‘Art Happens - the creative imagination, the state of emergency, and moments of emergent formation

Art … does not produce concepts, though it does address problems and provocations. It produces sensations, affects, intensities as its mode of addressing problems, which sometimes align with … concepts …’ (Grosz, E. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 1)

Elizabeth Grosz, drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray, links art to intensity: a feeling of heightened (somatic) experience through sense impressions - in contrast to conventional histories of art in which art represents evolving structures of value and the concepts which inform and are re-informed by such structures.

The mutuality of this supposed relation of art to structures of value follows the model of dialectical materialism: the political-economic subject (a citizen in liberal histories) is shaped by, but also intervenes in, the conditions of existence. This echoes the two-way relation of the use of words (parole) and the rules of a verbal language (langue) in Saussure’s theory: using words in new ways re-inflects the common understanding of the rules of the language. The introduction of new words in new social formations changes the wider terrain of concepts and values, if in marginally. This was the insight of a modern history of art. For critic Clement Greenberg, for instance, art was required to keep art moving, in a succession of vanguardist movements each renouncing (but inevitably drawing on) the previous movement.

This model of art’s development is incompatible with the insight proposed by Grosz, where art is an eruption, an emerging rupture, an emergency. This has precedents in the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and in Dada, Surrealism and Situationism. Or, in Walter Benjamin’s idea (in his ‘Theses on History’) that the state of emergency has become the norm, and in his concept of now-time (Jteztzeit): ‘an intensive, qualitative time which becomes visible in “states of emergency“ …’ as a history of the nameless counters the rulers’ historicism. (Buci-Gluksman, C. Baroque Reason: the aesthetics of modernity, London, Sage, 1994, p. 44). The insight of a relation between emergent culture and a state of emergency links, also, to new work in human geography. Nigel Thrift, for example, in Non-Representational Theory: Space, politics, affect (London, Routledge, 2007) addresses a need for geographies of feeling, proposing a ‘micro-bio-politics’ of moments of incremental, rhizomic change.

Between, then, a modernist model of an avant-guard and an art of emergent moments, is a potentially informative axis of incompatible understandings of art’s production and reception - how art happens. Ephemeral art in the 1960s, such as happenings, or auto-destructive art, announces a refusal of a continuity based on departure from a mainstream. Now, relational and dialogic art since the 1990s offers a further refusal of both the modern and the mainstream. But is it more than another of art’s departures, a semblance of the new? Or a radical break?

Yet to try to answer such rhetorical questions is not the point. It is more interesting to interrogate the gap between the modern and the post-modern, the modern continuity of departure and the fracture, the chasm or glimpse of chaos. The polarities of this axis are constituted not only by incompatible art histories but also by discrete insights in philosophy. As Grosz writes, ‘Art, like nature itself, is always a strange coupling, the coming together of two orders, one chaotic, the other ordered, one folding and the other unfolding, one contraction and the other dilation …’ (Grosz, Chaos, territory, art, p. 9).

Prof. Malcolm Miles (University of Plymouth, UK)

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