ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 16 number 1 march 2011

The task undertaken in this essay is to give an

account of the disordering effects of matter

made evident through the work of materiality in

the context of art. This endeavour responds to the

insistent provocations arising from matter’s

agency in relation to the way it is conventionally

understood. Rethinking the relations of matter,

otherwise than within an oppositional logic,

necessitates challenging not only the hierarchies

of oppositional thinking but also the very nature

of oppositionality.1 It is here that Jacques Derrida

locates the latency of undecidability that resists

and disorders oppositions from within. Derrida,

however, is wary of utilizing the concept of

matter, preferring instead to refer to the work

that matter yields.2 This reluctance, he argues, is

due to the concept too often being reinvested with

values aligned with presence in general, or being

presented as a fundamental principle exterior to a

relationship with, and dependence on, the

language of Western metaphysics. Bearing these

cautions in mind, I draw on the writings of

Andrew Benjamin, who focuses on the operations

of materiality and productivity of techniques in

artworks, to insist any account of content begins

with detailing the material presence of the work

of art.3 Utilizing this approach, I argue that the

work of the work of art is the activity of its

materiality that yields the disordering effects of

matter. It is these effects that unsettle conven-

tional hylomorphic understandings that regard

matter as inert and passive, as a vehicle for

expression or medium for signifying something

external to itself. Through these destabilizing

effects, the work of art exercises its potential to

expose heterogeneity and provoke difference.

This is not difference understood as an opposition

between two terms; on the contrary, it is the

production of difference as divergence, a

differentiating force aimed at interrupting the

circular economies of representation.

Rethinking the relations of matter has been the

focus of feminist theory seeking to overcome

mind/body dualisms, particularly in terms of

problematizing understandings of the body and

its associated materiality. Luce Irigaray, for

example, maintains the need to reconsider the

negation of material specificity in general, in

order to re-imagine the sexual specificity of

bodies. There can be no change to the social

order, she points out, without ‘‘socializing in a

different way the relation to nature, matter, the

body, language, and desire.’’4 For Irigaray this

transformation is crucial to alter the dynamics

between men and women, and challenge the

terri bird

FIGURINGMATERIALITY

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5

sexual indifference that fortifies discriminatory

economic and social structures. What she exposes

is the need to reconfigure linguistic practices to

enable a feminine relation to language, and

representation more broadly, to ‘‘retraverse

‘differently’ the matter/form dyad, the power/

act dyad, and so on.’’5

Through an extensive examination of the

history of philosophy, Irigaray demonstrates the

way it forgets the mediums through which its

representations take place. Drawing attention to

the unconsciously repressed procedures at work

in philosophy, she refers to these unacknow-

ledged passages as its ‘‘scenography.’’6 The

architectonics of this theatre, including the

geometric organization that frames its space-

time, remain, Irigaray suggests, so long as they

are uninterrupted. A transformation in this

spatio-temporal economy calls for a change, she

argues, in ‘‘the relations of matter and form and

the interval between.’’7 To formulate an imagin-

ary structure within which women have a non-

recoupable place, Irigaray proposes this interval

as a reserve for the irreducibility of the other,

inhabited by the unpredictable forces of desire,

unhinged from the familial arena of Oedipal

sublimation. She insists that for there to be an

ethics of sexual difference this interval needs to

facilitate women’s autonomy, allowing them to

take a ‘‘proper’’ place.

