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THINKING IN PAINTING
Gilles Deleuze and the Revolution
from Representation to Abstraction
by
Judy Purdom
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Continental
Philosophy
University of Warwick, Department of Philosophy
September 2000
CONTENTS
Contents
i
Illustrations
iv
Acknowledgements
vi
Abstract
vii
Introduction
Philosophy and Painting
1
2
5
12
12
13
15
16
18
Deleuze and Painting
Philosophy and Art
Strange New Spaces in Painting
Piet Mondrian
Jackson Pollock
Paul Klee
Francis Bacon
Trajectories
Chapter One
Merleau-Ponty, Bergson & Deleuze:
Moving Beyond the Human
The Work of Art
Merleau-Ponty and the Virtually Visible
Merleau-Ponty and the Turn to Human Experience
Bergson: Beyond the Turn
Bergson: Space and Unorganized Bodies
Deleuze and the Virtual as Event
20
21
23
31
37
39
45
Chapter Two: The Task of Painting: Cezanne
52
A Science of the Sensible
Merleau-Ponty and Gasquet'e Cezanne
<Sensation colorante»
Deleuze and the Art of Sensation
Nonhuman Becomings
"Colouring sensation" and the Diagram
Staging the Event
53
57
60
66
70
75
78
i
CONTENTS
Chapter Three
Mondrian: The Destruction of Space
85
From Shape to Line
Punctual Systems
The Musical Line
From Form to Composition
Lines of Force
1921: Composition and the Destruction of Space
Composition and the Pure Landscape
1937: Composition and the Phantastic Space of the Event
1941: New York and the Rhythms of Jazz
86
94
98
103
110
114
118
122
128
Chapter Four
Pollock: Catastrophic Landscapes and Unframed Space
132
'Iridescent Chaos'
Action Painting
Landscapes and Haptic Spaces
The Manual and Matters of Expression
The Theatre of Metamorphosis
Catastrophic Landscapes
Solid, Liquid and Gas
The Free Movement of Gases
Labyrinths and Folds
Chapter Five
Klee: Drawing with the Fermata
134
142
149
153
160
163
168
174
179
181
Counterpoint and Fugue
"taking a walk with a line"
Gestaltung
Pleats and Folds
Procreation and Divination
Journeys
"all form begins with a point set in motion"
Chapter Six
Bacon: The Eloquence of Paint
182
189
193
201
204
208
215
225
The Portrait: Face and Head
C. S. Peirce and Matter in Movement
The Face and the Affection-Image
Bacon and the Shock of Colour
ii
226
231
237
241
CONTENTS
Bacon and the Emergent Contour
The Impulse-Image and the Violence of Reality
Violence, the Montage and the Material Sublime
'Making' the Difference
Analogue estbetique
The Eloquent Scream of Paint
246
252
258
263
271
273
Conclusion
276
Bibliography
287
111
ILLUSTRATIONS
Chapter Two
2.1
Cezanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire 1885-87
2.2
Cezanne, Portrait ofJoachim Gas quet 1896
2.3
Cezanne, Montagne S ainte-Victoire 1904-6
Chapter Three
3.1 Juan Gris, Violin and Checkerboard 1913
3.2 Mondrian, Chgsanthemum 1900
3.3 Mondrian, Composition No. 10 (Pier and Ocean) 1915
3.4 Mondrian, Flowering Apple The 1912
3.5 Mondrian, Composition in Lines (Black and White) 1916-17
3.6 Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow, Blue and Black 1921
3.7 Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow and Blue 1937-42
3.8 Mondrian, New York City 1941
3.9 Mondrian, Victog Boogie Woogie 1943-44
Chapter Four
4.1 Pollock, Summertime (Number 9) 1948
4.2 Pollock, Blue Poles (Number 1 1) 1950
4.3 Pollock, Number 7 1949
4.4 Turner, Snow Storm: Steam-boat off a Harbour's Mouth 1842
4.5 Pollock, Moon Woman Cuts the Circle 1942
4.6 Pollock, Eyes in the Heat 1946
Chapter Five
5.1 Klee, Ad Parnassum 1932
5.2 Klee, Angleus Novus 1920
5.3 Klee, Line: free, active, passive (1956: 105-13)
iv
ILLUSTRATIONS
5.4 Klee, Ardent Flown* ng 1927
5.5 Klee, Sailboats in gentle motion 1927
5.6 Klee, Essence and Appearance (1956: 35)
5.7 Klee, Pursed-lipped Lady 1930
5.8 Klee, Town Square under Construction 1923
5.9 Klee, Garden, Yard and Homestead 1934
5.10 Klee, Shattered Labyrinth 1939
5.11 Klee, Cosmos and Chaos (1956: 3, 480)
5.12 Klee, Drawing with the Fermata 1918
5.13 Klee, Twittering Machine 1922
5.14 Klee, Pictorial Dimensions (1956: 24)
5.15 Klee, The Cosmic Curve (1956: 415)
5.15 The Koch Snowflake (Gleick 1988: 99)
Chapter Six
6.1 Bacon, Painting 1946
6.2 Bacon, Studies of George Dyer and Isabel Raosthorne 1970
6.3 Bacon, Three Studies ofLucian Freud 1969
6.4 Bacon, Head VI 1949
6.5 Bacon, Study after Vasquez's Portrait of Pope X1953
6.6 Bacon, Jet of Water 1979
6.7 Bacon, TripDlch May—June 1973
6.8 Bacon, Study for a Self-Portrait 1973
6.9 Bacon, Three Studies of the Male Back 1970
6.10 Bacon, Three Stu&es for a Crucifixion 1962
6.11 Bacon, Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe 1963
6.12 Bacon, Study for a Se?/-Portrait 1982
V
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people have contributed to making the writing of this thesis not
only possible but enormously rewarding and great fun.
I am grateful to the AHRB for their financial support and the extra
motivation that the award has given me, and to Dr. Christine Battersby
for supervising the project with her characteristic scholarship,
enthusiasm and attention to detail. Thanks also to Professor Keith
Anse11 Pearson who generously read sections of the thesis, and whose
lecture courses inspired much of the theoretical background of my
work; to Eric Alliez, Nick Land, Rachel Jones, Janice Richardson,
Ewan Porter and Aislinn O'Donnell for their useful comments and
encouragement; to my fellow PhD students with whom I have shared
many lively work-in-progress meetings; and especially to my daughter
Amy whose love and support has kept me going, and to whom I
dedicate this thesis. Thank you.
vi
ABSTRACT
The theog of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took
an from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theog of
thought without image.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968a: 276)
Reading with Gilles Deleuze, this thesis explores art as a production
that abandons representation as a formation of identity in favour of an
ontology of becoming. I argue that the move to abstraction in painting
resonates with the aim of "thought without image" because it counters
representation with a radical materiality that returns painting to the
movement of matter.
In order to situate Deleuze's thinking on art within a trajectory of a
philosophy of becoming I open the thesis with a chapter on Bergson
and Merleau-Ponty. Here I introduce the notion of 'thinking in
painting' and argue that, while in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of
art painting is a pedagogical investigation of the pre-human, chaotic
and invisible 'depth' of a lived visible world, Deleuze takes Bergson's
commitment to the possibility of moving beyond the human seriously
and reverses the order of perception in order to seize the non-human
virtual that eludes actualization. For Deleuze, the task of painting is
therefore not to reveal the ontogenesis of the actual and the lived, but
to extract the virtual and to embody it as a monument to that event.
In abstraction the interest moves from the mechanism of
perception to the work of paint, and in the subsequent chapters on
Mondrian, Pollock, Klee and Bacon I explore specific practices and
their peculiar logic of sensation. In Mondrian we see the strange space
of virtuality unleashed when the line is not constrained by the closure
of the punctual system, and in Pollock's explosive "all-over" paintings
identify that space not as a chaos but as a chaosmosis or machinic
heterogeneity. I argue that by understanding these modulating and
rhythmic compositions as haptic spaces, we break through the
distancing of visibility and can begin to think at the level of expressive
matter. I then turn to Klee, and using the famous image of "taking a
walk with a line" explore the notion of the emergent figure in the
context of Klee's aim to "render visible". What we find is an art where
space and the form of expression works on the plane of composition
and refers only to the unfolding rhythms of the abstract line. In the
final chapter I discuss Bacon's portraits and look at how the
multiplicity of the event that is maintained in the diagrammatic
composition is drawn into the recognizable face. I conclude that the
embodiment of the non-human event forces thought to confront the
possibility of the emergent identity that is realized in the abstraction of
"thinking in painting".
vi i
INTRODUCTION
The theog of thought is like painting: it needs that volution which
took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of
thought without image.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968a: 276)
Deleuze and Painting
In his conclusion to Difference and Repetition (1968a) Gilles Deleuze
draws a parallel between the theory of thought and painting, and
boldly declares that, "The theory of thought is like painting it needs
that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This
is the aim of thought without image" (Deleuze 1968a: 276). That
revolution is the subject of this thesis. I consider why one might think
that abstraction in painting is "without image", and ask what that break
with representation entails. I return to the specific work of painting
and the spaces that it produces, and in taking up the challenge of
"thinking in painting"—the title of this thesis—point to an ontology
of painting that opens onto the question of a philosophy of
expression.
For Deleuze, the affinity between philosophy and painting is
precisely that possibility of thought that breaks through the constraints
and conventions of representation, conventions which are dominated
by a logic of identity that frames and subordinates thinking within a
peculiarly human image or point of view; the perspective of the
subject, the structure of given concepts, and the hierarchical and
oppositional patterns of resemblance. In his attempt to extricate
thinking from that model of thought, and "to 'do philosophy" rather
than to write history of philosophy, Deleuze aims to make philosophy
a truly creative practice that takes thought beyond the narrow strictures
2
INTRODUCTION
of human representation to "thought without image" (1968a, preface
to the English edition pub. 1994: xv). He already sees that break with
representation and image in painting. Painting is therefore an
important reference with which to begin to understand Deleuze's
quest "to 'do philosophy", a point that is reflected in the many
discussions on painting that occur in his own work, and in his writing
with Felix Guattari (xv).
What is striking about Deleuze's work, and in particular that coauthored with Guattari, is its richness. A Thousand Plateaus (1980) is a
cornucopia of the arts and of sciences as Deleuze and Guattari weave
their way across music, literature, geology, physics, cinema, drama—
and painting. As Brian Massumi eloquently puts it his translator's
foreword to the 1998 edition, "This is a book that speaks of many
things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy substances and noology and
political economy" (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: ix).
What is Philosop? (1991) is equally eclectic because though the
answer to the interrogative title is enigmatically simple—that
"philosophy is the discipline that involves orating concepts"—
philosophy as a creative discipline must not merely rethink or
reformulate the old problems of philosophy and its concepts but make
new concepts and open onto a new reality (1991: 5). It is then with
invention in mind that Deleuze and Guattari examine the differences
and affinities between philosophy and science, and philosophy and the
arts, and their different forms of thought. They ask how these
disciplines work creatively to form, invent and fabricate, and what
philosophy might learn from other disciplines.1
1 In a note to his translator's foreword of A Thousand Plateaus (1980) (English
edition 1987) Brian Massumi writes, "Deleuze's books on the cinema (Cinema
1: The Movement-Image [1983], and Cinema 2: The Time-Image [1985B and on
3
INTRODUCTION
The particular importance of painting for Deleuze is reflected in his
many references to painters: sometimes they are comments in passing,
sometimes sustained discussion. His key work on painting is the
volume devoted to Bacon Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981a),
and there are important references to Pollock and Rauschenburg in
The Fold: Leibnk and the Baroque (1993a). 2 A concern with painting is
also evident in the work co-authored with Guattari; a discussion on
Turner in Anti-Oedipus (1972), references to Monet, Mondrian,
Kandinsky and Pollock in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and to Cezanne,
Van Gogh and Klee in What is Philosopbi? (1991) where a chapter
entitled Percept, Affect and Concept' is specifically concerned with
the intersection of art and philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1991:
163-199). These volumes, along with Difference and Repetition (1968a),
are central to my own study; and in unravelling some of the
complexities of Deleuze's philosophy, I take up his interest in painting
and devote chapters to Mondrian, Pollock, Klee and to Bacon.
This is not to imply that the techniques of one discipline can or
should be applied to another; indeed Deleuze and Guattari are
adamant that each discipline has its own specificity. Rather, it means
that by looking at one discipline—painting being my specific interest
here—we can open up another, examine its habits and restrictions,
steal its innovations and inventions, and take up the challenge to move
beyond the determined structures of representation to the new and as
painting (Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation [1981aD are not meant to be
exercises in philosophical expansionism. Their project is not to bring these
arts to philosophy, but to bring out the philosophy already in them" (Deleuze
and Guattari 1980: 518 note 21).
2 There is, as yet, no published English translation of Francis Bacon: Logique de
la sensation (1981a).
4
INTRODUCTION
yet unthought. By finding resonances between disciplines—abstract
painting and philosophy for instance—we might provoke new patterns
of thought and so move beyond the image of thought embedded in
the history of philosophy in order "to 'do philosophy", move to
abstraction and to think the new.
My principal aim is therefore not to use painting to illuminate
Deleuze's project, useful though that might be. Nor is it to provide an
uncritical Deleuzian commentary on painting. My project is more
ambitious: firstly, to use Deleuze's radical philosophy as a tool with
which to look at the different ways in which painting problematizes
the standard representational model of space and identity; and
secondly, to explore the production of novel compositions and to
suggest how they provoke the restaging of key philosophical problems
of modernity by pushing thought beyond the human condition.
Philosophy and Art
There is nothing new about philosophers studying art, and a long
tradition of philosophy as a discipline that approaches that 'beyond'
representational thought—the sublime in Kant or the unpresentable in
Lyotard, for instance. Deleuze's own thinking on art comes out the
Spinozist tradition, and in particular his reading of Bergson and of
Merleau-Ponty.3 It is thus situated within an alternative but major
trajectory of twentieth century philosophy, and embraces that quest to
think beyond the binaries of the Cartesian model of identity—which
3 See: Deleuze's two books on Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
(1968b) and Spinoza: Practical Philosop (1981b), his work on Nietzsche
Nietzsche and Philosop (1962), and the two studies of Bergson, Bergson's
Conception of difference' (1956) and Bergsonism (1966).
5
INTRODUCTION
polarizes matter and mind—and the humanism of the Descartes–Kant
tradition that has dominated western metaphysics. The question is:
what do Bergson and Merleau-Ponty enable us to think and to do that
the Descartes–Kant model does not?
In my first chapter 'Moving Beyond the Human', I put the
Deleuzian project in context and turn to Bergson and to MerleauPonty. I examine the privilege that, in their different ways, they give to
the artist's vision and working practices and why they think that art
challenges the theory of thought, in order to understand Deleuze's
project as a further development of the non-hylomorphic
understanding of the image that emerges within the Spinozist tradition.
Deleuze works with a Spinozist concept of the body—here the
painting—as a composition of relations. Remembering that Spinoza
acknowledges the mind only as the idea of the body, "an idea which
indicates the present constitution of the human body" (Ethics, Part IV,
Prop.1, Scholium), he rejects a Cartesian duality of matter–mind in
favour of a horizontal, relational model where the difference between
one body and another is a function of its material and contextual
specificity and not its representational relation to an a priori norm of
standard.
Deleuze works with a similarly radical and materialist notion of the
body as a horizontal composition. He describes it as a molecular,
mobile and complex assemblage, and contrasts it to the molar body,
which is organized in accordance with the normative rules of
representational—social, political, artistic—discourses. This means that
there is no exterior image or determination of representation as being,
but that the body, or painting, works "without image" and is the
expression of its material connections and the relations immanent to
its genesis and composition—its becoming. This model makes it
6
INTRODUCTION
possible to think about the painting at the level of its composition, and
to say what it does and how it is affected by and affects other bodies in
its relational network. In other words, to think within the particular
ontology of painting—"thinking in painting".
As my analysis of the work of painting in Mondrian, Pollock, Klee
and Bacon will demonstrate, in the move from abstraction to
representation, painting already suggests the possibility of challenging
the vertical model of representation and of working "without image".
The problem that first needs addressing is how we might break
through the representational distancing of visibility and begin to think
at the level of composition and expressive matter in order to imagine
new constitutions of the body and new ways of being. It is therefore in
the context of an ontology of painting that I introduce the notion of
"thinking in painting" and counter representation with an
understanding of abstraction as a radical materiality that returns
painting to the force and movement of matter.
Both Bergson and Merleau-Ponty give the example of art as a
practice which, if it is an art of invention and therefore truly creative,
defies the reference to the "image", and consequent predetermination,
that representation requires, and turns to the problem of its material
constitution—its genesis and composition. I therefore read them as
philosophers who anticipate Deleuze because they understand that art,
and painting in particular, has a specific task in that it abandons
representation as a formation of identity, and as a peculiarly human
perception, in favour of abstraction and an ontology of becoming.
Thus I argue, painting goes beyond the constraints of opinion and
appraisal, and the limitations of a centred construct of space—time to
abstraction "without image" and a new order of painting. The special
role that Bergson and Merleau-Ponty give to the art therefore echoes
the Bergsonian "leap into ontology" which Deleuze then demands of
7
INTRODUCTION
philosophy (Deleuze 1966: 57).
Bergson makes an implicit parallel between the artist and
philosopher when he argues that the function of philosophy is to break
the habits of thought, to go counter to the work of the intellect and to
do violence to the mind (Bergson 1911: 30). He cites the artist as
someone who already works against the limitations of the intellect and
its representational systems and opens his important work of 1911,
Creative Evolution, by using the example of the portrait to explain his
theory of creative evolution as the production of the unexpected and
the new. The finished portrait is explained by the features of the
model, by the nature of the artist and by the colours spread out on the
palette, but even with this knowledge no one, not even the artist, could
have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be like, for to predict it
would have been to produce it before it was produced—an absurd
hypothesis which is its own refutation (1911: 6).
The production of the portrait exemplifies Bergson's theory of
creative evolution as the realization of "that unforeseeable nothing
[ivrevisible rien] which is everything in a work of art" (1911: 341 [340]).
It demonstrates the emergent process of the entirely novel and
previously unthought as the progress of an internal impulse that
creates itself as form (341).4
4 Bergson again uses the phrase "unforeseeable nothing" in his late essay
The Possible and the Real' (1930) (Bergson 1930: 91). He talks about the
"unforeseeable nothing which changes everything", and he parallels the
"continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty which seems to be going on in
the universe" with the work of art (91). He cites Rembrandt and Velasquez as
artists of the unexpected and the original. His choice is interesting because
they are artists much admired by Francis Bacon whose own originality I
discuss in Chapter Six.
8
INTRODUCTION
In the 'Eye and Mind' essay (1961) Merleau-Ponty already heralds
that task and, like Bergson, accords a certain privilege to the artist's
vision. With Cezanne in mind, he argues that "thinking in painting"
opens up a pre-human vision that reveals the chaotic, amorphous and
normally invisible world of light and colour that is the "virtually
visible" [un visible virtue] depth immanent to ordinary or profane vision,
and he demonstrates how the "virtually visible" comes to visibility as
an actual object (1961: 168 [32]). This insight prompts Merleau-Ponty
to make the bold statement that "any theory of painting is a
metaphysics" (1961: 177).
However, because the invisible is immanent to what is actual and
visible, and therefore a "virtually visible", the metaphysics that is
demanded is not one of transcendental ideas, but a "metaphysics of
depth" (177). It is therefore a philosophical question of ontology, and
not of identity and representation. Merleau-Ponty astutely notes that,
while the painter might have a privileged vision that opens onto an
ontology of painting—and that therefore he "thinks in painting"—the
parallel move in philosophy is yet to come:
Yet this philosophy still to be done is that which animates
the painter—not when he expresses his opinions about the
world but in that instant when his vision becomes gesture,
when, in Cezanne's words, he "thinks in painting".5
(1961: 178)
Given that Merleau-Ponty is an important influence on Deleuze, it
is then not surprising that Deleuze ends Difference and Repetition with his
own plea for philosophy to emulate painting, or that in his subsequent
5 Merleau-Ponty references B. Dorival, Paul Cizanne (1948) for the phrase
"thinks in painting" (1948: 101-3) (1961: 178 note 33)
9
INTRODUCTION
work painting is a key reference, the names Cezanne and Klee being
particularly prominent. As the title of this thesis Thinking in Painting
indicates, the impetus for my own project is Merleau-Ponty's pointer
to "this philosophy still to be done".
While, for Bergson, art demonstrates the activity of creation as a
continuous becoming, and the unfolding of an immanent and potential
manifold that he finds in biological and animate systems, for MerleauPonty painting has a privileged role in that it illuminates the processes
of natural perception. So, while Merleau-Ponty associates this insight
with a move to a pre-human vision, Bergson takes a more radical
stance and suggests that it might take thought beyond the limitations
of human intellectual and representational thinking. Deleuze rises to
this challenge.
The key work here is the chapter 'Percept, Affect and Concept' in
What is Philosophy? (1991) in which Deleuze and Guattari consider the
art work as a monument that is not a commemoration or celebration
of the actual and of lived experience—someone or something—but
that is a body or state of affairs that captures and embodies the
sensation that is expressed in the virtual chaos before or beyond
human determination.
This argument centres on Deleuze's reading of the virtual—actual
relation and on the possibility of the virtual becoming an entity that is
distinct from the actual. In What is Philosop? Deleuze and Guattari
identify this independent virtual as the Event [Evinement] (Deleuze and
Guattari's capitalization), an idea broached earlier in Deleuze's essay of
1956 on Bergson, in the two cinema books Cinema 1: The MovementImage (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), which also depend on
a reading of Bergson, and in the work on acentred space in '1440: The
Smooth and the Striated' in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari
10
INTRODUCTION
1980: 474-500).
Art is important for Deleuze because, as he argues with Guattari in
What is PhilosOhy?, the work of art seizes the virtual that eludes
actualization and goes beyond the human to exist in itself as percept
rather than perception, as affect instead of affection. It exists without
image. Thus, in contradiction to Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze maintains
that art moves in the opposite direction to perception and that the
artist's aim is, not to expose the "virtually visible" or to show how the
thing emerges in the transition from the virtual to the actual, but
rather, to grasp and to extract the virtual, and in realizing the depth of
visibility to "think[s] in painting":
The aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of
objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the
affect from affections as the transition from one state to
another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of
sensations. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 167)
This revolution in art from the actual to the virtual, and from
representation to abstraction, is the focus of Chapter Two 'The Task
of Painting'. Here I argue that Deleuze's move to an understanding of
the virtual as Event (and therefore as a virtual that has become an
entity), though nominally a reversal of Merleau-Ponty's position that
the artist reveals the process of actualization and the move from virtual
to actual, is in fact heralded by Merleau-Ponty's own observations
about Cezanne's late painting and the work of colour.
The notion that art exists as a distinct reality demands that the
concern of the theory of painting turn from the mechanistic and the
technical to the problem of painting's own specificity and the
reconfiguration of pictorial space that that entails. It is this concern
11
INTRODUCTION
with what painting can do, rather than with what it means of
represents, that then governs my reading of the work of Mondrian,
Pollock, Klee and Bacon.
Strange New Spaces in Painting
Piet Mondrian
It is in Mondrian's grids that we shall first encounter the abstract as
a virtual space that defies the determination of representation, and its
requirements of containment and completion. This is the subject of
Chapter Three where I explore the move to abstraction as a revolution
that upsets the habitual thought of the image as a fixed and measurable
shape in space.
Here I engage with Clement Greenberg's assessment of Mondrian
as the quintessential Modernist abstractionist, and dispute his view that
Mondrian's grids conform to the rigours of punctual space—that they
work on a two-dimensional flat plane where lines are straight and solid,
and where colour lies flush with the canvas. I find that despite—and as
I will argue, paradoxically, because of—the rigidity of the grids, the
composition sets up a movement that produces vibrating lines and
modulating spaces.
Despite the logic of the flat canvas, what we see are indeterminate
and hyper-dimensional spaces that forestall the closure of the image
that representation requires. Mondrian thus creates a hallucinatory
virtual world of infinite movement where the two-dimensional surface
is disrupted by lines that hover and weave, where colour is not
contained, and where a different space—of unlimited and uncertain
12
INTRODUCTION
depth—is played out.
Reading Mondrian after Deleuze leads me to conclude that this
virtual topology conforms to Deleuze's definition of the Event in What
is Philosophy? in which the Event [8venementj is defined as "real without
being actual" and "indifferent to actualization (Deleuze 1991: 156
[147]). However, identifying the virtual spaces that I see in Mondrian's
work as an Event prompts the question of how we are to think and, as
Klee advised, to "render visible" these invisible forces without
constricting that movement within the structure of representational
space? How can one capture those modulating spaces? How can one
actualize them as a state of affairs, in a body, on the canvas, while
keeping hold of their vibrancy and infinite movement?
Jackson Pollock
Whilst in Mondrian's grids we begin to discern the strange spaces of
the virtual, in Pollock, whose work is the focus of Chapter Four, we
can start to articulate the specific movement of that space. If one
thinks about the dancing spaces of Mondrian's late work—New York
COI or the Boogie Woogie works—as an explosive noise of colour we
might imagine one of Pollock's "all-over" canvases. However that
explosion does not mean a catastrophe in the nihilistic sense, as chaos.
Although it means disintegration, that destruction of space does not
imply breakdown or confusion but rather a breakthrough to an
alternative experience of space, a space that is not static or solid but
becoming.6 On these canvases, patterns emerge as lines dance across
6 See: James Williams, `Deleuze on J. M. W. Turner: Catastrophism in
Philosophy?' in Deleuze and Philosophy: the Difference Engineer (Ansell Pearson
13
INTRODUCTION
the canvas; colours accumulate and coagulate; and novel intersections
are made as lines travel, connect and part. Pollock's lines follow a crazy
dance. They weave and halt; they divide and join, grow into splodges,
and fall back into wisps. Colours spin across the canvas, form
calligraphic loops, and solid splats. There is an orgy of colour that, to
borrow Deleuze's description of the Leibnizian event, moves like
"luminous waves" (Deleuze 1993a: 77).
Clearly these busy, confusing "all-over" canvases defy the logic of
representation, but is there a distinct logic of abstraction, or are
Pollock's canvases chaotic? Do they perhaps carry the sensation that
their evocative titles suggest—Summertime (Number 9) 1948, Autumn
Rhythm 1950 or Shadows 1950? Using Guattari's analysis of "machinic
heterogenesis", in Chaosmosis: an ethico–aesthetic parackgm (1992), I read
the exuberant multiplicity of lines that explode over Pollock's canvases
as a radiant multiplicity, a composed chaos which must be understood,
after Bergson, as a ramified series that becomes more and more
complex as its lines make new and unpredictable intersections,
intersections that owe nothing to the formal and representational
norms of the punctual system, and which usurp any definition of the
line as having a beginning or end (Guattari 1992: 33-57).
These are compositions that are always already in the process of
becoming but which, like the radiating grain of the sunflower head or
nuclear decay, have a specific force, direction and arrangement, and a
line of emergence that is abstract because it refers only to the internal
pattern and rhythm of its vital and virtual topology. Like
Rauschenberg, whom in The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque (1993a)
1997: 233-46). I return to Williams' reading of catastrophe as breakthrough
rather than breakdown in my discussion of Pollock in Chapter Four.
14
INTRODUCTION
Deleuze aligns with Pollock as an example of a painter who refuses the
representational model of painting as a window on the world, Pollock
creates surfaces that are a diagram or "an opaque grid of information"
produced by its own inflective radiating action (1993a: 27). What
becomes important is not what these marks mean—they do not
represent 'summertime' or 'autumn rhythm'—but how they work, and
the interest turns to the modulation of the canvas and the force of the
composition. Like the parallel explosive dissolution of form in the
move from solid states to the liquid and the gaseous, that new reality
demands a different logic, and I turn to Klee in order to begin to
articulate this fugitive thought.
Paul Klee
In Chapter Five, I discuss Klee's famous "random walk" as a line of
emergence, and use the motif of the journey—taking a walk with a
line—to understand Klee's method of Gestaltung (an experimental,
creative figuration) as a morphological production where the space of
the image belongs only to the movement of its unfolding and
elaboration (Klee 1956: 105). I go on to explore this abstract line as an
extraordinary mobile line which works within its own smooth,
indefinite and (n-1) dimensional space, and as such demonstrates the
radical nature of Klee's exhortation to "render visible".
What we find in Klee are figures that are, in the terms of Bergson's
essay of 1930 'The Possible and the Real' a "creative evolution" and
"the continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty" because the form
of the image is not predetermined within representational norms, and
does not refer to a fixed point of origin or point of view, but belongs
only to the smooth movement of its continuous becoming (Bergson
15
INTRODUCTION
1930: 91).
Because there is no transcendent determination or apioi synthesis
of the form the line might take, the process of emergence is an
inflective movement or event. The line does not therefore reproduce
the already visualised or visible but "renders visible" non-visible or
invisible forces. The visual and material line therefore takes on a quite
different function, no longer delineating a representation, but
capturing the immaterial and energetic forces of the immanent
movement of its own inflection. It therefore carries weight, intensity,
and density and is identified by it direction, speed and the sensation—
percept or affect—it produces. It is smiling, weeping or screaming,
hurrying, meandering or convulsing. It is the weight of the peasant's
sack in Millet, the thermal force of Cezanne's landscapes, or the
drudgery of life captured by Van Gogh in his muddy shoes.
Like Pollock, Klee often gives his haunting images descriptive titles,
such as Sailboats in Gentle Motion 1927 or Cging Woman [Weinende Frau]
1939, but these names do not denote resemblance in any formal sense.
Any resemblance to things or figures works at the level of sensation, as
for instance in the rocking motion or in the mournful pathos of Klee's
walking line in Cging Woman 1939. As these examples indicate,
abstraction as "without image" clearly does not necessarily mean nonfigurative but instead demands that we think about the figure in new
ways. Bacon does just that and, in Chapter Six, I turn to the radical
revolution of the portrait as a figure of sensation.
Francis Bacon
Deleuze has a special interest in the face. There is a chapter devoted
16
INTRODUCTION
to faciality in A Thousand Plateaus called 'Year Zero: Faciality', and a
sustained discussion of the face in Cinema I (Deleuze and Guattari
1980: 167-91; Deleuze 1983: 87-95). In this work, Deleuze identifies
two poles of the face: the face as a conceptual and social organization
and the fleshy, non-signifying close-up. It is the tension between these
poles that I see in Bacon. What is intriguing is that, despite the gross
deformation of the face, Bacon's portraits capture an unmistakable but
disturbing likeness These portraits are after all portraits of Bacon's
friends and lovers—George Dyer, Henrietta Moreaes, David
Sylvester—and, when compared to photographs, instantly
recognizable. I examine Bacon's working practices, and conclude that
it is precisely through the deformation and dissolution of the face that
that resemblance is made.
Bacon's portraits do not evolve in the way that Klee's emergent
images do as an elaboration of the inflective point. Bacon draws the
contour of the face out of the suggestion of the chance intersections
made in the chaotic splashes of colour and the haphazard marks of his
preparatory work—when he literally throws paint onto the canvas.
Instead of the easy Bergsonian creative evolution that I see in Klee's
work, I suggest that Bacon's faces depend on a surging Deleuzian
creative involution. This is because the deformation of the identifiable
face dissolves that image into a modulating space where colours
collide, and where the contour of the face exists only in the novel and
violent intersections of planes of colour. This dissolution means that
we see that face only according to the deformation of the human form
and that Bacon therefore opens the face up to a curious acentred and
asignifying nonhuman reality where resemblance is a matter of
sensation.
Having discussed how Bacon's portraits work—their composition
and genesis, the conditions under which they are made, and the new
17
INTRODUCTION
sensations they produce—I then go on to suggest a -typology with
which to approach these strange new images and to develop a theory
of thought that is like painting. In his own pedagogy of the image in
Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Deleuze uses C. S. Peirce's classification of
images in order to identify signs that correspond to specific
cinematographic concepts. This is an analysis that is at least as useful
when applied to painting, especially as Deleuze transposes Peirce's
semiotics from a system of signification to a concern with
territorialization and way that the material becomes expressive. This
means that the sign—here the index, and in particular the affectionimage—refers to artistic techniques and describes the material force of
the painting, and therefore that it indicates the realization of the Figure
as a signaletic composition, and painting as an art of expression.
Peirce's philosophy is a version of pragmatism that he calls
"pragmaticism" because of his emphasis on experimental method, and
practical meaning rather than truth (1940: 271, 259-60). Deleuze and
Guattari also call their philosophy "pragmatics" (1980: 15). Like the
pragmatic approach to philosophy, the pragmatic approach to painting
is one of looking in fascination. It means to approach the image with
the same experimental, revolutionary spirit with which Deleuze and
Guattari come to philosophy in A Thousand Plateaus. It means asking
questions, not about identity, but about the work of the image. Does it
work? What affects and percepts does it produce? What new
sensations does it make possible to feel? Does it make a difference?
(Deleuze and Guattari 1980: xv).
Trajectories
In their exploration of the power of colour and line—of paint—and
what is proper to art the great painters of modern abstraction, like
18
INTRODUCTION
Mondrian, Pollock and Klee move away from the figurative to
abstraction in order to work with the pure elements of painting—
colour and line. They produce fantastic paintings; canvases which
vibrate and dance; catastrophes in colour; paintings which disturb the
order and form of representation and force us to see, if we are looking,
new hallucinatory spaces and new morphological images. This
commotion is the very ungrounding of phenomenological perception.
It is a revolution takes painting from a logic of representation to a
logic of sensation; to the line that takes a walk, and the Figure that
emerges from an abstract diagram of colour.
This move to abstraction demands an analysis of the very specific
work of paint and the spaces and images that it produces. I begin that
task with a chapter on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty in order to show
how Deleuze radicalizes Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological ontology
of perception—the production of visibility and the painterly task of
making visible the invisible, or "virtually visible". I argue that the
challenge of what Deleuze is doing accords with his commitment to
Bergson's notion of creative evolution and the recognition that there is
an indetermination in things which takes them beyond the human
condition, and that this changes the task of painting from one of
revelation to one of revolution.
The task of painting flips from a concern with the actual and the
human to the more radical project of art standing up on its own,
independent of the viewer or the artist, a project that takes painting
beyond the limiting image of the human condition. This, I suggest is
the great achievement of abstraction.
19
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
Whether through words, colors, sounds, or stone, art is the language
of sensations. Art does not have opinions.
Deleuze and Guattati, What is Philosophy? (1991: 176)
The Work of Art
For Deleuze art is one of the great forms of thinking—the other
two being philosophy and science—and as such it has a very specific
task. Deleuze does not look to art as an exemplar of the philosophical
project but as a discipline that runs parallel to philosophy. Art has its
own specificity; it is thinking through sensations—percepts and
affects—rather than concepts. Nevertheless, art has an affinity with
philosophy. Indeed, in his short introduction to the English edition of
Difference and Repetition (French edition 1968a; English edition 1994)
Deleuze goes so far as to claim that "Philosophy cannot be undertaken
independently of science or art", and that philosophy forms its own
concepts "only in relation to what it can grasp of scientific functions
and artistic constructions" (1968a: xvi). That introduction was written
in 1994, the same year as What is Philosophy?, co-authored with Guattari,
was published in English, and only three years after the French
publication of the latter, so drawing our attention to the common
project of Deleuze's first and last attempts "to 'do philosophy'.
It is in the spirit of the challenge to philosophy to form its own
concepts that I read Deleuze's critique of the image of thought in
Difrervnce and Repetition. In Chapter Three 'The Image of Thought',
considered by Deleuze himself to be the "most necessary and the most
concrete" chapter, Deleuze critiques "the classic image of thought"
and proposes, "A new image of thought—or rather a liberation of
thought from those images that imprison it" (1968a: xvi—xvii). Thus he
21
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 86 DELEUZE
already signals the important movement of thought from pedagogy to
ontology and the attempt "to 'do philosophy'. When Deleuze and
Guattari turns to art and the pedagogy of the image in What is
Philsophy?—its conditions, methods, principles and practices—the
trajectory of their thought follows a similar pattern.' They try to grasp
artistic constructions only to liberate them from the images that
imprison them. Thus they put forward the revolutionary idea that the
work of art must stand up alone independent of the viewer or creator,
and exist beyond the human condition of lived experience: "The work
of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself" (1991:
164).
That project is haunted by the work of Merleau-Ponty and his
theory of perception, an analysis which culminates in the posthumous
volume The Visible and the Invisible (1964), the first part of a new project
that Merleau-Ponty had started work on two years before his death in
1961, and which is supplemented by 'Working Notes' that include
many explanatory notes and ideas for the final structure of the
proposed book. The Visible and the Invisible is complemented by the last
piece that Merleau-Ponty saw published, the 'Eye and Mind' essay
(1961). Both are pieces that give some prominence to the work of
painting.
1 Thanks to Keith Ansell Pearson, who alerted me to What is Phi losop? as a
pedagogy of the concept, and to Deleuze's work on the cinema as a concern with
what he calls the pedagogy of the image (Ansell Pearson 2000).
See also the introduction to What is Philo.y*,? in which Deleuze and Guattari
contrast the post-Kantian engclopedia of the concept, where concept creation
is attributed to a pure subjectivity, with a pedagogy of the concept, "which
would have to analyze the conditions of creation as factors of always singular
moments" (1991: 12).
22
M ERLEAU- PO NTY , BERGSON 86 D ELEUZE
In order to put Deleuze and Guattari's radical definition of the
work of art as somehow beyond lived experience—independent of
viewer or artist—in context, I therefore turn first to Merleau-Ponty
and discuss the conditions of experience through his notion of the
visible as a "wild being" with an invisible virtual depth. I go on to
argue that Deleuze reworks Merleau-Ponty's idea of the virtual in the
light of his commitment to the suggestion that Bergson makes in
Matter and Memog (1896) that the last enterprise of philosophy might
be a "leap into ontology", to seek experience at its source beyond the
turn where it becomes properly human experience (Bergson 1896:
184). Bergson is thus my next concern. I look at his work on
perception, and at his concept of the virtual, before tackling Deleuze's
own "leap into ontology" and his innovative reworking of the virtual
as an "Event" Ove'nementj beyond the human condition, and the
consequent idea that the work of art exists "without image" as a being
of sensation (1991: 156 [147]).
Merleau-Ponty and the Virtually Visible
While Deleuze's theory of the concept is an inquiry into what it
means to think, Merleau-Ponty asks the parallel question of perception;
what does it mean to see? The Visible and the Invisible begins with the
2 I am indebted to Diana Coole for her useful summary of Merleau-Ponty's
work and the links that he makes between philosophy and painting, especially
'A Certain Red: Colour, Visibility and the Modulation of the World in
Merleau-Ponty' (unpublished), a paper presented at the Tainting and
Philosophy' conference at the University of Warwick, May 1999. Thanks also
to Eric Alliez. My reading of Merleau-Ponty, and of Deleuze, has been much
influenced by the lecture course on painting and philosophy that he gave at
the University of Warwick, Summer Tenn 1999.
23
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 86 DELEUZE
words, "We see things themselves, the world is what we see ..." (1964:
3). But, this bold statement is not an article of faith; we must learn to
see. Thus Merleau-Ponty continues the task of philosophy as set out in
his work of 1945 Phenomenology of Pereotion where he states that "True
philosophy is to learn again to see the world" (1945: xx).
For Merleau-Ponty perception is not a facility of reflective thought
but concerns the human body, a body that inhabits the world. Here
Merleau-Ponty is anxious to return to the birth of meaning and, as
Claude Lefont explains in his editor's foreword to The Visible and the
Invisible, he calls for an examination of the condition of experience, and
raises the question of a description of experience faithful to experience
(1964: xxiii). Merleau-Ponty's work can thus be described as a
phenomenological ontology.3
In his engagement with Kant, Husserl, Bergson and Satre, MerleauPonty challenges certain philosophical habits of thought—the subject—
object distinction, essence and fact, notions of consciousness, image
and thing, being and nothingness—as tools in philosophical reflection
and objectification, and as the flattening of experience. He dismisses
these approaches as translations of the human condition, and in The
Visible and the Invisible announces a new philosophical project, a
description and examination of experience that would not exteriorize
and tame experience but that would work on the same level as
experience. His phenomenology of perception is therefore a project
that attempts to approach the human condition before its translation
according to the concepts and language of science and philosophy, and
to describe experience without recourse to the habits of thought.
3 See: Claude Lefont's foreword to The Visible and the Invisible (Medeau-Ponty
1964: xi—xxxiii).
24
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
Merleau-Ponty thus hopes to reveal a pre-human, uncultivated, and
normally inaccessible and invisible domain, and "to see the world".
By returning to the embodied body Merleau-Ponty proposes
interrogation [interrogation] as the new method of philosophy, a method
which in the Eye and Mind' essay he already recognises in a peculiarly
painterly practice that reaches beyond the "visual givens" (1961: 166
[167]). In interrogation, the task of the philosopher is not the
appropriation characteristic of habits of thought but to approach the
object as a see-er with the open, even exclamatory, question, "What do
I know?" [Que saisje?] (1964: 128 and note 9). The philosopher thus
interrogates the topography and production of the visible as an open
system. The painter, similarly immersed in the visible, opens himself to
the world and lives in fascination [fascination] (1961: 163, 167 [31]). On
the canvas he recreates "a delirium which is vision itself" (166).
Working with the idea of the world as "the prolongation of my
body" Merleau-Ponty develops a morphology of the visible that breaks
with idealism and the idea of the sensible as distanced and opaque, and
which proposes the sensible as "what there is" [ce qu'il y a] (1964: 57
[84]). He here supports the equation of body and matter that Bergson
first makes in Matter and Memoy (Bergson 1896: 20). He references
Bergson's The Two Sources of Moral and Re§gion (a late work of 1932)
and, paraphrasing Bergson, makes a parallel between his own concept
of the body in the world and that of Bergson by declaring that "my
body extends unto the stars" (1964: 57).4
4 Bergson's own text reads: "For if our body is the matter upon which our
consciousness applies itself, it is coextensive with our consciousness. It
includes everything we perceive, it extends unto the stars" (Bergson 1932:
258).
25
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
Throughout The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty engages
extensively with Bergson, referencing, in particular, Matter and Memog
(1896) and The Creative Mind (1934). For instance, in Chapter Three of
The Visible and the Invisible, 'Interrogation and Intuition', Merleau-Ponty
raises the issue of proximity and refutes "two positivisms": he argues
that Sartre flattens philosophy to the plane of ideality, and that
Bergson flattens philosophy to the plane of existence with the idea of
absolute fusion with the thing. For Merleau-Ponty both Sartre's
negation and Bergson's proximity are positivisms because in their
common notion of self-positing, or being-posited, they exclude
horizontal thought and ignore the complexity of depth entailed in
being in the world (1964: 127).
What Merleau-Ponty is anxious to do here is to get away from the
positivist projection of the thing as a distanced and determined object
of thought.5 He absolutely rejects the idea of an irreconcilable distance
between the "there is" [il a] of the world in itself and the bodily
subject that he finds in Sartre but he is careful to avoid the danger of
an absolute proximity and fusion between body and being that he
senses in Bergson. Immersion in the world is a complex intertwining,
not coincidence but a coexistence in which the invisible depth of
visibility is maintained. Thus when he states that "I am in the world
and I am not it" Merleau-Ponty is proposing a subtle idea of proximity
5 Following Medeau-Ponty Deleuze tries to think against positivism by
proposing the concept that is auto-poetic and self-positing; that is the
concept that is created, in the Bergsonian sense, rather than given (Deleuze
and Guattari 1991: 11).
Claire Colebrook offers a perceptive discussion of positivism from an
analogue perspective in her recent article 'From Radical Representations to
Corporeal Becomings' (Colebrook 2000).
26
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
through distance, hence his notion of intuition as "auscultation or
palpation in depth" (1964: 127, 128). This position couldn't be put
more bluntly than in his note of 1959 where he declares that,
There is no intelligible world, there is [il y a] the sensible
world .... The sensible is precisely that medium in which
there can be being without it having to be posited; the silent
persuasion of the sensible is being's unique way of
manifesting itself without becoming positivity, without
ceasing to be ambiguous and transcendent" (1964: 214
[266]).
With this in mind I understand Merleau-Ponty's late work as antiphenomenological because he does not centre experience on the point
of view of consciousness but on the body in the world:
Idealism and the reflective camp disappear because the
relation of knowledge is based on a "relation of being"
[<<rapport d'être))], because for me to be is not to remain in
identity, it is to bear before myself the identifiable, what
there is [cv qu'il y a], to which I add nothing but the tiny
droplet "such as it is". (1964: 3oci, 57 [83-84])6
In The Visible and the Invisible, the question that Merleau-Ponty asks
6 In a similar critique of idealism, in Difference and Repetition (1968a) Deleuze
rejects the ontology that equates Being with Identity, where an essential, true
and invisible Being is pitted against a particular, opaque and sensuous visible.
In this model, the cognizing and imagining seer is active in producing a
sensible and perceptual synthesis, and the mind or the imagination is a
sensitive plate contracting 'natural perception' from an invisible, atemporal
and aspatial ideality (Deleuze 1968a: 70).
27
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
of the (anti-)phenemenology of perception is not what a thing is but
"What is it that makes the visible a thing?" (1964: xl). It is a question
of metaphysics, an ontological question about the structure and the
being of the visible and its coming to expression in perception. With
this approach, Merleau-Ponty aims not to translate what is seen into
the order of thought, but to interrogate, or to see, what there is: "It is
the things themselves, from the depths of their silence that it
[philosophy] wishes to bring to expression" (4).
Here, Merleau-Ponty introduces that silent depth as the invisible
but, reading The Visible and the Invisible alongside the Eye and Mind'
essay (acknowledged by Lefort as a statement of ideas that MerleauPonty planned to develop in the second part of The Visible and the
Invisible), I understand that invisible as a virtual that belongs to the
sensible world of a pre-human domain. This is the virtual that is
actualized as a thing within profane, human perception and the
intelligible world of the visible.
Merleau-Ponty uses various phrases with which to describe this
difficult concept it is the "invisible inner framework" [membrure]
operative within the visible; an "in-visible" that, in the working notes
that form an appendix to The Visible and the Invisible, is described. as
"the secret counterpart of the visible"; it is that not ordinarily
presentable [Nichtureisentierbarl; the virtual focus of the visible; and, as
described in the 'Eye and Mind' essay, the "virtually visible" [visible
virtue4 (1964: 215; 1961: 168 [32]).
Hence, for Merleau-Ponty, the task of philosophy is not reflection,
appropriation or translation—a relation of knowledge that requires the
distancing of the thinking subject—but rather the interrogation and
the expression of "what there is". In the light of his discussion in the
28
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 8s DELEUZE
Eye and Mind' essay of painting as a practice that unveils the
mechanism of visibility, I understand interrogation as a parallel method
to painting. By reversing the distancing that representation requires,
interrogation demonstrates "the passage from the brute being to the
acknowledged" (1964: 57). Painting opens onto a pictorial depth and
similarly shatters the shell of external form, and returns to the prehuman obscurity of "what there is". Interrogation, like painting thus
reveals the genesis of things in the move from the "virtually visible" to
the actual.
With his notion of proximity as depth and, as it is developed in the
Eye and Mind' essay, the "opened world such as it is in our life and
for our body", Merleau-Ponty avoids the transcendence of the positing
mind and ephemeral judgements (1961: 160). However, he still centres
vision on the human—albeit the body rather than the mind—because
he understands the return to, what he calls, "the soil of the sensible" as
a return to a pre-human sensibility (160). The precise status of this prehuman is curiously ambiguous.
In order to avoid a dualism of mind—body, Merleau-Ponty insists on
a durable yet invisible pre-human world that is always already there as
the necessary counterpart to the visible human world. It is therefore an
"ambiguous and transcendent" condition of the human, pre-human
and therefore 'before' the human and yet somehow more rather than
less than the human because it is an opened world "qua vision,
pregnant with many visions besides my own" (1964: 214, 162). In view
of the privilege that Merleau-Ponty gives to the painter and the
painterly vision or fascination, and thus to the possibility of making the
pre-human visible, it seems that his aim is to open up the human to
the pregnant flesh of the world, and therefore to somehow expand the
human in order to embrace what is normally invisible.
29
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 86 DELEUZE
Merleau-Ponty's notion of vision in The Visible and the Invisible is a
haptic one. I see thrvugh my immersion in the world, not by grasping or
by the appropriation of a mind looking on, nor indeed by being
coincidental with or merging with the world (my italics). This is an
important point. Lived experience is not flat; to be swallowed up is as
bad as grasping with forceps (1964: 124). As Merleau-Ponty puts it in
The Visible and the Invisible:
There is an experience of the visible thing as pre-existing
my vision, but this experience is not a fusion, a
coincidence: because my eyes which see, my hands which
touch, can also be seen and touched, because, therefore, in
this sense they see and touch the visible, the tangible, from
within [du dedans], because our flesh lines and even
envelops all the visible and tangible things with which
nevertheless it is surrounded [entoured, the world and I are
within one another, and there is no anteriority of the
percipere to the percipi, there is simultaneity or even
retardation. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 123 [164])
Merleau-Ponty's observation here that there is "no anteriority" is key
to understanding his notion of the virtual as the counterpart to the
actual and the human. The "virtually visible" is not a ghostly
prefiguration but persists in the divergent process of actualization.'
Thus for Merleau-Ponty, the "virtually visible" is a pre-critical, preobjective, and even primordial world that has no means of expression
of its own and must be brought into being and into the zone of human
7 This point is taken up in a critique of Deleuze's notion of the virtual by
Alain Badiou (1997: 48,9).
30
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 86 DELEUZE
action. For Merleau-Ponty the task of the philosopher is then to bring
what is unthinkable and invisible into expression; that is to bring the
pre-human into the human and to actualize that virtuality. His aim is
for philosophy to explore the ontogenesis of the inhabited human
world and to show what it is that makes the visible a thing. The
painter's privilege is a similar insight into a pre-human virtual that is
normally obscured and reduced in the process of actualization and the
creation of the thing.
Merleau-Ponty and the Turn to Human Experience
Merleau-Ponty's model of ontogenesis is horizontal in that it starts
from the premise of the human subject, not as a mind, but as a body in
the world. It is the body immersed [immerged in the world that opens
up the patterns, relations and equivalence through which the
amorphous world of the "virtually visible" is made actual and
meaningful, and therefore visible. But, meaning is only ever partial and
provisional. The body sees, we might even say feels, the world from
the perspective of its own location, interests and habits; creating
meaningful patterns, figures and backgrounds, norm and deviations, a
top and a bottom. As Merleau-Ponty recognises as early as
Phenomenology of Perception (1945), the body is postural. It creates, or
incites, a style and signification:
we shape in the manifold of things certain hollows, certain
fissures—and we do this the moment we are alive—to
bring into the world that which is strangest to it a
meaning, an incitement .... (1945: 61)
The body is the primary relation to the world, and thus assumes a
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MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 86 DELEUZE
key creative role. In the Eye and Mind' essay Merleau-Ponty explains
how the body is transcended by the "immanent visibility" or "virtually
visible" which is functionally immanent to it as a "diagram" [le
diagramme] of the actual (1961: 164 [24]). I see "according to it" (164).
The diagram is a concept that is important to Deleuze's analysis of
painting, particularly his reading of Bacon's work, and is something
that I return to in the next chapter and again in my own consideration
of Bacon in Chapter Six. In Merleau-Ponty the notion of the diagram
reinforces the horizontal relation of body–mind because it is set up as
an imaginary that is "in my body" and is opposed to the notion of the
"image" as an exterior design. Deleuze reworks the diagram through
Bacon, and equates it with the independent "graph" of colour and
marks that compromises Bacon's preparatory work, and which
suggests the contour of the face. In Deleuze therefore, as in MerleauPonty, the diagram is suggestive of a certain reality, but whereas in
Deleuze that reality is independent, in Merleau-Ponty it exists as an
invisible but immanent visibility and is "a diagram of the life of the
actual" (1961: 164).
The invisible is not a de facto invisible opacity nor an absolute visible
but "the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains
it, and renders it visible, its own interior possibility, the Being of this
being" (1964: 151). Like a phantom or ghost, it is the in-visible depth
of the visible.' That depth—amorphous, transcendent and uncultivated
"wild being", the being of the sensible—is the concern of the
philosophy that Merleau-Ponty hints is yet to come.
8 See: Medeau-Ponty's note 'Visible–Invisible', May 1960 (Medeau-Ponty
1964: 246).
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MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON & DELEUZE
In his translator's preface Alphonso Lingis summarizes the status of
the visible in Merleau-Ponty's text as:
Not an assemblage of particulars each univocally
occupying its hic et nunc, not a wandering troop of
sensations nor a system constituted by ephemeral
judgements, not a set of objects whose being is fixed in the
norms for objectivity, the visible is a landscape, a
topography yet to be explored, uncultivated being still, wild
being still. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: xlvi)
Understanding the visible as a topographical depth leads MerleauPonty to consider that space as a model of being, and he contrasts this
with the Euclidian model (1964: 210). Clearly where perception is an
act that opens onto an amorphous, non-formal and transcendent
world we cannot think of space independently of the indiscemibility of
the "virtually visible", or as separate from the ontogenetic movement
from that virtual to the actual.
