In a post I wrote a while ago I referred to Timothy Morton's use of the term 'thinkfeel', which I took to be about 'grasping the ungraspability of a thing'. A few years later after getting involved with attempts to visualise things that are invisible, I'm even more impressed with Morton's ability to put words together in order to explain the unexplainably difficult nature of our reality. Morton told us that reality was populated by 'strange strangers', by which they (they use the 'they' pronoun) meant that the things around us, books, chairs, houses, soil, plastics, sunshine, water, trees and whatever you might encounter, are all weird. So how is the world weird? Perhaps its because we use language as a sort of screen behind which we hide from reality, we use words to single things out, 'books, chairs, houses' etc. which makes it seem as if there are nicely separate objects out there, but in reality everything is interconnected; a state that in Buddhism is termed 'dependent arising'. I have in the past when considering organic objects such as trees or humans, looked at the Markov Blanket effect, which explains how nothing living can ever in reality be an isolated fixed thing. This time, as I return to thinking about the issue, I'm more aware of animist approaches to the world, and that there is a long history of understanding everything we encounter as a fluid arrangement of energies. This both allows us to inhabit non living things mentally, (as in animist cultures as well as in the extended mind theory), and enables us to think about a life force energy, as something that gives agency to all things, not just organic forms.
Starbucks cup
If we take a basic plastic cup, something we often use when travelling, we find that the cup is involved in a complex journey too, one that involves vast time periods and which is often interwoven with our own path through life. The primary component of plastic cups is polypropylene and the main reason you are given the cup you have been given, is its affordable price. Polypropylene is made from chains of the monomer (a small, reactive molecule, that can be joined with other similar molecules) propylene, which is a hydrocarbon obtained from natural gas and crude oil. The monomer propylene is subjected to a polymerisation process, where it bonds with other propylene molecules to create polypropylene. One journey is back into deep history and the conversion over millions of years of organic matter into natural gas and oil. Another is into the anthropocene, our current geological age and is associated with the greenhouse gas emissions released during oil extraction, plastic processing, and consumption. We also journey into the world of material properties, where we find that polypropylene's structure provides good insulation, allowing a disposable cup to contain hot coffee without you being burnt. A journey into economics, might lead some people to believe that its use is cost-effective. It has a structure that allows for both crystalline and amorphous regions, therefore it can be strong and resilient, as well as flexible and pliant. This gives it as a material great versatility, helping to make it quite straightforward to produce, which drives costs down, because there are a lot of manufacturers who can afford and know how to use the technologies of its production; which leads to significant competition, that further drives down prices. It also has a very low density compared to other plastics and less weight means less cost in terms of transportation. We can now begin to see the cup as an aspect of a series of wider economic processes, which are themselves driven by material properties. The cup is now in my hand and I'm drinking from it, so it is now totally interwoven with my biological processes and my ecological network. I have already observed how the boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to people, can be thought of as places where one energy meets another form of energy. These systems are also where interactions take place that help to stabilise them. This being a situation that is operating alongside our perceptual awareness of the particular biological entity we are considering. A Markov blanket concept can be used to define the boundaries of this situation in a statistical sense. I.e. instead of a solid entity you have a series of probabilities whereby something is and isn't at the same time, something that can also be thought of as an active inference scheme. As you infer something is in existence, when you look at it directly it hardens up and becomes a fixed probability, called in this case a plastic cup.
Thinkfeel meditation on a plastic cup
Timothy Morton was at one time a Buddhist and therefore would have been very aware of the concept of 'dependent arising'. This awareness has I'm sure helped them to move away from the Western ideal of humans always attempting to master the world and its objects and to have more respect for the complexity of interconnected processes. What we might feel is a disturbing and difficult compaction, is perhaps a new 'beauty'. When we confront reality it is far too complex to experience, but encounters with objects always reveal something, even though they also make you aware that other things are not available to our experience. Everything and everywhere is real in its own way, and it is constantly interacting with everything else, including you.
There are diagrams that have been drawn to help us get to grips with the Buddhist concept of dependent arising and as I'm always fascinated by how diagrams help us rethink the world, it's perhaps time to look at some.
