Affect Theory In Art Criticism

Jeremy LeMahieu Art Criticism March 7, 2015

There it is.

Here you are.

The encounter ­ with art. Before, during, and after the recognition of the art object. Before, during, and after the art has been broken down into its essential formal elements. Before, during, and after having done an historical, sociological, or political economy of the work. The art is. Or better put, the art does. While great benefits exist in the application of these theoretical structures towards the ‘understanding’ of a work of art, it yet does more. As Lyotard said, “it harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its “reception” and “production”.”(Lyotard, Critical Reflections, 93) It grows, builds, bubbles out, flows, and shimmers its way into the viewer’s space ­ into a new space. Ready or not. It is this action, the affect, this specific function of this ‘art­machine’, that I want to explore. Once one is aware of the pre­recognition, pre­personal affect, can this moment successfully be brought into representation by a written critique? First, I look at affect. I discuss what I mean when I posit that affects are that which cause the bodily feelings induced by the encounter with an art object that births change ­ a ‘becoming’. These feelings belong to the body and are distinct from emotion. These feelings also belong to the object itself in an immanent sense. In the affect of art there is a coupling, joining, rhizomatic ‘becoming’ between the art­machine (object) and the subject­machine (viewer). Then, I propose a method not of reification of the affect, but a method of participation with the affect, a blooming of both deconstruction and affect. I propose a use of semiotics not for decoding but for experience, a project similar to that of art, a production of production, not a production of object. In short it is a call for a critique that does. I close with a case study ­ an experiment. Kant and his legacy through aesthetics offers some insight into the aesthetic experience. He acknowledges something special happens in the emotions, intellect, and imagination in the presence of the beautiful and sublime. This experience of the object is apart from its usefulness. As such, an appreciation for this object ought to be experienced in a disinterested fashion with no thought to its utility. A rose is best enjoyed when not thinking about how to eat it. This experience he contends is also universal. That if an object arouses in a viewer a pleasurable experience, all other people ought to be able to experience the pleasure as well. This he argues is because the response to the experience is something transcendental, grounded in but not “contained in nature”. The destination of this experience is from a place beyond the object and beyond the viewer. (Kant, Critique of Judgment) Greenberg similarly argues the aesthetic experience ought not get soiled by the things of this world (politics, religion, artist’s biography). It was to be appreciated at a distance. It was to be experienced on Clive Bell’s “cold white peaks.” The assertion is this aesthetic experience is something foreign to the world life. It is from an idealized (utopian) place beyond. Art, in this view, provides an escape, a transportation, from here to the alien unrealized utopia.

But can another option exist? Is it possible to understand an art encounter without referring to some (im)possible utopia? There have been no lack in attempts to answer this question. But of the most compelling answers have to do with affects. Lyotard understands the aesthetic experience, which he calls affects, as the overflowing and rapture of an object. (Lyotard, 93) That is, there is an excess within the object itself. Brian Massumi also thought of the immanence of an object, he understood the affect as a moment of intensity enacted on the body. (Massumi, Autonomy, 89,90) Alain Badiou describes affect as the “event site” : “a point of exile where it is possible that something, finally, might happen”. (Badiou, 84) Each of these men dealt with and argued against transcendence differently, but they each understood affect as that which arises in the body in the encounter with art. There is no looking ‘through’ art only looking ‘at’. And most prominently in the writings of Massumi there is a return to the body and away from cognition. First, a science story as told in Massumi’s Autonomy of Affects. In a study coordinated by Hertha Sturm, children were wired and shown three versions of a short video. The video told a story about a snowman. First, a story dubbed on top of the video was told in a cold and factual way. Second, the story was told in an emotionally charged tone. Finally, the story was told with only the moving images ­ no voice. This image only story was rated most pleasurable by the children, while the emotional telling was best remembered, and the factual was the least pleasurable to the children. They were then instructed to rate the scenes on a scale of happy to sad and then on the scale of pleasant to unpleasant. The results were surprising. The saddest scenes were also the most pleasant, and the happiest scenes were the least pleasant. Also curious was finding the factual telling of the story resulted in a decreased galvanic skin response while the image only version caused an increase. (Sturm, 25­27) (Massumi, Autonomy, 84) The galvanic skin response test measures the autonomic reaction. And the “Autonomic reaction refers to a number of physical changes, including increased respiratory rate or hyperventilation, palpitations, flushing, and gastrointestinal disturbance, which most frequently occur in response to anxiety­provoking or potentially dangerous stimuli.” (Cox & Stone, 2006) In other words, it was the image only version that elicited the strongest bodily response. Several implications are worth gleaning when considering this study. First, in regards to intensity, negative emotion (sadness) is the most pleasant. The relationship between intensity of arousal and emotional interpretation is counter­intuitive. Next, factuality is a turn off. Explaining something lowers the galvanic skin response. Next, form and content are not necessarily coherently linked. With the exact same form, there were three different experiences. Next, with phrases like, “I feel sad”, “that was a touching story”, and “ He is an abrasive individual”, what the English language already assumed, this study proves, that affect is an issue of skin and body, not of emotion. And finally, most important to the issues of art that I discuss, there a perception of danger, a threat, that results from the encounter with an image. There is a force that demands from the viewer a fight or flight. I submit that one of the primary avenues of travel of affect from art is through the feeling of imminence of danger. It is a snake under foot. The form positions itself in the world of the viewer and demands a reaction. You know you are outside. You know snakes live outside. You know of the possibility of a snake beneath your foot. But its form, in its presence, is jolting. The form has been moved from the world of the possible into the actual. Into your world. Before you

can perform its full zoological classification it has arrested your consciousness. There has been a rupture of your world ­ a crack. A break of habit. The threat is not transcendental. The threat is a world that is here and now. It is full of force, a bloc of sensations . You are aware of its positioning from your body. With threat comes a choice. One is of inaction which I do not wish to address. But it can be chosen. The more responsible actions involve fight or flight. But there is an option that combines the two which is the deleuzoguattarian fleeing. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari lay out a groundwork for understanding their concept of flight. In fleeing one escapes, not as a coward, but in an act of aggression. One flees in gathering weapons. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus) In The Heterogenesis of Fleeing, Gerald Raunig lays out a few helpful thoughts concerning this specific ‘kind’ of fleeing. First, “Fleeing...does not mean something escapist or pacifying, on the contrary it is an extremely active affair involving the continual search for the newest weapons.” (Raunig, “The Heterogenesis of Fleeing” in Deleuze and Contemporary Art, 45) He continues explaining that in fleeing one creates lines of flight. These lines of flight are not taken into imaginary or other worlds but rather into newly created real worlds that are here and now. But this is not painless. There is a sense in which in the act of fleeing one becomes a traitor unto him/herself. That is, you become­something­new in direct opposition to before. As a result, fleeing is not an “empty movement” it is an invented line and therefore productive. Finally, fleeing is not a ‘flight from...’but an absolute concept. It is a being­against. (Raunig, “The Heterogenesis of Fleeing” in Deleuze and Contemporary Art, 45­49) Raunig describes a kind of aggressive/actual/self­inflicted/flowing/producing/being­creating flight. With this considered it is apparent that this type of fleeing is not passive. But to help visualize this concept let us look at another uniquely deleuzoguattarian model, that of the rhizome. The rhizome grows and expands and creates with no hierarchical schematic. It bubbles out from itself to recreate itself into an ever expanding space. The lines of flight are ways to create more rhizome in every direction even at different speeds. It is truly multi­dimensional in both time and space. In this model distinct categories are enveloped, by both itself and others and becomes something new in a continuous flow of deterritorialization. “A rhizome then fosters transversal connections and communications between heterogeneous locations and events.” (O’Sullivan, Art Encounters, 12) Back to art. Back to the encounter. Between the affect producing art and the subject producing viewer occurs a change, a rupture in the habitual modes of existence. Both are changed forever in the encounter, in the affect, of a work. From the lines of flight, through the process of fleeing, a new world has emerged. As Robert Morris describes, “Once a perceptual change is made, one does not look at it but uses it to see the world.” (Morris, “Notes on Sculpture 4” in Art in Theory, 881) I now turn to Morris as he was largely responsible for articulating the perceptual side of Minimalism. In his work, and indeed much of Minimalism, the objects intrude into the space of the viewer. The viewer becomes aware of what once was a neutral space and their presence in

