Molecular Meanderings

While media have been used as the basis of much classification of artworks, how can art practices be described or classified outside of the legible (or credible) art objects? Arguably, the classification of art within the forms of its ‘media’ is imbricated with a molar view of substrates, materials and exchanges, fixing the engagement with art practices within a reified authority of a textual analysis.

This panel aims to draw together some current research across a variety of fields of visual culture, and explore the problems and possibilities of ‘extra-object’ aesthetic research. It aims to explore how the concept of medium can be reconfigured via deleuzian thinking and practices of ethnography. By researching practices that do not produce credible art objects, or visual modes regarded as obsolete or marginal, or even the types of exchanges that occur beyond the reification of spectatorship into a singular perspective of an art critic, this speakers on this panel hope to explore the aesthetics of becoming, of movement and possibility.

NO I DON'T UNDERSTAND IT EITHER

I wrote this as a draft panel proposal for some conference I want to present at in December. It's a product of a productive felafel lunch with the one other research i've found who is interested in a similar appproach to THE DISCIPLINE as myself. Unfortunately she lives in western Finland.

Deleuze is overrated and overrcited - and I'm interested in using "the rubric known as deleuze" in relation to the tension of molecularity ( discrete, contingent and temporarlly situated objects that are capable of multiple cnnections wiht a range of other similarly discrete, contingent and temporarily situated objects) - rahte rthan a molar - (think of chemistry labs in 1989; stained lab coat, flirting with boys while carrying phials of sulphuric acid - what's the aliquot? measuring the molar emount into an ehrlein flask... with a friggin oral pipette....). yeah, molar. Molar is an arbittrary and set, definied amount of the potentiality of an existing molecular configuration to effect err.... something.(wihs pred was still alive to correct and clarify this blither) Molar - is defining something as a fixed measurement. Molecular conveys potentiality (what could it do) and contingency (it could fall apart, and probably will, it is only like this under a specific range of circumstances) and i like it.

In relation to A R T... rather than describing art according to some lexicon of this is the truth, the whole truth this is the word, and the word was with god (the mastercritic)and one with god (the masterpiece) etc. - I like to think of a form of art discourse - that opens up an authoritative interpretation, (well, hell , breaks it apart even) - to other voices - to the contingency of the critical moment. Who is interpreting art - what are the exchanges behind producing the art object, describing it - what's being closed off in that moment off describing a work, what's bieng closed off in the moment off describing or liiting art to a specific artowork, objet or image?

what's being closed off when I write this particular set of propositions? when I extract, remove, censor, refine and code into JARGON my set of vague hunches and generla complete confusion about my thesis, my work, my life.

I spent most of this week, lying flat on my back wiht tears pouring out of my eyes. Each day I have found myself almost frozen in immobility. Can't move. well, I eventually move, but it's hard, slow and painful.

Writing is a melancholy act - and the kind of euphoric palabric flights that issue forth are a strange and probably inevitable counterpoint to the morbid stillness which precedes them. I'd like to be able to write - like Leiris in 'scratches' - in a way that articulates both staates. the condition off deahtlike immobility ad te flight of dazzling ideas...... I'd like to be able to articulate this moevement between the state of hell and state of pure delirious joy.

but hell, i can barely spell
who do I think I am?

and the whole elevated project is laughable when i consider the subject matter of my tome.


I jjust tried 3 times to insert and image into this posting - dragged of the internet - of an amateur life drawing class form NZ. Nothing about this image conveys lines of flight, or molecular becomings. It looks incredibly moribund and banal.

maybe thats the point.
the violence of a photography, and it does to violence to these sort sof encoutners - in seizing a singular moment - and draining it of all the temporal richness where the meaning is created.
if there is any meaning
and who gives a fuck anyway?
fuck oh fuck

I don't know whether I've been so sad this week - because i've been gestating on a paper (that still won't come), or missing abel horribly, or grieving for my brother. I try to imagine he's in the same place as charlie parker (I know that sounds hideously pretentious but trumpet players deserve their own heaven)

I heard a flugelhorn at a gig last night and had to force tears back in the darkness. soft dull tones, like a Paris sky in winter - sounding like soft drizzle. Very hard to do mambo on a flugel (it's much more milonga) .


the gig was crazed caberet with the sax player from Waiting for Guinness doing schamlzy skanky riffs. and the singer, a good friend - belting out the swansong of my former marriage:

Aaaaaannnnd
I'll be fine
and You'll be fine
No-one's died
and theoretically
We can still be friends
just as no-one pretends
that's it's the same
as before

Times like these feel like the onion cellar in gunter Grasses "the tin drum"

it's stopped raining. I'd better go for a walk before I collapse in front of another SODUKO.