Dependent arising three lives model
The diagram above uses a circular format based on the Tibetan “Wheel of Life”, with twelve links on the rim of the wheel. The circular format clearly illustrates the concept of “rebirth linking” connecting kamma (action) and consciousness. It also graphically displays the central role played by unwholesome roots (kilesa) of attachment (lobha), aversion (dosa) and delusion (moha). It uses the “three lives” elaboration. Links one and two are in a “past life” whereby ignorance or false knowledge sets the conditions for formations or pre-dispositions to arise. Links three to ten are said to be in the “present-life”, commencing with the arising of consciousness and the mind-body, which in turn condition further links to “becoming” (link ten). Links eleven and twelve are “future lives” linked to re-birth, old-age, death and inevitable suffering. Woven into an understanding of the diagram is both a macrocosmic viewpoint, encompassing “physical” rebirth and life in general; and a microcosmic viewpoint emphasising “moment-to-moment” phenomena of the mind and consciousness. Both perspectives are relevant to how kamma and rebirth relate to dependent arising. Kamma is associated with the idea that all actions (no matter how big or small) have consequences. However, for Buddhists it is more specific than that, as they believe that there are skilful and unskilful actions. A skilful action is one that produces happiness, whereas an unskilful action is one that produces suffering. It is this final point that has helped me to rethink my role as an artist within all this. The concept of 'skilful' action is I believe very important as it allows 'agency' into the framework. It allows for some sort of moral compass and helps us to think about the types of agreements that could be drawn up between humans and the Earth. It would be useful to have a contract on being born into this world, that states our responsibilities to it, as well as to each other. Well that's what I 'thinkfeel' at the moment, a time when I'm unsure about so many things and which finds me trying to 'thinkfeel' my way through a fog of uncertainty, any clarity or firm intellectual framework being blown away by current world events.
I see it more like this
Circular forms are useful when thinking about stuff of this sort as they imply never ending returns, suggesting wheels that rotate through themselves but also the axes that they turn around may lead to holes into which things can fall. I once thought of the lasso as something like this, perhaps more akin to a whirlpool or spiral galaxy, which was also a thing that could be tightened up until it had closed tightly upon the object that had been lassoed.
The lasso: Another of life's circles.
I produced these Western World cards at a time when an earlier US president was engaging in a Gulf War, a war that exposed a gap between world views, that seemed at the time to be a product of lies and wishful thinking, rather than a response to reality. Give us enough rope and we will repeat our mistakes over and over again.
Spike Milligan understood how 'thinkfeel' worked, he wrote as if he knew that poetry would one day leave science behind.
There are holes in the sky Where the rain gets in But they're ever so small That's why the rain is thin.
The 'thinkfeel' answer to why rain comes in very small thin drops.
Living in Leeds I have been unable to miss the work of Mike Moor. He is one of those artists that go under the radar but who carry on regardless and who every now and again produces an image that really makes me stop and look. I have suggested several times that mono print can be a very useful way of liberating your image making processes, because it allows you to move the ink about and watch what is happening in such a way that you don't need to become precious about things. An image will be glimpsed in a soft mix of ink and turps, the white of the paper might just catch an idea of a shape that can be clarified simply by cleaning it out with a rag. All you need is a way of transferring the images when they have arrived on to paper. The Northern cities of England have a long and powerful tradition of being fertile ground for artists, there is though very little in terms of an art infrastructure, far too few galleries, agents and dealers, and so the artists often get an undeserved reputation of northern dourness, especially when they visit the south and complain about how few opportunities exist for northern artists. I like to think their work is better because it is done in a cold unrelenting climate that has very few outlets in terms of selling or promoting work.
Mike Moor: Monoprints
Christopher P Wood is another Leeds based artist who has a highly personal body of work that continues to develop and who uses mono print as a process to free up his image making. This film below of him at work gives a very brief glimpse into his world.
Christopher P Wood in conversation about his mono prints
Christopher P Wood: Monoprint
Christopher P Wood: oil on gesso
Mike Moor and Christopher P Wood both continue to produce strong work and are brave enough to use mono-print as a way of tapping into the process of image gestation. I say 'brave' because it can also be a process that reveals things that perhaps you don't want to reveal. Maybe it's time for me to return to mono printing myself, it has been a while since I have made any. I am particularly interested in how my thoughts about drawing as traces of material processes, can be developed by printmaking, a process that I have always thought of as being about leaving traces of an activity.
In a post from nearly five years ago I wrote, 'Traces are usually traces of moments of surface contact. For example the imprint of feet as someone walks across a sandy beach, wet soles of shoes marking a hallway, a hand-print left on a steamy bathroom mirror. However traces can become more permanent, a tyre track left in mud can become ‘cast’ in hard baked clay as the mud dries out during a hot summer. A dead body sinks into a tar pit, becoming slowly materialized until revealed millions of years later as a fossil. A car runs through a pool of spilled paint, its tyres now leave a permanent print on the road'.