Merleau-Ponty likens perception to the surgeon opening a body and
seeing things "in their activiy% perception is not a perception of things,
but a perception of elements or "rgs of the world' (1964: 218 [italics
follow the original text]). Space is thus a sustaining and nourishing
voluminosity where lines are vectors and points are centres of forces; it
is not a perspective, punctual positioning or a "network of straight
lines" (195, 210). Interestingly the aesthetic world is likewise contrasted
to Cartesian space, and seen as "a space of transcendence, a space of
incompossibilities, of explosion, of dihiscence, and not as objectiveimmanent space" (216). 9 Perception as an action of actualization is, like
9 This ties in with Deleuze's own work on smooth and the striated space, and
with his reworking of Bergson's notion of duration, and the "potentially
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MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 86 DELEUZE
painting, like every action, a cut across the amorphous and invisible
world and is described by Merleau-Ponty as "a crystallization of time, a
cipher of transcendence" and "a certain sampling of the Being of
in division" (208).
In the Eye and Mind' essay Merleau-Ponty talks about the painter
interrogating with his gaze in order "to unveil" the means by which
objects that have only visual existence—light, shadow, colour—enter
profane vision and become "this thing" [cette chose]—Montagne SainteVictoire for example (1961: 166 [29]). What the painter is unveiling is
the virtually visible, a virtual which he evokes as a phantom of the
visible that has only visual existence, and which exists "at the threshold
of profane vision" (1961: 166). Is perhaps the movement of
actualization an action of veiling? And, if perception is a process of
contraction that screens and isolates the rays of the world, how must
we think about the plenitude of the invisible, a multiplicity that
Merleau-Ponty recognizes as "qua visible, pregnant with many other
visions besides my own" (1964: 123)?
Reading Merleau-Ponty after Bergson's Matter and Memog points to
the daily experience of perception as the conversion of a "present
image" [image presente] into an isolated "represented image" [image
represented (1896: 36 [33]). Bergson boldly declares that "To perceive
means to immobilize" by which he means that perception, because it is
determined by the place of the body, is a measure of human action on
things (208). Perception is thus understood as the consolidation of a
movement from virtual to actual, and as the distinction of
discontinuous objects, and as such as a dawning of and turn to human
manifold" as a virtual multiplicity. I discuss the idea of the virtual as an
explosion in Chapter Four, a chapter on Pollock's painting, and I consider
the line as a vector in Chapter Five where I look at Klee's work.
34
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
experience (36).
This analysis fits with Bergson's considered understanding, in Matter
and Memog, of the actual as a diminishing of the virtual:
To obtain this conversion from the virtual to the actual, it
would be necessary, not to throw more light on the object,
but, on the contrary, to obscure some of its aspects, to
diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the
remainder, instead of being encased in its surroundings as
a thing [tine chose], should detach itself from them as a picture
run tableau]. (1896: 36 [33])10
In a move that brings something beyond the human within human
perception, we thus actualize the virtual and "taking a bias in the
direction of our utility" make it a properly human experience (1896:
208).
However, by recognizing perception as a focused contraction and
representation of the material universe, Bergson notes that "if you
abolish my consciousness, the material universe subsists exactly as it
was"; it resolves itself into the uninterrupted continuity of its own
duration—a continuity that he conceives as a multiplicity, as
"numberless vibrations ... all bound up with each other, and travelling
in every direction like shivers through an immense body. (1896: 208)
His conclusion is that in the act of perception we seize something that
outruns perception itself (208). Thus he opens the way for the
O
Here the French edition has a different sentence structure; the move from
virtual to actual is described as "die Va virtuelle] passenait a Pacte" (1896: 36
[33]). This vocabulary is echoed in Merleau-Ponty's notion of the emergence
of the thing as "vision in act" (Merleau-Ponty 176).
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MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON Et DELEUZE
distinction of a virtual that exists beyond the turn to human
experience.
I shall come back to this point in a further consideration of
Bergson's position below, but here note the suggestion of the virtual as
a double openness. On the one hand the virtual is a pre-individual
specific to a state of affairs or body and actualization as "this thing",
and at the threshold or turn of human experience and profane vision
(1961: 166; 1964: 132). On the other hand the virtual is a selfdifferentiating multiplicity that opens onto, what Deleuze would see as,
the delirious smooth spaces and infinite movement of unimpeded
refraction and the plane of immanence. In this case the virtual is a
rather different virtual from Merleau-Ponty's "virtually visible"; it is
instead the virtual that Deleuze identifies in What is Philosophy? It is a
virtual that is distinct from the actual and that turns from human
experience to exist in itself as an Event and a being of sensation.
This is the virtual that Deleuze finds in the work of art, and which
is defined in What is Philsophy?, written with Guattari, as "an entity
formed a plane of immanence" (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 156). I
identify a hint of that virtual in Merleau-Ponty's all too brief discussion
of autogenesis at the end of the 'Eye and Mind' essay where he evokes
Bergson's sinuous outline [sqentement] as a line with its own radiating
movement and its own constituting power, and where he quotes from
writer and artist Henri Michaux who in 'Adventures de 4gnes' notes that
"no one before Klee had 'let a line muse" [laissi river une §gne]
(Merleau-Ponty 1961: 183).h1 Merleau-Ponty does not follow up the
11 Michaux is also taken up by Deleuze and Guattari who discuss Michaux in
respect to perception, disorientation and the use of drugs. See: Deleuze and
Guattari, '1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal ...' (1980: 283-87, 283
36
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
possibility of the autogenetic line himself, and how that line unfolds is
the focus of my own work on Klee in Chapter Five. For the moment, I
will stay with the notion of the virtual, and ask how we might grasp the
virtual that is distinct from the actual.
To this end I now turn to Bergson and intuition as a method that
pushes philosophy beyond the human condition to the nonhuman
ontology that characterizes Deleuze's attempt "to 'do philosophy". I
propose that it is this nonhuman ontology, rather than the philosophy
that unveils the pre-human, that the painter approaches when he
"thinks in painting", and that ironically this possibility is already there
in Merleau-Ponty's last writing (Merleau-Ponty 1961: 178).
Bergson: Beyond the Turn
Bergson's work is also implicitly anti-phenomenological when in
Matter and Memog (1896) he proposes that philosophy should abandon
its futile attempts to analyse and to explain experience, and instead
seek "experience at its source":
But there is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It
would be to seek experience at its source, or rather above
that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of
our utility, it becomes properly human experience. (Bergson
1896: 184)
Bergson goes on to acknowledge the difficulty of giving up certain
habits of thought, even of certain habits of perceiving. Nevertheless,
note 70). Examples of Michaux's calligraphic Indian Ink drawings are given
in Michaux 1998.
37
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
his later work on intuition as a method of philosophy, as developed in
Creative Evolution (1911), surely achieves more than just what he sees as
the negative part of the work. The method of intuition is an innovation
that shows that intellectual moulds and habits are inadequate to
understanding life and its continuity but this not necessarily imply that
proximity flattens philosophy to the plane of existence, as MerleauPonty supposes (1964: 127). Positively conceived, intuition takes
philosophy above or before the human condition and so frees thought
from the image, and requires philosophy to consider the question of
becoming.
As Bergson explains it in Matter and Mang, in the passage quoted
above, intuition approaches "experience at its source" by taking a leap
beyond the screen of interested, biased perception, which, by turning
the virtual towards actualization, isolates and immobilizes the virtual
and "extracts from the whole that is real a part that is virtual" (Bergson
1896: 193, 248). 12 It is therefore not a question of broadening humanexperience, as Merleau-Ponty's method of interrogation suggests, but
of going beyond the human condition, in the sense that Nietzsche's
rThermensch rises above the limitations of the human.
The contrast between intellectual thinking and intuition
demonstrates the implication that this move away from centred
12 In Matter and Memog Bergson explains perception in terms of light. in
perception we reflect back to surfaces the light that emanates from them,
light which without the screen of the body would have passed unopposed
and which would therefore never be revealed. Images therefore appear to
turn toward our body and it is only that aspect that interests our body that is
reflected (1896: 36, 37).
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MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
thinking has for the way we might think about space, and the
consequent resonance with the task of painting.
Bergson: Space and Unorganized Bodies
Bergson proposes intuition as a method of philosophy that
challenges the bias of the intellect towards the needs of human interest
and action. In Creative Evolution Bergson defines the intellect as "the
faculty of relating one point in space to another, one material object to
another; it applies to all things but remains outside them" (175). He
argues that intellectual habits of mind are an adaptation to the
conditions of human existence:
Hence should result this consequence that our intellect, in
the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the
perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent
the relations of external things among themselves—in
short to think matter (1911: ix).
In this restrictive model of thinking, a detached intelligence is turned
towards matter and ignores the processes of life where to exist means
maturation, change and creative evolution. Thinking matter is to treat
things as if they were inert, to think mechanically,. to be concerned
with physical operations and fabrication, and to think of matter as
indifferent to its form. Matter is thus spatialized as if it were a
homogeneous medium that can be divided and assembled, as in
Euclidian space, where "The whole of matter is made to appear to our
thought as an immense piece of cloth in which we can cut out what we
will and sew it together as we please" (156).
39
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
In Chapter Two of Creative Evolution Bergson polarises intelligence
and instinct (intuition being instinct that has become "disinterested,
self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it
indefinitely") for the purposes of definition, but he is most insistent
that they are like two interpenetrating tendencies, opposite and
complementary and that crucially "intuition may enable us to grasp
what it is that intelligence fails to give us, and indicates a means of
supplementing it" [my emphasis] (1911: 176, 177). We must therefore
think of intuition as a method that produces a movement of thought.
Intuition, understood as the inverse of intelligence, breaks down the
subject–object barrier, since it is defined not by distance but "by a kind
of sympathy" and immediate knowledge (176). 13 What is interesting
here, in the light of Merleau-Ponty's subsequent privileging of art in
terms of touch and fascination, is that for Bergson intuition is likewise
proved by the existence in man of an aesthetic faculty and witnessed
by the creativity of the artist.
Bergson cites the artist as someone who already perceives "by a
kind of sympathy" [tine espêce de ,rympathie] what he calls the "intention
of life", that is that things endure in their own way and that they have
continuity and, we might say, depth and he calls for a philosophical
inquiry "turned in the same direction of art" (1911: 177 [178], 176).
Intuition is therefore a method that is both negative and positive
13 "Sympathy" carries the weight of the break down of the barrier between
the subject and object, or artist and model, that both Merleau-Ponty and
Bergson find in art practice. Bergson (1911: 192-93), Merleau-Ponty (1961:
187) and Deleuze (1968a: 165) all use the analogy of swimming to describe
this mode of being in touch with reality—fascination/interrogation or
intuition—explaining that you do not learn to swim by following rules but
that you must 'go swim'.
40
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 86 DELEUZE
because it both challenges habits of conceptual intellectual thought and
produces a new way of thinking, a mode of thought explained in The
Creative Mind as a method that follows the life and reality of things,
their inward movement and their duration (1934: 190-92). I therefore
think that Bergson, and intuition as a method of philosophy, goes
further than Merleau-Ponty's notion of interrogation. While the later
involves creation as an activism or operationalism that reveals the
virtually visible, intuition is more radical because it struggles with a
model of the virtual that actualizes itself, so eluding the intelligible
appraisal that characterizes the turn to the human (as in MerleauPonty's model). That virtual emerges in a body that is not organized
within the frame of representational thought and human experience.
In Creative Evolution, in a section headed 'Unorganized Bodies',
Bergson introduces his notion of duration va dared as "the stuff of
reality" (272). He illustrates duration with the example of the
dissolving sugar-lump and famously observes that the wait for sugar
mixed in a glass of water to melt is experienced as a time lived, and not
as a mathematical time. (1911: 9-10). It is, he says, "no longer
something thought [du pense], it is something lived [du vicar , and he uses
this example to demonstrate that that process of the sugar's melting is
an abstraction, and that therefore things have their own manner of
sensible being, their own rhythm and movement (10 [10]).
Things—the sugar lump for instance—endure in their own way and
have their own pattern of duration but, while that movement appears
to be an isolable system, the peculiar duration of the thing (and he
distinguishes the "thing" and the "being" from the thought "object") is
lived only in relation to my own duration; as for example, when I
watch the sugar dissolve (1911: 15). My intuition of relative duration
reveals a being of the sensible inferior or superior to my own duration
41
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 86 DELEUZE
and, because it is immediate datum and a being with its own vital
,
movement and its own space, demonstrates a mode of existence
beyond my human experience.
As the everyday example of the sugar lump shows, Bergson equates
duration with change as well as with endurance, and indeed he goes on
to show that duration means "invention, the creation of forms, the
continual elaboration of the absolutely new" (1911: 11). He
understands that development as an evolutionary process of unfolding
in which the past persists in the present, like the change of form in the
continuous progress of embryonic life—or Klee's autogenetic "walk
with a line" (18-19). The interest for the philosopher thus centres on
becoming and the patterns of change, rather than on being and
identity.
As Deleuze notes in Bergsonism (1966), in Time and Free Will (1889)
Bergson ties the experience of movement to consciousness, and thus
makes duration a psychological experience (Deleuze 1966: 48).
However in Creative Evolution (1911), and with the simple example of
the sugar lump, Bergson demonstrates that movement belongs to
things and that things must endure in their own way.
With this model of creative evolution, Bergson recognises life as an
"impulsion or an impetus [elan]" that creates form for itself, and which,
admitting the unforeseeable, recognizes the indetermination of matter
(1911: 258 [259]). Bergson regards the inclination of life to creative
evolution as "an immensity of potential" [tine immensiti de virtua&e], a
"potential manifold" [virtuellement multiple] that, under the certain
conditions of its contact with matter, is spatialized as individual and
42
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON & DELEUZE
specific tendencies (258 [259]). 14 Individuation is thus understood as
"the work of matter", and reality as a "perpetual becoming" [le devenir
radical] (258, 272 [273]).
This curious movement of emergence is already understood by
Bergson when in Creative Evolution (1911), and in a criticism of Kant, he
condemns space understood as a mould or a ready made in favour of
duration and the movement of "springing forth", the point being that
emergence is not teleological but a the continuity of always becoming
(361). It is this movement of creation that Bergson sees in art.
As Bergson sees it the art work is not projected as 'out there' but
comes to fruition through an experimental process which depends not
on the regularity of the intellect but the conscious engagement the
artist and the sympathy with the object which he identifies as intuition
(1911: 176). He argues that by presenting the object within the closed
system of solid forms the intellect limits thought: it denies and forgets
the creative process and fixes the object in space rather than seeing
space emerge with the object. Contrasting the intellectual model and
"normal perception" with aesthetic intuition, Bergson privileges the
artist as someone whom, in the invention of the "unforeseeable
nothing", works against the mechanism of representation and the
limitation of intellectual moulds (177, 341). What becomes apparent is
that, instead of the object being fixed in space as an static objectified
form, the object creates its own form in duration, and appears as what
Bergson calls the "congealment of a movement" (239).
Bergson's point is that not everything—art and life for instance—
works within the radical mechanism of the intellect and the scientific
14 Bergson explains the manifold/multiple as "unity that is multiple and a
multiplicity that is one" (1911: 258).
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MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
and representational habits that distinguish and separate distinct
elements in the flow of experience. He argues that such an intellectual
approach means that space is regulated and prefigured according to the
requirements of a representational or closed system—it is an
organized, isolable body. Such mechanism requires predictability and
depends on preconceived constructed forms through which matter is
shaped and objectified.
In contrast to mechanistic, thought the artistic image is the result of
the process of creation—painting or carving—work which in Creative
Evolution Bergson, echoing Klee, describes in terms of emergence and
growth as "sprouting and flowering" and like the ripening of an idea
which changes as it is taking form (1911: 340-41). The notion of the
emergent object points to a radical reconfiguration of space as a
product of movement and change. Instead of the object being
projected in a determined space it evolves in the 'depth' or duration of
its own creation—it is an unorganized body.
In Bagronism (1966) Deleuze emphasises the Bergsonian
relationship between ontological duration and the question of space:
If things endure, or if there is duration in things, the
question of space will need to be reassessed on new
foundations. For space will no longer be a form of
exteriority, a sort of screen that denatures duration, an
impurity that comes to disturb the pure, a relative that is
opposed to the absolute: Space itself will need to be based
in things, in relations between things and between
durations, to belong itself to the absolute, to have its own
'purity'. (1966: 49)
44
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON & DELEUZE
It is such a reconfiguration of space that I identify in the work of
painters who, like Mondrian, Pollock, Klee and Bacon, produce
strange, novel and abstract spaces, but the privilege of the artist in that
reassessment of space is already there in Bergson's use of the work of
art as an example of creative evolution.
The close parallel between the task of philosophy and the task of
painting is evident in the resonance between Bergson's discussion of
intuition and the way that Bacon talks about painting. In his interviews
with David Sylvester (1962-74), Bacon talks frequently about working
at the level of instinct and intuition as a method that is antiillustrational, and sees his own work as painting that works directly on
the nervous system rather than through the intelligence (Sylvester
1975: 56). 15 He makes no reference to Bergson but the coincidence of
vocabulary is interesting. Bacon explains that he wants a thing to be as
factual as possible and at the same time to unlock areas of sensation:
Isn't it that one wants a thing to be as factual as possible
and at the same time to be deeply suggestive or deeply
unlocking areas of sensation other than simple illustration
of the object that you set out to do? Isn't that what art is
all about? (Sylvester 1975: 56)
Deleuze and the Virtual as Event
While Merleau-Ponty announces a "philosophy yet to be done" that
is not limited by human opinion, and Bergson recognizes "a last
enterprise" that goes beyond human experience, their respective
15 These interviews are the standard reference for Bacon. Deleuze makes
extensive use of them in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981a).
45
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
methods of interrogation and intuition do not necessarily lead to a
common understanding of what going beyond the human condition
might mean.
As I explained above, although Merleau-Ponty uses Bergson's
model of matter—body, and the immersion in and consequent intuition
of the world that implies, he suggests interrogation as a method by
which human perception might open onto a pre-human domain, a
space that is, from the point of view of profane or normal vision, invisible. Thus for Merleau-Ponty, the task of philosophy is to unveil
Wailed the "virtually visible" depth of the human condition (1961:
166 [31]).
Deleuze, however, has a more radical reading of Bergson's
argument for intuition as a method of approaching experience bgcore
the human. He understands Bergson as approaching a nonhuman
ontology. This reading then prompts Deleuze and Guattari, in What is
Philosophy?, to suggest that the task of philosophy is to identify the
virtual that exists in itself as an Event that is distinct from the actual
and the human, and thus to discover a completely different and
nonhuman reality (1991: 156).
In his 1956 essay Bergson's Conception of Difference' Deleuze
reconfigures Bergson's notion of the "potentially manifold" as virtual
multiplicity (1911: 258). Here Deleuze points out that it is not the
states of things that differ in nature but their tendencies, and he uses
Bergson's concept of duration to demonstrate how things endure in
their own way as an expression of a certain tendency. Following
Bergson's definition of the "potentially manifold" as a non-numerical
immensity—"a mutual encroachment of thousands and thousands of
tendencies which nevertheless are "thousands and thousands" only
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MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 86 DELEUZE
when once regarded as outside of each other, that is, when
spatialized"—Deleuze has a very particular understanding of
multiplicity as undifferentiated (1911: 258). With this definition in
mind, Deleuze is able to develop the notion of a virtual multiplicity.
This virtual is not the amorphous and chaotic "virtually visible"—
the "indecisive mumur of colors"—that is known only retrospectively
through the turn to actualization, that Merleau-Ponty describes in the
'Eye and Mind' essay (1961: 172). Deleuze's virtual is a reality distinct
from the actual, and exists as a multiplicity of inseparable variations
and the infinite movement of self-differentiation. This is a very
different approach to indetermination and chaos.
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari distance philosophy
from traditional science, which they gloss as a discipline that, like the
mechanism of profane perception as theorized in Merleau-Ponty's late
work, "passes from chaotic virtua4 to the states of eairs and bo&es that
actuafize it" (1991: 155-56). With references both to Prigogine and
Stenger's work Entre le temps et Peterniti (1988) and to James Gleik's
book Chaos: Making a New Science (1988), they distinguish philosophy
and science by their different approaches to chaos (Deleuze and
Guattari 1991: 118, 156). They define chaos after the 'new' science of
Prigogine and Stengers, not as disorder, but as a complex virtual:
It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual,
containing all possible particles and drawing out all
possible forms, which spring up only to disappear
immediately, without consistency or reference, without
consequence. (118)
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MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the object of science is to
construct functions (which are "presented as propositions in discursive
systems") with which to reflect on and communicate an understanding
of chaos, and therefore to "gain a reference able to actuake the virtual'
(1991: 118). Science works like a freeze-frame, immobilizing the
infinite movement of virtual multiplicity and ordering chaos. This is
not, however, to suppose a mechanical, ordered actual system but to
begin to deal with chaos, and in that sense this model of science
echoes Merleau-Ponty's aspiration to unveil the invisible.
In contrast to science, philosophy as understood by Deleuze and
Guattari, and with Bergson in mind, aims to grasp chaos as a virtual
multiplicity by "giving the virtual a consistency specific to it" (1991:
118). As Deleuze and Guattari see it, the problem of philosophy is
framed around the problem of creating consistent concepts without
losing the infinite movement of the virtual multiplicity. The problem is
"to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite into which thought
plunges" (42). To this end, instead of working on a plane of reference
like science, philosophy institutes a plane of consistency, otherwise
called a plane of immanence, that works like a sieve and sections chaos
without halting its infinite movement. Instead of referencing and
imposing order on chaos, the philosophical approach brings out the
'order' that is already there.
By thinking of intuition as "the envelopment of infinite movements
of thought that constantly pass through a plane of immanence",
Deleuze and Guattari support Bergson's notion of intuition as a
philosophical method that overcomes the representational distancing
that a plane of reference institutes (1991: 40). They contrast intuition
with the intension, or determination, of scientific methods and the
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MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 86 DELEUZE
scientific insistence on a plane of reference around which the order of
chaos is structured.
This model of philosophy is cashed out in Deleuze and Guattari's
development of the Event Ovenementj as explained in Chapter Six of
What is Philosophy?, and in their subsequent discussion of art as a
discipline that struggles with chaos but which, instead of confronting it
with references that limit—as science does—retains its infinite
variability within a composed chaos or chaosmos. Hence the
difference, noted by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus,
between Klee's evocation for art to "render visible", and the scientific
demand to reference the move from virtual to actual—to render or
reproduce the visible (1980: 342).
In a key passage in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari ask
what would happen if we reversed the logic of science, and instead of
following the process of actualization from chaos to state of affairs—
the move virtual to actual—we go in the opposite direction, from
actual to virtual. This is not the same trajectory at all but a move that
converges on a quite different virtual to the chaotic virtual. When we
go from the actual to the virtual we encounter the virtual that has
already become consistent on the open, indeterminate and desert-like
plane of immanence that envelops and sections the infinite movement
of chaos (1991: 36). This is what Deleuze and Guattari call the Event
Ovenementj (156 [147]).
The Event is distinct from the actual because it keeps the infinite
movement to which it gives consistency, and therefore eludes its own
actualization. However, this does not mean that the Event is an
extraordinary 'happening', far from it Deleuze's Event is an entity that
captures the infinite movement immanent to the very ordinary impetus
49
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
of life. It is not a question of an event being the actualization of a
potential, but of an entity that embraces the self-differentiating
movement of what Bergson calls "potentially manifold", and which
Deleuze reads as "virtual multiplicity". The reality of the Event does
not depend on actualization—and having a human reference—but has
a distinct reality as a composite becoming of a virtuality that consists
of hetreogeneous, simultaneous components: "variations, modulations,
intermezzi, singularities of a new infinite order" (1991: 156-58).16
If, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest in What is Philoso?, we take
seriously this idea of the virtual as an entity that remains indifferent to
actualization, we are committed to seize that virtual as an Event
(Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 156). Their aspiration for philosophy is
for philosophy to "become worthy of the event", an aim that requires
that we turn toward the virtual (1991: 160). It is precisely that move
that Deleuze and Guattari identify as the work of art, where the aim is
for art to exist in itself, as a composition independent of the viewer or
the creator—"a compound of percepts and affects" that is a bloc of
sensations that has a reality in the absence of human perception and
affection (1991: 164).
16 This concept of the Event is disputed by Alain Badiou who in Deleuze: The
Clamor of the Being (1997) argues against Deleuze's thinking of the Event as a
virtual multiplicity, a concept that finds the virtual continuous with the actual
and therefore unexceptional. Working through set theory and a notion of
multiplicity as an actual, functional and dosed set, Badiou develops a theory
of the Event as an extraordinary interruption that 'in faith' takes the subject
outside the normal order of being. His examples include Paul's conversion at
Damascus, and the French Revolution 1789. Far from being extraordinary
the Deleuzian Event is the secret part to actualization (Deleuze 1991: 156).
50
MERLEAU-PONTY, BERGSON 85 DELEUZE
Reading Deleuze and Guattari after Bergson's Matter and Memog
(1896), I understand this turn as a demand to give up the habits of
thought and of perception that mark human experience and to go
beyond that turn. Bergson likens this task to the mathematician
determining a function from the differential, where beyond the
infinitely small elements that we perceive of the real curve is "the curve
itself stretching out into the darkness behind them" (1896: 185).
Quite what that darkness would look like, and how it works as a
virtual that is real without being actual, are questions that motivate my
own study of how painting works. This is addressed in the detailed
discussion of the work of Mondrian, Klee, Pollock and Bacon that
comprises the main part of this thesis where I tease out a logic of
sensation beyond the human condition. First, however, it is necessary
to spell out the peculiar task of painting as a project that resonates with
the task of philosophy. To do that I return to Merleau-Ponty and his
discussion of painting—especially to the work of Cezanne—in the
'Eye and Mind' essay (1961).
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CEZANNE
Is it not the genius of Ozanne, to have given over all the means of
painting to this task: making visible the force of the fold of the
mountains, the force of germination in the apple, the thermal force of
the landscape ...etc?
Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981a: 39)
A Science of the Sensible
Merleau-Ponty gives a very specific task to what he calls the "secret
science" of painting it is to render visible what in ordinary or profane
vision is invisible and to expose the "diagram" [le cUagramme] according
to which actual visibility is produced (1961: 161, 164 [24]). He
observes that in profane vision we do not notice light, shadows,
reflections, colour; indeed, "To see the object it is necessary not to see
the play of shadows and light around it" (167). However it is precisely
that "virtually visible" [visible virtue4 configuration of light, lighting,
shadows, reflections and colour that premises the object, or thing and,
as an example of this obscuration, cites Rembrandt's portrait of the
captain in The Night Watch to show how the pictorial image depends on
the shadow (168, 167).
The shadow is the "virtually visible" that haunts perception and
which, "like ghosts" or like "the phantoms captive in it", is pre-critical,
primordial and pre-human (1961: 166, 167). What Merleau-Ponty
demands of art, and of painting in particular, is that it must return to
this secret and dormant depth of vision, reveal the invisible, and show
how this "deeper opening on things" works to support human,
corporeal visibility (172). He therefore declares that, "Any theory of
painting is a metaphysics"; it is, however, a metaphysics of depth (171,
177).
53
CÈZANNE
In Difference and Repetition (1968a), Deleuze implicitly engages with
Merleau-Ponty and points up a possible dissension to Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenology. Referencing Phenomenology of Perrotion (1945), he
objects that even though Merleau-Ponty's projection of a primordial
level of the visible is a projection of an Ur-doxa, it is still tied to the
model of recognition because it "remains no less prisoner of the form
a/ of do (Deleuze 1968a: 137 and note 6). Deleuze argues that, by
iden Tying the invisible as an Ur-doxa Merleau-Ponty ties the ghost of
visibility to the mechanism of recognition and 'common-sense', and
which makes the sensible an object of thought. However, while
Deleuze's objection holds for Merleau-Ponty's early phenomenological
work, his later work complicates the status of visibility, and takes a
decidedly anti-phenomenological turn, with an understanding of the
in-visible being precisely that, in-visible.
In the light of Merleau-Ponty's commitment to the work of art as
an opening onto the in-visible, he would surely agree when Deleuze
argues that "The work of art abandons the domain of representation in
order to become 'experience', transcendental empiricism or science of
the sensible", and that in dealing with what can only be sensed, the
issue of aesthetics becomes the very being of the sensible (1968a: 56—
57). Merleau-Ponty might want to add that, that science, as a science of
the encounter and of interrogation, is also a science of the
(in)sensible—and the (im)perceptible.
What makes the visible a thing is not its insertion into a locus of
space, but the articulation of an amorphous invisible murmur of
colours. Alphonso Lingis understands this when, in his translator's
introduction to The Visible and the Invisible, he talks about the sensible
thing being not in space but "like a direction" being at work across
space (Merleau-Ponty 1964: xlviii). The unity of the thing is not a
54
CEZANNE
"cluster of particles" but a "certain manner of being" [Wesen (vb.)], and
best understood as the complex composition of a "constellation[sr
rather than as a collection (1964: 115; 1961: 167). What is important to
note here is the double articulation of content and expression that this
configuration of being implies, a point developed by Deleuze and
Guattari in the plateau 'The Geology of Morals' in A Thousand Plateaus
(1980: 39-45).
As a manner of being the visible is borne by and of a certain style—
the luminosity of colour, the rhythms of shadows, the animation of a
latent and pregnant depth—which is its invisible support. This causes
Merleau-Ponty to explain the thing as "a concretion of visibility", and
Bergson to see the lines drawn by the artist as a "congealment of
movement" (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 132, Bergson 1911: 239). In either
case the visible is understood in terms of depth and has a
dimensionality and geology.' That geology does not define the identity
of the thing but indexes the thing as a punctuation in the baroque
proliferation and modulation of the depth of the visible.
As we saw above, in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty
stresses that the invisible transcends the body as the in-visible, and that
the consequent task of philosophy is interrogation. The corresponding
task of painting is to see from the point of view of immersion
[immerged. Merleau-Ponty takes up this challenge in 'Eye and Mind'
with the idea that the painter "opens himself to the world"
approaching what he sees by looking (1961: 162). "The painter", says
1 See: Merleau-Ponty's Working Notes' (lune 1, 1960) where he opposes a
'philosophy of history'—such as that of Sartre—not to a 'philosophy of
geography' but to a 'philosophy of structure' and a 'transcendental geology'
(1964: 259).
55
CEZANNE
Merleau-Ponty, "lives in fascination [la fascination]" , interrogating not
appropriating, seeing the object in the delirium of vision and unveiling
the phantastic constellations of the in-visible (167 [31]). The painter's
question of light, lighting, shadows ... is the phenomenological open
question:
The painter's gaze asks them what they do to suddenly
cause something to be and to be this thing [cette chose], what
they do to compose this worldly talisman and to make us
see the visible. (166 [29])
What is particularly interesting here is the radical pre-individuality
of the invisible constellation, where each thing, each mountain or each
face, is supported by a sensible but invisible composition peculiar to
this mountain, this face, "this thing". On the canvas, we see the
ontogenesis of the visible and the birth of order. We see exactly what
Merleau-Ponty demands of painting—the unveiling of the move from
virtual to actual—but, because the pre-individual depth of the
"virtually visible" is approached by the gaze and not by appropriative
thought, it cannot be thought of as a space of exteriority. In fact, the
thing has only visual existence—hence the privilege that MerleauPonty gives to the painter (1961: 166).
The 'experience' of the work of art—Deleuze's "science of the
sensible"—is not flat but, being supported by a "virtually visible"
constellation of colour, shadow ... "this thing' has depth but is not in
space. It therefore demands a very different conception of space.
Merleau-Ponty describes this space as "this internal animation, this
radiation of the visible" and argues that space and content must be
sought "as together" (180). Here then is the demand for an ontology of
painting that can deal with the invisible. Merleau-Ponty articulates this
56
CÉZANNE
argument by turning to painting—to Cezanne.
Merleau-Ponty and Gasquet's Cezanne
Merleau-Ponty's reading of Cezanne is very close to Joachim
Gasquet's literary memoir Ozanne (1921). Merleau-Ponty certainly read
Gasquet and surely knew other widely available witness accounts of
Cezanne.2 However, in the 'Eye and Mind' essay Merleau-Ponty
references more recent work on Cezanne: Dorival (1948) and Novotny
(1938), both of whom would have had access to Gasquet's account.
But, despite making no direct reference to Gasquet, Merleau-Ponty's
account of Cezanne in the 'Eye and Mind' essay (1961) echoes
Gasquet's vocabulary and his exuberant enthusiasm for Cezanne's
painting.
The quotes attributed to Cezanne in this debate are not therefore
strictly the words of Cezanne but of Gasquet's Cezanne. Gasquet's
memoir of conversations with Cezanne, published fifteen years after
Cezanne's death in 1906, are a florid and passionate homage, but the
reader is assured by Gasquet that they are a "faithful memory", even a
transcription, and that he has invented nothing.
Round these imaginary conversations, out of a hundred
others that I really had with him in the country, in the
Louvre or at his studio, I have put together eveiything I
was able to collect and everything I can remember of his
ideas about painting this was the way he talked and, as I
believe, thought. (1921: 146)
2 See: Medeau-Ponty 1945: 318. Witness accounts of Cezanne indude:
Bernard (1904), Denis (1907) and Vollard (1914), and Fry (1927).
57
CÈZANNE
Merleau-Ponty takes up Gasquet's memory of Cezanne, and
similarly focuses on two important concepts: geology and colour.
According to Gasquet's Cezanne, it is a commitment to geology and to
depth that distinguishes the work of the artist from that of the
draughtsman. With the thought that painting is very much an optical
affair, Cezanne returns to the logic of the eyes and drawing. The first
task of the artist is to "bath in experience" (the coincidence with
Merleau-Ponty's idea of the see-er immersed in the visible is surely not
accidental) and to draw the anatomical framework of the picture, the
earthly aspect (Gasquet 1921: 180-82; Merleau-Ponty 1961: 162). This
skeleton, like the "diagram" or "invisible inner framework (membrure)"
in Merleau-Ponty, is that according to which we see (1961: 164; 1964:
215). 3 It is the underpainting, the grisaille, or what Cezanne calls, after
Lucretius, the "geology of the landscape" (Merleau-Ponty 1961, 164;
Merleau-Ponty 1964: 215; Gasquet 1921: 182).
Cezanne is quite explicit in distinguishing drawing and art from
draughtsmanship. Drawing is not to paint the mindful imaginings of
pre-formed mythologies or ready-made ideas of objects—a tree, a face,
a dog (Gasquet 1921: 169). That is the job of the draughtsman. The
artist draws the invisible support of the visible and, as Merleau-Ponty
explains, brings to expression the specificity "this thing"—for example
Cezanne's Montagne Sainte-Vietoirr 1885-87 (fig. 2.1)—from that
diagram (1966: 161). In order to explain the importance of the geology
of the thing Cezanne cites the underpainting used by Paolo Veronese.
Underpainting is a geological construction of planes and, literally, an
invisible support that penetrates and gives depth to the vibrant
undulation of the colour, which here is the overpainting. Regretfully,
3 In Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981a) Deleuze introduces a different
vocabulary. He uses the French "chavnte" for framework, and translates
"graph" (as used by Bacon) as "le diagramme" (1981a: 73, 65).
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CEZANNE
says Cezanne, the importance of the "surrounding penetration" of
geology is lost in the work of draughtsmen, say Ingres, Holbein or
Clouet, all of whom Cezanne disparages as having "nothing but line",
and he mourns the fact that, "We've lost this knowledge of
preparations, this freedom and vigour gained from the underpainting.
To model—no, to modulate. We need to modulate ..." (Gasquet 1921:
178, 182).
The importance of this preparation—"the measurement of the
earth"— becomes clear when, having laid down a framework, Cezanne
turns his eye from the earth to the cosmos and to colour: "an airy
coloured logic suddenly ousting sombre, stubborn geometry.
Everything becomes organized: trees, fields, houses. I am seeing. In
patches of colour" (Gasquet 1921: 154). Cezanne clothes the delicate
framework of the earth in colour, saturating it in light. Because the
underpainting is a grey [gisaille] fragile structure and not a hard outline,
the colours interpenetrate and flow, making subtle and delicate points
of contact, and creating volumes that circulate and turn. Colours are
expression and content, and breathe life into the drawing: "as soon as
life breathes into it, and it is dealing with sensations, it becomes
coloured" (166).
It is the fullness of colour that produces sensation (166). The artist
speaks in colours, colours that are dense but fluid. This is what
Cezanne means when he extols the painter to modulation; the play of
colour that puts the measured but trembling earth (the framework)
into variation and which transforms the grey underpainting with the
fullness of planes of colour: "Planes in colour, planes! The coloured
place where the heart of the plane is fused, where prismatic warmth is
created, the encounter of planes in sunlight." (167).
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CÈZANNE
«Sensation colorantem
The problematic of the force of colour, and the equation of colour
and sensation in Gasquet's Cezanne, marks a radical shift in the way
that Merleau-Ponty thinks about the ontogenesis of the visible. Instead
of focusing on the role of the painter in unveiling the move from the
"virtually visible" to the actual, he turns to consider the autogenesis of
the visible. He also, and most tellingly moves from a general
consideration of painting to talk about Cezanne's late work, notably
the watercolours.
Cezanne's late paintings, like Portrait ofJoachim Gasquet 1896 (fig. 2.2)
or Montagne Sainte-Victoire 1904-6 (fig. 2.3), are characterized by distinct
patches of colour and the white spaces between the colours; something
that Merleau-Ponty recognizes in a quote from Georges Schmidt's
commentary on Cezanne's watercolours, where he talks about there
being "a flowing movement of planes of colour which overlap, which
advance and retreat" (1961: 181). In this work concrete outlines do not
emerge through the immobilization and organization of colour, or on
the definition of a framework. Instead of unveiling "vision in act",
here Cezanne captures the sensible activity of modulation and "renders
visible" the virtual hesitancy of the mountain or face (Merleau-Ponty
1961: 176).
We see this animation in Portrait of Joachim Gasquet 1896 (fig 1.2),
with its smile and its pinks, and where the patches of colour do not
conjoin into distinct planes or clothe a drawn geology or bone
structure, but turn to the cosmos of the blank canvas and resume,
what Merleau-Ponty calls "this internal animation, this radiation of the
visible" that the painter seeks in the name of colour (depth and space)
(1961: 183). Or consider Montagne Sainte-Victoire 1904-6 (fig. 2.3), the
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CÈZANNE
watercolour or the supposedly unfinished oil, where there are vast
cosmic chasms between the patches of colour and where the
voluminosity and clear outlines that we see in the tight planes of the
middle period is elusive.
The modulating images of Cezanne's late work surely achieve just
what Deleuze and Guattari demand of the work of art; they elude
actualization. Far from constructing a lived and visible 'human'
image—an actualization and perception of Montagne Sainte-Victoim or of
Joachim Gasquet—from the conjunction of planes of colour, the
image stays forever modulating and it is only that infinite movement
that gives it consistency. The tenuous contour of the mountain or face
is lifted from the earth and, opening onto the cosmos, the patterns of
colour produce uncertain, provisional and sinuous 'contours' that are
lines of sensation. The smile exists as it never was; a smile that exists
only in the brightness of colour, a line made in the relation of pink and
green.
Merleau-Ponty picks up on the radicality of Cezanne's late painting
in the 'Eye and Mind' essay, and finally understands art as autogenerative. He notes that in Cezanne's late watercolours, planes of
colour overlap, advance and retreat, and that "space radiates around
planes that cannot be assigned to any place at all" (1961: 181). As in
Klee who sets up a polyphonic depth by layering transparent colours
(something that I will discuss in Chapter Five), in Cezanne colour is
not fixed, concreted or actualized but is a flowing movement which
produces the rhythms and textures of life—of sensation. MerleauPonty is quick to distinguish this "dimension of colour" from colour
that describes nature; this is colour that "creates identities":
The question [rather] concerns the dimension of color,
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CÈZANNE
that dimension which creates identities, differences, a
texture, a materiality, a something—creates them from
itself, for itself .... (1961: 181)
In these paintings, "a something"—Montagne Sainte-Victoire 1904-6
(fig. 2.3)—is not the ordered actualization that references an invisible
and chaotic virtual, but an entity that retains the radiating depth of its
internal animation and the self-differentiating movement of the
fullness of colour; the same animation that is crucial to Deleuze and
Guattari's definition of the Event [Evenementj as an entity that has
"gained or kept the infinite movement to which it gives consistency"
(1991: 156 [147]).
Again it is Gasquet who sees what is crucial in Cezanne: the work
of colour as sensation—affect and percept. He terms the force of
colour "colouring sensation" [sensation colorante] 4 Cezanne already
understood the specific task of painting when, dismissing drawing as a
"bastard logic, falling somewhere between arithmetic, geometry and
colour", he discovered that the way to a full rendering or translation of
the sun, a tree, a rock, a dog ... is colour: "Colour, if I may say so is
biological. Colour is alive, and colour alone makes things come alive"
(Gasquet 1921: 162). For Cezanne painting is about character and life,
about moist flesh with its muscles, rich tones, and blood, and not
limited to the formulaic design of the draughtsman, which is perfect
4 "Colouring sensation" is Daniel Smith's translation into English of
Deleuze's "sensadon colorant? (Deleuze 1981a: 7, 73; Smith 1996: 46). An
alternative "Colour sensation" is Christopher Pemberton's English
translation of Joschim Gasquet's Ozanne (Gasquet 1921). Both are adequate
translations, the point being that colour is understood as a force, the
colouring/colour sensation, and not as sensation that is coloured.
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CÈZANNE
and idealized.
It is interesting that Cezanne turns to the 'old masters', and in
particular to Velazquez, to explain his passion for colour—luminous,
warm, Mediterranean colour—because, as I note in Chapter Six, Bacon
too was a great admirer of Velazquez, and reworks Velazquez' Poe
Innocent X 1650 in his own studies after Velazquez and in paintings like
Head VI 1949 (fig. 6.4) and Poe 1954. Cezanne admires Delacroix and
luminous colour, not the bloodless Ingres (according to Gasquet,
Cezanne ridiculed La Source 1856 [The Spring] but admired Ingres'
portraits and liked L'Age d'or 1862 [The Golden Age]. He also liked the
Venetians, especially Tintoretto (whom, in The Fold Leibniz and the
Baroque, Deleuze lists among Baroque painters), and the Spaniards
notably Velazquez (Deleuze 1993: 29-30). Painters of character.
Warm-blooded painters. Painters who make the sap flow, who touch
'life'. The painter, Cezanne says, must have an allegiance to a certain
"logic of colour" and work with colour as "colouring sensation"
(Gasquet 1921: 161).
The work of colour is explored by Merleau-Ponty in both the 'Eye
and Mind' essay, and in The Visible and the Invisible where he theorizes
the logic of colour as a logic of differentiation, and it is the selfgenerative power of this logic that causes him to privilege colour over
line (1964: 212). Colour works by differentiation; the perception of
red, for example, is made by seeing it in relation to other colours, and
that configuration gives the colour a certain vibrancy (red on green
looks different to red on brown) and throws up boundaries and
contours specific to that singular configuration. In this case the line or
contour of the figure would emerge only from the intersections of
modulating colour and accord to the logic of colour as "colouring
sensation". It is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty talks about the
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CEZANNE
peculiar way that things seem to offer themselves to the see-er and the
sense that "the vision we acquire of them seems to come from them"
(131).
In the chapter entitled 'The Intertwining—The Chiasm' MerleauPonty frames the problematic of the visible and the invisible, and the
self-emanation of the visible, with a rhetorical question about the work
of colour and the peculiar way that colour "imposes my vision upon
me":
What is this talisman of colour, this singular virtue of the
visible that makes it, held at the end of the gaze,
nonetheless much more than a correlative of my vision,
such that it imposes my vision upon me as a continuation
of its own sovereign existence? (1964: 131)
He uses the example of "a certain red" explaining that red is not a quale
(an essential property) but "a variant in another dimension of variation"
(my italics) (131). It is caught up in a web of relations and finds
consistency only within that constellation, a constellation called
variously—within the space of one page—as; a "certain
differentiation", an "ephemeral modulation", a "node", a "concretion
of visibility", a "punctuation in the field of red", and a "momentary
crystallization" (132). This profusion of terms can only point to the
subtle double openness of the visible that is at once intertwining and
chiasm. The key point here is that colour is not a thing or attribute but
a virtual focus in the palpable movement of ontogenesis. A "certain
red" is a fossil, its focus bound up in a chaotic participation, what
Merleau-Ponty calls its "atmospheric existence" and "woolly, metallic
or pourous pi configurations" [the punctuation is Merleau-Ponty's
own] (132).
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CÉZANNE
What emerges in the movement of colour is, as Gasquet had
already pointed out, not the prosaic line [signalementj of the fixed
contour (space-envelope) or the natural colour (colour-envelope) of
the objectified representational image, but the constituting or
generating line and the rhythmic pattern of the mist rising, the quiver
of the smile, eyes that look, a mouth that speaks—the animation of the
face in Cezanne's Portrait of Joachim Gasquet 1896 (fig. 2.2), or the
thermal force of the landscape in Montagne Sainte Victoire 1904-6 (fig.
2.3) (Merleau-Ponty 1961: 183; Gasquet 1921: 223).
With the influence of Gasquet and this notion of "colouring
sensation" in mind, Merleau-Ponty's reworking of the contour at the
end of the 'Eye and Mind' essay becomes essential to the demand for
the painter "render visible", and marks a radical shift away from
representation. It is, as Merleau-Ponty admits a matter of "freeing the
line" (1961: 183). Here the contour does not circumscribe the thing, as
the "prosaic line" does. Merleau-Ponty describes such lines as,
indicated, implicated and imperiously demanded by the
thing, but they themselves are not things. They [the lines]
were supposed to circumscribe the apple or meadow, but
the apple or meadow 'form themselves' from themselves,
and come into the visible as if they had come from a prespatial world behind the scenes. (1961: 183)
Thus far from ruling out lines in painting, as perhaps Impressionism
does, the line is freed from the point and becomes a "generating axis"
that, like Klee's musing line "renders visible" rather than, as Deleuze
and Guattari point out "render or reproduce the visible" (MerleauPonty 1961: 183, Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 342).
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CÈZANNE
Deleuze and the Art of Sensation
The task of making visible the invisible is, for Merleau-Ponty, the
force of seeing and of painting [ci force de voir, el force de peindn] (1961:
161 note 2). But, for Deleuze, the expose of the invisible is not
enough; art must not just unveil the "virtually visible" but extract it. To
this end Deleuze reverses the order of visibility—from virtual to
actual—supposed in Merleau-Ponty's anti-phenomenology of art, in
order to seize the virtual that eludes actualization—something that I
think is achieved in Cezanne late painting. This virtual has a distinct,
secret and unlivable existence as pure percept; Deleuze understands it
as an Event (1991: 156, 175). Deleuze thus takes Merleau-Ponty's
evocation of the ghost or phantom that has only visual existence
seriously, but what he identifies in art is not the liberation of the
phantom and its restoration in the ontogenesis of the actual and
human image of profane vision, but the artist making art stand on its
own as pure being of sensation and a monument to the Event
(Merleau-Ponty 1961: 166-67, Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 169). The
force of painting is then, not making the invisible visible but, in a
move from the actual to the virtual, raising perceptions to the percept
and making art stand on its own as "a bloc of sensations" (1991: 164).
This is an important move. As we have seen, for Merleau-Ponty the
virtual world is the "amorphous" phantastic invisible world of quality,
light, colour and depth: the pre-human world unveiled by the artist.
However, Merleau-Ponty identifies three different phases of Cezanne's
painting the first is representational, in the second he is unveils the
pre-human, and in the last he captures a virtual animation. It is this
third period which points to Deleuze's argument that the artist might
extract a curiously nonhuman reality. In Phenomenology of Perception 1945,
Merleau-Ponty (here with a reference to Novotny) notes that Cezanne
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first tried to paint expression, but later realized that expression is
produced in the sensible configuration of the thing (1945: 322). This,
he says, is why Cezanne's paintings are "those of a pre-world in which
as yet no men existed"(1945: 322). The third and most revolutionary
phase of Cezanne's work is the late work—for example Portrait of
Joachim Gas quet 1896 (fig. 2.2) or Montagne Sainte Victoire 1904-6 (fig.
2.3)—in which the virtual reality is captured without it being stabilized
as an actual object and brought into human and profane visibility, and
where its constellation and modulation is kept in play.
The virtual that Deleuze and Guattari identifies in What is
Philosophy? is just such a virtual. It is not a chaotic virtual that finds a
restricted consistency as an actual and human composition, but a
virtual that has become consistent without ever being lived, because it
is realized as an Event in the material of painting (1991: 165). This
consistent virtual is real without being actual, the phantom of the
visible has cut its bond with perception, and the work of art stands up
by itself and works to its own logic of sensation. The painting does not
actualize the virtual but embodies it, so that, instead of being an
experience 'as lived', it is given 'a life' and, escaping representation,
becomes experience (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 177; Deleuze 1968a:
56-57). This is why, as Keith Ansell Pearson notes in his article 'Pure
Reserve: Deleuze and the Nonpsychological Life of Spirit' (2000),
while both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze talk about painting in terms of
becoming, Merleau-Ponty says that "any theory of painting is a
metaphysics" but, for Deleuze, painting is a virtual materialism, and its
theorization an ontology of the Event as an entity (Ansell Pearson
2000: 2).
Cezanne longs to catch hold of and preserve that surge of sensation
that Deleuze and Guattari identify as the Event, and which I equate
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with Gasquet's description of the force of life as "this aspiration of the
earth towards the sun, this exhalation from the depths towards love"
(Gasquet 1921: 154). The problem for art is to capture this force.
Gasquet has Cezanne admit that "It would take a genius to immobilize
this upward surge in a moment of equilibrium, and yet suggest its
thrust. I'd like to catch hold of this idea, this burst of emotion, this
vapour of life hovering over the universal fire .... To paint that minute
in its precise reality!" (154). To would be to make the virtual
consistent; and this is precisely the task that Deleuze and Guattari
assign to painting when they open their discussion of art in What is
Philosophy? with the bold but enigmatic statement; "Art preserves"
(Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 163). What is preserved? The smile, the
blood throbbing under the skin, the wind shaking a branch ... the
animation of the face, the pulse, turbulence ... the "colouring
sensation": "What is preserved—the thing or the work of art—is a bloc
of sensations, that is to sty, a compound ofpercepts and ceects" (164) .
"Colouring sensation" is a pivotal concept in Deleuze's logic of
sensation [logique de la sensation] and though Francis Bacon: Logique de la
sensation (1981a) is, as the title suggests, an exposition of Bacon's work,
Cezanne, another great colourist, pervades the volume. In the light of
Merleau-Ponty's homage to Cezanne, and because of my own
understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's insistence of the work of art
as a being of sensation as a radical reversal of the movement from
virtual to actual in Merleau-Ponty's ontogenesis of the visible, it is
important now to tease out the work of "colouring sensation", a
phrase that in Deleuze is always specified by quotation marks as
«sensation oloranteo. This analysis of "colouring sensation" then leads me
to consider Deleuze's understanding of sensation as "nonhuman
becomings of man", a refinement of Bergson's commitment to the
move beyond or before the human condition "of man" (Deleuze and
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Guattari 1991: 169). I then turn to a short discussion of Deleuze's
reworking of concept of the diagram as a construct that paradoxically
sustains and releases "colouring sensation" before moving on, in
subsequent chapters, to look at the work of colour and line in
paintings by Mondrian, Pollock, Klee and Bacon.
Deleuze recognizes that Cezanne's innovation is to understand that
sensation is created in the vital patterns and rhythms of the colour on
the canvas. It is not an ephemeral quality (as in Impressionism) but the
material force of paint, a rhythm that runs through the canvas. Like the
rhythm of music, or the vital rhythm of the visible interrogated by the
artist that rhythmic force is sensation, sensation that acts immediately
on the nervous system, "which is of the flesh" va chaid (DeLeuze
1981a: 27). And, here Deleuze cites an unreferenced remark from
Cezanne; that rhythm is a force that works to a "logic of the senses"
[Iogique des sens], which Deleuze then explains as a non-rational, non-
cerebral logic (31).
"Colouring sensation" does not describe but colours and gives a
certain force to that which it passes through. It is created by the artist
and with the material of painting—colour—but has a peculiar power
of affect. This is something that Deleuze and Guattari develop in What
is Philosophy? in which they understand art in terms of sensation, as a
discipline that deals in the percept and the affect. In Francis Bacon:
Logique de la sensation, Deleuze gives Bacon as an example of the force
of "colouring sensation". When one looks at Bacon's painting of meat,
and here Painting 1946 (fig. 6.1) is perhaps the most famous example,
the accuracy of the visual representation—the red colour of meat—is
not the issue, but there is a definite resemblance at the level of
sensation: one feels the meat, tastes it, smells it, weighs it—as one does
in Soutine (1981a: 31). Deleuze says that such a sensation constitutes
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"the forceful moment (non-representative) of the sensation" [le moment
Iathique»] (1981a: 31). "Le moment vathique»" does not have a direct
translation but I think that it is best understood as implying the
"sympathetic communication" characteristic of aesthetic intuition in
Bergson's Creative Evolution (1911: 176-77). The important point is that
it is a non-representative moment in which the sensation is a Proustian
experience, which like Combray and the famous taste of the madeleine
is a sensation—percept and affect—as it never was or will be lived in
the phenomenological sense. This leads Deleuze and Guattari to later
identify percepts and as nonhuman landscapes of nature and affects as
nonhuman becomings of man (1991: 169).
