Showing posts with label object orientated ontology. Show all posts

Saturday, 18 October 2025

Speculative grace

The plane journey to Gothenburg and back to Leeds was broken by having to change planes at Amsterdam, therefore I had a lot of time to fill and so decided to re-read Adam S. Miller's 'Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Orientated Theology'. I had read it initially some time ago and happened to spot it on my bookshelves just as I was thinking about what to take with me to read. It's a strange book, as it tries to tease out the religious concept of 'grace' from the writings of someone that developed a body of writing focused on how science makes meaning.

Latour was though a life long Catholic and therefore as a Christian his thinking would have been coloured by his Bible readings. He was not trying to argue the importance of Christian beliefs but his arguments do suggest that certain Christian ideas, helped him shape his thoughts. For instance, Matthew 5:5; "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth," and 2 Corinthians 12:9 that states, "He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness'". After looking at the way that science actually operated in real life situations, Latour had decided that you can never actually be objective, he had then developed the idea that you cannot separate opposites out from each other and that reductionism, or the focusing down on one direction or way of understanding the world was not just wrong, but that it was actually an impossibility. An idea therefore, of power residing in weakness, could have helped him to think about dissolving distinctions between culture and nature or subject and object. By stating that the world is actually an amazing network of interconnections and that everything relies on everything else, Latour suggests that if any one thing pulls itself out of the matrix and acts as if it has power over other things, it will in effect eventually undermine itself, as it would cut the very ties that enable it to be what it is.
He also argues that nothing is ever actually a thing, there are simply nodes or centres that are connected to everything else. Although at times there could be a suggestion of an object's separate identity, this could only be a constantly shifting one, one that was in itself determined by all the various connections that thing might have from moment to moment. This is a type of strength through harmony; something that could easily have emerged out of Latour's Christian beliefs, for instance many Christians believe that the unity of believers is built on humility, forgiveness and mutual respect. A unity that is achieved not through uniformity, but by valuing diversity within a common faith. I was also reminded of the Markov blanket concept, whereby, although for the sake of the way they use communication systems it might be useful for humans to be able to nominate a tree as a separate thing, in reality it is an event or aspect of a process. The boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to trees (or indeed people) can be thought of as the supporters of free energy, or places where that energy meets other forms of energy and where interactions take place that both help to stabilise the entity and to ensure it is in constant communication with all the surrounding energy fields that it depends on for survival. If so, something called a Markov blanket can be used to define its boundaries in a statistical sense, i.e. instead of a solid wall you have a series of probabilities whereby something is and isn't at the same time, called in this instance, the active inference scheme. But Latour goes much further than this, he believes that all things operate in the same way, both organic and non organic and that some things might be processes. I was then reminded of Timothy Morton's 'hyperobjects', which could also be things such as global warming.

Latour looked at the complexity of the everyday and in doing so, he helps us value what is going on right in front of us and Adam S. Miller opens out an argument that 'grace' can be found in Latour's writings by this very fact.

I wrote the note below in a very shaky biro hand whilst flying between Gothenburg and Amsterdam.

"Votives and the Pluriverse"

If we take a point of view that everything is interconnected and that everything is always becoming, in flux, never quite establishing fixed boundaries, then a votive practice that is multi faceted would seem to make sense. The need to create a flow, to establish the conditions of constant fermentation, can be met as a practice evolves out of parallel views. Grace emerges from the fermentation of the multitude. It is embedded in the bustling give and take of objects. A votive always emerges from a complexity. Ceramics allows us to make forms that are collapsing and emerging at the same time and as they do, at some point we can come to a temporary stop and see how this evolving object can now talk to the situation that it emerged from.

My votive making emerges from a complex something that comes out of a conversation. The conversation may well be far too hard to simplify or clarify what is needed, so there has to be a process of finding a line through what is being said. I push back against someone to see what will come out of the dialogue. They then push back at me, often with a statement such as, "It's not like that, its more like..." In this way forms arrive out of the flow, rather than an object being made from a pattern.

Votive forms made of psychic animal body parts

I.e. what your organs might look like if you were inhabiting the soul of an animal

In Gothenburg I had been giving short presentations to medical professionals about the work I had been doing at Pinderfields Hospital. When not having to be doing that, I was free to follow anything else that was happening, and the other much more comprehensive presentations were being given by scientists that were very interesting. I had been reading Craig's book on interoception just before leaving, therefore I could see how important neuroplasticity was to the way our nerves operate and how our body parts are connected through our backbones. I saw two presentations in particular that looked at ways to use stem cell growth to foster the development of new neurons that could reach over divides made during traumatic injury, when a backbone is broken. It was hoped that these new discoveries would lead to a way to repair broken spinal networks and in doing so get limbs moving again.

The patients who were involved were very similar to the group I had met in Wakefield, all had suffered traumatic spinal injuries. However the 'actants' as in Latour's use of the term, also included several non-human creatures, including mice and monkeys and machinery. The images of the injuries were made using powerful electron microscopes, giant sections of backbones were projected on several screens as presenters pointed to newly grown dendritic shaped fibres beginning to spread out into bone substrates. Craig had made me aware of an evolutionary history of the different types of nerve fibres running through the spine and therefore I was not surprised when for instance one presenter pointed to the existence of nerves carrying visual information through adjacent channels. No one mentioned that nerves carrying more emotional information would also have to pass through the backbone's super highway. I was though now beginning to see these presentations as entries into a type of micro world, one that I entered guided by science, that was re-shaping my visual spinal image bank. This caused some sort of oscillation of my being, that also included the mice and monkeys that had given their lives to the research conducted in the many medical laboratories that had been working on these issues. I was being connected via a series of networks that were previously unavailable to myself, but which had already been invisibly shaping my experiences.

Bruno Latour's ideas level the playing field between things. He used the image of a constant fermentation that arises as a physical/chemical/quantum/emotional/psychological and economic mix that is achieved by the constant swelling and current mixing of energy seas. It's an idea that for many would be too disconcerting, people often want some form of certainty and the rise of rightwing philosophies points to this need. You need a certain confidence to ride the waves of uncertainty. An idea of time as a relative thing that operates in different ways as it interacts with small and large scale events, can for some people be very disconcerting, as people are in many ways already dead, as well as not yet born. As an artist I can see how objects effect me, they shape my mind, they penetrate me and I am worked on by them from within. I need to accept this, if not I could have no real belief in the power of the objects I make to effect other people. As you read this post, another non-organic thing enters your mind and as it does it begins to reshape your body. This may only be for a moment, you may well decide that this text is boring and stop reading, but in the short time you were reading, you were being re-shaped. Any perception of rightness is just a temporary "momentary truth", that sits within a larger, ever-changing process of constant becoming. It is a fascinating thing, one that can either be embraced or rejected, and as it is embraced there are wonderful opportunities for becoming immersed in the flow of possibilities.

Grace is normally defined as an acknowledgment that one's well-being is a result of God's undeserved kindness, benevolence, or blessing. Grace is something that reminds us that luck or good fortune is not a product of one's own actions, it is a game of chance. However in a world where there is no God, there can still, it has been speculated, be a form of 'grace'.
This is a way of thinking about the implications of a world where the idea of a deity, sits within or on the same playing field as a game of marbles or a TV set. The wonder is in the everydayness of it all and the fact that you are indeed special. No matter how insignificant you might feel you are, you have existed and still exist as a something. That existence is a complex amalgam of events and physical happenings that has during all the time it has been with us, been rubbing up against other things and in doing this it has in turn, shaped them. You might not be able to see this, you might be too close to the happening that is you to see it, but it is still happening and in that happening you are bathed in the speculative grace of now.

Thursday, 9 January 2020

Quantum entanglement

Tyre tracks encounter each other and the road surface.

I have posted before on lines and their entanglement and how nets can be used to think about interconnections. I have also posted on quantum theory and how this can be used to help us think about the fact that everything is constructed of different patterns of vibration or interconnected energy fields. By linking quantum theory to object orientated ontology, it could be argued that we can move towards a more 'flattened' or non hierarchical way of thinking about reality. If so, any event could be a drawing, but conversely the idea of defining something using a particular word becomes redundant. This is very counter intuitive and it is in opposition to all those theories that put human rationality on top of a pyramid of importance. One conceptual model that can be derived from a coupling of OOO with quantum theory, is one that could be used to think of a world without 'conditionality', something that would be quite disturbing if you are a Buddhist. Buddhists have a word 'pratityasamutpada' which means 'dependent origination', which suggests that because existence is dependent on previous or connecting factors, it is conditional on those factors.
'He who sees the Principle of Conditionality sees the Truth. One who sees the Truth sees the Buddha'. See The important issue here is that Buddhists and many other religions and philosophies look at the moment of now as being conditional on all the infinite number of things that have happened before. For instance I would not be here to write this if my mother had never met my father. But I would also not be writing this if mammalian evolution had not taken place in the way it did and a different set of creatures had filled that particular evolutionary niche left open after a meteor collision with the Earth served to extinguish most of the dinosaurs.
I have previous looked at the Northern European concept of the Wyrd, one that is centred on an image of a thread that is wound around and between an individual and all the events and things and people that that individual encounters during their life span, a thread that is 'cut' on death. This image also suggests the interconnectedness of everything. Conditionality suggests that there is an underlying cause and effect for everything and that therefore one thing follows another. However in a universe where stones are no more or less important than Greta Garbo or a dandelion or this computer on which I'm typing, or a dog or a cushion or an idea, such as Batman, each entity is simply a particular configuration that happens to be in that configuration at one particular moment and which at any other moment might be part of something else. The interactions these things may or may not have will depend on their relative space time positioning and whether or not they affect each other will depend on their individual time and spatial properties. But what if some things can happen in two places at once or if time as we think of it, i. e. a situation whereby one thing follows another, is not the way things work, time being simply how we as a species have built an idea to help us navigate and understand our local space time experience. Conditionality has recently become even more questionable because it would appear as if there is no such thing as a single point in time to hold on to.

More things interacting with stuff, visualised by other things interacting with stuff

If everything is more like a wave than a thing, then as waves occupy multiple places in space all at once, anything and everything can occupy multiple spaces at once. This is called "quantum superposition" and recently scientists have observed a molecule made up of 2,000 atoms occupy two places at the same time. We are now aware that bacteria are influenced by magnetic field changes at a quantum level and as our bodies are made up of approximately 50% bacteria, it is becoming apparent that we are, like everything else, interacting with quantum fields much more than we ever realised before.

Because entangled particles remain connected in such a way that actions performed on one affect the other, even when separated by great distances, we can perhaps intuit other ways beyond the human to think about conditionality or cause and effect. The phenomenon "spooky action at a distance" depends on elemental particles or fields existing in all possible states simultaneously. Our previous mental picture of these things suggested that there was a boundary between the ordinary and the quantum world, but what if there isn't? If a molecule of 2,000 atoms is subject to quantum superposition there is no reason to expect that there's a limit to the size of quantum effects. It has recently been theorised that bacteria can become entangled with light particles and it has been seen that some birds can navigate the Earth by responding to bacteria that are themselves entangled with the Earth's magnetic field. All sorts of areas of thinking are affected by quantum entanglement. For instance; if our memories are simply patterns of chemical and/or electromagnetic connections, these patterns may, like those of the bacteria in our stomachs, become entangled with other electromagnetic fields. Our perceptions consist of recorded changes in chemical and/or electromagnetic connections, so at some base level, a memory, an idea and a perception all exist in a similar electrochemical format. Percepts, perceptions, sensations and reality all entangled together at a quantum level in ways previously unimaginable.

A drawing made with graphite on paper, encounters computer software and because of the implications of the encounter, the idea is further adjusted to suggest imaginary encounters with a library of quantum effects

So where are we going with this? If I am a thing like any other thing consisting of a series of interacting fields that interact with other fields and I am interacting with stuff just like everything else is interacting with stuff, my drawings can be seen as the result of a certain type of material entanglement, and the materials I engage with, are at the same time engaging with me, neither being more or less important than the other. I am in effect the subject of my drawing materials' engagement, just as much as an idea I might have. It could be argued that I am an idea implied by the way certain materials are coming into new formations.

This might not be as weird as it appears. It has been pointed out that quantum mechanical effects are key to the ability of green plants, through photosynthesis, to almost instantaneously transfer solar energy from molecules in light harvesting complexes, to molecules in electrochemical reaction centres. As photosynthesis is vital to our existence on this earth, I would suggest that we are entangled with this energy transfer at every level. When we eat food and release the energy tied up in plant and animal cells, are we not re-entangling the quantum mechanical effect of photosynthesis into ourselves and as far as the sun is concerned being just another localised twist in the entanglement of its long time energy release.
As far as the sun is concerned we are in effect no different to the paper and the charcoal with which a drawing is made. You could well now argue that I was back using another version of 'conditionality', first of all the sun then the leaf etc.
However in order for me to make sense of my nowness I need an idea such as conditionality in order to make decisions that suggest that what I do now will effect what is going to happen in the future. Conditionality enables me to navigate 'local' conditions, therefore I/we need it as an idea to remain sane.
I have referred to Graham Harman's diagram before when reflecting on Object Orientated Ontology, but it is worthwhile revisiting it in order to look at how quantum entanglement can be seen as part of the way we could think about the state of things as they are.

Harman argues that in the day to day we deal not with real objects, but with their sensuous surrogates or manifestations. We fail to recognise the difference between real objects and sensuous objects because we live amongst a particularly localised set of entanglements where sensuous qualities have become associated with our particular sense organs' abilities, thereby rendering us blind to what is in reality hidden (to our sense organs that is) within objects.

I think of this in a slightly different way. If I encounter a mountain, I can never actually experience it, I can only have a series of small encounters with the bits of the mountain I come into contact with. However from my tiny bit of information I can deduce all sorts of things that allow me to survive. For instance I may experience a certain coldness because of the mountain's height and may therefore respond to this by putting on warm clothes. So yes I don't ever encounter the 'reality' of the whole mountain because it consists of what feels like an infinity of possibilities, but I do respond to aspects of it, such as whether or not snow covers it.
I try to open this issue out in another post on the limits of language and would argue that Harman is like so many other philosophers tied down with words and that his sensual object/real object distinction would disappear if he had no verbal or written language to refer back to. I would argue that we would simply interact with whatever is happening, the enactment on contact being some sort of exchange dependent on degree of touch and length of time tho two elements are entangled.
Gravitational fields, electromagnetic fields, weak, and strong nuclear fields all mediate the four known fundamental forces. These fields interact by exchanging particles, which is their mediation or effect.
This is how the four forces are described:

Strong interaction: the interaction responsible for holding quarks together to form hadrons, and holding neutrons and also protons together to form atomic nuclei. The exchange particle that mediates this force is the gluon.
Electromagnetic interaction: the familiar interaction that acts on electrically charged particles. The photon is the exchange particle for this force.
Weak interaction: a short-range interaction responsible for some forms of radioactivity, that acts on electrons, neutrinos, and quarks. It is mediated by the W and Z bosons.
Gravitational interaction: a long-range attractive interaction that acts on all particles. The postulated exchange particle has been named the graviton.

If one existed, a unified field theory would bring these four interactions together into a single framework. (Carlo Rovelli suggests that we now have an answer to this in terms of information theory, but even so, he would argue that as new information comes into a system, part of the previous information becomes irrelevant). We might not be aware of them at our day to day human scale but they are what previously scientists took to be the reality that underpinned our existence. Now however we are told by scientists that this is only about 5% of 'reality' and the other 95% consists of dark matter and dark energy, things we can at the moment only guess at as to what they actually are.
I am as an artist going to suggest that what is important here is the moment of 'exchange' between one thing and another. Whatever dark matter is it will have an infinity of possibilities, and it will be possible that some things will be able to respond to certain aspects of it, and how they respond will be the imaginative possibility of the situation.
So how does all this impact on drawing? There is a book on architectural possibilities, 'Siteless: 1001 Building Forms' by François Blanciak. If you haven't come across it before do look it up, because it is a wonderful example of how visual thinking can be far more powerful than traditional linear, written or verbal thinking. The book is a response to the imaginative possibility of a series of situations.

As you can see from the images above, what Blanciak does is to provide us with what have been called by Ian Bogost, 'visual ontographs'. These are speculative encounters between possibilities of forms. They remind me of an exercise we used to set students on the Leeds foundation course, which was to explore how many variations of interacting basic forms you could draw. Blanciak's forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) from a constant and consistent viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. In many ways they reflect the flattening of hierarchy that I believe happens when a unified field theory is implied. No one thing is more important than another, but each encounter raises possibilities for future actions. (As new information comes into a system, part of the previous information becomes irrelevant). The fact that all of Blanciak's drawings are the same size reinforcing the fact that no one encounter is more important than another.

This is interesting because it also points to a specifically aesthetic phenomena. In this case objects are not reduced to their sensuous manifestations, but are all speculative. The imaginative begins to occupy the same status as the real, both being types of encounters between things rather than being things in themselves. As I pointed out earlier, stones are no more or less important than Greta Garbo or a dandelion or this computer on which I'm typing. But in this case it is about an encounter with the qualities of Greta Garbo, the 'Garboing' or the 'dandelioning', the action rather than the object. My role in this being that of a bricoleur, someone who is making the most of what is at hand.

In my work for a recent 'Library Interventions' project I imagined that as I walked through the library I could be guided just as a bird could by some sort of quantum level interaction. All I had to do was leave myself open to its influence. A decision to stop and draw was an unquestioned instinctive one, one that could have been predicated by light bouncing off book titles and entering my field of vision and at some point getting entangled with some memory electrons. A type of speculative theory.
My encounter with the bookshelves was diagrammed via an old drawing process that I used to use, centred on measurement and an awareness of my location in relation to the shelves I was looking at. (I'm reminded of this by Mike Croft's previous guest blog post, whereby he takes on the implications of this sort of perceptual drawing and pushes it to a particular limit).

Initial observational drawing

The initial drawings were annotated with the names of specific texts that could be found along the central axis of vision. More drawings were then made from the ones made on location, this time allowing for 'speculative' encounters to be as important as encounters with sensuous objects. These speculative encounters were implied by book titles found. The drawings were then processed using computer software and a geometry of targeting applied to clarify the sighting process.

Aesthetic phenomena in this case allude to the domain of real objects beyond their qualitative manifestations in sensuous objects, this in effect freeing me from any form of being trapped in 'actualism' where objects are reduced to their sensuous manifestations. This is why making and drawing are much better ways of dealing with these issues, they leave the imagination to material inventions rather than ones predicated by words. My equivalent images to Blanciak's being ones where ceramic invention is linked to thoughts about library books as if they had organs for perceptual encounters, such as eyes, noses, ears, fingers and tongues. A book about Islamic pattern, may encounter one on cowboy boots, and as it does the imaginary taste of leather shapes a new formal logic. Initially images were simply about how things might emerge from rough lumps of clay, but as these images merged with possibilities coming from both drawings and clay shaping, new hybrids emerged.

Drawings and ceramic objects made from the drawings

Once I began making these ideas changed again, my encounters with clay revealing something that was pushing back very forcefully and making its own demands as to what it should or could be. The drawings were about what pen and ink can become, not what clay can do.

Objects made from an encounter with clay

From one position this object looks like a set of books, from another a pair of armoured knight's boots. This was an idea of the clay's rather than myself, I had set out to make a pair of cowboy boots thinking about books, but in the making process things changed. Clay, books, boots, ideas about the possibilities of what clay can look like, the word 'movement', the word 'time', all possible events within a wider range of events such as an exhibition, or a studio production, or an artist's work. As the clay began its own dialogue with my hands there was a point when I wasn't sure which of us was doing what. The same material dialogue, but perhaps to an even greater extent, then takes place during the glazing process. There is no way I can intervene in the kiln firing, I just have to trust that my intuition as to whether flow rate, eventual colour, surface texture etc. is right and that I have enough experience to predict the outcome. However the variables are so wide that there is always something that happens that I'm not expecting. As I have pointed out already, as new information comes into a system, part of the previous information becomes irrelevant. I. e. the traditional approach to art making or any form of planning or academic research, is to set out a question or set of issues to work with, that lead to a pre-determined set of procedures that you then can reflect upon as to whether or not the actions taken were successful or not. However working in this way things just happen.
This not being in control is very important as it reminds me that other things have agency in this series of conversations. My interest in object orientated ontology leading me to foreground these issues and to hope that as I try and reduce my human centred awareness and acknowledge alternative non human realities, I can persuade others to try some other alternative modes of thinking. Our present systems of thought seem to have brought us into difficult and dangerous waters, so as an educator and artist it would appear to me that one of my roles is to point to other possibilities and suggest frameworks for thinking that might help someone come to terms with a world that seems to be out of kilter with the way we inhabit it.

An illogical relationship

The fact that we don't know what 95% of the reality that we exist within consists of, suggests that our very limited perception of reality may well be very like the experience of a line in Abbot's 'Flatland'. A line could not conceive of a three dimensional solid, therefore if a line was picked up and moved through a space beyond the 2 dimensional world it existed in, it would in effect disappear and only reappear again if it was placed back into its own flat world. The three dimensional world would also allow for a view of where a line was to be seen as a series of positions that were possible points for reinserting that line back into its own space, therefore it could be reinserted at a point of previous existence, i. e. breaking the causality chain of time. For the line conditionality would therefore be questioned.