this now activated space. The artwork obstructs the viewer’s place in the room, and works as an act of figure / ground reversal. The walls, corners, and floor in relationship to the viewer become as much a part of the art as the object itself. Robert Morris writes that art “gets caught in plays of relationships between transparencies and solids, voids and shadows and the parts separate and the work ends in a kind of demure and unadmitted composition.” (Morris, “Notes on Sculpture 4” in Art in Theory, 881) He continues, “What art now has in its hands is mutable stuff which need not arrive at the point of being finalized with respect to either time or space. This reclamation of process [as opposed to finished object] refocuses art as an energy driving to change perception.What is revealed is that art itself is an activity of change, of disorientation and shift, of violent discontinuity and mutability, of the williness for confusion even in the service of discovering new perceptual modes.” (Morris, “Notes on Sculpture 4” in Art in Theory, 881) The viewer changes the space and thus changes the art. The art imposes its space into the viewer and thus changes the viewer. A new perceptual mode ­ a new world is created. There are two common methods of writing about this experience. One describes the experience and brings it into the realm of representation. The other explains how the experience was created through a process of deconstruction. The following is a demonstration of both: Reading 1. Representation In Robert Morris’s installation at the Dwan Gallery in 1966 (Figure 1) viewers are confronted with large geometric forms resting on the wooden floor. They obstruct the view of other rooms and intrude into normal walking patterns through the space. They feel close to each other and too large for the room. The viewer has to find uncomfortable ways to move around and find other art, other angles of viewing, and other viewers. As the viewer moves, their perception of space changes, they feel different, uncomfortable, and conjoined with the work. Their world becomes instantly more sensuous. As the viewer becomes more and more aware of their presence in the room, the slightest change in their movement or in the movement of another registers as perceptual shift in their mind. Reading 2. Deconstruction There is of course another way of understanding Morris. In looking at the same installation, we see the same geometric forms scattered around the white walled room. The forms rise from the wooden floor. Their simple geometry acts oppositely of Cubism. Where Analytic Cubism attempts to show the multiplicity of profiles of a form in space at one given time, Morris’s Minimalism shows us singular profiles of multiple objects as the viewer moves through space over time. The viewer sees a surprising number of possibilities of angles and perceptions. Furthermore, these art objects masquerade as mere objects. They are designed with expressed purpose to exist in a gallery, but in the end they are white objects verging on decoration. This operation is also in direct dialog with, and an inverse of, the “readymade.” That is Duchamp made banal objects into art, but Morris makes art into banal objects. Finally, in regards to its theatricality, collectively the viewers in their relationship to the artwork and each other completes the work. Both the viewers and the objects serve a functional purpose in the completion of the artwork. While to my knowledge Morris never uses the word

deterritorialization, his work certainly blurs boundaries between object/art, theater/art, and object/subject. He creates a line of flight away from the “neutral” gallery. He creates a crack in the habitual mode of existence of sculpture, and began a growth. It is entirely possible to describe an experience with this Morris installation. It is also valid to explain how the feelings were pre­established in the historical and social context and in the discourse surrounding it. But I contend, by bringing the experience of the encounter into representation, one loses sight of what his work does best. In an attempt to look for meaning, in an archaeological cartography of signs in a defined network, this critique hears the language but remains imperceiving to the sound. (O'Sullivan, Aesthetics of Affect. 127) It feels like someone explaining a joke. “It’s funny because...” When the experience is brought into representation the encounter is supplanted by its explanation. As Massumi writes “Approaches to the image in its relation to language are incomplete if they operate only on the semantic or semiotic level, however that level is defined (linguistically, logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these combinations, as a Symbolic). What they lose, precisely, is the event – in favour of structure.” (Massumi, A User’s Guide. 220) In other words, the act of tracing the lines of flight in a written critique actually inhibit the experience of a viewer. As the Sturm study pointed out, by bringing in factuality, the body feels less. Art may afterall, invite a reading. It might even invite a deconstruction. It always exists in the register of representation. “But to remain solely within this remit is to miss what art does best: effects a transformation. As such art...calls for a different mode of interaction: participation. To miss ­ or elide ­ this magical ­ and immanent ­ to remain within one’s own, known, world. In this latter place art might still have a role; as self contemplation and shield from mortality. But it is a role at once fascistic and conservative. It restricts the possibilities of life and reifies the notion of what art is. As such art becomes a machine for increasing alienation rather than the means with which to overcome it.” (O’Sullivan, Writing on Art. 119) I propose a written critique that considers its work as contributing to not representing the affecting qualities of a work in their writing. This type of writing seeks to create forces that couple together with the reader, the writer, the written, and the art work. It seeks to give the viewer the same sense of possibility as an artist approaching a blank canvas, as a carpenter approaching wood, as the contraction of past and future potentialities, “ungraspable in the moment of occurrence but real in its effects.” ( O’Sullivan, Art Encounters, 21) This kind of writing is a writing that does, that puts the writing in a parallel register to that of art making. It participates in the cooperative project of producing affect. The ‘meaning’ of the work, if this is still a helpful term, would be a mapping of movement of the lines of flight through the multi dimensional time­space and the contraction of history and future as the new world is produced. It should still follow a logic. That is, this is not a random venture, but it is not hierarchical either. There is no defined center, it resists a unifying principle. It shifts and shimmers with differences of “level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, intensity.” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 222)

As an experiment in this type of written critique, I turn to Janet Cardiff’s installation The Forty Part Motet, 2001. installed at the High Museum of Art, 2014.