I take up the parallel that Deleuze draws between Bacon and
Cezanne in regard to the nonhuman in this section of Francis Bacon:
Logique de la sensation, Tainting and Sensation' later, in Chapter Six, in
which I explore how Bacon constructs certain configurations of colour
(Figures) on the canvas, creating rhythms and patterns that embody
and preserve the specific Event of the painting in a precise and
nonhuman sensation. Here however, I want to tease out Deleuze's
notion of the nonhuman with respect to Cezanne in order to put it in
the context of the radicalization of the task of painting that is entailed
when Merleau-Ponty turns from the depth of the "virtually visible" to
colour and the autogenetic line in the 'Eye and Mind' essay.
Nonhuman Becomings
If art is to stand on its own, independent of creator or viewer, as
Deleuze and Guattari advise in What is Philosophy?, then the task of art
is to wrest the percept from the perception and to paint, as I think
Cezanne does in Montagne Sainte Victoire 1904-6 (fig. 2.3) as a
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"nonhuman landscape of nature" (Deleuze 1991: 169). In What is
Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari explain the percept with a reference
to Cezanne, as "the landscape before man, in the absence of man"
(169). Like Gasquet's Cezanne who wants the artist drunk (or like
Michaux, drugged), happy and swimming in the reality of paint,
Deleuze finds the artist losing all temporal, spatial and objective
determination and, abandoning himself/herself to the landscape,
passes into the landscape, which is thereby still of man, but before man
(Gasquet 1921: 183, Deleuze 1991: 169, 169 note 6). Such immersion
or fascination—Merleau-Ponty's vocabulary—requires the artist to go
beyond the perceptual state and to be "a seer, a becomer" who is
saturated with life and who being in touch with the modes and
rhythms, lines and colours of life shatters lived perception and finds
the percept (Deleuze 1991: 171).
Deleuze and Guattari's example of immersion is from literature,
from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dallowg, and demonstrates the town as a
percept, or a "nonhuman landscape of nature" because Mrs Dalloway
perceives the town by becoming imperceptible herself (never again will
I say "I am this, I am that") (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 169; Deleuze
and Guattari 1980: 29; Woolf 1925: 11). Passing into the town, "She
sliced like a knife through everything at the same time was outside
looking on"; she becomes indistinguishable from the town itself
(Woolf 1925, 11).
According to Deleuze and Guattari, in Woolf it is style that counts.
Lists of thoughts, observations, memories are built up with the
distinctive rhythms and syntax that compose percepts and affects;
sensations which carry the life of London but which are not adequate
to, or which even undermine, any lived perceptions. Instead of
representing London 'as lived' the Woolf's writing embodies London
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as 'a life' and preserves the town as a nonhuman landscape and Mrs.
Dalloway as a nonhuman becoming. Past and present, London and
India, Bond Street and Westminster, early morning or afternoon, are
no longer distinguishable. Form is dissolved and the novel is a
monument to that non-distinction. Woolf therefore creates a new
sensation, not celebrating something that happened or an opinion of
London as a city, but catching the rhythms of the town.
Deleuze and Guattari echo and rework Merleau-Ponty by
understanding the work of art not, as Merleau-Ponty does in the Eye
and Mind' essay, as recreating the "delirium which is vision itself" on
the canvas or on the page, and so replicating the emergence of the
landscape from virtually visible to actual, but as preserving the delirium
of the virtual in the movement of the material; the paint, colour, line
(Merleau-Ponty 1961: 166).
Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is the material itself that passes
into sensation and which is expressive (1991: 167). The sensation—
gesture, thrust, smile; metallic, crystalline, stony—is not a perception
that refers to an object but is preserved as percept or affect in the work
of art—hence the rhythm of Woolfs lists. The percept or affect refers
only to the material of the work, and is therefore not coloured, in the
sense of it being described and affected, but colouring and affective. If
there is resemblance to any perceived object, resemblance is produced
on the canvas and made with colour, line and shadow. As Deleuze and
Guattari insist,
If resemblance haunts the work of art, it is because
sensation refers only to its material: it is the percept or
affect of the material itself, the smile of oil, the gesture of
fired clay, the thrust of metal .... (1991: 166)
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So we move from Cezanne being immersed in the landscape, in
Merleau-Ponty, to Deleuze and Guattari and the landscape as percept,
where we see, what Deleuze and Guattari call "Cezanne's enigma":
"Man absent from but entirely within the landscape" (1991: 169). 5 As
Deleuze and Guattari explain it is not a question of being in the world,
but of becoming with the world: "We are not in the world, we become
with the world; we become by contemplating it" (169). Far from
liberating the phantom of the virtual within the actual, as MerleauPonty wants painting to do, Deleuze and Guattari see art raising the
actual to the phantastic and, working on the level of the virtual or
plane of immanence, create percepts and affects that are worthy of the
Event because they keep hold of the infinite movement of the virtual.
The problem for art is to "render visible", by its own methods, the
movement and the force of its "colouring sensation".
In Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981a), in a move that cuts
across the dilemma between the figurative and non-figurative Deleuze
follows Cezanne and identifies the "Figure" [Figure] (Deleuze's
capitalization) as the sensible form that is given to sensation (1981a:
27). 6 Deleuze finds Bacon close to Cezanne in that in his painting the
first [primordiale] function of the Figure is to "render visible" the
5 Deleuze does not give a specific reference here. He may have Gasquet in
mind. Gasquet remembers Cezanne saying that when he reads Lucretius he
feels as if he is "saturated by all the shades of the infinite" and merging with
the earth (Gasquet 1921: 153).
6 Merleau-Ponty points out that the dilemma between figurative and nonfigurative is badly posed, if we understand, as he does, the visible as the
surface of a depth: "it is true and uncontradictory that no grape was ever
what it is in the most figurative painting and that no painting; no matter how
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invisible force of sensation (40). As for Millet, for whom the weight of
the peasant's burden was more important than the fact that it was
potatoes, Cezanne makes visible the weight of the mountain's
geological folds, the germinal life of the apple and the thermal force of
the landscape, Van Gogh extracts the incredible beauty of the
sunflower Vorre inouie d'une graine de tourneso4, and Bacon the essential
violence of the body—the erotic postures of sleep, or of wrestling, the
catatonic contortion of the body that has been sitting for too long, the
distortion of the face as it screams, smiles or vomits (1981a: 39-41).
Those intensities are produced in an energetic configuration of colour
and the Figure, as a body that carries [rapportet] sensation, becomes an
issue of a material–force relation.
We can now begin to understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean
when in What is Philosophy? they say that "The work of art is a being of
sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself" (1991: 164). They are
certainly thinking of Merleau-Ponty when they talks about sensations,
percepts and affects as "beings whose validity lies in themselves and
exceeds any lived" (164). And it is Cezanne whom Deleuze evokes as
that genius who catches the vapour of life when he declares in Francis
Bacon: Lagique de la sensation that it is the material that becomes
expressive, and when he lauds the artist who paints the precise reality
of sensation.
Is it not the genius [genie] of Cezanne, to have given over
all the means of painting to this task: making visible the
force of the fold of the mountains, the force of
germination in the apple, the thermal force of the
landscape [pgsage] ... etc? (1981a: 39)
abstract, can get away from Being, that even Caravaggio's grape is the grape
itself' (1961: 188).
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The problem the artist faces is how to keep the movement of colour in
play, to make the material expressive, and to "render visible" the force
of sensation. In other words: what are the means and method of
staging the Event on the canvas? In order to answer that question,
Deleuze introduces the notion of the diagram.
"Colouring sensation" and the Diagram
The diagram [le ofiagramme] is an important concept for Deleuze, one
that is also used by Merleau-Ponty—for whom it is the threshold
between the "virtually visible" and the actual—and by Peirce—who
understands it as suggestive system of relations and an "abstractive
observation" much neglected by philosophers (Merleau-Ponty 1961:
164; Peirce 1940: 98).7 While Deleuze's philosophy is undoubtedly
influenced by both Merleau-Ponty and Peirce, his notion of the
diagram is one that he borrows from Bacon—whose portraits are
suggested by a preparatory "graph" of chance marks thrown on the
canvas.
In his work on Bacon, Deleuze devotes Rubric XII to a discussion
of the diagram. He translates Bacon's "graph" as le dagramme and
defines it as "an operative group of lines and zones, asignificant and
non-representative strokes and patches" rensemble operatoirr des bgnes et
des zones, des traits et des taches asignifiants et non repthentijii (66). As such
the diagram functions on the threshold between the preparatory work
7 See: Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aestbeticcs and Barb, Abstract Ad: Sites of
Imaginary Space (1995). Reynolds's discusses the diagram in Peirce's work as
concerned with relations in the constitution of the thing, relations that work
on the meta-discursive level of the imaginary and which reveal unexpected
connections (Reynolds 1995: 195-97).
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and the act of painting it is a chaos full of potential. Deleuze calls it a
"chaos-germ" [chaos-germe]. The diagram has a productive role: to be
suggestive [«suggemn] and to introduce constructive possibilities
[(possibilities de fait)]. Deleuze argues that, because these new
possibilities arise only out of the manual throw of paint, they escape
the optical, and therefore human centred, organization of
representation and the 'thing'. One no longer sees any thing—as in a
catastrophe or chaos.
It [the diagram] is like the assurgent appearance
[suqissement] of another world. These marks, these strokes
[ces marques, ces traits] are irrational, involuntary, accidental,
free, random [au hasard]. They are non-representative, nonillustrative, non-narrative. But they are no longer
significant or signifying they are asignifying lines. (1981a:
66)
Deleuze specifically associates the diagram and its non-punctual
topology with a new reality, a reality that he identifies, after Cezanne,
with the "indeterminate sensation" [sensation confuses] that the artist
"brings about" [Vorte en naissant] (1981a: 66). I suggest that here
Deleuze is reading Cezanne through Merleau-Ponty because in the
Eye and Mind' essay Merleau-Ponty specifically likens the painter's
disclosure of how the virtually visible becomes visible as a "continued
birth" [une naissance continuie] (Merleau-Ponty- 1961: 168 [32]). But, while
here Merleau-Ponty celebrates that movement from the pre-human to
human visibility as the moment when the human is born, Deleuze's
equation of virtuality with indeterminate sensation [sensation confuses]
reiterates his theorization of the virtual as a domain of infinite
movement, movement which is beyond the human, and that produces
sensation which is independent of the human—nonhuman becoming.
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As an "operative group of lines and zones" the diagram turns
attention towards the constitution and structure of the work. In the
eighth rubric of Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation 'Analogy', Deleuze
details two aspects of the chaos and catastrophe of the diagram;
geology, which is a "framework" [ochaOented (a framework that in
Merleau-Ponty is a "membrure"); and colour, which is sensation, or
more accurately "colouring sensation" ksensation colorantod (1981a: 73;
Merleau-Ponty 1964: 215). Deleuze's analysis mirrors Cezanne's own
parallel between earth and cosmos, and geology and colour; as I
discussed in my reading of Merleau-Ponty and Gasquet's Cezanne,
above. Indeed, he acknowledges Gasquet in a footnote, and reminds
the reader that in Cezanne the geology is the support that earths the
image, while colour lets it soar: the earth reaches for the sun [la terre
monte vets le soled] (73). In fact the diagram is exactly what Cezanne calls
the motif—the relationship [rapport] of framework and colour that
gives life to the painting.
Deleuze is at pains to stress that geology and colour are intertwined
in Cezanne's painting. Without framework, colour lacks life and clarity
[de duree et de clarte] produces empty abstraction, without colour,
geometry is empty [abstraite] (1981a: 73). Together they work as
structural and compositional elements that give the painting solidity,
life and clarity [concrete/ sensible, dude, clarte], and importantly they do
that without recourse to the imposition of an exterior point of view.
The diagram thus works on two fronts: it is the suggestive chaos-germ
[chaos-germe], and it is the chaos [Ocher] that works against, lays waste—a
verb that carries the same connotation as the French (Ocher, to spoil—
and resists optical order (66).
This operative work of the diagram is particularly clear in the late
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Cezanne, for instance in the modulating image of Montagne SainteVictoire 1904-6 (fig. 2.3), while the infinite movement of this internal
animation is particularly clear in the case of Mondrian, whose work I
discuss in the next chapter. In Mondrian's grids, as in Cezanne's late
work, the diagram sets up a chaotic or catastrophic domain in which
lines and marks and patches of colour oscillate and where depth is
indefinite; it is a zone which is animated but where that expression—
sensation as affect or percept—does not inhere in any lived state but in
a virtual topology. The diagram can thus be understood as the staging
of the Event in painting.
Staging the Event
Each artist has his or her own inimitable style and, because of that
particular diagram of traits and marks, a distinctive method of staging
the Events In Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, Deleuze identifies
three broad approaches, three different ways in which the painter
returns to the work of colour and line. These are exemplified
respectively by Mondrian, Pollock and Bacon. These artists are all the
subject of further discussion in this thesis, but here I want to continue
my discussion of the diagram by showing how these artists work with
the double structure of im-materiality identified by Deleuze in the two
moments of "colouring sensation" ksensation coloranted and framework
[chal)ente], and to demonstrate that double structure as the staging of
8 I have borrowed the phrase "staging the Event" from Keith Ansell Pearson.
In a section of his book Germinal .1..0 entitled 'Staging the Event' he discusses
Deleuze's complex conception of the Event. He usefully puts Deleuze's
Event in the context of Spinoza, Leibniz and Nietzsche, pointing out that
Deleuze's reading is far from idiosyncratic (Ansell Pearson 1999: 121-29).
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the Deleuzian Event—the new reality that, as Deleuze and Guattari
identify in What is Philosophy?, keeps the infinite movement of virtual
multiplicity at the same time as it is actualized in a state of affairs
(1991: 156).
Deleuze's first example is Mondrian who sets up a digital code and
produces a novel, purely optical space. In a play on the English word
'digit' and on the French 'cloy [finger] and *dal' [digital], Deleuze
explains that digital does not mean manual but numeral. Under the
asceticism of Mondrian's straight lines runs a stream of digital chaos
which you have to get over to recover the figurative form (and so see
the canvas as a geometrical composition), while his solid squares are
figurative (landscapes [ptysage]) and jump over the chaos. There is a
tension between the figurative shapes and the defiguration wrought by
the oscillating lines. In this tension we see the radiant multiplicity of
digital counts; dots and colours that dance in an indeterminate depth
and which dazzle the eye.
In contrast to the ascetic formality of Mondrian's canvases,
Pollock's abstract expressionism eludes form with an "all over"
informal chaos of lines and colours that "neither begins nor ends".
Deleuze says that he finds in Pollock something that, for him, makes
modern painting different to abstraction: rhythm (1981a: 68). Here the
matter of paint is given its maximal extension and the diagram takes
over the canvas. The optical space collapses and the manual line
pervades. In Pollock the painting becomes at once both a catastrophe
and a diagram [tine peinture-catastrophe et tine peinture-ckagramme] (68).
Deleuze reads Pollock's lines as gothic, lines that run between [entre]
points rather than from point to point, which never ceases to change
direction, and which attain a power "of more than 1" [supe'rieutv a 1]
where the line holds for a surface and where the depth that is the
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"virtually visible" has found consistency as a topological surface (68).9
From this point of view, abstraction remains figurative since the
line still delimits a contour, but a rather unusual contour (1981a: 68).
The contour that is produced in the intersection of chaotic lines does
not outline, but instead extends the movement and rhythm of the
diagram. The figurative is then here not aligned with representation,
and is not in opposition to abstraction.
Deleuze draws a parallel between the work of Pollock, and that of
Velasquez and Turner—between the abstract and the particular
figuration, even portraiture as in the case of Velasquez, of these more
traditional artists. He finds the same radical figuration in Velasquez,
who is a painter who "paints between things" [<beindre entre des choses»],
and in the late watercolours of Turner—who not only conquered
impressionism, but also the explosive line and the line without
contour, in order to paint the catastrophe (68).
The diagram as an agent of defiguration [gbrmation] and waste
[Ocher] is most obvious in Bacon, the artist whom Deleuze cites in his
third example of the diagram. Deleuze thinks that Bacon is Cezannian
because he dissolves form, deforms the body or face, and opens the
Figure to the chance and irrational marks of the diagram and "colour
sensation". Drawing on the interviews with David Sylvester, Deleuze
uses Bacon's notion of the graph [translated as le tfragramme], to discuss
9 This seems a particularly obscure phrase. It was made dear to me by
Deleuze's own mention of Pollock in The Fold where he uses Pollock and
Rauschenberg to explain the Baroque surface as a surface that stops being a
window on the world and becomes a grid of information: "the line with
infinite inflection holds for a surface" (Deleuze 1993: 27).
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how colour and line work as material elements of painting (Sylvester
1975: 56).
In Bacon the graph is the haphazard splashes of paint thrown on
the canvas. Like a catastrophe, or the wastes of "a Sahara"—an
analogy uses by both Deleuze and Bacon—it is a zone where all
perspective is lost, and where the smooth space of pure colour works
against the standard language and closure of perception (Deleuze
1981a: 66; Sylvester 1975: 56)." The graph belongs entirely to the
painting but, even so, must be said to precede the act of painting, and
in this sense Bacon's figures both occupy and pre-occupy the canvas
because they are already in the canvas, and what we see on the canvas
is the struggle between the paint and the particularity of the figures
which afterwards [apres coup] arise from it. Deleuze likens it to "a
catastrophe taking place on the canvas, in the grid of (figurative and
chance) information [les don/Ides figuratives et pmbabiaed (1981a: 65). The
graph is a specific but chance play of colour which, like the
disorienting cacophony of images in Mrs. Dalloway's London, is a
constructuve defiguration that sets up a nonhuman becoming and a
new sensations.' What becomes clear is that the Event of painting is
not a shadowy phantom but real, consistent and im-material.
10 When the "Sahara" is introduced into the work there is no sense of
orientation of proportion. Bacon likens this to seeing something under a
microscope (perhaps the skin of the rhinoceros) or through a telescope; you
change the units of measure from the human, to the microscopic or the
cosmic (Sylvester 1975: 56; Deleuze 1981: 65).
11 For a succinct summary of Deleuze's position on abstract painting as an
escape from the cliches of figuration, see: Daniel Smith, Deleuze's Theory of
Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality' (Smith 1996: 29-56).
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In Germinal Life (1999), Keith Anse11 Pearson usefully explains the
staging of the event as a double structure. Actualization in a state of
affairs (as a consistency on the canvas) is doubled by a counteractualization that keeps the im-material movement of virtuality in play:
On the one hand there is necessarily the present moment
of its actualization: the event 'happens' and gets embodied
in a state of affairs .... On the other hand, the event
continues to 'live on', enjoying its own past and future,
haunting each present, making the present return as a
question of the present, and free of the limits placed on it
by any given state of affairs. (1999: 124)
While in perception the event appears to be transcendent to the
actual state of affairs, when this double articulation occurs on the
canvas the Event (as identified by Deleuze and Guattari) is embodied
in a state of affairs but continues to exist as a percept that is an entirely
immanent movement indifferent to actualization. As Deleuze and
Guattari maintain in What is Philosop?
it [the Event] has a shadowy and secret part that is
continually subtracted from or added to its actualization:
in contrast with the state of affairs, it neither begins nor
ends but has kept the infinite movement to which it gives
consistency. (1991: 156)
In Cezanne's "modern painting'—Klee and Matisse are also
mentioned by Merleau-Ponty as artists who sever their adherence to
"the envelope of things"—that movement is carried in the modulation
of colour. It is perhaps most obvious in Mondrian's grids and
82
CgZANNE
Pollock's "all-over" work, which I discuss in the next two chapters of
this thesis, canvases that encapsulate what Deleuze and Guattari mean
when they go on to claim that,
[But], even in this state of affairs, the event is pure
immanence of what is not actualized or of what remains
indifferent to actualization, since its reality does not
depend on it. The event is immaterial, incorporeal,
unlivable: pure reserve. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 156)
The diagram, or graph, sets up the virtual topology of the Event
where marks, colour and line oscillate in the infinite movement of
depth, a depth that traverses and animates the Figure. Though Deleuze
does not reference Merleau-Ponty here, the coincidence of vocabulary
is a reference in itself. Merleau-Ponty describes the invisible, or
virtually visible as "in my body as a diagram of the life of the actual" [le
diagramme de sa vie dans mon corps] [my italics] (1961: 164, [1961: 24]). The
diagram is the "pulp and carnal obverse" of life [son envers charnel] and
the flesh according to which we see (164.).
In Deleuze the diagram has the same operative quality but in
Deleuze it is not the depth of the visible and that according to which
we see, but a movement of composition, a c rensemble operatoire' that
works on the level of the plane of immanence. What Deleuze sees in
Bacon is the artist working at that level, using the suggestion of that
immanent composition to draw out contours and to construct the
Figure that carries the "colouring sensation" set up by the diagram; the
Figure "without image". He paints heads that seem glorious,
disturbing, and horrible, and makes twisted bodies that are contorted
in a violence that belong only to the convulsion of 'flesh'; the diagram
and its strange topological spaces. His Figures are taken over by the
83
CEZANNE
scream or the orgasm, the expulsion of vomit or break of a smile. He
does so by listening to the song of the paint; to the diagram and colour
that itself vibrates and spasms, surges and splits. Bacon thus saves the
contour without the danger of a retreat into chaos and what Bacon
calls the "mess" of abstract expressionism.
The double structure of the diagram is most clearly seen in the
ascetic diagrams that Mondrian sets up in his abstract work of 1920-44
where he stages the Event by taking the rectilinear system to breaking
point He puts the diagram to work. It is clear in these paintings that
the silence of the invisible is an extraordinarily resonant silence and
that the curious spaces that the diagram opens up have a life and logic
of their own. We will see that that virtual topology is not a chaotic invisible depth but an inflective, coherent and differentiated plane that
produces morphological images—images that emerge as shape and
patterns, and which like the Bergsonian image that is so important in
Deleuze's analysis of the cinema, are images that can only be
understood from the point of view of their composition and genesis.12
As Deleuze and Guattari say, "There are rules, rules of `pla(n)ing', of
diagramming ..." (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 70). Rules of painting.
What are those rules, and how does painting work if it is to fulfil the
task of standing up on its own as a being of sensation? We begin with
Mondrian.
12 The mathematician, Ian Stewart, is also concerned with the morphology of
life. In Life's Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World Stewart
explores the mathematics of biology, and argues that DNA capitalises on
physical principles and processes to produce the distinctive patterns of life—
reproduction, evolution, development and ecosystems. He coins the term
"morphomatics" for his proposed mathematics of emergence, a mathematics
which recognizes life as a process rather than a substance, and which deals
with qualitative rather than quantative data (Stewart 1998: 140, 245).
84
(fig.3.2) Mondrian, Chgsanthemum 1900
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1916-17
MONDRIAN
not the construction of space ffOrm), but the destruction of it is what
abstract art requires.
Piet Mondrian, 1942 (1987: 385)1
From Shape to Line
Writing in 1960, Clement Greenberg finds Mondrian the
quintessential Modernist abstractionist: the "utter abstractness" of his
grids observe the strict limiting, and traditional, condition of the
picture; the use of colour is conservative; and there is subservience to
the frame (Greenberg 1993: 90). Mondrian's art is deemed static,
framed, punctual and flat. The images are seen as rigidly twodimensional with no hint of the figurative or the three-dimensional
illusion of space that opens up the possibility of representation and the
recognisable image. For Greenberg, this resolute orientation to flatness
and a purely optical picture-space puts Mondrian "among the very
greatest painters of the century", along with Leger, Matisse and
Picasso. But ironically, it is when Mondrian risks the norms of the
picture that his work proves to be most conservative.
Greenberg defines Modernism in painting as precisely that move
which acknowledges the norms and conditions of painting—the flat
surface, the rectangular canvas and the properties of colour—to be
defining factors. He cites Manet as the first Modernist painter, and
approaches Mondrian through Cezanne, Matisse and Cubism (1993:
86, 13). He observes that, even though in his grids Mondrian has
1 This quote is from a note on space-determination from 1942, found among
Mondrian's papers. See: 'A Folder of Notes' in Mondrian, The New Art—The
New Lift: Collected Wtitings of Piet Mondrian (Mondrian 1987: 385).
86
MONDRIAN
pushed back the limiting conditions of the picture and reduced the
painting to black lines and coloured rectangles, the form still echoes
the picture's traditional frame. Indeed, he thinks that the very
limitations of the pictorial form are, for Mondrian, positive factors,
and he notes that,
The crisscrossing black lines and coloured rectangles of a
Mondrian painting seem hardly enough to make a picture
out of yet they impose the picture's framing shape as a
regulating norm with a new force and completeness by
echoing that shape so closely. (90)
The frame is paralleled by the intersecting lines and the rigidity of
the solid rectangles, so repeating the neat convergence of the enclosing
shape and the picture as a discontinuous, complete and closed image.
Greenberg thus argues that abstract art confirms rather than subverts
the tradition of the frame and that Modernism continues the past, "It
may mean a devolution, an unravelling, of tradition, but it also means
its further evolution" (1993: 92).
Greenberg does not make any distinction between abstract art and
the representational or figurative tradition; abstract art just presents the
requirements of all painting in its purest most distilled form (82).
Modernism is not a question of abstract or non-abstract but of the
abandonment of the representational illusion of three-dimensional
space and a commitment to working on the picture plane. Thus there
is a place in Greenberg's Modernism for the non-abstract Modernism
of Manet, Matisse or Leger. Modernism is not characterized by a new
subject matter, but by its commitment to the structural principles of
painting and the new kind of picture-space that it sets up. The tradition
of perspective and representational space gives way to flat optical
87
MONDRIAN
spaces, and a composition of lines and planes of colour. Thus in his
article 'Obituary and Review of an Exhibition by Kandinsky' (1945),
Greenberg argues that to free painting from representation is to set up
a new pictorial space and to "recapture of the literal realisation of the
physical limitations and conditions of the medium" (Greenberg 1968:
3-6 and quoted in Osborne 1991: 65). For Greenberg, Mondrian
confirms the basic structural principles of the Western tradition, and
ultimately his work succeeds or fails on the same basis as a Titian or a
Rembrandt—the formal unity governed by the principles of frame,
colour and flatness (1993: 83). However Mondrian's "utter
abstraction" is far from being an absolute flatness, as Greenberg
acknowledges.
The non-representational, formalized and geometric space that
Greenberg sees is not as static as it might first appear. Indeed, he goes
on to admit that the Modernist rationale that dictates flatness is a
simplification and an exaggeration, and that despite the fact that the
flatness of a Mondrian grid does not permit the trompe-Poeil effect of
three-dimensional space and natural appearance, the work does open
onto an optical illusion.
Greenberg notes that, paradoxically, it is Mondrian's strict
conformity to the horizontal and vertical that inverts the twodimensional to produce what he calls "a kind of illusion that suggests a
kind of third dimension" (90). 2 Flatness, it seems, 'does not necessarily
mean a punctual discontinuity or the stillness of fixed shape, and as we
2 Here Greenberg contrasts the tnympe l'oeil sculptural "illusion of space in
depth" created by the Old Masters—a space one could imagine walking
into—with the analogous Modernist pictorial illusion, a space which can only
be seen into.
88
MONDRIAN
shall see, it is an indefinite dimensionality that prevails in Mondrian's
later work.
The pictorial "illusion" is for Greenberg a space "that was felt, if
not read, as flat" (Greenberg 1954: 113). Here, in an article from 1954
on Leger, Greenberg is talking about Cubism and collage but the point
could as easily be made about Mondrian's work. What is important for
Greenberg is that abstract art maintains the rational coherence of the
flat surface, and therefore the integrity of painting as independent. The
object is formalized as a configuration of planes, as if rolled flat, but
nevertheless, the different textures, speeds and rhythms of those
planes sets up the pictorial illusion of "a kind of three dimensions".
There is it seems a problem in reading the space as flat. Greenberg
sees the illusion of depth as an unsought consequence in Mondrian's
work, a consequence which is nevertheless interpreted by him, as an
efficacious "new rule of coherence" in the same mould as the
Synthetic Cubism of Leger, Braque and Picasso (113).3
The fact that Greenberg finds Mondrian unsuccessful in rendering
absolute flatness led me to look at his grids again and to ask what the
3 While Analytic Cubism—Juan Gris (fig. 3.1)—is characterised by facetplanes that merge the object with the picture plane, Synthetic cubism—
Leger, Braque, Picasso—is identified by "definite and linear contours" and a
lack of shading. This definition works at the level of the flatness of the
surface, but even here Greenberg sees an escape from flatness in the way that
the image appears to stand proud of the canvas and to extend into the nonpictorial real space in front of the canvas. Picasso's constructed bas-relief, like
Construction: Guitar 1912 or the numerous other constructions of guitar and
violin made between 1912 and 1916, plays on this illusion by extending the
different planes of the pictorial surface into actual space.
89
MONDRIAN
lines are really doing. I shall argue that it is that very unsought and
undrawn consequence of depth that opens onto the much more
interesting virtual space of indefinite dimensionality, and that rather
than the stillness of the flat surface we have canvases that vibrate and
dance. Indeed, I would question whether two-dimensionality is really a
guarantee of painting's independence and 'purity', and whether
Greenberg's definition of Modernism as a concern with twodimensionality and flatness is very useful when even an artist as
'abstract' as Mondrian fails to deliver.
An alternative to Greenberg's art criticism is represented by Harold
Rosenberg, a polarization that is exemplified in their different
approaches to expressionism in painting. While Greenberg finds
expressionist content in the pure physicality of the painting—an
expression that depends on flatness—Rosenberg identifies with the
spiritual, even theological, expressionism suggested by Kandinsky and
Mondrian's interest in theosophy, and carried over into the way that
Rothko and Newman understand their work.' It is not flatness that is
important to Rosenberg, but the status of the work as Abstract
Expressionism, or as in his expressionist reading of Pollock's work, as
"action painting".
Georges Bataille offers an interesting alternative reading of "pure
4 See: Peter Osborne's article Modernism, Abstraction, and the Return to
Painting' for an overview of Modernist art criticism, including the
Greenberg–Rosenberg debate (Benjamin and Osborne 1991: 59-79).
See also: Robert Pippen Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, Chapter Two
Modernity and Modernism' for a discussion of the paradox of Modernist art
as both revolutionary and liberating, and reductive and formal (Pippin 1991:
29-45)
90
MONDRIAN
painting" in his short commentary Motet (1955). He focuses on the
movement inherent in the picture-space. Bataille acknowledges that
Manet moves from "narrative anecdotal painting to pure painting—
patches, colour, movement", while still remaining a subject painter. He
does not see Manet's picture-space as flat; it is interwoven and
animated, even musical (Bataille 1955: 45). Referring to Manet's Portrait
of Baudelaire's Mistress 1862, Bataille says that, Manet "transposed the
merely picturesque into a delicate fugue of calico and lace" and later
that Manet's work is "painting for its own sake, a song for the eyes of
interwoven forms and colours" (30, 35). Bataille makes much of, what
he calls the "silence of destruction" in Manet but like Merleau-Ponty's
silent invisible this plane of colour is an extraordinary resonant silence.
The subject slips into a "tremor of suspended animation", investing
the canvas with a forceful "fugitive presence" (114).
The animation that Batnille sees in Manet is not unlike the
modulating movement that I see in Mondrian's grids. Both painters set
up a picture-space that frees painting from perspective and the
representational tradition but that move does not restrict 'pure
painting and optical space to flatness. The animated space of Manet's
painting, like that which I find in Mondrian, disrupts the principles of
Modernism as identified by Greenberg, but works with the "patches,
colours and movement" essential to Bataille's definition of "pure
painting". This leads me to conclude that the mechanical model of
space as a closed construction is not a useful model with which to
approach what is happening on the canvas, and that that space is not
exhausted by the determination of the point–line configuration of
formal geometry. I go on to explain that it is precisely this 'crack' in
the rigidity of the formal aesthetic that allows for the dislocation of the
complete and the closed space. The 'crack' opens onto a fantastic,
virtual, and strictly counter-representational space, a space that, in her
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MONDRIAN
book Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginag Space
(1995), Dee Reynolds calls an "imaginary space" because it is an
incorporeal space liberated from any definition.
I will come back to Reynold's notion later, but here I want to stress
that this indefinable space is the product of disruptive practices which
sets up a new reality, one beyond both a traditional representational
schema and the self-referential model of Modernism. As Reynolds
suggests via her analysis of the disruptive signifying practices of
Mondrian, Kandinsky, Rimbaud and Mallarrne, "Such art does not
reflect reality, but neither does it reflect itself: it sets itself the task of
producing and proposing new models for experience" (1995: xii).
We have here two very different models of pictorial space—the
formal or striated space and the modulating or smooth—and two very
different lines; the rectilinear line that echoes and marks out the formal
pictorial space, and the abstract line that wards off the ideal of flatness
and the fixed space of the framed picture. Mondrian's work is
revolutionary because the lines of his grids do not delimit or define a
shape, but are abstract lines. In other words, his work is abstract
precisely because it does not conform to the frame, acknowledge
flatness, or accept colour as an attribute. It does, however, produce a
curious animation. I propose that Mondrian breaks through the model
of determined, formal space that is integral to Greenberg's notion of
pictorial integrity—a space that is identified by •Deleuze and Guattari
in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) as "striated space"—and produces a nonformal space—Deleuze and Guattari's "smooth space"—and that as
such it proposes a new model for experience (1980: 474-500).
Deleuze and Guattari draw a similar contrast between the rectilinear
line and the abstract line in the plateau '1440: The Smooth and the
92
MONDRIAN
Striated' in A Thousand Plateaus where they pose the question, "What
then should be termed abstract in modern art?" (1980: 499). They
identify two very different spaces in art, the amorphous acentred space
of the smooth, and a closed dimensional striated space. They conclude
that those different spaces are realized by the work of very different
lines. The first is the geometrical, punctual line that expresses the
formal conditions under which space is striated. This line is inherently
representational because, even though it doesn't represent anything in
particular, it echoes the frame and thus effectively represents the
picture itself as an ideal rectilinear space, as Greenberg thinks
Mondrian's grids do. The second line is the multi-directional mutant
line—Deleuze and Guattari reference Pollock's free line—the line
"that describes no contour and delimits no form ..." (1980: 499).
This abstract line is not contained by the point but remains free and
realizes the abstraction of smooth space. We can then understand the
move from representation to abstraction as the destruction of
(striated/dimensional) space. Here there is a striking parallel between
Deleuze and Guattari's description of lines that work in smooth space
and Mondrian's own understanding of the expression of the abstract.
Mondrian observes that Cubism "broke the closed line, the contour
that delimits individual form", and that Kandinsky "broke the closed
line that describes the broad contour of objects" (Mondrian 1987: 64).
However while Cubism went only so far as to fragment the object, and
Kandinsky remained with the capricious curved line and an expression
of natural feeling, Mondrian himself aimed for the complete break
with form and the plastic expression of the abstract wrought by "the
intensification of form to the straight line" (64).
In Mondrian's destruction of space, both two-dimensional flatness
(Greenberg's ideal of Modernism) and the three-dimensional illusion
93
MONDRIAN
of representational space are overtaken by the force of the straight, but
abstract, line. In a move from the striated to the smooth, space
becomes no longer an issue of shape and completeness, but of the line
and the infinite. However, this does not mean that Mondrian is not an
artist of 'pure painting', indeed as Sylvester is quick to assert a
Mondrian is "the most self-sufficient of painted surfaces (besides being
as intimate as a Dutch interior)" (1997: 135). The move to line
demands that we think about 'pure painting—and about
Modernism—in a different way: as painting that breaks through the
restriction of the representational frame, and which works with the
abstraction of "smooth space".
Before exploring this revolution to abstraction, and as a point of
contrast to Mondrian's move to the destruction of (striated) space, I
want to take a look at the work of the line in the conventional,
construction of formal Euclidean space. This is the line that is
subordinate to the point, and which delimits form—whether that form
is the representational illusion of three-dimensional reality or the twodimensionality of the flat picture plane.
Punctual Systems
In a punctual system we form the line by joining the points. The
line frames. The line marks out and constructs space. It shapes and
delimits form. We turn it once to form the right angle and to open
94
MONDRIAN
onto the plane. We turn it twice to form the cube, and three times to
form the hyper-cube. One dimension, two dimensions, three
dimensions, four .... In a punctual system we feel the pulse, follow the
beat, apply the rules of proportion and perspective. This is a
mathematical project, a principled art. Here there is a structural
relationship: point is to line as line is to plane. Look at the
construction, everything in agreement Point to line to plane. Space is
deferred to the point; space is referenced, ordered and understoodPentendement.
In a punctual system each turn refers to a single principle of
ordering, that most fundamental principle of structure, proportion.
Geometry = measurement. Each turn is a reflection of the point. Here
geometry is about formal issues of appearance and representation. It is
a plan of construction, scheming and politic. It is the constrictive,
punctual and ordinal art of numeracy. It is an art that constructs space,
an art of distinguished and fixed points. Where one point is referenced
to another, and another, the line is formed, and then the plane. The
point acts as an immobile origin in the geometric schema, point to line
to plane. There is an absolute subordination of the line to the point It
is the point of reference, dominating space, organizing and distributing
tensions and oppositions. It is at once both the coordinated and the
coordinating point, a didactic and focal point, or as Deleuze and
Guattari have it, the "third eye" (1980: 292).
This "submission of the line to the point" is characteristic of
centred, hierarchical or closed systems, and what in A Thousand Plateaus
Deleuze and Guattari call "the aborescent schema" in contrast to the
"rhizomatic" development of the multiplicity and of open systems
95
MONDRIAN
(1980: 293). 5 Deleuze and Guattari present the schema of majority as
typical of the arborescence because it demonstrates its hierarchical
structure (see below) (544). Here "man" is the "central point" on
which the system ultimately converges, and from which the lines of the
figure ebb and flow. Juan Gris's drawing Violin and Checherboard 1913
(fig. 3.1), and E. Jouffret Sixteen Fundamental Octagons of the lkosahedroid
1903 are artistic and mathematical equivalents, the salient feature of
each being that the structure converges on a central point and that the
lines are determined by, and subordinate to, that fixed point of
reference. The figures present a mechanistic system of spatialization
where each line is a component part of a whole, and measured and
identified by its position to a fixed, exterior point.
dult (dominant point)
• Man (central point)
(child) 0% ,...,
% / ....
n/
t/
(woman) Of—
\
-...‘,\\,.
• male (dominant point)
Within this geometric model the key referents to the central point
are the simple axes, and the horizontal line and the vertical line that
form the right angle. The principle of this right and proper angle is
basic to any other point or line in the system. Functioning as a
regulating norm, the axes form the enclosing shape and limiting
condition of the picture, like a frame. The points are coordinates and
the line is the tension between fixed points and represents the relation
of those points. The line moves only between points: points that are
always external points of origin. This line constructs space
5 See: Deleuze and Guattari's introduction to A Thousand Plateaus in which
they contrast the centred structure of the tree–root system with the acentred
complexity of the rhizome or multiplicity (1980 3-25).
96
MONDRIAN
systematically and the "plan(e)" formed by the intersection of lines is
grounded by the zero point (0,0) (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 265—
68) .6
Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term "arborescent" fits with
Mondrian's early theorization of the point. According to art critic
David Sylvester, Mondrian understood the point as a point of repose
and equilibrium, a sort of check to the ebb and flow of natural growth
(1997: 134). But such a containment of energy is a potentially explosive
intensity, an intensity evident in Mondrian's early paintings of flowers,
particularly Chgsanthernum 1900 (fig. 3.2) where the structure closes in
on itself, driven by a centripetal force that sucks it into the originary
point. As we shall see by following the development of Mondrian's
work from flower, to tree, ocean and the later grids, the later nonfigurative work is not a break with the object so much as a
radicalization of Mondrian's preoccupation with the zero point in
which he realizes the inherent indetermination of (0,0)—an
indetermination which resists closure.
The intense point is a feature not just of the Mondrian's flower
paintings but of Mondrian's tree series where the movement is an ebb
and flow from the central trunk, and of the Pier and Ocean work where
the short vertical and horizontal lines of the sea to-and-fro from the
centred pier. In both series there is an increased density of line and
colour at the point of convergence, as if the image was fed and fired
from the centre. The growth and the decay of the tree, and the ebb
6 See: '1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal ...' in which Deleuze and
Guattari distinguish between two ways of conceptualizing the plane: a) The
structural plane that is a necessary condition of design and form, hence the
use of the term "plan(e)"; b) The plane of consistency or composition which
knows only relations between unformed elements (1980: 265-68).
97
MONDRIAN
and flow of the tide, are a tragic expression endlessly repeated and
always secured—but ultimately to be drawn into the black hole of the
fixed point, and death. In the later grid work the zero point becomes
not a point of repose but a vibrant and heterogeneous point that
dances and dazzles.
For the moment however, what is important to note is that, as
Mondrian shows in his tree series, what Deleuze and Guattari call "the
arborescent schema" does not mean statis but the natural growth and
secured, habitual repetition of the grounded process. Mondrian tries to
annihilate the regularity of growth with opposition and equilibrium,
and so make repose plastically visible.' His concern is to move beyond
punctual systems and naturalistic space to a "direct plastic expression
of the universal" (1987: 42). To this end he comes to see colour,
dimension and position not as attributes but as relations, and his work
becomes more and more rhythmic, more and more musical (153). I
suggest that in his grids Mondrian produces lines that are not
subordinated to the point and that do not fit Deleuze and Guattari's
model of "the arborescent schema". Mondrian thus moves from
deference to the point—line system and representation, to the free line
and abstraction.
The Musical Line
So, what about the line itself; the line not effected by the point?
This line does not outline or shape, nor does it conform to the simple
axes. It does not evolve from, or return to, the principle of the point,
and is not proportional. Instead, this is a line that involves, that has a
7 See Mondrian's essay 'Natural Reality and Abstract Reality: A Trialogue
(While Strolling from the Country to the City) (1919-20)' (1987: 82).
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mode, movement and texture, which has speed and direction, and
which accelerates and slows down? It is a line that destroys punctual
space, and which is disorderly, dissonant and disaffected; that is free.
This is the line as counterpoint and also as vector. Such a line does not
converge on the point and therefore is quite different from the closed
line that contours and delimits form. Not being closed it cannot
outline and define and, liberated from any particular definition, is
distinguished only by its traits and texture. As Sylvester suggests, the
line that is freed from the point has an autonomy which make it "less
referential, more and more musical" (1997: 433). It is dynamic; it has
rhythm and speed.
The move from shape and the line that delimits form to the free
rhythmic line involves an ontological transformation that takes
painting from representation to abstraction. As Mondrian understands
it, this transformation requires the destruction of space (form) and the
freeing of the line:
The important task of all art, then, is to destroy the static
equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one. Non-figurative
art demands an attempt of what is a consequence of this
task, the destruction of particular form and the construction of
a rhythm of mutual relations, of mutual forms of free
lines. (Mondrian 1987: 294)
Mondrian creates dynamic rhythm by juxtaposing opposites; thus he
opposes construction and destruction, and the vertical and the
horizontal, in an attempt to neutralise naturalistic space and objecthood, and to free a vital rhythm. Instead of being representative, that
rhythmic, musical line is creative or form-giving.
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MONDRIAN
In 'The New Plastic in Painting' (1917) [De Nieuwe Beel&ng in de
schilderkun4, Mondrian discusses how modem man is turning away
from the natural and how life is taking on a more "determinate abstract
appearance" (1987: 28). That abstract is understood variously
throughout the volume as an expression of the "universal" (41), as
"spirit" (68), and as "vitality" (348). This move to abstraction is bound
up with Mondrian's quest for the universal, for spirit, essence and for
pure vitality, and he sees this as a move beyond the attachment to the
static equilibrium of the external and of appearances.'
His task is to take painting from being an art of descriptive form
and the punctual, representational line, to a new art of the universal
and the plastic. The new art is, he says "the determinate plastic expression of
aesthetic relationships" (1987: 28). This leads him to seek the plastic
8 For reference to Mondrian's art as realizing the essence of life [1' rhythme
vivant], see: Jean-Claude Lebensztejn 'Mondrian, la fin de Fart', Critique, 39
(1983), 893-912, an article that is referenced by Reynolds (1995: 215). I have
included this reference to essence because of Bergson's interest in essence as
a virtual and as an event, as set out in Tim Sourres of Mordo and Rek:gion
(1932). It is here that Bergson aligns essence with the musical, and implicitly
with rhythm. As so clearly explained by Deleuze in Betgsonism (1966), Bergson
talks about emotion as a pure element that is not represented and does not
have an object (Deleuze 1966: 110). It has only an essence, a potential and
intensity (en puissance) which traverses objects. For instance, the quality of
emotion in a piece of music that expresses love depends on its essence, not
on its object (love for a particular person). It is a creative emotion because it
creates the work in which it is expressed and makes the music sing or cry.
That essence is the event or virtual power of the music, it is sensation and
affect. As such it is, like the Deleuzian Event in What is Phi losopW, a virtual
that is real without being actual (1991: 156). Lebensztejn also picks up on the
theme of dance rhythms in Mondrian.
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structure of things rather than to depict the particularity of appearance,
and to find pictorial relationships that resisted the closed line, the
contour and individual form. That plastic structure is experienced, he
believes, in the "dynamic rhythms of determinate mutual relations"
and where art realizes those relations the universal can become visually
perceptible without being tied to a particular form (295). For instance,
Mondrian observes that, "the more we see the relationship of the
colours, and the less we see the individual colours, the more we become
free of the particular and thus of tragic expression" (86). Like colour,
dimension and position are not regarded as attributes but as relations
and those relationships assume a direct plastic expression that works
beyond limiting form and defined representation. This expression
affects energy and rhythm; as Mondrian puts it, "The action of plastic
art is not space-expression but space-determination. Through
equivalent oppositions of form and space, it manifests reality as pure
vitality" (348).
Mondrian's association of the universal with pure vitality fits with
his interest in theosophy and its mystical and utopian vision of the free
spirit. It also fits with the colour theories of Goethe and of Steiner
which treat colour as having an energy of its own that can be
experienced independently of objects. But Mondrian's interest in
vitality, and in matter as energy, also fit with the concept of élan vital
and the equation of matter and energy made by his contemporary
Bergson (1859-1951).9
It is this vitality which I come to read, after Deleuze and Guattari,
and with Bergson in mind, as the virtual. As we shall see, this rhythmic
vitality is a virtual which is rendered visible in the destruction of
particular form, and which opens onto a very different space to that
9 Mondrian (1872-1944)
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striated space carved out by punctual lines. I argue that by freeing the
line and setting up a musical, rhythmic relation of lines Mondrian
constructs a smooth space—an acentred space with rhythmic rather
than punctual values.
So, how does Mondrian achieve this? Mondrian's neo-plastic work
is an exploration of space-determination or form-giving that depends
on the vectorial line. As Nieuwe Beekkng, literally "New Form-giving",
his Neo-Plasticism is an abstract art that subverts the punctual system
by inverting the dominance of point over line.' Rather than the
submission of the line to the point, here the point submits to the line.
But, this is more than a deconstructive reversal of formal geometry.
Mondrian is concerned, not with formal issues of appearances and
their relation to a closed conceptual and visual geometry, but with
painting as a creative, plastic structure. An art of formation rather than
form. Space-determination or form-giving is not a case of yet another
analysis of the given condition of the picture and yet another
10 Mondrian used the phrase nieuwe bee/ding in his first published essay of 1917
'The New Plastic in Painting' [De Nieuwe Bee/ding inde sehilderkunst]. Bee/den (vb)
means form-giving or creation, beeldend plastic or image-forming (1987: 27).
The distinction between expression and determination, and between
construction and building, becomes clear in Klee's theory of form-building
Gestaltung. Like Klee, whom I discuss in Chapter Five, Mondrian addresses
form in the infinitive, as a theory of formation or form-giving and creation,
not of form—in Dutch the verb bee/den and its substantive heckling, which
correspond to the German Bi /dung. Klee develops his own theory of
formation as Gestaltung rather than Formlehm. As Mondrian himself notes, in
German Neo-Plasticism [De Nieuwe Bee/ding] is translated as Die neue
Gestsaltung (1987: 27). In English 'plastic' does not carry the same connotation
of creation.
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impression of the regulating norm ("space-expression"), but the
invention and composition of a new synthesis of reality ("spacedetermination"). This is a move which means breaking with the
(pre)determined form of the closed system and building the abstract,
not because it isolates the determining condition of the picture, but
because it is resolutely concrete in its refusal of the grounding point.
Painting then moves from being a medium of representation and
impression to a being a performative, operative and creative art. It
becomes Abstract Expressionism.
If the line is form-giving it must be active, not submissive, open not
closed. 'Line' here is a verb. 'To line' is 'to mark'. The line has modes.
To mark: to stamp, to cut, to write, to trace; each line has a distinctive
texture. It is musical because it is an articulation with rhythm and
harmony. It resonates. It has modes of production, movements of
construction and destruction, movements of territorialization and
deterritorialization. To mark or to line distinguishes; it has a power as
affect—speed, direction, deviation ... transformation. There is no
formal construction, the expression of the line is its movement and its
theme and variation. It is composition. But this composition is not the
chromatic harmony of the melody or the concerto with its linear
exposition and development. This is the complex interwoven motifs of
the symphony, or the non-pulsed rhythms of jazz.
From Form to Composition
The annihilation of form is clearly seen in Mondrian's early series of
paintings of a single tree, a series that begins with the "tragic
expression" of The Red The 1908, and ends with the clear dissolution
of form in Flowering Apple Tree 1912 (fig. 3.4), a painting where the
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MONDRIAN
dynamic rhythm of mutual relations can be clearly felt. In this series
there is a clear progression from the particular to the general; from the
definite, contoured appearance where the form appears as volume,
planes and lines, and where the tree is a particular construction of
space, to the reduction of form into a harmonious composition of
curved lines across the canvas. Abstraction is thus understood as the
destruction of form and the expression of a general or universal reality,
and not as the representation of form in the abstract. However, this
does not mean that abstraction is something vague, but rather that it
works through concrete expressive means: colour and line, dimension
and position. As Mondrian explains in a note of 1939 on Abstract Art:
When volumes, planes, lines, remain intact, particularities
are not abolished, the general expression of reality is not
established. In order to do this, these means must be
aneantise [annihilated through] further abstraction until
they become neutral forms or, by greater consequence,
reduced to elements of form. (Mondrian 1987: 372)
In the 1908 tree painting The Blue Tree the tension between the
centrifugal flowering of the branches of the tree and the centripetal
pull of the central trunk is a balance that constructs the definite and
static form. In an article of 1966 'A Tulip with White Leaves', Sylvester
says that The Blue Tree 1908 demonstrates the urgency of growth and
likens its spreading to a shellburst (1997: 132-36). However, in
Flowering Apple The 1912 there is a dynamic equilibrium between the
convex and the concave, and we see a first hint of the later grids in the
tensing of some of the peripheral curves into straight horizontal and
vertical lines. What is most striking about Flowering Apple Tree 1912 is
that, despite a residual symmetry, the form of the tree is dissolved into
a pattern of lines that spreads evenly right across the canvas, and
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which denotes a general vitality rather than an individual existence.
In Mondrian's subsequent series Pier and Ocean and the 'plus-minus'
compositions of 1914-17, some of which, like Composition in Line and
Colour (Windmill) 1913 are explicitly and concretely entitled as "in line
and colour" or "with colour planes", the grid pattern of lines becomes
more obvious. In an essay of 1966, Sylvester wryly notes that an
inward concentration persists in the seascapes as the ocean radiates
from the vertical focus of a man-made projection, the pier (1997: 133).
While this pictorial concentration effectively means that, as Sylvester
puts it, "The ocean is not oceanic, consuming, illimitable", there is in
fact no actual convergence on the pier. In Pier and Ocean 1914 or
Composition No. 10 (Pier and Ocean) 1915 (fig. 3.3) for example, the
ocean radiates from the pier only to be checked by an enclosing ova1.11
The ebb and flow of the ocean is rendered in the pattern of pluses and
minuses that set up a tension between centripetal and centrifugal
forces that defies convergence, and the ocean shimmers across the
canvas. Only two years later, in Composition in Lines (Black and White)
1916-17 (fig. 3.5), Mondrian eliminates both the pier and the framing
oval line to create a shot of short vertical and horizontal lines where
there are no contours, where particularity is abolished, and where only
rhythm remains.
ji The oval or circular 'frame' of the ocean in these paintings is not unlike the
circles that Bacon uses to emphasis details of his studies, as seen for instance
in, Three Studies of Figures on Beds 1972. Bacon was interested in X-ray images
and the circles function similarly in that they are close-ups which isolate the
image, or part of the image, from its space/time context. Mondrian's oceans
could similarly be read as a drop of the ocean or as close-up images that
distort the narrative frame of representational space.
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MONDRIAN
Sylvester is an astute critic of Mondrian, and I agree with much of
his analysis, not least because of his difference with Greenberg over
whether Mondrian deals in shape or line. (Sylvester identifies the move
from shape to line and thus to the open spaces of abstraction;
Greenberg stays with shape.) However, I cannot agree with Sylvester's
assessment that "In Mondrian figuration is equated with the
centripetal, non-figuration with the centrifugal" (1997: 133). Sylvester
maps these forces onto symmetry, seeing the figurative work—flowers,
trees and the earlier seascapes—as symmetrical and the later grid work
as non-symmetrical. However, as is clear from Mondrian's own
writing, equilibrium is not a case of pictorial balance, but of intensity
and the release of rhythm. What is important is not the move from the
figurative and lines of nature to the non-figurative and lines "not
matched in nature, lines proper to art", but the move from
representation to abstraction; from the static equilibrium of particular
form and the representational line, to dynamic equilibrium and the
abstract musical line. The difference is precisely that while static
equilibrium is defined, dynamic equilibrium opens onto the virtual
rhythms of movement and change.
Where I think that Sylvester is right is in seeing that the contained
energy of the "palpable oneness of the solitary flower or tower" in
Mondrian's figurative work gives way to the "subliminal oneness of a
vivid equilibrium" in the Composition work (Sylvester 1997: 136). I
disagree however that that the 'oneness' of equilibrium implies a
Modernist attachment to what is 'one with' or 'proper to art', as
Sylvester suggests. We have here two very different models of oneness:
the oneness of static unity and form, such as in Mondrian's
chrysanthemums where energy and growth is checked by an enclosing
centripetal force; and the complex oneness of a rhythmic and virtual
multiplicity where the ocean or the composition is never still and never
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defined. 12 I want to argue that the very indefmition of the ocean is real
but virtual; it is a virtual multiplicity that works in the smooth space
effected by the actual but abstract lines of the composition. Here the
ocean is truly oceanic because it becomes acentred and without focus:
a composition, not a form. As we shall see more explicitly with regard
to Mondrian's grids, the "vivid equilibrium" of the virtual multiplicity
is far from being a "subliminal oneness", it is in fact more than
palpable (in the sense of being seen and thought). Like the emotion in
music, this vivacity acts directly on the nervous system and 'hits you in
the guts'; and thus it works as a disruptive, imaginary space, and an
ontological transformation which challenges the tradition of painting
with a new reality.
This new reality is signalled in what Sylvester calls Mondrian's
"general revulsion against green and growth", but while Sylvester sees
Mondrian replace the representational line that traces the growth of a
tree in space with the straight lines that are proper to art, I propose
that, in a move that takes him from particularity and the lived to the
general, Mondrian is experimenting with a vitalist notion of life and of
nature (Sylvester 1997: 133-34). This conception of life resonates with
that of Deleuze, for whom life is—and here I use Daniel Smith's
succinct phrase—"an impersonal and nonorg-anic power that goes
12
Sylvester argues that the oneness of static equilibrium is compounded by
Mondrian's insistence on painting in the singular: one flower, one building,
one tree. There is some similarity here between Sylvester's critique of
Mondrian and his critique of Bacon. The solitary figure is discussed in
Sylvester's interview with Bacon in 1962 when Bacon makes the point that
the single figure, as isolated in an armature or floated on a colour field, avoids
the issue of narrative in the painting and concentrates the image (Sylvester
1975: 8-29).
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beyond any lived experience" (Smith's introduction to Deleuze 1993b:
xiv).
Reading life after Nietzsche's "will to power", Bergson's élan vital,
and the work on variation and selection in the evolutionary biology of
Darwin, in Essay Critical and Clinical (1993b) Deleuze develops a
concept of life where life is expressive rather than functional. In
explaining life in his introduction to that volume, Smith quotes
Deleuze's commentary on Charles Dicken's Our Mutual Friend where
the death of a rogue prompts Dickens to observe that "the spark of
life within him is curiously separable from himself now" (Dickens
1864-5: 503). Smith comments that,
The life of an individual has given way to an impersonal
and yet singular life that disengages a pure event freed
from the accidents of the inner and outer life, that is, from
the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. A homo
tantum . (Smith's introduction to Deleuze 1993b: xiii).13
The idea that in art the 'spark' or impetus of life (Bergson's elan
vital) is somehow felt rather than understood is not uncommon.
Sylvester admits that Mondrian's late work has, in natural light, a
physical resonance: "In front of picture after picture there was a sort
of draining, a giving up of self. The mind felt intent but empty and
unfocused. It was the body that was focused" (1997: 436). Such a
'spark' is also key to the 'totally physiological sensation' that., in Cinema
Deleuze associates with the sublime and which is described as
"shock" and as the "I FEEL" (Deleuze 1985: 158). A parallel sensation
13 See also: Deleuze 'Immanence: A Life ...' (1995).
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is identified by Bacon who strives to paint the immediate image that
impacts onto the nervous system (Sylvester 1975: 104). Does perhaps
Mondrian himself aim for the 'too much', that spark of the singular
that goes beyond the objectivity of natural appearance to impact on
the nervous system?
In his recent book Germinal Life, which centres on Deleuze's
homage to Bergson, Keith Anse11 Pearson summarizes this nonnatural, nonorganic, germinal life as the expression of an "infinite
substance", a force of life that accompanies but is not crossed by the
intervention of external factors (Anse11 Pearson 1999: 12). Read in
such a way, Mondrian's move to the abstract line is not a rejection of
nature but a decoding and deterritorialization of the body or object—
the flower, the tree, or the ocean. Expressive not functional, line not
shape; it renders the ocean oceanic.
Ansell Pearson is at pains to stress that non-organic life is not
opposed to but accompanies the organic in a double articulation that is
explained by Deleuze's introduction of "a 'musical' conception of
nature" (1999: 210-11; my note 8 above). Understanding nature as
musical or melodic allows Deleuze and Guattariin What is Philosophy? to
understand art and nature as analogous, and as combining two living
elements: "House and Universe, Heimfich and Unheimfich, territory and
deterritorialization, finite melodic compounds and the great infinite
plane of composition, the small and large refrain" (Deleuze and
Guattari 1991: 186). In Mondrian's grids we see art as a twin
movement of musical framing and unframing. The frame is not
coordinated, but a structure that joins and holds up "determinate
melodic cvmpounds" of line and colour. But, this framing, or
territorialization, does not just isolate the image as a complete picture,
but opens onto the complex "ymphonic plane of composition" (185). The
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MONDRIAN
"external envelope" of the frame is traversed by the line that Mondrian
forces beyond the frame—the infinite line—and the melodic
compound that echoes that tight structure is deframed, delimited and
taken apart by the line that leaves the canvas (187). The rigid
construction of framed compounds gives way to the symphonic
composition, and new affects are created, affects that work in the
abstract smooth space of deframing. Lines escape the closure of
punctual intersections. They combine, weave, play and dance to create
a cacophony of sound and space: "an event freed from the accidents
of the inner and outer life" and rendered visible in the double
articulation of (de)-formation and composition (Smith's introduction
in Deleuze 1993b: xiii).
Lines of Force
I ended Chapter Two with a short discussion of the diagram,
explaining it as a painterly concrete structure that sets up a virtual
topology. I read the diagram as an agent of deformation, as a
disruptive text that works against defined form, and that opens onto
the virtual (which I see as a zone of indefinition and as a Deleuzian
Event because it becomes an entity that maintains the compositional
animation of the virtual multiplicity). I mentioned that that double
structure is most clearly seen in the ascetic diagrams of Mondrian's
grids, and I now want to elaborate that point in order to examine what
is at stake in Deleuze's idea of the virtual as Event, and how it works.
Mondrian sets up a diagram using the formal opposition of strictly
vertical and horizontal lines, a grid described by Deleuze as not so
much a diagram as "a symbolic code" [un code gmbok'que] (1981a: 67).
On the one hand this grid seems to adhere to a fixed Euclidean
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MONDRIAN
geometry of point, line and shape, but when we look again we see
novel, vibratory and vertiginous spaces that resist closure and maintain
the animation of the virtual multiplicity. The tension is between an art
of representation and an art of expression—of song and sensation.
In keeping with his assessment of Modernism as a concern with
two-dimensional flatness, Greenberg conceives Mondrian's painting as
the construction of space and an art of shapes—there are blue
rectangles, red rectangles, yellow rectangles .... Sylvester disagrees
instead sees Mondrian's grids as a composition of lines. In an article
written in 1966 he observes that,
A Mondrian does not consist of blue rectangles and red
rectangles and yellow rectangles and white rectangles. It is
conceived—as is abundantly clear from the unfinished
canvases—in terms of lines—lines that can move with the
force of a thundarlap or the delicag of a cat. [my italics] (1997:
135)
For Sylvester a Mondrian involves lines that have force and delicacy;
lines that, as we shall see in Mondrian's last canvases, carry the buzz of
the city and the rhythms of jazz; lines that are musical; blazing lines
that destroy the precious space 'proper to art' and which instead of
referring to the point are defined only my the direction, speed and
texture of their movement.
So, shape or lines? I want to argue that it is precisely Mondrian's
strict adherence to the vertical and the horizontal shape or frame that
opens up the 'crack' that enables him to dislocate shaped space, and
from which the much more interesting "smooth space" of the
Composition series and the Boogie Woogie pictures emerges; paintings
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where the "utter abstractness" of the two-dimensional surface gives
way to canvases that vibrate and dance, that are animated and musical.
It is the musical conception of philosophy, one that he owes chiefly
to Bergson's conception of living beings as musical beings, that
Deleuze returns to time and time again, not least in What is Philosophy?
where, together with Guattari, he develops the idea of art as
composition touched on above (1991: 191). What is notable in this
musical conception, is the double articulation of the song where a rigid
framing opens onto, even allows, the soaring variation. Take the
example of the sonata Peleuze and Guattari cite Liszt), which is a
tightly structured and canonical form of theme and development
(1991: 190). But, those themes or compounds of sound presented in
the first movement explode into the variation of the second and third.
The musician finds an opening in the theme that gives way to a much
freer, deframed composition; the symphonic, the song, and the jazz
that Mondrian was so fond of. But, what does it take to make lines
sing? How does the double structure of the diagram work?
Deleuze describes the diagram in Mondrian as a "digital" code, but
as he explains here digital does not mean manual but numeral (1981:
67). Digits are discrete units in a differential relation; each unit is
distinctive but does not comprise a part or a greater whole." In
Mondrian's grids the vertical and horizontal lines remain discrete, they
14
Leibniz's interpretation of the murmuring of the sea, and the
differentiation of blue and yellow in the colour green also work as 'digital'
differential relations. In green, yellow and green remain distinct and yet are
obscure because they are not distinguished as separate parts. See: Deleuze
1968: 212-14. I discuss the differential relation in more detail in my chapter
on Klee, Chapter Five.
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never join up or change direction, never close on or determine a shape,
are never punctuated and never conjugate on a point. They do not
construct two-dimensional space. Using an image from Merleau-Ponty,
we might say that the lines function like the woof and warp of the
weave, simultaneous and successive but, unlike Merleau-Ponty's "a
certain red" which I discussed in Chapter Two, Mondrian's lines never
crystallize into a visible node but rush on weaving under and over each
other (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 132). They have expression but no
definition. They move with delicacy—in French doigte'—or full of
thun der.15
Under the asceticism of the straight line runs a scattered stream of
digits which you have to get over in order to make shape cohere (and
so see the canvas as a flat geometric composition, as Greenberg does,
for instance), while the squares jump or float over that 'chaos'. There is
a tension in the digital code between the structure and its destruction
as the binary explodes into the giddy multiplicity of counts, dots and
colours that vibrate in the indeterminate virtual depth of weaving lines.
It is a dance that dazzles and excites the eye; a dance that gives 'life' to
the movement of the free line and which functions as an Event in the
Deleuzian sense because it keeps "the infinite movement to which it
gives consistency" (1991: 156).
Mondrian's work is a double movement of framing and unframin&
construction and destruction. The frame—the vertical and the
horizontal form—is not so much coordinates as a structure which
joins and holds up the "determinate melodic compounds" of line and
15 The French offers an extra allusion here. As light touch', doigti is a play on
Medeau-Ponty's theorization of the free line (as in Klee's musing line) as
haptic rather than prosaic (1964: 183).
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MONDRIAN
colour—the right-angled intersections, and the red, blue, yellow
rectangles of Greenberg's conception. But, this framing, or in
Deleuzean terms "territorialization", does not isolate the image as a
complete and actualized picture, but opens onto the complex
"symphonic plane of composition"—onto infinite lines and the virtuality of
indefinite dimensions. The "external envelope" of the frame is
traversed by the line of variation, and the melodic compound of the
vertical and the horizontal is deframed and taken apart by the soaring
line that leaves the canvas (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 187). In the
move from shape to line, lines escape the closure of punctual
intersections to create a pictorial Event, a cacophony of visual noise
with novel intersections and lines that combine, weave, play, and
dance. New percepts, affects and sensations are created, ones that
work in the abstract vectorial space of destruction.
1921: Composition and the Destruction of Space
In keeping with Deleuze's own pragmatics, I intend to look at the
image itself, the image as a system of relationships between its
elements.' Certainly there is a rigid adherence to the vertical and the
horizontal that echoes the frame; Sylvester and Greenberg agree on
that, and despite Sylvester's emphasis on the line he reflects a
16 As I noted in my introduction, Deleuze calls his philosophy "pragmatics"
because, in defiance of philosophy as a system of beliefs or propositions, it is
not analytic or encyclopaedic, but aims to create new concepts and then to
ask what new thinking those concepts allow (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: xv).
Likewise, the affiliated pragmatics of art creates new percepts, affects and
sensations. This project is the focus of What is Philosop? and its "pedagogy of
the concept" (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 12).
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MONDRIAN
Modernist sentiment when he talks about Mondrian's lines being
proper to art: "... lines not matched in nature, lines proper to art, lines
echoing the bounding lines of the canvas itself" (1997: 134). Strictly
speaking though there is no frame to a Mondrian Composition, the
frame has been brought into the picture and been put to work. The
frame is a canonical form that holds up the melody of line and colour
but there is also a play of line that is far more complex, intersections
that are quite novel. There is both the creation of territory and the
movements of deterritorialization. There is certainly some confusion
about space. Even Greenberg has to admit that Mondrian produces "a
kind of illusion of a kind of third dimension" (Greenberg 1993: 90). It
seems that the picture is not so flat after all.
Take Covosition with Red, Yellow, Blue and Black 1921 (fig. 3.6).
Immediately the eye is drawn to the stark red square, to shape, and
indeed this geometric shape is framed by straight vertical and
horizontal black lines and secured by their intersection at the
coordinating zero point, the right-angle. And yet, those lines are not
contained by that stop, but go on. Nor are the lines cut off by the
outside frame of the canvas. Encouraged by the blocks of colour,
some travel on to the edge and beyond, others are cut short as if
suspended. Lines intersect but, unstoppable, do not halt. It is as if
Mondrian is painting a block of something much larger, something
perhaps infinite. It is as if the canvas is the broken middle of a neverending patchwork. Because of this, we have no idea of scale. Are the
distances between lines human, cosmic or indefinable? Do the lines
join to form two-dimensional shape, or remain one-dimensional? The
problems are posed, never resolved. Each line has its own direction.
Each is doggedly vertical; resolutely horizontal. But, are the lines flush
with the canvas or floating above? Are they flat or undulating?
Certainly they are in communication and yet they do not seem to
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coordinate. There is a deliberate composition of the lines; a coming
together or assemblage that makes the painting a composition and that
gives it its distinctive mood. There are connections, conjunctions and
disjunctions: connections, where there are relations and associations
between lines that cross or cut across each other; conjunctions, where
lines join, split or divide; and clisjunctions, where lines run parallel and
where each line is an exclusive drive to the infinite. These three
techniques of composition make the lines work to produce a particular
pattern and visual intensity and crack tht geometry and symmetry iDi
representation, creating quite a different space. 17
The vertical and horizontal grid repeats the line of the conventional
frame and echoes that rigid form of space where the line turns to
construct the plane. But it only echoes in order to mock and to crack.
The turn of the line does not open onto the neat two-dimensional
plane of Greenberg's "utter abstractness", nor is it restricted by the
picture's edge. Indeed the paintings are mounted on wood, as if on a
plinth and as if precisely to avoid the boxing of the canvas. The viewer
does not look into the frame, rather the painting extends into its
surroundings and the lines shoot out beyond the frame and into the
ether. The work does not admit the limitation of the plane, or
construct an artificial or complete representational space but remains
indefinite. Each digit remains discrete, and the work an open system.
Like Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the concept, each work has
components and is defined by them (1991: 15). It is a multiplicity and
an entity only in so far as it is an aggregate or "combination" [chiffre] of
17 See: Smith's introduction to Deleuze, Esserys Critical and Clinical (1993b).
Smith explains connection, conjunction and disjunction as "three types of
synthesis among singularities" (1993b: xxvii)
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elements (15). 18 Composition is never a complete synthesis. Sylvester
as much as admits this when he observes that "Mondrian wanted the
infinite, and shape is finite"; so Sylvester conceives Mondrian's work in
terms of lines—broken vectorial lines (Sylvester 1997: 135).
Instead of the ordered stability of geometric shapes, of intersecting
lines and coloured rectangles, we have the digital disequilibrium of
infinite, continuous lines. Instead of the representational model and its
dependence on a space—time that is dominated and framed by the
coordinating point, we have an expressionist model where a new space
or depth emerges in the process of destruction. This is in effect a
critique of the mechanistic model of space-expression and the
metaphysics of product and presence. It raises the question of a
metaphysics of process and an ontology that does not refer the line to
the point. If art is to contribute to that project it is, as Mondrian says,
"not the construction of space (form), but the destruction of Vce that
abstract art requires" [my italics] (Mondrian 1987: 385). The
destruction of space depends on the vectorial line, a line that opens up
the punctual system by inverting the dominance of point over line.
Rather than the submission of the line to the point that we see in
framed territorial structures, here the point submits to the line. So,
what about the free line? This is a line not effected by the point a line
that doesn't outline or shape, a line that doesn't conform to the simple
axes and that doesn't evolve from, or return to, the principle of the
point. What about the line that slips the frame to stand on its own, that
has rhythm and, to quote Sylvester, "the force of a thunderclap or the
delicacy of a cat" (1997: 135)?
18 See also the translators' note in the English edition of What is Philoso?
(1994) in which "figure" and "numeral" are offered as alternative translations
of chiffre (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: ix)
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If we focus on the free line in such paintings as Composition in Red,
Yellow, Blue and Black 1921 (fig. 3.6), we see that Mondrian frees the
line from the point and finds lines that are 'proper to art', not because
they conform to regulating norms, but because they are utterly
concrete. Mondrian's free lines neither take their conception of space
from the closed, arborescent system of representation, nor are limited
to the restrictive geometry of abstract formalism. Instead, Mondrian's
lines are abstract because they function within an 'open' rather than a
'closed' system, and point to a space of 'pure painting' that is beyond
the frame.
Composition and the Pure Landscape
Through the destruction of space, the diagram produces a new
model and a different reality. It produces affects, percepts and
sensations that are quite outside the reality of perception or opinion,
quite unliveable and in that sense an effect that is vertigo or
hallucination that refers only to the material of its execution. Rather
than the delirium of vision that Merleau-Ponty sees in painting, we
have the hallucinatory dance of the percept itself, rendered visible in
the matter of the canvas, and therefore immaterial. We can now
understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean when in What is
Philosophy? they define the event as immaterial; "The event is
immaterial, incorporeal, unlivable: pure reserve" (1991: 156).19 This new
reality does not depend on actualization but extracts new plastic
landscapes from the rigidity and neat convergence of the lived.
19 Deleuze and Guattari's capitalization of 'Event' in What is Philosophy? is
inconsistent. Here they use a capital and the lower case within the same
paragraph (1991: 156).
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It is Cezanne who, as we saw in Chapter Two, is so often quoted as
talking about "Man absent from but entirely within the landscape", as
a way of understanding how the painter, seeing 'in fascination', creates
a visible reality that usurps the structured distance of positivist
perception with the topological depth of delirious vision (Deleuze and
Guattari 1991: 169)." However, it is not Cezanne but Mondrian who,
for Deleuze and Guattari, is the artist of the pure landscape, "a pure,
absolutely deterritorialized landscape" (1980: 301). It is Mondrian who
makes the pure animation of the landscape visible and constructs a real
that is quite beyond the human, a real yet to come—an Event.
Here Deleuze and Guattari echo but rework Merleau-Ponty by
understanding the work of art, not as recreating the "delirium which is
vision itself" on the canvas and replicating the emergence of the
landscape from virtually visible to actual, but as preserving the delirium
of the virtual in the material—paint, colour, line—so that it is the
material itself that passes into sensation and which is expressive
(Merleau-Ponty 1964: 166). So we move from Merleau-Ponty, and
Cezanne being immersed in the landscape, to the landscape as a
percept and the painting as a site of the Event (Deleuze and Guattari
1991: 169). This is the landscape that is not measured, solid or fixed,
but the nomadic tract that is acentred and unlimited. It is "any-space-
20 Deleuze does not give a specific reference here. He may have Gasquet in
mind. Gasquet remembers Cezanne as saying that when he reads Lucretius
he feels as if he is "saturated by all the shades of the infinite" and merging
with the earth. As morning comes he withdraws his eyes from the earth,
gradually geological structures become clear, "red earth masses emerge from
an abyss" and he begins to distance himself from the landscape, "to see it"
(Gasquet 1921: 153-54).
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whatever" (Deleuze 1983: 111). Perhaps, the land as land(e)scape; as
ocean or as Sahara.21
Because, for Deleuze, it is not in the mechanism of perception but
in the material of painting that the virtual is found, the task of the artist
must be to experiment with that material. Far from liberating the
phantom of the virtual within the actual, art raises the actual to the
phantastic and works on the plane of composition. The modulation of
colour against colour, and the patterns and constellations of the virtual
world, are then not a style which supports and gives character to
vision, but an expressive material entity. This consistent virtual is real
without being actual. The phantom of the visible has cut its bond with
perception and has become "inverse", and the work of art stands up
by itself with its own logic of sensation. This is why, while both
Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze talk about painting in terms of becoming,
Merleau-Ponty says that "any theory of painting is a metaphysics",
while for Deleuze painting is a materialism of the virtual, and its
theorisation an ontology of the event (Ansell Pearson 2000: 2).
The deterritorialized zone, of the landscape or composition, is
necessarily destratified. It is diagrammatic and functions as what in A
Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari call the "abstract machine"
(1980: 141). The work of the abstract machine is not the hylomorphic
action or mechanism of imposing form on matter, but the movement
of matter itself. Hence its abstraction. However, as we see in the pure
line and colour of Mondrian, matter is not an undifferentiated inert
mass or an amorphous chaos, neither a "chaotic white night or an
undifferentiated black night" but an explosion of digital movement
and change (70). If we think of a Mondrian canvas as an abstract
21 On the "Sahara" see: Chapter Two note 10, above. See also Deleuze 1981:
65 and Sylvester 1975: 56.
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machine that works diagrammatically, we can see that there is no
substance (formed matter) and no form of expression or form of
content, just the movement of the discrete elements of matter. These
elements—colour and line—operate as nothing but function and
matter, matter being a substance that is physically unformed, and
function being an expression not yet serniotically formed. Deleuze and
Guattari can then say that, "A diagram has neither substance or form,
content or expression", but is "pure Matter-Function" (141).
This makes sense in the light of the fact that Deleuze takes up
Bergson's conception of matter as energy and light, and, when we look
at how light and colour work, it is clear that matter is a differentiated
multiplicity, and not inert or a chaos. Indeed, the movement of matter
operates according to certain rules and those rules work to the logic of
the differential, a logic that distinguishes the diagram as a complexity
governed by rules of self-organization and inflection, rather than a
chaos. As Deleuze and Guattazi zeraind us in A Thousand %Atm it
diagram is not random but, because it is a zone of deterritorialization
with its own rules of "plan(n)ing" (1980: 70). The diagram shows up
this movement of matter, and it is this virtual materialism that is seen
in Mondrian's destruction of space. The virtual is a dazzling, dizzying
plane of patterns and rhythm.
22 Mondrian's experiments with the rigid diagram are continued in the work
of Bridget Riley. Riley literally makes a diagram by mapping out her work on
graph paper. Her absolute precision produces the most dazzling spaces,
spaces that are not chaotic but which form regular patterns; waves, vortexes,
lines that pleat .... These rhythms strangely echo the patterns of chaos found
in the Mandelbrot set, in the flow of viscous fluids, or in the strange chaotic
harmonies that result when different rhythms (radio frequencies or planetary
orbits) collide. See: James Gleik Chaos (1988), which includes computer
generated illustrations of these 'chaotic' patterns.
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1937: Composition and the Phantastic Space of the
Event.
The destruction of space is particularly obvious in the last of
Mondrian's Compositions, such as Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue
1937-42 (fig. 3.7), where the grids are predominantly black and white.
The paring down of the picture to a linear grid, with peripheral patches
of colour, serves to emphasize the painting as a composition of broken
lines. Indeed, as Mondrian's series of Compositions develops, even the
coloured shapes begin to be reduced to lines; short and straight; red,
blue, and yellow lines are dotted about; lines which perhaps, as
Sylvester suggests, herald the broken, fragmented lines of Mondrian's
last work, the Boogie IFoogie jazz variations; lines which, freed from the
point, have an autonomy which makes them "less referential, more and
more musical" (1997: 433).
The non-symmetrical and irregular metre creates a quite
hallucinatory effect of jumpy lines and there is an unsettling staccato
that breaks up the lines within the picture. Connections between the
lines are hesitant and that vibration produces a spark—the grey
point—that takes over the inbetween. Grey dots flash, filling the
interval, an interval that is then not a punctuation or an abyssal gap,
but bursting with life. Like the musical fermata, this crack is a pregnant
23 Dee Reynolds recognizes this movement as the lines themselves appearing
to expand and dilate. She calls them "optical ffickers" (Reynolds 1995: 183).
The tumultuous grey point of indetermination also occurs in Klee as the
pictorial symbol of the non-concept, a mathematical point of non-opposition
between dimensions. Both black and white but neither, it is the point where
all colours exist simultaneously. (Klee 1956: 3). I discuss the 'chaos' of the
grey point in Chapter Five.
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pause, a vibratory quietude that erupts into a blazing tumult.' The
effect is quite beyond the vertical and the horizontal, but it is an
expression that emerges from that functional norm.
The painting is not fixed and there is no determined or
determinable appearance, each line is a vector dancing across an
ambiguous, fluid space of indefinite dimensions. Sylvester calls it "an
illusory space", like Greenberg before him, but with Merleau-Ponty in
mind, I prefer to think of it as a phantastic space, or as Reynolds does,
"imaginary space" (Sylvester 1997: 436; Reynolds 1995: 23). In any
case it is a topological space which extends above, below and beyond
the canvas. Shallow, and of infinite depth; it is the Deleuzian "anyspace-whatever" [espace quelconque] (Deleuze 1983: 111-122). It operates
on the plane of composition and the work is a gathering together, even
a phantasmagoria (from Greek phantazein: to gather together, to make
visible, to see and not to recognize). These weaving, hovering,
undulating, animate lines work in indefinite space to create a fantastic
pictorial other dimension and give an indefinite depth to the work
which vibrates between one, two and three dimensions ... or is it
more? In the Composition series of the 1920s, and the subsequent New
York C40 and Boogie Woogie paintings, there is a coexistence of multiple
dimensions where the line is "space-giving" not "space (form)dividing", "space determination" not "space expression"—Nieuwe
Bee/ding or Neo-Plastic art.
There seems to be a certain irony in Mondrian's rigid deployment
of the vertical and the horizontal line freeing the line from the
convergent point. But in fact, Deleuze and Guattari's own definition of
24 Thanks go to Dr. Rachel Jones (University of Dundee) for suggesting the
image of the fermata.
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the broken middle, or line-block, is that it "no longer has vertical and
horizontal coordinates" but is non-pulsed, and they evoke the diagonal
as a "line of separation" which transverses and thwarts localizable
connections and submission to the point. (1980: 296, 186).
Compositional and choreographical, rather than mechanically
geometric, the space in these paintings emerges from the movement of
the line. The lines deviate, go off the point. They are a composition, a
creation and a dance. The system functions inventively and the
referential and reverential dead line of punctuality is usurped by
variation and the abstract and active musical line, a vector which can
be both the mathematical diagonal process and the more literal oblique
line.
By insisting so rigidly on the vertical and the horizontal, Mondrian
implicitly produces the diagonal, an undrawn and perhaps even
unsought line of separation, that cut across the grid and which further
disrupts any apparent coordination. This is evident in the virtual
diagonal that, prompted by the vertical and the horizontal lines, runs
obliquely across the canvas, and in the more complex diagonal process
which produces an nth variation and which we see in the dazzling
intersections of Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue 1937-42 (fig. 3.7).
Both defy submission to the point. Both are a transversal movement
virtual to the apparent calm of the vertical and horizontal axis.
The diagonal is a Deleuzean "dynamic axis", or line of flight [figne de
fuite], a line which belongs only to the interval or 'crack' between the
vertical and the horizontal (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 298, 546 note
89). The diagonal is not an individuation within pictorial norms but a
singularity quite beyond that punctuality, and, I suggest, a 'crack' that
pushes our conceptualization of the picture beyond its regulating
norms. We see this in Mondtian's compositions, and indeed it is to
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Mondrian that Deleuze and Guattari turn to as an example of how the
frame self-destructs and the line becomes mobile.
They recognize yet another stage in the move to pure colour and
line in the lozenge paintings where Mondrian finally releases the
diagonal by the simple inversion of the square, producing in the
lozenge that Deleuze and Guattari call Mondrian's "perfect square"
(305). Mondrian's own analysis is that he sets up a balance between
opposites—the vertical and the horizontal—to create an eqthribnurr2
and to destroy by neutralisation through mutual opposition; "by
plastically expressing relationshOs which change each opposite into the
other" (Mondrian 1987: 40). He aims to counteract conceptual form
and to create what Reynolds calls a "living rhythm" (Reynolds 1995:
178).
In order to resist any sense that this diagonal is a superficial optical
illusion, Reynolds insists that it is a pictorial "imaginary space". As she
argues, here in reference to Kandinsky, the pictorial imaginary space
perverts space—time and is not representational. Seeing the picture
plane vibrate, she perceptively argues that it must be a system not a
structure, and she describes the rhythm that is set up between the
pictorial and the imaginary space in terms of the Peircean diagram. In a
section headed 'Imagining the Future' she explains that what is crucial
to the diagram is that it is a system of relationships that provokes new
way of thinking, and that new reality is derived from the sensory (or
more accurately a "sensory unreality") and the material, and not from
abstract and conceptual thought (Reynolds 1995: 3 note 5, 216). The
painting, she says, "is not 'imaginary' unless it negates itself by
exceeding its own powers of presentation, suggesting more that it can
explain or make visible" (3). So though with her Kantian background
Reynolds aligns the work of imaginary space with the experience of the
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sublime and a positive excess to conceptual definition, and although
she thus keeps hold of the role of the viewer and a productive
"imagining activity", it is clear that it is the painting itself that is
disruptive and which functions, not as "an object of reference" but as
"an object of imaginary transformation" (8, 3).
In identifying the work of art as an "event" in the sense that it goes
beyond the power of conceptual presentation, Reynolds attempts to
escape both the notion of art as a recognizable object and the
Modernist ideal of self-referentiality (Reynolds 1995: 23). Her concept
of event is therefore close to the Deleuzian Event as set out in What is
Philosophy? because it remains an open system that disrupts the
standard language. According to Reynolds, the content of the painting
"consists, not in ideas which can be defined in conceptual terms, but
rather in an event" (my italics) (23). She understands the painting itself
as a stimulus to imaginary activity, and "imaginary space" as an effect
of the painting that, because it fissures the coherence of the work, goes
beyond definition and the signifying process (23). In hanging onto the
idea that the painting undergoes an ontological transformation by
being experienced as a site of imaginary space Reynolds limits the task
of painting to the disruption and provocation of thought, and does not
push the painting itself as a production and invention of new
sensations.25 However when it comes to Mondrian, she does
25 Reynold's works through Theodor Lipp's theory of Einfithlung to develop
her notion of imagining activity as a relation of empathy with the object of
perception. Like the painter's fascination and the immersion in the visible
that Merleau-Ponty talks about in his 'Eye and Mind' essay, Lipp's notion of
Einflihlung touches the quality of colour, its "dynamic potential" (Kraft) and
mood (Stimmung), and like Cezanne he describes that energy as a direct
experience (unmittelhar) belonging to the colour itself Reynold's chooses to
use Lipp because he understands Einfalung as a pleasurable aesthetic
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acknowledge Mondrian's view that his painting was a preparation for a
Neo-plastic architecture—"we will live in realised art"—as a Utopian
vision, and she goes on to recognize that "the crucial issue for
Mondrian's aesthetic, as for Kandinsky's, is the ontological status of
the pictorial space" (Mondrian 1987: 340, 344; Reynolds 1995: 157).
Because the lines in Mondrian's grids are active rather than ordered,
they raise the question of the ontological status of the painting, and
that of the logic of the line when it is pushed beyond representational
structure. Mondrian achieves his equilibrium not by flattening, fixing
and subduing the vertical and the horizontal, but by syncopation,
modulation and variation; that is by rhythm and movement and a
refusal of the fixed opposition of the punctual system. The "network
of intersecting rhythms" that Reynolds sees in Kandinsky is equally
appropriate to Mondrian (1995: 139). By developing a multilinearity in
which the horizontal and vertical lines interweave and defy closure,
Mondrian goes further than juxtaposing opposites within a system and
goes on to create the counter-punctual and diagonal event of the
phantastic, imaginary space. These intersecting rhythms are clearly seen
in Mondrian's New York City series where blue, red and yellow lines
race across the canvas and off in a multi-layered grid of straight lines,
like a street map of New York, or the trails of car lights in a
photograph of traffic at night. Blazing lines hurtling across the city.
contemplation, and she contrasts this with the pain entailed in Kant's
experience of the sublime (22). However, I think that she could have made
her point about the empathetic relation with the work of art as a way of
enacting pictorial rhythms and experiencing imaginary space equally well
through Merleau-Ponty.
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MONDRIAN
1941: New York and the Rhythms of Jazz.
The lines of Mondrian's New York City 1941 (fig. 3.8) clearly do not
represent but construct a new type of reality, a hallucinatory reality of
pure sensation. The city is distinguished by the dynamic of the lines: by
movement and rest, speed and slowness, by lines of force or delicacy
of a cat". Its reality is not a spatio—temporal relation but involves
multiplicity, and its identity is an assemblage or composition of its
material elements and their differential speeds. The composition is
consistent but never stilled and never silent. It is material and energic.
More a commotion than a chaos. Never a state of affairs. This is
exactly what Deleuze and Guattari call the Event; a virtual that has
become consistent but which is distinct from the actual because it
keeps "the infinite movement to which it gives consistency" (Deleuze
and Guattari1991: 156). It has absolute quiddity as a singular entity that
refers only to the intensity of matter and movement, and which
therefore has no representational identity. Its expression and content
are an effect of that diagrammatic conjunction.
As we see, in painting the diagram is "an operative composition"
rensemble oiratoird and produces new percepts, affects and sensations
(Deleuze 1981: 66). This is New York City 1941. It is a name that
designates a colour or intensity (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 142). Like
Virginia Woolf's London landscape, which Deleuze and Guattari
discuss in the plateau '1730: Becoming-intense ...' it is vertiginous but
absolutely specific, a haecceity. "A haecceity has neither beginning nor
end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of
points, only of lines" (1980: 263).
London or New York, the landscape has its own inimitable style.
Fog or glare. The rush of tail-lights, or the buzz of the crowd. New
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MONDRIAN
York COI has its own distinctive rhythms. What we see in the
commotion of colouring lines is not the irregularity of chaos but a
coherent behaviour from which a certain content and expression are
extracted. A certain rush. Like turbulence. There is a parallel here
between the turbulence which Mondrian effects and the science of
non-linear thermodynamics as set out in the work of Gleik (1988), and
Prigogine and Stengers (1979), scientists who rework chaos as a selforganizing complexity.
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari reference Gleik whose
book Chaos (1988) includes a useful discussion of turbulence (Deleuze
and Guattari 1991: 156 notes 14 and 16: Gleik 1988: 121-25).
Turbulence is also discussed by Prigogine and Stengers in Order out of
Chaos, surely work known to Deleuze and Guattari who reference their
later work (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 118 note 1). Both Gleik, and
Pigogine and Stengers argue that even the predictable behaviour of
stable systems can fluctuate (Prigogine and Stengers 1979: 110 '15,
167). The, so called, stationary state is not inert but may react to
thermodynamic forces acting on the system or to fluctuation produced
by the system or its environment. This instability may then be
amplified and cause the system to become far from equilibrium.
Indeed the fluctuations may affect the entire system and push it into a
chaotic state where the linear is exceeded by a qualitatively quite
different, new reality, the non-linear, and quite different, turbulent,
behaviours ensue.
As Prigogine and Stengers are quick to point out, although these
new behaviours appear to be chaotic on the human or macroscopic
level, they are in fact highly organized. Patterns and rhythms emerge:
waves, convection currents, and oscillations; all of which involve
multiple space—time scales and owes more to fluid dynamics than the
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MONDRIAN
science of solids. Their behaviour corresponds to that of fluid systems,
like light, energy and indeed matter itself.
This move to turbulence is surely not unlike the delirious
movement of the new reality that Mondrian effects when he strains the
vertical and the horizontal axis. The formal geometry breaks and gives
way to the explosive destruction of space. Patterns dissipate across the
canvas and waves of turbulent undulating lines speed on. There is the
distinctive but indecisive murmur of the freeway, and the dissonant
buzz of the city. Mondrian composes the New York Go pieces by
pinning coloured strips of paper to the canvas; strips that still adhere
to the unfinished New York Go II (unfinished) c.1942 and New York
City III c.1942, studies in oil and tape. The effect of the irregular beat
and complex weave create an unfathomable, orgiastic depth, and when
seen against the neutral bare beige canvas the lines appear like a mesh
curtain or web of strings hanging in cosmic space. The real
disintegrates before our eyes and, like the noise of city traffic, distance
and direction are distinct but obscurely indefinite.
By taking that most basic of geometrical forms, the straight line,
towards infinity and fracturing the rigid two-dimensional plane,
Mondrian destroys the condition of the picture and subordinates the
point to the line. His radical linearity takes punctual geometry to
breaking point as the insistence on the straight and infinite line,
without intersection or deviation, inevitably defies the flatness of
abstraction. Freed from its submission to the point, the line has no
measure only direction, speed and slowness, force and delicacy. Who
can tell in what dimension it moves? Without defining points the
depth and distances in this open weave of lines are imperceptible, they
could be cosmic or minute—or variable. It seems that when taken to
its limit the punctual system is fractured and goes into reverse
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MONDRIAN
[renversed. As Deleuze and Guattari maintain, "One elaborates a
punctual system or a didactic system, but with the aim of making it
snap, or sending a tremor through it" (1980: 295). This is surely
Mondrian's great achievement: the destruction of space. But, he goes
on to create even more daring work, work that not only dazzles the eye
but which hits the nervous system and which physically hurts—like
jazz.
The fragmentation of the line into line-blocks, in the Boogie Woogie
paintings, Broachvg Boogie Woogie 1942-3 and Victog Boogie-Woogie
1943 14 (unfinished) (fig. 3.9) is the final breakthrough to painting a
multiplicity that is open to myriad compositions. If jazz is, as Sylvester
defines it, "a form of music in which every piece is a variation", then
this is jazz (1997: 435). Each painting is an ensemble or set of
variations, an improvisation worked out using coloured confetti so that
the piece is literally provisional, transferable and infinitely variable, in
process. Plastic art. Paper art. It is perhaps not accidental that Victog
Boogie-Woogie 1943 11 (unfinished) remains exactly that, interrupted
and unfinished.
The perfect square of the lozenge likewise sets up the painting as
somehow on the cusp of change, as if tradition has been spun round
and all sense of perspective lost as if it is in suspension, waiting to be
whirled round again. But, it is not just the experimental state of the
work or the oblique-angled canvas that is bewildering, the lines
themselves also escape, even fly from, definition. In the Boogie Woogie
paintings the line is a chain of colour-blocks that compose a complex
line and a complex pattern. It is as if the dazzling interval or point that
we see in the Composition series has exploded into a kaleidoscope of
coloured pieces. What was fluid is now gaseous. The line is already a
broken line, made up of fragment, tiny coloured blocks. It never
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MONDRIAN
existed as a whole measured by its distance between points, but is
always already a series of non-localizable blocks. Like musical notes.
Like digits. Any definition is tested to the limit; where are the
coordinates, where are the right-angles that open onto the plane,
where is the beginning and the end?
Mondrian has pushed the geometry of the line beyond the
threshold of stability and, far from equilibrium, the closed system
tremors and the interplay between the vertical and the horizontal
bursts into infinite lines and indefinite depths. Absolutely unregulated.
Utterly abstract. The work of art exists in itself. The blazing line is
always becoming, fragmenting and (re)assembling. It is molecular and
it proliferates, each colour-point the point of a novel intersection and a
new departure; but the intensity of the point is maintained in the line,
because "it is now the point that has become subordinated to the line,
the point now marks the proliferation of the line, or its sudden
deviation, its acceleration, its slowdown, its furore, its agony" (1980:
297). It has become abstract, like Deleuze and Guattari's "line of
flight": "the line has become abstract, truly abstract and mutant, a
visual block: and under these conditions the point assumes creative
functions again, as a colour-point, or line-point" (298).
Boogie Woogie is jazz; non-pulsed time and a beat–off-beat
rhythm. Victog Boogie-Woogie—this is 1944 and Mondrian had left
Holland, and Europe on the brink of war, for London and then New
York in 1937—is taking a walk, dancing, dreaming. This is life.
Dancing a Boogie Woogie the sorcerer Mondrian is testing the system
and breaking away; he is experimenting and inventing, taking the line
and making it dance. He is extracting the event of painting. To boogiewoogie, to dance ... devilishly good.
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POLLOCK
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer
a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or
any end He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a
fine compliment.
Jackson Pollock, New Yorker 1950 (O'Connor 1967: 51)
'Iridescent Chaos'
No beginning and no end. This is indeed a fine compliment
because it acknowledges the abstract lines and the unframed smooth
spaces of Jackson Pollock's painting. The famous "all-over" canvases,
like Summertime (Number 9) 1948 (fig. 4.1), Lavender Mist (Number 1)
1950 and Blue Poles (Number 11) 1952 (fig. 4.2), are a tumult of colour
and line that resists the confinement of either an external frame or
internal reference points. Pollock's line is the abstract line, not the line
that runs from point to point but the transversal line that run between
[entre] points and that defies the contour. It is described by Deleuze
variously: in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation it is gothic [«kgne
gothique»] and northern [sOtentrionale] (1981a: 68); in The Fold Leibniz
and the Baroque it is Baroque and "the line with infinite inflection"
(1993a: 27); and in A Thousand Plateaus the abstract line is defined with
a specific reference to Michael Fried's assessment of Pollock's work
as:
multidirectional, with neither inside nor outside, form nor
background, delimiting nothing, describing no contour,
passing between spots or points, filling a smooth space,
stirring up a close-lying haptic visual matter that "both
invites the act of seeing on the part of the spectator yet
gives his eye nowhere to rest once and for all," (Three
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POLLOCK
American Painters [Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum,
1965], p. 14]. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 499 note 38)
Here Deleuze and Guattari make three key observations about the
work: the characteristics of the abstract line are seen as "describing no
contour", the smooth space is understood as "haptic visual matter"
and as disorientating the eye of the spectator. With these points in
mind, my own reading of Pollock's work is that, in the move to
manual art or action art, it takes the ontology of painting beyond
Mondrian's destruction of space, and confronts the material, energic
element of painting as an event. In Pollock painting becomes an art of
expressive matter, which in performance produces a form of
expression 'without image'—the Event. What we find in the work are
the conditions that make that Event possible: the return to the manual,
and the chaotic multiplicity of, what Deleuze calls, "stroke-lines" [traitbgne] and "colour-patches" Vache-couleurj and their free correlation
(Deleuze 1981a: 68).
Like Mondrian, Pollock executes an optical catastrophe and, like
Mondrian, his colour and line function as a diagram, an operative
group of traits and marks that works at the level of the material,
through the relation between elements. But whereas, in his grids,
Mondrian cracks the restrained digital diagram to effect a destruction
or dffbrmation of space, in Pollock the optical is overtaken by the
peculiar material and heterogeneous "abyss Or chaos" [l'abime ou le
chaos] of the abstract line, that is the line that does not contour or
delimit (Deleuze 1981a: 68). This produces the unsettling visual impact
of Pollock's work mentioned by Fried, and the dazzling, disorienting
effect that I first identified in Mondrian's late work, the Boogie Woogie
paintings, where the line explodes into molecular points and vibrates
with the blazing rhythms of jazz (Fried 1965). What I argue here is that
this chaotic fragmentation is more than destruction or deformation
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POLLOCK
[olformation]; it is a dissolution or decomposition of form and a
movement of counter-actualization. This dissolutive chaos does not
however mean dereliction but the different, abstract process of
formation "without image", something made clear by Guattari in his
own study of a creative aesthetic paradigm Cbaosmosis (1992) where he
coins the term chaosmosis, a word that puts an affirmative spin on
chaos by embracing the notion of an event-centred and "processual
creativity", and of a "machinic autopoiesis" (Guattari 1992: 7,13).
In Chaosmosis (1992) Guattari reworks the autopoietic as a machinic
assemblage that synthesises heterogeneous elements and that is open
to virtual change, hence the term "machinic autopoiesis". In Germinal
Life (1999) Ansell Pearson usefully explains Guattari's development of
"machinic autopoiesis" as a "machinic heterogenesis" (Ansell Pearson
1999: 168-170). This is to distinguish the autopoietic entity that
functions as a unitary, individuated and closed system of selforganization, from the open and creative evolution or autogenesis that
Guattari demands of the aesthetic paradigm.'
Guattari conceives the diagram as an autopoietic machine, a
development of Peirce's own description of the diagram as an "icon of
relation" (1992: 44). This understanding of the diagram as autopoietic
requires it to maintain a "functional and material consistency", while
being machinic demands that it be an open system in which
components are mobile and can move in and
•
out, make novel
1 "Autopoiesis," Guattari says, "deserves to be rethought in terms of
evolutionary, collective entities, which maintain diverse types of relations of
alterity, rather than being implacably dosed in on themselves" (1992: 39-40).
To explain this, Guattari gives the example of a wall (42). A heap of stones is
a collection of parts, but a wall is a heterogeneous collective entity without a
delimited unitary individuation. The wall is a molecular construct that
depends on the tensions between inside and outside, and left and right.
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POLLOCK
connections or mutate, thus "freeing it from an identity locked into
simple structural relations" (44). Guattari's rethinking of the diagram
refines the notion of the diagram as an abstract machine delineated in
A Thousand Plateaus by emphasising that it is not only an operative that
constructs a new type of reality free from the constraints of punctual
identity, but a system concerned with the molecular construction of
material composition and its virtual tensions, and which undermines
individuated structural relations (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 142). He
calls it a "machinic heterogenesis" (1992: 33-57).
The burst of colour and line that we see in Pollock's canvases is,
similarly, not just operative but cataclysmic. In his own short
discussion of Pollock in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981a)
Deleuze talks about the painting becoming a unity of catastrophe and
diagram, "une peinturr-catastrophe et une peinture-diagrammei' (1981a: 68).
Key to this conjunction of catastrophe and the diagram is the notion
of counter-actualization. Pollock's work is a fine example of painting
that works as a mode of counter-actualization because it stays with the
diagram and works only as a composition—as a performative whirl of
colour and line. In the catastrophe the landscape of painting is radically
changed; the framework of the canvas 'proper to art' is blown apart
and with it the order of space crucial to actual formation; nothing is
delimited and the eye has nowhere to rest. Pollock's lines and splodges,
strokes and marks are abstract lines that work on the plane of
composition. Defined by their free movement they function like
gaseous particles, molecular units that erupt as distinctive "linear
features" [kniaments] and "fragments" [granulations] distributed across
the smooth spaces of the pure landscape—the ocean or the West—a
distribution with "no beginning and no end", and where actualization
is actively resisted because the painting stays with the free movement
and change of the diagram (Deleuze 1981a: 68).
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POLLOCK
This radical catastrophe moves painting beyond Merleau-Ponty's
problematic of the depth of the visible, and takes the question of the
virtual from that concern with perception and the optical to the
question of the manual and the vitality of matter and material. But this
is not just a problem of rendering visible the virtual composition
immanent to the actual—as in the optical catastrophe of dazzle—but
of working on the level or plane of composition, and therefore of
extracting a rather different virtual. This is the virtual that Deleuze and
Guattari identify in Ir'hat is Philosophy? (1991) as distinct from the
actual, the virtual that is no longer chaotic but "that has become
consistent on the plane of immanence" (plane of composition) (1991:
156). Being distinct from the actual, the Event [Evenement] is a change
of state, another world (156 [147]). Deleuze and Guattari describe it as
a "completely different reality where we no longer have to search for
what takes place from one point to another, from one instant to
another, because virtuality goes beyond any possible functions" (157).
For Deleuze and Guattari, the identification of this distinctive virtual
marks the move to abstraction and he argues that while the Modem
renders visible or—in the light of his inversion of Merleau-Ponty's
reading of Cezanne—extracts the virtually visible, abstraction
discovers the vital rhythm of matter and material (68). Hence his
concept of a virtual, and vital materialism.
In the plateau 'The Geology of Morals', in A Thousand Plateaus
(1980), Deleuze and Guattari set out a theory of organization—they
call it "coding" or "territorialization"—based on the work of Danish
Spinozist geologist Louis Hjelmslev (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 40—
45). This is a liquid system, which maps onto the model of the virtual—
actual circuit. The importance of this model is that it breaks down the
duality of content and expression, form and substance that are
characteristic of systems of representation in favour of flows of matter.
Instead of the top down imposition of form on matter, Deleuze and
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POLLOCK
Guattari offer a geological model of sedimentation that sees flows of
matter thickening into stable strata, a movement from a 'chaotic'
virtual to the actual.
This model sets up a complex net of matter, content and
expression, form and substance whereby, in a double articulation of
sedimentation and folding, order and stable structures emerge. Briefly,
the distinction between the articulations is not between form and
substance, but between content and expression: a fluid process of
selection and ordering is the first articulation—the substance and form
of content; and in the second articulation—expression—structures and
compounds are established as intersections become stable. The
articulations are not separate; content is just as much substance as
content, and content just as much form as expression" (Deleuze and
Guattari 1980: 44). This geological model breaks down the dualities
content and expression, form and substance, and keeps hold of the
idea of organization as a material process. However, it is not a matter
of essentials, of solids and constants, but of spontaneity, fluidity and
movement, and of cracks, upheavals and tremors. Of action, and of
style.
Hjemslev's geological model prompts a theorization of the virtual—
actual circuit as a fluid system akin to geological sedimentation. For
example, the virtual—actual relation—as explored by Merleau-Ponty in
his commentary on the painter's vision as "fascination" in the "Eye and
Mind' essay—sees the actual landscape drawn out of an amorphous
virtual murmur of colour in a double articulation where content and
expression emerge together (Merleau-Ponty 1961: 167).
However, the explosion—the dissolution and decomposition of
form—that is the "all-over" canvas has a radical implication for the
status of the virtual. As we saw in the last chapter, Mondrian makes a
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POLLOCK
radical reversal of that movement of actualization in his Composition
series; thus effecting a counter-actualization. In a movement from
actual to virtual, he cracks the punctuality of the line to reveal the
dazzling smooth spaces of abstraction. He then goes on to work on
that plane, and to extract the virtual in the blazing abstract lines of the
Boogie-Woogie work, lines that, with their perpetual movement work
counter actualization. In this work there is no easy flow from the
virtual to the actual—as there is in Cezanne's middle period and
paintings such as Montagne Sainte-Victoire 1896 (fig. 2.1)—and no
closure or "territorialization". Instead it is the virtual that becomes an
entity, and which is in effect both content and expression.
Pollock continues that work of counter-actualization and, I suggest,
forces a change of state from the easy liquid flows of the virtual–actual
circuit to a different order of existence in the free movement and
gaseous state of the virtual that stands on its own as an Event on the
canvas. This is to enter the non-punctual world of the transversal and
the abstract line that is multidirectional, with neither inside or outside,
form or background, beginning or end.
Deleuze explores the gaseous state in Cinema 1 (1983), in reference
to Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov's technique of montage, but this
technique is not exclusive to the cinema (1983: 80-86). As I will argue
later in this chapter, I see the gaseous at work in Pollock. In Pollock, as
in Vertov, the image of liquid flows is inadequate. It is not an optical
movement that confronts us in Pollock, but the "material, energic
element" of movement (Deleuze 1983: 84). Deleuze sees this
decomposition as the extraction of particles of matter, and likens it to
the explosive texture of Seurat's pointilfiste painting (85). It is the
modulation and the "iridescent chaos" of the Cezannian world before
man (81). Pollock is certainly not concerned with optical construction,
such as the Cubist illusion of space, or the Cezannian depth of
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POLLOCK
visibility that I discussed in the light of Merleau-Ponty's concern with
the perceptual move from the virtual to the actual.
In the same way that Greenberg reads Mondrian as a quintessential
Modernist, he finds that in Pollock "a set of more or less familiar
conventions continues to operate" (Greenberg 1993: 110). He
understands Pollock as continuing the Cubist concern with an
illusionary optical space, and he judges the success of Pollock's work
by the "dramatic and pictorial unity" of the patterns of colour, shape
and line that he effects within that illusion of depth. In his opinion
Pollock's painting of 1941-46 continues the "ornamental patterns and
heavy, cursive lines" of Picasso's Late Cubism of the 1930s, and the
paintings of 1947-50 develop the facet-planes of Analytic Cubism,
typified by the mono-chromatic Cubism of Braque and Picasso (1910–
12): "The interstitial spots and areas left by Pollock's webs of paint
answers Picasso's and Braque's original facet planes, and create an
analogously ambiguous illusion of shallow depth" (110).
Greenberg's interpretation of Pollock sits in marked contrast with a
more radical reading which is informed by Deleuze and Guattari's
comments on Cezanne, an artist of "close vision–haptic space"—a world
before man (1980: 493). In my understanding of Pollock as a painter of
the pure landscape, I want to push the notion of the landscape further
than I did in the last chapter, where I explained it as an acentred,
unlimited smooth space. Here I explore the pure landscape as a "close
vision–haptic space" and argue that, whereas Mondrian plays with an
optical dffermation that opens onto smooth space, Pollock's insistence
on painting as a manual art—"action painting"—means the
catastrophe of the optical, and the landscape as an Event that is
inseparable from the movement, rhythms and textures of its material
genesis and composition.
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POLLOCK
Action Painting
In an article for Vogue in 1967, entitled 'Jackson Pollock:
"Inspiration, Vision, Intuitive Decision", Greenberg notes that
Pollock was not as interested in making theoretical points as Mondrian
was. He goes on to add that Pollock nevertheless did make theoretical
points, but in his art rather than in writing. for instance, the insight
that flowing paint held the surface better than the marked line or
contour, and that was a move away from "madeness" and the look of
the intended (Greenberg 1993: 248). Greenberg's recognition of
Pollock's art as painting that 'works' and that opens up theoretical
thinking—even perhaps to open up a new reality—points to the
intersection of theory and practice in "action painting".
Pollock experiments with the work of paint and explores just what
it is `to paint': he tries splashing and drizzling he puts the canvas on
the floor, horizontally; he plays with colour and line. He pours and
splatters, drips and spots, throws on sand and cigarette butts, makes
handprints and footprints. He dribbles chaotic images of lines and
daubs splodges of paint that spill out over the edge of the canvas; he
makes images that cavort and dance (Deleuze calls Pollock's "action
painting" «danse frenetique») (1981a: 69). They are indefinite and
orgiastic. Above all they are asignifying. There is no point in asking,
"What do they mean?". Meaning is not the issue, action is, and as such
Pollock's painting raises the question, "What can painting do?". This
question is one already posed by Pollock who was concerned whether
a painting worked or not In an interview of 1967 for Art in America,
his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, remembers that he would ask, "Does
it work?' Or looking at mine, he would comment, 'It works' or 'It
doesn't work'. He may have been the first artist to have used the word
'work' in that sense" (Freidman 1972: 87). The question of work is a
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POLLOCK
question of performance and of the material of paint as a matter of
expression.
The topology of Pollock's "all-over" work, such as Summertime
(Number 9') 1948 (fig. 4.1) or Number 30 [Autumn Rhythm] 1950, is far
from fixed, but it is not a primordial soup out of which some
homogeneous and meaningful image will be distilled or cut out—
pastoral scenes of summertime or autumn perhaps—but a
heterogeneous and multiple configuration of line and colour, the force
of which emerges in the 'colour' of its complex composition of
intersections and relations. There is a mess of lines and splatters,
shooting and swirling in a melee of colour. When Pollock paints he
selects colours, materials and implements with which to make a
network of lines, but instead of imposing an 'order' of intersections
and connections to fix a particular formed matter or invariable
'content' on the canvas, the network of lines remains in action. This is
Abstract Expressionism. There is no sedimentation and the content
remains a chaosmosis, processual and in-performance. Expression, or
suggestibility, is similarly elusive because the organization and
intersections of the canvas resist the formation of stable structures and
compounds, and the raw matter of paint is never articulated as a
defined functional structure. In Pollock we are always thrown back
onto the heterogeneous matter of paint; unformed, unorganized;
flowing, dripping, splattering paint. Not so much organization as
orgiastic, and such orgiastic chaos is not easy on the eye. Where to
begin, where to end? It defies a neat subject position and point of view
and presents no coherent object. Instead there is the indefinition of
the abstract line and colour that spills over the canvas.
Pollock himself is clear that his aim is not illustration but
expression, and he aims to paint the equivalent of the experience of
the age. In a note found in Pollock's files on his death is the following
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POLLOCK
hand-written statement (Friedman 1972: 195).
No sketches
acceptance of
what I do—.
Experience of our age in terms
of painting—not an illustration of—
(but the equivalent.)
Concentrated
Fluid
For Pollock, action takes over from representation.
In his interview with William Wright for Sag Harbor radio in 1950,
Pollock admits that the unconscious as "a very important side of
modern art" (O'Connor 1967: 79-81). However, his argument is that
the unconscious drives mean a lot in looking at paintings, that is in their
interpretation, and he side steps Wright's question as to whether the
artist is painting from the unconscious. Instead he talks about painting
as expressing "his feelings rather than illustrating", and stresses his art
as an "immediate" and "direct" way of making a statement, and as
"inspired improvisation". Pollock suggests that the move away from
representation in painting has occurred because of mechanical means
of production. Because the photograph has captured representation so
well, the artist has turned to the modern preoccupation with the
unconscious, and that aim demands new theory and new practice.
In his direct painting Pollock clearly does not see the practice of
painting as a coded application or as the forming of matter. He is not
trying to make paint reflect some perception, impression or sensation,
but putting paint to work—knotting lines and smearing colour. This is
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POLLOCK
not to say, however, that the history and traditional techniques of art
are not important for Pollock, but that one might argue, as I do below,
that he pierces the problematic of what is 'proper to are—Deleuze's
word (used both in relation to the theory—practice relation and to
painting, notably Turner) is percer which carries the weight of the verb
'to break through' (Foucault and Deleuze 1972: 206; Deleuze and
Guattari 1972: 132). What painting does is what is important here
because in the 'action' model of painting there is no separation of
theory and practice, only theoretical action and practical action.
In a conversation with Michel Foucault entitled 'Intellectuals and
Power', Deleuze discusses the new relationship between theory and
practice that he sees as coming out of the events of May 1968
(Foucault and Deleuze 1972: 205). Although here Foucault and
Deleuze are considering theory and practice within the revolutionary
movement, their reading has resonance for my reading of Pollock,
himself a revolutionary in his field. Foucault and Deleuze see a new
"partial and fragmentary" relationship between theory and practice
(205). They understand this relationship as quite different from the
process of totalization that distinguishes the understanding of practice
as the application of theory, and its opposite, the idea that practice
somehow informs theory. In these relationships the aim is to translate
theory into practice and practice into theory, an application which
totalizes theory and practice within a closed system of expression. But,
in the fragmentary relationship there is no smooth transition between
theory and practice, and no ultimate equivalence. Rather than a
relationship of resemblance, there is the halting relationship of the
relay.
As Deleuze and Foucault understand it, "Practice is a set of relays
from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one
practice to another", the point being that both theory and practice are
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POLLOCK
action, the action of breaking through "obstacles, walls and blockages"
(Foucault and Deleuze 1972: 206). However, Deleuze gives privilege to
practice as an instrument of change when he maintains that "No
theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and that
practice is necessary for piercing this wall' [my emphasis] (206). In this
active process, theory hits a wall that is then pierced by practice and
practice reaches a block that is then cleared by theory. Theory here is
not a static body of knowledge but a "box of tools", something that is
useful, that works. It is up to the intellectual, or the artist, to put those
tools into action.
Understanding action, as Foucault and Deleuze do, as a
constructive and creative approach to problems is helpful because it
suggests that Pollock's "action painting" could be more than the
sloppy and chancy mess it was dismissed as by European critics after
the Venice XXV Biennale in 1950. It was, apparently, given the "silent
treatment"; and though Pollock was admitted as an "American
phenomenon", by Douglas Cooper of The Listener, his work was
dismissed as "an elaborate if meaningless tangle of cordage and
smears, abstract and shapeless ..." by Cooper, and as "wild and
woolly" in Time (O'Connor 1967: 53). Without realising it, Cooper's
assessment seems very apt. Abstract and shapeless is exactly what
Pollock's work is if the problem is representation but, insofar as his
work has 'no beginning and no end', it is a fine compliment where
experimentation and creativity are at stake. In his struggle for
experience over illustration, Pollock puts his tools to work and pierces
the block or wall of representation with novel practice, practice that
demands a new theory of abstract, but material, expressionism.
An heir to Cezanne, Pollock's problem is to paint sensation—a
sensation that he interprets as the "Experience of our age"—and he
sets out to make 'the equivalent' of that experience. Just as Van Gogh
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POLLOCK
understood that he must paint the muckiness and squelchiness, not the
brown, of the ploughed field; and just as Millet recognized that it was
the weight of the sack that the peasant carried that was important, not
what was in it; so Cezanne saw that he must no longer see the
wheatfield but lose himself in it (Deleuze 1991: 167; Deleuze and
Guattari 1980: 343, 493). He must see it close-vision. All optical
perspective is lost and the space of the field is no less and no more
than the play of colour—"colouring-sensation" [sensation colorante].
Pollock works the experience of the age like a Cezannian field; the
canvas is a ripe explosion—heat, fullness and abundance—of colour
that does not occur in nature or in illustration. A painter of the
landscape of the USA in the Forties and Fifties, Pollock's "all-over"
canvases are an orgy of colour and movement with no evident
organization, and landscapes with no identifiable landmarks—like the
vast open spaces of the USA with its prairies, deserts, and oceans.
Pollock recognized that movement and rhythm was what he was after
in his "all-over" paintings when he says,
My concern is with the rhythms of nature ... the way the
ocean moves.... The ocean's what the expanse of the
West was for me.... I work from the inside out, like
nature. (Friedman 1972: 228; Polcari 1991: 255)
These landscapes are not illustration or even expressionism, if we
mean by that the expression of ... because they are not about
representing or giving a complete account of some perception,
impression or experience. They are rolling catastrophic landscapes;
landscapes without features but with plenty of colour—the "colouring
sensation" [sensation colorante] that is the force of Cezanne's late work,
not coloured sensations [sensation en couleud—the colour of uncertainty
and change, of the "experience of our age". This is 1950.
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POLLOCK
I discussed "colouring sensation" in the context of Merleau-Ponty's
work and Cezanne's late painting in Chapter Two, and here want to
extend the notion of "colouring sensation" to embrace what, in Francis
Bacon: Logique de la sensation, Deleuze calls a "haptic sense of colour"
(1981a: 90). In contradistinction to the optical, the haptic is
distinguished as a function of touch and, after Alois Riegl, as
"«taktischeo" (99).2 Haptic therefore carries with it the insubordination
of the manual in painting and implies a sense of colour as colour-force:
as hot and cold; as expanding and contracting, as pure tones and
broken tones; as the play or modulation of colour. As Deleuze puts it,
"that which one calls haptic vision is precisely this sense of colours
[sens des coleurs]" (96-97). "Action painting" makes "colour sensation"
and the movement of the virtual a material concern. It pushes the
notion of the virtual beyond its association with the acentred,
vertiginous chaos of smooth space—such as I identified in Mondrian's
grids—to a concern with its material components and the palpable
textures of the diagram that give it consistency.
I understand this space as a close vision–haptic .pace, after Deleuze and
Guattari who discuss the aesthetic status of close vision–haptic space in A
Thousand Plateaus '1440: The Smooth and the Striated' (1980: 492).
Here they again acknowledge a debt to Riegl—for whom close visionhaptic .pace is a morphological, folded surface epitomised by late Roman
relief work—as well as subsequent work by Wilhelm Worringer and by
2 In her article 'Validation by Touch in Kandinsky's Early Abstract Art',
CriticalInquig, Autumn 1989, Margaret Olin gives a useful explanation of the
haptic using Berkeley's vision of the moon as a reference. She describes how
the illusionary and fragmentary perception of light and shape is made 'real' by
a correlation with the more reliable sense of touch. See also: Berkeley, An
Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, 1709.
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POLLOCK
Henri Maldiney. 3 They go on to develop "the Smooth" as a material
space, describing it as "both the object of close vision par excellence
and the element of a haptic space", and giving the desert, steppe, ice
and sea as examples of such "local spaces of pure connection" (493).
They specifically draw attention to close vision as the "law of painting"
and reference Cezanne as an artist who works in smooth space, which
they here describe as a Riemannian space—a "pure patchwork" of
connections, an amorphous, heterogeneous space in continuous
variation (1980: 493, 485).
Landscapes and Haptic Spaces
Among the many and mixed reviews of the US pavilion at the 30CV
Biennale in 1950, was this from Alfred H. Barr, Jr., writing for Art
News, who discusses
... the most original art among the painters of his
generation. Pollock uses no brush, but lays his canvas on
the floor and trickles the fluid paint on from above, his
hand weaving the colour into a rhythmic, variegated
labyrinth. The result provides an energetic adventure for
the eyes, a luna park full of fireworks, pitfalls, surprises and
delights. (quoted in O'Connor 1967: 52)
A luna park. Something full of surprises and delights; a labyrinth of
amusements, an adventure, something new. 4 Where are the
3 See: Iverson 1993.
4 See: The Fold for Deleuze's discussion of the labyrinth and Baroque
mathematics (1993a: 17). In differential calculus, as for the irrational number
(such as 7), variation is infinite and undefinite. In other words, the irrational
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individuated features, the landmarks and the contours? Where are the
straight lines? This is an unknown, unexplored and fathomless space,
an alien landscape.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari had already moved
from the idea of the canvas as a wall on which the landscape is
inscribed to the notion of the landscape as a fluid double structure, the
white wall/ black hole system (1980: 167). Echoing the notion of the pure
landscape as a deterritorialized, acentred and unlimited zone—a
smooth space—Deleuze and Guattari understand the face as a white
wall! black hole system, a system where the image emerges as a
combination or pattern in the liquid morphology of the virtual, the
"dimensionless black hole and the formless white wall" (168). Hence,
in the plateau 'Year Zero: Faciality', Deleuze and Guattari see the face
as the correlate of the landscape, boldly declaring that "the "problem"
with which painting is inscribed is that of the face—/andscape" (1980:
301).5
Rather than see the face as a screen exterior to the thinking,
speaking, feeling individual, or as a blank canvas or surface on which
ready-made human features and expressions are inscribed—a nose
here, a smile there—in the white wall/ black hole system the face emerges
as a distribution of white and black, engendered on the white wall, in
the black hole. There is nothing in the black/white system that
resembles a human face, yet nevertheless "faces are distributed and
is released from subordination to the fixed point and therefore cannot be
represented by the straight line of rational points but is labyrinthine.
5 This correlation between landscape and face will become important when,
in Chapter Six, I discuss the work of Francis Bacon and how the portrait
emerges in an unframed 'landscape' of colour and line.
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POLLOCK
faciality traits organized" (169).
Like Hjelmslev's geological model, discussed above, the white
wall/ black hole system breaks down the duality of content and
expression, form and substance in favour of flows of matter. The
system works as an abstract machine, a machine which Deleuze and
Guattari define in diagrammatic terms as, "the aspect or moment at
which nothing but functions and matters remain" (1980: 141). They go
on to add; "A diagram has neither substance nor form, neither content
or expression" (141). Instead, it distributes substance and form,
content and expression, across the plane of consistency, the plane that
"knows nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural.
It knows nothing of the distinction between contents and expressions,
or that between forms and formed substances" (68). The face is such a
distribution. It is a surface of white planes and black holes, a map of
lines and colour where contours emerge in that distribution to
produce, out of the obscurity of the virtual, the eye, the ear, or the
bone of the brow; the face that is chiselled or the face that is rounded.
Pollock's late black and white works are a case in point.
In 1951, after the release of Hans Namuth film of him painting, and
after falling sales after his fourth solo show at Betty Parsons Gallery in
New York, Pollock succumbed to depression and a bout of heavy
drinking. This period also saw a change in direction in his work to
black and white paintings, paintings that are a fine demonstration of
Deleuze and Guattari's white wall/ black hole system. In Pollock's last
paintings such as Portrait and a Dream 1953 and Number 7 1952 (fig. 4.3)
a head emerges out of meandering lines and daubs of paint. These
black and white works had a mixed reception. Emily Genauer for the
New York Herald-Tribune (February 7, 1954) saw them as "a real step
forward", while Roger M. Coates (New Yorker December 1956)
thought them a return to an earlier figurative style (O'Connor 1967:
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POLLOCK
70, 75).
What is crucial to note in the white wall/ black hole system is the
continuum of the deterritorialized zone—the pure landscape—and the
face. The white wall–black hole is not a formless ground of actuality
but a virtual that becomes an entity. The system itself presumes
nothing. Deleuze and Guattari call it an "abstract machine of faciality
[visageite]" (168). It runs hot and cold, and fast and slow. It is ripe and
full of colour, distinctive and individual, but certainly not natural or
even human. This distribution is not distinguished by shape or
proportion but by "colouring sensation" and relations of timbre and
hue—tone, quality and complexion. High or low, soft or sharp, this
colouring is a matter of expression and is understood only in terms of
its composition and construction—how it works, and what it does.
The landscape works in the same way as the face. There is no empty
set on which the scene is set; instead the abstract machine produces
the pictorial nomadic landscape as a surface of daubs of colour and
meandering lines, within which contoured features might, or might
not, emerge; an adventure for the eyes and an event of close vision–hcptic
.ace; like a map of Gettysburg or a luna park.6
In a review for the New York Sun December 1949, Henry McBride
compared Pollock's Number 14 1949 to "a flat, war-shattered city,
6 The idea that contours emerge out of the abstract lines of the diagram is key
to the argument that I make in Chapter Six for an understanding of
portraiture/figuration that is itself a revolution to abstraction. The possibility
of the emergent contour is important in an understanding of Deleuze's
notion of the Event within the Bergsonian ontology, as a virtual multiplicity
that is continuous with the actual. This contrasts with Alain Badiou's critique
of Deleuze in Dekuze: The Clamor of Being (1997), which I noted in Chapter
One. See: Chapter One note 16.
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POLLOCK
possibly Hiroshima, as seen from a great height in moonlight"; and
Sam Hunter, writing for Time magazine, also in 1949, disparagingly
comments that "A Jackson Pollock painting is apt to resemble a child's
contour map of the Battle of Gettysburg ..." and goes on to note that,
"Nevertheless, he is the darling of a highbrow cult which considers
him 'the most powerful painter in America." (quoted in O'Connor
1967: 49, 46). Hunter's "nevertheless" misses the radicality of Pollock's
break with convention; it is precisely because his painting breaks with
the fine contours of the mature landscape on a human scale that
Pollock is a powerful painter. His battle is the struggle against the
clarity of representation and his landscape has all the violence of
Gettysburg, the bloody chaos and complexity of the contour freed
from strategic precision. There is no "nevertheless".
The Manual and Matters of Expression
In Pollock's painting the 'landscape' is transversed by the abstract
line—strokes, marks and patches of colour—and it is the manner in
which these heterogeneous and material components (the chaosmosis)
of the landscape are held together that creates the melody and rhythm
of the work (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 336). We are led to consider
the conditions of the Event on the canvas. It is defined at the machinic
level by diagrammatic virtualities—correlations, tensions and
intersections—and by the capacity to form melodic and rhythmic
themes, and by what Deleuze and Guattari call the "consistency of
matters of expression" [my emphasis] (1980: 334). Ironically this seems
to be just what Greenberg admires in Pollock's painting when he
praises its "intensity and force", "splendour and eloquence", and its
"range of mood" (1993: 111). So although when Greenberg identifies a
unity in Pollock's successful work he distinguishes between the
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POLLOCK
delimiting pictorial unity and what that unity communicates, his
emphasis on Pollock's compositional and technical skill points to a
concern with unity as a synthesis of the heterogeneous material
components of the painting over the individuated optical illusion it
might perpetrate. For instance, he mentions that Pollock followed
Hans Hoffman in turning to "drip" techniques in order to get away
from the "artificial" marks, habits and mannerisms of the painterly
hand left by brush, or palette knife, and he perceptively notes that
"marked lines or contours did not hold that [picture] surface with the
same inevitability as those that resulted from the falling or flowing of
paint" (1993: 71, 111, 248).
Pollock's vigorous efforts to eliminate the deliberate and
"madeness" from his work shift the interest from optical space and
pictorial composition to the manual and the action of painting itself—
Greenberg talks about Pollock's "revulsion from cmadeness', from the
look of the intended and arranged and contrived and trimmed and
'tickled" (Greenberg 1993: 248). In a move that echoes the move in
Mondrian's Boogie-Voogie paintings from the line that is subordinate to
the point to the abstract line where the point marks the movement of
the line, the hand is no longer subordinate to the optical. It is the
power of the manual that confronts the eye, and the matter and
material of painting (the stroke-lines [trait-figne] and the colour-patches
[tache contend) that mark the rhythm of the abstract line. This is "action
painting", painting where the point has a creative function and the line
is 'without image'.
The analogy of the map is therefore useful but tenuous because
these are not human landscapes and, unlike the aerial map or images of
the earth from space, no definite form will emerge when they are
zoomed in on or focused. These landscapes are close vision–haptic ipace in
which both the object 'out there' and the subject as point of view are
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POLLOCK
lost—as in Cezanne's wheatfields, or the desert, steppe, ice and sea,
which are Deleuze and Guattari's own examples of smooth space
(1980: 493). Here orientations, landmarks and linkages are not fixed
but change and unfold according to step-by-step local relations, as in
Riemannian space. In contrast to the distant vision and perspective of
optical space, haptic space recognizes no orienting distance between
subject and object and so no point of view. Haptic implies a sense of
touch [from the Greek haptein to touch) but in choosing haptic' over
'tactile' Deleuze and Guattari stress that the eye is not in opposition to
the hand, and that in haptic space the eye may assume a non-optical
function (1980: 492).
This accords with Merleau-Ponty's image of the artist who
"immersed in the visible", "interrogates with his gaze"; and it is
something that we shall encounter in Klee and the idea of journeying
through a painting (Merleau-Ponty 1961: 166). Deleuze too defines
haptic vision as the touch of the eye when in the last rubric in Francis
Bacon: Logique de la sensation 'The Eye and the Hand' where he describes
haptic vision as "when sight discovers in itself a function of touching
that belongs to it and to it alone and which is independent of its
optical function" (1981a: 99). The point being made here is that the
eye 'touches'.
The demand for the eye to take on a non-optical function—a
Cezannian immersion—is recognized by Sylvester. In a broadcast
review of Pollock's retrospective at the Whitecbapel Art Gallery in 1958,
he observes that a Pollock landscape is not a static, scenic view. There
are no focal points. The viewer must enter the painting, and become a
participant in its creation by journeying through it, strolling,
meandering, even crashing and battling through the landscape; "We
create the perspectives as we move about in the painting" and what
appears chaotic to the static eye becomes a seductive composition
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POLLO CK
(1997: 63). Sylvester sees this immersion as a way of taming the canvas.
For him Pollock's work "seduces as readily as it bruises" (62). Pollock
is the "wild man", the "slapdash improviser", the "frenzied doodler"
the producer of "conflict and strife", and of "violent combat", but he
is also the master of serenity, elegance and calm (62). He remembers
that "The first time I saw some Pollocks—it was in 1950-1 thought
they were incoherent nonsense, messy, uncontrollable daubs, pots of
paint flung in the public's face. What could I have been using for eyes?
Pollock's handling of paint and organization of colour is as sure, as
subtle, as magisterial as Matisse's or Bonnard's" (62).7
What is wild from the outside is an elegant walk from 'within'. But,
not everyone finds such an easy solace in Pollock. In her review of the
1999 retrospective at The Tate Galleg in London, Sally Vincent relates
how Kurt Vonnegut felt depressed because of the inhumanity of
Pollock's work. Vonnegut's analysis is not unlike Sylvester's but
whereas Sylvester finds the work exciting, Vonnegut "came away
feeling like shit" (Vincent 1999: 12). "Pollock's paintings have no
7 This review of 1958 was not published until Sylvester's volume of critical
essays About Modern Art appeared in 1996. The review repeats, almost
verbatim, an analysis of Klee's late work first published in 1948, and also
included in the collected essays (1996: 35-38). Here he similarly describes the
spectator as participant and compares the viewing experience to swimming
and being buffeted by waves: Sylvester likens this experience to swimming,
commenting that, 'We are as much a part of it as we are of the sea when we
go swimming. We plough our way through it and in turn are buffeted by the
waves—lines continually changing in plane and direction" (63). Swimming is
also an analogy used by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition to explain the move
to objective perception (1968: 165), and by Gasquet's Cezanne in his
description of a visit to the Louvre (Gasquet 1921: 183).
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POLLOCK
horizon, no focal point, nothing to recognize. No meny ... there's
nothing to recognize but novelty" [my italics] (12).
That jarring novelty occurs when the hand is no longer subordinate
to the eye, and when the manual takes on a radical independence to
make marks that are, as Deleuze says in a passage to be discussed later
in this chapter, "irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, chance"—not
representative, illustrative or narrative (Deleuze 1981a: 66). The hand
imposes on the eye confronting vision with the shock (coup] of the
asignifying, a strike that impacts like the force of a thunderclap that
Sylvester identified in Mondrian's lines (1997: 135). As Deleuze and
Guattari point out in 'Year Zero: Faciality', there is no continuum
between the representational and illustrational image and the image
that confronts (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 170). It is not that, under
the microscope or the telescope, some latent organization will be
disclosed. There is no possible point of view—objective or
subjective—of coherency or constancy. There is no organization, just
experimentation. Just energy and motion, colour and line. The canvas
is a displaced and decentred, asignifying "unframed space".
This is the landscape of Pollock, something already noted by Lee
Krasner who, in an interview with Bernard Friedman in 1957,
characterized the Pollock's canvas as "unframed space" (Friedman
1972: 157).8 This "unframed space" is absolutely not the picturesque,
pastoral landscapes, of say Constable, where there are distinctive
features, fixed locations and a coherent, integrated completion, but
something more like the vibrant, chaotic seas of the late Turner. It is
the labyrinthine space of Pollock's Summertime (Number 9) 1948 (fig.
4.1) or Lavender Mist (Number 1) 1950 where there is no defined
8 Friedman's book is perceptively entitled Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible
(1972).
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territory but an absolute deterritorialization.
In Pollock the move is from the optical to the manual. Colours are
thrown at the canvas—dripped, poured, drizzled—in defiance of any
representational, illustrative or narrative norms, so that, as becomes
crucial in Bacon's work, figuration is suggested by and arises within a
chaotic configuration of colour and line without contour. In reference to
Bacon, Deleuze describes the diagram as preparatory works, but for
Pollock the diagram is not a preparatory work. He stays with pure
manual painting producing catastrophic, chaotic canvases with bursts
of colour and line that tend towards the absolutely asignifying and the
absence of suggestion. Whether called "action painting" or Abstract
Expressionism, this 'unframed' expressionism is a style: the manner
and rhythm of performance; quiet or noisy; calm or rushed; dancing or
trudging. The verb 'to paint' has endless permutations and
modifications: rhythms, tones, tempo. A temperament. Each painting
is defined by its individual style and marked by its number and date.
Visual but not optical, diagrammatic but not structured, Pollock's
painting is governed by experience not rationale; the hand not the eye;
touch not vision. It is an art of distribution not depiction, line not
shape. The manual labyrinthine spaces that Pollock constructs with his
chance lines are the close vision—haptic space of the landscape.
In 1950, Pollock had a major show at Betty Parsons's Gallery in
New York; a series of landscapes numbers 1-32. Among them are
paintings with lyrical titles, like Lavender Mist, Shadows, Autumn Rhythm,
titles that suggest that the paintings are expressive and descriptive,
even representational. But, these paintings are Number 1 [Lavender Mist]
1950, Number 2 [Shadows] 1950, Number 30 [Autumn Rhythm] 1950, and
the title bestowed retrospectively. Like an epithet or tag, the titles are
not descriptive or a measure of the work but serve only as an aide
memoirr in parenthesis, like a "combination" or cipher, an opus number
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or identifying numeral [chiffre] (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: ix). For
who is to say that the complicated web of dribbles and splodges—
black and white and blue—in Number 1 [Lavender Mist] 'represents'
lavender mist. The painting is, after all, only the first in the series, Only
the initial experiment of that year.
The condition of that work is the experimental action 'to paint';
painting where action takes over from representation. It is far from
being child's play or casually sloppy, as suggested by Mr. A. Hyatt
Major (Curator of Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York) in an article for Life magazine 'A Life Roundtable on Modern
Art' (October 1948) when he remarked: "I suspect any picture I think I
could have made myself" (quoted in O'Connor 1967: 44). However
Hyatt Major is not alone. Bacon, who admits the importance of the
"accident" in his own work, dismisses the tacbiste or free marks of
abstract expressionism, and of Pollock in particular, because he doesn't
like the "sloppiness" of it (Sylvester 1975: 52, 61, 92). However, I think
that it is precisely this sloppiness that takes the painting from the eye
to the hand, and that, ironically, it is by drawing the contour out of the
chance and 'sloppy' marks of his own preparatory work that Bacon
carries the immediacy of the manual line into his portraits.
Pollock himself absolutely refutes the suggestion that his work
depends on the accident, and by implication that it is sloppy or chancy.
He situates his painting within the oeuvre of European modem art and
justifies his methods as fitting to the contemporary development of
that tradition. In an important interview, with William Wright for Sag
Harbor radio in 1950 (but never broadcast), he talks about how the
means and techniques of different eras and cultures express the needs
of each age; "Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of
need, and from a need the modem artist has found a way of expressing
the world about him" (quoted in O'Connor 1967: 80). That expression
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POLLOCK
is not an accident, a slip-up or an anomaly, and neither are the
techniques.
Though painting on the floor, using liquid paint and the brush as a
drip stick, gave Pollock an unusual degree of freedom—the freedom
to move around the canvas and to apply the paint with the fluidity of
the stroke—his compositions are controlled, and that control comes
from experience. In other words, his painting is far from chaotic.
When asked by Wright if the stick is not more difficult to control than
the brush, Pollock replies: "I don't—ah—with experience—it seems to
be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and I don't
use—I don't use the accident—`cause I deny the accident" (O'Connor
1967: 80). The accident is impossible because Pollock has no definite
image in mind, just a general idea of what he is about, and because
there is no preconception there can be no accidents or mishaps. Either
the painting works or it doesn't. "Action painting" does not necessarily
mean a disregard of tradition or theory; it does mean experimentation
and the effort to break through tradition. It does mean the landscape
that is a close vision—haptic space and a luna park full of fireworks, pitfalls,
surprises and delights.
The Theatre of Metamorphosis
Like fireworks, Pollock's "all-over" canvases are an explosion of
colour where patterns emerge with the force of flight. Like fireworks,
they are a spectacular that dazzles the eye and where the geometry of
the optical collapses. And like a rocket or flash of lightening, these
explosive lines wreak not only an optical but also a material
catastrophe that works on the plane of composition. I suggest that this
catastrophe goes beyond a mere disturbance of recognisable form,
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POLLOCK
which is how James Williams reads Deleuze and Guattari's
understanding of Turner in his article Deleuze on J. M. W. Turner:
Catastrophism in Philosophy?' (1997). Williams gives The Fighting
Temeraire' 1838 as an instance where "recognizable forms are disturbed
or torn asunder in explosions of light and colour" (Ansell Pearson
1997: 238).
However, reading Turner after Deleuze's later work on the diagram
in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981a) leads me to the more
radical interpretation of Turner as wreaking a material catastrophe that
takes painting beyond the movement of deformation to the gaseous
explosions of dissolution and decomposition. This I associate with the
"superior empiricism" that in Derrffce arid Repetitiott (19684, Deleuze
aligns with aesthetics as a science of the being of the sensible (that
which can only be sensed) and a "properly chaotic world without
identiy" (1968a: 56-57). Deleuze specifically mentions painting and
sculpture as "distorters" of representation and "modern art" as a
theatre that tends to realize conditions where representation is
"distorted, diverted and torn from its centre" and where that
divergence and decentring is affirmed; where, in short difference is
shown to be cliffering (56). Here art becomes "experience" but an
experience beyond the frame. Deleuze describes this open experience
of modern art as "a veritable theatre of metamorphosis and
permutations. A theatre where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth without a
thread"; it is a world that accords to "a strange 'reason', that of the
multiple, chaos and difference (nomadic distributions, crowned
anarchies)", and which is, as Deleuze says, "completed and unlimited"
(1968a: 56-57). With his own intricate labyrinths, and his aim to paint
the "experience of our age" without illustration, Pollock's "all-over"
canvases are surely a theatre of this strange reason.
Deleuze's "superior empiricism" echoes Bergson's work on creative
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POLLOCK
evolution because it too is concerned with a theory of matter that
breaks through the habits of representation and returns to the vital and
virtual movement that haunts actual experience.' As I discussed in
Chapter One, in Difference and Repetition Deleuze tries to "do
philosophy', a project that turns on the attempt to introduce
difference into the concept (1968a: xv). This is configured as the
demand for "thought without image" and the effort to break through
the limiting rationale of norms, conventions and common sense. These
are the same habits of representation that accord to what, in Creative
Evolution (1911), Bergson calls the "logic of solids", a model that
determines matter within a given identity of the concept as discrete
and discontinuous forms—as homogeneous units in space (Bergson
1911: ix). The breakthrough comes in going beyond that determination
of solids, setting flows in motion or, as I think Pollock does, attaining
the gaseous state of free movement, and painting "without image".
The effort to think "without image" and beyond the identity of the
concept causes Deleuze to review the task of philosophy and ask the
question "What is thinking?". The parallel concern for the arts is
"What is art?" and, more specifically, "What is painting?". Pollock
returns to this question in his exploratory manual painting, a move that
I interpret as a return to a theory of matter that confronts the
dissolution of form. The manual throw of paint is 'pure' painting
because of it effects an optical catastrophe, and because it disregards
pictorial conventions 'proper to art'. Instead, the painting becomes on
the canvas, each throw of paint a repetition that is a variation, each
throw a stroke or mark that changes the dynamic of the 'whole'
figuration. The canvas is always a whole that is always "incomplete"
9 Keith Ansell Pearson provides a useful discussion of Deleuze's "superior
empiricism" and its parallel with Bergson's creative evolution (Ansell Pearson
1999: 77-84).
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POLLOCK
when viewed from the point of view of a representational model, but
which as 'pure' painting is "completed and unlimited".
The dissolution and decomposition of form executed by Pollock's
manual, "action painting" is what Bergson would call "a free action or
a work of art" because it produces the continual elaboration of the
new; each stroke and mark is a variation "without image" and
therefore absolutely creative (Bergson 1911: 223, 11). In Pollock the
lines and colour are 'beyond' the space—time frame; elements are not
isolated, there are no distinct contours and the 'whole' is in continuous
variation—a catastrophic burst of colour and line. As such the
composition defies optical and pictorial cohesion and eludes
actualization. It thus performs as an Event on the canvas, an Event
Ovenementj that is defined by Deleuze and Guattari in What is
Philosophy? as the "pure immanence of what is not actualized and what
remains indifferent to actualization" (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 156
[147]). So while the Event is a virtual in the sense of being 'before' the
actuality of optical and pictorial experience, it is the real extracted in
the manual dissolution and decomposition of form.
How then are we to think of this Event on the canvas, an Event
that remains indifferent to actualization and the logic of identity and
solids? There are other worlds and other states of reality: the liquid and
the gaseous. And while deformation might point to a liquid conception
of matter, the more radical dissolution that we see in Pollock suggests
the gaseous, and explosive, catastrophic landscapes.
Catastrophic Landscapes
Deleuze and Guattari first write about catastrophe in painting in
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POLLOCK
Anti-Oedipus (1972), nine years before Deleuze's work on Bacon.
Surprisingly perhaps Deleuze and Guattari have Turner's late work in
mind, The Slave ShO
Typhon [sic] coming on 1840 or Snow Storm: Steam-
boat off a Harbour's Mouth 1842 (fig. 4.4) for instance, where lines
without contours swirl, shoot and dive in the chaotic intensity of the
storm, and where patches of dark and light cut across the definition of
sea, sky and ship:
The canvas turns in on itself, it is pierced by a hole. A lake,
a flame, a tornado, an explosion. ... The canvas is truly
broken, sundered by what penetrates it. All that remains is
a background of gold and fog, intense, intensive, traversed
by depth in what has just sundered its breath: the schiz.
Everything becomes mixed and confused, and it is here
that the breakthrough—not the breakdown—occurs.
(1972: 132)
The breakthrough comes in the performance of the abstract lines of
Turner's diagram when the canvas turns in on itself. It does not
function as a surface, screen or white wall upon which to inscribe an
impression of the storm. Such coding and organization is not just
dismantled or broken down, but being "pierced by a hole" it escapes
signification/significance, and here again Deleuze uses the verb percer,
to break through.
Deleuze and Guattari comment that, seeing Turner "one
understands what it means to scale the wall, and yet to remain behind;
to cause flows to pass through, without knowing any longer whether
they are carrying us elsewhere or flowing back over us already" (1972:
132). This is a key moment in move from representation to
abstraction, and the breakthrough to painting as an abstract machine.
Turner is not executing a breakdown, disintegration or deformation of
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form but escaping the exterior organization of systems of signification
and what is 'proper to art'. There is no state of affairs, no lived, and no
'body' of actualization.
Turner resists the visibility of actualization and works at the level of
the imperceptible/invisible and the unliveable, and reveals the infinite
and im-material movement that is the terror of the storm. Deleuze and
Guattari note that Turner's last, and they suggest most accomplished
paintings, are often thought "incomplete"—like Mondrian's last work
and Bacon's canvases. He sees that incompleteness as a strength
because it means that the work belongs to no recognized school or
period, but instead finds status in its incompletion as
experimentation.°
But at least something arose whose force fractured the
codes, undid the signifiers, passed under the structures, set
the flows in motion, and effected breaks at the limits of
desire: a breakthrough. ... art as a process without goal,
but that attains completion as such. (Deleuze and Guattari
1972: 370)
In the circulation of the strange liberated flows of the broken
canvas the painting becomes truly abstract. There is no recognized
form of content or form of expression: the wall is pierced. The
painting is asignifying, an abstract machine that produces the storm in
10 In a footnote on art as experimentation Deleuze and Guattari refer the
reader to John Cage. See: Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 371 and Cage 1968: 13.
Deleuze and Guattari also cite Anglo-American literature as an art that moves
to abstraction, citing Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Jack
Kerouac (1972: 132). See also: On the Superiority of Anglo–American
Literature' (Deleuze 1977: 36-76).
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the "combination" [the-7v] of colour and line (Deleuze and Guattari
1991: ix). The storm becomes an Event on the canvas, a performance
on the plane of composition that works as a being of sensation. Its
reality depends on internal modulation of colour and performance of
the abstract line. It works through counter-actualization, resisting fixity
or coding with a virtual multiplicity, and is therefore an Event that
"remains indifferent to actualization" (Deleuze and Guattari 1991:
156).
In Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981a) Deleuze returns to
Turner, referencing him as a painter who, like Pollock, makes a
catastrophe of the painting. Turner in 1842 and Pollock a hundred
years later both return to the manual and the diagram—the operative
assemblage of strokes and marks, lines and zones—the haphazard grid
of marks that takes over the canvas. Like Pollock, Turner was a
physical painter who began by pouring paint, and who attacked the
canvas in a frenzy of tearing, scratching and scrubbing, and whose
canvases retain that intensity in the finished work: "he tore, he
scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy and the whole thing
was a chaos" (Wilton 1987: 114).'' The intensity is not illustrative of
the storm, but its equivalent. As chance gestures, the web of marks of
the diagram is "non-representational, non-illustrative, non-narrative"
(Deleuze 1981a: 66). There is no optical organization only a return to
practice and to the theatre of metamorphosis, to catastrophe or chaos:
"The artist's hand has stepped in [s'est integ)osed to exercise its
independence and to smash Prised a sovereign optical organization:
nothing more is seen, as in catastrophe or chaos" (Deleuze 1981a: 66).
Catastrophe and chaos are evocative words, but neither is without
11 See Williams 1997 who makes extensive use of Wilton's work on Turner.
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POLLOCK
ambiguity. While the word 'catastrophe' is evocative and, as is evident
in Turner's work, appropriate, I want to stress that the Event of
abstraction that we encounter on the plane of composition is not
extraordinary, despite Deleuze and Guattari's definition of Turner's
catastrophe as belong in to no school and no period. What becomes
evident in the painting is the 'catastrophe' as counter-actualization and
the breakthrough to abstraction, and that this move returns painting to
the plane of immanence and the very ordinary work of the material
and matter of paint. What is extraordinary are the transcendent limits
that govern codes, territory and the definition of what is 'proper to art'
that restricts content and expression to recognisable signifying forms.
Chaos too is rather misleading. Deleuze equates the diagram mess
or disorder [le gdcherj and he regards it, in Turner though not in
Pollock, as a prelude to figuration (1981a: 66). As Williams recognizes
in his work on catastrophism, Turner transforms the diagram into a
narrative painting by the addition of a few hesitant but recognisable
details, such as the vertical line of the mast, the curve of the paddle
wheel and the yellow flare of the chimney, details which take Snow
Storm: Steam-Boat off Harbour's Mouth 1842 (fig. 4.4) from a chaotic
virtuality to actualization, but without losing the force of the
catastrophe, the gdchis of the diagram. The choice of the French word
gdchis is interesting because of it reinforces the concern with painting
itself, with matter. As well as 'mess' and 'disorder', giichis means 'waste',
and the verb gicheris to waste or to spoil [gdted. Like the English word,
gash, there is the implicit action of the slash and the wound, and
indeed the Old French garser means to wound. Earlier, in Differrnce and
Repetition (1968a), Deleuze uses the scar and the wound to explain his
definition of the sign as a contraction or synthesis of time. In the same
way that the scar is a contraction or contemplation and the "present
fact of having been wounded", Turner's Snowstorm can be understood
as a contemplation that carries the violence enacted on the canvas into
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POLLOCK
the finished work, work that remains forever wounded and therefore
'incomplete' (Deleuze 1968a: 70-7). The specific details of ship or fire
are a contraction of the act of painting, an intimate circuitous relation
where the matter and movement of the virtual persists in the actual,
like the scar that is a sign of the wound.
In Pollock's work there is no detailing and no figuration. Instead of
exteriorizing the work and looking to illustration, Pollock stays with
the giichis and goes with the rhythmic movement of the action of
painting. The melee of line and colour is not a chaotic prelude to an
ordered and recognisable, liveable actualization, but stands on its own
and is revealed as an event that eludes actualization precisely because it
remains faithful to its own infinite and movement. Pollock also
wounds the canvas, but his work remains raw. There is no figuration
here, just a battleground of lines and colour. Pollock calls it "direct
painting" because he doesn't make sketches or drawings, but it is also
direct because it doesn't have recourse to the transcendent framework
of illustration (O'Connor 1967: 81). Reaching, throwing and
scratching, pouring, dripping and splattering, there is energy, vigour,
speed and direction; patterns and rhythm. There are traits of action
and the power of the hand. The painting remains at the level of the
catastrophe of the diagram and with action, as a complex(ion) of
thrown line and colour.
Solid, Liquid and Gas
When he comes to discuss Bacon, Deleuze compares the manual
attack on the canvas to the eruption of another world, a world without
identity or signification:
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POLLO CK
It is like the sudden appearance of another world [le
sugissement d'un autre monde] Because these marks [marques],
these strokes [traits] are irrational, involuntary, accidental,
free, chance. They are non-representational, nonillustrative, non-narrative. But they are also not significant
or signifying: they are asignifying strokes [traits]. They are
the traits [traits] of sensation, of an indefinite sensation
[sensation confuses] (the indefinite sensation that one ffinds in
continued birth [qu'on epporte en naissan4 Cezanne says).
(Deleuze 1981a: 66)
This comment about indefinite sensation and birth or arising of
[naissant] echoes Merleau-Ponty's commentary on Cezanne in the 'Eye
and Mind' essay where, discussing how the painter reveals the
"virtually visible" to demonstrate the depth actual, he says that "The
painter's vision is a continued birth" (1961: 168). Deleuze's reading of
Cezanne is more radical than that of Merleau-Ponty because, as I
discussed in Chapter Two, whereas Merleau-Ponty sees the artist
bringing the prehuman virtual into the human vision and actuality,
Deleuze sees the artist working at the level of sensation, extracting the
virtual which arises on the canvas "like the sudden appearance of
another world".
Reading Anti-Oedipus (1972) after the work on Bacon (1981a), I
suggest that this eruption is a breakthrough that pushes painting
beyond the fracturing of codes, and beyond the move to the liquid
flow of smooth spaces. When the canvas or wall is pierced, flows are
disrupted and the system crumbles. There is dissolution of form, from
solid, to liquid and to the explosive catastrophe of the gaseous. This is
suggested by Deleuze's work on the perception-image in Cinema 1
(1983) where he tracks three states of the perception-image: solid,
liquid and gaseous.
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POLLOCK
In this analysis Deleuze gives a special privilege to cinematography
observing that the cinematographic image cuts across the nominal two
poles of perception, the subjective and the objective. He takes as his
starting point Bergson's definition: subjective perception refers to a
privileged central image, such as the human eye; objective perception is
where images vary in relation to one another, as in things (1983: 76).12
In the cinema, the camera adopts an independent cameraconsciousness that introduces another perception, called after
Pasolini's theorization, a "free indirect subjective" perception, or more
lyrically "the cinema of poetry" (74). The. perceptiori image, either
subjective or objective, is reflected in the eye of the camera, and thus
loses its status as subjective viewpoint or objective thing. Subjectivity is
complicated when the man watching is himself being watched, and
objectivity is compromised by the autonomy of the camera (which in a
double complicity is not necessarily the privileged eye of the auteur or
director but might itself be in movement).
Instead of distinctive poles of perception, subjective passes into
objective and fixed points disappear as the camera—here the centre of
reference—is itself put into movement, zooming, splitting, cutting,
focusing .... Instead of a world that conforms to a logic of solids and
fixed reference points, there is the confusion of a non-representational,
non-narrative form; there is the "appearance of another world". What
becomes important in this moveable feast is not the framework of the
12 These two poles of perception are not exclusive; for instance, the most
subjective of perceptions, a dream or hallucination perhaps, is experienced
more like an objective perception because what distinguishes the dream from
wakefulness or the hallucination from normal reality is that the privileged
centre of human consciousness is itself put into movement (Deleuze 1983:
76).
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POLLOCK
image but the composition of the cinematographic frames and the
'whole' as an assemblage or set [ensemble] of simultaneous images.
There is no solidity, only the rhythms of flowing-matter. The inversion
of movement from the movement between fixed points, to the
movement of the point or the eye itself is a change of state, from the
logic of solids to the liquid state and the "dizzy disappearance of fixed
points" (77). Here the image "passes through or under the frame",
defying the exteriority of the centred eye, and being actualized in the
material configuration of the molecular construction. When it comes
to painting we can see a parallel move in Pollock's extraordinary work
of the 1940s, which I read as experiments in liquid flows that herald
the explosive gaseous work of the later "all-over" canvases.
In a review of Pollock's one-man show at the San Francisco
Museum of Art in 1945, a show which included The Moon-Woman 1942,
Stenographic Figuir 1942 and Male and Female 1942, Alfred Frankenstein,
for the San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, likened Pollock's work to
jazz:
His pictures are almost entirely nonrepresentational, but
his abstraction has nothing to do with geometry; the flare
and splatter and fury of his painting is emotional rather
than formal, and like the best jazz, one feels that much of
it is the result of inspired improvisation rather than
conscious planning. (quoted in O'Connor 1967: 38).
As we saw in Chapter Three, jazz was important in Mondrian's
move from form to rhythm. Music again becomes important in
theorizing Klee's work, but here the reference is interesting because of
the equation between the "inspired improvisation" of jazz and
Pollock's non-formal painting of the 1940s where the dissolution of
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POLLOCK
the motif is an inversion of movement that takes the image from
"conscious planning" and the solid to the liquid state and to rhythm.
Canvases like Male and Female 1942, Moon Woman Cuts the Circle 1943
(fig. 4.5), and Mural 1946, are mannerist paintings where movement
and connections become more important than form and content. In
using the motif as totem rather than as iconic motif, Pollock is already
on the way to 'pure painting as he is concerned not with the
construction of a solid image but of an energetic force produced in the
diagrammatic system of shifting relations between motifs—
intersections, connections, divergences and conjunctions. Take Moon
Woman Cuts the Circle 1943 where the new moon, the knife, the
hermaphrodite Indian ... are not so much symbolic images as localized
diagrammatic features. They are 'facts', details that are dislocated from
their narrative within Roman legend or Greek myth and assume
autonomy as totems, that is as specific figural motifs whose
connections are far more important than any intrinsic or iconic
meaning. That the features are details is a point that Friedman makes
about Pollock's late work, in his book Jackson Pollock: Energy Made
Visible (1972). His observation that those details construct an image of
energy is equally as relevant to the work of the 1940s:
... Details, details, and more details, some seemingly
isolated phenomena, others the effects of specific causes,
and yet all the details, all the facts, all the things, all the
things as facts, all the drips, splatters, spots, stains ... all
these add up to a total flowing image of time past, present
and future, an image greater than the sum of its parts, an
image extending beyond the limits of the frame and
beyond death, an image of energy and its abstraction as
money .... (Friedman 1972: 243)
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POLLOCK
By laying these details out across the surface Pollock makes them
work as points between movements of convergence and divergence, of
departure and return. Moon. Woman. Cut. Circle. 1943. They are
details: knife to bird to head-dress to breast ... 'bit' by 'bit' moon
imagery adds up and works on its own surface or plane, like a rolling
landscape that flows without reference to an exterior subject, story or
memory. Interiorized, the motif becomes rhythmic—as in the best
jazz, in the writing of Proust, and the music of Liszt, or Wagner.
Proust, Liszt and Wagner are Deleuze and Guattari's examples
when in the plateau 'Of the Refrain' they distinguish between the motif
that functions as a signpost (again using the vocabulary- of the
landscape) and the autonomous rhythmic character:
... the motifs increasingly enter into conjunction, conquer
their own plane, become autonomous from the dramatic
action, impulses, and situations, and independent of
characters and landscapes; they themselves become
melodic landscapes and rhythmic characters continually
enriching their internal relations. (1980: 319)
Non-pulsed, the motif remains a precise and identifiable feature,
but it enters into the continuous variation of a improvised composition
and, no longer the mute representation, it is the painting itself that
sings. Deleuze and Guattari identify the independence of characters as
a key moment in the move from representation to abstraction
commenting that, "The discovery of the properly melodic landscape
and the properly rhythmic character marks the moment of art when it
ceases to be a silent painting on a signboard" (1980: 319). They go on
to add, "This may not be art's last word ..." (319). Indeed it is not.
In Pollock's subsequent work the totemic motifs dissolve into the
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POLLOCK
"all-over" surface. Take for example Eyes in the Heat 1946 (fig. 4.6) and
Shimmering Substance, also 1946. These are interim works where the
motif is there but is either dissolved or submerged in the encroaching
web of line. In his commentary on Pollock in Abstract Expressionism and
the Modern Experience (1991), Stephen Polcari accurately describes the
eyes in Eyes in the Heat 1946 as ones that "lurk" in the surface, eyes
which are swallowed up by the heat (Polcari 1972: 250). The surface of
the canvas has all the heat of the battle; it is intense, active and all
consuming. Shimmering, dazzling and astonishing, there is nothing
ethereal about the surface; it is the matter of paint that shimmers—the
thick impasto strokes and the muddle of cut threads. In both Eyes in the
Heat 1946 and Shimmering Substance 1946 the surface is dense and
sculptural. What lies below is thin. The eyes in Eyes in the Heat 1946
and the yellow and red circles of Shimmering Substance 1946 are flat and
thinly painted, as if the structured content, weak and thinly formed, is
swallowed up by the strength of the whirling, swirling mass and the
free movement of the activated surface.
The Free Movement of Gases
The activated surface is an energetic system where each line and
mark acts and reacts with each other. This corresponds to the gaseous
system as Deleuze describes it in cinematographic terms in Cinema 1
(1983), a system of "universal variation" and "universal interaction
(modulation)": "Everything is as the service of variation and interaction:
slow or high speed shots, superimposition, fragmentation, deceleration
[demultipfication], micro-shooting [micrv-prise de vue]" (1983: 80-81).
Deleuze refers to Cezanne here, likening the modulation that he sees
in Vertov's cinema to what Cezanne had already identified as "the
world before man" and "iridescent chaos" (Deleuze 1983: 81).
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POLLOCK
In this system there is no focal point or exterior point of view but a
close vision—hafitic space, the point being that the eye is brought into the
image. Deleuze draws a parallel between the eagle-eyed, human eye
and the camera used as an apparatus for shooting film, and
understands the move in cinema to montage, as in Vertov's work, as a
move beyond the conditioning limitation of the camera and beyond
the human. He thus distinguishes the cinema from the work of the
camera, stating that "The cinema is not simply the camera: it is
montage" (81).
While from the human point of view montage might be seen as
construction, in the `cine-eye' [kino-ye] it is "the pure-vision of a nonhuman eye, of an eye that would be in things" (Deleuze 1983: 81).13
However the `cine-eye' is not so much in things as in matter. The
image stands on its own as a material montage of actions and
reactions. I think therefore that the ccine-eye' works in the same way as
the "autonomous vision of the content", the "pure Form" that
Deleuze identifies with Pasolini's "free indirect subjective" perceptionimage, which I mentioned earlier (Deleuze 1983: 74). By cutting across
the objective and subjective poles of perception, this independent
vision of the camera touches what Deleuze calls the "genetic element' of
all possible perception (1983: 83). This is because it is not just
concerned with the movement of internal relations, as Pollock is
concerned to do in his mannerist work, such as Moon Woman Cuts the
Circle 1943 (fig. 4.5), but returns to a differential of vital materialism to
work on a plane of vibration and to confront the elements of free
movement.