What I was interested in was that there were at least two sides to every mark/trace. In fact there were usually several things involved and our 'normal' propensity is to isolate these and look at how they effect the situation, but the more I think about materiality, the more I begin to see that the amalgam of things, people, materials, plants, whatever is effecting the situation, is probably going to be as Karen Barad points out, an entanglement of things. Imagine a situation whereby a truck is driving down a road. Suddenly a dog runs out into the road and the driver instinctively swerves to avoid the dog. As the truck mounts the pavement its front left wheel smashes into a large paint can that had been left on the pavement by a shop-front painter, who was at that very moment painting a black frame around the shop window. Luckily the painter was not hit by the swerving truck, but as the black paint splashed out over the pavement the vehicle's tyres ran straight into the pool of paint and began printing long black traces of themselves along the pavement and back onto road. So who or what made this paint drawing? Was it the dog, was it the paint container or the paint, or was it the tyres or the man driving the truck? This complex event was a commingling of effects, and the bringing together of the various elements involved. In fact, if the driver of the truck demanded more respect for their agency within the situation, I would be suspicious of their motives. The truck driver may want us to think that he thought to avoid the unthinking actions of the dog, but we would not expect to have to negotiate with the paint, in relation to what part it played in this event. The paint's unthinking action was to just be there. But if we as Timothy Morton suggests, 'release the anthropomorphic copyright', (Morton, 2017, p. 11), we would have to drop the idea that thought is the top access mode, and that as Morton goes on to state, 'brushing against, licking or irradiating, are also access modes as valid as thinking'. In this case the stickiness of the paint, the receptive nature of the road and pavement to receiving a coat of paint, (for instance it could have been raining heavily and a film of water may have prevented some of the paint sticking to the truck's tyres) all came together with the shape and form of a rubber tyre, that in this situation was to make what in artistic terms could be called a mono-print. In comparison it is useful to contrast the making of this mono-print with a very similar situation, whereby although not all the participants are humans, it is only the humans that are deemed worthy of being named as individuals and other things are described as being owned by humans. Automobile Tyre Print (1953) was made by Rauschenberg directing the composer John Cage to drive his Model A Ford in a straight line over twenty sheets of paper that Rauschenberg had glued together and laid in the road outside his Fulton Street studio in Lower Manhattan. I suspect that Rauschenberg poured black paint on the road surface between the left side front and back tyres, so that only one tyre was covered in paint when it rolled over the pool of black paint. The car was then driven carefully by Cage in a straight line over the 20 sheets of paper, so that the black paint was printed along the full length of the 20 sheets.
Rauschenberg: Automobile Tyre Print (1953)
Because one specific human being had the idea of doing this the work is titled in such a way that the human's name comes first and as we are humans too, we expect this. This event is singled out in a particular way; it was an important moment for Rauschenberg because it made concrete one of his ideas. This is why the year is indicated in the title. But the print could have been entitled 'A collaboration between a Model A Ford, the Fulton Street road surface, 20 sheets of typing paper, black house paint and two human beings'.
Ski track in snow
A ski track can look very like a drawing, but the history of skis is also about the history of snow and the history of snow is a dance of air and temperature and water and latitude and gravity, as well as a series of relationships with human beings. In another earlier post, 'Drawing as a trace of touch' I had this to say; "Perhaps all a drawing really consists of are the traces left after one thing has touched another. I liked this definition as it suggested a situation whereby a basic contact between things was the most important issue". But perhaps it's not the basic contact between things, but their entanglement that is vital. There are some very interesting entanglements right in front of me. I'm typing this on an Apple Macintosh computer. The idea of calling the company 'Apple' came first, then 'Macintosh' a name that was suggested by an Apple employee who's favourite apple was a Macintosh variety, was added. This complex machine, made up of metals and plastics and electronic components, is informed by mathematical codes that instruct how it will behave when in interaction with someone like myself. It feels as if it is very far away from the natural world, but of course it is just as much a part of it as an apple tree.
