Encounters Beyond the Gallery

Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Difference

Renate Dohmen

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Encounters Beyond the Gallery challenges the terms of their exclusion, looking to relational art, Deleuze-Guattarean aesthetics and notions of perception, as well as anthropological theory for ways to create connections between seemingly disparate worlds. Embracing a unique and experimental format, the book imagines encounters between the art works and art worlds of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tamil women, the Shipibo-Conibo of Eastern Peru and a fictional female contemporary artist named Rikki T, in order to rethink normative aesthetic and cultural categories. Its method reflects the message of the book, and embraces a plurality of voices and perspectives to steer critical attention towards the complexity of artistic life beyond the gallery.

1

Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing

This project is committed to experimentally expand relational aesthetics into the sphere of culture and revolves around transformative encounters between the art of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Shipibo-Conibo and Tamil designs, and the fictitious artist Rikki T. A further key issue this chapter explores is the question, What might constitute an appropriate mode of writerly address for this project? Methodologically it takes inspiration from Guattari’s conception of the transversal, and experiments with how this notion can be engaged and translated into a method that reflects the project’s intellectual horizons and concerns. It thus seeks to conjunctively explore Guattari’s notion of transversality and subjectivity, Bourriaud’s interpretation of Guattari’s ideas in relational aesthetics, anthropology’s self-reflexive engagement with writing, issues of ‘speaking for’, questions of criticality in art as well as Fabian’s notion of the coeval as fundamental conditions of the global contemporary.¹

Transversality as Method

Guattari’s conception of transversality is intimately linked to the re- envisaged, productive notion of subjectivity he proposed as part of his critique of psychoanalysis. He sought to develop a creative, therapeutic model that expands psychoanalysis beyond the analyst–analysand coupling epitomized by the couch. Guattari initially focused his critique on the role played by psychoanalytic contexts such as the psychiatric institution and its inhabitants. But he soon broadened this focus and declared the interconnectivity of the three ecological registers of environment, social relations and human subjectivity² central to his reoriented understanding of subjectivity, on which Bourriaud’s articulation of relational aesthetics draws. Guattari takes issue with the scientific orientation of psychoanalysis and sees the established therapeutic method as participating in a symbolic order that ‘weighs down like a deterministic lead cape, like a deathly fate’ on human existentiality.³ For him a constructive therapeutic framework needs to be based on an integrated and transformative strategy, which takes personal and collective aspects into account.

His revised processual notion of subjectivity, characterized by flux and creative leaps, is therefore also characterized by exchanges with contextual collectivities. For Guattari, the individual can no longer be seen as the ‘other’ of society.⁴ Furthermore, his collective repositioning of subjectivity abandons the notion of the bounded and centric subject as ‘a nucleus of sensibility, of expressivity – the unifier of states of consciousness’.⁵ It rather stresses the porousness of an individual now seen to fundamentally participate in a whole range of environments as part of dispersed actualities or vectors of subjectification that as partial subjectivities are located beyond the order of signification.⁶ For him, these breakaway or dissident subjectivities are the prime means of liberation from semiotic fixity.⁷

The subject for Guattari is thus no longer a straightforward matter. It is linked to ‘all sorts of other ways of existing’⁸ outside consciousness. It consists of ‘components of subjectification’⁹ that have their own autonomous existence and meet in the interiority of the subject conceived as a place of encounter for diverse trajectories that pass through it and harbour a productive potential. Guattari refers to these generative forces as ‘machinic’, a term not to be confused with mechanistic.¹⁰ Rather, Guattarean machinism is defined as a multiplicity-generating operative mode with a ‘collective character’¹¹ situated ‘before’ or ‘alongside’ ‘discursive subject–object relations’.¹² It brings together various modes of existence in a contact zone or machinic interface where multiple exchanges can occur.¹³ For Guattari, machines are as diverse as the territories they traverse and link in the process, reshaping them by a ‘sort of dynamism’.¹⁴ The creation of machinic assemblages is central to Guattari’s notion of the transversal. It, however, does not create bonded parts or new fusions, but generates an ‘assemblage of possible fields, of virtual as much as constituted elements, without any notion of generic or species’ relation’.¹⁵ Machinism’s transversal movements are thus characterized by an enormous variety and variability of connectivity and influence. They underpin the constitutive heterogeneity Guattari posits at the heart of subjectivation and generate processual openings for new, future productions of subjectivity.¹⁶

For Guattari, this is central as it allows for a therapeutic optimism lacked by traditional approaches to human individuation. Psychoanalysis is now no longer based on a transferential interpretation of symptoms understood as a function of a pre-existing, latent content. It rather is ‘the invention of new catalytic nuclei capable of bifurcating existence’¹⁷ engendered by machinic interactions that are key for the transversalism of the processes of subjectivation. Guattari supports these statements with evidence from his clinical practice at the psychiatric hospital La Borde, and presents the idea that the event can act as ‘the potential bearer of new constellations of Universes of reference’.¹⁸

Take a simple example: a patient in the course of treatment remains stuck on a problem, going round in circles, and coming up against a wall. One day he says, without giving it much thought: ‘I have been thinking of taking up driving lessons again, I haven’t driven for years’; or, ‘I feel like learning word processing.’ A remark of this kind may remain unnoticed in a traditional conception of analysis. However, this kind […] can become a key […] which will not only modify the immediate behaviour of the patient, but open up new fields of virtuality for him: the renewal of contact with long lost acquaintances, revisiting old haunts, regaining self-confidence […]¹⁹

