They say you shouldn't meet your heroes. Fortunately, I don't have any but then Giles Deleuze’s writings and lectures, most active from the mid 60’s onwards, must be regarded as something far more omnipresent; a terrain of always-becomings for the mind, a wonderful poetic map to apply externally into the world. The kind of archetypal, anarcho-thinking anomic Frenchman which art's own pursuit of contemporaneousness is indebted. It is here that such indebtedness appears manifest, where a selection of art works and collections find reflection in some of his writings. Among his many interests and concepts (he stated that 'doing philosophy' is the creation of concepts): cinema, difference, Lacan, leftist politics, madness, 'May 68', metaphysics, nomadism, strata, Virginia Wolfe, wolf packs... prominently stands desire; not as a lack of, but as an innate energy in humans. ‘Desiring machines’: an embodiment of our productive drives that construct realities toward other experiences and connections with other desiring machines - or what might be called multiplicities – that create social structures, yet are also capable of being; “…explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors… It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire and even to find something more efficient than repression, so that repression, hierarchy, exploitation and servitude, are themselves desired.” (Anti Oedipus pg 126-7). Ahhh Deleuzian writings, you can dip into his translated tomes at any given point and find something anew that will spurt out a cluster of thoughts and ideas. It's mental magic (and I hadn't read anything like that before). Few thinkers have been as widely ransacked for referential ideas in this current contemporary art world, where monstorous Deleuzian incarnations have emerged, conjoining academia, activism and aesthetics. Which is pretty unsurprising, given their shared interest in becoming; "with Mozart's birds it is the man who becomes a bird, because the bird becomes music" (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 53). And this exhibition could well be mistaken for a kind of posthumous desiring-shrine-machine, dedicated toward his philosophical (or self-proclaimed concept making) work; especially his anti-psychiatry collaborations with anti-psychiatrist Felix Guattari. The weekend then was a series of thought 'trajectories' (a favorite and recurring concept in Deleuzian discussions) from a man who in 1995 launched his own bedridden body from a window. Indeed his notion of 'lines of flight' would refer to this romantic desire to flee, to expose and traject through the cracks of society.
Alternatively, this can be given some context in the form of Semiotext(e)'s editor Sylvère Lotringer who visited for the weekend. His journaled conference on "Madness and Prisons" in 1975 at Columbia University is recorded and relayed here through his 'Schizo-Culture' books referring Deleuzian schizophrenia as a cultural Capitalist condition. This event was aimed to be a meeting of cross atlantic minds from France and the US. Lines were drawn among the likes of Foucault, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Lyotard and Deleuze. Or to lazily borrow a quote from the gallery - who quote from Semiotext(e) - “ [to] bring together two continents of thought through a revolution of desire". Perhaps with the exception of Foucault, the others were not well known outside of France at the time (although there's always been a marketable interest) so this temporal event can be seen as among early ruptures towards a western academic adoption of what is now both celebrated and vilified as post-modernist and 'continental' theory. An attack of the state apparatuses; the prison, the hospital and control. Even so, we can regard all this as one of the dominant counter-culture onslaughts of its time, being predominantly Anglophone and western in aesthetics and social background. An observation which is pretty much overlooked in this positive retrospective.
Paraphernalia of American counter cultural icons are dispersed throughout the exhibit, stuck onto walls and display cases. The Ramones' 'teenage labotomy', Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Patti Smith, Jack Smith... creative acts of desiring machines washed ashore the white walls and vitrines, but purposefully void of any linear historicity (Deleuze would of course not appease such attempts). One wall features those in contact with Lotringer for the event, now offering a kind of aestheticised actualisation of these strands of thought displayed in a jumble, reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's popular notion of a ‘rhizome’. Not a diagram or tree with single points or roots of entry; but an archive machine that functions to express varieties of measurements between connecting images in order to make other mentalised assemblages.“We do not have units (unitès) of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement” – (pg9 A Thousand Plateaus). But this is not strictly about the event itself, any more than it is strictly about Deleuze. Rather, connected desires subjected through these frameworks.
Offering a guided tour around the exhibit like a peripatetic is Kodwo Eshun; everyone agrees he is good at engaging the work. He's certainly well informed. Sylvère walks around with us too - donning his fedora which he will later on joke about in the open audience discussion. His own creative output is also present; videos and a page from one his publications entitled ‘Nietczhe Returns’ depicting the philosopher riding through like a cowboy in Texan wilderness, heroic and intellectually deterritorialising (Euro-Colonising perhaps?).
