brogan bunt

The notion of socially engaged art practice can be interpreted very literally as art that involves forms of social interaction. So, for instance, Pablo Helguera, in his excellent small instructional handbook, Education for Socially Engaged Art, explains that “what characterizes socially engaged art is its dependence on social intercourse as a factor of its existence”(2011, p.2). Yet at the same time the notion of “engagement” clearly has wider implications. It suggests not just interaction between people per se, but a broader commitment to the field of the social. An artist is “socially engaged” in the same manner that they may be “politically engaged” – it suggests a passionate ethical orientation. Here the notion of the social extends beyond simply thinking of groups of people to involve something much larger and less obviously dependent upon particular practical contexts of interaction. It involves a vision of society and of the social process. It involves notions of dialogue, political struggle and freedom. The social represents a flawed and problematic terrain, but also one of infinite potential, in which a series of very general hopes are variously hatched, maintained and dashed. The problem for me with the notion of socially engaged art is that it conflates these very different senses of social engagement – the literal and the political – without properly acknowledging their difference and tension. At one level socially engaged art is banally reduced to group participatory interaction, while at another level the politico-ethical implications of these various forms of interaction are stretched to breaking point. There is a need, at the very least, to recognise that participation is not a sufficient form of social engagement, nor even the only means by which dimensions of more broadly conceived engagement are possible.

Well, I hardly expected this to happen. All during the Christmas break I had been unable to climb a short roof problem on a small, steep boulder just beside the creek. Then there had been weeks of rain. I went up there on Thursday and surprised myself by reaching the crux move twice. Then yesterday I actually did the problem. I had expected the process to be much more protracted and to provide the overall subject for this diary, but now it seems I will need to find a harder problem and to think more carefully about the nature and scope of this project.

Now that I have climbed the boulder problem, the convention is to give it a name. I have called it “Huffman” after a radical anthropologist friend. Not quite sure what I’ll call the overall boulder yet.

The problem is very short. It involves climbing a metre or so through a small roof to a large horizontal break and then scampering up to the top. Here are two images, one of the overall boulder and the other indicating some of the relevant holds.

Distant view of Huffman problem

Sequence of hand holds

Here is a detailed account of the problem.

1. Start lying on the mossy rock terrace at the base of the boulder with hands matched on the starting holds, right foot placed on a small depression in the roof and left leg flagging underneath right leg. Pull up off the rock terrace, making sure no portion of body remains in contact with the ground, then swing up for the first left hand hold.
2. Reach up high for the first right hand hold – an awkward sloping hold with a small crimp at the back.
3. Pop left hand up to sloping eyebrow style hold.
4. Smear left foot quickly on pale wall underneath roof as a basis for stepping up high with the right foot to the far right edge of starting hand holds, then lunge in a controlled manner for the horizontal break. This is the crux move – easy to lose body tension and drop the right leg.
5. Match left hand in the horizontal break.
6. Lift left foot up to first left hand hold position and reach up with right hand to the sloping hold at the top of the boulder, place right foot in the horizontal break and step up to the top.

Lie down beneath the boulder

Grab start hold with both hands

Jam right toe into initial foot hold

Reach with left hand for first hold

Pop for crux right hand hold

Left up to eyebrow style hold

Smear left foot and jump right foot up on the start holds

Lunge to horizontal break with right hand

Match in the break with left hand

Lift left foot up on to initial left hand hold

Clamber up to the top

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Imagining an overall monograph length study reduced to a single wordy poster. This is very incomplete.

Initial Postulates

1. A ←→ B
   It would seem that we begin with two distinct entities, A and B, that somehow come into relation.
2. A ← C → B
   A and B enter into relation via a third term, C. C represents a dimension of mediation. It serves as an interface and prosthesis. It acts as an intermediary, suggesting a curious combination of solicitous passivity and unnerving agency. While it may dutifully link together A and B, it can also lead their relation astray and most certainly renders it in its own particular terms. The question then arises whether C itself constitutes an independent identity, as notionally solid as A or B, or whether it only emerges through the relationship between the latter? Linked to this, of course, is another question concerning whether A and B can be properly said to exist prior to this or any other specific relational context? According to Hegel, for instance, existence in itself can only ever be notional and abstract. Determinate identity emerges dialectically – through a relation to other things. Which leads to yet another question, very legible in terms of traditions of post-structural criticism, can existential precedence properly be ascribed to A and B, or is C not awkwardly positioned as the paradoxical origin of the two terms that it draws into relation?
3. (A ← C → B) = D
   The relation of A to B through C constitutes a fourth term, D. D represents the overall medial event in which A, B and C all gain their uncertain determinate identity. Very importantly, when we speak of D we are not referring to an object as such but to a complex context that involves not only entities but also processes and relations. D appears at one level as a field of manifestation, but also at the same time as one of veiling and withdrawal.

Theses Proper

1. The notion of media and mediation extends beyond its contemporary association with forms of technological communication to involve much broader frames of experience, manifestation and interaction.
2. Technological media is emblematic of vital features of mediation, but also runs the risk of projecting, in contrast, a pure terrain of intimate experience unaffected by mediation. Media appears, in this context, as a convenient bogey, an exterior force that constantly undermines our inner faculties and resources. And so, cast as neatly exterior, the intimate play of mediation that is characteristic of both human experience and material interaction generally is forgotten.
3. So often the insistence on social determination. The social, it is suggested, is the chicken that produces the media egg. It is the hidden dimension of agency that enables inanimate media to appear as an active agent of social change. In this manner, the media – and the field of mediation – is denied any genuine social agency. No greater criticism than “technological determinism”.
4. Better, perhaps, to think of the gauge boson – the fields of particles that carry forces between entities, in the process conveying and manifesting fundamental natural interactions. Or perhaps to think of the mechanisms that enable signaling between living cells. These modes of mediation owe nothing to the invention of writing or the printing press or mobile communication devices.
5. Doesn’t this risk, however, abandoning a precisely critical interrogation of media and mediation? Doesn’t it link the notion of media spuriously to natural processes that cannot possibly be subject to historical change, that offer absolutely no potential for enlightened social transformation? How to answer this? Yes, this is a thinking of mediation that reflects upon the limits of the human and acknowledges our emplacement in processes that shape and exceed us. But this acknowledgment is also profoundly social and political.

A set of eight posters:

1. 50 walks
2. sun in the forest
3. theses on media
4. bouldering diary
5. on the problem of positioning my home renovation project as an art project
6. global home hunt
7. a week of email
8. my cosmology

Small essays – with the odd sketch to appease viewer expectations – focusing on variety of things that may only go together here – everyday activities, elemental diagrams, dubious instructions, general theories and self-serving polemics. Each printed in a single colour and all neatly assembled in four columns and two rows.

Looking back, I am reminded that my first blog post discussed my conception of media in terms of my undergraduate training in the field of communication and media studies. An additional observation here.

Communication always seemed the more abstract and ineffable of the two terms. Communication was associated with lectures and essays, media with practical workshops and projects. Communication described a particular perspective on the social – one that was focused less on objects and things than upon relational processes. Media appeared more tangible. At the simplest it was just cameras, audio recorders, telephones, typewriters, etc. It was the strange singular-plural term that named the set of available communication mediums. However it quickly became evident – through the debates surrounding technological determinism and causal agency – that the media were much more than a specific order of technological thing. Media were social forms as much as specific configurations of matter. In this sense, they too obtained an ineffable dimension, as well as a more complex, less clearly determinable materiality. The media denoted less an order of object than an order of activity, involving aspects of representation, negotiation and communication. The shift then, even if it was never really very clearly articulated, was from a static conception of media to a dynamic realisation of mediation. And this had curious consequences, allowing the notion of mediation to emerge as more general than the concept that apparently preceded and enclosed it – communication.

The process of writing these blog entries is a bit like improvising at the piano. In the case of the latter, I very often play similar stuff – the same old chord progressions, melodic sequences and bass patterns. And here, rather than crafting a lengthy, linear argument, my focus is on the iterative exploration of particular themes, particular conceptual motifs – at present, the notion of media. I circle around the topic of media, I approach it from different angles. It gradually, if only through persistent attention, takes coherent shape, then may be summarily dropped, gradually fade away or make a series of unexpected returns.

What does the notion of media suggest once a specifically technological conception of media is abandoned? Media is so often conceived in terms of the notion of extension (McLuhan), prosthesis or exoskeleton (Stiegler) that it becomes difficult to recognise more intimate fields of mediation. Media are arguably not only devices – they also describe a milieu and a play of negotiation. They are not only things, not only material entities, or even space of material possibility, but also take more elusive shape as dimensions of process, of the interaction between things. Here a static and substantialist conception of media passes into a dynamic one. Media passes into mediation – and interfaces, encounters, patterns and exchanges occur everywhere. So walking through the local forest, just as much as photographing a horse or attending to the Internet, can be regarded as a form of mediation.

This reads strangely because The technological status of media seems so obvious. Within the tradition of critical media theory the notion of media has always been associated with technological forms of representation and transmission that obtain their identity precisely in contradistinction to the field of direct communication and experience (as embodied in speech and literal social action). The technological represents a vital cultural gulf and point of transition – a shift beyond the intimacy of interpersonal and group communication towards the disjunctive and anonymous exchanges that are characteristic of industrial mass society.

Within this context, technological media can at times represent the logic of capitalism (Adorno and Horkheimer) or even a passage beyond human agency itelf (Kittler’s sense of the active machine). The role of critical theory is typically either to expose literal and metaphoric media machinery, and in making it evident to somehow lessen its oppressive power, or to confirm the passage beyond the human per se.

Yet both these perspectives tend to ultimately paint critique into a corner, describing such an airtight technological and cultural system that no possibility of resistance or of exteriority is tenable – most evident, for instance, in Baudriallard’s notion of the simulacrum.

A curious thing about these apocalyptic visions of media is that while they may unflinchingly describe the grim implications of technological modernity and postmodernity, they can often be softly nostalgic about earlier, more apparently direct forms of communication. This is evident not only in Baudriallard’s famous exchange with Enzensberger, in which he critiques the notion of radical media, arguing that the only radical move available is to abandon media altogether (preferring the model of street level political action employed during the May 68 Paris student revolts), but also in Bourriaud’s conception of relational aesthetics, in which the aesthetic reinvention of local level interaction is positioned as an alternative to the spectre of the global digital information system. In both cases, dropping technology is associated with recovering a human space of intimate engagement.

But what if, in contrast, we were to acknowledge that mediation extends beyond the technological – that it goes right down to the level of the human, and, more than this, that it also extends to the non-human, to the realm of matter itself? Social interaction and the interaction between material things (however conceived) is never a matter of pure, undifferentiated encounter. It is always constituted as mediation, as a complex play of interaction, in which precisely multiplicity is manifest.

This clearly needs a great deal more explanation, but here I can only point to the deeper relevance of this change of perspective. At one level it would seem that adopting a broader conception of mediation risks losing all sight of political critique – fading off, perhaps, into a space of metaphysical consolation – but in a time of global enironmental crisis and in a time in which the social so urgently requires critical reinvention, there is no scope for adhering scrupulously to the narrowly human apocalypse of simulation or to a limp and nostalgic dream of direct interaction. Acknowledging a much wider realm of mediation works to establish both a political relation to the broader material field and an acute awareness of the play of distance and displacement that is constitutive of any encounter, any experience, any interaction whatsoever. The space of immediate experience ceases to be a sadly superceded fiction or an utterly emphatic alternative, rather it takes shape as a vital contemporary field that is just as subject to mediation as any other. Rather than crudely opposing presence to mediation, mediation becomes the means that experience as multiplicity gains mobility and becomes manifest.

On the Problem of Positioning my Home Renovation Project as an Art Project

I have been preparing a house for sale for the past few months – putting in a new kitchen, sanding and polishing the floors, replacing guttering, painting the whole place inside and out, etc. All of this involves an endless series of tedious tasks, demanding endless visits to Bunnings, as well as endless close encounters with an endless series of vile substances – bleach, vinegar, paint, asbestos, epoxy fillers, metal shards, real estate agents, etc. None of this seems to bear any relation to any of the things I would ostensibly like to be doing, and yet, if I am honest, my current practice is indeed home renovation. So why not consider its problematic status as a form of practice – one that in this case miraculously produces a saleable work? Here then my aim is to pose a question about the relation between art and other spheres of activity; and in response to conceive something like a cosmology of the renovation of a 70s fibro home – specifying the primary elements, the fundamental devices and the procedural-narrative scenarios that are characteristic of this process.

two dumb boxes radiating towards one another

I was also thinking of:
a hand-written bouldering diary
one end of the gutter appearing neat and the other roughly torn
a black gutter with shiny scratches
it may also be twisted
video of the shop where I buy the guttering
video of Bunnings (upon which all renovations depend)
a little pile of the sharp gutter offcuts (perhaps placed in a small glass case)
video of a walk up Byarong creek
notes for this project
instructions for this project
images that an imaginary hermit drew (he was real enough but I never met him)
a background that deflates the pomposity of the work
a work that deflates any potential for authentic revelation

If I a produce an artwork from activities such as walking and bouldering, then it takes characteristic shape either as an event or as a piece of documentation. If I’m expected to show something in a gallery space, then actual walking around the escarpment or bouldering on nearby rocks can scarcely literally take place – so the obvious recourse is documentation. The artwork emerges neither as event or as documentation but in the structured relation between the two.

I’m considering avoiding documentation in a current project. Which also means that I must avoid any reference to a prior, unrecoverable event or activity, Rather than highlight the dimension of action, rather than fetishize it through documentation, I must allow it to slip away. Opting for a probably more traditional approach, I am thinking of producing an actual sculptural work – one that represents an indirect and abstracted relation to dimensions of experience.

Here is a sketch for the work:

And here is what I have written above, since my handwriting is fairly illegible:

Sun in the Forest
A piece of colourbond steel guttering suspended from the roof with an ornate sun pattern cut in its lower end. A spotlight above casts light down through the pattern on to a set of plastic buckets full of leaves.

An effort to draw together some things – forest, sun, a home renovation project. The work is legible in terms of contemporary environmental issues – in terms of the collapse, for instance, of notions of pristine, authentic nature and the emergence of new points of coincidence between human and cosmological time. Yet it is not really intended as a cryptic riddle that demands some neatly coherent reading. The various elements within it take shape, for me, more as idee fixees than as calmly legible semantic symbols. It is the poetic juxtaposition of materials and the formal architecture of their encounter that interests me.

This solution – the production of a sculptural installation work – is hardly novel, but let’s see what can be done with it. No doubt the awkward relation between event and documentation cannot be entirely repressed. It will find its way within the work.

As much as I admire her work, it occurs to me that there is a fundamental contradiction within Claire Bishop’s conception of participatory art (2012)¹. Bishop explicitly stresses that her focus is on forms of art that involve literal social participation, but at the same time ascribes the aesthetic quality of this work to its capacity to reach a non-directly participatory audience. Participatory art practice figures as a kind of medial theatre that gains aesthetic currency only inasmuch as it discovers effective means to be more broadly communicated. Participatory art, she argues, must obtain a formal coherence that reaches out beyond the immediate participatory context. In this manner the aesthetic contours of participatory art shift away from any dimension of participatory immediacy towards aspects of medial identity. We have then, in a sense, the conditions of any other piece of art – the inevitable plays of delay and distance that are constitutive of (modern) aesthetic experience. If aesthetics is fundamentally concerned with the problematic manifestation of community – of a community that never quite substantially exists, that can only take shape via veils, representations, metaphors, all kinds of displacement – then Bishop is still concerned with this very same medial pull. She works to describe the non-participatory potential of participatory art.

What is perhaps needed is a less clearly established boundary between the participatory and the non-participatory; one that recognises that aesthetic practice, whether participatory or not, is always at once intimately concerned with realising community while also endlessly deferring any possibility that it may simply appear. Rather than firmly distinguishing between work that literally involves participation and work that does not, it seems more pertinent to consider how art both summons and withdraws from community (social engagement). There is a need to acknowledge a more general context of complex and paradoxical orientation that involves not only efforts to realise community directly (the spectacle of participation) but also and equally deliberate efforts to turn away from all thought of its realisation (Bishop’s “via negativa“).

It is funny how so often I miss the shots that seem obvious later.

Lugging a camera up Mt Keira, with every intention of remaining open to whatever comes along, things happen and I fail to recognise them. For the second time in two days, I encounter two women in Islamic dress who have walked just at sunset through the road barriers up towards Byarong Park. They seem alarmed at my presence so I deliberately walk swiftly past them, doing everything to appear as non-threatening as possible. In the process, of course, I miss the shot of them holding up their mobile phones to record the sunset above Mt Kembla – a completely different vision of the Illawarra encounter; representing a complex, contemporary relation to the romantic wilderness scene.

Just prior to missing that image I had missed another. Walking along dark bush trails I was surprised to hear the sudden and very loud sound of a roaring engine and squealing rubber. The protracted burnout stopped just before I got back to the road. Instead of black circles, I discovered a furrowed set of a parallel black lines ruuning for several hundred metres down the road. The whole area stank of burning rubber and the white road markings were literally obliterated in places by the thick black tyre marks. Disturbed by this careless stupidity, I didn’t even consider photographing the scene. Once again I missed an opportunity, failing to see what was directly in front of me.

It would seem that I have trouble recognising an image unless it resonates with a space of reflection. Immediacy, all too often, escapes me.

To be honest, if I wander up there again tonight it will be with the faint hope of making amends, of gaining another opportunity to photograph the Islamic women and the messed up road. In the process, no doubt, I will risk being distracted from whatever it is that actually happens this evening.

Of course it is not possible to look at the Sun directly. The source of light itself – generally, specifically and in every sense – can not itself become an object of view.

It can only be regarded askance.

So I will approach the Sun through a selection of Sun writings – not heliographs or even photographs, but written meditations on the nature of the Sun.

Since these notes are in orbit, since they represent a circling around the topic, I can describe the initial set of writings here.

Thales, the first of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, predicts a solar eclipse in 585BC that halts the battle between the Medians and the Lydians. This story is almost certainly apocryphal, but it links the beginning of Western philosophy to reflection upon the intercession of cosmic events within the space of human affairs. The Sun appears for reflection precisely as it withdraws, as it engages with a theatre of light’s suspension – its obscuring and passage into darkness.

Heraclitus recognises fire and flux as the principle of all things and yet regards the Sun as no larger than a human foot. It is a small bowl passing above the Earth each day, which rises, burns and declines with the exhalations of the Earth. Heraclitus describes then the Sun’s intimate relation to the Earth, but has no means of comprehending the scale of the Sun – a burning that exceeds any variety of terrestial flame.

Anaximander, on the other hand, who actually precedes Heraclitus, is the first to theorise the vast size of the Sun, yet this somehow leads to a neglect of its immediate heat. Suddenly recognised as an immense thing that exists at an immense distance from the Earth, the Sun grows increasingly abstract. Prior to the Sun, prior to any specific thing, Anaximander describes the apeiron, the indefinite. I am drawn to this view – this sense of everything arising from the indefinite and ultimately returning to it – but what is the relation between the indefinite and the experience of the real – let us say, the light of the Sun? How can the indefinite and the notion of the Sun be thought together? As a play of light, as warmth on the skin, or the experience of cold? As all of this, but without anything so specific? There seems a need to imagine an inexpressible experience of the Sun, summoning neither subject nor object, distance or proximity. Beyond the interaction of Sun, natural world and senses, there is the need to conceive a zone of experience/existence that precedes (or possibly exceeds or proceeds from) all categories.

This next reference is less immediatedly sunny. I want to say something about Parmenides‘s threshold – the key mythopoetic conceit that provides the basis for his determination of the primary, singular, undifferentiated nature of being. In his prologue, Parmenides describes being transported across the firmament on a chariot to the gates that separate day from night. Here the godesses, daughters of the Sun, teach him that there is only being and not nothing and that everything is one. So once again we find something like the liminal zone of an eclipse, which obtains its force precisely in terms of playing upon and unsettling fields of difference (dark and light). That it should be this more complex, irreducible space that provides the basis for recognising and asserting a primordial unity seems interesting/paradoxical.

At the end of Plato‘s parable of the cave, the freed prisoner makes his way out of the cave (the space of illusion) to discover the blinding light of the Sun. Initially he longs to retreat to the cave. Only gradually does he develop the capacity to regard sunlight and the Sun itself directly, which appears as a metaphor for the realm of pure forms – of ideal truth. Here then, the heat of the Sun, the actual basis of its capacity to blind, the process of nuclear fusion, for example, that 20th century science will discover transforms hydrogen into helium, slips away to the side. The Sun is regarded as form of pure light, of pure intelligibility, that touches only at an ideal level (as an immaterial harbinger of truth).

