Trans/form

Using a title like trans/form to discuss art in the 21^st Century is risky. For older readers it might evoke Generation X ideologies and an interest in mysticism, the transcendental or other uplifting concepts. But this subject bears no relation to any notions of “elevation” – although it does have the potential to shift us sideways and involves thoughts about perception which may very well depart from the branches of Western objectivity that we have all come to know and trust.

            Trans/form is a simplification of transitional form, and implies a contradiction: if something is transitional – moving from one stage or state to another – then it cannot be a form as such, but a phase. It is the possibility of phase-form that is central to this discussion, especially in relation to a particular kind of contemporary art practice. It is a kind of art that is not (and cannot be) enclosed verbally or socially. Instead, it becomes the active ground where something can occur unmediated by dialectics yet still bear a direct relation to the real and resistant world – but without recourse representation.

            In one way or another, the whole of the development of Western art has been about “representation”. In the mid twentieth century when the efficacy of this objective was called into question, non-figurative art arose to ‘present the unpresentable’. It examined such things as the unconscious, the spiritual and the sublime, and gave rise to a range of formalist and conceptual imperatives. So, Representation and Abstraction can be seen as the twin source-books from which most art practice is said to derive (yet another Western rationalist duality). This is not questioned here, but I believe it overlooks another approach to art and another kind of practice that cannot be discussed easily using these terms of reference.

            The art in question seems to have evolved without the benefit of a great deal of critical attention at all. The nature of the work itself must take some responsibility for this; its clear purpose does not match the programs of theoretical discourse in at least two ways. Firstly, it has affiliations with the idea that something can be perceived independently of socialisation. And secondly, the art in question elicits the a-rational, or the inability to subscribe to fixed meaning, a transgression that is also outside the framing structure of much current theoretical discourse. Yet globally, artists still produce this kind of work – Brice Marden, Ian McKeever, Wes Mills, Jake Berthot, Anish Kapoor to name just a few (not to mention a wide range of Australian Aboriginal artists). I prefer to think that their work has little to do with representation or abstraction and I offer the term trans/form to identify a viable third option.

Operating outside

            The simplification of trans/form from transitional form is in itself highly relevant as it performs the kind of aphoristic action that is the key to the actual art practice. Unwilled, something arcs between the two words, trans and form, connecting them to a new meaning: transform. This meaning is not discernible in either word separately, but in trans/form the two words begin to form an alliance and the potential new meaning of this alliance lies somewhere unlocated between them. This kind of action which can operate outside is highly relevant to the subject.

            In one sense, trans/form in art operates outside the strictures of categorisation (cone cube sphere / apple chair cloud / number letter word / sign symbol metaphor). This is not to say that the image/object cannot be cone-like or resemble a letter or symbol, but it will resist the compartmentalising action of these categories; it cannot be claimed as just a cone or a cube. Trans/form in two dimensional art (painting, drawing etc) does not present objects but a phase. The content of such works cannot be considered in isolation but as shifting elements in a continuum, subject to, and interactive with, the entire visual field. Presented in this way, the subject of the work will be open to multiple implications, none of which will have an equivalent in verbal discourse. This is part of its operation: the art makes an appeal to the alogical aspect of consciousness; the area of experience which does not respond to the formalising function of rationalism held in position by the disciplines of physics, geometry, linguistics, semiotics and so on.

            An obvious difficulty is immediately apparent: if the image/object in front of one’s eyes cannot be objectively named, how can it be described? As we know, description requires a regime of pre-established definition and depends on language-based analysis. Yet fixed definition is counter-productive to any consideration of trans/form. But our way of negotiating contemporary cultural issues is founded on rigorous critique and debate. This creates a very real crisis for any sustained critical investigation of trans/form in art because critique by nature is as quick to ignore as much as it addresses. Therefore any art that cannot be categorised spontaneously gives rise to confrontation and very often what cannot be rationalised is ignored.

            A review of a particular aspect of Aboriginal painting by a Melbourne art reviewer, adequately explains this critical dilemma: “Every exhibition that ever was goes down as a ritual act of classification. If art can’t be classified, it can’t be exhibited.”  “...the work is profoundly foreign to Western awareness. The overwhelming emotion that I felt related to my inadequacy and ignorance. I can say that this work has a nice composition, this one has handsome patterns or a large figure in the middle... If I’m honest, I can only describe them in formal terms”. The reviewer knows that we can like the work but asks: how can it be conceptually framed beyond a conversation about aesthetics if we have no classification for it? Without another option, the writer elicits his knowledge of Representation and Abstraction, but neither is helpful when discussing this kind of Aboriginal painting and frustration arises.