Elizabeth Grosz characterizes the place pro-

posed by Irigaray as the in-between, an indeter-

minate space of undecidability, a tear in the

fabric of dualism.8 Reconfiguring understandings

of space and time, and their connections to a

concept of corporeality, have been key concerns

for Grosz since her initial encounter with the

work of Irigaray, amongst others, in the 1980s. In

recent writings Grosz focuses on what she

describes as the ‘‘messy biology, matter, materi-

ality’’ of bodies, to draw attention to aspects

evaded in much of the theoretical analysis that

centres on questions of ‘‘the body,’’ gender and

identity.9 Grosz turns towards an exploration of

the modes, forms and effects of temporality on

bodies, both living and non-living, to pursue the

more elusive dimensions of the force and

difference of matter. One of the challenges that

Irigaray issues, according to Grosz, is to

understand woman’s relation to temporality

based on an understanding of time as not

subsidiary to space. This is crucial to Irigaray

for the work of sexual difference to begin, as she

advocates, ‘‘[p]erhaps we are passing through an

era when time must redeploy space?’’10 Such a

realignment requires an ontology of becoming,

Grosz maintains, constituted by ‘‘a paradoxical

conception of time modeled on an unknowable

future,’’ matched by a correspondingly ‘‘para-

doxical conception of the relations of subjects and

objects.’’11 In her project to rethink the openness

of material variation, Grosz proposes a reinvigo-

rated appreciation of the future based on an

understanding of time as ‘‘the force of differ-

ing.’’12 This force is the movement that makes

any becoming possible through the capacity to

transform, and Grosz claims, ‘‘to unbecome, the

apparent givenness and inertia of material objects

and to give these objects new virtualities, new

impulses and potentials.’’13

Also responding to the potential force and

dynamics of matter, Brian Massumi suggests

provocatively, matter is ‘‘self disclosing’’ rather

than waiting passively to be given meaning or

form; maintaining matter passes through contexts

rather than being disclosed by them.14

Positioning matter as a complex site of activity

allows for processes of making to be understood,

not as an imposition of ideas, form or meaning,

but as movement through matter. This movement

entails a transposition of one material force to

another as interchanges of form, surface and

effect. In this space between processes of

receiving and responding there is a domain of

instability, where matter’s self-disclosing and

divergent possibilities emerge. This is the

province of what is to come, a reserve of excess,

described by Grosz as, ‘‘accommodate[ing] not

just otherness, but the kind of otherness that is

beyond the limit, outside the definition and

control of the self-same and the self-identical.’’15

By inhabiting this undecidability art remains

open to the force of differing, an incalculable

exteriority in excess of what is knowable. This

openness to an outside is produced as an effect of

the work of the work of art with the possibility of

provoking thought. Reconceiving the relations

of matter as an encounter with an outside that

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6

provokes thought exposes the political potential

of art practices. This potential is oriented towards

configuring new ways of thinking together with

new modes of subjectivity and inhabitation.

Pursuing a similar argument with regards to

art’s political potential, Simon O’Sullivan asserts

that ‘‘a transformation in how we think about art

will necessarily alter the topology of how we think

ourselves and vice versa.’’16 Furthermore, I would

maintain that these transformations emerge from

the productive tension of an openness to a non-

manifest exteriority at the limits of knowledge as

the work of matter.

Of particular significance to the understand-

ings of matter outlined by both Grosz and

Massumi, and the approach towards art practices

developed by O’Sullivan, are the writings of Giles

Deleuze. Deleuze cites the revolution in art that

leads to abstraction in his appeal for ‘‘a theory of

thought without images.’’17 Art brings into play

forces of difference, Deleuze argues, through

repetitions that have the possibility to disrupt a

representational model of thinking based on the

primacy of identity. Deleuze’s understanding of

art’s potential to provoke thought is considered in

this essay through an account of the activity of

materiality, by focusing on the productivity of

repetition evident in the practice of Melbourne-

based artist Fiona Abicare.18

Abicare utilizes sculptural techniques of repro-

duction, such as modelling, moulding and

casting, to engage processes of repetition along

with various modes of doubling, such as pairs of

photographic images, to induce heterogeneous

relationships between patterns and replicas. An

initial fascination with a family collection of

Lladro figurines not only motivated Abicare to

investigate processes of copying and duplication

but also the settings of their display. This

questioning of display brings into play the

dynamics of spatiality through the elaborate

inventions of matter with the prospect of

suggesting new modes or styles of inhabitation.

Abicare explores these prospects by deploying

style as a procedure to mark out specific

territories in response to the complexity of

existing amid a world of objects and others.