An Apple Mac is entangled with the idea of an apple, they inhabit the same world, the same world where Newton 'discovered' gravity by seeing one fall from a tree and Eve is reputed to have gained a knowledge of good and evil by eating one. The Bavarian pastor and artist Korbinian Aigner was imprisoned for his anti-Nazi sermons. He worked as a gardener in the concentration camps Dachau and Sachsenhausen, where he cultivated several new apple varieties, one for each year of his internment. His work was shown at Documenta 13 in 2012, now repositioned as a conceptual art statement. In each case apples must have caused some chemical and electronic discharges in a human brain, as some sort of associations were made by humans on their perceptual contact with the fruit of a tree. Amongst many non human life forms, rabbits, elk, bears, mice, chimps and birds all eat apples, and the pips pass through these animals' digestive systems and are excreted, often in places far away from the parent plant. The initial contact between an apple and human was probably very similar and the human could be seen as a seed distributer, just as could a steep slope, whereby an apple might roll away from the shade of the parent tree and find a cleft within which to rot and sow its seeds. In this case it could be argued that apple trees 'discovered' gravity before Newton did. Gravity, soil, insects, rain and sunlight are also vital to the coming into being of something humans call an apple tree. But what if we back peddle the human part? The tree would not have a name, this is something we as humans give to things as a sort of shorthand that helps us communicate between ourselves. The soil/root relationship and ecosystem would be focused on how well the tree was anchored by its roots, how water and nutrients were being accessed and how the energy store was working. The soil structure would be something that was determined by a coevolution of plants and soil, reflecting local ground conditions, bedrock and weather history. This commingling would be the local communication system, and communication would be maintained by both biological and chemical interactions. The soil has no need for names, but can still communicate with the tree. Plants can also leave imprint fossils when they are covered by sediment. The leaf tissue degrades, leaving an imprint of where the leaf once was.
Plant fossil
The imprint fossil above it could be argued is something similar to the ski-print and the mono-print. All are impressions of one thing on another, and in the case of the fossil the complexity and delicacy of the image is as subtle as human 'artistic' mono-prints. Alois Senefelder the discoverer of lithography wrote an autobiography. The fact that he had discovered that limestone could hold traces of greasy marks and that you could make prints from the process was interesting enough, but the fact that he had then patented this, was seen by himself as a wonderful thing and he celebrates it to the full in his autobiography. Of course limestones have been holding and transferring marks for as long as limestones have been around, (witness the image of the plant above), but it was a human that 'capitalised' on the process. Lithographic limestones were formed in shallow lagoons. The combination of mild hypersalinity and low oxygen content is believed to have inhibited the formation of microbial mats and prevented the invasion of bottom dwelling organisms that would have left larger fossils, and not only that they would have churned the gently settling sediment up, producing a less homogeneous and smooth grained rock. Stagnancy was required to avoid a churning or sculpting of the sediment by currents or wave action. So in the lifetime of the limestone in question, there was time when the lagoon water, the microscopic shells of sea creatures and microbial mats were all of one thing, a sort of slowly shifting and settling thing, that as a process would eventually after millions of years and billions of tons of pressure from layers and layers of other rocks, result in a certain type of limestone. However this limestone was now revealed again, unearthed and subject to erosion. As far as the limestone is concerned though it makes no difference whether or not it is being eroded away by acid rain or by a printer's levigator. The life of the human, may when looked at from the point of view of the stone's life, appear to be like that of a mayfly, so short as to be inconsequential, but the making of tools such as the levigator does ensure that erosion will during a certain period of the stone's history be very fast. A concept of time is more the province of the human and its short timeframe, so historically little communication has taken place between the stone and its artist, but the artist that has most empathy with the stone, is also most likely to be the one that makes a drawing on it that best responds to the qualities of the stone's surface. But outside of our human frame it is important to remember that there are no edges between stone, weathering, other adjacent minerals and forms of contact with other surfaces. Only our words form discrete differences and we tend to forget that.
Marc Chagall: The Magic Flute: Lithograph
Human beings value 'intention'. And yet I suspect that the image that Chagall has made on the stone arrived as he drew it, he would have responded to the shape and size of the stone and would have collaborated with the master printers that worked to support him. Yes, he would have had some intention, but if he hadn't allowed himself to be influenced by the stone and the lithographic inks and crayons available, he would have produced a stiff and lifeless image. The final image I would suggest, arrived out of the process of making. If only we could take away the famous name, if only we could simply accept the gestation of the image as being a process of material engagement. If we could, we might be able to extract the image from the capitalist system and just see it as what it is, as part of a process, rather than as a high cost luxury item. The print's subject is a dissolving of human and animal forms into a magical world and this is something that does echo some of the things I have been wittering on about. In particular the dissolving of the boundaries between things, of being able to see human beings as symbiotic creatures, as much about themselves and their bacteria as being mammals, as much about their embeddedness into an ecosystem, as being a product of the weather and gravity.
References:
Barad, K (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter New York: Duke Press Tick, B. and Grabowski, B. (2015) Printmaking: A complete guide to materials and processes London: Laurence King Morton, T. (2017) Human Kind London: Verso Other related posts Drawing and printmaking The work of Emma Stibbon The imprint and the trace