            There appears to be no consensus of opinion that would embrace the validity of an art which allows for the proposition that something can be created – a phase-form – which will operate outside language, which will defy enclosure of the kind established by European logic and yet still relate to tangible experience. Such an art is an affront to reason. It is truly transgressive in that it is unapologetically at cross purposes with the canonical tenets of Western analytical thinking.

            One of the most enlightening discussions on this subject can be found in an essay by John Yau on the work of Jake Berthot and is worth quoting at some length. “Proof requires unimpeachable evidence. As some Logical Positivists believe, it is based on language and language systems.... Berthot aims his paintings at what lies beyond language and the process of naming. However, he is neither an atavist interested in the primordial sublime nor a spiritualist developing images of the ineffable. His paintings, like all truly provocative art, resist absorption into a narrative or critical theory.” Elsewhere Yau writes, “Berthot’s paintings are neither abstract nor self-referential. They are the visual and physical counterparts in an unnamed human encounter... [Berthot] asks the question: How does one see, experience, and evaluate the world he or she inhabits?”

Abstraction

            Trans/form, as it applies to art, does not occur in a play of light on water, a textured surface or a water-stain in wallpaper. These may be sites for a host of interesting discussions to do with pattern and perception as recognised by Arnheim and Gombrich, but the kind of phase-form under discussion does not exist there. Conversely, where trans/form does occur, some current art theorists may not recognise it and the art may be reduced in critical terms to the water stain formed on a wall: the blind critic’s fall-back position is to elaborate on the ‘abstract’ nature of the work. To recognise only the work’s formal characteristics and defining the work in ‘abstract’ terms is a way for some to counter this intractable position. But the problem with discussing trans/form in terms of abstraction is that it incurs false readings. In the first place it can incorrectly link the subject to the theory of Abstraction (capital A) and on to the sublime. The ‘Abstract Sublime’ according to Robert Rosenblum is based on the belief that art may evoke experiences that are ultimately tied to ethical imperatives. These have their roots in religious belief and manifest as an awareness of transcendent Reality. Abstraction of this kind depends on a kind of faith, that something is ‘apparent’ that is both unobserved and ineffable – like religion itself. Trans/form in art has no preconceived strategic project let alone one that aspires to these kinds of higher ethical ideals. This in turn takes it into the area of the apolitical – yet another problem for those who feel that all art must be opinionated.        

Reassessing The Gaze

             Before entering a renegotiation of our visual relationship to the tangible world, we should at least summarise some of the ideas that have led us to the way we interpret the visible. One key component of this is the now widely recognised concept of the gaze. A clear and concise reading of the gaze can be found in Norman Bryson’s work Vision and Visuality. Bryson says that if Sartre is an originator of “the gaze” (le regard) it is Lacan who developed it and ultimately inserted it into our common theoretical understanding of vision. Lacan’s reading of the gaze stems from the idea that, in looking, the viewing subject is in a significant way menaced by the view. The view is not a simple play of light off surfaces but an intelligible system of signified form held in place by the defining elements of language. Bryson says, “For human beings collectively to orchestrate their visual experience together it is required that each submit his or her retinal experience to the socially agreed description(s) of an intelligible world. Vision is socialised ...”

            ‘Seeing’ then, is a matter of absolute fidelity to strictly applied definitions and any deviation from this is no more than visual fallacy, hallucination, fantasy or some other form of delusion. Bryson continues, “Between the retina and world is inserted a screen of signs, a screen consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built into the social arena.” “When I speak, I am inserted into systems of discourse that were there before I was, and will remain after I am gone. Similarly when I learn to see socially....I am inserted into systems of visual discourse that saw the world before I did...” Bryson explains that Lacan identifies our position in relation to the visible. He contends that the viewing subject that may have thought itself at the centre of this process is not at all, in part, because of the intervening socialising screen of signifiers. ‘Seeing’ anything is forever frustrated by the gaze.