This is the primary gesture of art, according to

Grosz, on which she notes Derrida and Deleuze

are in rare agreement, ‘‘the construction or

fabrication of the frame.’’19 Grosz sketches a

relationship between Derrida’s investigation into

art’s various frames, in The Truth in Painting,

and Deleuze’s discussion of art, written together

with Felix Guattari in What is Philosophy?, with

particular reference to their understanding of

art’s territorializing as sensory. The following

examination of Abicare’s practice responds to this

understanding of art as differentiating planes of

coherence in which to think and act. These zones

of consistency are filtered and composed from an

incalculable exteriority comprised of the indeter-

minate forces of chaos that encompasses all

possibilities. This discussion is framed primarily

by the writings of Deleuze who asks, as Claire

Colebrook notes, ‘‘just what style of life some-

thing – a political form, a work of art or a

philosophy – enables.’’20 The deliberate styling of

Abicare’s installations exceeds the conventions of

decor and decorum as they flirt with the libidinal

forces of chaos loitering on their edges. What

they enable is the interruption of routine modes

of inhabitation by confounding customary ways

of encountering the world.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze asserts,

‘‘a fundamental encounter’’ is not an object of

recognition, rather ‘‘[s]omething in the world

forces us to think.’’21 The claim that Deleuze

makes rests on a distinction that Plato identifies

between two types of things, and the sensations

they provoke. These sensations are characterized

on the one hand by that which is harmonious with

what is conceivable, imaginable or somehow

already known. These sensations leave the mind

calm and inactive; as Deleuze writes: ‘‘[t]hought

is thereby filled with no more than an image of

itself, one in which it recognises itself the more it

recognises things.’’22 On the other hand, opposed

to this is an encounter with what can only be

sensed or grasped as a range of affective qualities

that resonate without being recognizable. What is

grasped ‘‘is not a sensible being,’’ as Deleuze

states, ‘‘but the very being of the sensible.’’23 The

irreducibility of this sensation disrupts the

habitual range of experiences, or otherwise

challenges customary ways of being in the

world, such that they demand further enquiry

or compel thinking.

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It is sensations of the second type that Daniel

W. Smith argues constitute for Deleuze the basis

of an aesthetic.24 This is not to suggest that

Deleuze proposes a general theory for the

reception or interpretation of art, as his focus is

on the conditions for the creation of the new,

which maintains the distinctiveness of each art

form and singularity of each artwork. As Smith

notes, Deleuze understands each artwork as

utilizing its particular materials and techniques

to confront its own problems, through the

invention of different procedures in response to

an array of intensive forces. Through these

various procedures Deleuze and Guattari describe

art as throwing a plane of composition over chaos

to yield its force as sensation. This is the

peculiarity of art for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘‘to

pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to

restore the infinite,’’ which in turn, ‘‘through the

action of aesthetic figures, bears monuments or

composite sensations.’’25 It is this aim that all the

arts share, to incorporate something of the

vibratory forces of chaos, without fixing or

commemorating them as their continuous mobi-

lity means they are always becoming other.26

The composite sensations, or blocks of sensa-

tions, produced by art are a compound of

autonomous percepts and affects, existing inde-

pendently from the experience of a viewer. As

Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘‘The work of art is a

being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in

itself.’’27 At the same time, sensation, as Smith

stresses, ‘‘must not to be confused with the

material in which these syntheses are effected.’’28

To this end Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two

types of relationships between sensation and

material. In the first instance, they write,

‘‘sensation is realized in the material and does

not exist outside of this realization.’’29 In the

second instance, one they associate with moder-

nist painting, sensation is no longer realized in

the material, rather it is, as they state, ‘‘the

material that passes into sensation.’’30 Whilst

sensation exists in principle in itself for Deleuze

and Guattari, it is in the interplay between finite

occurrences materialized as works of art and the

infinite that sensation is suspended momentarily

as material and through which material is

intensified. Through its capacity to transform

into a sensory experience forces lying at the limits

of sensibility, forces of the outside or the virtual,

art as an encounter with these intensities compels

us to think.

An understanding of the work of the work of

art, as a block of sensation that compels thinking,

is evident in Abicare’s 2008 installation

COVERS.31 This installation formed a scenogra-

phy that brought together sculpture and photo-

graphy, with interests in fashion, interiors and

display, to produce an arena of intensified

sensations. These sensations were activated

across multiple surfaces: not just those of the

artwork but the gallery itself, with its polished

concrete floor and irregular angled walls and

ceiling, brought into play through the work of

art. The apparent architectonics of this theatre

engaged with investments of desire, libidinal

forces erupting through crusts and bloodless skin,

to destabilize and disorder its space of appear-

ance. This space was styled as an interior

accommodating a place of seemingly silent

reception in perpetual anticipation of an amorous

encounter. The characteristics of this encounter,

as proposed by Irigaray, are the basis of an ethical

love relation between women and men, one that

acknowledges the irreducible difference of each,

in which each has a proper place. In the absence

of such a place this amorous encounter is

forestalled, and in COVERS, without a threshold

to grant entry, the viewer was caught in the

circularity of its plan.