We approach two videos titled; 'and so I’ll make myself believe it that this night will never go' from Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, one features a man citing from Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia' by a Parisian motorway. We watch him, reminiscent of those Oxford Circus people who shout from the bible towards passers-by, his own internal JG Ballard concrete island. He is neither in the most effective place to spread the word, nor is his approach effective, but I suspect this was already second guessed and so it becomes admirably futile in its stance anyway. Symbolic of the flows of capitalism; these cars, these modernist desiring machines that seek their destinations, appear imperceptible in such non-places. I am reminded of something which I think Deleuze may have once been recorded as saying - although it may also have been Burroughs - in which societies of control replace Foucault's idea of the disciplinary. On the motorway you can drive as far as you like, but only within its (necessary) permitted directions and speeds. In the other video a woman is muted as another female voice overlays, accompanied by facebook and twitter feeds; societies of codes. Words and meaning are open to manipulation, like Anri Sala's 'Intervista - finding the words' (in which he reinterpreted a lost soundtrack to some old footage of his mother speaking at an Albanian Marxist gathering) they become buried, except not over years but days, when released within a culture of accelerated communications. Deleuze; “Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational… Everything about capitalism is rational, except capital…A stock market is a perfectly rational mechanism, you can understand it, learn how it works; capitalists know how to use it; and yet what a delirium, it’s mad…” (‘On Capitalism and Desire’ interviews- Semiotext(e)). Is revolutionary desire a capable will to power and if so how can 60's libidinous philosophy possibly resist or mutate collectively against more efficiently rationalised machines? This is what I think the videos create connections with.
In a corner, coloured ribbons hang and tie from a spiral painted disc with a pasted-on mouth. from its centre a clear tube protrudes more ribbons. An ‘assemblage’ by Plastique Fantastique; not too unlike a psychedelic pagan-dream-catcher that might be inserted into Leigh Bowrey’s face. It’s title; ‘Ribbon Probe (for May Day): Tie-Untie-Retie’ insinuates a maypole concept prevalent in their work. This serves as an artifact for their own Guattari-an schizo-infused offspring performances; desiring imperceptibility, perhaps as a kind of resistance to common realities within/through art and its audience. Opposite a triangular painting with a facial appearance sits on a shelf and could be by Emil Nolde de-skilled, except it's actually by Mary Barnes, looking green and deflated with yellow lines for eyes. We know of her life that she was treated for schizophrenia by anti-psychiatrist RD Laing throughout the late 60’s to 70’s. Whilst a back story can be an overbearing influence or fetishisation on reading aesthetics, this work nevertheless reveals how artistic expression functions as various processes of therapy in context of the exhibition.
"You are all part of the enemy!" Lotringer later reassured the audience during the open discussion; among the accused were self-declared artists of varying sorts, academic types and art workers. Perhaps he is right, after all the supported economies in art lie on a currency of insider knowledge, sometimes hinged by those who are aware of philosophers like Deleuze and those featured in Semiotext(e). (As I write this I can only assume the people/person/just me who is still bothering to read this will likely have some prior knowledge). But if contemporary art is driven to commodity sign values - which it would appear was being suggested - then it is only because they are formed as its cultural product. It is glamorous, intellectual, escapist, value effecting and self-indulgent, academic, critical and crony liberating; and yet the business of actually generating an economy from it is just that. Boundaries of differences are less distinct, they form ‘and’s’ rather than ‘or’ in that Derrida-sense. But they are always conveniently open to capital impregnation too. If under Deleuzian Spinozian terms an imminence of ethics is finding a way to act within life, perhaps art, and especially the ‘plastic arts’ in its religio-contemplative functions and belief in new frontiers, enters into something akin to transcendentalist ethics. All the while desiring the same materialist world that other successful capitalist workers enjoy. This is my guess as to why everyone in the room was labelled as supplements to some sort of enemy regime. A cultural nihilism pervades in which art is but one death drive towards this. At least this was the impression I was given in the discussion... Then we had tea and free nibbles.