In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos became flesh. 1

(Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis, 1556)

Spem in alium nunquam habui Praeter in te, Deus Israel

Qui irasceris et propitius eris et omnia peccata hominum in tribulatione dimittis

Domine Deus Creator caeli et terrae

respice humilitatem nostram Sings the circle of forty speakers. The speakers are black and inward facing. Each speaker sounds the voice of one singer. A tenor. A soprano. A child. I have never put my hope in any other but in You, O God of Israel who can show both anger and graciousness, and who absolves all the sins of suffering man Lord God, Creator of Heaven and Earth be mindful of our lowliness. Sounds of the forty voices singing a sacred text in Latin reverberate through the halls of the museum. Before your arrival, its song was heard in the corridor. After you leave its circle, it continues. “What is, is a refrain. A scoring over a world’s repetition. A scratching on the surface of rhythms, sensory habits, gathering materialities, intervals, and durations A gangly accrual of slow or sudden accretions. A rutting by scoring over.” (Stewart, “Worlding Refrains”, in The Affect Theory Reader. 339) In the center of the installation, the voices literally surround the viewer. Different parts dominate the auditory experience as the body turns. As the ears turn. Yet visually, the experience remains virtually unchanged. The speakers are grouped in fives with gaps in between. The song itself lasts eleven minutes surrounded by three minutes of sounds of hushed speaking and breathing. Viewers work their way around the installation. Inspecting. Examining. Looking at other work in the museum obstructed by the sculpture. (Figure 2) “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me...Here I am, I have come to do your will.” And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” (Holy Bible, Hebrews 10:5,9)

1 an incarnation, a becoming­human “In the beginning was the word (Holy Bible, John 1:1a) The word became flesh” (Holy Bible, John 1:14)

“He [Le Blek] walked in a square formation, repeated it; he walked in rectangles, triangles, circles and oblongs of different dimensions; half­circles, diagonals...He had developed by now a technique in which he would break each step into several components, and each of these would be executed slowly, with concentration: right heel against stone, roll the sole of the foot across the stones, lift the heel and then toes, raise the left foot, move it forward, left heel against stones, and on. He had developed grace to match his skill, executing his movements whilst maintaining balance and breathing. One day he took his walk barefoot; the next he discarded the rest of his clothes. He experienced the deep interlacing of the materiality of these repeated movements, and the affective relations of stones and feet. Stone sensitised skin. His muscles responded – soft, subtle vibrations. These intensifications did not cause him to lose his focus. But he slipped into a lapse – an apartness from the world. A feeling originating in his belly that spread as an intense heat giving rise to what might have been a temporary unconsciousness, or a profound loss of awareness – he was unsure – whilst not affecting his body, which continued to repeat its movements according to the patterns now established. At first uncomfortable Le Blek began to enjoy this loss of awareness. His periods of apartness were prolonged by graduated steps. He found himself able to retain some vestige of awareness – a third eye? – the capacity of an additional perception with which he could track shifts even within the texture of his apartness.” (Chapman and Stahl, “BLOODCRYSTALPOLLENSTAR” in Deleuze and Contemporary Art, 291) The circular installation has left the realm of representation, though it is that too, and become an incarnation. A texture of sound reverberates in the ear and in the chest cavity, in a “body you prepared for me”. Respice humilitatem nostram. And then a murmur. The non­sacred worms its way inside the refrains. The eleven minutes continues to surround the three minutes, a fourteen minute loop. Why does nobody talk to circles? Because there’s no point. The work uses the symbolic registers of language and religion to effect change on the body. It has created an event for full participation and it infects the experience of all other artwork within hearing distance. It has no boundary.

*** Affect is nothing new. Kant knew it was going on in the 18th century. Neither is considering the immanence of an art object something new. Morris demonstrates that. But figuring out what to do with these things has been an issue of much discussion. Is it really beneficial to break apart our experiences to understand them? I have attempted to provide an alternative ­ a method of contribution to the artwork, a worlding and coupling together. After all has been understood, deconstructed, semiotically reconstructed, and fluid centers of meaning pinned down, after all is written and said, after all the viewers leave, even after the work has been removed, the art still does. something. And that something is used to see the world, a new world. I agree with Lawrence Grossberg.“In the end, I still want to figure out what’s going on. And I believe that giving the best answer one can, without simplification or reduction, even if it means giving up your favorite theoretical or political assumptions, is the responsibility of the intellectual and the most important contribution that the intellectual can make to the imagination and actualization of the virtual future. That is, to realizing that ‘another world is possible.’” (Grossberg, “Affect’s Future” in Affect Theory Reader, 338) This is a hopeful critique.

Figure 1. Robert Morris, Exhibition at the Dwan Gallery. Installation View, 1966.

Figure 2. Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet, Installation View at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA 2014.

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