Primarily two devices activated the plan of this

installation. Firstly, an almost opaque full-length

curtain veiled one corner of the gallery, obscuring

it from view. This softly billowing surface

intensified the gallery’s spatial dynamics at the

same time as incorporating the angular ceiling to

operate as an extension of its verticality.

Secondly, a centrally positioned screen, standing

approximately eye height, interrupted the view-

er’s movement through the space, contributing to

the plan’s circularity. This screen created two

very distinct milieus, different in both size and

character. The larger, more public side of the

screen was faced with a faux-rock fac�ade cast from

a mould taken off the surface of volcanic rocks.

The smaller, more private side of the screen was

faced with white gold leaf under glass, creating a

figuringmateriality

8

faceted reflective surface. Other elements inhab-

ited the space of the installation, principally a

life-size truncated or headless figure of a woman,

partially modelled, partially moulded, and cast to

appear clad in a pair of linen trousers and silk

blouse of a style fashionable in the 1940s. This

figure gestured towards the entrance of the

gallery, greeting the viewer with all the profi-

ciency and grace of an accomplished hostess,

seemingly unaware of her faceless presence. The

other prominent element was a pair of photo-

graphic images featuring a young woman seated

at a shelf observing herself in a mirror. She was

dressed in an identical outfit to the headless

figure, and the mirror also reflected the faux-rock

surface of the screen and part of the curtain.

However, exactly where she was seated was

uncertain, as was her relationship with the

headless figure.

Even though the face in the photographic

images may have revealed the identity of the

headless figure, they functioned as part of the

furnishings of this mise-en-scene, as much as they

did a portrait. This was reinforced by the

detailing of the images’ aluminium frames

echoing the framing of the screen, as well as the

frame of the chair on which the young women was

seated. The exaggerated performativity of these

photographs, involving not only the figure in the

images but the styling of the setting, complicated

their apparent indexical function. Operating

within the realm of portrait photography, the

images ostensibly recorded a young woman, self-

absorbed with her own appearance and the styling

of her hair. However, she was at the same time

disguised, masked amid the surfaces within which

she was framed. These surfaces enmeshed the

young woman in ornamentations, supplementary

trappings that enfold and envelop her in a place

not of her own making. From this perspective she

appeared constrained within the styling of this

display.

The repetitions evident in the pair of photo-

graphic images augmented the intensification

activated by the curtain, screen and figure. This

intensification was further embellished by two

supplementary elements, rock objects on the shelf

in the photographic images, which were also

present in the installation. The smaller of the

rocks, a gilded aluminium cast modelled after a

gold nugget, was positioned on top of the screen

in the installation. The larger rock, revealing odd

eruptions resembling almandine garnets, was on

the floor of the installation behind the screen.

This rock was partly wrapped in a loosely folded

cast of the blouse from the featured outfit. A

crumpled cast of the trousers of this outfit was

also discarded on the floor nearby. The apparent

casualness of this placement contrasted with the

generally restrained style of the installation.

However, this was not the only place where the

veneer of propriety was punctuated. Protruding

from beneath the faux-silk blouse of the headless

figure, erect nipples gave this avatar an animated

quality otherwise absent. Similarly, in the photo-

graphic images a slight shadow in the blouse

indicated the young woman’s breast pressed

against the shelf. This inkling of her sexuality,

Fig. 1. COVERS 2008. Heide Museum of Modern Art. Type C photograph, aluminium, 530mm� 500mm. CopyrightFiona Abicare (the artist). Photographer John Brash.

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9

along with her bare feet exposed below the

trousers, disturbed the veil of reserved decorum.

These hints of the disconcerting force of desire,

a reservoir of sensations barely contained,

troubled the prevailing stillness and restraint of

the scene.

