the joy, at the triumph of civil society in an act that was clearly the product of talent and will accommodating itself to liberating rules" (Hickey, 1997).
Dave Hickey, The Heresy of Zone Defence (which you can read in full here and I strongly advise you to do so. The play which it is written in response to is embedded at the top of this post.)
Ralph
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: toward a minor literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hickey, D. (1997). Air guitar: essays on art & democracy (1st ed). Los Angeles : New York: Art issues. Press ; Distributed by D.A.P. (Distributed Art Publishers).
Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (A Swerve ed). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
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