This suggests that the anxiety created by the recognition of a ‘socialising screen’ (which interrupts the subject’s perception of the thing viewed) may also be a concern about ownership; can I claim what I see as mine if am pre- programmed to see it in a particular way? I would contend that we can in at least one way: we choose which elements to observe, contemplate and remember. In other words, apart from a collective recognition, there may be another element at work: sense perception. If the viewer cannot lay claim to original vision, original sensation of it may be another matter. So, a view of the world, the socially pre-organised one, may also be conditioned by the individual’s sense of it; I feel and imagine differently than you and I can identify this in the view before me. It would seem that this leaves the potential open for the viewing subject, using sense perception, to interpret the thing seen a little differently than any other.

But there is one other vital factor at work that limits sense perception: all this is played out – the viewer, the screen of signs, the interpretation – according to a particular Western methodology, one that considers everything as static entities in a system of interposing relationships. We think of the material environment around us as an object-world. Over many centuries we have systematically catalogued everything using intelligent, analytical methods that constantly undergo addition and revision. A flower then, is different from a stick. But a flower is also yellow, fragrant, delicate, fresh, small, rare, seasonal and so on as we seek to particularise the object. Biologically, the flower is also separated into a hierarchy of classification: species, genus, family, order – and parts: sepal, column, stamen, labellum, and so on. This kind of scientific objectivity of course allows us to negotiate the world around us and is one important way to appreciate the complexity.

            But in perceptual terms it also insists that our flower is recognised as a fixed, isolated, schematised entity that can not only be distinguished from everything else but is also in some way in opposition to other things with fixed classifications. In other words while we may feel that Caladenia Dilatata belongs to a system that recognises it as a synchronous part, it is also opposed to it at the moment it is defined; it is segregated out from everything that is not itself. In the object-world, while observing ‘flower’ we necessarily see everything that it is not flower as the other. But perhaps there are other ways of looking at the world that are not fully recognised or understood using the Western empirical methods that most of us have been indoctrinated into.

Phase-form

            Norman Bryson also introduces the reader to a foremost Japanese writer, Keiji Nishitani. He begins by pointing out that Sartre, Lacan and Nishitani all seek to destabilise the old Cartesian model in which “Both subject and object exist in a state of mutual confirmation and fixity. The subject, from its position of centre amidst the world of things, looks out on objects and perceives them as separate entities.” Yet whatever inroads we feel we have made to shake up the old Cartesian model of central self, it seems that it is still the general conception we all have. It accounts for our keen ability to dispassionately modify the planet as something to act upon, on the pretext that it requires continual redefining if we are to maintain our control of it.

            In any case, despite decades of intense post-structuralist debate, in the real world, few have progressed beyond the Marxist position which holds that everything operates according to rigid laws that can be tested and ratified by science, and that all this can be explained with language. Some call these ‘metanarratives’ and they are considered to be ‘givens’ – absolute truths rather than socially arranged structures. But they stand between us and another possibility implied by Nishitani.

            In his book, Religion and Nothingness, Nishitani devotes some time to a significant development of Sartre’s gaze function, which Bryson effectively outlines. But Nishitani extends the discussion even further. A part of his concept of vision is that we as viewing subjects observe things as static objects by bounding them hypothetically with an outline and cutting them out from the surrounding field. In other words, we can only see things as static objects if we first eliminate everything else that is not them. But if we can reverse this, if we can remove that immobilising outline and withdraw from the notion of a static object in space, the ‘object’ resumes its place as part of an indivisible totality. It exists in a continuum, in a scheme of ever changing, co-dependent occurrences relative to the entire visual field.

            If we now reconsider the empirically defined flower in this context, as Bryson puts it “its existence is only a phase of incremental transformations between seed and dust.... the entity comes apart. It cannot be said to occupy a single location, since, its locus is always the universal field of transformations: it cannot achieve separation from that field or acquire any kind of bounded outline”. Object ceases to exist when the framing apparatus is removed. In its place is a continuous “field of transformations” in which the viewer can now be recognised as existing inside the existence of everything else. To contemplate a tree or a rock or a mailbox not as separate from oneself, but as a continuum, a phase in which the observer is an integral part, is to be inclusive of everything.

This is the sense in which the term trans/form is used, that everything is not a static isolated unit but is in phase-form; it is becoming everything else. This is not Zen. It does not imply a sense of a higher being or a higher state of being. It has its origins in physicality and recognises the body (and everything else) as a transitional site of interactive energies. It is as pragmatic as the certainty that one day a tree will become a rock and I will become a tree. We easily accept the Western maxim ‘dust to dust’. It is only a tiny step further from dust to tree; it just takes a little longer.