This passage demonstrates an instance of transversality that underscores a productive notion of subjectivity. As new existential territories are claimed, the subject takes off, and moves into a terrain beyond itself. Guattari refers to this phenomenon as ‘auto-production’ or ‘auto-poiesis’ and sees it as constitutive of a processual ethico-aesthetic paradigm modelled on artistic creativity, which he proposes as an alternative to traditional psychoanalytic approaches. He holds that psychoanalysis has everything to gain from art’s ability to generate the unprecedented and unexpected. In his view, art is the perfect antidote to what he considers the shackles of science. But he also warns that art ‘does not have a monopoly on creation’.²⁰ He champions art as the much-needed dissensual creator of productive ruptures in the textures of meaning, yet qualifies this by stating that he does not mean the kind of work that circulates in the institutions of the art world but refers to ‘a proto-aesthetic paradigm’ that represents ‘a dimension of creation in a nascent state’.²¹ Therefore, for him art is the activity of a ‘subjective creativity, which traverses the generations and oppressed peoples, ghettoes and minorities’, and he sees ‘the aesthetic paradigm’²² as foundational ‘for every possible form of liberation’.²³

These repositionings of subjectivity and aesthetics are central to Guattari’s philosophy of immanence that revolves around the notion of non-identical being-as-becoming understood as representative of a world of potentials qualified by partiality rather than totality. This understanding is offered as an epistemological alternative to the transcendental in Western philosophy characterized by universals and fixity.²⁴ Guattari emphasizes a manner of being and a condition of self-identity that is no longer tied to transcendental points of reference,²⁵ but is based on ‘generative praxes of heterogeneity and complexity’.²⁶ For Guattari, this ‘should lead to the fall of the “ontological Iron Curtain” […], the philosophical tradition erected between mind and matter’,²⁷ and constitutes a conception that is potent for this discussion, as neither Shipibo-Conibo nor Tamil worldviews subscribe to a mind–matter dualism.

A transversal methodology based on the collective reconceptualization of subjectivity therefore not only resonates with conceptions of human interconnectedness claimed for relational aesthetics but also with the ‘indigenous’ epistemologies with which this exploration is concerned. Furthermore, Guattari’s notion of transversality and the machine offers new departures for thinking that the ‘other’ as the machine ‘always depends on exterior elements in order to be able to exist’²⁸ and is permanently installed in ‘a relation of alterity’.²⁹ Guattari thus sees the machinic as guarantor of a transgressive connectedness of mind and matter, that is, the non-discursive infinitude and discursive finitudes of ‘energetico-spatio-temporal fluxes’³⁰ fundamentally linked to potentialities and to becomings, which he sees as characteristic of a forward-looking, future-oriented stance.

Guattari translated these ideas into therapeutic practice through a regular displacement of institutional hierarchies or a ‘peripatetic psychiatry that is not stuck behind a desk’.³¹ His method for creating transversal moments in a regularized institutional scenario was to introduce La Grille or the Grid, a schedule of rotating tasks undertaken by the staff of La Borde. This was not easy to implement, as it involved a doctor’s acceptance of a periodic suspension of his or her authority. It also proved difficult to find compatible, rotatable duties: while medical staff could quite easily be persuaded to ‘take up tasks such as dishwashing’,³² it was much more difficult to get non-medical staff to perform functions relating to patient care. As Guattari relates, the ‘compromises were many, the fears were great’.³³ For Guattari this transformation and diversification of institutional routines represented a transversalization of hierarchy that demonstrated the mutability of inherited models and provided the opportunity for an active participation in social affairs, which Guattari refers to as ‘initiatic’ moments.³⁴ For him they created a space where transformation could take place, where a group of people could overcome their separateness and ‘come together in the “flash of a common praxis”, in mutual reciprocity rather than mutual Otherness’.³⁵ And even though transformations characterized by a transversal flash can only be momentarily achieved, the transformative effect can be considerable. He saw this ‘mobile analysis’ as an antidote to the rigidity of the power relationship between the analysand and the analyst that displaced traditional, limited transference scenarios, which, according to Guattari, obstruct transversal relations, only allow for a vertical hierarchy and create negative societal structures in the form of fixations on the super-ego ‘indelibly stamped by daddy’s authority’.³⁶

Bourriaud picks up on these ideas and reinterprets them for scenarios in contemporary art that for him epitomize scenarios similar to Guattari’s institutional therapeutic mobilizations. He adopts Guattari’s productive reframing of subjectivity and the centrality of an aesthetic paradigm for emancipatory processes but repositions Guattari’s understanding of the ‘proto-aesthetic’ which did not refer to professional art practice by associating it with the field of fine art. Bourriaud defends this move with the argument that ‘artistic practice forms a special terrain for this individuatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 Transversality, Relational Aesthetics and Modes of Writing
• 2 Rirkrit Tiravanija, Relational Aesthetics and Cultural Alterity
• Faction 1 ‘The Raw and the Cooked in Common Places’ – ‘Rikki T’ at the Serpentine Gallery, Review by ‘Johnny Zucker’
• Faction 2 Rikki T and Curator C En Route
• Faction 3 Itinerant Thoughts – London, Paris, Peru and Elsewhere
• Faction 4 Itinerant Thoughts – Paris, London, Tamil Nadu and Elsewhere
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography