MFA Dissertation | Part 1 |
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Becoming a Becoming-BodyAdrienne Ranson In partial fulfilment of a Masters in Fine Arts, Abstract The becoming-body, a term developed in this dissertation, is a response to my enquiries regarding the limits of the body and the possibility of transcending those limits within my studio practice. I currently consider the limits of the body to be the perception of duality. Traditionally duality has been maintained to be the dominant and guiding cipher for the experiences and communication of experience of the body, which in this discussion includes events of the mind. To transcend the limits of the body, hence the borders of dual thinking, requires thinking of the body, particularly within my experience as an artist, in a new and transformed manner. My enquiries draw upon my interest in and selected readings of the Buddhist dakini (her compassion and wisdom understanding dependent-arisings as empty of self-existence) presented by Anne C. Klein and Janice Willis. This is combined with the terms becoming, becoming-woman and becoming-imperceptible as developed and theorised specifically from Deleuze and Guattari’s work A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. The terms related to becoming are critiqued from a feminist perspective and include comments and criticisms by notable feminist thinkers and writers Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook, Nicole Shukin, Dorothea Olkowski and Rosi Braidotti. In response to my enquiries the becoming-body became a synthesis of the development of the activity of compassion (as mindfulness and concentration) with the expression of becoming according to a feminist reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman. Interlinked with theories are the contrapposto body of the baroque period and the work of artists, such as Sue Williams, Marianne Baillieu and Jenny Saville who have paralleled and influenced my art-making as I have sought to internalise the becoming-body as process and product. In conclusion the becoming-body manifests these multiple and changing interests in repeated performances in paint. Repetition folds in my history of influences, affects and relations, and results in a folding out of new experiences and potentials. In this manner the becoming-body does not achieve transcendence from the limits of the body, instead the becoming-body enables me to come closer to the apparent borders between inside and outside thereby contracting the difference between the two and expanding my awareness of both. Key Words Buddhism, Marianne Baillieu, baroque, contrapposto, drawing, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, feminism, painting, Jenny Saville, Sue Williams Acknowledgements Deep gratitude is extended to my Tibetan Buddhist and feminist teachers, present and past, without whom I would not have been able to think in the way I do in this dissertation, also my partner Maree (Mouse) White, my parents Lois and Tony Ranson, friends and colleagues Jo T. Smith, Anne Mein and Heather White, supervisors Diane Quin, Jacquie Phipps and Fran Marno, and the Whakatane Historical Society Scholarship Trust Fund for financial aid. List of Contents Part 1 Introduction: traversing the territories
Conclusion: the anomalous position of the becoming-body
Introduction: traversing the territories My journey through the concepts and terms presented in this dissertation is based on a continual search for a consistent and sustainable experience of happy satisfaction within my body and therefore life. As I lived with and through my body, my perceptions seemed governed by the divide between what I saw as happening inside my mind and body and that which was perceived as outside combined with the desires of attachment and aversion. This notion of an autonomous thinking subject results in a hardening of the difference between the self and the other. Because of this hardening of perception I experienced my perceived pleasures and, more distressingly, my pains, as either permanent, or, at the least temporary yet inevitably recurring. Each wanting was derived from an awareness of that which was not wanted and vice versa, reinforcing a cycle of excitement and agitation. Thoughts of ‘I like this’, ‘I don’t like that’, in conjunction with their object of apprehension continued an incessant labelling and prioritising of things. This thinking of life in dual constructions resulted in an organisation of my life into polar opposites such as pleasure/pain, reason/emotion, man/woman, self/other and so on, in which one unit of the dyad was often favoured by myself, or socially, as the preferred experience. They were all fraught, I believed, with a self-perpetuating cycle borne of ontological dualism resulting in alternating, multiple and continual experiences that pass through the affects of agitation, indifference and excitement. If I wanted to be freely, consistently and spontaneously happy it seemed I needed to transcend the limits of my dualistic perception. Thus I wondered; could I transcend the limits of this body that manifested as dual thinking, within the activity of my art-making? My answer to this question lies within a term I have developed called the becoming-body. The becoming-body is a concept borne of my understandings and experience of Buddhism, feminism and most recently from my research into the work of contemporary philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is not my intention to present an analysis of feminist or Buddhist thinking in this dissertation, for this is thoroughly and clearly covered in the work of Anne Klein; Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists and the Art of the Self. Instead I briefly describe the feminist and Buddhist contexts with which I am currently and firmly aligned. However I offer a feminist critique of my selected readings of Deleuze and Guattarian thinking as it feeds and sustains the term becoming-body. In my development of the term becoming-body I use the word body as synonymous with mind throughout my research and thinking. From a Buddhist perspective the human mind is explicitly located in a body and affected by it. At the same time I agree with Klein, a student of Buddhist philosophy and practice, that the mind is not limited to the flesh and blood of the body only (1995, p. 71). For example I am convinced of the logic that describes a ‘begininglessness’ of all phenomena based on causal relations. From this position I find it is easy to comprehend a Buddhist paradigm of life that acknowledges a subtle form of consciousness riding a very subtle physical form which departs the body at death (ibid.). I also use the term body as directly interactive with the mind for feminist reasons. If the mind and body are seen as “two avenues of access into a fully integrated complex in which they participate” (Klein, 1995, p. 72) then there is no basis for framing an opposition that allies men with reason and women with emotion and bodily experience. The feminist thinking of the mind and body as a mutual and coextending partnership was an essential launching pad enabling my release from a personal and political dualistic panorama. That I use the word body rather than mind in the term becoming-body serves to orientate my thinking and experience to the material world as a form of social awareness and activism supporting neatly my feminist loyalties. Combining these affects of the body with the word becoming refers to the activity of a flesh and blood body and an abstract or virtual body that also tidily accords with my Buddhist leanings, and subsequent selected readings of the term becoming posited by Deleuze and Guattari. To explain the term becoming-body in more depth my discussion is arranged in parts I call territories. These territories outline my influences beginning with feminism, to picturing the body in baroque art, followed by the Buddhist philosophy embodied in the dakini. In this dissertation I specifically focus on the compassion that energises the dakini, a Tibetan Buddhist female figure of spiritual enlightenment and succour. This is succeeded by selected readings of Deleuze and Guattarian thinking. I propose a fusion of selected aspects of each of these territories resulting in the term becoming-body. Thus the three main factors that activate the becoming-body are, in brief summary, an alignment with the awareness of the perception of duality as an activity of difference (especially in my art practice), an alignment with the becoming-woman of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking and similarly aligned with the compassion of Buddhist philosophy. I conclude my discussions with the proposal that the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari cannot be absorbed into conscious thinking without a theory of care such as that posited in Buddhist compassion. For these reasons I offer the principles of the dakini as a discourse that would enhance the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari while using Deleuze and Guattari’s language to provide pivotal insight and artistic growth as I attempt to break away from solidified perceptions of duality. However, as useful and beneficial Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking is, even when overlaid with a theory of care from a Buddhist perspective, the becoming-body did not definitively provide me with an experience that transcended the limits of the body. In conclusion the becoming-body is presented as a term that has dispersed the previous borders of my thinking as art practice. It has shown to provide a greater awareness of differences within my own activities as artist as well as within the image making of others. The becoming-body results in the positing of an experience that I can continually extend as it becomes yet another border to scale and surmount. From its vantage point I can create further multiple and infinitely transforming boundaries. As mentioned the growth of my thinking in the main body of this dissertation is divided into territories. Each territory, as an area or ‘body’ constitutes a selected avenue of thinking that has emerged within my art practice. Each territory is also aligned with specific artists work that captured my attention. The images of the baroque contrapposto body and work by Jenny Saville, Marianne Baillieu and Sue Williams have been of especial inspiration to my developing art practice as I seek to embody the becoming-body within process and image. I show how Saville utilises the photograph to image the female body in the conflict of dualism. Rather than blur the boundaries Saville enlarges and exaggerates her forms in paint producing a drama of duality similar to the performative distortions of baroque imaging. Hers is a becoming-body borne of serious materiality, in the flesh of the content and the muscle of the paint. Conversely, Baillieu’s body gestures flout conventional picturing by traversing the immediacy of an event in paint. As a spontaneous body she compellingly creates a becoming-body of her own that parallels the ecstasy of baroque portrayals of Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture of Saint Teresa. In comparison, I show how Sue Williams’ history of recent art-making traverses both Saville and Baillieu as she moves from the graphic depiction and violent mockery of and rage at sexual abuse to her more recent revisionist take on abstract expressionism (Schwabsky, 2002, p. 95). As a result I present the evolution of my art-making beginning with disruptions of a manner of drawing and painting from figurative and representational to a ‘conditional’ form of abstract expressionism (Linkers cited by Lynn, 1987, p. 74). It is conditional for it poses relations to body parts that are ambiguous, abstracted, dispersed and expressively conveyed. To illustrate the content of each territory in more depth I begin with feminist expressions of the body in art-making. I draw upon the history of the self-portrait as a device commonly used by women in western art history as a means of expression and/or social comment. I too use the self-portrait to consciously involve my artistic activities in a long tradition of women artists who have employed the same device to continue a discourse on the hegemony of duality from multiple viewpoints. The most obvious dyads are those of imaging of women in relation to gender politics. Next, I compound my interest in and dissemination of duality from feminist territories of thinking as I traverse my attraction to the baroque body. The baroque body in this text specifically relates to the borders of the body as depicted in the use of contrapposto common in baroque imaging of the figure, particularly in reference to Lorenzo Bernini’s 17 th century sculpture of The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1645-1652) (Fig. 6). The depiction of St.Teresa in the flows and folds of her gown as she is pierced by a transcendent grace is compared to the thanka, a holy image of Machig Lapdron (Fig. 4) used for meditational visualisations. Machig Lapdron is an example of an emanation and embodiment of a Buddha who appears as a dakini. The experiences as presented by St. Teresa and the dakini, I believe, are both immanent and transcendent. This discussion is brought into western contemporary art practice with reference to the images of Jenny Saville’s naked and gargantuan bodies twisted, splayed or bound by her imaging in paint. Saville positions the body much like those artists of the baroque period. In comparison with Bernini’s depiction of St. Teresa, Saville’s bodies combine the abject and the sensual rather than the religious and the erotic. By using my understanding of principles and techniques within the baroque and Buddhist imaging, as well as the language of Saville, my sense of multiple and shifting dualities grew. Thus my awareness of difference expanded and contracted my notions of the borders of the body. In this manner I am led to emphasise my mark-making in order to become aware of their differences so as to rupture my hold on the borders between dyads on these same differences. Building upon my introduction to the Buddhist dakini the dissertation continues with a brief elaboration of the essentials of Buddhist philosophy and practice. These are the twin wings of wisdom (knowing the nature of dependent-arisings) and compassion (the infinite extension of that wisdom to others). With reference to Anne Klein and Janice Willis I briefly present a history of the principles and imaging of the dakini as a feminine figure of spiritual leadership and succour as well as basic premises of Buddhism. Buddhism, feminism and Christian baroque symbolism provided much of the flesh and blood of my early studio practice. Despite the useful and enlightening understandings derived from the feminist portrait, the baroque body and the dakini within my mark-making, I found my ability to expand my borders, let alone dispel them, limited by my inability to think non-duality both verbally and visually. At this point I engage with the thinking proffered to me by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically from their eloquent and erudite epic A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. I found this treatise to be a remarkable combination of powers resulting in a use of words and development of ideas in new terminology that ushered me closer to a verbalised sense of non-duality. This was particularly evident in their term ‘becoming’. In relationship with art making I found ‘becoming’ paralleled the immediacy of the art event in paint as depicted by Marianne Baillieu. As a spontaneous body I discuss Baillieu as she compellingly creates a becoming of her own in the fusion of gesture and meaning in her art making. As well as exhibiting much in common with Buddhism, Deleuze and Guattari emphasise becoming as integrally related to women, or as they term it ‘becoming-woman’ (1987, p. 291). In my understanding of the becoming-woman a group that is made of multiple factors is dominated by the ‘man-standard’ (p. 291) such as the dominating forces of a phallocentric economy. It is transformed, or deterritorialised, by the influence of the ‘minor’ (p. 105). The minor is the opposite to anything that assumes a state of power and domination (ibid.). It was a manner of thinking duality familiar to feminists, yet their new style of language proved especially crucial in my enquiries about the limits of the body whether the human body or bodies of politics, bodies of art. The theory of becoming and becoming-woman applauded the efforts of feminists while advocating against the solidification of feminism into set, organised or ‘major’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.104) configurations that dictate what a feminist is or does. Thus the essence of continual transformation is posited as the formative ingredient in any event organised or otherwise. For these reasons I appropriate Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman (a theory of becoming that moves through the abstracted notion of woman) as formative in my term becoming-body. However, as interesting and useful as Deleuze and Guattari’s term becoming is, I agree with Nicole Shukin who suggests, “ that while Deleuze does manage to siphon enormous affective energy off intertexts that are evoked without being raised, an inexorable weight of allusions pressures his thinking into old molds- particularly when it comes to sexual difference” (2000, p.153). That is to say Deleuze and Guattari’s language and thinking rely on a history of semiotics that privileges male desire. Shukin describes a text in which female bodies and the drudgery of female lives has been sacrificed to a philosophy that favours the ‘raw’ or doing that is without will, rather than the ‘cooked’ or doing that is connected with voluntary effort (pp. 147 - 149). The powers of immanence sought by Deleuze and Guattari are associated with apparent ‘raw’ or involuntary activities, rather than those that are ‘cooked’ (ibid.). Their terms are described in words that favour trajectories, intensities, or bursts of movement and speeds that evoke either a gendered neutrality (Irigaray cited in Grosz, 1994, p.162) or a celebration of masculine virility without the inclusion of words that could celebrate feminine power, such as, fluidity (Irigaray cited in Olkowski, 2000, p. 94). For these reasons I refer to the influence of Sue Williams’ art work. Her images of graphic political satire from the 1980s and early 1990s with her current expressive wit, rearticulated the need for me to be explicitly political and imbued with a female voice articulating female desires and concerns. Following from my reservations with Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman i.e. that I believe a sense of the feminine is diminished in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, I refer back to the dakini. The compassion of the dakini is imaged in her fruitful and vacant womb emphasising the body and language of the body feminine. I continue to show how the compassion of the dakini also assuaged my difficulties with Deleuze and Guattari’s term becoming-imperceptible. In my reading of Deleuze and Guattari the creativity of desire as infinitely productive leads through all becomings and becoming-woman towards becoming-imperceptible. Becoming-imperceptible is a state in which the resonance of all kinds of connections results in an indiscernability and impersonality that is the endpoint of all becomings (Grosz, 1994, p. 179). In my understanding of their readings becoming-imperceptible is suspiciously subordinated to an apparent dissolute selfhood that could lead to eternalism or nihilism. Thus, I overlay my selected readings of Deleuze and Guattari with a theory of compassion such as that fundamental to the principles of the dakini. It is my belief that this overlay fortifies and extends the celebration of life inherent in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming. Throughout these singular and multiple deliberations, from portrait to the baroque body, to the feminist abstract expressive, from the Buddhist dakini to Deleuze and Guattarian becoming and back to the dakini, I have begun to understand the inherent nature of transformative and relational change within the activities of the body, whether it be living in a body, picturing the body, or theorising the body. In this manner I have begun to appreciate the possible experience in my studio practice that is non-dualistic, one that is contiguous and coextending with what is termed duality. My deliberations also emphasise the activation of a theory of care or compassion that intermingles with the visceral sense of understanding duality and non-duality as one experience. These two factors of care and duality/non duality are finally permeated with a form of social activism that recognises the importance of transformation in a material world while aspiring to be cognisant of its immaterial nature. These multiple, repeating and changing activities are the essential nature of the becoming-body. I approached my art-making with a feeling of compassion, not to picture compassion as such, but as a form of mind-training within the activity of painting, much like meditation. In this journey I embodied, as much as I was able, the compassionate response, a dynamic of mindfulness whose purpose is to develop an identity that is enlarged and energised (Klein, 1995, p.199) by its connection to other bodies (bodies of art history, bodies of philosophy, the flesh and body of the paint, my bodies of intent and so on). In order to continually imbue my art-making with the compassionate response I realised I needed to repeat the fluid relation between deliberate thought and spontaneous response. The compassionate approach created a sane base upon which to encourage a growing awareness of difference. My art-making transformed with an understanding of differences as affects and tools in art-making from the figurative to surface patterning and culminated in my revision of the abstract expressive gesture as a conditional form of abstract expressionism. Finally, at the end of two and a half years of study it became clear I needed to charge my image making with the obviousness of its repetitive nature. In this manner I deepened my awareness of my objectives while increasing my fluency in conveying these intentions to others. Like artists before me the act of repeating techniques in tools, media and concepts aids in consolidating the skills acquired in the studio process and results in a familiarisation that leads to further discoveries as adjustments and deviations. In order to absorb ever deeper my own developments I consciously enter into a deliberate and performative aspect of painting. I learnt the image as a script, not to mimic, but to re-enact a set of mind-moments embedded in the nature of the term becoming-body in order to familiarise myself with every nuance and flavour of my thinking in gesture, colour and concept. From a Buddhist point of view this became a sustained artistic meditation in mindfulness as compassionate response. The feminist counterpart to repetition emphasised the positive aspect of taking a history of image-making and language inculcated with male desires, such as Deleuze and Guattarian becomings, and by using it, deterritorialise it, into texts communicating other than male interests. From within my understanding of becoming, becoming-woman, becoming-imperceptible and the becoming-body repeating images served to reiterate the nature of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the essential transformative nature of all phenomena. Repetition became, for the becoming-body, both an immanent act that was also inherently transcendent, its nature being of the body yet not confined to the body alone.
Becoming a Becoming-Body- deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation My motivating query wished to transcend the limits of the body, limits that I recognise as the perception of duality. I wished to know if I could experience transcendence from the limits of duality in the act of art-making. This resulted in the acknowledgement of the combined forces of immanence and transcendence, both of which are loosely blended in the term becoming-body. This term is my current answer to my guiding queries regarding the possibility of transcending the body in the activity of art-making. The term becoming-body as developed in this text began in my studio practice with a photographic portrait of my self in flight or fall. The choice of the self as subject is common amongst many Western women artists, whether avowed feminist or not, from Artemesia Gentileschi (Fig. 1) in the 17 th century, to modern artists such as Frida Kahlo (Fig. 2) or contemporaries such as Jenny Saville (Fig 3). Indeed any image to a relative extent is in essence a portrait of the individual making it and at the time of making. The marks that are made and the motivations for mark-making are specific to the body of that person, much like a signature. The combinations of colour, tone, shape, form, line, combine into a singularity that, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, is a repetition of singular differences (cited in Colebrook, 2002, p. 93). This is not just in differences of pictorial imaging but also of affects such as love, fear, grief, horror or pleasure (ibid.). It is singular in that it has its own authority at the time of performance and is not merely a representation, a copy or imitation. In accordance with Deleuze (cited in Colebrook, 2002, p. 93), I believe that my image-making, including image as product, as portrait or signature, whether photographed, drawn, painted, or repeated in any manner of art-making material and method, is an act attesting to the transcendental condition of difference involved in becoming. Art-making and its product become an event in life that is both immanent and transcendent. To illustrate my thoughts on immanence and transcendence I comparatively explore my chosen and feminist approaches to Buddhist and Deleuze and Guattarian philosophy, summarily rethinking representation as a means for my image-making.
Figure 1. Artemisia Gentileschi Self Portrait as The Allegory of Painting 1630 oil on canvas 96.5 x 73.7 cm. Germaine Greer. (1979). The Obstacle Race. London: Fakenham Press. Frontispiece.
Figure 2. Frida Kahlo The Two Fridas 1939 oil on canvas 170.5 x 170.5 cm. Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. Leslie, Richard. (1997). Surrealism: The Dream of the Revolution. Twickenham: Tiger Books International PLC, p. 84.
Figure 3. Jenny Saville Closed Contact 1995-96 3 of 16 photos C-prints and plexiglas produced in collaboration with Glen Luchford #2 top and #4 bottom 71 ¾ x 71 ¾ x 6 ¾ inches, #12 centre 96 x 72 x 6 3/4inches. Nochlin, Linda. (2000, March). Floating in Gender Nirvana. Art in America, Vol. 88, p. 95. Rethinking representation results in my cursory attempt at digesting the erudite, and at times enigmatic thinking of Buddhism and Deleuze and Guattarian philosophy, in order to reach a thinking of transcendence that is adequate for the space allowed in this dissertation. I begin with the feminist territories of thinking that emphasise giving a voice to the experiences and thoughts of women in a world largely dominated by male privilege. This is followed with an outline of the contrapposto body in baroque art as it relates to the use of duality to depict a transcendence that is beyond duality. Accordingly I combine my interests in feminist and baroque territories and discuss the images of Jenny Saville. As I endeavour to understand further the exigencies of thinking duality and non-duality I follow with a focus on Buddhism and the principles of the dakini (in particular the compassion of the dakini) as freedom from the demands of the self, or selflessness. My basic premise accepts that the principles of the dakini emphasise the spiritual transformation of the individual. This results in a simultaneous experience of duality and non-duality specifically grounded in the feminine body. The compassion of the dakini is bound to an experience of selflessness, impermanence and the interdependence of all phenomena. This results in an activity whose driving force is to activate these same qualities in others. In this manner she offers a path to transcendence from the limits of the body. However, the activation of the compassion of the dakini (Fig. 4), while of manifest importance to the development of the becoming-body, did not adequately enable me to express verbally and visually a political viewpoint aligned with my Western feminist biases. Therefore the central section of this dissertation continues with the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking of duality and non-duality within their theory of becoming and becoming-woman as a form of social activism. The essence of becoming in any form or relation is one of continual transformation. In this manner Deleuze and Guattari base all events in a field of multiple, proliferative, engaging parts that are immanent in experience and expression of experience. At this point I select and discuss an image by Marianne Baillieu, Simian pilgrimage (1983), in relation to the immanent nature of becoming and her influence on my own art practice.
Figure 4. Thanka of Machig Lapdron 2001 reproduction on book cover. Edou, Jerome. (1996). Machig Lapdron and the Foundations of Chod. New York: Snow Lion Press. While I found the terms becoming and becoming-woman both engaging and illuminating, I still held reservations about Deleuze and Guattari’s use of language. This causes me to enter into a feminist and analytic discourse on selected readings of, in my opinion, fundamental problems with the terms becoming, becoming-woman and what is presented as their inevitable progeny; becoming-imperceptible. In this section I refer to the images of Sue Williams and the critiques of feminist thinkers and writers such as Elizabeth Grosz, Nicole Shukin, Rosi Braidotti and Dorothea Olkowski to illustrate my feminist approach to and reservations with the language of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman. In particular Shukin and Olkowski criticise Deleuze and Guattari for either neglecting or diminishing the feminine in their language. Because of my misgivings with the language of Deleuze and Guattari as well as the essential nature of the concomitant term becoming-imperceptible I return to the language and principles of the dakini (Fig. 4). I refer explicitly to the essential nature of the dakini as couched in language that categorically cites the womb and womb imagery as a means to realising the co-existence of duality with non-duality. My intention is to show how Buddhist thinking about duality, with a focus on the essence of the dakini and her womb imagery together with selected language of Deleuze and Guattari result in a synthesis that appropriates becoming-woman as a powerful form of social activism. It is powerful because it is grounded in and energised by the twin wings of compassion and wisdom understanding duality as essentially non-dual in nature. For my art practice its power is multiplied by the deliberate favouring of the female body. These factors of female imaging with experiences of duality as non-duality are combined into one voice that I term the becoming-body. A utopian alliance of the wisdom and compassion of the dakini within the becoming-body proposes an ethics of sexual difference that has, as its goal, a confounding of the opposition between immanence and transcendence. Feminist Territories: the hegemony of duality I began as many women artists before me have done with the self- portrait. To draw or paint the portrait of my body emphasised my enduring understanding of feminism wherein the personal is political, as much as the political is personal. By preferential and affirmative imaging of woman, as opposed to man, I engage with a feminist ‘herstory’ that emphasises the personal stories of women. Giving a voice to these stories addresses the possible distortion or silencing of those voices by the dominant and male forces in power, what Deleuze and Guattari call the “man-standard”(1987, p. 291). While I am not advocating a reverse phallo-centrism where women are privileged over and above men, I was, and still am, mindful of the need to continuously and clearly narrate women’s stories. I maintain this stance in order to avoid the silencing of women that has so often occurred in most cultures in the present and the past. Feminism had also taught me about the inherent inconsistencies in the labeling of dualities in oppositions and hence ascribing a hierarchy to them, valuing men rather than women, reason over emotion, mind over body and so on. Feminism described to me a world I felt only instinctively, one that seemed vastly unfair in many instances, especially where it came to the differences between what men as opposed to women did and were able to do. I cognitively learnt that, on psychological and political grounds, once subject and object are experienced as mutually defining, the relation between the two assumes most importance. I applied this thinking to the osmotic relation between inside the body and outside the body, especially in terms of maleness and femaleness. In doing this I discovered they became a relationship in which, as Klein writes; “ “you” and “I” may retain our different identities without becoming the dominated, subjected, or objectified other” (1995, p.154). Becoming aware of the relation between what goes on inside and what goes on outside the body meant I needed to familiarise myself with the dichotomies of process and product within my own studio practice. I chose the image of a woman in flight, posing in various uncomfortable positions on chairs, ladders and trestles, as a friend, directed by myself, took photographs. The choice of flying figure directly related to the imaging of a woman in the ambiguous position of falling or flying in the bottom right of Figure 5, repeated in two images from a previous body of work. In brief this image symbolized the nature of impermanence and was my interpretation of a similar Tibetan Buddhist teaching picture I once saw. Representations of female figure, the dark and light mice, foliage, fruit and the act of climbing, alluded to the nature of existence, the cycling of day and night, life spans of living things, perceptions of objects as desirable and the incessant craving for pleasure and avoidance of pain that propels human responses, respectively. This image voiced not only the feminist body by depicting a woman rather than a man climbing but also a Buddhist body of thought alluding to an impermanent nature of a life that can feel very solid and permanent. It served as an idiosyncratic teaching on the transformation of the mind from both a feminist and a Buddhist point of view. By contemplating impermanence the feminist student of Buddhism can orientate her/his thinking towards the insubstantial nature of living in order to be released from duality or the boundaries of the falsely perceived self. The photograph of me flying or falling was intended to be a continuation of these interests. Imaging myself as a woman in flight, unearthed from gravity, the weighty body weightless, the impossible flying body, was a neat and apt metaphor for considering duality and non-duality. By uprooting the body and offering myself, through this imaging; the possible attainment of the impossible, I managed to provide a launching pad for the development of a combined awareness of the body’s boundaries and beyond those apparent limits.
Figure 5. Adrienne Ranson Impermanence-6 2002 oil on canvas 195cm by 195cm. Baroque Territories- contrapposto as a dialectic on duality I acknowledge that searching for an experience beyond the body is neither a new nor novel approach. For example I chose to photograph my body, not only in flight, which has its own history of dualisms, but as one distorted by unusual or extreme twists of the posture and joints. This is referred to as contrapposto, a popular method of depicting the body in baroque imagery. Content such as the contrapposto body depicted the human condition in relation to contemporary and predominantly Christian understanding of life and living. In the dynamic compositions of moving intertwined forms the human condition was portrayed as a material world of flux, full of robust sensuality and often with a sense of expansion and ascension. For example, Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (Fig. 6) places St Teresa midway between heaven and earth, a place in which the material body could experience the rapture of a connection with God that is ostensibly based upon a beyond the body experience.
Figure 6. Lorenzo Bernini The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa 1645-52 marble sculpture gilded wood rays ca 1648-52. Santa Maria della Vittoria Cornaro Chapel, Rome. Hibbard, Howard. (1977). Masterpieces of Western Sculpture. New York: Helvitica Press, p.121. Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is twisted in both erotic pain and pleasure as Saint Teresa’s spirit is penetrated by divine grace. The Bernini sculpture in particular celebrates the soul as it is awakened to spiritual passion through the erotic wounding or death of the self. In my opinion this wounding correlates directly to an immanent experience that transcends the body.
Figure 7. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora 1734-35 oil on canvas 395 x 225 cm. Museo del Settecento Veneziano di Ca’Rezzonico, Venice. Eschenfelder, Chantal. (1998). Tiepolo. Köln: Könemann, p. 36. In general terms James Elkins (1990, p. 90) describes the picturing of the baroque body that circle/spiral/twist, evident in Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa or Tiepolo’s The Triumph of Zephyr and Flora (Fig.7), in a world fraught with dualisms housed in the body and mind. The coil of pain, the twist of pleasure combine dual conundrums within the movement of lush flesh and sumptuous fabric to invoke the freedom from the body whether in Christian promise or the narratives of Greek deities respectively. Combining Feminist and Baroque Territories: blurring the borders of duality in art practice, the images of Jenny Saville and my studio practice Both factors of embodying the limits of the body and twisting or distorting the limits in order to affirm and/or contest the boundaries of duality continue to be of particular relevance four hundred years later in the work of contemporary artists such as that of Jenny Saville. In my opinion Saville’s rendering of the body exudes a contemporary interpretation of baroque contrapposto. Her bodies are distorted in richly exaggerated foreshortening like those bodies in evidence on baroque ceiling frescoes. However, unlike the contrapposto body Saville’s portraits are twisted and bound signifying contemporary concerns with expressing her response to the Western imaging of women.
Figure 8. Jenny Saville Fulcrum 1999 oil on canvas 8 ½ x 16 ft. Nochlin, Linda. (2000, March). Floating in Gender Nirvana. Art in America, Vol.88, p.97. In her 1999 exhibition Territories, Linda Nochlin reports that Saville records her movements in the “ uncanny combination of delicate brushwork and brutal slathering of paint” (2000, p.95) surrendering the reader to a celebration of flesh that is abject, excessive and sensual. Saville’s images of bruised female flesh connect with the power and deep disturbance, confrontation and passivity, menace and pathos, significant of a phallocentric economy in which, I believe, we all partake. Her “gargantuan and naked bodies” (ibid.) painted from photographs of herself (Fig. 8),, become embodiments of the force and subjugation of the woman’s body situated in a culture that encourages the “waif-obsessed” (ibid.).
Figure 9. Jenny Saville Matrix 1999 oil on canvas. 10 x 7 ft. Nochlin, Linda. (2000, March).Floating in Gender Nirvana. Art in America.Vol. 88, p.96. Saville moves in a play of differences grounded in Western pictorial conventions, balancing the opposing forces of light, tone and movement in the technical activity of applying paint to a surface while presenting a visual discourse on the hegemony of duality in her own singular manner. Her bodies, grossly enlarged with exaggerated foreshortening, or intimately viewed as cut and splayed close-ups utilise the oppositions of the intellect and the visual. Saville’s “…relentless embodiment of our worst anxieties about our own corporeality and gender” (2000, p. 97) are specifically conceptual. She paints the spaces between dualities as illustrated in the highly ambiguous nude body of transsexual, Del la Grace Volcano in Matrix (1999) (Fig. 9). In this image Saville pictures flesh, rich in painterly swathes, and also not flesh, merely colour on a canvas resembling flesh. Saville uses the photograph as a drawing tool for her painting and like Saville I employ the photograph to picture my interests. The photograph is a launching pad for thinking on duality, putting into action my thoughts and feelings, in drawing and paint. The movement from photograph to drawing proceeding through the further distortion of painting blurs the borders of the dualities of self/other, subject/object, past/present. By photographing my self then drawing my self in postures of contrapposto I am repeatedly blurring the boundaries between subject and object. The twisted self/body as subject of the photograph becomes the object submerged into the photograph, which in turn becomes the subject for drawing, pulling the experience of the image ever closer to the immediacy of the art event whether it is in the studio or exhibition space. This apparent circularity of disturbance confuses the definitions of where the subject or object resides. The disturbance continues as the twisted body concurs with the baroque aspiration to transcendence from the material world. As the weighty and contrapposto body becomes impossibly weightless I comment on the boundaries to the material world. If I were to actually try to fly and leap from a precipice I am surely courting, if not my death, a debilitating injury. To picture a human body flying is to call upon the boundaries of existence and place the body-image in a zone sensitive to that which is beyond the body; death of the self. When drawing I demonstrate the movement of line in the business of responding to a photograph of my self, flying or falling, while holding close my aims to increase my awareness of differences and to possibly disrupt and confound my perception of dyads (Fig. 10). The marks consistent with the half-lazy swoop recall bodily sensations of gentleness and relaxed impressions. In contrast the scratch and splash of ink conjure activities within the body of agitation and anxiety as loci of discomfort and apprehension felt as a visceral force. While the images have recognisable bodies drawn upon the surface of the paper I attempt to retract my senses from coarse cognitive thinking, to be closer to the domain of embodied senses, focusing on the immanent becoming in the act of drawing. With a brush and ink I would launch into a curvilinear glide that followed the bend of the back, and then I would change tools to pick up a stick.
Figure 10. Adrienne Ranson Untitled 2002 drawing on paper 140 x 90 cm. With the stick, that scratched and jumped across the surface of the paper, I could indicate the flurry of excitement around the head, the speed and agitation involved in cognitive dualism. And, then with a pencil, I would blindly trace the contours of the hand. Even if the marks made and the methods and techniques used respond to affective states, my intent is be multiple and inclusive exhibiting my humanity in its varied guises celebrating its differences with care and attention. My mark-making, while utilizing differences in affect as application, attempts to disavow the materiality of the borders of the represented body by creating an ambiguous space in the placement of lines on paper. There are outlines that break and dissolve, and lines that indicate the direction of posture, rather than the literal representation of limbs arranged this way or that. Thus the intensities of lines that fly and intersect, bisect, or combine become the performance of the artist and the projection of an aspiration to immanent awareness and transcendence. Duality is depicted in the contrast of rhythms, directions, speeds and intensities, at the same time these same depictions blur the solidity of duality by offering the performance in gesture, the movement of artist as she thinks her art-making. The body as depicted by my lines became combinations of abstraction, gesture and realism in a schema of linked parts that both disrupted and combined with the space in which the marks were placed. Instead of distinct boundaries between the shapes of the body and the space it inhabited, the body became described in motion, as lines moving through time and place, with the outside taking particular presence inside the body. As a result I felt a renewed and deepened awareness of the interdependence of inner and outer phenomena and the osmotic and oscillating circularity between dyads within art-making. By drawing on and utilising this knowledge I developed a keener awareness of the dual merging of the personalised and depersonalised in my studio practice. Thus I blended issues important to the feminist on psychological and political grounds as evidenced in Saville’s portraits, the baroque body for Christian spiritual purposes and the Buddhist for philosophical and cognitive reasons. Buddhist Territories: duality and the dakini My preferred understanding of the world is feminist and Buddhist. I am, therefore, particularly interested in the parallels between the baroque imaging of duality and release from duality and the Buddhist understanding of how to be released from duality. The Christianity of gnostic mysticism emphasised the union of the self with that which is beyond the self, i.e. God, in order to be released from the boundaries of the body as exemplified in Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa (Moon, 1997, p. 219). In comparison, Buddhists emphasise the understanding of the nature of duality coupled with a compassion that results in the blissful release from those same limits. Images such as the thanka of Machig Lapdron, popularly considered to be a dakini and deity, an emanation and embodiment of the buddhas, are used as focuses in visualisation practices in meditation. These images of emanation and embodiment are employed as methods for calming the mind and body, increasing concentration and non-conceptuality which, according to Klein, “aid access to ontological non-dualism” (1995, pp. 167,168). Achieving these aims is associated with an experience of physical and mental bliss (ibid.). In effect it is a bliss resulting from the dissolution of the split between subject and object. I find it interesting to note the comparison between the joy or bliss that arises from time and practice spent meditating on this dakini or other images of the Buddhas and the spiritual and physical bliss of combined “intense pain” and “excessive sweetness” St. Teresa reports to have experienced in her vision of an encounter with an angel (cited in Honour & Fleming, 1984, p. 439). In order to understand the principles of the dakini as method and means to achieve the bliss associated with the dissolution between subject and object, a Buddhist practitioner must be thoroughly grounded in the philosophy of Buddhism. In my understanding of Buddhism duality is the conventional perception of phenomena as dependent on causes and conditions. The interdependence of phenomena that is experienced as duality is the action and experience of sense, feeling, discrimination and cognitive functioning (including fantasies and dreams) between and about events in life. Non-duality is the awareness that the ultimate nature of all phenomena is infinitely impermanent and changing, therefore, lacking inherent self-existence. To illustrate, Anne Klein writes: The mind that conceives of an inherently existent “person” itself depends on various moments of mind during which this perception takes place, and each moment depends on its sub-moments. Minds, persons, and all other phenomena exist in dependence on a series of moments and on their own parts. To understand this is to understand persons or things as “dependent-arisings”, and as existing conventionally, meaning dependently, instead of inherently, meaning utterly independent of causes, parts, or naming. Everything that exists, the entire world and the beings within it, is considered a dependent arising (Klein, 1995, p. 126). Thus the Buddhist reference to the ‘wisdom’ of the dakini is the understanding of the processes of interdependence between inside and outside the body and their fundamentally impermanent and infinite nature. To demonstrate; the identity of a self or an image has, as its bases, causes and conditions. Just as Deleuze and Guattari write; “There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made” (1987, p. 4), so the painter and the painting are reliant on the materials that come together to enable the event to occur. The mind, the body, the canvas, the paint, the brush and all those other minds and bodies, tangible, intangible and abstract, that formed these materials and so on, peeling back the layers of cause to their most imperceptible and infinite sources creates an understanding of interdependence. Each point on the continuum of painter and painting has, therefore, no independent and inherent self-existence on its own. An image, as is the self, is upon analysis ‘unfindable’ (Klein, 1995, p.134). Therefore the painting has no independent existence on its own side rather it is empty of inherent existence. This same reasoning can be applied to all phenomena. This does not mean that paintingness or thingness are disrespected, for their functioning is real and practical. Emptiness “… can be characterised as an ‘essence’” (ibid.). Although “…one fashions a table [painting] no-one fashions its emptiness” (ibid.). Even if the painting were to be altered or deteriorate, its emptiness would still exist. Emptiness, sometimes called selflessness, or thinglessness, is inviolable and always present. It is itself empty. It is unconditioned by causes and contexts, unlike people and things, yet is a feature of the conditioned people and things. This positions thinking of the world with a perception of borders that have no true solidity or permanence, a world of bodies as labelled by the mind that is ostensibly without limits; hence it is empty or exhibits emptiness. Thus phenomena have two aspects, its conventional nature (that it is dependent on causes and conditions) and its ultimate nature (that it ultimately lacks inherent self-existence). This is commonly called the Two Aspects of Truth (Dhargyey, 1974, p.13). For a serious practitioner of Buddhism training in realizing the Two Aspects of Truth in conjunction with activating a continuous, sustained and joyous compassion is crucial to release the self from the dogmas of duality. The dakini of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon acts as a guiding cipher to and embodiment of the realisation of the Two Aspects of Truth and compassion. In a discussion by Anne Klein on Yeshey Tsogyel, a female Buddha, a dakini is metaphorically represented as a figure who inhabits and moves in a space-like sky (1995, p.159). While my images of myself in flight were not a method of imaging the dakini, it was both fortuitous and useful that the dakini, the Sky-woman, and my flying woman had a parallel relation in their respective associations to release from duality. Klein defines the dakini in the following terms: They are known in Tibetan as “space-journeying ladies,” or “ females who travel through the sky” (mkha’ ‘gro ma). This term, here translated as “Sky Woman” to preserve the poetic brevity of the Tibetan, is also used in colloquial Tibetan (minus the feminine ma ending) to signify those other sky borne creatures, birds, whose two wings symbolize the method [compassion] and wisdom that form a complete path to Buddhahood. (ibid.). In this instance, it is my opinion, the wisdom of emptiness as embodied by the dakini refers to the coextending interaction of duality and non-duality as the Two Aspects of Truth. Janice Willis believes the most inclusive definitions within Buddhist tantric contexts view the dakini as the supreme embodiment of highest wisdom and as the “symbolic concretisation of the direct, unmediated and non-conceptual experience of voidness [wisdom]” (1987, p.58). In her essay Willis explains that the dakini is “fairly ubiquitous” (p. 57) to discuss for there is little scholastic consensus as to her meaning for the conventional and historical imaging of the dakini is varied and multiple. She incorporates a melange of potent and dynamic ideas and images ranging from mystic consorts to tricksters and witches, from prophets and protectoresses to flesh-eating demons (ibid.). In some accounts she has even appeared as a stone statue and a dog (p. 68). As Willis comments her nature is elusive and allusive (p. 72) and although she appears in female form (I assume the statue and the dog were female) she is not ‘female’. Like all Buddhas, or those who embody a complete awareness of non-duality, the dakini is ultimately ungendered. From a number of summary overviews Willis concludes that the dakini is definitely a feminie principle (ibid.) that is highest wisdom itself, “limitless, effusive and entirely blissful” (p. 74). In my experience as a feminist developing an understanding of Buddhism and the dakini has been of crucial importance. For the becoming-body in this dissertation the wisdom and method of the dakini is fundamental, especially the method or compassion of the dakini and the language with which she is presented. Compassion or the wish to free all beings from all difficulties and provide their happiness is, in Buddhist terminology, commonly called universal altruism or bodhicitta. Altruism in this sense is not the do-good variety of human experience (although it incorporates the compelling drive to relieve all phenomena from difficulties) but an altruism born of the absence of the self’s demands. In this dissertation I equate the demands of the self with the perception of duality. Becoming mindful of the activity of duality as thoughts, speech and acts based upon dependent-arisings is a foundation stone for developing compassion. The two aspects of wisdom and compassion constitute the mind that is in Buddhist terms called Enlightened. In this manner the dakini with her twin wings of method (another term for compassion) and wisdom manifests as a continual extension of her own capacity for enlightenment towards helping others discover theirs (Klein, 1995, p.160). Thus the altruism of the dakini naturally gives rise to joyous, effortless and judicious activity that is solely inspired by benefiting others. The principles of the dakini reiterate and develop my experience of the importance of “profound human connection”, or relationship with others, which has a very important place in Western spiritual development (p.196). Moreover this connection has supported my growing awarenesses of interdependence, openness and individuation, simultaneously offering release from their constraints. As Klein concludes in the final paragraphs on the ritual context of the female Buddha and dakini, the Great Bliss Queen: “Empowered compassion, which also incorporates the dynamic of mindfulness, describes an identity that is energised and enlarged by its connection with others, partly because compassion does not take one “out” of oneself, but expresses the fluid complementarity between deliberate thought and response” (p. 200). In my studio practice my art making embraced these thoughts with the attempts to practice mindfulness in my colour choices and brush stroke. My art making become slower, deliberate and impregnated with as much of a sense of care I could momentarily muster. Deleuze and Guattarian Territories: using duality to deterritorialise territories, the nature of becoming, the images of Marianne Baillieu and my studio practice Feminism and Buddhism taught me to be mindful of the dualisms of life, the ineluctable and infinite differences between things and to value those differences while dispersing their hierarchical boundaries. Buddhism, particularly in the feminine form of the female Buddha and the dakini promised a permanent release from those boundaries in the body of a woman. Through meditation practices the body could be transcended with the combined events of a sustained visceral experience of wisdom and method, or understanding the Two Aspects of Truth and compassion. But could I do that in my art-making practices? I began to answer this question through the analysis of the blurring and distorting of my representations of the figure. Yet I was not satisfied. To answer this question further I needed a way of thinking that would create a visual text eliciting my interests and evoking my utopian aspirations rather than representing them. My limited readings of Buddhism did not, to date, obviously offer this, and so I turned back to my own cultural history of Western philosophy and art practice in the form of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking on becoming. Theirs was a way of thinking in motion, with, through and between dualisms. And while it had much in common with Buddhism, theirs was a way of thinking that affirmed the activity of social activism more obviously in line with my feminist concerns. The Two Aspects of Truth of Buddhism are a critical analysis of duality that exhibit a ‘both-and’ relation rather than an ‘either-or’ relation, much like Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘logic of the AND’ (1987, p. 25). The conjunction ‘and’ has special significance for thinking as it is a word that proceeds from the middle “coming and going rather than starting and finishing” (ibid.). To be between things is not a localisable relation but a movement that is transversal and perpendicular “that sweeps one and [sic] the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle”(ibid.). Hence it is a philosophy of movement that is immanent and transcendent simultaneously and is an activity inherent in a thinking of ‘becoming’ ala Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze regarded himself as a transcendental philosopher (Colebrook, 2002, p. xxix). The transcendental approach is to question how a distinction between inside and outside occurs (ibid.). According to Buddhism’s theory of emptiness and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘logic of the AND’ (ibid.), both inside and outside are perceived as spatial qualifiers. Yet the boundary between the two is a result of solidifying an illusion when in true reality all phenomena are infinitely and coextensively mutable, impermanent and changing. Thus duality and non-duality are not the binary pair which the very form of duality and non-duality as separate entities imply. I found that through an understanding of the Two Aspects of Truth coupled with the “logic of the AND” (ibid.) I need not be trapped by the binary nature of language. Deleuze and Guattari enabled me, by using their language, to articulate an awareness of overt and subtle, misconceived dichotomous thought, while simultaneously identifying the value of a familiarity with dichotomy. I can have an identity yet not be restricted by its illusion of solidity. As Grosz writes: Deleuze and Guattari will readily acknowledge that one must pass by way of or through binaries, not in order to reproduce them but to find terms and modes that befuddle their operations, connections, that demonstrate the impossibility of their binarization, terms, relations, and practices that link the binarily opposed terms (Grosz, 1994, p. 181). Like Deleuze and Guattari my practice in developing a knowledge of dualisms in art-making required I acquaint myself, mindfully, with the dualisms available to me in experience, technique, and tools. These dualisms are a manner of the combined experience and description of differences between experiences which are then assembled into a singularity picturing my interests. Historically the perception of a difference between inside and outside, such as the interior subject that knows the exterior objects of this world, or thinking of a creator, such as the Christian God who creates the subjects and objects in this world, has, in classical Western philosophy, become the central organising perspective for thinking materiality and non-materialty (Deleuze cited in Colebrook, 2002, p. xxix). It has resulted in theories of representation in which the border between the object and the representation of the object, such as thinking/experience and speech/words/signs, have been accepted as a truly existent. My previous work privileged the represented body as distorted and exaggerated with feminist, Buddhist and baroque sensibilities. There was still in evidence the outline of the body regardless how ephemeral were the marks that indicated the shifting zones of inside and outside the body. In my search for transcendence from the limits of the body I recognised a need to think beyond picturing a representation of the mutability of life. Like Saville, my drawing of a woman flying employed the traditions and conventions of duality as representation. Whereas work by an artist such as Marianne Ballieu (Fig.11) intensifies the polarities of duality in such a way as to explode them apart, to reveal them for the social and self-created illusion they are. According to Ross Moore, dyadic pictorial constructions dominate Western art conventions. In an accompanying text to Baillieu’s images Moore makes the observation that: Western pictorial conventions are created in a bid to resolve a tense complex of interlocking dualisms. Image is juxtaposed to meaning, external shape to inner value, abstraction to illusory realism, signs of civilisation to signs of nature, classical structure to expressionist feeling, historical antecedents to passionate moment (1988, p. 82).
Figure 11. Marianne Baillieu Simian pilgrimage 1983 oil and acrylic on canvas 198.2 x 137.1 cm. Yuill/Crawley, Sydney. Grant, Phyllis (Ed.). (1988). Advance Australia Painting. Auckland: Academy Press, p. 83. Moore continues to write that: “ she [Baillieu] seeks to subvert polarities, force a fusion, a union of gesture and meaning so complete, so instantaneous, that the viewer is denied access to dialectical viewing” (ibid.). In this manner Ballieu creates as close to an immanent manner as she can. Thus the forms of Simian pilgrimage (1983), in their accented mysteriousness, are placed in the domains of non-representation and therefore in a condition of ‘pragmatics’ala Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.78). Pragmatics, in this case refers to the performative and illocutionary aspects of language; which, put very simply and generally refers to the internal acts immanent to speaking, and the non-discursive or implicit presuppositions involved in communication, respectively. Thus, language as a visual form of speech pertains to the body in ways contiguous with what a body does in this world rather than what one is. A body that does is in motion, transforming energies and, hence, potentially able to disturb the power of organisation and culturally inscribed hierarchies. By picturing the verb rather than the noun, Baillieu’s images, are the becoming nature, or a line of flight, from the pre-existing forms and norms of art-making. As a mutation, for a line of flight acts in such a way as to change the pre-existing activity of things, Baillieu embodies the anomalous voice on the fringes of central institutions. In the Deleuze and Guattarian sense the anomalous position is a style of social activism (1987, p. 245). The anomalous position transforms the multiplicity. By adding or subtracting one dimension in the multiplicity, the group changes (ibid.). Thus Baillieu’s work creates a new border, or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it, “the enveloping line or farthest dimension” (ibid.) within her own multiplicity, and that of the history of art-making. As a result Baillieu transcends the limits of the perceived body, and by virtue of working in mediums and expressions based on duality she creates a new limit to transcend. In Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions on becoming, life and thinking of life are not independent activities, rather they are events in life that have the ability to transform each other within their various and multiple connections. It is the lack of truly existent boundaries between inside and outside, or subject and object, or mind and body that allows for a ‘deterritorialisation’ of “the connection of forces that produce distinct wholes” (Colebrook, 2002, p. xxii). The deterritorialisation of territories allows transformations, as deviations or mutations, to occur. These transformations are what constitute and motivate “becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.10). Thinking or art-making, then, is not a representation of life but is a transformative act within life. To illustrate the connection between deterritorialisation and becoming, Deleuze and Guattari write: The orchid deterritorialises by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp: but the wasp reterritorialises on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialised, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorialises the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is only true on the level of strata… something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, a surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp (ibid.). The becoming nature between the wasp and the orchid is a relationship without the boundaries of perception. Their activities are seen as inclusive and multiple. Deleuze and Guattari write; “Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialisation of one term and the reterritorialisation of the other: the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialisation even further” (ibid.). In this manner ‘immanence’ presents life itself as a creative power with neither outside nor inside. There is an infinite and indefinite relationship between bodies and becomings in territories, deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations when, as described by Colebrook; “Life creates and furthers itself by forming connections or territories” (2002, p. xxii).
Figure 12. Claude Monet Water-lilies (detail-left) ca.1917-19 oil on canvas 100 x 300 cm. Musee Marmottan, Paris. Stuckey, Charles F.. (1988). Monet: A Retrospective. Leicester, England: Galley Press, pp. 298-299. The images of Baillieu express the profound connection with what is happening within the relationship of territories. The painter and the painted become an exuberant process that is reciprocal, simultaneously interlinked and affective. Baillieu deflects the perception of two apparently independent subjects with separate activities and goals into an infectious coextending movement combining painter and painting. This activity is not unique to Baillieu for it is decidedly apparent in the works of abstract expressionists such as Wassily Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock, even evident in the gestures of impressionist Claude Monet’s Water-lilies (Fig. 12). Indeed, I believe all art can be read according to Deleuze and Guattari’s manner of becoming. Art manifests not only as a phenomenon of bordering but also as the combined forces of multiple events in relationship. Art-making and its products become events in life that, while singularly aligned with the artists interests and desires, attest to experiences that are both immanent and transcendent, both of duality and non-duality. For example, once an image is completed and presented to the viewer, the spatio-temporal event of viewing an image coalesces with the interests and desires of both the artist at the time of making the image and the viewer apprehending the object. This can result in previously unimagined vistas of thinking and feeling. It is an experience readily evoked in both artist and viewer in images such as those of Simian pilgrimage. Combining the forces of multiple events is a manner of thinking Deleuze and Guattari apply to all levels of life from artists to humans in general to genetic activity and beyond. The connective forces that allow any phenomena to form what it is constitute its territory. This is a theorising of the space between in which thinking is placed in all directions, rather than from the subject who perceives the object. Thus I can conceive of drawing and painting as inherently and richly active with deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations as, for example one colour or brush stroke in relation to another changes the first. By utilising this thinking the limits of the body are melted, made porous with an immanent experience that could allow for a transcendent awareness to emerge. In my opinion Baillieu successfully conveys the collapse of the border between the immanent experience and transcendent aspiration when her images are read according to the becoming nature of territories in relationship. The title of Baillieu’s image, Simian pilgrimage (Fig. 11), further compounds and extends the reading of the deconstruction of the borders between dualisms within pictorial conventions and meaning. The title both opposes and conflates a full leap into the apparent unconscious effusion of her body painting. The two words, ‘simian’ and ‘pilgrimage’, when separated, seem juxtaposed, and when together, counterpoint a sacred journey with monkeyness or an ape-like influence. The animal and the divine are yoked, intimating the combined forces of the sacred and the profane, much like the erotic and the spiritual are combined in the image of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa or the abject and sensual in Saville’s painterly depiction of the flesh of the body. The consequence of fusing two apparently essential opposites refutes the boundaries of conceptual conventions. To confound the logic that maintains such terms base (monkey, sex) and sacred (pilgrim, nun) as polar opposites leads to the dissolution of their apparent boundaries. This resonates in Ballieu’s signature mark-making as it dismantles and lambastes pictorial conventions leaving in their wake the ambiguous and anomalous. The playful nature of Baillieu’s gestures in paint and the humour inherent in the title Simian pilgrimage emerge in my own picturing of the body and continue my search for the confounding of the difference between immanence and transcendence. My mark-making, while serious with intent, is also imbued with the humour derived from the absurdity inherent in a perception that misperceives duality as a solid and self-existent paradigm. Thus the involuntary laugh for example, combines temporary yet wonderful forces together into an experience that is akin to the loss of a sense of the self within a simultaneity of senses of self, similar to accounts given of making love (Stern, 1995, p. 30). Moreover, Michelson (cited in Elkins. 1999, p. 54) declares laughter is “a form of excretion” (ibid.), a symptom of the loss of a sense of self, just like excretions of faeces, urine, phlegm, bile, and so on, can be considered a loss of a sense of self. In this analogy laughter is combined with aspects of the abject and with joy, with the profane and the sacred, with sex, death and the celebration of life, similar to the combined forces of the two words ‘simian’ and ‘pilgrimage’. By utilising aspects of duality in image-making that accord with my personal interests I combine my multiple experiences of life, responses to those selfsame experiences and my utopian aspirations into a singular language, pertaining to the moments it was expressed. That language and acts are merged accords with Grosz’s account of social inscription that produces subjects of a particular kind (1995, p. 32). To place my thinking in the middle of the fused thought and act, as does Baillieu, is to contract the space between the moment of doing and the moment that is done. By thinking in this manner metaphor and representation become effects of language/art, rather than their essential nature. Thus the work of Baillieu, as well as Saville and Bernini, may also be discussed within the framework of the non-representational and within a theory of becoming as posited by Deleuze and Guattari. With their own brand of political awareness Deleuze and Guattari infuse language with indirect discourse that is found in the doing and saying (drawing, painting) of speech (image). Language, visual or otherwise, is irrevocably merged with the multiple and immanent interests of artist/speaker. It is summed up as a mechanical function of assemblages and movements of deterritorialisations; cutting away any “universal propositional logic” and “grammaticality” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 148) resulting in the consequence of language/image as essentially pragmatic in nature. In this manner the social inscription of the body becomes awash with its own possibilities to transform. Any and every image is then produced and continues to produce the essence of becoming considered in the example of the wasp and orchid. They reiterate the performative and illocutionary pragmatism of the human that does and makes anything. It was with little surprise I read of Colebrook’s assertion that Deleuze elevated and privileged certain modes of art-making such as abstract modernism (2002, p. 177). She cites his preference for the presentation of words “not as meanings but as sounds, rhythms or ‘surface effects’” such as those in the poetry of e.e.cummings (ibid.). Similarly my imaging, while reading and analysing the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, coincided with this aspect of surface patterning and evoked a synaesthetic response with music and dancing. My methods of art-making changed. Instead of depicting the body directly I began layering several recognisable bodies one on top of the other. I abandoned the photograph as a reference point and focused on the interaction of paint-brush, movement and colour as surface discussion between brush marks (Fig. 13). The term becoming assumed an exaggerated importance due to its inclusion of the actions and meanings of the words mutual, inclusive, reciprocal, immanent. The term becoming tied to my body as I painted combined multiple and changing functions both mentally and physically. At this point I perceived a space in which the combined activities of the body and becoming to merge. This offered me a possible path to a release from the constraints of the body as a combined immanent and transcendent experience.
Figure 13. Adrienne Ranson Untitled-Yellow 2003 oil on canvas 123 x 133 cm.
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