In his three volume, Philosophy of Nature, Hegel argues that the light of the Sun bears no relation to the terrestrial flame. It is not an actual burning. It is a purely ideal light that pours forth with no need for fuel and that imparts no heat whatsoever. The proof, he argues, is that the air is cooler on high mountains than in valleys – altitudinal proximity to the Sun does nothing to increase temperature (ignoring, of course, how latitude affects climate). While this can only seem bizarre to us now, it is important to note that Hegel was not a scientific illiterate. On the contrary, he was very well acquainted with the science of his day. What it does demonstrate is a deep attachment to an idealist metaphysics and to the notion of the Sun’s ideal distance from nature proper and from the material human realm specifically. The Sun becomes indicative of the gap between ideality and materiality. Can we imagine anything like this now? Now that that cosmological events have become so immediate? Now that the time of the Sun plainly intersects with historical time?

It may also be worth revisiting Nietzsche‘s The Birth of Tragedy, with its distinction between Appolo and Dionysos, between the Apollonian light of representation, illusion and art and the Dionysian darkness of dance, music and intoxication. Appolo is closely associated with Helios, the Titan god of the Sun, and within this schema the Sun is positioned on the side of formal order, reflective visibility and rational consciousness. Even here then, even within the context of the work of a philosopher who is passionately opposed to the heritage of idealism (to Kant and Hegel specifically) there is conception of the Sun as lofty, austere and ultimately immaterial.

Dissident Surrealist, Georges Bataille, resists all this. In articles such as “Solar Anus” and “Rotten Sun” he insists that solar illumination represents not a calm, self-contained light, but rather a filthy, hot explosion of matter. In its heat, horror and blindness, it represents the summit of rational being in other terms, not as absolute knowledge but as a spewing forth – an “expenditure without reserve”. Yet this parodic inversion of the idealist metaphorics still cannot avoid casting the Sun in humanly, poetically sensible terms. To regard the Sun in terms of the logic of excess, abandon and horror is, at least to some extent, to humanise it. Perhaps?

Then there is Maurice Blanchot‘s short story, “The Madness of the Day”, in which trajectories of blindness and insight become indissoluably entwined. The work suggests a kind of Dionysian sunlight of the soul, in which every effort to see and to clarify is itself a motion of abandon and loss.

I should probably also discuss Jaques Derrida‘s “White Mythology”, which includes a detailed examination of the metaphor of the the Sun within western philosophy – particularly in terms of questioning the possibility of grounding this metaphor in any kind of notion of immediate experience, any kind of intimate experience of the Sun. Instead the metaphor appears as an instance of catachresis – of imposed relation, of criminal usury, of passage away from any hope of authentic, original meaning. So where, however, does this leave the Sun and the experience of the Sun? Where does this leave the Earth and its rising temperatures? To imagine the baseless autonomy of the human field of meaning – its endless deferral from consequence – is also to project a time in which the Sun – the spectre of the Sun – is placed yet again at an infinite distance.

And finally, perhaps, I would like to say something about the contemporary speculative realist position, which would no doubt describe the Sun as a kind of object, perhaps a metaobject. It would grant the Sun’s its presence and its impenetrable autonomy; it cannot be known exhaustively, it does not depend on our seeing it to exist. Yet cast as an object – as the integrity of an object – we risk losing the sense of our complex, indefinite, real and mediated relation to it. We risk nominalising the phenomenon – losing sense of the alterity, intimacy and elusiveness of the Sun. We risk imagining that we can stand back from the Sun and describe its contours. It is not as an object that we confront the Sun, but as a profound, inescapable, awkwardly and impossibly bounded conceptual and experiential space.

The Sun is the very problem of the present, of recognising the present and acknowledging its demands.

What is there to say about the Sun? To circle around the Sun. To imagine that the Sun is distant – to know the Sun’s distance and proximity at once.

What can I write about the Sun? What can I argue about the Sun that is not either deliberately perverse or entirely obvious. I can write of paradoxes, of the relation, for instance, between visibility and invisibility, between the bright and the obscure – and no doubt I will, but there must be other possibilities.

I can write of the Sun’s relation to the present, the elusiveness of the present, the Sun’s position both as sign of immediacy and sign of mediation (the play of light, the play of surfaces).

But it is perhaps best not to attempt to anticipate a response to the Sun, but simply, dubiously, to respond.