A film has now been made of Flatland, and as available on YouTube, it is worth watching if you have never encountered Abbot's work before. The movement between 2 and 3D thinking is something fundamental to imaginative thinking and the position of drawing as a major game player in this process is vital.

The artwork that relates to these ideas was exhibited in the Leeds Arts University gallery as part of the Library Interventions series of artist's responses to the university's library.

Capra, F. (1997) The Tao of Physics London: HarperCollins (I first read this book back in the 1970s and it influenced my work then, I have since revisited Capra's writings and find him still relevant)

Rovelli, C (2017) Reality is not what it seems London: Penguin

Wednesday, 23 October 2019

Philip Guston and alien phenomenology

Steve Bell: Boris Johnson

In times of political turmoil artists often turn to the absurd to communicate their obvious dismay as to what is happening around them. Steve Bell has seen Boris Johnson as an arse, and back in the 1970s Philip Guston saw Richard Nixon as a prick and ballsack. For Guston in particular his use of caricature was part of an ongoing transformation of his work as he moved from being an abstract expressionist to being an artist that dealt with harsh uncompromising imagery, imagery that was as much a reflection of popular culture, as an awareness that if as an artist you had to match up to one of the greats of the past, Goya was as powerful as Velasquez.

Untitled (1971), Philip Guston

Untitled (Poor Richard) (1971), Philip Guston.

Philip Guston: Richard Nixon

From the Richard Nixon series 1971-74

The Richard Nixon drawings helped Guston to develop an approach to drawing that highlighted the raw absurd nature of life. He was also able to use the processes of caricature that he used to reinvent Nixon as an image, on other not always human objects, such as sticking plasters, shoes and coats. A severe distortion of human forms, could also be applied to non-human forms, giving to each subject a new 'reality' or 'attention' that ensured that these objects were no longer just 'background' details to a human drama but significant 'players' in their own right.

Philip Guston 1980

The smoke from the cigarette is just as powerful as the fingers, which are as weighty in this image as sticking plasters or an ear or an eye. A coat and some shoes stand for an absent human and in doing so they are just as important in terms of image hierarchy as a human subject. This is where Guston's importance lies. He is able to transcend the human centred preoccupation of the cartoonist's imagery and in applying these conventions to non-human forms, is able to show us our own closed circuit of anthropomorphism, to be what it is, a problematic navel gazing, that has led to the dangers of climate change and species destruction.

Philip Guston

A dismembered head, a green bottle, a light bulb, all inhabit the same space and all have a presence in this image that suggests that as actants (Bruno Latour's term) they all have equal possibilities, each one open to speculative narratives that may or may not entangle the others in their narrative gravity. These images of Guston's are perfect illustrations of what Ian Bogost calls Alien Phenomenology, a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. A position that has at times been called a flat ontology.

This post is one of a series that begins to collect together ideas related to object orientated ontology, agential realism, speculative materialism, and other ways to give more weight to things that sit outside human centred disciplines. Gradually these posts will be used to put together a hopefully coherent philosophy of drawing as material thinking.

In essence, other things have as much impact about what goes on as we do. We cannot but be entangled in the influence fields of other things in order to be part of the events that happen in our local timeframe. We have though in the past tended to not recognise the role that all these other actants have and we have instead prioritised the human (and often just one sort of human; white, male, middle class European) to the exclusion of everything else.

Friday, 4 May 2018

Touch: Photography and frottage as indexical forms of drawing

Max Ernst Frottage

Adam Fuss: Photogram

frottage

noun

the technique or process of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art.

the practice of touching or rubbing against the clothed body of another person in a crowd as a means of obtaining sexual gratification.

photogram

noun

the technique or process of making a photographic image without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material and then exposing it to light.

archaic: a photograph.

