TIME TRANSCENDENCE PERFORMANCE PROCEEDINGS: PAPER
Author
Cassandra Barnett
Lecturer, School of Design and Visual Art, Unitec New Zealand
PhD student, Film, Television and Media Studies Department, University of Auckland
Title
Art out of step, art out of time: a Simondonian aesthetics
Abstract
The hylomorphism dominating Western aesthetics suggests that art is comprised basically of
matter and form, yet contemporary art can be temporally and perceptually slippery in ways that
exceed the explanatory powers of hylomorphism. Fluid, amorphous qualities are evident for
instance in the recent works of two Australasian artists: Daniel Crooks’ disorienting timeslice
videos, and Lisa Benson’s evanescent drawings on unfixed photographic paper. This paper
argues that Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, which was developed in the 1950s
and constituted a sustained critique of hylomorphism, can help us to appreciate such artworks
emphasising imperceptible processes and disorienting transformations. The concept of
individuation, like that of becoming, restores attention to the ontogenetic forces preceding and
exceeding the appearance of ‘matter’ and ‘form, and underlying the operation of perception
itself. The paper ends by speculating that perception, and the viewer, may gain something
important from art that does not produce individuated forms at all.
1
Keywords
Gilbert Simondon, individuation, Lisa Benson, Daniel Crooks, aesthetics
Paper
Becoming exists as one of the dimensions of the being… it corresponds to a
capacity beings possess of falling out of step with themselves, of resolving
themselves by the very act of falling out of step. (Simondon 1992, 300)
This paper tests the potential of Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation for aesthetics,
via an engagement with single works by two current Australasian artists. Simondon was a
student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; his works on individuation and the philosophy of technology
were written in the late 1950s, and these works were influential, in particular, upon the late
twentieth-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Simondon’s works have more recently been
revisited by philosophers Bernard Stiegler, Brian Massumi and Elizabeth Grosz to name just a
few.1 I will first introduce the two artworks and describe some of the tensions they give rise to. I
will then outline Simondon’s concept of individuation. Finally, I will bring the art and the
individuation together, explaining why I think an art of individuation can offer something novel
and important to perception, and something meaningful to the lives of its viewers.
Pan No. 2 (One step forwards, one frame backwards) (2007) is a video work by the New
Zealand-born, Australia-based artist Daniel Crooks. At one level, the work presents us with a
fairly mundane urban scene: a cosmopolitan array of people (some besuited, some capped and
skateboarded, some resplendent in designer logos), a variety of vehicles, roads and tramways
and train tracks, and the odd pigeon. All these elements are bathed in the crisp, blue-skied
1
As further evidence of his growing relevance to contemporary thought, in 2009 a special issue of Parrhesia: A
Journal of Critical Philosophy was devoted to the work of Simondon.
2
brightness typical of a hot day in Melbourne, and there is a continuity to the movement in the
scene that is vaguely suggestive of real time, of a single-take slice of life. However, none of the
elements I’ve mentioned are behaving as you would expect them to. Instead, their slow, fluid
movements are inventing new relations between space and time and perception with each and
every frame of the video projection.
The people’s ambulations appear arbitrary, ludic, sometimes occurring on the spot, only
occasionally actually propelling them through space. Even when the figures are displaced, they
drift according to some remote locomotive power quite disconnected from the laws of physics.
And at times they drift in several directions at once, thus also upsetting our temporal
assumptions. For irrespective of whether they are moving or still in the extensive sense, the
figures are continually subject to another, intensive movement, causing them to stretch then
dwindle, implode then bloom forth in a perpetually renewed interrogation of their own shape,
their internal organisation, their very existence. (The still-sequence in Figure 1 gives a rough
idea of the work’s transformations, though of course to experience their full effect one would
need to watch the video itself.)