Kodwo Eshun walked us under a dark stairway where a type of site-approptiate installation has been made, by this I mean that a tv video containing Plastique Fantastique again and o(rphan)D(rift>) neatly sat beside prior graffitied walls that exude the overall aura of the screening as something a bit cyberpunk and DIY and grassroots and urbane. Although certainly immersive, with cut up sentences and looped indeterminate footages, it had the feeling of over indulgence and a lack of criteria for me to judge when applying the intellectual cache of Deleuzian-buggery. But this is where the ideas find much of itself today; a premonition of cyberspace and it's body without organs as an overbearing potential, equally revolutionary and anti hierarchial as it is capitalist, self-enslaving and abstract. It's schizophrenic and accelerationist desiring lines encapsulate much of what we experience in the virtual field, whether that be the product of the internet or his own understanding as something actualising potential. The ruptures of hacking, the becoming identities online, its imperceptability, the speeds, rhythms and intensities of desiring borderless communities, and online shopping with its striations and smooth spaces, could all be realisations or at least visualisations of this world subjectivity. His maxim, to 'escape philosophy through philosophy' reveals itself through art's own escapes. Like art's incorporation of 'digital art' and 'post digital art', today's institutes are upheld through expansion, multiplicity and fluidity. But just as Lotringer - who should be respected - supplements this into an industry of thought through his publications and just as art systems translate this into their own desiring shrines, arguably, such fluid co-option makes potential revolutionary desires and enemies of us all, 'in every place and at every level'*.
* Schizoculture: The Book pg 163 Deleuze excerpt from 'Dialogues' 77
Alternatively, this can be given some context in the form of Semiotext(e)'s editor Sylvère Lotringer who visited for the weekend. His journaled conference on "Madness and Prisons" in 1975 at Columbia University is recorded and relayed here through his 'Schizo-Culture' books referring Deleuzian schizophrenia as a cultural Capitalist condition. This event was aimed to be a meeting of cross atlantic minds from France and the US. Lines were drawn among the likes of Foucault, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Lyotard and Deleuze. Or to lazily borrow a quote from the gallery - who quote from Semiotext(e) - “ [to] bring together two continents of thought through a revolution of desire". Perhaps with the exception of Foucault, the others were not well known outside of France at the time (although there's always been a marketable interest) so this temporal event can be seen as among early ruptures towards a western academic adoption of what is now both celebrated and vilified as post-modernist and 'continental' theory. An attack of the state apparatuses; the prison, the hospital and control. Even so, we can regard all this as one of the dominant counter-culture onslaughts of its time, being predominantly Anglophone and western in aesthetics and social background. An observation which is pretty much overlooked in this positive retrospective.
Paraphernalia of American counter cultural icons are dispersed throughout the exhibit, stuck onto walls and display cases. The Ramones' 'teenage labotomy', Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Patti Smith, Jack Smith... creative acts of desiring machines washed ashore the white walls and vitrines, but purposefully void of any linear historicity (Deleuze would of course not appease such attempts). One wall features those in contact with Lotringer for the event, now offering a kind of aestheticised actualisation of these strands of thought displayed in a jumble, reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's popular notion of a ‘rhizome’. Not a diagram or tree with single points or roots of entry; but an archive machine that functions to express varieties of measurements between connecting images in order to make other mentalised assemblages.“We do not have units (unitès) of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement” – (pg9 A Thousand Plateaus). But this is not strictly about the event itself, any more than it is strictly about Deleuze. Rather, connected desires subjected through these frameworks.
Offering a guided tour around the exhibit like a peripatetic is Kodwo Eshun; everyone agrees he is good at engaging the work. He's certainly well informed. Sylvère walks around with us too - donning his fedora which he will later on joke about in the open audience discussion. His own creative output is also present; videos and a page from one his publications entitled ‘Nietczhe Returns’ depicting the philosopher riding through like a cowboy in Texan wilderness, heroic and intellectually deterritorialising (Euro-Colonising perhaps?).
We approach two videos titled; 'and so I’ll make myself believe it that this night will never go' from Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, one features a man citing from Deleuze and Guattari's 'Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia' by a Parisian motorway. We watch him, reminiscent of those Oxford Circus people who shout from the bible towards passers-by, his own internal JG Ballard concrete island. He is neither in the most effective place to spread the word, nor is his approach effective, but I suspect this was already second guessed and so it becomes admirably futile in its stance anyway. Symbolic of the flows of capitalism; these cars, these modernist desiring machines that seek their destinations, appear imperceptible in such non-places. I am reminded of something which I think Deleuze may have once been recorded as saying - although it may also have been Burroughs - in which societies of control replace Foucault's idea of the disciplinary. On the motorway you can drive as far as you like, but only within its (necessary) permitted directions and speeds. In the other video a woman is muted as another female voice overlays, accompanied by facebook and twitter feeds; societies of codes. Words and meaning are open to manipulation, like Anri Sala's 'Intervista - finding the words' (in which he reinterpreted a lost soundtrack to some old footage of his mother speaking at an Albanian Marxist gathering) they become buried, except not over years but days, when released within a culture of accelerated communications. Deleuze; “Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational… Everything about capitalism is rational, except capital…A stock market is a perfectly rational mechanism, you can understand it, learn how it works; capitalists know how to use it; and yet what a delirium, it’s mad…” (‘On Capitalism and Desire’ interviews- Semiotext(e)). Is revolutionary desire a capable will to power and if so how can 60's libidinous philosophy possibly resist or mutate collectively against more efficiently rationalised machines? This is what I think the videos create connections with.