Both these techniques above rely on the direct contact between two surfaces, or 'things coming together'. Some of my recent posts have suggested that if we used object orientated ontology as a lens with which to explore how the materiality of drawing could lead to a less human centric way of thinking about theory, we could create a better balance between meaning as something that only applies to human lives and meaning as something that is applicable to the totality of all experiences, be these animal, vegetable or mineral. It is though very hard to avoid putting human feelings at the centre of the struggle for meaning. The fact that psychology is now such an important theoretical driver, makes it impossible for me to avoid seeing the relevance of the second definition of 'frottage', to the sexual associations we have with touch. A photograph is usually associated with theories of the gaze, the 'male gaze' being one that treats female subjects as objects and this is at its clearest perhaps within the realm of amateur photography, where I am amazed to see that photographing the female nude is still seen as an important genre, one that often comes under the heading of *'tasteful nudes'. Sight and touch in these cases become conjoined. The 'distance' that light has to travel to get from the subject via the camera lens to the light sensitive surface is in effect diminished by the need to touch the surface of the model's skin.

Newspaper ad

The drawing above from an old newspaper ad for x ray specs sums up the psychology of the situation, "Is that really his body you "see" under his clothes", the text works as an attempt to divert attention from the reality behind the drawing.

The feminist artist Nancy Davidson in her early works dealt with the recorded gestures of her body. In one such piece she used frottage by having her bodily weight transfer the patterns of the wooden floor underneath her to strips of paper. The resulting work was a record of touch formed by her body and the floor’s surface. These processes allowed her to touch another object without having to be touched by the 'male' other, she in effect was taking control over how touch could be conceptualised. Her images becoming both traces and signs. (Compare with the Anthropometry work of Yves Klein)

Nancy Davidson: Frottage

Alan Sonfist’s Earth Mapping of New York City is a charcoal drawing that is also both a trace and sign. A trace is something inscribed by the artist’s direct physical presence, while a mark is a sign placed with deliberate intention. The drawing is a rubbing of pine needles and dirt that suggests the composition of the New York City landscape long before it was inhabited. The drawing as you spend time looking at it transforms into a landscape with its suggestion of depth, mountains, and even animals or figures in action.

Alan Sonfist: Earth Mapping of New York City Charcoal frottage

Adam Fuss's photogram's are also traces and signs. However they also suggest a relationship with spirit photography. His ghost images of clothes suggest a similarity with those early photographs which were often in reality double exposures. Because of photography's newness and because unsophisticated audiences had no awareness of how these images were made, these photographs had seemed like strange magical records of the spirit world. The direct touch of the photogram as a technique being read as something from beyond the grave, a process that was supposed to be about an indexical relationship with reality, was read as a type of doorway into the fantastic.

Spirit photography

I'm rambling again, but only to search for a series of connections about how traces and direct contacts with other surfaces can lead to a variety of readings, which can on the one hand make us more aware of the material nature of image making but on the other of how other humans will read into anything narratives of their own experiences, a direct touch being associated with being alive and by extension an awareness of sex and death.

Bruno Latour suggests that 'resistance' is the first mark of the real. In the case of a drawing the paper resists the attack of the charcoal. This is the material aspect of every situation. "Availability' is seen as the second mark of the real. 'Reality' according to Latour is itself defined by an oscillation between 'resistance' and 'availability'. 'Availability' is a tangled series of interconnections that sets out the framework within which the real comes to be. As Miller puts it each object comes to be what it is "through the difference it creates in resisting others". The trials of strength and weakness between 'availability' and 'resistance' are finally resolved by "how the multitude of links that an object has passing through it are stacked in relation to one another." (Miller, 2013, p.52) In the case of a charcoal drawing, the passivity of the charcoal allows it to be shaped into forms that can be linked into a complex series of links with metaphorical and other meanings. As things come together one will always be more resistant than another, (a sort of philosophical Mohs scale of hardness) and whatever is more malleable is then capable of taking the form of or allowing an infusion into other things, ideas or whatevers.

For a detailed discussion of Latour's ideas see: Miller, A (2013) Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and object-orientated theology New York: Fordham University Press

For an introduction to the idea of the male gaze see:

Mulvey, L (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema available at http://theslideprojector.com/pdffiles/art6/visualpleasureandnarrativecinema.pdf

Charles Peirce's term 'indexicality' refers to the physical relationship between the object photographed and the resulting image. Paul Levinson emphasises the ability of photography to capture or reflect "a literal energy configuration from the real world" through a chemical process.

*If we look at the etymology of the word 'taste' we can see that it is intimately associated with 'touch'. Our present English use of the word "taste" evolved from the Old French "taster," which originally meant "to examine by touch or test". The modern sense of "flavour" didn't emerge until the 16th century. This historical connection highlights how the sense of taste was initially understood through the physical act of touching, which was also about 'testing' out experiences before committing yourself to them.

Drawing