Amid the mutations of the various elements,

both in the images and amongst the other

components, multiple foldings were generated

that also unsettled the outwardly opaque and

silent matrix. These folds amplified the installa-

tion’s constitutive differences, enabling numerous

assemblages to form across several topographic

fields, facilitated by the use of shared techniques

and materials. Fields such as that formed by the

folds, pleats and creases in the faux-volcanic rock

surface, itself an archive of countless forces,

working together with the folds of the rock

objects, curtain and numerous versions of the

outfit. The outfit in itself mapped material

Fig. 3. COVERS 2008. Heide Museum of Modern Art. Forton, aluminium, steel, gold leaf, Georgette, dimensionsvariable.Copyright Fiona Abicare (the artist). Photographer John Brash.

Fig. 2. COVERS 2008. Heide Museum of Modern Art. Forton, aluminium, steel, gold leaf, Georgette, dimensionsvariable.Copyright Fiona Abicare (the artist). Photographer John Brash.

figuringmateriality

10

displacements, replicating silk and linen in cast

acrylic resin that mimicked ceramic with matte

finish. Through these processes the materials

where transformed into blocks of sensations,

assemblages of flesh, fabric and stone. The

productive instability of these fields set in

motion compound relations that proliferated

difference by denying the primacy of an original

over a series of copies. This is the effect of the

simulacrum that, Deleuze argues, ‘‘seizes upon

the constituent disparity in the thing from which

it strips the rank of model.’’32

The interest that Deleuze has in the simula-

crum is tied to his enquires into Plato’s theory of

Ideas, the relations of essence and appearance,

original and copy, model and reproduction,

identity and resemblance. This enquiry is under-

taken in association with his larger project of

overturning Platonism and subverting the

domain of representation. Overturning

Platonism is the task that Deleuze assigns to

modern philosophy in Difference and Repetition,

which, as Paul Patton notes, carries with it the

ambiguity of the French word renverser in the

sense of overcoming or reversal.33 Gregory

Flaxman also takes up this ambiguity to argue

convincingly that Deleuze is engaged in much

more than simply inverting Platonism in that he

wants to overcome it from the inside, to challenge

its oppositionality, through the production of

simulacra, ‘‘beginning with the simulacrum of

Platonism itself.’’34 In Deleuze’s earlier writings,

in particular, this project involves examining

Plato’s texts in which he tries to distinguish true

claimants, or authentic well-grounded copies or

resemblances, from false inauthentic semblances

or simulacrum. What Plato discovers, according

to Deleuze, is that ‘‘the simulacrum is not simply

a false copy, but that it places in question the

very notations of copy and model.’’35

The predominant techniques used in the

production of Abicare’s installation – modelling,

moulding and casting – convey imprints of

matter on matter, transcribing events and work-

ing to extenuate the relationships of pattern and

replica. Whilst appearing to faithfully reproduce

a pattern, these processes of repetition generate

variations and divergences rather than sameness.

Each process of repetition, with its associated

shifts in material and procedure: exchanges from

pattern to mould, mould to replica, modified

replica to mould back to replica, introduced

modulations and deviations that work to under-

mine the presence of a grounding identity. In

effect, the work of this work of art, the site of its

activity, was its materiality effectively abandon-

ing any notion of an authenticating original in

favour of endless variations. Its work was the

elaborate invention of matter actively engaged in

processes of formation, calling into question the

relation of model and copy through the produc-

tion of multiple differences, semblances and

simulacra.

The repetitions of elements in COVERS had a

relation similar to that described by Deleuze:

‘‘[r]epetition is truly that which disguises itself in

constituting itself, that which constitutes itself

only by disguising itself.’’36 Deleuze argues that

this is the productive chaos out of which the

positive power of the simulacrum is set in

motion: the return and affirmation of the

different. The simulacrum works against the

illusion of unmasking which for Deleuze pre-

sumes, as Smith notes, ‘‘a face behind the mask,

an original model behind the copy.’’37 Any

attempts to fully comprehend COVERS or

unmask its meaning were short-circuited through

complicated processes that utilized the constitu-

ent disparities within the photographic images,

and between these images and the other elements

in the installation. In the photographic images the

young woman’s face was pleated between the

reflected surface of the faux-rock screen and

curtain, and the folds of her hair, folds repeated

in the rock objects on the shelf and in her

trousers. These folds disguised her as yet another

surface that at the same time engaged processes

of repetition in a productive dispersal of sensa-

tions traversing the surfaces of these images. This

dispersal of sensations also permeated the

installation as an unpredictable libidinal force

that eluded demands seeking an authenticating

original. Where the Platonic inclination to cast

out simulacra entails a subjugation of difference,

Deleuze redeploys its nomadic distributions,

emphasizing the inclusion of difference in the

movement of repetition. Inhabiting the nomadic

distributions of COVERS were processes of

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recomposition that, as Deleuze and Guattari

advocate, disrupted by activating clandestine

flows forming new assemblages.

These assemblages were effects of simulacra

operating in this installation to create an imma-

nent network, circuits of relations forming align-

ments, connections and disjunctions that emerged

from the work of matter. Whilst this work yielded

recognizable objects, such as the headless figure,

the immediacy of their affective qualities con-

tested the hold of representational form. What was

resisted was a form/content duality typical to

understandings of art tempted by the illusion of

transcendence that configures art in a relationship

to truth, as a representation of a prior presence. In

asking how transcendence is constituted Deleuze

maintains, as Colebrook notes succinctly, ‘‘trans-

cendence emerges from immanence.’’38 This is not

to suggest that transcendence is within imma-

nence; for Deleuze the relationship between self

and world, inside and outside, is a differentiation

that emerges from the dynamic of life. This

relationship should not be mistaken, Colebrook

argues, ‘‘as some original difference which might

explain life.’’39 Life is not full and present to itself,

Colebrook maintains, ‘‘a being that then evolves or

differs.’’40 Nor is there a consciousness that then

comes to know a world outside of itself. Life is, for

Deleuze, ‘‘the potential to differ,’’ as Colebrook

emphasizes, ‘‘precisely because something ‘is’

only its responses.’’41

Similarly, the understanding proposed by

Deleuze and Guattari with regards to how

matter comes to be formed is one that assumes

its dynamic potential, challenging a devaluation

of matter typical of dualist philosophies.

Advocating the inherent flux of matter, they

insist it is ‘‘less a form capable of imposing

properties upon a matter than material traits of

expression constituting affects.’’42 Matter is in

continuous movement, as Deleuze and Guattari

write, ‘‘a conveyor of singularities and traits

of expression . . . this matter-flow can only be

followed.’’43 As such, matter’s capacity to differ

is not determined in advance; instead, this

potential is activated in connections and relations

through displacements and deviations as a

response to encounters with outside forces.

This is an outside, or relation to exteriority,

that is produced through processes of differentia-

tion, rather than existing prior to an act of

differentiation or having a presence that is

knowable or in some way locatable outside these

processes.

An understanding of exteriority as an effect of

difference challenges conventional understanding

of matter, which presumes it receives form,

content and meaning from elsewhere. Underlying

this habitual comprehension of matter is an

opposition of the intelligible and the sensible

residing at the core of conceptual categories that

structure hierarchies and determine relations.

This restrictive framework not only structures the

presumed secondariness of matter, but nature,

bodies, women, etc. It also contributes to the

detrimental social, cultural and political conse-

quences that ensue from these conceptual

hierarchies. This legacy simplifies conceptions

of what is, to how we know. As Grosz maintains,

it reduces ontology to epistemology, with the

consequence that materiality is similarly reduced

to the function of representation. The constitutive

difference proposed by Deleuze, and shared by

Irigaray and Derrida, ‘‘a difference that preexists

the entities that it produces,’’ Grosz writes, leads

to a more abstract approach to the ontological

questions raised by the problems of matter.44

These questions inform all practices influencing

not only how we think about art but also, as Grosz

insists, those that concern subjectivity and

politics. Configuring ‘‘matter as force and

difference’’ as Grosz does has the potential, she

argues, ‘‘to bring about new frames of reference

and new kinds of questions.’’45

If matter is not simply a vehicle for conveying

intentions or meanings, then attention needs to

be paid to the form that its force of differing

takes in each specific instance. This is the work of

the work of art, the mode of its differentiation,

the style of its cut that negotiates the relations of

inside and outside operating in any particular

artwork. The limits of any differentiation or

demarcation are only ever partial, and the

incorporation of forces of an outside in excess

of what is knowable is inevitability incomplete.

It is from the subversion of this excess, the

latency inherent in the dynamics of matter’s

provocations to conceptual hierarchies, that the

figuringmateriality

12

potential for the new, as Grosz comments, is

welcomed as an indeterminable future.46 This is a

project shared with Irigaray and Deleuze, as

dissimilar as their approaches are; as Tamsin

Lorraine remarks, both evoke a future that

diverges from and exceeds the customs and

habits of the present.47 Through vastly different

frames of reference Irigaray and Deleuze similarly

question forms of representational thinking and

explore zones of indiscernability, that acknowl-

edge the dynamic processes of subjectivity and

other forms of relationships in ways that

formulate new questions. Through their engage-

ments with the forces of life, Irigaray and Deleuze

chart the possibilities for conceptual and corpor-

eal transformations. Despite their differences,

each in their distinct manner confronts ‘‘the

limits of what is perceivable . . . and conceivable,’’

as Lorraine maintains, ‘‘lead[ing] us to an infinite

beyond both that is our most important resource

in the rejuvenation of human life.’’48

Maintaining an openness to this excess or

exteriority at the same time as fabricating a

frame, which enables an intelligibility that comes

with recognizable boundaries and contextualiza-

tions, is the territory of art’s political potential.

Situated in this zone of undecidability are

practices that experiment with resisting and

disordering oppositions from within. They man-

oeuvre in the space between a material’s becom-

ing and its processes of formation, inserting the

disordering effects of matter that compel think-

ing. These practices do not seek an effective

relation to the political through direct forms of

political expression, imagery or actions. This

potential is not conveyed in terms of what they

represent, but in their openness to something

beyond. Art’s relation to the political resides in

its effects, the leap it takes into the unknown in

bringing about something new, as Grosz suggests,

through a dislocation of and with the present that

produces the world it figures.49 By inhabiting the

uncertainty of the incalculable qualities of matter,

its residues that resist incorporation as an excess

beyond the knowable, art practices experimenting

in this territory produce contexts that allow for

the maximization of difference.

It is in this manner, for example, that

COVERS activated the disordering effects of

matter harbouring forces of desire to menace the

demands for pragmatic or calculable ends. These

effects troubled normative positions attributed to

the feminine other as trapped, mirroring forms of

identity she can never satisfy. The circularity of

the installation, in plan and also in part elicited

by its mobilization of matter’s difference

described above, instigated an interval. In this

interval, embellished by a disquieting intensifica-

tion, the viewer was detained, unable to locate the

illusive figure or subject of the work. Fashioned

in its place were crusts of representational form

across whose surface matter’s difference

traversed – a difference that generated aberra-

tions in place of answers, deploying objects to

disperse the figure between multiple platforms.

This staging challenged a simplification of what

matter is to ‘‘unbecome,’’ as Grosz suggests an

apparent givenness, via a ceaseless interchange

across the thresholds of surface and depth, face

and mask, ornament and decoration. Through a

play of repetitions and simulacra, COVERS

mimed distinctions between matter, form and

content to navigate differently their dualistic

configurations. Constituting itself through a

masquerade of disguises, it undermined the

certainty of these designations. In their place it

signalled the potential to rethink

the topology of material relations

and their associated social, cul-

tural and political formations

beyond an oppositional legacy.

notes1 This is the interpretative operationthat Geoffrey Bennington identifies in thewritings of Jacques Derrida. See GeoffreyBennington, Interpreting Derrida (London:Routledge, 2000) 9.

2 Jacques Derrida, Positions [1972], trans. A. Bass(London: Athlone,1981) 65. Although often charac-terized as caught in a cul-de-sac of linguistic philo-sophy, Derrida’s generalized understanding ofwriting and emphasis on iterability makes him, asMichael O’Driscoll remarks, ‘‘one of our mostimportant thinkers of materiality.’’ See ‘‘Envois /En Soi / Encore: Derrida’s Little Letter,’’ Mosaic39.3 (2006) 217.

bird

13

3 This understanding of ‘‘the work of the work ofart,’’as aneffectof itsmateriality, is put forwardbyBenjamin invarious texts, such asDisclosing Spaces:On Painting (Manchester: Clinamen, 2004) 20^21.