3
Figure 1
Daniel Crooks
Pan No.2 (one step forwards, one frame backwards), 2007
video still sequence
digital video, 4:43 minutes, 16:9, stereo sound
courtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery
So instead of the distinct bodies and opposing forces of Newtonian motion, we seem to be
witnessing a different dimension of melding bodies and unified forces. Subjects and objects of
action are hard to define. Figure and ground are not always distinguishable. Events can’t be
lined up chronologically. And since single-source perspective isn’t quite working, our own
position as viewer is also destabilised. Witnessing this familiar-yet-unfamiliar scene, viewers
may be forgiven for feeling similarly amorphous, for falling out of step with themselves. What is
this space that will not be walked over? What is this time in which individuals may be doubled,
4
halved, multiplied, dispersed, co-existing with themselves and travelling in numerous directions
at once? What is this flickering, floating world of extinctions and rebirths? I’ll come back to
these questions.
Another artist whose works pose temporal and perceptual paradoxes is New Zealander Lisa
Benson. Compared with Crooks, Benson’s tools are rudimentary and her results are often
fugitive and lo-fi, but the parallels between their work offer an interesting seam for
investigation.
5
Figures 2-4
Lisa Benson Fade, 2008
Work featured in group exhibition atmos, MIC Gallery, Auckland, 2008
Antique black and white photographic paper and gathered light from the artists studio and MIC
Gallery for the duration of atmos courtesy of the artist and Antoinette Godkin Gallery
6
Benson’s work Fade (2009) was installed at the Dancehouse Gallery in Melbourne for the
duration of the Time Transcendence Performance conference. (An earlier incarnation of the
work was shown in 2008 as part of atmos, a group exhibition at MIC Gallery in Auckland; the
installation shots printed here as Figure 2, 3 and 4 are taken from that show.) Fade consists of a
series of rectangular ‘drawings’, as Benson calls them, of various sizes, scattered across a wall
of the gallery – a wall adjacent, at one end, to a vertical sliver of window. The initial impression
is of a candy-coloured sprawl of restrained geometric abstractions. But if you take a closer look,
it is pretty clear from the velvety sheen of the emulsion and the curling edges that these
drawings are in fact images made with light on traditional photographic paper.
The idea of photographic abstractions may pose a mild conundrum for old-school art historians,
but the more interesting paradox is one that takes a while to dawn. To see it, you need to stick
around for a while, or make repeat visits to the gallery. For, in fact, the works are unfixed and
still gathering light, and hence quietly, slowly expiring before your eyes. The process may speed
up or slow down depending on the quality of light on a given day, but either way it is gradual
enough to only be detectable after a period of time has elapsed.
Having discovered this fact about the works, viewers often start to ‘look for’ the change,
wanting to bear witness to it, to ‘see’ the art for once and for all. Some viewers (especially the
buying kind) even want to prevent the change by fixing the images and preserving their fragile
beauty. Yet we can’t prevent it and we can’t see it – at least not without looking away for a time
and back again. In a sense, to see it, we must miss it. If sensitive to such things we may find
ourselves moved, for the work is subtly lifelike: moving, changing, dying, eluding our grasp.
Whatever we see is instantly gone forever, we have no time to get acquainted with the work in
7
its current form, our thought can’t keep up with what we’re seeing. One way or another,
Benson’s work, like Crooks’s, throws us out of time, out of step with ourselves.
I will now turn to Simondon’s theory of individuation. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it
bears some relation to the notions of ‘becoming’ and ‘emergence’. Simondon theorised
individuation in a number of texts devoted to different levels of reality, from technological
invention to human psychic individuation. As Elizabeth Grosz points out: “Individuation is in no
sense tied to the human: it is what characterises cloud formations, the formation of crystals, the
currents of oceans, as well as the development of cells, and the creation of individuals” (Grosz
1998, 38-55).
For ease of explanation I am in this paper focusing on Simondon’s account of the individuation
of a brick, one of his more concrete objects of investigation. This account opens Part I of his
1958 thesis, published as The Individual and its Physico-Biological Genesis (1964). I will then
introduce a few concepts from Part II, published as Psychic and Collective Individuation (1989),
in which Simondon analyses the individuation of the living. 2
In theorising individuation, Simondon wished to challenge our abiding tendency to think in
terms of discrete, fully-constituted, separate entities or individuals, be they bricks or humans, as
though they are simply given. For instance, where the brick is concerned, we might describe its
production hylomorphically, in terms of some matter (clay) being given some geometric form (a
cubic rectangle) via a mould. But matter and form, clay and rectangular mould, are all discrete
individuals, so we still would not have explained the dynamic process whereby these individual
2
The majority of Simondon’s work has not yet been translated into English; hence I rely on unpublished
translations for my quotations in this article. I would like to acknowledge the generosity of Taylor Adkins in
providing these.
