Habit, art, and the plasticity of the subject: the ontogenetic shock of the bioart encounter (original) (raw)
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Much has been said about the constitutive and generative potential of matter, of its vibrancy, endless productivity and resilience. With its impersonal kind of agency, matter is both a producing force and a relationality. New Materialism, specifically, calls for a refiguration of the question of matter, bringing new approaches to debates on embodiment and interactions among bodies. Finally, the troubled divide between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’ is shaken too, as it begins to strike us as increasingly obsolete. Accordingly, the present paper examines encounters with artifactual creatures in artistic practice. In looking at kinetic sculptures of Theo Jansen and U-Ram Choe, as well as Merleau-Ponty concept of ‘the flesh’, it develops an extended notion of interaction whereby organic ‘human’ bodies are invited to participate in the terrestrial biome affirmatively by empathetically responding to that which is non-animalesque and not even biological – artifactual automata. What is foregrounded here is the relative autonomy of artifactual entities, the immersion in environments defined by the presence of artifactual agents, and the possibility of a human-artifactual participatory becoming. Here ‘living’ material bodies are defined in terms of their capacities to generate events and regimes of novelty. A body becomes a meta-stable locale composed of diffuse responsive states opening up toward the entirety of an environment. Here notions of empathetic immersion and participation intertwine to shape a new ecology of interlacing material bodies with their singular forms of interaction and response.
Creating the semi-living: on politics, aesthetics and the more-than-human
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2009
Although geographers have remarked on the aesthetic and political character of a technoscientific biology, there has been an accompanying tendency, following disciplinary trends and social theory more broadly, to read these as being separate issues at the analytic as well as substantive level. Whereas the former becomes read as a matter of artistic practice and appreciation, or visual appraisal, the latter is considered to be the exercise of power through discipline and regulation. Here, I draw upon Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics (2007, Continuum, London) to make a stronger claim for the role of the aesthetic, wherein a political regime is understood to be comprised of a 'distribution of the sensible' that orders what can be seen and what can be said about it, that determines who has the ability to see and to speak, that organises the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time, and that locates the identity of the quick and the dead within a grid of intelligibility. Political struggle is necessarily aesthetic insofar as it is an attempt to reconfigure the place not only of particular groups, but also the social order within which they are embedded. For Rancière, artistic practices are but particular ways of making and doing; they can have a distinctly political function, however, in the way that they reorder the relations among spaces and times, subjects and objects. To animate this discussion I draw on examples from critical BioArt that address the more-than-human world of Semi-Living Objects. From overt manifesto to ironic commentary, the practices, understandings and artefacts that comprise BioArt work to challenge the political, economic, cultural and ethical contexts within which a modernday technoscientific biology operates.
The Tissue Culture and Art Project: The Semi-Living as Agents of Irony
Performance and Technology, 2006
This is an examination of the performative aspects of the Semi-Living (and objects of Partial Live) grown by the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A). The Tissue Culture & Art Project, among a growing number of artists and collectives are involved with the presentation of manipulated living systems in an artistic context. In contrast with art that deals with the representation of life through established artistic strategies, TC&A"s type of engagement with living systems generate an experience which is closer to live/performance art. The phenomenological experience of the audience (as well as the artists) is of major importance for the TC&A. In much of TC&A"s work the audience are "forced" to actively participate in or be implicated with the alteration of the life cycle of problematised, technologically dependent fragments of life. As part of the TC&A we look at Semi Live Art (where humans and Semi-Living are unequally collaborating) as an attempt to challenge people"s perceptions of life. Like performance or live art, TC&A is interested in the presentation of the subject rather then its representation. The audience is confronted by the existence of the Semi-Living through the different performative and aesthetic strategies of TC&A, but first and foremost by the fact that Semi-Living are sharing the time and space of the engaged audience. By presenting something that is "sort of alive", that could only exist because of us and is dependent on us, TC&A lay bare the hypocrisies created to deal with the paradoxes in human relationships with other living beings.
Non/living Matter, Bioscientific Imaginaries and Feminist Technoecologies of Bioart
Australian Feminist Studies, 2017
Bioart is a form of hybrid artistico-scientific practices in contemporary art that involve the use of bio-materials (such as living cells, tissues, organisms) and scientific techniques, protocols, and tools. Bioart-works embody vulnerability (intrinsic to all beings) and depend on (bio)technologies that allow these creations to come into being, endure and flourish but also discipline them. This article focuses on ‘semi-living’ sculptures by The Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A). TC&A’s artworks consist of bioengineered mammal tissues grown over biopolymer scaffoldings of different shapes and require sterile conditions of a bioreactor and constant care in order to survive. The article explores how bioart-works are always already intertwined with multiple (bio)technologies and techniques of care and labour, forming specific feminist technoecologies that challenge conventional bioscientific and cultural imaginaries of embodiment and the relation between physis and techné. TC&A’s sculptures expose life as the non/living: the processual enmeshment of the organic and inorganic, living and non-living, and growth and decay. The article argues that thinking with and through the feminist technoecologies of bioart mobilises philosophical inventiveness: not only does it problematise the entwinement of technology and biomatter and of culture and nature, but it also prompts us to rethink the ontology of life.
As Lively Mock'd as Ever: Plasticity and the Aesthetic Image of Life
Doctoral Dissertation, 2018
This dissertation contends with the treatment of the biological in literary representation, arguing that the biological lacunae particularly visible in critical practice are best redressed by a formal exploration of aesthetic images of life. Biology, as I will show, admits of contingency, spontaneity, and novelty at the level of its aesthetic representation in a manner entirely distinct from what might be gleaned from a critical practice focused exclusively on the annals of discursive history. I approach this dynamic as an isomorphism of symbolism and biology and argue that just as contemporary philosophy has, through the work of Catherine Malabou, traced the symbolization of the biological, aesthetic criticism should seek to trace the biologization of the symbolic, that is, should seek to trace the way biology imposes its presence as an ontological piece of representation. Working my way back from the prominent appearance of three specific tropes in naturalist texts, I demonstrate within this dynamic that the aesthetic image of life asserts its plasticity against an impossible transcendental alterity, an alterity too long taken for granted in critical practice.
It is thought that matter can be invoked through ineffable means, through forces of intuition, inspiration or reflection. From what fragile testimonies and bodily influences arouse. This paper is concerned with the interplay between encounter and insistence in the experimental philosophies of contemporary "emergent" science. It considers how the biological can persuade variations of life that generate natural, social and cultural existence. Through architectural and aesthetic tropes, the writing gestures towards an esoteric materiality as it considers the transformative momentum of bodies offered by advances in fertility science and in regenerative skin technologies, and explores the performative yet quiescent spaces of their lived negotiations. What was once thought the culturally artifactual body now grants artful access to scientific knowledge creation through its inherently unsettled nature and the attendance of alteration. Experimentally, this paper wonders if questions of corporeal ecology can be sustained in an era of scientific knowing (still) imbued with vulnerability.
Art as experience of the living body, Introduction
Art as experience of the living body, an East/West experience, 2023
This book analyses the dynamic relationship between art and subjective consciousness, following a phenomenological, pragmatist and enactive approach. It brings out a new approach to the role of the body in art, not as a speculative object or symbolic material but as the living source of the imaginary. It contains theoretical contributions and case studies taken from various artistic practices (visual art, theatre, literature and music), Western and Eastern, the latter concerning China, India and Japan. These contributions allow us to nourish the debate on embodied cognition and aesthetics, using theoryphilosophy, art history, neuroscience-and the authors' personal experience as artists or spectators. According to the Husserlian method of "reduction" and pragmatist introspection, they postulate that listening to bodily sensations-cramps, heartbeats, impulsive movements, eye orientation-can unravel the thread of subconscious experience, both active and affective, that emerge in the encounter between a subject and an artwork, an encounter which, following John Dewey, we deem to be a case study for life in general. Ce livre analyse la relation dynamique entre l'art et la conscience subjective, selon une approche phénoménologique, pragmatiste et enactive. Il vise à faire émerger une nouvelle approche du rôle du corps dans l'art, non pas comme objet spéculatif ou matériau symbolique, mais comme source vivante de l'imaginaire. Les contributions théoriques et les études de cas sont prises à diverses pratiques artistiques (arts visuels, théâtre, littérature et musique), occidentales et orientales, ces dernières concernant la Chine, l'Inde et le Japon. Selon la méthode husserlienne de « réduction », en écho à l'introspection pragmatiste, les textes témoignent que l'écoute des sensations corporelles-crampes, battements de coeur, mouvements pulsionnels, orientation des yeux-mises en jeu par l'oeuvre, permet de dénouer le fil de l'expérience inconsciente, à la fois kinesthésique et affective, qui émerge dans la rencontre entre un sujet et une oeuvre d'art, une rencontre comprise, à la manière de Dewey, comme un cas d'école de la vie en général. Christine Vial Kayser (PhD, HDR) is an art historian and museum curator (emeritus). She is an Associate researcher with Héritages (CYU) and a member of the Doctoral School 628-AHSS. Her research relates to the capacity of art to transform representations within an individual and in the collective mind, through embodied, mnemonic, and affective processes, in a global, comparative (East/west context). She works at the crossroads of art theory, anthropology, and neuroaesthetics. Christine Vial Kayser (PhD, HDR) est historienne de l'art et conservatrice de musée (émérite). Elle est chercheur associé à Héritages (CYU) et membre de l'ED 628-AHSS. Ses recherches portent sur la capacité de l'art à transformer les représentations au sein d'un individu et dans le cadre collectif, à travers des processus incarnés, mémoriels et affectifs, dans un contexte global et comparatif (Est/Ouest). Elle travaille au croisement de la théorie de l'art, de l'anthropologie et de la neuroesthétique.