In a corner, coloured ribbons hang and tie from a spiral painted disc with a pasted-on mouth. from its centre a clear tube protrudes more ribbons. An ‘assemblage’ by Plastique Fantastique; not too unlike a psychedelic pagan-dream-catcher that might be inserted into Leigh Bowrey’s face. It’s title; ‘Ribbon Probe (for May Day): Tie-Untie-Retie’ insinuates a maypole concept prevalent in their work. This serves as an artifact for their own Guattari-an schizo-infused offspring performances; desiring imperceptibility, perhaps as a kind of resistance to common realities within/through art and its audience. Opposite a triangular painting with a facial appearance sits on a shelf and could be by Emil Nolde de-skilled, except it's actually by Mary Barnes, looking green and deflated with yellow lines for eyes. We know of her life that she was treated for schizophrenia by anti-psychiatrist RD Laing throughout the late 60’s to 70’s. Whilst a back story can be an overbearing influence or fetishisation on reading aesthetics, this work nevertheless reveals how artistic expression functions as various processes of therapy in context of the exhibition.
"You are all part of the enemy!" Lotringer later reassured the audience during the open discussion; among the accused were self-declared artists of varying sorts, academic types and art workers. Perhaps he is right, after all the supported economies in art lie on a currency of insider knowledge, sometimes hinged by those who are aware of philosophers like Deleuze and those featured in Semiotext(e). (As I write this I can only assume the people/person/just me who is still bothering to read this will likely have some prior knowledge). But if contemporary art is driven to commodity sign values - which it would appear was being suggested - then it is only because they are formed as its cultural product. It is glamorous, intellectual, escapist, value effecting and self-indulgent, academic, critical and crony liberating; and yet the business of actually generating an economy from it is just that. Boundaries of differences are less distinct, they form ‘and’s’ rather than ‘or’ in that Derrida-sense. But they are always conveniently open to capital impregnation too. If under Deleuzian Spinozian terms an imminence of ethics is finding a way to act within life, perhaps art, and especially the ‘plastic arts’ in its religio-contemplative functions and belief in new frontiers, enters into something akin to transcendentalist ethics. All the while desiring the same materialist world that other successful capitalist workers enjoy. This is my guess as to why everyone in the room was labelled as supplements to some sort of enemy regime. A cultural nihilism pervades in which art is but one death drive towards this. At least this was the impression I was given in the discussion... Then we had tea and free nibbles.
Kodwo Eshun walked us under a dark stairway where a type of site-approptiate installation has been made, by this I mean that a tv video containing Plastique Fantastique again and o(rphan)D(rift>) neatly sat beside prior graffitied walls that exude the overall aura of the screening as something a bit cyberpunk and DIY and grassroots and urbane. Although certainly immersive, with cut up sentences and looped indeterminate footages, it had the feeling of over indulgence and a lack of criteria for me to judge when applying the intellectual cache of Deleuzian-buggery. But this is where the ideas find much of itself today; a premonition of cyberspace and it's body without organs as an overbearing potential, equally revolutionary and anti hierarchial as it is capitalist, self-enslaving and abstract. It's schizophrenic and accelerationist desiring lines encapsulate much of what we experience in the virtual field, whether that be the product of the internet or his own understanding as something actualising potential. The ruptures of hacking, the becoming identities online, its imperceptability, the speeds, rhythms and intensities of desiring borderless communities, and online shopping with its striations and smooth spaces, could all be realisations or at least visualisations of this world subjectivity. His maxim, to 'escape philosophy through philosophy' reveals itself through art's own escapes. Like art's incorporation of 'digital art' and 'post digital art', today's institutes are upheld through expansion, multiplicity and fluidity. But just as Lotringer - who should be respected - supplements this into an industry of thought through his publications and just as art systems translate this into their own desiring shrines, arguably, such fluid co-option makes potential revolutionary desires and enemies of us all, 'in every place and at every level'*.
* Schizoculture: The Book pg 163 Deleuze excerpt from 'Dialogues' 77