            In summary, the essentialness of something being in the world is that it never culminates in a fixed or normal state. The material world is a continually shifting of states or phases. We are included in this. When we see the world, we do not stand apart as an entity contemplating an otherness but are realised as an inextricable part of everything that is not us. This is not just relative to the ‘view’, the part that is in front of our eyes but inclusive of every part, even the unobserved. The relevant point is that this alternative way of perceiving already maintains a presence in very distinct aspects of visual art practice.

Sentience

Sentience arises from the fact that we are first and foremost an organism. In lay terms we can say that organisms survive as part of a larger cosmology by simply bumping around within their terrain using a range of complex receptors. Nature gives us pain so that we may withdraw from the cause, and pleasure so that we may actively seek it (food, sex, sport) and both are designed to preserve the body. The idea is to both minimise any adverse contact with the surrounding elements and maximise that which is propitious to us: mammals are attracted to warmth until it becomes excessive and then they retreat etc. It is this motorneuron activity that permits life in the first place and extreme alertness to environmental change and the ability to withdraw from adversity ensures survival. Essentially this is a function that predates intellectual development (the latter can only evolve out of the pre-established stability of the organism) and is still the primary biological requirement that governs the way we negotiate our daily lives, in tandem with our intellect.

            Art, we can assert, largely depends on these dual functions, it is just a matter of balance. In the case of the art discussed here, there is at least an equal emphasis on sentience as a part of the visual dialogue. With this kind of art, it is this sentience that engages the viewer and the experience can be described as oscillations: between the work’s material properties, elements within the work (the activated ‘ground’) and between the viewer and literary clues offered with titles and so on. I believe these oscillations are largely sense-perceived and bear little relation to Western Rationalism.

            In a recent newspaper review, popstar Lou Reed spoke of the “unfiltered” joy of rock n’ roll. “The music that speaks to you speaks past your conscious mind. It is always interesting for me to hear something and find I am tapping my foot. That is something going in directly, straight to the spine.”  Echoing this, Francis Bacon spoke of an art “that will impact straight onto the nervous system.” Trans/form in art is absorbed into one’s own experience, initially, not through a theoretical aperture but by way of this kind of sentience. This is not to say that that the intellect is not also at work – to say otherwise would reduce the recognition of art to no recognition at all. It simply means that it does not use the same process that might be required for comprehension of the written word, for example.

            All of this is predicated upon the importance of the body as receptor. Yet some have postulated that one day we will be able to transcend the necessity of an organic body. Stellarc claims “through cyber-systems we have the potential to escape the tyranny of our present biological structure...” To counter Stellarc’s ideal of a mind functioning in a renewable machine, there is an equally valid argument. It states that without the being to house the brain, consciousness would disintegrate into meaningless rubble in seconds, having no sentient structure to administer it. If this is so, it’s possible that the myriad inefficiencies of the body may turn out to be an important factor in defining who and what we are; what makes us human.

 The Body-formed 

            A key requirement in creating this kind of art seems to be the prolonged engagement of brain, body and physical materials working synchronistically. The work is induced into existence and probably begins by a reference back to the artist’s body, to a pre-reflective awareness that originates in sentience; one’s sense of being in the world. As already stated, it is recognised here that the mass/energy of the body, the functions of consciousness and the immediate field are inseparable. They are fused together into one mutually dependent operation as a basic law of physics. It must be emphasised that everything that is not body is an inextricable part of this equation; sense perception is annihilated in a vacuum, it cannot exist without the substance from which body is made: the physical environment.

            Once commenced, if the work evolves out of something, it is likely to be its own rudimentary beginnings. The work is never fully imagined or realised in advance. A prearranged outcome has no potential to take the artist to the outside, beyond the signified. In the process of making, the imagination is deadening; it is a reactive force that again reverts back to ‘an image of’ – to representation. The work is usually layered, or built up, sometimes to be broken down or obliterated and then rebuilt. It is this relentless process of erasure and replacement, of incorporation and removal that resolves into a haptic and visual schemata of a new unnamed order. This ‘new order’ depends on the body(hand), the brain and the medium negotiating a kind of contractual agreement. They form an alliance, of sorts, that is worked out during the process of making. In the end a compromise is reached between medium and intention.

            From the artist’s point of view this has nothing to do with ‘mastering’ something or ‘self expression’.  The process allows the artist to lose sight of the apparent need for self-expression, to relinquish project in pursuit of something deeper which is not self-reflexive. It requires a sense of absence, in which the mind and body cast about for a very real contractual arrangement with the tangible world, one that no pre-organised methodology can realise. The outcome of the arrangement is a win/win situation because neither artist nor medium had any prior agenda. But this ‘outcome’ is hardly as easy to obtain as it sounds. These bald descriptions of the process belie the real difficulty of ‘arriving’ at a point that is tolerable for the artist. In fact it is ‘arrival’ that is part of the dilemma because the work rejects the whole notion of completion.

            For the spectator, what is seen is a totality. It is not a fragment of a larger picture, nothing is deemed to be going on outside the work; it is not a cropped view. The whole of the visual ground is activated. While there are usually half-recognised elements that draw one’s attention (that repel the possibility of non-objectivity), these elements are indivisibly embedded in the visual field. They cannot be reduced to component parts as each part only has substance in relation to the whole.

            Finally, the work is not activated through imagination but by one’s own experience of the organic world. The work never appears ‘alien’ even as it evades classification. This anticipates the viewer’s reception as active rather than contemplative. The “screen of signs” is largely removed and the audience is mobilised by direct experience as opposed to the actions of deciphering representation or pondering the abstract.

            Roy Oxlade, in a review of Hugh O’Donnell’s work seems to be discussing these very issues. He notes that representation focuses on something outside the self – the subject – and this is seen essentially as the other. “When things are clearly defined [in this way], the referential otherness of the world is preserved.” But he says that O’Donnell “cannot accept that separation and talks of ‘wanting to reclaim the otherness of an object.” He goes on to explain that in painting a relationship, O’Donnell in some way sees himself as becoming the object of it. O’Donnell himself says, “the struggle for a painter is to have a sense of absence, a sense of space...” Whatever the method, all body/hand processes and all materials are suitable vehicles towards this ‘intensive’ position beyond reason or ‘image’.

Being Is Nowhere

             No text that deals with a subject like trans/form would be complete without a reference to Georges Bataille. My own introduction to his writings came as late as 1996 by way of an interview with Rosalind Kraus and Yve-Alain Bois in relation to an exhibition they curated, L’Informe: mode d’emploi (The formless: instructions for use). A central concern of Bataille’s was to seek an escape route from the closed frame of empirical knowledge through the non-linear and the non-systematic. His notion of ‘the formless’ pivoted on this refusal to accept the enclosing methods of constructed knowledge. Conventional thinking tries to appropriate the unknown into the known by developing theories to explain it, by taking action. His term for this is project.  Project starts with a kind of premise, therefore it cannot include the unknowability of the unknown. What is unknowable can only be acknowledged by avoiding this kind of action upon it. “Action is utterly dependent on project” and project limits life’s possibilities, ‘man’ loses his essence in project. 

            Bataille’s departure point in thought was “inner experience”. His notion was to deliberately let experience lead where it would rather than lead experience to some end-point. “Inner experience is the opposite of action. Nothing more.” “Inner experience, not being able to have principles in dogma (a moral attitude) or in science (knowledge is not its goal or origin) or in a search for enriching states (an experimental aesthetic attitude) cannot have any other goal or concern than itself.

            Bataille wants to undo the form and concept of the world that our unrelenting quest for knowledge has carefully constructed. He wants to negate the possibility of this kind of ‘reality’. Descarte’s well-worn edict I think therefore I am can be restated I think that I think, therefore I can never know what I am. I construct my own thoughts, therefore I cannot know what I am beyond this construction. But Bataille suggests that the knowing subject can be something else which his own knowledge of himself cannot annul.

            At the epicentre of trans/form in art, this ‘something else’ is being traced. If we can say there is an intensity here it is not one which agenda precipitates. Instead, the artists reach into the texture of the real for something that undermines agenda. What they present for our consideration, is the real substance of being aware and can be seen as a presentation of consciousness coming into being. It is irrelevant that we cannot connect the substance of the work to our photographic object world; to do so is to return it to the paralysing dialectics that has underscored so much pictorial art.

            In a world that is becoming more and more synthesised, where actual experience is increasingly replaced with virtual experience, where information takes priority over knowledge, this kind of art reminds us of what it means to be human – a subject that could turn out to be more instructive than we imagine. And “being human” (at least one crucial element of it) might turn out to be something beyond the reach of mere language. Perhaps trans/form can remind us of this; take us momentarily onto a new field of the immeasurable, away from enclosure to the outside and towards something that predates the naming of things – or perhaps I should say, towards a kind of communication that works without it.

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© Robert Hollingworth