8
units came together to generate something new. To really understand how a brick takes form,
says Simondon, “one would need to penetrate inside the mould itself to follow the operation of
the capture of form to the various levels of the dimensions of physical reality” (Simondon
2007a, 8).
And this is what Simondon does for us: he takes us ‘inside the mould’ to follow the ‘operation
of the capture of form’. During this operation, he explains, clay is pressed into a mould by the
energy of a worker, the malleable clay becoming a vehicle for that energy. Meanwhile the mould
opposes the energy carried in the clay with its own weaker force, limiting where the clay can go.
Individuation occurs when the energetic potentials of disparate elements (clay, mould) are
brought together and actualised in this way. They create a metastable state of tension that, for
the duration of the operation, is unified as a single system, a reciprocity of forces. “So that there
is a single system of forces”, says Simondon, “it is necessary that matter and form both play a
dynamic role; but this dynamic equality is only true in that moment” (Simondon 2007a, 5). The
individual brick that results is the unpredictable product, the once-only actualisation of this
dynamic energy system, mediating between the clay and the mould and the worker.
But that’s not all. For this highly charged and instantaneous clay+mould+energy system to
become possible, whole series of prior energy transfers and physical transformations were
needed:
To give a form, it is necessary to construct such a defined mould, prepared in
such a fashion, with such a species of material. There thus exists a first advance
which goes from the geometrical form to the concrete material mould […]. As
for clay, it is also subjected to a preparation; as a raw material, it is what the
9
shovel raises to the surface at the edge of the marsh, with roots of rush, and
gravel grains. Dried, crushed, sifted, shaped, lengthily kneaded, it becomes this
homogeneous and consistent dough having a rather great plasticity to be able to
embrace the contours of the mould in which one presses it, and firm enough to
preserve this contour during the time necessary for that plasticity to disappear.
(Simondon 2007a, 2)
Once we start thinking in terms of these long chains of physical transformations and transfers of
potential forces, we start to understand how separate individuals like rectangles or moulds or marsh
clay or brick-making dough are in fact the ‘by-products’ of imperceptible processes of energetic
mediation; of individuation.
During such processes, great temporal distances are collapsed. The time of the worker and the time
of the marsh and the time of the thought of a rectangle attain a shared time, in which past and future
intermingle. The extraction of clay from the marsh contained a premonition of the brick-making
operation; the brick-making operation now activates some of the potentials in the marsh.
Individuation is this simultaneous discovery of both a problematic (great physical or temporal
incompatibilities) and a solution to that problematic (a common order, of forces and potentials,
where incompatibilities may be resolved).
Simondon wants us to see the ‘more-than-this’ that is individuation: the hidden aptitudes of clay and
mould; the potential they contain to connect, to communicate, to processually resonate with each
other. For Simondon, this communication is the real individuation, and “the form that we see is only
the vestige of the individuation that was formerly achieved in a metastable state” (Simondon 2007b,
4).
10
Moreover, those forms, the products of individuation, are not only individuals. For, like each
transmutation of the marsh clay, they continue to carry forward within them potential forces that
may become joined to other forces to produce other individuations. The brick may join with cement
and bricklayer and other bricks to compose and sustain a tower; or it may come together with an
arm to break a window.