4 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One [1977],trans.C. Porter and C.Burke (Ithaca,NY: CornellUP,1985) 191.

5 Ibid.154.

6 Ibid. 75.

7 Luce Irigaray, AnEthicsof SexualDifference [1984],trans. C. Burke and G.C.Gill (Ithaca, NY: CornellUP,1993) 7; emphasis in original.

8 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside:Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA:MIT P, 2001) 93.

9 Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature,Power (Sydney: Allen, 2005) 171.

10 An Ethics of Sexual Difference 18; emphasis inoriginal.

11 TimeTravels178.

12 Ibid.

13 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘‘Bergson, Deleuze and theBecoming of Unbecoming,’’ Parallax11.2 (2005) 10.

14 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual:Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: DukeUP, 2002) 228.

15 TimeTravels 74.

16 Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze andGuattari: Thought beyond Representation (NewYork:Palgrave, 2006.) 16; emphasis in original.

17 Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968],trans.P.Patton (NewYork:ColumbiaUP,1994) 276.

18 In pursuing this argument this essay engageswith the challenge articulated by Grosz regardingthe use of the writings of Deleuze ^ to thinkabout artworks that hewould have had little timefor himself, given his preference for works of highmodernism. See Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory,Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth(NewYork: Columbia UP, 2008) 18 fn.14.

19 Ibid.10.

20 Claire Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for thePerplexed (London: Continuum, 2006) 4; emphasisin original.

21 DifferenceandRepetition139;emphasis inoriginal.

22 Ibid.138.

23 Ibid.140; emphasis in original.

24 Daniel W. Smith, ‘‘Deleuze’s Theory ofSensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality’’ inDeleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. P. Paton (Oxford:Blackwell1996) 31.

25 Gilles Deleuze and Fe¤ lix Guattari, What isPhilosophy? [1991], trans. H. Tomlinson andG.Burchell (NewYork: Columbia UP,1994) 197.

26 Grosz extends Deleuze and Guattari’s interestin musical vibration and connects it to CharlesDarwin’s considerations of music’s seductivepower to elaborate art’s effect as a ‘‘vibratoryforce’’ through the materiality of sensation. SeeChaos,Territory, Art 61.

27 What is Philosophy? 164.

28 ‘‘Deleuze’sTheory of Sensation’’ 47.

29 What is Philosophy? 193; emphasis in original.

30 Ibid.; emphasis in original.

31 COVERSwas exhibited at the Heide Museum ofModern Art, Melbourne, from 1November 2008to 22 February 2009.

32 Difference and Repetition 67.

33 Paul Patton, ‘‘Anti-Platonism and Art’’ in GilesDeleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, eds. C.V.Boundas and D. Olkowski (London: Routledge,1994) 143.

34 Gregory Flaxman, ‘‘Plato’’ in Deleuze’sPhilosophical Lineage, eds. G. Jones and J. Roffe(Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009) 9.

35 Giles Deleuze, Logic of Sense [1969], trans. M.Lester and C. Stivale (New York: Columbia UP,1990) 256.

36 Difference and Repetition17.

37 ‘‘Deleuze’sTheory of Sensation’’ 104.

38 Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed116.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid. 6; emphasis in original.

41 Ibid. 6, 5; emphasis in original.

42 Giles Deleuze and Fe¤ lix Guattari, AThousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

figuringmateriality

14

[1980], trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P,1987) 408.

43 Ibid. 409; emphasis in original.

44 TimeTravels174.

45 Ibid.172,173.

46 Architecture fromthe Outside 94.

47 Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze:Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca, NY:Cornell UP,1999) 215.

48 Ibid.13^14.

49 Elizabeth Grosz, Nick of Time: Politics, Evolutionand the Untimely (Sydney: Allen, 2004) 257^61.

Terri Bird

Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Art &

Design

Monash University Caulfield Campus

PO Box 197, Caulfield East

VIC 3145

Australia

E-mail: terri.bird@artdes.monash.edu.au

bird

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