Bare your self naked for creation. Notes on impersonality, the encounter and a body for a life
In works previous to Thousand Plateaus (2005), such as Logic of Sense (1990), Gilles Deleuze stresses the importance of the impersonal as the dimension one must reach in order to counter-effectuate the Event. Impersonal, or neutrality, is a characteristic of singularities and of the Event. Although Deleuze never relates the Event to an experience, regarding experience as an event is our answer to such a question as the becoming-imperceptible or the radical affirmation of any body as a haecceity. Impersonality is a way of allowing the becoming. However, there seems to be a misuse of the notion of becoming as a process of deconstruction or transformation, underlining or enforcing the self instead of dismantling it. Patricia MacCormack's (2011) defense of the lizard-man, and the cat-man, as both bodies in-between and becoming, is such a misuse. Their and Body Art practitioners attempt of overcoming the Self and a subjectivity through the excess and extreme emphasis of turning all bodies “as aesthetic events which can experience and are experienced through zones or folds of proximity” (198) not only falls on the field of mimesis and representation, as they inflate subjectivity and a fixed Self. Turning the body into an event calls for a re-questioning of an ethical-aesthetic êthos, one which seeks to free life (DELEUZE, 1996) through the creation of encounters, and a much radical de-personalization of the self. This de-personalization or impersonality understood as an elimination process of subjectivities and selves determined by the socius follows Deleuze's Bartleby (1993) three characteristics, plus one: a trait of expression, a zone of indeterminacy, a fraternal function and a subjective-significative nudity. This is a fundamental dismantlement through a «leap of the will», as to achieve that composition in which we are a life in the same immanent plane as everything that composes Nature (DELEUZE, 2005). This is an impersonality towards life and creation (close to asceticism), one could argue, opposed to an imposed depersonalization of death and destruction (close to death camps' bare life). Nevertheless, for a body to become the event that it is, i.e., a body for a life, one must also address art's territory. First as an encounter (an ethic-aesthetic realm), which can produce what we call the space of the Event, following the idea of taking extra-daily practices and techniques into daily life. Art is too mediated/mediatic and mediates too much (perceptions and experiences). It is most of the time a stance for the production of the monolithic Self. To release both Life and Art, affects and percepts, from their shackles, one must avoid and produce actions and situations evading the alienation and fetishism of forces, close the gap of mediation between subject and object of experience. Hence, we propose to rethink Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones (1994), as a possibility of how to deterritorialize and produce encounters in daily life. A practice of immediatism: creation happening outside Art.
2004
The field of biological arts deals with modern biological knowledge, its applications and outcomes as both medium and subject. This is a transgressive and explorative art form that draws its inspiration and discourses from a diverse array of disciplines and modes of art expressions. At this stage it seems to be too early to discuss biological art as a movement per se, but rather it can be analysed as a problematic engagement with a new medium for artistic expression. The motivations and backgrounds of the main artists in this emerging field range from formalistic approaches to total transgression of both the artistic and scientific discourses. Works that involve living components in their presentation can be seen in many cases as time base works. They are durational pieces that can be viewed as an 'art as documentation'. In his essay Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation, the Russian critic Boris Groys (2002) explains this turn towards 'art as documentation' as the necessary result of art understood as 'a form of life'. He writes 'it is not the making of any finished artwork that is documented. Rather, documentation becomes the sole result of art which is understood as a form of life, a duration, a production of history.'(1) Relevant here is the work of the Tissue Culture and Art Project of which I am a founding member. This paper will explore the concept of partial life that led to the development of semi-Living art works, through the work of some of the leading figures in the history of partial life. The Work of the Dr. Alexis Carrel is relevant for this discussion about the epistemological, aesthetical and historical issues the practice of tissue culture for both artistic and scientific purposes. Two of the recent Tissue Culture & Art installations will be presented as case studies surveying the performative and installation staging aesthetics, and other approaches in presenting living biological systems in artistic context.
Sculpted Selves, Sculpted Worlds: Plasticity and Habit in the Thought of Catherine Malabou
2014
One of the contemporary trends marking our current moment in theory is the call for the elaboration of 'new' materialisms. The new materialisms, however, have taken two principal articulations: a Neo-Spinozist materialism read through the work of Gilles Deleuze, represented by thinkers such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett and William Connolly and a Neo-Hegelian materialism read through Jacques Lacan, represented by figures Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston. Concomitant with this return of materialism has been a resurgence in the topic of habit as a topic worthy of philosophical investigation. There is, however a division in the treatment of habit between the two camps. Habit is deemed positive by the vitalist materialisms influenced by Spinoza and Deleuze-illustrating the self's continuity and openness to the outside-but neglected by the Neo-Hegelian materialisms of Badiou, Žižek and Johnston as an instance of the political quietism of the 'micropolitical'. Contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou, typically associated with the figures of the Neo-Hegelian camp, elaborates a different materialism based on the principle of plasticity developed through not Hegel and Lacan, but Hegel and Heidegger and thus sits liminally between the two dominant materialist orientations. This thesis will elaborate Malabou's ontology of plasticity and argue how a reading of habit through Malabou's plastic rapprochement of Hegel-Heidegger offers a different perspective on habit as a critical ethicopolitical modality that can helpfully negotiate some of the binaries or impasses that mark contemporary ongoing debates in the interrelated fields of ontology and political theory