I will now go over the individuation of the living, which Simondon explains in Psychic and
Collective Individuation partly in terms of the operation of perception: the perception ‘by’ subjects
‘of’ forms or objects. Clearly, though Simondon doesn’t discuss it, this relates to the viewer and the
work of art. Considered as individuals, subject and object, or viewer and artwork, are as disparate,
heterogeneous and incompatible as clay and rectangle. Perception is the individuating operation that
brings these elements together. Perception, like the brick, results from a metastable state of tension
between heterogeneous elements. But in the case of the living, the tension or incompatibility exists
between a subject and the milieu it finds itself in. The operation of perception discovers, within that
state of tension, within the energetic potentials carried by a subject and a milieu, an internal
resonance, a compatibility between them. This compatibility manifests as the form of an individual
object now perceived by an individual subject. Simondon writes:
Perception is not the grasping of a form, but the solution of a conflict, the
discovery of a compatibility, the invention of a form. This form that constitutes
perception not only modifies the relation of object and subject, but also the
structure of the object and that of the subject. (Simondon 2007b, 3)
11
The degree of intensity of the tension or metastable state underlying the perception influences the
kind of subject and object produced by the perception. Simondon gives the example of a child’s
aptitude for recognising parts of the body when encountering a specific animal for the very first
time:
[In this] situation strongly developed by fear, sympathy, or terror […it is] the
tension, the degree of metastability of the system formed by the child and animal
in a determined situation, which is structured in the perception of the corporeal
diagram of the animal. Here perception not only grasps the form of the object,
but its orientation as a whole, its polarity which makes it lie down or draw up on
its legs, makes it fight or flee, or makes it adopt a hostile or a trustful attitude
[…] (Simondon 2007b, 4)
So, what the child experiences is part of what the child then perceives: not just an animal shape but
its orientation, as well as the child’s relative orientation, in a dynamic relationship. The greater the
dynamic intensity between subject and milieu, the more ‘pregnant’ the resulting objective
perception. For in the act of perception, not only is the form of an object discovered; its orientation
or polarity is too. And simultaneously, in this moment of perception, the subject is also oriented.
The subject perceives, Simondon says, so as to be oriented, and each form or object perceived is in
fact an intermediary, enabling a coupling of the subject and the world. The act of perception is this
reorganisation of a structure or relationship, incorporating subject and object and world. Simondon
clarifies, “it is not the object that is perceived, but the world, polarized in a way such that the
situation has meaning” (Simondon 2007b, 9).
12
So how might these ideas of Simondon’s help us when viewing the two artworks I showed earlier?
I’ll start with Lisa Benson. Like Simondon, Benson directs the viewer’s attention towards the whole
process of individuation, which is in excess of the individual units produced. The real work of art
Fade is not the drawings/photographs/images, but the whole operation of the capture of form: the
mediation between the photographic paper’s potential and the light’s force, occurring on a
dimension where paper and light, despite their heterogeneity, engage in a singular, reciprocal
communication. Benson reminds us that the forms we see (colour, tone, two-dimensional shapes)
are merely a vestige of that encounter, that meeting of forces; and that these forms are already
feeding into new individuations, new forms.
Like the prepared, malleable clay, the art you see now contains inexhausted potentials carried
over from past transformations; in the work’s seeming ‘aliveness’, its metastability, we sense the
level of indeterminacy whereby any visitor to the gallery could yet lay a hand on one of these
images and irrevocably alter its evolution. At the same time, the artwork’s potential is delimited
by its current form. Here, darker marks framing the edge of the paper index its earlier position in
a stack whose sides alone were susceptible to the light. There, cloudy forms record the presence
of mould on the aged paper (see Figure 4). These individuations cannot be undone. The
imperceptible swelling of future possibilities is a part of the work now; the forms perceived
today contain in some part the work’s future. At the level of force these temporal distances can
be bridged. Whenever you see the work it reveals the potential for forms to appear, and
disappear.
In a moment I will attend to the effect of all this on the viewer, but first I would like to return to
where I started, to my questions regarding Daniel Crooks and his world of disorienting
movements, spaces and times. What is this world Crooks has created? Perhaps it is a world of
individuation. I think that Crooks, like Benson, alerts us to the whole process of individuation,
13
and not just its products. But with Benson we ‘see’ what we can’t see – the invisible dimension
of potential – when we look away from the work’s present form. Crooks, instead, performs a
sleight of hand that makes the invisible presently visible. If spatially and temporally disparate
elements attain a common dimension during individuation, Crooks literally pictures this for us.
Consider his technical procedure. To make these works, Crooks takes the digital frames of his
video-recording, ‘slices’ them up vertically, then rearranges these thin strips so that segments
from earlier and later frames now sit alongside each other in a single frame. Through this
rearrangement, disparate fragments of a figure’s successive movements through space and time
are given simultaneously so that, when animated, the figure appears to us to have multiple
polarities; to be moving in several directions all at once. Magicked away is the linear time of
individuals, individuals which are now here and now there but never in both places at once. In
its place is a diagram of the time of individuation.
Thus, in Pan No. 2, we see how a figure’s movement enacts, moment by moment, new syntheses
of its past and future potentials. What for Simondon occurs on the level of force is, thanks to
Crooks, suddenly perceptible at the level of not-so-individual bodies. Instead of individuals, we
see a rising and falling of tensions and resolutions, we see the capacity to individuate.
Finally, I would like to consider the individuation undergone by the viewer of these works of art.
Both Benson and Crooks draw our attention to something we don’t ordinarily see: the realm of
potential, the communication between heterogeneous forces that makes our perception of individual
forms and objects possible. They offer us a kind of perception-plus, a perception that ‘sees’ more
than this, that ‘sees’ the process of individuation. But if we need the perception of forms to be
oriented in the world, as Simondon suggests, what happens to our orientation when we ‘see’ more
14
than this, when we see perception itself in its process of emergence or individuation? And what kind
of orientation, what kind of coupling between viewer and world, will result from this kind of
seeing?
Simondon writes: “Every time the tension of the system cannot be resolved in the structure or the
organisation of the polarity of the subject and the polarity of the object, a malaise remains”
(Simondon 2007b, 4). I think that both Benson and Crooks alight on this malaise, only in their
hands it becomes no longer a malaise but an opportunity. To couple with the worlds they offer, to
find an orientation, the viewer must, in a sense, start perceiving differently. The only perceptible
forms an encounter with this art can produce are dynamic forms, forms on their way to becoming
new forms. Thus every orientation is swiftly undone. That is, the only orientation the viewer can
find is one of perpetual disorientation. The relationship with the world encouraged, demanded, by
these works is one in which transformation and disorientation become the solution to the tension of
the system, indeed, they become the only workable mode of coupling with the world.
Such a solution is possible because we viewers already carry within us, at the level of potential,
a wealth of dynamic and disorientating forces – forces retained from our own past individuations
(most likely occurring outside of the gallery) and waiting to be called upon when new
incompatibilities arise between us and our world. What is individuated again and again during
this kind of perception is a new structure for the artwork, a new structure for the viewer, and a
new polarity for the world they share; a polarity which produces transformation and
disorientation as meaningful forms.
Meaningful because when we look at Crooks’s videos, we see the way we too are coming into
being continuously. In Crooks’s blooming, smearing, recomposing forms – as in the unstoppable
15
emergence and decay of Benson’s drawings made with light and time – we see something of
what it really feels like to be alive, falling in and out of step, losing ourselves and reinventing
ourselves and losing ourselves again from moment to moment to moment.
Works Cited
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1998. Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought. Symploke 6, no. 1: 38-55.
Simondon, Gilbert. 1992. The Genesis of the Individual. In Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary
and Sanford Kwinter, trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter, 296-319. New York: Zone.
---. 2007a. The Individual and its Physico-Biological Genesis.
Trans. Taylor Adkins.
Unpublished translation.
---. 2007b. Psychic and Collective Individuation. Trans. Taylor Adkins. Unpublished translation.
Images
High-resolution images have been provided separately due to their large file sizes.
Image Captions
Figure 1
Daniel Crooks, Pan No.2 (one step forwards, one frame backwards), 2007, video still sequence,
digital video, 4:43 minutes, 16:9, stereo sound, courtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery.
Figure 2 – Figure 4
Lisa Benson, FADE, 2009, installation shot, antique black and white photographic paper and
gathered light from the artist’s studio in Hamilton, New Zealand (2003-2009) and the
Dancehouse Gallery, Melbourne (for the duration of Time Transcendence Performance),
courtesy the artist.
16
17