13 The English edition of Vertov's writings is entitled Kno-Eye:The Writings of
Diga Vettov after Vertov's essay of 1926 Wino-Eye' (1960: 60-79). ICino-eye
is a key concept for Vertov and °cans throughout his writings.
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POLLOCK
The gaseous state is defined by "the free movement of each
molecule" (as opposed to the formal solid state where "molecules are
not free to move about, and the material liquid state where "the
molecules move about and merge into one another") (Deleuze 1983:
84). Deleuze likens this return to the particle of matter to Seurat's
pointiaste work and to Landow's film Bardo Follies where the screen
gradually disintegrates into a granular soft focus, with the effect that
the screen itself seems to throb, and finally to divide up into bubbles
of air. Pollock's "all-over" work is a similar decomposition, a gaseous
state where heterogeneous components move freely in variation and
modulation, and the 'whole' as montage exists only in the texture of
that becoming.
In Chaosmosis, Guattari calls the movement of montage a "collective
dance" (1992: 35). This defines montage as a "machinic heterogenesis"
that synthesises all of the components it traverses because "[different
components are swept up and reshaped in a sort of dynamism" (35).
The abstract machine of montage "abstracts" (collects) as it dances
across the plane of composition, giving the sporadic lines and marks
"an efficiency" and "a power of ontological auto-affirmation" (35).
Guattari highlights the fact that "abstract" is also to "extract" (35).
Echoing Deleuze and Guattari's statement in What is PhilosObi? that
the task of painting is to "extract" new melodic landscapes, the
collective dance can be understood as movement that wrests the
virtual from chaos, a dance that, as it unfolds, extracts the virtual as a
real entity or Event on the canvas (1991: 176, 156)
Variation and modulation does not therefore mean that there is no
discernible patterning in the image, but only that that patterns emerge
in the creative ontogenesis of montage, in the movement of the
"collective dance" and, as I noted above, at the "service of variation
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POLLOCK
and interaction" (Deleuze 1983: 80-81). As both Sylvester (1997) and
Vincent (1999) have noted, the shock of Pollock's work is precisely
that the images jar with human perception. Pollock's work seduces and
bruises. It is not a question of the human eye determining a correlation
between images or between lines. Instead, it is rhythm and the "eye of
matter" that fills the interval between action and reaction (Deleuze
1983: 81). As Deleuze explains, again using Vertov, it is not the quality
of each line that counts, but the material system and the "dialectic of
matter" itself (1983: 39-40). In Pollock, the strokes and marks are in
perpetual interaction, lines and splashes are components—"catalysts,
converters, transformers"—which receive and transmit movement,
affect speed, direction and order, and which have an effect on the
'whole' out of all proportion to their individual status (39). This is
particularly clear in Pollock's grandiose work, Mural 1943, where a
playful correlation between haphazard strokes and marks sets up a
powerful repetitive rhythm, like a dance. This huge mural is twenty
feet long and eight feet wide, and was painted in a single, frenzied
session. A distinctive vertical black stroke is repeated across the length
of the canvas in a complex rhythmic dance of swirls and flings, as if
the 'eye' is following a strange swirling figure striding along, and where
the dancer is indistinguishable from the dance. Each 'molecule of
paint is an abstract line and a free movement. Each throw a differential
element in a montage and a machinic assemblage of molecular
interactions—actions and reactions—that produces a pointilfiste texture
out of which patterns emerge.
The theme of the dance is continued in later paintings of 1947-8,
among them the works with strange silhouetted cut-out figures, like
Untitled (Cut-Out) 1948-50, and one of Pollock's most famous works
Summertime (Number 9) 1948 (fig. 4.1). Here black and grey 'dancers'
parade along the canvas, carried along by a maze of fine swirls and
interspersed by flashes of red and yellow: a repetition accentuated by
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POLLOCK
the long thin canvas (33 inches x 18 feet). This calligraphic rhythm and
pattern is eased by the impossibility of taking in such a breadth in one
view; the viewer has to go with the pattern, inevitably reading from left
to right as if following the whirl of the dance and the steady rhythm
that is built up as the repetition proceeds. There is always movement,
but this is the movement of action and reaction, and of the
process(ion) not progression. Each turn of the dance is different from
the last; there is no beginning or end, just a network of correlations
and the topology of composition.
Repeated patterns are again seen in Lucifer 1947, with its striking
lurid green splatters which repeat across the canvas—a rare flash of
brightness within Pollock's otherwise muted palette of earthly tones.
But repetition is most pronounced in one of Pollock's last, and most
well known, paintings Blue Poles (Number 11) 1952 (fig. 4.2) where eight
dark blue 'poles' lurch across the canvas—blocks of colour added after
the layering of the dripped web and exactly printed using a wooden
plank. Such patterning opens onto the problematic of a repetition that
does not replicate or mimic because there is no model to feed off, and
it therefore owes nothing to resemblance. When we look at what is
happening on the canvas, and bearing in mind that Pollock's method is
the deliberation of the manual and of the chance throw of paint, the
repetition of the dance is one where difference persists. There is no
ground of repetition, but each repetition engages the chance throw of
paint in a movement of continuous rhythmic variation, where novel
patterns and distinct images emerge in the chaosmosis of the diagram.
That rhythm and that repetition are catastrophic; they are also
operative and creative. In that movement of the dance, the Event
unfolds.
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POLLOCK
Labyrinths and Folds
In this chapter I have looked at the conditions of the Event,
arguing that while Pollock's insistence on painting as a manual art in
effect treats the canvas a diagram of haphazard strokes and marks.
That diagram is not a chaotic preparatory work out of which an actual
state of affairs is drawn by the fascinated eye. As an abstract machine,
it works in the opposite direction to wreak a catastrophe on the
canvas. That catastrophe is not a chaos but a chaosmosis, a "machinic
heterogenesis" that, like Vertov's `cine-eye', traverses the haphazard
throw of line and colour sweeping those component marks up in the
collective dance of the montage. The canvas throbs and dances,
finding expression in the texture of correlation (diagrammatic
virtualities) and intersections made in the movement of unfolding that
is repetition.
In the next chapter, on the work of Paul Klee, I go on to theorize
the labyrinthine movement of the dance, and here the notion of the
fold becomes important. In The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque (1993a)
Deleuze identifies the fold with the Baroque, and cites Klee, Dubuffet,
Rauschenberg and Pollock as modern Baroque artists. Baroque art is
experimental, it contorts and turns upon other formulas and develops
styles that confuse different orders of time and space. There are
elaborate costumes, ornate architecture, and painting that hides shape
in ruffles and drapes. There are the intricate tangles of Pollock's webs.
There are the spirals and twist of Klee's undulating lines. There are
folds upon folds, and labyrinths. In the Baroque dance of matter, the
fold animates the material of art to reveal the sensation of the material
itself, an affect that in What in Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari lyrically
describe as "the smile of oil, the gesture of fired clay, the thrust of
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POLLOCK
metal, the crouch of Romanesque stone, and the ascent of Gothic
stone (1991: 166). The result is a dizzying animation in which matter
reveals its texture. The material of art becomes expressive matter,
producing a 'form' of expression in the inflective meanders of matter.
It is that vertiginous movement of inflection that we saw extracted in
the Event of Pollock's seductive, bruising painting—movement which
is extracted and made consistent in the music and expression of
Summertime (Number 9) 1948, or Lavender Mist (Number 1) 1950 and
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) 1950. The question is how does it work?
For the answer to that we turn to Klee and the "line out for a walk".
180
i.) moving freely, a point shifting its position forward
5
2
10 1
b.) an active line limited in movement by fixed points
A
c.) the line becomes passive as a result of the activation of planes
(fig. 5.3) Klee: Free, active, and passive lines.
From The Thinking Eye (1956: 105-13)
COSMOS
real
antithetical
chaos
chaos
Klee: "Cosmos—Chaos"
From The Thinking Eye (1956: 3)
red-violet
blue-violet
red-orange
blue
orange
blue-green
yellow-orange
yellow-green
Klee: "Sum of the peripheral colours = grey."
From The Thinking Eye (1956: 480)
(fig. 5.11) Klee: Cosmos and Chaos.
From The Thinking Eye (1956: 3, 480)
KLEE
In abstraction, reality is preserved.
Paul Klee, The Thinking Eye 1922 (1956: 463)
Counterpoint and Fugue
Paul Klee's work is musical. It is described by Andrew Kagan as
"polyphonic painting" and as "contrapunctuar; and by David
Sylvester, as "atonal" (Kagan 1983: 47, 52; Sylvester 1997: 36). In his
fascinating look at the relationship between art and music Paul Klee: Art
& Music (1983) Kagan emphasises the multi-voiced, many-layered
aspect of Klee's work; in his essays on late Klee (1937-40), reprinted
in About Modern Art (1997) Sylvester dwells on the fact that the
pictures have no centre or focus, and no fixed form. The point they
both make is that Klee's painting undermines perceptual habits, and
works against the optical coherence that the focal point and the
framing line imply. The work has no boundaries or fixed contours. It
cannot be read as a whole but is built up by, what Sylvester calls "a
roving, not a static eye", and which I understood in my last chapter
after Deleuze's commentary on Vertov as the non-optical, non-human
`cine-eye' or eye of matter (Sylvester 1997: 41; Deleuze 1983: 80-81).
Klee sees in his own painting all the textural complexity of Mozart and
argues that to read the painting the eye must see as the ear hears, build
figures and harmonize colours and tonalities.'
1 ICagan's musical analogies are by no means arbitrary, Klee was an
accomplished musician—teacher, critic, historian and player—and looked to
Bach and Mozart, and to the eighteenth century work on music theory by
Johann Josef Fux for principles governing painting (Kagan 1983: 41). In 1928
Klee wrote, "What had been accomplished in music by the end of the
eighteenth century has only begun in the fine arts" (Kagan 1983: 40).
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KLEE
The musical term 'counterpoint' best describes Klee's defiance of
'clear and distinct' rectilinear form, and the way that he refuses
subordination to the point of reference and the limitations of pictorial
dimensionality. Thus Klee seems to refuse rectilinear Euclidean
geometry in which the line is defined as the shortest distance between
two points and where the line, limited by the points, is clear and
distinct.' During the period 1921-1933, which culminated in the major
painting Ad Parnassum 1932 (fig. 5.1), Klee was, on his own admission,
seriously involved in trying to create work that directly paralleled the
multi-dimensionality of musical form, notably counterpoint and
polyphony. His Bauhaus course notes (1921-22) include examples of
"drawing in two voices" and of the polyphonic treatment of colour
and line, as for example Polyphonic-abstract 1930 against which Klee
added the following definition: "Polyphony: the study of harmony, the
theory of simultaneous sounds. Simultaneity of several independent
themes. Polyphony as a simultaneous multi-dimensional phenomenon"
(1956: 519). As Kagan points out, here Klee is influenced by the work
of Robert Delaunay on simultaneity.
In his first notebook (1939), Delaunay credits Cezanne as an artist
concerned with the destruction of a Renaissance tradition, a tradition
governed by "the idea of spectacle, fundamentally a literary subject,
which entails perspective as its means; and the idea of spaces seen
from the outside—rather than space created from within" (Delaunay
and Delaunay 1978: 20). It was Cezanne who, rejecting drawing and
destroying perspective, "began to break up the line" and, in order to
create space "from within", to experiment with colour and movement
(205). As Delaunay observes in a note of October 1913, "Color gives
2 See: Chapter Two for my discussion of the disruption of this formal line in
Mondrian.
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depth (not perspective, nonsequential, but simultaneous) and form and
movement" (46). And in 1917 he bids for "Depth through an adequate
craft, through relationships between color contrasts—form that is
depth. (Depth that is color and not chiaroscuro)" (71). As in MerleauPonty's 'Eye and Mind' essay (1961), colour rhythms and depth (which
Delaunay specifically details as duration) are tied up with a visual reality
of life and movement that contrasts with understanding and the
mechanical perception of geometry, and like Merleau-Ponty, Delaunay
privileges art with revealing that reality (82, and note 1). In his article
of 1912 'Light', reprinted in the cottected writings, he inpktes "La tts
seek to see" (Delaunay and Delaunay 1978: 82).3
Dismissing Impressionism as effect and Cubism and Symbolism as
allusion, Delaunay cites Seurat as the modern artist who begins to
approach painting as an art "which represents in all its purity a plastic
art" (Delaunay 1978: 27). He goes on in his observations on painting
to emphasis the "Reali0 of Ad" as the movement of colour in painting
(57). Its method is simultaneity. In a note from the early 1920s he
distinguishes modern art as plastic art, and in work from 1917
develops the notion of "form-colour" as a concern with depth:
The new art aims at the formal representation of space
continuously in movement—real volumes.
And colors are, in their simultaneous contrasts, the
marvelous means of expression for constructing
movement—which they produce by their material .... (61)
Later he adds that:
3 Dealaunay's article Tight' (1912) was translated into German by Klee (Der
Sturm, no. 144-45, February 1913).
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Painting is above all a visual art
In depth
Without mechanical elements. (72)
Polyphonic simultaneity presents a complex understanding of the
one—many relation that, with depth in mind, might be understood as a
musical chord, or the internal animation of a virtual multiplicity.
Delaunay makes his own connection between music and "pure
painting"; he likens simultaneity to the fugue, comparing his WitzdawsOpen Simultaneously 1912, to the fugues of J. S. Bach (Kagan 1983: 55).4
The comparison with 'fugue' is appropriate here because the fugue has
a layered musical depth of theme and transposed repetition, and
incidentally, carries the implication of flight from form because fugue
is a derivation of the Latin fugere meaning a running awg orflight.
A similar depth pertains in Klee's own example of "drawing in two
voices" and in Ad Parnassum 1932 (fig. 5.1). Hue, colout 'and lint ate
two counter-punctual melodies working in harmony. The colour
pointillism shimmers. Kagan quotes Klee as referring to his work as
"so-called pointillism" as for example in a letter of March 1932 (1983:
81 note 74). Klee's pointillism does not intensify light, as in
impressionism, but is a transparent layering that creates depth and
carries a distinct voice. In Ad Parnassum 1932, as elsewhere in Klee's
polyphonic paintings, the line soars. Simultaneously. The eye must
'hear' the crossings, weavings and foldings of these simultaneous
soundings: building and harmonizing a multi-dimensional image. The
4 Kagan is quoting from a review by Delaunay in Die A0en, VI, 12 (August
1912), 700. Delaunay talks about painting that is purely expressive, "beyond
the limits of all past styles", in 'A Note on the Construction of Reality in Pure
Painting' (1913) (94-96).
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precision of the coloured patchwork grid, though likened by Kagan to
a musical staff, is not a ground that contains or supports the line; nor
is the colour trapped within the line (Kagan 1983: 67). In the
polyphonic work colour and line are read as independent themes or
simultaneous voices. Colour adds another voice to the line, but in a
most unconventional way.
Sylvester describes these paintings as "polychromatic chessboards"
and makes the observation that because the sides of the checks
(colour-blocks/points) are wavering lines instead of straight ones the
'squares' are not rectilinear but seen as oblique planes, each with its
own unique slant (1997: 41). The effect is a strange vibrating depth, a
"warped surface" or an "undulating façade" where, because there is no
fixed perspective, depth is indeterminable (41). Klee remarks that "The
depth of our surface is imaginary", and that it requires that spatial
relations be organised by the eye (Klee 1956: 53, 340). Because colour
is not colouring, and the line not limited by points, the eye must
however take on a non-optical function and organise a polyphonic
multi-dimensional and imaginary or phantastic space. But in these
atonal pictures without a focal point, how is the work to be built or
harmonized?
The composition is built up by the roving eye, an eye with a haptic
rather than an optical function. In Klee, as for Pollock, the eye must
become, what Deleuze terms the "eye of matter" and enter the work,
drawing the composition by making local connections and working
with the disorientation of close-vision (Deleue 1983: 82). The eye must
get involved, and seduced by the matter of the canvas, construct the
line of the image as it walks and dances. Sylvester recognises this
function of the eye and agrees with Klee that the activity of the eye is,
as in Klee's model of form production, like the active line "out for a
walk" (Klee 1956: 105):
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KLEE
These are pictures without a focal point. They cannot be
seen by a static eye, for to look at the whole surface
simultaneously, arranged about its centre — or any other
point which at first seems a possible focal point — is to
encounter an attractive chaos. The eye must not rest, it
must allow itself to be forced away from the centre to find
a point at which it can enter the composition — there are
usually many such points, most of them near the edge —
and so journey through the picture, 'taking a walk with a
line'. (Sylvester 1997: 35) 5
This line is precisely the line that Deleuze and Guattari describe as
Gothic, nomadic and abstract (1980: 497). It is abstract because it has a
multiple orientation, and is not rectified or contained by fixed points.
It is an affect of "smooth space", a space with no definition or
dimensions, a space of infinite and oceanic distances where new
distributions and myriad compositions are always possible. There is no
definite orientation, foreground or background, outlining or placing.
The picture is alive to continuous variation as it figures and dances.
Deleuze describes this line as a line where writing is absent, a
description that recognises the line as free from the regulatory sign
systems that determine the notion of writing (497)• 6 This line unfolds
5 Here Sylvester is referring to Klee's late work, the Bern period, 1937-38
until his death in 1940.
6 The abstract line is an affect of smooth space not a line determining space,
when the line would be figurative. The abstract line draws, the figurative line
writes. Deleuze and Guattari do not develop a discussion of writing here, but
a tangential allusion to Derrida's work on writing cannot be dismissed. Of
Grammatology was published in 1967, Writing and Difference in 1978, A Thousand
Plateaus in 1980.
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and the image is figured in the morphological production that Klee
theorizes as Gestaltung or form production. The 'form' the picture takes
is a dynamic form composed by taking a walk through the picture,
unravelling or unfolding a line as one goes, creating a figure in the
duration of the random walk.'
Deleuze and Guattari are surely thinking of Klee, perhaps even of
the Angelus Novus 1920 (fig. 5.2), when they describe the random or
nomadic line as being alive, inorganic and swirling.
Heads unravel and coil into ribbons in a continuous
process: mouths curl in spirals. Hair, clothes ... This
streaming, spiralling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of
variation liberates a power of life that human beings had
rectified and organisms had confined, and which now
matter expresses as the trait, flow, or impulse traversing it.
(1980: 499)
The figure remains always at the point of mutation, the hair and
clothes only distinguished by the trait of the twist, the curl and the
fold. The hair nothing more than the curl, represented only as a trait of
the line as colour and tonality. Walter Benjamin describes it thus: "A
Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as
though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are
spread" (Benjamin 1955: 249). The stance might be Medusan but the
7 In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari reference Worringer,
Abstraction and Empathy (1908) for their understanding of the abstract line as
"Gothic or Northern" (1980: 496; Won-inger 1908: 106-21). Their reference
is to a 1927 edition (Putnam's and Sons) in which the chapter heading is
'Form in Gothic', 38-55.
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angel is about to fly. When the eye travels with the line the angel will
soar like a crescendo, spiralling eccentrically, freeing itself from the
earth in infinite motion. The angel is a figure that is an affect of
abstraction. Benjamin pictures the Angelus Novus as the angel of
history. He stands in the midst of the human catastrophe of the
twentieth century, about to be driven backwards "irresistibly into the
future" by the storm caught in his wings; streaming, spiralling, "out for
a walk" and hurtling into the unknown. With the above quotation
from Deleuze and Guattari in mind, we might add that the zigzagging,
feverish line liberates a power of life beyond the human and "without
image".
"taking a walk with a line"
Klee develops his twin theory of form production and pictorial
form, which includes his famous "walk with a line", during his
Bauhaus years 1921-33. His teaching notes, journal jottings and
sketches from that period are collected in two handbooks of
pedagogical writings, The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature. 8 On his
own account these pedagogical works complement his pictures, and it
therefore seems sensible to use these notes to bring out the philosophy
in the art.
As his concern with form production suggests Klee is interested in
what art produces, not what it represents. That operative function is
demonstrated by Klee in his image of "taking a walk with a line". Klee
describes this line variously, as linear-motion self-contained, as linear8 The two section headings in The Thinking Eye are 'Towards a theory of
form-production' and 'Contributions to a theory of pictorial form'.
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active, as free, as restful and harmonious (1956: 105, 123). Musically it
is the lilt of the folk-song, un-elaborate and companionable. What
makes this line so easy is that it is without aim or purpose, fixed point
of reference or image. Klee says that; "It goes out for a walk, so to
speak, aimlessly for the sake of the walk" (105). Described as the point
set in motion, this point is understood as an agent, not a stop; and the
line is free, not rectilinear.
Lines, however, are not always abstract, even when 'on a walk', and
under the heading 'Contribution to a Theory of Pictorial Production',
Klee determines four different productions of the "line on a walk": the
line that moves freely, a line limited by points, and the line that
becomes passive by translating into the plane, and the line that is
displaced by the plane (fig. 5.3) (1956: 105-13). Each line begins with
the point set in motion, and the point set in motion has an
unarticulated potentiality. The line is essentially free but becomes
limited under certain conditions. In a progress that echoes the turn of
the line in the punctual system, which in Chapter Three I described
with reference to Mondrian, Klee illustrates the progressive restriction
of the "line on a walk". The free line becomes restricted in movement,
and therefore only "active" when subordinate to the fixed point, and
becomes passive as a result of the activation of planes, until in the final
figure its movement is blocked by the plane.
The line moving freely walks for a walk's sake, and is depicted as a
curved and meandering line. Importantly it has no definite beginning
or end, and no stops or supports. It is an abstract line, moving freely.
Klee labels his figure "moving freely, a point shifting its position
forward" (1956: 103). Its form is only the 'inform' of its direction,
speed and rhythm, and its linear energy. It is a textural line. The
second, active line is limited in its movement by the fixed point or
stop. It moves from 1-2-3-4— and onwards, and in conformity with
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its Euclidian geometry each leg of its journey is the shortest distance
between points. Klee suggests that it is more like a series of
appointments than a walk, and because it takes the most direct route
between points, he sees it as hurrying rather than wandering. Klee's
third and fourth examples are the passive line. This works like the
active line in that there is a determined progress from one point to the
next, but once the lines are joined this linearity becomes planarity and
the figure is fixed. Linear energy is passified, blocked by the plane.
Under different conditions, the four modes of the line and the
consequent forms result in very different figurations. Deleuze and
Guattari recognise this when, in the plateau 'The Smooth and the
Striated' in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), they insist that "The abstract is
not directly opposed to the figurative" but rather that "The figurative
or imitation and representation, is a consequence, a result of certain
characteristics of the line when it assumes a given form" (1980: 497).
Those certain characteristics express the conditions under which the
line operates, and out of which the figure emerges or arises as a plastic
formation. Like Klee, Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge different
degrees of abstraction or smoothness under different conditions. The
smooth and the striated are not pure spaces, but exist in mixtures
where the one is translated, reversed or returned to the other. So, the
smooth can be captured and enveloped by the striated, the striated
dissolved into the smooth (1980: 475). The smooth—in Klee the
cosmic—and the striated, which in Klee corresponds to the
schematised space of defined form, are the extreme conditions of
space.
At the one extreme we have the rectilinear or punctual system
under which "transversals are subordinated to diagonals, diagonals to
horizontals and verticals, horizontals and verticals to points", space is
striated and the line describes a contour (497). At the other extreme we
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have the abstract and "a fine that delimits nothing, that describes no contour"
and that works in smooth space (497-98). For Deleuze and Guattari it
is the "nomadic line invested with abstraction", a line that they identify
with Worringer's Gothic line because it has "the power of expression
and not of form" (498). By this they mean that it does not constitute a
form of expression that striates and organizes matter, but that it is instead
a form of expression that is better understood as autogenetic figuration
or creative evolution and which is "accompanied by material traits of
expression" (498). In Klee's terms, it promotes essence and quality, not
appearance and quantity. Like the fugue it is a flight from fixed form.
I like this introduction of the 'figure' into thinking about Klee's
work, for two reasons. Firstly because Klee's late work, his Beme
period (1933-40) to which the musical vocabulary of fugue and
counterpoint most accurately applies, includes many figures—weeping
woman, noisy person, loved one, clown, faces. Secondly, Klee's
distinctive logic of creativity depends on the notion of Gestaltung as an
active, performative constructivism or form-building. It is a word that
holds onto the active connotation of building, and the pro-active
connotation of figuration as figuring. Again the accent is on time,
change, and the line of emergence.
With his image of "taking a walk with a line" Klee explores the
principle of composition for an art that refers only to an operative
function. As we will see later, that function is a creative evolution. The
line is a "random line" without beginning or end, and goes out for a
walk, its power of expression and its figuration emerging in the
duration of that movement. In Bergson's terms it "brings with it that
unforeseeable nothing which is everything in a work of art ... it creates
itself as form" (Bergson 1911: 341). And here in Bergson we have the
notion of form that requires autogenesis, a form of expression and
figuration that becomes so important in Klee's notion of Gestaltung.
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Gestaltung
In a short article from 1948, entitled 'Auguries of Experience',
David Sylvester explains the subtlety of Klee's move to function as a
move from a concern with appearance and object, to a concern with
the conditions of existence, saying that "Klee was concerned not so
much with objects as with the conditions under which they exist and
the forces which act in and upon them. This indeed is the burthen of
all Klee's writings" (1997: 46).
Sylvester interprets this passage as Klee being less concerned with
the objects that are experienced as with the process of experiencing
them. This emphasis on experience must be understood in the context
of Klee's own concern with movement and change. Sylvester suggests
that we experience Klee's pictures by journeying through them, thus
making novel associations and finding strange resemblances between
the signs scattered across the canvas. I go on to discuss the analogy of
the journey in the next section. However, here I want to argue that in
his own theorization of function Klee is concerned with the processes
of form and with creation rather than with the conditions of
experience. Klee contrasts "living form"—the metalogic of the smile
for instance—with the formalism of the exact, and the 'magic of life'
with the 'magic of experience' (Klee 1956: 60). This would point to the
concern with the conditions under which objects exist as a concern
with the principles of composition and not with experience as
Sylvester supposes.
In The Thinking Eye Klee insists on the word Gestaltung for his theory
of pictorial form, rejecting the more usual Formlehre, in order to point
up figuration as a theory of morphological form production that
"emphasises the paths to form rather than form itself', and which
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"clearly contains the idea of an underlying mobility" (Klee 1956: 17).9
Gestaltung is an experimental creative figuration (17, 21). Klee defines
Gestalt as "over against form", emphasizing creativity as a practice of
formation and "form-making", in contrast to the more static Formlebre
"theory of form" or "form-deciding", and interestingly in the light of
his polarisation of earth as death and the cosmos as life, he notes
Gestalt as 'living being, and Form as 'nature mode' (17).
Klee uses the word "genesis" to explain Gestaltung (1956: 17). He
splits genesis into two phases, which he maps onto the primordial
masculine and the primordial feminine: "Genesis as formal movement
is the essence of the world of art. In the beginning the motif,
harnessing the energy, sperm. Work as form-making in the material
sense: primordial feminine. Work as form-deciding sperm: primordial
masculine" (17). He also points to centripetal forces as 'feminine', and
centrifugal forces as 'masculine' (23). Perhaps wisely, Klee does not
develop this problematic polarity. As I read the work, the oppositional
structure is a tenuous starting point. What is more interesting is how
Klee works the tension between and beyond opposites.
The important point is that the form or figure emerges, or arises,
within the creative process and, in that sense, exists in itself as a
harmonization of a few colours and tonalities, and the building of
figures. So although Klee himself refers to Gestaltung as a "genesis" or
even a "cosmogenesis", and though the fundamental interiority of that
process makes it an autogenetic process, the emphasis on form-making
as a creative practice points to Gestaltung as a movement that
resonantes with Guattari's notion of "machinic heterogenesis", which I
discussed in reference to the movement of Pollock's "all-over"
9 See Chapter Three note 10, of this thesis where I compare Klee's method of
Gestaltung with Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism [de nieuwe bee/dung].
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canvases (Klee 1956: 17, 22, 415).
Klee's description of the cosmogenetic moment reiterates
O'Connor's description of Pollock's work; it is "Suns, radiation,
rotation, explosion, movements of fireworks, sheaves" (Klee 1956: 22;
O'Connor 1977: 52). This affinity between the machinic and Klee is
confirmed when in his sustained study of the Event The Fold. Leibniz
and the Baroque (1993a), Deleuze references Klee as a modem Baroque
painter, and himself uses the word Gestaltung, describing the fold as
"producing a form of expression, a Gestaltung, the genetic element
Per/lent genetique] or infinite line of inflection, the curve with a unique
variable" (35 [49]).10
For Klee, form emerges from the material and action of painting,
and because that performance hinges on what he terms "ideal,
intangible" qualities--line, tone, value and colour—and not on the
quantative "material"—wood, metal, glass and so on—painting must
be understood as performing rather than conforming (1956: 17).
Gestaltung thus seems to work on the same level as machinic
heterogenesis, and be similarly concerned with the correlation of
diagrammatic virtualities, the tensions and intersections in the work,
and with the way that, in the movement of genesis (the fold), the
material become expressive matter. That expression is informed,
abstract and non-representational, not because it defies form, but
because the form is not predetermined—there is no poetic mood or an
idea as a starting point, just the pen or the manual throw of paint and
autopoiesis.
10 As well as Klee, Deleuze cites Fautrier, Dubuffet, and Bettencourt, as
modem Baroque painters. Delaunay is the obvious omission.
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Klee's own understanding of painting as a creative form production
is very close to Bergson's idea of painting as a creative evolution. I
focused on the importance of the artist as a truly creative practitioner
in Chapter One, when talking about the affinities between art and
philosophy as disciplines that think "without image". There I
specifically referenced Creative Evolution (1911) and the analogy that
Bergson makes between the work of art and creative evolution.
Creative evolution, like the work of art is a free action: "it transcends
finality, if we understand by finality the realization of an idea conceived
or conceivable in advance" (Bergson 1911: 224). Because Klee's art
begins with practice—the point set in motion—and not with the idea
or pre-given image, there is the same notion of the work of art as
"unforeseeable and new" that there is in Bergson (1911: 340-41). Both
talk about the form sprouting and flowering, and both see form
unfolding through time, indeed Klee is most explicit about this noting
that, "[For] space is also a temporal concept", something graphically
depicted in the aptly titled watercolour Ardent Flowering 1927 (fig. 4.4)
in which strange figures bloom in bursts of diverging lines (Klee 1956:
340).
Bergson's emphasis on art as free action—he talks about painting in
particular—highlights two aspects of the creative process that are also
important to Klee: essence and time. The idea that the emergence of
form is stretched out in duration as a "creative evolution" has
implications for the idea of essence. Thus Bergson finds that, "The
sprouting and flowering of this form are stretched out on an
unshrinkable duration, which is one with their essence" (1911: 341).
Klee similarly wants to turn art from a preoccupation with appearance
to the contemplation of essence, and sets the vitality of essence against
the statis of optical appearance.
The naming of that experiential but material force as "essence" and
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its contrast with "appearance" would at first seem to situate Klee
within a Platonic frame, but what is interesting here is that Klee,
endorsing a mystical cosmogenesis, interprets essence as a primal
impulse, a force which he articulates in terms of movement and
growth, and not as a transcendental reality or as an original Idea or
image. This move to an ontology of becoming enables him to contrast
movement with statis, and quality with quantity, and therefore to
develop a logic of creativity where the only criteria is an immanent
movement. In a section headed 'Objects of nature investigated in
regard to their inner being. Essence and Appearance', Klee states both
that "What we are after is not form, but function", and that "Art is the
transmission of phenomena, projection of the hyper-dimensional, a
metaphor for procreation, divination, mystery" (1956: 59-60). The
editor of The Thinking Eye, Jiirg Spiller, notes that whereas in the first
version of this text Klee emphasises the problems of 'function' and the
'creative', in the second version he focuses on the balance between
'exact knowledge' and 'intuition'. It is interesting that Klee echoes
Bergson in associating 'function' and the 'creative' with 'intuition'.
The "metalogic"—Klee's word—of hyper-dimensional and
creative production stands against the formalism of distinct fabricated
forms like squares, circles, triangles, domes, cubes ... and is concerned
with "all the seductions between good and evil" (1956: 60). Here in
Klee, as in Pollock, we find the notion that the work of art is to seduce
or perhaps to bruise, and that its domain is sensation and not
representation. The scent, the gaze, and the smile are Klee's own
examples of art's contemplations; interesting choices in the light of
Bacon's later struggle with the cry and the smile, which I come to in
the next chapter.
How to represent, or perhaps better, picture things, becomes then a
question of essence rather than appearance, but it is an essence
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predicated on a creative impulse and the processes leading to form.
Klee writes,
Representation according to essence, contrasted with
representation according to appearance or with physical
and spatial penetration. Accent on the processes leading to
the form. (1956: 383)
For Klee quality is the ultimate in individual human experience, and
his task is to carry that experience into the conceptual, "rendering
visible" the essence of experience that is masked by the preoccupation
with quantity in the industrial world, but which he thinks remains
embedded in the unconscious. He gives a certain privilege to art and
painting in particular, believing that to bring this inherent quality of
experience to visibility demands pictorial symbolism or pictorial
thinking because it would otherwise be limited by the use of
preconceived forms with its assumptions of quantitative relations. In
the pictorial, quality emerges directly out of the work of painting and
the walk of the line. For Klee, the problem of form is not a question of
spatial representation but of emergent figuration. Thus essence
functions, not as a ground but as an indeterminable immanence, and
the creative force of Gestaltung.
Gestaltung carries the power of creativity, life and movement, and it
is the essence of this power that Klee wishes to make visible. His aim
is to move towards its source and to make it known through matter, in
real and living form—"it is thus that matter takes on life and order"
(17, 463). Like Bergson, Klee understands essence as invisible but real
and demonstrates it as a virtual multiplicity and an event. Conceived in
terms of both substance and duration, essence creates the work in
which it is expressed, and it is that reality which is preserved in plastic
art. It is not an art of copying or reproduction but of abstraction and
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the art of "transformation and new creation" (460). Klee recognizes
that to make visible this essence is a metamorphosis—"we cross a
boundary of reality"—and, as Bergson does, finds in that movement
the creation and production of differences (1956: 460; Deleuze 1966:
98).
Here Klee departs from the mathematical formalism of the Bauhaus
where he taught from 1921-31, despite supporting the qualitative
values central to the Bauhaus programme—to develop the possibilities
of an industrial age without precluding creativity and freedom. Klee
understands the move from punctuality to process in terms of
reduction and distillation, advising that "it becomes necessary to
reduce the conglomeration of quantitative phenomena which fill the
universe and human existence" (1956: 14-16). He interprets process in
humanistic terms as a move to a full consciousness of the value of
existence, and that means revealing the essential masked by
quantitative forms. My Bergsonian reading of this turn to essence is
that, because it takes creativity seriously and works within the ontology
of becoming, it effects the dissolution of solid forms and a turn to a
logic of fluids and gases. As my discussion of Pollock in Chapter Four
showed, that effect is explosive rather than reductionist.
The idea that the work of art evolves or unfolds through the work
of painting means that time becomes an issue for the artist. This is
something that Klee takes on board when for instance, in a diary entry
of 1917, he remarks that "Polyphonic painting is superior to music in
that, here, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of
simultaneity stands out even more richly", and in 1922 when he
describes structure as the handmaiden of movement, "Articulation in
time and in different kinds of movement gives rise to different orders
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of magnitude" (Kagan 1983: 57; Klee 1956: 302).'' So, in a sketch like
Sailboats in gentle motion 1927 (fig. 5.5) or in the oils, Four Sailboats 1927
and At Anchor 1932 the essence of the boat is its sailing, the time and
movement of its drift with the sea. The rhythmic to and fro of the
tacking line traverses matter and generates the "representation
according to essence" of the sailboat in gentle motion, and the
appearance of the boat is resisted by the impulse of the waves. In each
work, the 'experience', and essence, of the boat is its sailing and we
see, in pictorial thinking, matter expressing the flow traversing it. The
relaxed rhythms and the movement of the sea and boat are what
count. Different rhythms engender different appearances.
Klee distinguishes the work of art as a practice that reveals an
essential vitality. Like Bergson, he understands essence as continuous
through the growth of the work, and wants to turn the study of
appearance to the art of contemplating "unoptical impressions and
representations" (Klee 1956: 63). Reading this notion of essence as a
non-optical multiplicity gives it a function that echoes the non-optical
function of the eye sought by Deleuze in the movement of close visionhaptie space where the space is mapped by the acentred movement of
the "eye of matter". 12 Instead of a space focused on the privileged
point of view we have an a-centred 'depth' and, as I will explain, an (n1) dimensional space—for Klee it is "hyper-dimensional"—and find
form emerging in the complex folding of the montage. In The Fold the
montage or multiplicity is described by Deleuze as having many folds,
and it is the fold that affects materials and which because it becomes
11 Kagan is quoting from Klee's Diaries (no. 1081), 374.
12 The mathematical 'function' is a relation or mapping between two sets in a
many—one relation. There is also the hint of activity and even of the
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expressive matter "produces a form of expression, a Gestaltung —
7)
(1993a: 35).
Pleats and Folds
I earlier described Pollock's "all-over" canvases as labyrinths
because of their intricate tangle of lines. Deleuze opens The Fold.
Leibnk and the Baroque with the motif of the labyrinth, returning to
etymology to define the labyrinth as "multiple because it contains
many folds", reminding the reader that the multiple does not have
many parts but is what is folded in many ways (Deleuze 1993a: 3). He
goes on to find the condition of the Event in the virtual multiplicity of
the folds of matter. The smallest element of the labyrinth is the fold,
which Deleuze understands in mathematical terms as "a simple
extremity of the line" and as a variable curve (6). The characteristic of
the fold is that it is a line that is not subordinate to the point, but
which is an abstract line with free movement, and which therefore
functions as a molecular and 'gaseous' component of the multiple
labyrinth. There are no straight (punctual) lines and no points in the
continuity of the labyrinth, just the collective dance of the stroke and
the mark, "Folds seem to be rid of their supports—cloth, granite or
cloud—in order to enter an infinite convergence" (34).
In my discussion of Guattari's book Chaosmosis (1992) and the
notion of "machinic heterog-enesis" in Chapter Four, I described the
infinite convergence of the fold in the "collective dance", a movement
where what is operative is the correlation and tension between
diagrammatic virtualities that work as links or turns in the folds of the
explosion of the form in the etymology of 'function, from latin fungi, to
perform of discharge.
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dance. The nature of the manual painting as an abstract and
autogenetic machine means that that inbetween is indefinite/indefinite
and functions as a point of inflection. Inflection is the virtual energic
force of the fold, and determined by Deleuze in The Fold. Leibniz and
the Baroque as "the ideal genetic element of the variable curve or fold"
and as "the pure Event of the line or of the point, the Virtual, ideality
par excellence" (Deleuze 1993a: 14, 15).
As we saw in the last chapter, with the manual throw Pollock
returns painting to the raw matter of its material. Using Bergson's
example of painting as a creative evolution, we can see that such a
return to matter corresponds to the starting point of the work of art;
"Nought as matter, it creates itself as form" (Bergson 1911: 341).
Pollock's "all-over" canvases, such as Summertime (Number 7) 1948 (fig.
4.1) or Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) 1950, are a complex labyrinth of
strokes and marks, and an intense dizzying cacophony of shooting
lines and splashes of colour. Their novelty as 'form' arises from the
force produced in the modulation of the material configuration. What
is important is the manner in which that matter is amassed, and the
plastic or machinic forces of that endogenous convergence. In Klee's
work, such as Salboats in gentle motion 1927 (fig. 5.5), the force of the
painting is produced in the texture and movement—the walk—of the
line.
In The Foli. Leibniz and the Baroque (1993a) Deleuze identifies the
movement of convergence as pleats and folds, an operative function
that he associates with the Baroque. He calls machinic forces the
"pleats of matter", pleats that are "defined in respect to the matter that
they organise" (1993a: 12). Those pleats reveal the textures of matter;
for instance, the different rhythms and melodies produced across the
landscape, as in Ad Parnassum 1932 (fig. 5.1) for example, where the
different densities of colour and mark produce 'light' and 'dark'
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rhythms.
Deleuze, here talking about folds of fabric in Baroque work, and
about Helga Heinzen's contemporary paintings of striped and folded
fabrics, describes this level of materiality as a "theater of matter"
(1993a: 37). Like a theatre it is the setting of an event. What it envelops
is the immaterial animation that makes matter expressive; after all what
is expressed has no existence outside its expression (35). This concern
with conditions and the genesis of the figure is echoed in Deleuze's
reading of Baroque art as abstract art [Part informe4, and his insistence
that abstraction—Klee, Fautrier, Dubuffet, Bettencourt—is not
opposed to (creative, evolutionary) form; "abstraction [Pinforme4 is not
a negation of form: it posits form as folded, existing only as a <mental
landscaped .... Material matter [Les matiens] is the ground [le forml, but
folded forms are styles or manners" (35 [49-50]).
Imagining the labyrinth of matter as a Baroque house with two
interconnecting levels, Deleuze distinguishes two different articulations
of production: the amassing of matter and the animation of matter. On
the one hand we have the labyrinthine meander of matter and the
chaos of strokes and marks, on the other hand we have the "folds of
fire", the invisible and immaterial force that animates the material,
dizzying it and bringing the 'body' of the work alive, so that it
functions as an operative chaosmosis (30).' Deleuze calls this 'upper'
level "the folds in the soul" (14-26). It seems that the interiority
conferred on matter by the move to abstraction, wrought by a return
13 Deleuze has Tintoretto and Last Judgement 1560-62 in mind here. He
divides the painting into two levels; the lower level shows tormented bodies
"their souls stumbling, bending and falling into meanders of matter", the
upper level attracts them like "folds of fire bringing their bodies alive,
dizzying them ... (1993a: 30).
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to the manual and to Action Painting, provokes a curious dizzying
movement of inexact convergence. We saw that movement in
Guattari's collective dance and in Pollock's vibrant "all-over" canvases
where what is operative is the correlation and tension between
components, novel intersections that work as links or turns in the
dance of matter. The inbetween is the fold, and it is in the movement of
the fold that the material is animated and becomes expressive matter.
The fold is an operative function—the operative function to which the
Baroque refers—that produces a form or figuration (3, 34). That
"form of expression" is defined by Deleuze as a Gestaltung.
Painting must not only confront the 'pleats of matter' and therefore
of the material of expression, but those pleats—the molecular
components and matter of the material—must harness the immaterial
and energetic forces between those components. That between is
identified by Deleuze as the fold and as the Event of the line. In Klee
that Event is rendered visible in the walk of the random line.
Procreation and Divination
With the preceding discussion in mind, it seems appropriate to
understand Gestaltung more in terms of the Deleuzian material—force,
than matter and form. What counts is the energy of the line and its
manner and style—forces, densities and intensities (Deleuze and
Guattari 1980: 343). With metaphors of flowering and fruitfulness in
mind, Klee describes the process of genesis:
The point sets itself in motion and an essential structure
grows, based on figuration. The end is only a part of what
is essential (the appearance). True essential form is a
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synthesis of figuration and appearance. (1956: 21)
The point set in motion is a key concept in Klee's theory of
Gestaltung and the notion of the emergent figure, and one that I will
comeback to later in the chapter. However, what is important to focus
on here is that Klee goes on to represent the movement of emergence
in his knotty sketches where the problematic thought of correlative
oppositions is visualised (fig. 5.6). These examples are labelled
'Representation according to essence (movement and growth)' and
'Synthesis of essence and appearance (interpenetration, interlacing)'.
The corresponding painting is the watercolour Ardent Flowering 1927
(fig. 5.4), which I mentioned earlier. Here strange filigree forms bloom
in the performance of movement, growth, interpenetration and
interlacing and appearance of a form of expression conditioned by the
rhythm and material—force of the abstract line. Flowers blossom in
twists and curls, and swirl into intense complex heads, which look
remarkably like the loops and spirals of the strange attractors which
Edward Lorenz would map in 1963 in his work on the chaotic rotation
of turbulence in fluids."
The question of material-force confronts the double articulation of
Gestaltung as a figuration of expression. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze
and Guattari approach the notion of material—forces through a
discussion of the work of art, recalling the thermal and magnetic
forces, and the folds of the landscape in Cezanne, the weight of the
potato sack in Millet (1980: 342-43). What they identify in these artists
is that the work of art, here already understood in machinic terms as an
14 Lorenz's work demonstrates the apparent contradiction of a deterministic
chaos where, as in the whirlpool, the turbulence of dissipative systems is
squeezed and folded into the intense whirl of a strange attractor. See: Gleick
1987: 121-153.
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"assemblage", no longer confronts forms and matters, or themes but
instead takes on the value of pure material so that "the essential thing"
is force, density and intensity—weight or gravitation. The Cezannian
landscape or the peasant's sack in Millet has an individuated existence
through the non-visual, virtual forces of the multiple folding that it
harnesses. In this way Deleuze and Guattari draw a parallel between art
and philosophy of the "modern age"; Klee is their example from art,
Nietzsche the philosopher in question. Using Klee's own vocabulary,
they explain that the essential relation for those disciplines is no longer
matter—form (or substance—attribute) but material—force, and that this
is a move from a philosophy of earthly things to Cosmic philosophy.
The material of modem painting is deterritorialized and molecularized
matter, but its concern is not the chaos of the earth, but the forces of
an "immaterial, nonformal and energetic Cosmos" (342). In other
words the visible must capture the invisible ("nonvisible forces"). As
Klee clearly states in his 'Creative Credo' (1920), "Art does not
reproduce the visible but makes visible" (1956: 76-79). He
immediately links that statement of intent to abstraction because in
'making-visible' graphic art produces forms without losing the identity
of its own material elements—its calligraphic character, and the
rhythm, life and order of its genesis (77).
In his 'General Review' (1922), Klee reiterates the importance of
abstraction as an art that keeps hold of genesis, creativity and
formation over the analytical determination which is "the organization
of differences into a unity, the combination of organs into an
organism" (1956: 449). In contrast to such pre-determination,
abstraction is "all affirmation" and "absolute" (463). It is not in the
theoretical structure of the piece but exists in and for itself, is there or
not there (463). It is that reality that is preserved in art. He concludes
by returning to the aim of art as "making-visible":
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In summing up we may say: Something has been made
visible which could not have been perceived without the
effort to make it visible. Yes, you might see something, but
you would have no exact knowledge of it. But here we are
entering the realm of art; here we must be very clear about
the aim of 'making-visible'. Are we merely noting things
seen in order to remember them or are we trying to reveal
what is not visible? Once we know and feel this
distinction, we have come to the fundamental point of
artistic creation. (454)
The task of art becomes to "render tiiible", not as Deleuze and Guattari
remind us, to render or to reproduce the asible (1980: 342). Deleuze
and Guattari thus define modern painting, and philosophy, as "a
material of capture" (342).
Klee himself recognises Gestaltung as a method that dissolves form
in order to return to movement and matter when he notes that it
"preserves almost physical vitality" (1956: 16). In the same gesture he
dismisses the distinction between the real and the imaginary, a
distinction already overturned in the imaginary or phantastic spaces
revealed in Mondrian's work. As such Klee is implicitly fitting in with
Deleuze's understanding of the virtual as real but not actual. That same
virtuality seems to pertain in Klee's notion of Gesaltung, a theory of
form production in which "it is no longer admissible to draw any
distinction between an object which is real and one that is imaginary,
each image, being a moment of experience and of existence, is no
longer a fixed and detached representation but preserves almost
physical vitality" (Klee 1956: 16). That moment of existence is an
Erlebnis, an experiential structure or way of being, which has a certain
rhythm or life force. Klee's experiments with rendering visible this
force in a series of sketches entitled 'Rhythms in nature' (1956: 268).
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Here the flow of the pen and ink line resonates with the rhythm of
movement in exhalation/inhalation, walking, blood circulation or day
and night, and the images emerge from the rhythm of the line to
"render visible" the physical vitality of immaterial animation and the
experience of the movement. They are abstract figurations that emerge
in duration, movement and the journey of becoming.
Physical vitality and the force of the line seem particularly strong in
the major work Pursed-lipped Lay 1930 [Versiegelte Dame 1930] (fig. 5.7)
where Klee utilises the continuous line and where the form of the
figure is determined and materialized in the movement of that line, a
movement echoed in the German title in the prefix ver- with its
implications of change, dissolution and disappearance. The stern,
almost catatonic attitude of the Pursed-lipped Lay 1930 is a specific
magnitude of the meandering lines: lines which unfold out of the,
ironically, open 'red point' of the pursed sealed lips, as if the mouth is
ready to spew, a fold bursting with anticipation. These free lines figure
the face, the expression of which refers to the expectant pout of the
lip. As with the Bacon portraits, which I discuss further in the next
chapter, the face disappears through the mouth; what emerges is an
attitude—haughtiness. Despite the strange perspective, and a passing
resemblance to Picasso's later painting Woman in a Fish Hat 1942, the
resulting portrait is quite different from the multi-perspectival, and
spatial, cubist take. Here there are no fixed dimensions, and despite the
remnant of a humanist determining logic in the defining contour or
'crust' (here the quiff), Klee's work remains a radical experiment with
the possibilities of creative figuration and the self-generating image.
Journeys
Klee describes the task of 'making-visible' by drawing a topological
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plan and taking a journey with a line as it spirals, arches, zig-zags ...
(1956: 76). He thus demonstrates the key principle of abstract art: that
"All becoming is based on movement ... [f]or space itself is a temporal
concept" (78). Two examples serve to make the point. Town square
under construction 1923 (fig. 5.8) (a watercolour with pen and ink sketch)
is ostensibly a plan, with buildings clustered along a graphic free line—
exactly the curving sweep of the pen that uses to illustrate the active
line on a walk, in the 'Bauhaus Book', Pedagogical Sketchbook of 1925.
The perspective is strange in its variability, even if the arrow to the
bottom right is taken as a suggested subject position.
As I quoted Sylvester saying, earlier in this chapter, Klee's pictures
lack a focal point and demand that, in order to avoid encountering a
chaos, the eye must enter the composition (Sylvester 1997: 35). To
make any sense of the simultaneous perspectives in Torn square under
construction 1923 (fig. 5.8), the eye must travel along the road of the line,
and take a walk through the square, organizing and imagining. In this
particular piece the free line is literally there in the work, but in the
later landscapes it is the eye itself that creates the trajectory of the line.
Take Garden, Yard and Homestead 1934 [Garten, Hofund Hausrat 1934]
(fig. 5.9), enter through a gap or a gate, and wander, explore and
discover. This may be a cliche, but every visit will reap new delights to
the eye as it moves with both constraint and freedom.
Jean-Clet Martin, writing about quite other constructions in his
essay on ecclesiastical architecture, pilgrimages and relics 'Cartography
of the Year 1000: Variations on A Thousand Plateaus', is also forced to
think of journeying: pilgrimages and crusades, but also transversals,
vectors and flight (1994: 265-88). Martin acknowledges the influence
of Georges Duby's volume LEurope du Moyen-Age (1984). Interestingly
he says that, according to Duby, the ecclesiastical Romanesque is
"both an equation and a fugue", and he describes its architect as "a
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pure visionary able to compose psalmodic assemblages" (1994: 268).
Psalmody is defined by Martin as "a nonmeasured musical time" and
as "a brutal and violent war chant" (267). The musical analogy is again
the appropriate one.
I include this excursion here because Martin adeptly describes the
"dance of the pilgrims" as an ambulatory journey which links together
the sanctuaries of the incompossible worlds of the domed basilica and
the deep crypt "like so many views of a kaleidoscope agitated
according to various speeds and slownesses", and where the dance is a
transversal that runs between closed, independent spaces, and which
"traces a line of transition from one world to another" (274). He goes
on to quote Duby who uses the analogy of the rondo, describing the
unveiling of the liturgy to "a slow, majestic rondo" (274). Here again
Martin is implicitly commenting on and extending the insights of
Deleuze and Guattari in that in the rondo the refrain is repeated
between episodes. It is a form that is often used in the last movement
of a sonata, a form of composition evoked by Deleuze and Guattari in
What is Philosophy? to demonstrate the openness created by modulation,
and the way that "a plane of composition is born from the joining of
musical sections, from the closure of sonorous compounds" (Deleuze
and Guattari 1991: 190). 15
When Martin turns to his discussion of the relic the character of the
transversal line as a line of experimentation that brings together
heterogeneous elements without reducing them to a unity becomes
15 I refer to the sonata as an explosive form of theme and variation in
Chapter Three where I discuss how Mondrian's rigid vertical and the
horizontal grids open onto the soaring variation of the deframed
composition.
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clear. Using the image Borges's Chinese bestiary, from Foucault's The
Order of Things (1966), Martin makes the point that the ambulatory line,
or "aleatory series", maintains propositions that are chosen around
function rather than category (Martin 1994: 273). The series is quite
disparate; in this case the strange eclectic reliquary of fabric, bones, and
jewels seen by the hero of Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose
(1980):
I saw, wonder of wonders, under a glass bell, on a red
cushion embroidered with pearls, a piece of the manger of
Bethleham, and a hand's length of the purple tunic of St.
John the Evangelist, two links of the chains that bound the
ankles of the apostle Peter in Rome, the skull of Saint
Adalbert, the sword of Saint Stephen, a tibia of Saint
Margaret, a finger of Saint Vitalis, a rib of Saint Sophia.
(Martin 1994: 273; Eco 1980: 423)
The relic is not a fragment of a coherent collection or whole, but a
wonder. It is a wonder precisely because it does not fit, and cannot be
normalised. The collection is a multiplicity that escapes hermeneutic
interpretation, ordering and categorisation. However its humour and
distinctive function emerges through arrangement and differentiation,
when it is put into a series with other such remnants and drawn into,
what Martin calls "this heteroclite retinue of relics" (Martin 1994: 273).
As Martin suggests, the very obscurity of the relic challenges the
notions of support and principle, and the power of identity. Where is
the resemblance and similarity between the withered rose and a tibia of
St Margaret, between a rib and a sword? The swarm of relics is
obscure, but each item is quite distinct. Each wonder is included in the
reliquary, but it does not belong in the fragments is chosen around a
function—the miracle, the myth and the wonder—and weaving a
diagonal between bones, jewels, and scraps of cloth deploys a plane of
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consistency that refers to a pragmatic order of visibility.' That order
has neither beginning nor end, nor centred support, but functions as a
complex, heterogeneous organization, a labyrinth or multiplicity.
In the first paragraph of The Fold. Leibni and the Baroque Deleuze
talks about the Baroque labyrinth as a "multiple": "The multiple [le
multOle] is not only what has many parts but also what is folded in
many ways" (3 [5]). Here his definition of the "multiple" accords with
the Bergsonian understanding of the "multiplicity" as virtual and
continuous. It is not reducible to numbers or to discrete parts, or to a
set (Deleuze 1966: 38). It also fits with Deleuze and Guattari's
discussion of the multiple as a rhizomorphic heterogeneity in A
Thousand Plateaus (1980) (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 8-9). 17
16
Martin compares Eco's list of relics (the "text") to the statement, defining a
statement after Foucault and Deleuze as "a discursive formation cutting
through many levels and orders; it is a multiplicity that escapes structural
normalization and hermeneutic interpretation" (1994: 273). A statement
"refers to an order of visibility, and gives rise to a pragmatics and semantics,
for linguistics is not enough to account for it" (274). Eco's list forms a
statement because it constructs a state of affairs that is a non-discursive
reality. For Deleuze and Guattari's reading see A Thousand Plateaus 'Postulates
of Linguistics' (1980: 75-85).
17 Deleuze's theory of virtual multiplicity is disputed by Alain Badiou. See:
Badiou 1994 and Badiou 1997. Badiou pits the Leibniz—Deleuze ontology
that works with the multiple as a folded and inclusive point-subset against his
own "set-theory ontology of elements and belonging" (1994: 53). He
acknowledges the tension between the "belonging" of the element and the
"inclusion" of the part or subset. For Deleuze the smallest unit of matter is
not the point "which is never a part" but the fold, which is "a simple
extremity of the line" (Deleuze 1993a: 6). For Badiou the element has a value
as a discrete unit of matter. While Deleuze recognises the virtual multiplicity
of the differential relation, Badiou insists on the actuality of the multiple and
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In their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari
characterize this peculiar order as a rhizome, a configuration for which
they arrive at the formula "pluralism = monism" declaring that "It is
composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in
motion" (1980: 20-21). As in Eco's sanctuary of wonders there is no
definable and countable inventory with a beginning and a point of
completion, but only a middle [milieu] from which it grows (21). As in
the peregrinations of Martin's pilgrims there is no set itinerary, and
each new halt or deviation changes the dynamic and the humour of the
journey. The multiplicity remains volatile and mobile.
The multiplicity is defined by Martin, after Deleuze and Guattari, as
"a variety from which unity has been removed" and is given the value
or dimension (n-1) (Martin 1994: 278). 18 As Martin points out, this
subtraction is not modelled on a negative ontology; (n-1) is a positive
formula "that affirms the being of differences" (279). What is
subtracted is the invariable principle that supports multiple fragments
as a unity and a recognisable identity, the principle that signifies the
power of the verb "to be". When that cohesive principle is subtracted
the multiplicity preserves all differences inside the dimension (n-1),
decomposing the conjunctive identity "to be", and privileging the
disjunctive and aleatory connections of the vagabond movement The
fragments remain distinct and autonomous, gaseous elements tied up
as a swarm or host of relics only by an "unqualifiable distance and a
monstrous proximity" (279):
a "resolute 'set-theory ontology', which weaves out of the vacuum the greatest
complexities, and reduces to purr belonging the most entangled topologies"
(Badiou 1994: 53).
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... jewels, enamels, fibulas, and buckles display their
piercing light rays as a cloud of luminous stars, a veritable
swarm of shiny points turning around themselves, like a
volatile whole. ... Here, the power of inorganic life begins
to beat according to disparate rhythms. It is the power of a
life liberated from the constraints of unity, totality, and
organic purposiveness—dust of stars and solar
singularities. (279)
Sylvester finds similar eclectic series in Klee. Contrasting Klee's
method of composition with the constructed forms of Renaissance
painting, he finds echoes of Mexican picture-writing, Egyptian
hieroglyphics, Sumerian cuneiforms, Chinese ideograms and the
Gothic, observing an affinity with German Gothic illumination (1997:
36). Shattered Labylinth 1939 VerstOrtes Labyrinth 1939], a painting from
Klee's Bern period, is a case in point. Again the verbal prefix—zer
indicating disjunction or destruction—resonates in the title of the work
suggesting catastrophe, destruction and the complexity of the
labyrinth. In Klee too the figure is a composition of disparate
fragments working in the dimension (n-1). With no defining
categorization the figure, whether it be pilgrimage or painting, exists
only as it emerges from the tortuous and disjunctive synthesis of the
journey of its composition and is characterised only by the textures of
that travel. Meandering, halts and deviations; twists and arabesques—a
journey into the unknown and the obscurity, and the continuous
variation of the event of (n-1) dimensions.
Klee creates his work with the same spirit of adventure that
Sylvester demands of the viewer, as a journey, a walk and a creative
metamorphosis. He is aware of the radicality of this move to
18 See: Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 6
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abstraction:
In this realm we cross a boundary line of reality. There is
no copying or reproducing, but rather transformation and
new creation. If we surrender to it, a metamorphosis
occurs, something which, if healthy, is always new. (Klee
1956: 460)
This process of form-production [Gestaltung and "taking a walk with
a line] begins with the point set in motion, and this is what I now turn
to in order to explore how the virtual multiplicity works in the case of
Klee's paintings.
"all form begins with a point set in motion"
The Thinking Eye opens with a discussion on Cosmos—Chaos and
focuses on the problem of creativity as one of bringing order out of
chaos. However in keeping with Guattari's notion of chaosmosis as a
"machinic heterogeneity", Klee understands 'chaos' as a "cosmogenic
moment", a complex and vibratory point fundamental to the creative
form-production Gestaltung (Guattari 1992: 33-57; Klee 1956: 22). This
"cosmogenetic moment" is the starting point of the "line on a walk", a
line which has no beginning or end, but which erupts from the middle
[milieu]. While I read the point as a 'moment' Of continuous variation
and modulation, in The Thinking Eye Klee describes the point as "an
infinitely small planar element, an agent carrying out zero motion, i.e.
resting" (1956: 105). However he admits that the point has primordial
motion; it sets itself in motion and affects the active line and the
genesis of form.
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Mathematically, this point is a point of inflection. Klee pictures it as
the grey point and as chaos. It is a point where all the colours of the
spectrum are distinct and yet remain obscure in the 'chaos' of their
differential relations and appear as grey. The differential relation is a
"distinct and obscure" perception because, for example, yellow and
blue remain distinct and yet are obscured in the production of the
colour green. (In contrast, the noise of the sea, or hunger, is clear but
confused because we do not distinguish its specific elements—the
individual waves or the need for sugar or salt.) This Leibnizian
identification stands as a direct confrontation to the Cartesian principle
of commonsense as thought that is "clear and distinct" and
demonstrates the differential relation as a virtual multiplicity.'
The grey point, as a point of inflection, functions in (n-1)
dimensions and, as Martin so clearly argues, that multiplicity is an
unreified variation that preserves and "affirms the being of
differences" (1994: 279). It is, in Deleuzian terms, deterritorialized.
This is consistent with Klee's own statement about "real chaos" in
which he states that "The nowhere-existent something or the
somewhere-existent nothing is a non-conceptual concept of freedom
from opposition" (Klee 1956: 3). 2° Clearly this point is 'chaos' not
because it is indistinct (it is not), but because of its strange obscurity as
an inexact dimensionality—(n-1).21
19 See: Deleuze 1968a: 213
20 See: Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 99-100 for the additional parallel between
deterritorialization in philosophy and Samuel Butler's utopia Etrwhon,
nowhere/now-here. Pictorially Erewhon would be 'no-where' figure of the
(n-1) dimensional point. Like Gestaltung it is 'over against form'.
21 See: Daniel Smith's article entitled "Deleuze's Theory of Sensation:
Overcoming the Kantian Duality" (1996: 29-56). Smith discusses Deleuze's
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KLEE
As Martin's description of the strange disjunctive synthesis of the
reliquary demonstrates, this point of 'chaos' is a dimensionality that
preserves difference because it refuses the cohesive structural ontology
of "to be". What is important in Klee's understanding of the point as a
primordial and cosmogenetic chaos is that it is the same disjunctive
non-concept, free from the limitations of an oppositional order,
"forever unweighable and unmeasurable" and always inbetween (Klee
1956: 3). As the analogy of the grey point demonstrates, it is a
heterogeneous complexity or multiplicity that keeps the differential
relation in play, and which embraces the "distinct and obscure".
The grey point is a point at once black and white, but neither black
nor white. It is a point where all colours are active (fig. 5.11). Klee was
very interested in Goethe's theory of colour relations, and his theory of
the grey point seems to owe much to Goethe. Klee calls grey the
colourless median; a colour created when opposite colour quantities
are equal. As his many diagrams of the spectral circle show, the
importance of grey is that it is the "total equilibrium" of the whole
spectrum (1956: 505). Black and white are polar colours, red and green
diametric, and blue and yellow are peripheral (475, 499-511). The
median of each pair is grey. Thus the paradox of grey is that it is both
colourless and the sum of the colours. Grey is the chaotic
indeterminable, and potentially any colour. As such, grey is a
differentiating principle.
Like Mondrian whose grids depend on the tension between the
take up of a post-Kantian tradition that embraces the anti-Cartesian
philosophy of Nietzsche and Bergson (and indeed Leibniz) and which
embraces the 'distinct and obscure', rather than that of Fichte and Hegel who
rely on progress towards a clear and distinct reason.
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KLEE
vertical and the horizontal, Klee works with the idea that through polar
equilibrium opposites cancel each other out. The grey point—"utter
chaos" or "real chaos"—is grey because it is, as Brian Massumi puts it
in A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1992), a "bipolar
integration": neither light or dark, black or white, blue or yellow, up or
down, hot or cold, neither concave or convex, and crucially neither line
not plane—or both (Massumi 1992: 19). But, by being always between
polarities the grey point is an intense point that carries the movement
and distribution of tension between that polarity. Like the rhizome, it
does not so much have dimensions as "directions in motion" (Deleuze
and Guattari 1980: 21). Grey is not a gerchis [waste] or mess of colours
but between colours, a non-colour. Klee does not deal in muddied
translucent colour; his lines remain clear and crisp, and the colours
precise. Grey is between colours that are opposite in the spectrum and,
as such, achieves the curious status of a heterogeneous multiplicity by
being a 'whole' that is at once both all colours and none.
The dimensions of the point of inflection are similarly paradoxical
being both between dimensions and non-dimensional. Contemporary
physics provides a vocabulary and analysis of such points and of
emergent form, as we see by reading Klee alongside Order out of Chaos
(1979) by Prigogine and Stengers, who were also influenced by
Bergson's work on time, dynamic systems, and being and becoming
(1979: 90-94). Once Klee's grey point is understood as the
mathematical point of inflection, it is possible to develop a theory of
the abstract line in terms of a continuous, non-narrative linearity. Such
a theory demands that expression be understood as an emergent image
drawn in duration out of the point set in motion, and not as a
manipulation of space. The point of inflection is by no means empty
or static, despite being defined in Collins English Dictionag as a
mathematical "stationary point". This is clear if the point of inflection
is understood as it is mathematically, as the point on the curve at
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which the tangent is vertical or horizontal—that is, where the
curvature is both concave and convex, or neither. This point is not
really a point at all, but the smallest interval between the line and the
curve, where the curve is infinitely variable. The interval, where the
curve is neither convex nor concave, is a point of inflection, an
anticipation where movement can go in any direction. It is an interval
intense with potentiality and the openness of chance. In A Thousand
Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari call the smallest interval "diabolical" and
a "master of metamorphosis" (1980: 109). They go on to say that in
the interval,
We witness a transformation of substances and a
dissolution of forms, a passage to the limit or flight from
contours in favor of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and
matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a
precise point. We witness the incorporeal power of that
intense matter, the material power of that language. (109)
With this fluidity in mind, the point of inflection can be imagined as
subject to Zeno's paradox of division, where each part has absolute [00]
magnitude and division is an infinite process. It is continuous and
infinitely folded. Its precise composition is a 'problem' of distribution
because it is not subject to exterior determination but open to choice.
Martin reminds us that for Deleuze "a problem constitutes a
multiplicity or a distribution of singularities in the vicinity of which
curves and diagrams are determined, nonactual and yet real" (Martin
1994: 266). It is not a case of choosing one world over another but of
choosing choice (Deleuze 1985: 177). In the case of Klee's painting it
is its multi-dimensionality, or rather its (n-1) dimensionality, that gives
it this capacity of openness and freedom of movement.
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KLEE
In Cinema 2 (1985), Deleuze finds this same character in the flat,
disconnected and fragmented images of "cinematographic
automatism", in the work of Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer,
Eric Rohmer, and of Jean Luc Godard (1985: 178). He designates it "a
cinema of the spirit" (178). In a key passage, which is as relevant to
Klee as it is to Godard, he stresses that 'reading' the visual image is not
a question of association but of fissures and differentiation. In respect
to two films by Godard—/ci et ailleurs [Here and Elsewhere] and Six fois
deux [Six times Two]—he remarks:
Film ceases to be 'images in a chain ... an uninterrupted
chain of images each one the slave of the next', and whose
slave we are (Id et ailleurs). It is the method of BETWEEN,
'between two images', which does away with all that
cinema of the One. It is a method of AND, 'this and then
that', which does away with all the cinema of Being = is.
Between two actions, between two affections, between
two perceptions, between two visual images, between two
sound images, between the sound and the visual: make the
indiscernible, that is the frontier, visible (Six fois deux). The
whole undergoes a mutation, because it had ceased to be
the One-Being, in order to become the constitutive 'and'
of things, the constitutive between-two of images. (180)
Functioning between, the point can be imagined like the dazzling
inexact connections in Mondrian's Compositions that I saw as grey
flickers and as a musical figuration or fermata, an image that Klee offers
in his own pictorial production with the appropriate title Drawing with
the Fermata 1918 (5.12). Twittering, hovering, buzzing the vibration is
always inbetween. A pregnant pause. Neither one thing nor the other.
Neither linear and two dimensional, or planar and three dimensional—
and 'nowhere' inbetween—the dimensionality of the work is overtaken
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KLEE
by endless movement.
The most obvious example of the break with the Modernist
concern with flatness and the break through to the smooth topological
spaces of continuous modulation is the famous Twittering Machine 1922
(fig. 5.13). Here the linear and the planar dimensions are never
separated but remain confused, in an ironic play of the twodimensionality of the canvas and the three dimensional illusion of
representation that goes beyond simultaneity. Klee talks about the
linear-medial being "neither line not plane but some sort of middle
thing between the two", but although the lines are in contact they do
not intersect at defined points (fig. 5.3) (Klee: 1956: 109. Instead they
set up the explosive and vibratory connections of the point set in
motion. In the chaotic complexity of this (n-1) dimensionality, the
picture is reworked every time you look. The eye keeps on roving.
Always going on. Twittering on. The inflective point, not so much
chaos, as complexity. The canvas is a cacophonous 'noise' out of
which the myriad patterns of smooth space will be drawn. The
twittering birds emerge out of the out of the event of nondimensionality, composed in the directions of motion, and produced in
the performance of the active and emerging line. The twittering birds
are curious linear-medial figures that have no defined contour and no
position in space, and none of the certainty of shape and solidity.
While works like Twittering Machine 1922 (fig. 5.13) reveal the
peculiar dimensionality of abstraction, Klee's own pictorial diagram
"all form begins with a point set in motion" does not really capture the
(n-1) dimensionality of the line emerging from the point (fig. 5.14).
Rather than admitting the active line, here Klee collapses the line into
the plane, noting that the line becomes passive as a result of the
activation of the plane. The resulting form is an identifiable, clear
shape—in this case a square. However the dimensionality of the plane
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KLEE
is itself indeterminable, and topologically the square is flat, like the
undulating colour blocks in Ad Parnarsum 1932 (fig. 5.1). More useful is
Klee's notion of the point set in motion as a move from earth to
cosmos (fig. 5.15).
Whereas Mondrian aimed at the neutralization of opposites through
equilibrium and balance, Klee finds freedom from opposition in
"eccentric forces" (Klee 1956: 415). He talks about "the cosmic curve
moving away from the earth ad infinitum", a flight echoed in the
Deleuzian "breakthrough", the divergent series, and the fugitive (Klee
1956: 415). It is a break with earthly, grounded punctual form, the
parallel limitations of formal space–time, and a centred and
perspectival optical function. Klee moves from earth to cosmos, from
the static to the continuous variation of the smooth space effected by
the point set in motion and the free movement of the "line on a walk".
He makes the analogy between the formation of the spiral, and life and
death. While the fixed centre is statis and death, the spiral is life—
escape, breakaway and a line of flight.
The irony of this opening up to the Cosmos is that Klee then
adopts what he calls "an earthbound position"—a reminder of
Deleuze's own Paris-bound nomadism. However, this earth-bound
'position' (I hesitate to use the word) also defies dimensionality in that
it is a position of such close, or microscopic, vision that all perspective
is lost. The positional space is pulverised and assumes the smoothness
of radical deterritorialization and close vision–haptic space.
As Deleuze describes it, here in reference to inflection, infinite
variation and Koch's curve, the line either sinks back into the fixed
position or is liberated through freer and freer movements as it reaches
for the open sky and fluctuation; it "rises skyward or risks falling upon
us" (Deleuze 1993a: 17). Koch's curve is a continuous loop with an
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infinite length but finite space. It is a fractal and a way of picturing
infinity. Koch's curve has precise but irrational dimensions, 1.261859
dimensions—more than one, less than two. It is an example of the way
that bipolarity opens onto the infinite, as the Klee's grey point does. By
angular transformations through self-similarity the differential between
poles produces a complex shape, the snowflake curve. The result is a
monstrous shape but one that has a mathematical precision, symmetry,
pattern and rhythm. It is an infinite cavernous shape, more than a line,
less than a plane, and it has a 'perimeter' or contour which is regular in
its irregularity (Gleick 1987: 98-99). In Koch's curve there is a certain
pattern to the burgeoning flight of the curve, and the crisp, precise
form is certainly not chaotic. It is not, however, predictable. For
instance, the angle of fractal transformation is deferred, and therefore
unrestricted by the determination of self-similarity. Variation becomes
infinite and the interval between poles a site of turbulence. Chance
comes into play.
The curve is a world of infinite folds and lines of flight, indicated
only by the whirling vortex that dissipates into the complexity of
infinite fluctuation. This is the fractal spiral formation of Klee's cosmic
curve. Like particles in a column of cigarette smoke, the line reaches a
degree of freedom so complex that it can be described as turbulent or
as a 'noise' of gaseous particles. Here there is a variable movement
where inflection becomes the transversal line of turbulence as the
inflective unfolding of the spiral becomes vortical and the systematic
fractal mode of the Koch's curve opens onto fluctuation. Incidentally,
the vortex—that whirling mass of the spiral— has a second dictionary
22 The analogy of the cigarette smoke is Gleick's. In Chaos he likens the
random movement of turbulence to smoke. "A plume of cigarette smoke
rises smoothly from an ashtray, accelerating until it passes a critical velocity
and splinters into wild eddies" (1987: 122).
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KLEE
meaning; it also refers to a "situation, or way of life regarded as
irresistibly engulfing" (Collins English Dictionag). It seems that the
whirlwind, like the ocean, has no orientation but is endlessly engaging.
The abstract line spirals and twists cutting across and blocking the
formation of the plane, and opening onto the joyous complexity of the
fractal. Here chaos becomes rhythmic and gestural, and the figure
arises out of the multiple fold of the point as a material trait of
expression—whirling, swirling and daring in its hyper-dimensional
modulations, it is truly a contrapunctual music of the spheres.
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The meanings, all of them, & in the paint, and thg are in the paint
not latently but in the impact of the paint upon our senses, on our
nerves. Nothing in these paintings is more eloquent than the paint
itself
David Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The Human Body (1998: 25)
The Portrait: Face and Head
With an uncanny resemblance, but grossly distorted, Francis
Bacon's portraits of his friends—George Dyer, David Sylvester,
Michel Leiris, Isabel Rawsthorne—are shocking images, portraits
where the representational likeness is distorted and dissolved in a
violent deformation of the face, and where recognisable appearance is
resisted. Resisted, blocked and overtaken by the matter and marks of
paint, and by the patterns of composition—by the texture of ribbed
overprinting and the sweeping stroke of green or blue, by the
unexpected extension if a contour, and by the rhythm of colour and
line. Wierd heads arise out of the multiplicity of the diagram, drawn
out of the chaosmosis of the wild throw of paint. More animal than
human.
Of course the portrait is a face. Or is it a head? In A Thousand
Plateaus (1980), in the chapter entitled, 'Year Zero: Faciality', Deleuze
and Guattari identify two poles of faciality, the disciplined, socially
produced face, and the fleshy non-signifying head (1980: 167-91). For
the face recognition is key, but for the head it is the peculiar ressemblance
sensible that in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981a) Deleuze
explains as a raw product arising against the lifelike form of the
traditional portrait: "the likeness arises then like the raw product by
means of non-similarity" [la ressemblance snit alors comme le produit brutal
de moyens non ressemblants] (1981a: 75). This is the strange resemblance
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that is identified by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? (1991)
as the resemblance that haunts the work of art and which is the affect
of the material itself—"the smile of oil, the gesture of fired clay ..."
(1991: 166). With this in mind, in this last chapter of the thesis I
explore how the affect is produced in Bacon's work as the scream of
paint, and how that nonhuman affect is expressed in the face, thus
opening up the face to new sensations.
In Difference and Repetition (1968a) Deleuze had equated resemblance
with the logic of representational equivalence, and opposed
resemblance to repetition: "Repetition and resemblance [ressemblance]
are different in kind—extremely so" (Deleuze 1968a: 1). The French
adjective ressemblants means lifelike or true to life, and is used as an
evaluation of the truth of the portrait. Deleuze wants to break with the
lived, lifelike perception and move beyond the human. Bergson makes
the opening move here in the distinction that he makes between the
resemblance that is a mechanical "similarity or repetition", and which
is governed by a geometry of the same where like produces like, and
the repetition of creative evolution produced in duration, which is
possible "only in the abstract" (1911: 45-46). It is this latter repetition
or resemblance that Deleuze, writing in Francis Bacon: Logique de la
sensation finds in the particular resemblance at work in the work of
art—the "ressemblance sensible" that arises in the composition of colours,
lines ... (1991: 166; 1981a: 75).
Emerging in duration, out of the matter of composition, the
centred and human resemblance of the lived and lifelike face are
impossible. Instead a non-codified and non-signifying "ressemblance
sensible" is made "by means beyond representation/likeness" [par de
moyens non ressemblants]:
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BACON
sensible resemblance is produced, but instead of being
symbolically, that is by the detour of code, it is
«sensuousness», by way of sensation [la ressemblance sensible
est produite, mais, au lieu de retre 4-ymbofiquement, c'est-d-dire par le
detour du code, elle est «sensuellement9, par la sensation] (1981a:
75).
I shall argue that the "means beyond representation/likeness"
employed by Bacon are a practice of deformation that brings about
"the ruin of representation", a break with representation that
Dorothea Olkowski in her book Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of
Representation, understands as the intrinsic goal of artists and nomads
(1999). Instead of creative forces being subordinated to objectified
representation and mindful cognition, we find the pragmatism of
'painting without image' and the shock of sensation that impacts on
the nervous system.
Deleuze and Guattari again echo Bergson in their work on faciality,
in A Thousand Plateaus in which the mechanism of representation is
opposed to the abstraction of creativity, and the face opposed to the
head. The socially produced face is instantly recognizable—ears, eyes,
nose, mouth; happy or sad, old or young, man or woman; student,
worker, judge ... (1980: 117). This is a complete face with an outline
and features, a face that conforms to the order of representation—
contour, convergence and completion. It is a finely crafted, disciplined
organization, produced within a rationalized social and theoretical
milieu, the discourse of white male and European, and as Deleuze and
Guattari detail, of Christ as Year Zero. The portrait is an identified
likeness; where there is no name and no semblance there is no portrait.
The conventions of this signifying faciality require that portraiture deal
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in the familiar and rather comfortable form of recognizable likeness,
and that likeness carry intimations of character.'
The head—the fleshy non-signifying head—is quite different to the
readable face of the regal portrait or the obvious signification of the
symbol. For Deleuze and Guattari the head is a "horror story" (1980:
181). It is fleshy and animal, a featureless and ill-defined close-up: it is
fleshy surface, with "pores, planes, malts, bright colours, whiteness,
and holes ..." (181). Like Pollock's "all-over" canvases it is a
catastrophic landscape—or meat (181). It is a head with no distinct
outline or definite features, and no face. The face has perspective, it is
generalized and human, meaningful as a realistic and faceified [visagetfee]
representation. The face as envisaged. The head, on the other hand, is
a close-up and arises, or emerges, within the material configuration of
the work; it is particular, even nonhuman.
A model of the portrait as an emergent figure is already hinted at in
the root of the Latin word 'to portray' pro-trahere, to drag forth, a word
brought into English via the fourteenth century French pvtrairr, and
translated as 'to depict', which in turn comes from the Latin de-pingerr,
out of paint. Depiction is a 'top-down' Enlightenment model that sees
the portrait brought to light, a figure formed out of base matter.
However, the prefix de-, with its connotations of distancing and
removal (from, away from, out of), and which is retained in the
modern French depindre, to depict and to portray, is a reversal of the
positive meaning inferred by the prefix pro- (in favour of) of the Latin
prv-trabere, and maintained in the English 'to portray', and in the French
l In his book Portraiture Richard Brilliant offers a more complicated definition
of the portrait; he rethinks the portrait as a simulacrum of reality and a
symbol of a named individual. He cites Picabia's machine part images and
Duchamp's $2000 reward as examples. See: Brilliant 1991.
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BACON
noun portrait. The distinction is important in my argument for the
portrait as an emergent image.
In Cinema 1 (1983) Deleuze returns to the notion of faciality and
again talks about the two poles of the face, the outlined, featured face
of facefication [visagiffication], and the micro-movements which indicate
expression and that he calls the traits of faceity [visage'ite]. Deleuze goes
to great pains to stress that these poles are not exclusive and that the
face involves different mixtures of faceification and faceicity, the
important point being that the face is not a surface on which
expression is inscribed, but that the face is itself a close-up and an
affect:
As for the face itself, we will not say that the close-up
deals with [traite] it or subjects it to some kind of
treatment: there is no close-up of the face, the face itself is
close-up, the close-up is by itself face and both are affect,
affection-image. (1993: 88)2
It is in the face as close-up that we find a pure being of sensation.
This is the affect that is no longer feeling or opinion but that exists in
itself in the smile of oil or the scream of paint, and it is this abstraction
that Deleuze and Guattari identify in the work of art when in What is
Philoiphy? they state that "artists are presenters of affects, the inventors
and creators of affects" (1991: 175). In the previous chapter, on Klee,
we saw how pure sensation arises from the vibratory, non-conceptual
concept of the 'grey' point and how, by means of the material, art
works to "render visible" and to preserve the Event of that "colouring
2 See: Chapter Three on Pollock where I discuss the face—landscape as a
distributive white wall/ black hole ystem and as an abstract machine.
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sensation". The question remains as to how philosophy might become
equal to the Event of the work of art, and how we might conceptualize
the eloquence of paint and the strange and shocking intensity of the
percept or the affect that stands on its own.
C. S. Peirce and Matter in Movement
Deleuze's definition of the affect, or affection-image, comes out of
his reading of the work of C. S. Peirce. So, before moving on to
examine the production of the affect in Bacon's work, I shall first put
Deleuze's work on the face as close-up and affect in context.
Deleuze calls Peirce the "founder of semiology", a pioneer whose
strength was "to conceive of signs on the basis of images and their
combinations, not as a function of determinants which were already
linguistic (1983: 69; 1985: 30). The Peircian theory of signs is then not
to be understood as a theory of reason, signification or mediation
within a linguistic model, but as touching on the direct and the
pragmatic work of images.
I regard Peirce's Pragmatism as a philosophy of interpretation after
Nietzsche for whom interpretation is philosophy's highest art because
it is an affirmative practice and "the active expression of an active
mode of existence" (Deleuze 1982: 2-4). Peirce defines pragmatism as
a positive science, a category that also includes mathematics and the study
of behaviour—idioscopy--as well as philosophy, which he defines as a
science of experience (Peirce 1940: 61). It is anti-illustrational, proexperiential, experimental and provisional (261). This makes
pragmatism a particularly maverick phenomenology, even a
metaphysics despite Peirce's disclaimer, because it deals with reality
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BACON
and "meaning" as a disposition and not as truth (271, 314 and Chapter
22). Note disposition, already here is an opening onto an expressionist
aesthetic because there is no idealization in Peirce's "meaning". Peirce
distances himself from the metaphysical concern with truth and
being—"Suffice to say once more that pragmatism is, in itself, no
doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to determine any truth of things.
It is merely a method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and
of abstract concepts"—but I suggest that his work points to the
metaphysics of becoming taken up by Deleuze (Peirce 1940: 271).
In conversation with Pascal Bonitzer and Jean Narboni 'On The
Movement-Image' reprinted in Negotiations, Deleuze discusses the
significance of Peirce's classification of images and signs, and explains
that
in each case there are internal signs that characterize these
images, from both genetic and compositional viewpoints.
They are not linguistic signs, even when they are aural or
even vocal. The significance of Peirce is to have worked
out an extremely rich classification of signs, relatively
independently of the linguistic model. (1990: 46)3
Peirce starts, not with the model, appearance or the figure; but
"with the image, the phenemenon or from what appears" and tries to
maintain semiotics as a 'descriptive science of reality', and to resist the
subordination of semiotics to a representational system (Deleuze 1985:
30). However, in Cinema 2, Deleuze concludes that Peirce is wrong to
3 See: Deleuze 1990: 46-56. This conversation first appeared in Cahien- du
Cinema 352 (October 1983). For further discussion of the movement-image
see, Deleuze 1985: 30-34.
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claim his logic of signs as a fact of appearance. Because Peirce's
semiology is a classification of signs on the basis of images, their
combinations and their power, quality, and action, Deleuze argues that
the type of image must be deduced from the point of view of its
composition and genesis (1985: 31). This turn from 'lived experience'
to the work of the image—its composition and genesis—makes the
sign a question of matter which expresses movement (the movementimage) and the emergence of sensation as a set of actions and reactions
(the perception-image) rather than of signification. Deleuze and
Guattari therefore transpose Peirce's classification of signs to the
question of territorialization—deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari
1980: 531 note 41). This means that types of image are deduced from
the expression of the material configuration.
This move depends on Bergson's work on images, matter and
movement in Matter and Memog (Chapter 1) (1896: 17-76). Bergson's
first thesis of movement is the idea that, the image = movement.' If, as
Bergson contends, every image (where the image is "the set of what
appears") is indistinguishable from the material and its actions and
reactions, then the image is a modulation where there is no privileged
perspective or Zero point. It is acentred. The set of all images, Deleuze
concludes, constitutes a plane of immanence (or plane of composition)
on which the image exists 'in-itself as the absolute identity of image
and movement. This 'in-itself of the image is matter [matiere] and that
matter is a "signaletic material" [signalitique] (Deleuze 1985: 33).
Understanding the image as matter, Deleuze then reads Peirce's
conception of the sign as indicative of the image and its combinations,
4 Deleuze recognises three theses of movement in Bergson. See: Deleuze
1983: 1-11.
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and the sign then refers to the expression produced by matter in
movement va matiere en mouvemenl (33).
For Deleuze, as for Bergson, the movement-image and matter are
identical because the self-existing image is the movement of matter:
This in-itself of the image is matter: not something hidden
behind the image, but on the contrary the absolute identity
of the image and movement. The identity of the image and
movement leads us to conclude immediately that the
movement-image and matter are identical. (Deleuze 1983:
58-9)5
Deleuze distinguishes the automatic or autogenetic movement as
the immediate given of the image, and the image as one that escapes
the hylomorphic form of modern figuration and abstraction:
This kind of movement no longer depends on the moving
body or the object which realizes it, nor on the spirit
which reconstitutes it. It is the image that moves in itself.
In this sense it is neither figurative nor abstract. (1985:
156)
With the equation of the image and movement in mind, Deleuze
borrows and adapts Peirce's classification of signs in his own
delineation of cinematographic concepts, but Peirce's pragmatic
semiotics is at least as useful when applied to painting, a parallel which
Deleuze himself acknowledges when in his preface to the English
edition of Cinema 2, he explains his own reading of the
cinematographic image:
5 See: Bergson 1896: 10
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BACON
It is not quite right to say that the cinematographic image
is in the present. What is in the present is what the image
'represents', but not the image itself, which, in cinema as in
painting, is never to be confused with what it represents.
The image itself is the system of the relationships between
its elements, that is a set of relationships of time from
which the variable present only flows. (my italics) (1985:
xii)
In his written response to a serious of questions about the
cinematographic image Doubts about the Imaginary' (1986), Deleuze
talks about the cinema "trying to construct an image of thought"
(1990: 62-67). But instead of constructing a dogmatic image of
thought which projects the imitative common sense view of reality—
recognizable, truthful and independent—cinema creates the selfmoving image or movement-image. It signs. Of course, cinema
produces signs specific to it peculiar techniques, but these signs are not
exclusive: "Once it produces them they turn up elsewhere", and the
world starts "turning cinematic" [fire du cinema]; it adopts cinematic
models and it works like a film (65, 193). It is this self-movement that I
see in Bacon's 'cinematic' painting.
Because the cinematographic image is characterized by its material
structure—the montage—and not by its representational or narrative
form, Deleuze understands cinematographic images as signs, and
"Signs are images seen from the viewpoint of their composition and
genesis" (1990: 65). So, while cinema and painting have their own
aesthetic techniques, they have an affinity as works of art that stand on
their own, and which in their self-movement "render visible" the
"difference in itself" of the virtual.
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BACON
While in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari go on to explore
how the infinite movement of the virtual multiplicity is preserved in
the work of art, in Cinema 2 (1985), Deleuze finds the same automatic
movement in the cinematographic image. He makes a case for
analysing paintings as if they were cinematographic images, something
that seems particularly apt for Bacon's images where the figure arises
out of the "malleable mass" [tine masse plastique] of colour, a mass
described as "a descriptive material loaded with visual and sound
features of expression, synchronized or not, zig-zags of forms,
elements of action, gestures and profiles, syntactic sequences" (1985:
156 [207], 159). This mass functions like the montage where the image
and its expression is a system of relations.
As we shall see later in this chapter, with respect to Deleuze's
discussion of montage and the film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, Deleuze
maintains that the distinction between painting and the cinema is that,
while the painting is immobile and dependent on the mind, and has to
'make' movement, in the cinema the image 'itself makes movement
(1985: 156). However as I have argued throughout this thesis, the
distinction of the Modernism of Mondrian, Pollock, Klee, and the
subject of this chapter Bacon, is the abstraction that works against the
referential image, and that this work functions instead as the selfmoving image. In paintings like those of Klee and Bacon the image or
Figure emerges in a way not dissimilar to the cinematographic image; it
emerges from the inflective movement if the line and the intersection
of colour. Like the automatic cinematographic image, here painting
moves in itself.6
6 Deleuze notes that Eisenstein analyses the paintings of Da Vinci and El
Greco as if they were cinematographic self-moving images (1985: 156). I
come back to this point later in the chapter.
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BACON
The Face and the Affection-Image
Peirce distinguishes three modes of being, three kinds of images
that are all avatars of matter in movement (the movement-image), and
which are deduced from the various aspects of the reactions and
actions of the material (the perception-image). 7 They are the affectionimage, the action-image and the mental or relation-image (Peirce 1940:
77-93).8
The affection-image (in Deleuze "the affect") carries quality or
power and corresponds to what Peirce calls "Firstness". It refers to
qualities like red, bitter and hard, and expressions like terror or
compassion, and is `unmaterialized' because it fills the interval between
action and reaction, and is thus an expressed (1940: 80-87). The
action-image is concerned with change and with forces that are related
to one another as in action–reaction, exertion–resistance or excitation–
response. Pierce associates the action-image with "Secondness" which
is the "actual fact" carried the tension and charge of the existential
relation, and which has a brutal force (87-91). The third image,
corresponding to "Thirdness", is the relation-image where one thing is
related and compared to another. It refers to the "general fact" or law
about phenomena that is extrapolated by the mind (91-93).
The artist—painter or cinematographer—is, as we have seen,
concerned with the affect or affection-image and how to "render
7 As the set of actions and reactions the perception-image extends into the
other types of image, but all are avatars of the movement-image (matter). See:
Deleuze 1985: 30-33.
8 Deleuze develops Peirce's classification, and extends it to six types of
image. See: Deleuze 1985: 32.
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BACON
visible" the force of red or bitter, terror or compassion. I am,
therefore, concerned here only with the affection-image. In the work
of Cezanne, for example, I described how the "colouring sensation"
produced in the diagram of colour planes was an affect that expressed
the smile of Joachim Gasquet, and how the thermal force of the
landscape was created in the hesitant intersection of water-colour. In
Bacon, I see the force of the scream.
In Bacon's portraits there is the same attempt to paint the power of
affect. It is not the shape of a chin, or the proportions of the face, or
even the quirky turn of the mouth that indicate likeness. There is not
that certainty of perspective that allows for recognition, and yet there
is a resemblance made in colour. Red cuts into blue, the white streak
dissolves into green, pink smudges into yellow: contours arise within
the composition and the material becomes expressive; the white
brushstroke forms the brow, the red overprint indicates the mouth,
but like the confrontational optical images ('opsigns') that Deleuze
identifies in the cinema of Godard or Ozu it is the "colouring
sensation" [sensation colorante] not the colour of the represented which
counts. As Godard says, "It isn't blood, it's some red" (1985: 22).
There is no human or linguistic signification; it is the force of colour
that impacts. Any resemblance is certainly not a reassuring human
likenesses [ressemblants] but a horror that disturbs and shocks human
sensibility. It is an affect that refers only to the material of the work. It
is that affect that is expressed by, and celebrated in the face. The face
emerges: a portrait not of outlines and features but of colour and its
power of colouring.
In an important passage in Cinema 1 (1983), Deleuze gives the face
or close-up as an example of the pure affect:
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BACON
It is the face—or the equivalent—which gathers and
expresses the affect as a complex entity, and secures the
virtual conjunctions between the singular points of this
entity (the brightness, the blade, the terror, the
compassionate look ...). (1983: 103)
Here the face is seen as a configuration that gathers the affect as a
"complex entity" or "the expressed"; it is an entity that gives
consistency to the infinite movement of its own "virtual conjunctions"
and expresses the affect produced in that multiplicity (103). Real
without being actual, it is this "complex entity" that Deleuze and
Guattari call the Event Ovenemen1 in What is Philosophy? (1991)
(Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 156 [147]).
As Deleuze already explains in Cinema 1 affects are "powerqualities" (1983: 102). They can be actualized in a particular state of
things, as objects with particular characters in a particular space-time
(and thus be brought into the zone of human action), or they can
function outside spatio-temporal coordinates and work with their own
"virtual conjunctions" and maintain their status as pure affect in the
"complex entity" (1983: 103).
As pure affect, the affection-image is defined by Deleuze as "that
which occupies the gap between action and reaction" (Deleuze. 1983:
Glossary). In other words, it keeps hold of the autogenetic movement
that makes matter signaletic material. The affect is the expressed
produced in the tremor between colour planes or in the vibration of
the point of inflection, and which fills the interval of movement. It
exists in any-space-whatever [eipace quekonque] and is not generalized or
thought of as an isolated thing (Deleuze 1983: 65, 111). Instead of an
excitation being received, differentiated and reflected in a new
movement or action, and perceived as a thing, it surges up and by
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BACON
occupying the gap between action and reaction eludes actualization by
keeping hold of the infinite movement to which it gives consistency.
As Deleuze says, "Movement ceases to be that of translation in order
to become movement of expression" (1983: 66). We see that
movement in the face that expresses the pure affect in the gasp of
terror, the howl of the scream, or the quiver of the smile. It is not
surprising, says Deleuze, that it is in the face we rediscover the
acentred image "in its primary regime of variation"—self-movement
(66).
In Bacon's portraits that variation is seen in the fragmentary
disjunction of the colour and in features that never converge. Here the
curl of Muriel Belcher's ear; there the line of Henrietta Moraes' cheekbone, a gesture towards a nose, the mouth a streak. In each portrait the
elements are there, and in a sense so is the 'unity' of the face, but the
organization is dismantled, and the thing distorted far beyond
appearance. Here the face is made up of elements but always in
permanent upheaval, not unlike the catastrophe of Pollock's "all-over"
paintings. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze likens such a fragmentary
multiplicity to the originary world of philosopher and scientist
Empedocles (c.490-430BC) who thought that the world was composed
of four elements—air, fire, water and earth—and that these elements
were governed by the opposing forces of love and discord, and in
9
permanent upheaval. In Cinema 1 Deleuze goes on to distinguish the
9 In the introduction to Difference and Repetition (1968a) Deleuze again
mentions Empedocles, here claiming that Nietzsche's Zarathustra dramatizes
Empedocles. His point is that in Zarathustra ideas are dramatized rather than
concepts represented: "Zarathustra is conceived entirely within philosophy,
but also entirely for the stage. Everything in it is scored and visualised, put in
motion and made to walk or dance" (1968a: 9).
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BACON
image in upheaval as a refinement of the affection-image, which he
calls the impulse-image, but before examining that move I want to
look at Bacon's work in the light of my discussion of the face as closeup and affect.
Bacon and the Shock of Colour
Portraits by Francis Bacon are aptly described as fleshy, meaty
heads rather than socially produced faces. Certainly, Bacon had a selfavowed fascination with meat, an obsession witnessed across his
oeuvre, in Painting 1946 (fig. 6.1), Figure with Meat 1954, and Second
Version of 'Painting 1946" 1971, and carried into the pink, greys and
greens of the flayed, fleshy tones of the portraits. These portraits are
produced, in the spirit of Gestaltung, 'over against form' and are drawn
in the diagrammatic shock of colour that Bacon quite literally throws
on the canvas.
Bacon starts by throwing paint onto the canvas. This is his graph or
diagram. The portraits owe their resemblance not to observation,
memory or habit but to the violent splash of colour that functions as
an inflective point out of which the figure-image and its power as
affect arises. Bacon supports his method when he talks about trying to
make the portrait that owes as little as possible to conventional
standards of appearance: "my ideal would really be just to pick up a
handful of paint and throw it at the canvas and hope that the portrait
was there" (Sylvester 1975: 105-7). But as Bacon acknowledges, the
graph is "inspired chance" and owes much to his experience as an
artist and to his knowledge of his materials (96). Chance however is
very different from the accident, and here we must distinguish, as
Bacon does, between the irrational and the unconscious activity (96).
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BACON
Bacon sees the throw of paint, and the consequent graph, as a defiance
that owes all to "instinct"—he is most insistent on this word—and
thinks that it cannot be explained (again we have the reversal of
positing and of evaluation) (Sylvester 1975: 101). The linear brushstrokes, the patches of colour, the throwing, ragging and sponging,
streaking and dashing are techniques which are actions of the hand not
of the will or the eye (1975: 96). This is emphasized in the French
where Deleuze translates Bacon's technique in precise terms as
cleaning, sweeping and crumpling [nettoyer, balayer Cu chiffonner des
endroits], so indicating an active and manual resistance to representation
and the centred perception (Deleuze 1981a: 65).
In the haphazard and complex composition of the graph, lines are
drawn—aleatory series with their strange novel intersections,
combinations, separations, and dislocations—and it this configuration
that the face arises [stogir] as a complex entity that embodies an
affective charge. In his work on cinema, Deleuze aligns the production
of the affect with montage (and in particular with the work of
Eisenstein) because, as he understands it, the montage works in the
collision of independent shots (1985: 34-35). Bacon's graph works in
the same way, as the collision of colour-marks. If such self-moving
images are peculiarly cinematographic, as Deleuze thinks, then Bacon
is a cinematographic painter—an artist of movement and affect, and
what Bacon calls the "feeling of life" (Sylvester 1975: 43).
Bacon analyses his own painting as heads that arise by means of the
material its
in the mysterious fluidity if oils:
For instance, the other day I painted a head of somebody,
and what made the sockets of the eyes, the nose the
mouth were, when you analysed them, just forms which
had nothing to do with eyes or nose or mouth; but the
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BACON
paint moving from one contour to another made a
likeness of this person I was trying to paint. ... Because
this image is a kind of tightrope walk between what is
called figurative painting and abstraction. It will go right
out from abstraction but will really have nothing to do
with it. It's an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto
the nervous system more violently and more poignantly.
(Sylvester 1975: 12)
Bacon clearly understands his own work within the problematic of
a new order of painting and sees this new appearance as the rendering
visible of affect. In an interview with David Sylvester in May 1966 he
states his aim: "What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the
appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the
appearance" (Sylvester 1975: 40).
There are then, for Bacon two moments of creativity, distortion and
recording, and it through this creative method that he dismantles the
face, and produces his abstract expressionist and shocking portraits.
The first moment—distortion—requires Bacon to disaizregate the
cliched features of the generalized face. He refuses the structures of
determinate faciality and returns to automatic movement and the
chance throw of paint, and he uses that colour as a "graph" or diagram
out of which he draws his portraits (Sylvester 1975: 56). The second
moment of Bacon's creative process brings that distortion to a
recording of the appearance, a record that stands as a monument to
the compound of percepts and affects invented in the chance throw,
and which refers only to that material expression. It is therefore the
diagram and not the model that suggests appearance. As Bacon
explains, "You survey the thing like you would a sort of graph and you
see within this graph the possibilities of all types of facts being planted"
(my emphasis) (Sylvester 1975: 56).
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BACON
I want to stress that I am not reading Bacon's double method after
Merleau-Ponty, as the actualization of a "virtually visible" depth, nor as
a virtual—actual circuit (Merleau-Ponty 1961: 168). Indeed I am arguing
that because the resemblance in Bacon's portraits depends on the
differential relations of their genetic components (the noise of colour)
Bacon stays with the determination of a virtual content. This means
staying with what Deleuze terms differentiation, and not differenciating
the face by distinguishing and specifying parts and features. Although
Deleuze does not make the comparison, the two processes that
comprise the system of the movement-image—differentiation and
specification—seem to me to parallel the movement virtual—actual as
set out in Difference and Repetition, that is differentiation and
differenciation (1985: 28-9; 1968a: 206-207). Differentiation (from
cllie'rentier) is a mathematical operation of differential relation.
Differenciation (from cafferencier) is to become or to make different and
p in
is associated with the difference of species and clisinguishedarts
the context of the movement-image, this means that instead of moving
to the action-image and specification, Bacon keeps hold of the
modulation essential to differentiation and the affection-image (the
affect) that surges up in the interval of that movement.
Bacon does not, therefore, take the work from virtual to actual, but
renders visible the difference of the virtual. In Bacon we discover what
Deleuze and Guattari recognize as "a completely different reality"—
the virtual that becomes consistent, and which becomes an entity or
Event equal to the components and modulations of its genesis (1991:
157). In contrast to the socially produced face and Deleuze and
Guattari's parallel declaration that "The face is a politics", we have
here the portrait that is indifferent to the specified and to the lived
10 See also Patton's Preface to Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1968a: xi).
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BACON
state of affairs and to politics, but which is real because it embodies the
movement of its own nonhuman becoming (Deleuze and Guattari
1980: 181, 169). We have the portrait that is a resemblance not because
it is lifelike, but because the material is expressive and because the
affect made with colour and line is extended to the particular smile or
scream and the face (the close-up) that gathers and expresses that
affect. Bacon therefore achieves the curious nonhuman becoming of
man because the traditional closure of the portrait as likeness is
dissolved, the virtual is realized in matter and the face opened to
difference and new sensations (1991: 169).
In Bacon's work, the riot of colour and chance—the graph—is a
"grid of information" (in the same way that, as Deleuze suggests in The
Fold, Pollock's "all-over" paintings are) (Deleuze 1993a: 27). It is an in-
formative composition and a construction of the smooth space of (n1) dimensions, or as Deleuze calls it in Cinema 1 "any-space-whatever"
(Deleuze 1983: 111). Bacon stays true to that space because it is in the
graph that new intersections are made and new sensations invented, as
for instance when Bacon "sees through" the diagram that he can make
the mouth go right across the face to make it like the opening of the
whole head (1975: 107). Thus the portrait and its expression is
consistent with, and works on the same level as, the material
composition.
Take Studies of Geoige Dyer and Isabel Rawstborne 1970 (fig. 6.2) where
the mouth is a smudged cacophony of red, white and blue, a sweep
that extends across the cheek. Bulbous, overprinted, and ribbed, the
mouth pours all over the face in an expressive but pictorial and surface
vitality. It is an image drawn out from the flesh of the paint. In this
way Bacon carries the distances of the irrational into appearance. As
Bacon says in what Deleuze thinks is the most important passage in
the interviews with Sylvester, he would "love to be able in a portrait to
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BACON
make a Sahara of the appearance—to make it so like, yet seeming to
have the distances of the Sahara" (1975: 56).
In Bacon's work we are always aware of the material fact of the
paint and its configuration as a multiplicity. The heterogeneous but
simultaneous components of the figure stand out clearly as individual
strokes and marks. There are smudges, splashes, and vvhisps, layering,
over-printing and erasure. Texture and rhythm. The power of the work
is in the composition and in the modulations of that composite, and it
is the expression—the pure affect—of that "matter-force" that is
recorded in appearance and which touches the nervous system as
terror or the compassionate look (Deleuze's examples), or as we shall
see in Bacon, as the smile or the scream (Deleuze 1983: 103). What is
important is that the insistence of the chance graph remains active in
the portrait. Referring back to Cinema 1 and Deleuze's analysis of the
face as the close-up which expresses the pure affect as a "complex
entity" or the "expressed", which I mentioned above, we can see that
Bacon's great achievement is in keeping the "virtual conjunctions" of
the graph—a complex, malleable and material mass—in play (Deleuze
1983: 103). Indeed, he not only keeps holds of that movement but
secures it by giving it an existence, a 'life' and a 'body', and thus
presenting it, or recording it, as a new nonhuman sensation of man.
Bacon and the Emergent Contour
It is the abstract line produced in the movement of the material
configuration of the graph or diagram which becomes a nonillustrational 'form' or Figure (Deleuze's capitalization), "as factual as
possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive" (Deleuze 1983:
103; Sylvester 1975: 56). Because the Figure arises within the graph, it
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BACON
is, strictly speaking, neither abstract nor figurative but figure-image. In
contrast to Pollock, and to Abstract Expressionism, which he
dismisses as "chancy" and as "sloppy", Bacon goes on the record and
puts the matter of chance to work (Sylvester 1975: 92, 94). He draws
the abstract line out of the collision of the diagram and extends it into
the particular portrait. Hence his rationale that in distortion he brings
the thing back to a recording of appearance. Thus, while he expresses
the affect in the complex and animated entity that becomes the face as
close-up—thus celebrating the new sensation of the nonhuman
affect—Bacon also manages to save the contour and present a
recognizable image 'of man'
Bacon uses the suggestion of the graph to draw out information, to
change the units of measure, to construct new facts, to manipulate and
to invent. That new order is recognised by Deleuze as a radical break
through in painting. He observes that "certainly the diagram is chaos, a
catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm in line with [par
rapport au] a new order of painting" (1981a: 67). But, while the
catastrophe in Pollock depended on an explosive line without
contours, Bacon's distinction, according to Deleuze, is that he saves
the contour:
To save the contour, nothing is more important for Bacon
... The diagram must not devour the whole picture, it
must remain limited in space and time. It must remain
operational and controlled. (1981a: 71)
However in this new order of painting the contour does not
outline, but functions to return the portrait to its material structure
which, independent of any definite form, will stand out as pure affect.
I would add that in that dissolution, form dissolves into the virtual and
its modulating zone of indiscemibility (the (n-1) dimensions of any-
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BACON
space-whatever), and that in the act of saving the contour—or more
accurately of finding a new order of the contour in the rhythm of the
line—Bacon sections the 'chaos' of the virtual and creates a portrait
that is consistent with its plane of composition. Hence the new order
of the portrait as an entity or Event that remains indifferent to likeness
and the lived state of affairs, but which nevertheless has a strange
resemblance at the level of affect.
In Chapter Five of Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation Periods and
Aspects of Bacon: A Summing Up', Deleuze defines the contour as a
"membrane" working between material structure and Form: a
membrane with three functions—isolating, distorting and dissolving
Form (Deleuze 1981a: 23-26). h1 In the light of the above discussion, I
suggest a fourth function—drawing out or extracting—which extends
the order and rhythm of the abstract line (the virtual) into the contour,
so bringing the depth of virtuality to the surface and realizing it in the
portrait.
Echoing the "torsion" [la torsion] of the fold—explained in The Fold
(1993a) as the intertwined intersection of world and sub ject—Deleuze
opens his text as follows, "The head as meat is man becoming animal.
11 A translation of this chapter appears within an article by Jonathan Keates
entitled Portraits in extremis, which was published to coincide with the 1985
exhibition of painting by Bacon at The Tate Gallery London (Keates 1985).
There is no reference to Deleuze's book (1981a) or translator cited in
Keates's article. The text is entitled "Periods and Aspects of Bacon: A
Summing Up' by Gilles Deleuze".
In the text in Keates, the French Figure is translated as Form. This is not a
good translation as 'Figure' (with a capital) in Deleuze is specific to the
emergent image and defies the determination that 'Form' implies. I have
therefore retained Deleuze's terminology and use "Figure" throughout.
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BACON
And in this becoming, the whole body strains to escape, the Figure
strains to rejoin the material structure" (DeLeuze 1993a: 26; Deleuze
1981a: 23). That escape to the malleable mass of the composition is
the work of the contour. Deleuze finds three different movements of
the contour in Bacon's work. Firstly, there is the contour that isolates
the form from its ground by closing it in an armature as in the many
works where the figure is boxed in, such as the triptych Three Studies of
Lucien Freud 1969 (fig. 6.3). The second contour is the contour that
contains and shrouds the Figure, as in Study Or Vekisquez 1950 or
Head VI 1949 (fig. 6.4) where the Pope is contained behind a curtain.
Here, as Deleuze says, "the Figure is blurred to infinity", and the only
interval in the obscuration of the pleats of the curtain is the gapping
chasm of the mouth (1981a: 25). 12 And thirdly, there is the contour
that is smudged and streaked to produce a shrouded face or body,
sometimes against a bright clean background, as in the triptych Studies
of the human body 1970.
The use of all three contours in the same canvas, as in Study Or
Veldsquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1953 (fig. 6.5), cuts across
Sylvester's division of Bacon's oeuvre into three periods (Sylvester
1997: 173-78). 1 ' Deleuze too recognizes the coexistence of different
12 In Cinema 1 (1983) the face caught in the shadows of foliage, or the strips
of a venetian blind is described by Deleuze as Expressionist: "The
Expressionist face concentrates on the intensive series, in both forms which
disturb its outline and deprive it of its features" (1983: 92).
13 Deleuze mentions this division but does not give a reference. However in
an article of 1962 Sylvester does distinguish three key periods of Bacon's
work: 1. (1949-56) Use of the space-frame around the figure and the floating
head. 2. (1957) Bacon starts to use vivid colour and to treat the canvas "as a
surface, not as a tank". 3. (1962 Three studies for a Crucifixion) The dissolution
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BACON
movements of the contour throughout a three-phase development of
Bacon's work, but he then admits a fourth and final phase in Bacon's
work. The fourth stage involves a further mode of abstraction where
form has dissolved and the Figure appears as pure affect, and in a way
that is absolutely consistent with the plane of composition, as for
example, in the Jet of Water 1979 (fig. 6.6), or Sand Dune 1981. But why
does Deleuze see this as a separate recent period? Does this
dissolution of form not also coexist within the other movements of
the contour? Is there not in the earlier work, especially in the series of
Popes, the jet of the abominable scream or the unbearable smile? And
in later paintings, like TripOch May–June 1973 (fig. 6.7) does not the
viewer suffer the pure affect of the spurt of white by George Dyer's
back and on his foot—a projection which is never just vomit or sperm
but the pain that shocks?
The act of rejoining the material structure is lyrically described by
Deleuze in his summing up of aspects of Francis Bacon's work
(Deleuze 1981a: 23-26). Deleuze sees the features of the face in
Bacon's portraits—for example, Study after Vekisquez's Portrait of Pope
Innocent X 1953 (fig. 6.5)—escaping through the screaming mouth, and
the smile lingering after the disappearance of the body, like the smile
of Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat. In this case, the body is obliterated for
the benefit of the smile or the scream, which insists as an affect (joy,
ecstasy, or terror) without its formal embodiment. Instead of the
matter of paint being defined and formed by the definite contour,
matter is dislocated and in continuous variation, and becomes
expressive matter-force:
of form and the aim "to make things that are formal yet coming to bits"
(Sylvester 1997: 173-78).
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BACON
the precision of sensation, the neatness of the Figure, the
rigour of the contour continue to act within the mark and
the strokes which they don't so much efface, as give a
power of vibration and non-location (the mouth that
smiles or that cries)
[la precision de la sensation, la netted de la Figure, la rigueur du
contour continuaient d'agir sous la tacbe ou sous les traits qui ne les
effacaient pas, mais leur donnaient plutdt tine puissance de vibration
et d'illocalisation (la bouche qui soulit au qui ale.] (1981a: 71)
According to Sylvester, the power of vibration and disorientation
(or non-location) does not arise out of a sloppy Abstract
Expressionism but out of the precise but irrational tacbiste or free mark
(1975: 61). Such marks are irrational and irregular because they lack
uniformity, shape and proportion, but at the same time, like the
irrational number 7C, they are singular, indivisible, irreducible and open
to the infinite. The point is that the chance mark is not just a-signifying
but active in the dislocation and dissolution of form (Bacon's
distortion), and in a new order of painting as the preservation of
sensation (in which Bacon brings that distortion back to a recording of
the appearance).
Bacon associates the power of colour in his portraits with what he
calls the "violence of reality" (Sylvester 1975: 81). This violence is
specifically that which resists the move to signification and which
impacts on the nervous system rather than the mind. In Deleuzian
terms this is the violence associated with the impulse-image because it
is an expression of permanent upheaval, as characterized by the
tension between the elements in Empedocles's world order, or the
collision of shots in Eisenstein's cinematic montage, both of which I
noted above. What is useful about Deleuze's introduction of the
impulse-image viv-i-vis Bacon is that it is a movement characterized
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by a lack of realism (actualization), non-naturalistic violence, and
brutality (Deleuze 1983: 134).
The Impulse -Image and the Violence of Reality
In the impulse-image, power and quality is always an aberrant
violence that refers only to the force or impulse of its "virtual
conjunctions" (Deleuze 1983: 133-40; 103). Deleuze describes the
impulse-image as brutal and indecent, and, in reference to the films of
Nicolas Ray (Johnny Guitar 1953), as "lyrical abstraction" and as "beauty
through and in a permanent upheaval" (1983: 134-36). Finding an
affinity between the cinema and painting, he references Bacon as a
painter of the violent impulse-image. This is because the impulseimage lies somewhere between the affection-image and the actionimage, where affect is never specified or translated into action and, like
the scream, remains on the cusp of action as "violence in act [en add"
(136).14 Bacon's painting gives a body and a life to that impulse.
While he absolutely clear about the necessity of violence in his
work, Bacon makes a distinction between the "violence of war"
(Deleuze's "violence of action"), which he is not interested in, and the
14 The derivation of 'impulse' from the Latin impelletr, to strike against,
situates the impulse-image as an image that works against completion in
action or concept, and therefore as an image which works against
appearance—counter-actualization. The additional implication of impulse as
a sudden inclination both suggests the image as immediate and as fugitive,
and I am mindful here of the ambivalence of the point of inflection, which I
discussed in reference to Klee's 'grey' point, and which lies between the curve
and its tangent and the cknamen which opens onto the line of flight (Deleuze
and Guattari 1980: 361).
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"violence of reality" (Deleuze 1983: 136; Sylvester 1975: 81). It is a
distinction between narrative content and the signaletic materiality of
paint: "When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do
with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remake the
violence of reality itself" (Sylvester 1975: 81).
Bacon's aim is to repeat the impulse of violence in paint, not to
illustrate violence. Later in that same conversation of 1973, Bacon
likens the limitation of seeing to a screened existence, a comment that
resonates with Bergson's insight in Matter and Memog (1896) that
representation (the conscious perception of matter) is a conversion
that isolates, and diminishes—even violates (Bergson 1896: 35-36).
Behind the screen of action is the "violence of reality", a brute reality
that bursts through the screen of cognized appearance, as if disrupting
perception with a brute materiality: "We nearly always live through
screens—a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people
say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been
able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens" (Sylvester 1975:
82).
Deleuze describes the "violence in act" that he finds in Bacon as
internal and as "static", but the adjective 'static' here does not denote
stillness but the dynamism or shock of the electrical charge. "Violence
in act" is a contained violence in the sense that it is a vibratory tension,
and here Deleuze gives the example of a 'character trembling with
violence. This points to violence as a vibratory charge, and to the
impulse as a brutal force that exists between affect and action.
Here Peirce's notion of Secondness is useful, because Secondness is
that mode of the image that, while associated with the action-image by
Peirce, is the force that resists, disturbs and shocks. I suggest that
when that force is kept in play and there is no closure on action (as in
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Bacon's paintings where the actual face is not differentiated) the image
has a tendency to counter-actualization, and is best understood as
working 'in act' between the affection-image and the action-image, and
is therefore better aligned with the impulse-image. As Pierce explains
Seconciness is a matter-force that works against the completion of
actualization; it therefore does not entail the completion inherent to
the action-image, which is the actualization of qualities in a state of
things, and that therefore requires the fixity of a specific space-time. In
'The Principles of Phenomenology' Peirce acknowledges that
Secondness is not the mind's creation but the "fact" of matter that
works against the will (1940: 74-97). It is active and real, not an
unmaterialized quality (red, hard or bitter) but "matter": "But we feel
facts resist our will. That is why facts are proverbially called brutal.
Now mere qualities do not resist. It is matter that resists" (1940: 77).
The factual behaviour or transformation of the thing under the knifeedge is one example of Secondness because it is the weight and force
of the thing that counts. Whether something is hard or soft is an
imperceptible, immaterial and incorporeal fact of behaviour and a
mark of its resistance to the knife.
Secondness is that which is directly experienced rather than known
through the structure of generalization (as happens in the mental or
relation-image). For Peirce, "experience" is broader that perception
and denotes the "shock" (Peirce's italics) of sudden changes of
perception—such as the abrupt change of note of a whistle or the slip
of the knife—and is met with a certain resistance because it forces one
to think otherwise (Peirce 1940: 88). In Bacon, a similar shock is
experienced both in the disjunction between the recognizable face and
the catastrophe of the thrown colour (a counter-actualization), and at a
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material level in the violence of the affect produced in the impulsive
movement of colour and expressed in the portrait.15
Secondness is the imperceptible experience that works against
appearance—the resistance of a door, the movement of a weathercock
or clock, the touch of the mouth (Peirce 1940: 115, 275). With your
shoulder against the door you experience or feel the tension between
effort and resistance, a force that Peirce calls "an unseen, silent, and
unknown resistance" (76) It is this impact that Peirce calls Secondness
and a "pure sense of actuality" (76). Secondness is therefore a sign of
material—force, of the unexpected, and of "facts" which we experience
as the brutal force or "violence of reality" that impacts on the nervous
system, and which challenge our perspective or make us think
differently—the spontaneous, the unpredictable and the shocking (87—
8). In Peirce's vocabulary Secondness is real rather than symbolic: "In
the idea of reality, Secondness is predominant; for the real is that
which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other
than the mind's creation" (79). "There is no reason in it" (76).
It is this resistance, this Secondness, which Bacon captures in the
throw of paint and in inspired chance, when his aim is precisely to
counter the generalized, perceived image with the imperceptible reality
of particularity. For instance in 1974, he talks about the manipulation
15 Nietzsche talks about a similar resistance to the evaluation and opinion
entailed in normal perception in his analysis of active forces. This is the force
that works against the reactivity of generalization and demands an "inversion
of the value-positing eye" piese Umkehrung des werte-setzen-den Blicks]. See:
Nietzsche 1887: 21 [22] and Deleuze 1962: 56. This inversion of the eye
implies that the eye give up its position as the exteriorized and determining
centre of the punctual system, and instead become the roving, acentred and
interior "eye of matter" that we saw in Klee's work, and which Deleuze finds
in the automatic and self-moving image (Deleuze 1983: 81).
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of photographs of the body, and in particular images from
Muybridge's volume The Human Figure in Motion 1887:
I manipulate the Muybridge bodies into the form of
bodies I have known. But, of course, in my case, with this
disruption all the time of the image—or distortion, or
whatever you like to call it—it's an elliptical way of coming
to the appearance of that particular body. (Sylvester 1975:
117-8)
Secondness disrupts the representational model because it is an
image or phenomena—what is rendered visible and thus what
appears—that does not resemble something else, as in the oppositional
model of representation, but which has an elliptical reference, like the
relation of the shot to the hole, the resistance of the door, or the
scream to the mouth. The important point is that in Secondness it is
the shot, resistance or the scream that is expressed and which stands
on its own as an impulse-image. Thus, the reality of the scream in act
[in acte] rings out long after the horror of war, and it is this "violence of
reality" that the work of art preserves (Deleuze 1991: 161).
Secondness is not ordinal but cardinal. There is Firstness in the
Second, which is an index only of its own Firstness—its redness or
blackness—a Representum qua thing expressive only of the
configuration of its composition and genesis, and which captures its
"colouring sensation". It is red not blood. Take Bacon's chasmic
mouths in his Pope series, portraits that are "completely irrational
from the point of view of illustration" (Sylvester 1975: 12). As if torn
away from the meaning that is secured in the determinate space-time
of the action-image and thrown back on fetishistic fragments of the
impulse-image, the scream is the impulse of an aberrant violence and
works as a sign or symptom of the virtual conjunctions of the any256
BACON
space-whatever. 16 It is the white noise of the cry in the wilderness; the
cry that bears witness, that Seconds.
The distinction of Bacon's work is that that symptom is given a
reality in its embodiment as the specific face or body, and becomes a
real possibility of man. This is something that Bacon recognizes when
he talks about his particular way of painting being more poignant than
illustration because it brings the "violence of reality" into the face:
What has never been analyzed is why this particular way of
painting is more poignant than illustration. I suppose
because it has a life completely of its own. It lives on its
own, and therefore transfers the essence of the image
more poignantly. So that the artist may be able to open up
or rather, should I say, unlock the valves of feeling and
therefore return the onlooker to life more violently
(Sylvester 1975: 17).
In his magnificent painting Tripch May—June 1973 (fig. 6.7) Bacon
makes the "violence of reality" a possible by incorporating or
embodying the violent affect of George Dyer's death, a death in which
'a life' is revealed as a pure Event. It is a life and a death that exists
only in its as realized in the material of paint so that the paint itself
becomes expressive. This death does not exist as a concept in any
absolute form, and is therefore an intensely individual singular death.
Bacon dissolves form and returns the figure of George Dyer to its
becoming-animal where the contortion of the flesh struggles against its
refinement and dignity as the personalized human body. That neat
representation is ruined, and instead we find that the violent reality of
16 I sin using symptom here in the Nietzschian sense, as something that
reflects a state of forces. See: Deleuze 1962: x.
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the body as meat is indeed possible as an embodied reality. Here is the
singular essence, the 'jet', of vomit, of shit and of sperm, and the
horror of the suffering flesh. Here is a life recorded and caught in a
matter of expression, and a Figure that is an impulse-image that stuns
and shocks. It is a horror that is not only rendered visible but
preserved as a celebration of the moment of indistinction when the
humanity of George Dyer's life and death is dissolved, and only its
nonhuman becoming exists.
Violence, the Montage and the Material Sublime
In Cinema Z in the chapter headed 'Thought and Cinema', Deleuze
develops his thinking about "the image that itself moves in itself" as a
sublime conception of art (1985: 156). In keeping with the later
definition of the autonomous image in What is Philosophy? (1991)—
"The work of art as "a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in
itself"—he states that "It is only when movement becomes automatic
that the artistic essence of the image is realized" (Deleuze and Guattari
1991: 164; Deleuze 1985: 156). And he goes on to argue that that
autonomy produces a shock to thought and touches the nervous
system directly (156).
Deleuze gives this image (which because of its definition as
autonomous and acentred is a nonhuman becoming) the name
"nooshock" after Peirce's noosign, which is an image that goes beyond
itself towards something that can only be thought (Deleuze's italics)
(1985: 156). A "nooshock" goes towards something that can only be
felt This shock is not the shock of the "figurative violence of the
represented"—Bacon's "violence of war"—where force is actualized
in a determinate space-time (as found in what Deleuze thinks of as
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"bad cinema"). Rather, it is the shock that is "the very form of
communication of movement in images" and the "violence of reality",
like the gaseous explosion in Pollock, or the disjunctive connections of
the aleatory series in Klee, and like the 'jet' of Bacon's diagram
(Deleuze 1985: 157).
Deleuze uses Eisenstein's theory of montage to think through how
the communication of images (matter in movement) in the
"nooshock" works and how it produces the brutal impulse that hits
the nervous system. He understands it as the conflict or tension b
between simultaneous shots or 'moments'. In 'The Dramaturgy of
Film Form' (1929), Eisenstein maintains that art is always conflict
because it manifests the clash of opposing passions and the opposition
between organic inertia and creativity (1929: 45-163).
According to Eisenstein the basic element, dramatic principle and
methodology of art is montage, an aesthetic technique that opens the
work to the abstract line of autonomous movement. Unlike his
colleague Vsevolod I. Pudovkin who understood the succession of
film shots as the unrolling of a complete idea, Eisenstein insists on
simultaneity: "each sequential element is perceived not next to each
other, but on top of the other" (1929: 49). He therefore defines
montage as "an idea that arises from the collision of independent
shots" and it is in this rhythmic disjunction that the potential energy of
the plastic shot becomes a force and an affect (49).
Eisenstein's own example of montage is the roar of the stone lions
in his film Battleship Potemkin 1925 where an artificially produced image
of motion is created in the collision of shots of three different lions, in
three different postures. This image is taken up by Deleuze, who notes
Eisenstein's achievement: "('and the stones have roared)" (Deleuze
1983: 89). The 'whole' image of stone lions roaring is only possible
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BACON
because, firstly the lion is shot in close-up and its form is dislocated,
and secondly because the component shots form an autonomous
series or montage. We move from the stone to the scream, and a new
reality. The stone roars.17
Eisenstein makes much of the comparison between painting and
cinema. He notes the importance of "spatial disproportion" and
"irregularity" in art, citing Renoir's manifesto for La Societe' des
Irregularistes (1884) (1929: 51). He also supports Camille Mauclair's
observation that artists as diverse as Michelangelo, Rembrandt,
Delacroix and Rodin threw aside "the ballast of exactitude as
conceived by our simplifying reason and our ordinary eyes" (51).18
However, painting does not just construct spatial disproportion but, in
the visual vibrations set up by irregularity and colour, creates the
dynamic effect of temporal disproportion, and here Eisenstein gives
the example of the cubist painter Leger, and the mobility of ToulouseLautrec's disjunctive figures. For Eisenstein then, the great painting
shares his characterization of cinema as montage and as "visual
counterpoint" (Eisenstein 1929: 52).
In Cinema 2 the montage is embraced within a concept of the
material sublime and becomes the material-image or figure-image.
(1985: 158-9). This is the image that, in the gyrations of its internal
17 The famous image of The Nanny's scream, also from Battleship Potemkin,
works in the same way: the first shot of the nanny's face is seen
simultaneously with that of her with cracked glasses, shot between the eyes.
The face screams. Bacon was fascinated by this image of the scream.
See: Eisenstein 1949: fig. 7.
18 Maudair is writing of Rodin's drawings in her preface to an edition of
Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mg illustrated by Rodin and published in 1940.
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BACON
composition and the impulsive movement of a signaletic material,
produces the "totally physiological sensation" of the shock-wave or
nervous vibration. Deleuze references Eisenstein and describes it as
"an 'orgy of sensations', a visual music which is like a mass, fountains
of cream, fountains of luminous water, spurting fires ..." (158-9). This
vivid description is of a sequence from The General Line by Eisenstein
who according to Deleuze develops "a pathos-filled power of
imagination which reaches the limits of the universe" (159).
As Deleuze explains it, the sublime in Eisenstein is a "dialectical
sublime" and is constituted in two inseparable moments: a circuit that
goes from percept to concept, and from concept to affect. It is the
vibratory charge of the gaseous image (percept)—here called a
"harmonics"—which has an ex-statis shock effect on thought. It forces
thought to think itself, and returns thought to image and concept to
affect, and to the physiological shock of the 'I feel' (1985: 158). Far
from 'presenting the unpresentable' as a resistance to or displacement
of the subject, as for instance Lyotard's sublime does, in Deleuze's
radicalization of the sublime, the affect is "the expressed" of a precise
configuration of matter, and rendered visible in the sign of affect (here
the impulse-image), as expressed for instance, in the exquisite scream
of the close-up or face."
For Deleuze the movement of the "dialectical sublime" is not
exclusive to the cinematographic image, but characteristic of the more
general "artistic image" (Deleuze 1985: 156). Deleuze points out that
Eisenstein talks about the paintings of Da Vinci and El Greco as if
they were cinematographic images (156). So while he thinks that the
19 For Lyotard 'presenting the unpresentable' involves an "it is felt ..." and
an abeyance of the need for presenting the unpresentable within rationalized
thought.
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difference between painting and the cinema is that, whereas for the
pictorial image the mind has to make the movement, movement is the
"immediate given" of the cinematographic image, he does admit the
possibility of painting that works cinematographically. In Bacon, for
example, the fact that the contour as "membrane" forces the portrait
to rejoin the material structure means that the portrait as a 'whole'
exists in itself as movement—as 'cinematographic' montage and as a
heterogeneous complex entity.
While it would be contrived to map Eisenstein's moments of the
sublime directly onto Bacon's two moments of distortion and
record—his aim to distort the thing, but in that distortion to bring it
back to a recording of the appearance—Deleuze's reading shows up a
keen similarity (Sylvester 1975: 40). Deleuze's association of montage
with the material sublime entails the same opposition to the complete
and conceptual image found in Bacon's distortion of appearance, while
the return to matter makes the figure-image an entity, or record of
appearance. In Bacon, the face is overtaken by the rhythms of the
montage, and the 'whole' dissolves into the simultaneous depth of the
plastic "malleable mass": streaks and swirls, white here, green there,
the pink of flesh. This is most clearly seen in the almost lurid colours
of the self-portraits, such as Two Studies for a Seportrait 1972 and
especially Study for Seff-Portrait 1973 (fig. 6.8), where the face is a mass
of pinks, greens, oranges, purples and blues—a noise of colour.
Study for Sey-Portrait 1973 is a particularly interesting work because
unlike the frill face portraits like Seportrait 1970, Three Studies for Self
Portrait 1972, and Seff-Portrait 1972, the forehead, nose and chin of this
profile are accurately and sharply defined, and appear as a silhouette
against the sky blue background. However, far from compromising the
dissolution of the face, this fine contour serves, like the armature of
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the earlier work, to exacerbate the isolation of the figure-image, and to
reinforce this expressionist image as a specific portrait.
Because of this resistance to the concept and generality of the
'whole', and the poignancy of the affect, Deleuze echoes Eisenstein
and uses the terms "drunkeness" and "pathos", rather than logos, to
characterize the peculiar logic of sensation: "The whole is no longer
the logos which unifies the parts, but the drunkeness, the pathos which
bathes them and spreads out in them" (Deleuze 1985: 159). This
vocabulary of intoxication resonates with Deleuze's much earlier
discussion of "unbounded, uncoordinated and inorganic difference" in
Difference and Repetition (1968a) where, anticipating his later work on the
cinema and on painting, Deleuze concludes that, if it is to break
through the "iron collars of representation" and work "without
image", the greatest effort of philosophy must be "inventing
theological, scientific and aesthetic techniques which allow it to
integrate the depth of difference in itself ... of allowing it to capture
the power of giddiness, intoxication and cruelty, and even of death"
(262)." This demand would not be lost on Bacon, who felt that he was
helped to paint more freely through drink, drugs and tiredness
(Sylvester 1975: 13).
'Making' the Difference
One of Bacon's favourite paintings is Degas's pastel After the Bath
1903. It is the backbone that intrigues him. The top of the spine
protudes, arising out of the flesh. Suddenly and perhaps surprisingly
20 In Difference and Repetition Deleuze identifies four "iron collars of
representation": identity in the concept, opposition in the predicate, analogy
in the judgement, and resemblance in perception (1968a: 137-38,262).
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BACON
the spine is exuded, bone co-existent with flesh. A similar simultaneity
between flesh and bone was something of an obsession for Bacon. He
talks about the Degas in his second interview with David Sylvester in
1966, and in 1970 he paints a triptych Three Studies of the Male Back (fig.
6.9) where the spine is a scar on the blues and pinks of the wounded,
oozing flesh. This is no exoskeleton; the fine dark line and the sharp
white stroke of the spine are bones that are an cores coup suggested after
the material fact of flesh. A record after the fact. It is not that the bone
determines a 'fleshed out' body shape, and thus actualized as a state of
affairs, but that the bone projects in all its skeletal detail. It is a contour
realized in the flesh and thus a nonhuman becoming that becomes an
entity and a body.
This is more obvious in the French when, with Three Studies for a
Cruczfrxion 1962 (fig. 6.10) and Crucifixion 1965 in mind, Deleuze
describes the back-bone as "surajouti, dans un jet de peinture au hasard et
apres coup" [added on top, in the chance throw of paint and after the
event] (1981a: 20). Deleuze also talks about the emergence of the head
in terms of arising usingfaire sugir. "defaire le visage, retrvuver ou faire surgir
la tete sous le visage" [to strip the face, to find or to make the head arise
from under the face], a vocabulary which keeps hold of the sense of
immediacy and action that is not necessarily implied in the English
"arise" (1981a: 19).
Bacon describes this inversion of form graphically when he
imagines images arising from rivers of flesh: "I hope to be able to do
figures arising out of their own flesh with their bowler hats and their
umbrellas and make them figures as poignant as a Crucifixion" (83).
The figures arise without ground [sans fond] emerging in the
autonomous and continuous variation of the diagram to appear, not as
a defined form, but as meat. The parallel "poignancy" of the flesh and
the Crucifixion is already expressed in Bacon's early work Three Studies
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BACON
for a Cratifixion 1962 (fig. 6.10) in which the right-hand canvas a
screaming carcass hangs upside down. This study was inspired by the
Cimabue Crucifixion 1272-4, an image which Bacon thinks of as a
"worm crawling down the cross ... just moving, undulating down the
cross" (Sylvester 1975: 14).
In the raw product—meat—flesh and bone are on the same plane
and existent in a common zone [la zone commune/ la zone d'inckscernabi&te]
(Deleuze 1981a: 21). Deleuze goes on to explain this common zone as
the 'depth' before the human, where there is no difference
(resemblance) between man and animal. Rather than an "arrangement"
of the human or the animal it is, he says, "an identity of depth" [une
identite de fowl (21). The identite de fond is a zone of indiscernibility where
there is no fleshing out, no outline, reference or skeleton, and where
the reality of the body exists in the indetermination of invisibility, in
the virtuality of modulations and the matter-force of the composition
and its affect—the vulnerability of the flesh, the smile, or the scream
that is la ressemblance sensible.21
The body is in this sense the entity that Deleuze and Guattari
identify with the Event in What is Philosophy?. It is distinct from and
indifferent to actualization "since its reality does not depend on it"
(1991: 156). It is an event that is "immaterial, incorporeal, unliveable:
21
Bacon suggests that it is the tension required of direct feelings that is
missing from Pollock's "free marks", and that this is because their
spontaneity is associated with the unconscious rather than with an intelligent
and conscious irrationality (Sylvester 1975: 60). In his article on Turner,
Catastrophism in Philosophy?, James Williams argues that it is by 'controlling'
catastrophe" that Bacon avoids the loss of intensity we see in the "manual
confusion" of abstract expressionism (Williams 1997: 244).
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BACON
pure reserve" (156). In the context of painting, and of the work of
Francis Bacon in particular, Deleuze calls this Event the reality of
becoming [la reakte du devenir] (1981a: 21). In my own reading of Bacon,
I return to Deleuze's first attempt "to `do philosophy" Difference and
Repetition (1968a) (again finding an affinity between the first and the
last of Deleuze's philosophy) in order to understand that "reality of
becoming" as a groundless repetition that, because it arises in the
immaterial, incorporeal and unliveable Event, is a repetition that
produces the singular resemblance of la ressemblance sensible.22 In that
sense, the resemblance that we see in a Bacon portrait is "a repetition
that 'makes' the difference", and which, by including difference,
renders visible the "terrible power" of depth and the virtual (Deleuze
1968a: 292). The face is fractured and deformed, and realized in matter
not as a determined and grounded recognizable form, but as the
monstrous head made visible. It is therefore a portrait that resonates
with philosophy as 'thought without image' because as painting
without image it is an attempt to `do painting' in a manner analogous
to the 'doing' of philosophy in Difference and Repetition.
The question of ground is not to be dismissed lightly. It is a matter
taken up in some detail by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition where the
question of identity and determination—and the well grounded
repetition of representation—is challenged by the "demonic images,
stripped of resemblance" (simulacra and phantasms) that distort such
neat determinations, and which undermine the homogeneous extensity
of the ground with the more profound [profon4 depth and artistic
reality of a repetition which is Ungrund or groundless [sansfon4 (1968a:
22 M I mentioned in my introduction, Deleuze himself distinguishes Differrncr
and Repetition as his first attempt "to 'do philosophy", as opposed to writing
history of philosophy in his studies of Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Proust.
See: Deleuze 1968a: xv.
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BACON
127, 229). In his conclusion to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze goes on
to make particular reference to the face, and to identify groundlessness
with depth and with "an autonomous and faceless existence" (275).
Something of the ground rises to the surface, without
assuming any form but, rather, insinuating itself between
the forms; a formless base, an autonomous and faceless
existence. This ground which is now on the surface is
called depth or groundlessness. Conversely, when they are
reflected in it, forms decompose, every model breaks
down and all faces perish, leaving only the abstract line as
the determination absolutely adequate to the
indeterminate, just as the flash of lightening is equal to the
night, acid equal to the base, and distinction adequate to
obscurity as a whole: monstrosity. (275)
Deleuze distinguishes three levels of repetition and it is worth
briefly rehearsing them here, not least because, like Bacon, Deleuze is
anti-illustration and aligns anti-illustration with groundlessness (1968a:
285-94). Deleuze claims that the highest object of art is not imitation
but repetition: "Art does not imitate, above all because it repeats; it
repeats all the repetitions [habit, profound and ultimate or ontological],
by virtue of an internal power (an imitation is a copy, but art is
simulation, it reverses copies into simulacra)" (1968a: 293). The
portrait as a ressemblance sensible also reverses imitation because its form
rejoins material structure to become consistent on the plane of
composition. It can therefore be understood as an ontological
repetition, a non-mediated "difference without concept" (25, 288).
The first of Deleuze's three repetitions is the passive "habit of
living" (74). This is the grounded and mimetic copy which is explained in
terms of the Same, but which relies on the negation of one image
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BACON
standing in for another; each exclusive, each a spatial and temporal
presence, each a discontinuous case. Here repetition is horizontal and
"bare" and difference is understood only as generality (1968a: 73).
Deleuze associates it with Habitus.
In the second mode of repetition, aligned with Eros—"the seeker
of memories"—and with Mnemosyne—"the treasure of the pure
past"—the 'whole' does not depend on comparison and generality but
on the contracted 'totality' of duration as the grounding of all cases or
copies (274). Cardinal numbers, for instance, imply the more profound
ordering of the ordinal number because the 'third' entails both the first
and the second, a contraction that gives 'three' its weight and depth by
introducing the displacement between one and two into the third.
Deleuze's own example of the copy is the abandoned snake skin; a
material 'case' and indifferent epidermis which has lost the animation
of the profound repetition which secretes it. This second mode of
Deleuzian repetition is vertical and "clothed"; its elements are the
displacements and disguises that are embraced in the contracted depth
of cardinality (287).
In his use of photography as an impetus to the portrait, particularly
the studies of animals and people in motion by Edward Muybridge,
Bacon plays with both images of habit and of memory, finding in the
photographic 'shot' that disruptive difference that jars with the
represented image, and which ultimately opens up a space for an
engagement with the more radical acentred difference of the diagram,
difference which is not between repetitions but which reverses [renversed
the economy of Sameness with "a repetition which 'makes' the
difference" (292).
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BACON
Bacon used a wide range of photographs: shots taken of himself in
automatic booths, stills from films, medical and radiography plates,
photographs of big game, and most frequently photographic portraits
of his friends, which he commissioned from John Deakin, and
Muybridges' sequences from The Human Fig= in Motion 1887. When
asked by Sylvester what especially interested him about the photograph
Bacon talks about displacement and the acentred image, and relates
that to the requirement to capture a new reality by journeying through
the depth of the painting.
Well, I think one's sense of appearance is assaulted all the
time by photography and by film ... I think it's the slight
remove from fact, which returns me onto the fact more
violently. Through the photographic image I find myself
beginning to wander into the image and unlock what I
think of as its reality more than I can by looking at it.
(Sylvester 1975: 30)
Deleuze's third repetition is the ultimate or ontological repetition, a
gmundkss repetition. It does not replace or suppress the repetitions of
habit or memory but introduces into their displacements and disguises
the more radical powers of difference—divergence and decentring.
This repetition is an ungrounding which takes the transformative
powers of the repetition to a new reality—the leap to the non-human
transmutation of the face at its extreme undoing, and to the head. It is
this "repetition for itself" that Eisenstein uses in the rhythmic
resemblance set up in montage, and which we see in Bacon's use of
the diagram where he employs the unconditioned, groundless chance
mark (tachiste) to insert the raw power of colour into the familiar
shapes of the human image.
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BACON
In this third mode of Deleuzian repetition, it is not a case of
supplementing the habitual image but of inserting the divergent,
decentring and distortive power of the diagram into the portrait, and
thus "'making' the difference" by making the ground rise to the
surface and realizing the portrait as the expressed—what Bacon calls
the "violence of reality", and which is for Deleuze that intoxicating
depth of difference where all (human) faces perish (Sylvester 1975: 81;
Deleuze 1968a: 262).
It is the new sensation produced in the diagram that is drawn in the
portrait, which carries a likeness that is not dependent on the
similarities of appearance. ROM traire, the portrait is a drawing that
draws out. And, like firer, it is a drawing out, or up, or from, or to; it is
not a drawing of. It preserves the animation of the thing independently
of model, viewer or artist: Michel Leiris' smile, the scream of the pope,
the grin of the Cheshire cat. It is therefore not a repetition of habit or
memory, but a repetition that preserves sensation. Thus portraiture is a
drawing where replication is not the point, but the groundless
repetition that makes the difference is. And what is drawn (tirer)? A
plan, profit, a conclusion, and information. The force of the thing is
appropriated from the grid of information. And herein is the
difference. The portrait touches the sense of its subject, not a
presupposed identity. And it is this sensation that is recorded or
preserved in the image. The record is a symptom after the fact, and
conveys information, carrying the irrationality of the diagram and
signalling its force as matter in movement. It quite literally marks the
matter—force of the diagram, bringing that force into the figure-image,
and capturing the eloquence of paint in the portrait. How rightly then
Deleuze and Guattari's transpose Peirce's semiotic signs to the
question of territorialization (1980: 531 note 41).
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BACON
Analogue esthitique
In a curious passage in the conclusion to Difference and Repetition
Deleuze explains difference—disguise and displacement—as
constituent of repetition and, on insisting that the thickness (depth) of
repetition must not be suppressed, notes that repetition must be
"confounded with analogy itself" (1968a: 271). His concern is that the
interiority of relation should not be lost, and here he refers back to
what he calls the "unresolvable difficulty" of analogy, that "it must
relate being to particular existents, but as the same time it cannot say
what constitutes their individuality" (38). Analogy thus works to
modulate rather than to generalize, and allows the identity of the
particular existents (concepts) to subsist "either in confused form or in
virtual form" (33). With this proviso of analogy in mind, we can then
see that when in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation Deleuze identifies
the techniques of painting "without image" as an "Analogue esthitique",
aesthetic techniques that work in an "analogical' manner" and that
affirm the virtual form as a pre-individual and differential difference—
a difference without concept that produces la ressemblance sensible
(1968a: 271).
In a short discussion of Cezanne in Francis Bacon: Logique de la
Sensation Deleuze is adamant that the diagram works in an analogical
manner. He likens the diagram to the analogical synthesiser or
modulator, "In short, it is perhaps the notion of modulation in general (and
not of similitude) which is appropriate to our understanding of the
nature of the analogical language Vangue] or of the diagram" (1981a:
76). It is this image of the modulator that holds onto the pragmaticism
of the diagram as composition. The possibilities for composition are
infinite, but for it to work, and for the contour to be drawn out of the
abstract line, the intersections of the tachiste must be precise. A collapse
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BACON
into chaos would mean that the diagram was a dysfunctional mess
[gel chid. This peculiar use of analogy is not to say that analogy rests on
any similitude or that there is any one to one correspondence of parts,
but rather that the composition brings to the surface the depth of the
virtual and the 'impulse' of those virtual conjunctions. For example,
when Bacon nails the flesh onto the bed in Lying Figure with Hypodermic
Syringe 1963 (fig. 5.11), he uses the syringe as a symbol doubling the
limp heaviness of the layered paint with its green and red underbelly
oozing into the flayed, almost transparent surface of the mattress. The
matter—force of the fleshy meaty colour is exactly that of the body,
convulsed in exhaustion. Such is the mystery and the eloquence of
paint.
Like Cezanne, Bacon does not make analogies, but work within an
Analogue estbetique, creating assemblages of lines and colours which
suggest relations, postures and attitudes, and from which new varieties
(aleatory series) are drawn and within which new entities are formed
(1981a: 75). The variable relations and differential differences of the
virtual—the depth of difference and its power of divergence and
decentring—are included in the portrait and seen in the dissolution of
the face and the strange new contours of the head.
This is why Deleuze can say that Bacon is "cerebrally pessimist,
nervously optimist" (1981a: 31). The representational thinking that
separates expression and form demands a restrictive aesthetic ideal and
is pessimistic, whereas in Bacon's paintings the impulse of surface
expression is nervously optimistic because it works the open potential
of difference 'in itself'. What is the mouth if it is not this smudged pad
of paint, soft and dense with a shadow of red? Moist and malleable.
Kissing, licking, salivating, screaming. Bacon discovers the force of the
mouth, shocking, terrible, and violent—horrific, even demonic. It
impacts on our senses and gets on our nerves. As Deleuze suggests "it
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BACON
is a question of causing a little of Dionysus's blood to flow in the
organic veins of Apollo" (1968a: 262). This is also what makes Bacon a
tragic artist in the Nietzschean sense, "The tragic artist is not a
pessimist—it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and
terrible in existence, he is Dionysian ..." (Nietzsche 1889: 39).
The Eloquent Scream of Paint
To paint the scream or the cry, and to paint the smile was Bacon's
first obsession, famously the subject of his works based on Velisquez's
Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1650: Head VI 1949 (fig. 6.4), Pope H 1951,
and Study cOer Vekisque's Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1953 (fig. 6.5)
(Sylvester 1975: 34, 50). Inspired by a second-hand book with handcoloured plates of diseases of the mouth, Bacon became interested in
illustrations of the mouth, but it was Poussin's The Massacre of the
Innocents 1630-1, and the still of the screaming nanny from Eisenstein's
Battleship Potemkin that preoccupied him. Two rigid spasms and two
hauntingly powerful screams. Take for example, Bacon's Head VI 1949
(fig. 6.4). The intense black hole of the mouth compels a response as
the eye hesitates over the light detail of the teeth, adverts to the white
curve echoed in the cuff and the collar, and dallies with the bare, spare
suggestion of the purple robe. A dark curtain of thin brush-strokes
draws a haze down over the face, blinded and blotted out with an
abruptness that returns us to the depths of the empty scream, that
spasm trapped in the armature.
Bacon acknowledges the tension between figuration, distortion and
the record of appearance in his work. He discriminates between the
"fact" of appearance and his own "invention" of appearance from
illustration and the "image", arguing that it is in the distortion of the
image that he is able to record fact, and that the methods by which this
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BACON
is done are "artificial" (Sylvester 1975: 40, 100). 23 He starts with the
chance throw and draws out the portrait that is suggested by that
configuration, thus securing the impulsive nonhuman becoming of the
virtual conjunction in the face. As I discussed, Bacon talks about his
method as a concern with "the violence of paint", and that violence as
an attempt to remake "the violence of reality itself' (81). This violence
is surely Peirce's "brute reality" because the immediacy of Bacon's
artificiality gives it the force of Seconciness; it is "accidentally actual"
and an "unconditional necessity" (Peirce 1940: 90).
I equate this "artificiality" with the move to abstraction and to
painting as a material composition, self-movement and the strange
'reason' of the multiple, the dizzy, drunken logic of sensation and of
difference 'in itself'. The subjects of Bacon's portraits are Lucien
Freud, Isabel Rawsthome, George Dyer ... Bacon himself. There is at
once a radical distortion and a haunting familiarity, no likeness
[ressemblant] but a curious sensible resemblance [ressemblance sensible].
Facial features are distorted far beyond appearance, but it is in that
distortion that the material becomes expressive and the fact of the
subject recorded—Lucian Freud's melancholy, Isabel Rawsthome's
self-depreciation and downcast eyes, George Dyer's pride.
In Study for a SePortrait 1982 (fig. 6.12), Bacon sits, curled
introspectively to one side of a bare room, alone in a sea of blue and
beige. His face is isolated by the contour of a frame or mirror, and the
fine ring of a magnifier; it is shrouded and blurred by the catastrophic
cloud of the haze exuding from that armature, and exploded in a mesh
23 The artificial, like Eisenstein's artificiab is man-made. Bacon brutalises the
man-thought with the man-made, subordinating the eye to the hand and
disrupting the rational image with the irrationality and specificity of material
artificiality.
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BACON
of bulbous reds and textured whites, set sharp against the flat and solid
plane of the black sweater and the stab of the blue dart that draws the
mouth into dissolution. A monument to Francis Bacon arises.
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CONCLUSION
Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to
rediscover, to restore the infinite.
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1991: 197)
In conclusion to this thesis I want to return to the equation that
Deleuze and Guattari make in What is Philosophy? (1991) between pure
sensation and the nonhuman; between the percept and nonhuman
landscapes of nature, and between the affect and the nonhuman
becoming of man (1991: 169). Deleuze and Guattari understand the
percept and the affect as going beyond the human and lived state of
the perception or the affection, and explain this, not as a return to a
pre-human amorphous chaos, but precisely as that move from
representation to abstraction that I see in the painting of Mondrian,
Pollock, Klee and Bacon.
I have argued that while representation is essentially a human and
centred expression that defines the object and produces perceptions
and affections. In contrast to representation, abstraction deals with the
asignificant and with the pure sensation of percept and affect. It thus
reverses opinion and description, and goes beyond forms of
representation to work "without image".
In his own work on painting Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation
(1981a), Deleuze identifies the abstract line as a contour that emerges
in the material composition and describes that asignifying line as "like
the sudden appearance of another world" [comme le surgissement d'un autre
monde], and in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is
the task of art to extract and to "render visible" that other world
(Deleuze 1981a: 66; Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 163-99). But, I go
further than that, and suggest that by embodying that new reality
painting is not just making visible but making possible. It thus
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CONCLUSION
demands that we rethink the entity produced when the artist 'thinks in
painting' because this entity does not work in an exteriorized, centred
space—time zone but in abstraction.
For instance, Pollock creates the catastrophic new haptic spaces of
the nonhuman landscape by insisting on a radical abstraction wrought
by his return to the manual. His "all-over" paintings are glorious
explosive landscapes; landscapes that embrace the complex depths of
the line with infinite inflection, and which exist as surfaces that,
because they function as a machinic chaosmosis, embody the very
multiplicity of that inflection. They are paintings without a beginning
or an end. We saw in Klee's "walk with a line" how the material of
painting becomes expressive, and how that expression endures the
infinitude of its own becoming by producing form that is folded. And
in Bacon we saw the affect that, created on the plane of composition
and therefore in abstraction, erupts as a violent and horrific sensation
that working against the human dissolves form, and returns the face to
the nonhuman close-up—the head.
Deleuze insists that the dissolution of form into the indefinite zone
of "any-space-whatever" is not a move or passage from one lived state
to another. The other world that arises in the work of art is far more
radical than that. The sensations that art produces go beyond the lived
and, correspondingly, beyond the economy of representation. Ahab
not imitating the whale but becoming-whale, Mrs. Danoway becomingimperceptible, Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, becoming-bitch
are all examples of a decentring that dissolves the distance of subject—
object relations with its perceptions and affections, and which instead
works in a zone of indetermination or indiscernibility where things or
the individual—Montagne Sainte-Victoim or George Dyer—are always
becoming and "endlessly reach that point that immediately precedes
their natural differentiation" (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 169, 173). In
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CONCLUSION
painting, that zone of indetermination is the plane of composition, a
common zone in which one cannot distinguish animal from human,
head from face, flesh from bone, but out of which arises an
appearance that embodies and preserves the vibration of its own
becoming and indetermination, thus giving a 'life', 'body' or, as
Deleuze and Guattari suggest in What is Philosophy?, a 'universe' (1991:
177). Hence Bacon's double method of distortion and record, and the
parallel duality of Deleuze and Guattari's statement that "the
peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to
restore the infinite" (197).
What we saw in Bacon was the dissolution of form that returned
the face to a point bOre its differentiation (Deleuze's differenciation) as
a significant construct, a move from the actual to the virtual, and to
the face as close-up or head. As the close-up, the face is an indefinite
composition of pinks, blues and whites, strokes and marks, a diagram
that preserves the multiplicity of the face bOtv it is specified as a
human and lived actualization. As such it is imperceptible from the
point of view of a socially produced representational construct. That
return to the plane of composition gives the face an existence in "anyspace-whatever", which is a zone of indetermination where the
definition of the face dissolves into the head. But, while certainly not
actual the face that is imperceptible is not, strictly speaking, a virtual, if
by virtual we understand the chaotic pre-human "virtually visible" of
the virtual—actual circuit, as for instance theorized by Merleau-Ponty.
Wrest from the virtual—actual circuit to stand on its own, this virtual
exists as an entity on the plane of composition, and is a quite different
virtual from the amorphous pre-human depth. Preserved in the
material, on the canvas, this virtual eludes actualization and keeps the
infinite movement of its reality as an Event in play. It is pure affect or
pure percept, and a nonhuman becoming.
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CONCLUSION
As I suggested in my last chapter, Bacon records a portrait that
captures the violence of that reality because he works from the
suggestion of the diagram, and creates portraits that are consistent with
the multiplicity of their becoming, so restoring the infinite to the faces
of his subjects; George Dyer, Isabel Rawsthome or Lucien Freud, for
example. Bacon's portraits are therefore not shocking because they
present an unpalatable truth or horror, but because they hit us with
new, unfamiliar nonhuman sensations—the face as it never was, is or
will be lived, the face whose expression is produced in the machinic
relations of the diagram and not as a representational construct. Bacon
thus gives an existence to a new non-propositional reality of man.
We first encountered the 'hit' of the pure sensation in the rhythms
of the Boogie Woogie in Mondrian's grids, where the punctuality of the
coordinating axis explodes into the vibrant pulsation of colour-blocks.
It was here too that I first explained abstraction in painting as painting
which returns to its own methods, and by means of its own material
creates sensations that remain indifferent to actualization: when indeed
the artist 'thinks in painting'. I associated the strange dislocated spaces
produced by this move to abstraction with the depth of the visible
sought by Cezanne in his own acknowledgement of the power of
colour as "colouring sensation" [sensation colorante], and with the
"virtually visible" identified by Merleau-Ponty in his 'Eye and Mind'
essay (1961). However, while Merleau-Ponty is concerned with the task
of revealing the invisible, I saw the more radical move to the virtual
that exists independently of the actual in Cezanne's late watercolours.
This is the virtual that Deleuze and Guattari identify in the work of art,
which they define as "a being of sensation and nothing else" (Deleuze
and Guattari 1991: 164). Art preserves sensation.
I followed that task of preservation through the work of Pollock,
Klee and Bacon. As Pollock's work so aptly demonstrates the
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CONCLUSION
explosion into abstraction works within a quite different order of
painting to representation. As Deleuze explains in The Fold: Leibniz and
the Baroque (1993a), in abstraction "the surface stops being a window
on the world and now becomes an opaque grid of information on
which the ciphered line is written" (1993a: 27). Instead of the hand
being subordinate to the eye, and therefore to form as seen and as
lived, the eye is made subordinate to the hand and to the work of
paint. So in Pollock's "all-over" canvases, for example, action painting
produces a grid of information and the "ciphered line" that holds for a
surface and which maintains its own curious spatiality—(n-1)
dimensionality (27).
This resolute move to abstraction and to the work of paint takes my
interest in painting beyond a concern with the possibility of revealing
the visible by demonstrating the multiplicity of a virtual masked by
actualization, as in Cezanne's work on planes of colour, such as
Montagne S ainte-Victoin 1885-87 (fig. 2.1). In contrast to this concern
with actualization, what I find in Pollock is painting which dells only
with what it can create with its own methods, by means of the
material. What it produces is a different virtual to the one revealed as
the invisible to actualization, as in Merleau-Ponty's model. It is a
virtual that is made or rendered visible. It creates, by its own means, a
virtual that has become consistent and become an entity without
surrendering its status as abstraction. In What is Philos? Deleuze
and Guattari call that virtual the Event because it is a virtual "that
eludes its own actualization" (1991: 156). How does it do this? By
keeping the infinite movement of virtuality in play, and so maintaining
its character as a multiplicity. As is demonstrated in Pollock, there is
no beginning or end, just the infinite movement of becoming. What I
went on to argue is that the movement of the virtual is not a chaos that
requires the order of actualization to become an entity and to enter an
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CONCLUSION
ontology of being, but a quite different virtual that has its own order as
becoming.
I explored the order of becoming in my chapter on Klee, showing
how the abstract line emerges from the labyrinthine folds and the
movement of the differential relation. This is the line of inflection, the
abstract line that holds for a surface. What Deleuze is quick to point
out, and what is evident in Klee's work, is that "abstraction is not the
negation of form: it posits form as folded" (1993: 35). Thus we see in
Klee the strange emergent forms or images produced by "taking a walk
with a line" and seen in the "feverish line of variation" that is caught in
a matter of expression, as in the wild spiralling of Angelus Nevus 1920
(fig. 5.2) and the twisted contortion of Pursed-lipped Lady 1930 (fig. 5.7)
(Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 499).
Klee proposes Gestaltung as a creative figuration that works "over
against form", but what is clear from the 'ardent flowering' of his art is
that new forms arise, forms which are indeed folded and which emerge
in duration (1956: 17). These forms retain their integrity as
abstraction—thus working over against the exteriorized theory of form
Formlebre
because they are realized in the material, material which has
itself become expressive. The form is made visible by means of the
material, making visible 'Sail-boats in gentle motion' or 'Ardent
flowering', not as a representational resemblance (perception and
affection), but as pure "colouring sensation" (percept and affect). Klee
thus "renders visible" the radical abstraction of pure sensation and
demonstrates that, far from negating form, 'thinking in painting'
produces the expressive resemblance that refers to its own material. It
is therefore a curiously nonhuman resemblance [ressemblance sensible]
because it is never lived and has no human reference. It remains
acentred.
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CONCLUSION
The importance of Bacon in this study is to take that nonhuman
resemblance—the resemblance that can only be understood in terms
of its composition and genesis—and to incorporate or embody that
Event in the portrait and thus to give it an existence as the nonhuman
becoming of man. This embodiment has a peculiar status because, while
the Event becomes an entity by being preserved in the material, which
itself becomes expressive, it does not lose the movement and vibration
of the process of becoming. In other words, the reality of the Event is
given a body without being actualized and brought within human
perception and affection.
We have then a body that is becoming rather than being, and which
thus stands bOre man as the nonhuman becoming of man. In
Deleuze's own work on Bacon the embodiment (and recording) of the
sensation produced in distortion is denoted by the capitalized 'Figure'
in order to distinguish it from the figuration characteristic of the order
of representation, and to signify the Figure as an entity that embodies
the virtual Event. Figure is therefore a non-linguistic concept, one
produced within the practice of painting.
As we saw in the last chapter, like Pollock before him, Bacon is
concerned to keep that practice pure, and in order to do so
subordinates the eye to the hand. He starts with the throw of paint,
and it is that chance painterly configuration that is brought to the
portrait, so that when he saves the contour it is a contour that arises
within the material. It is an abstract line that is extended and drawn
into the portrait—a depth brought to the surface. What is important is
that, because Bacon 'thinks in paint' that contour is created by its own
means and maintains its character as an impersonal and singular Event
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CONCLUSION
of painting that stands on its own. The Figure is then an impersonal,
singular embodiment: a body, a life.1
Echoing his work on Bacon and the notion of the contour as a
membrane [membrane] that assures communication between the Figure
and the material structure, and which isolates, distorts, and ultimately
dissolves form, in The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque Deleuze argues that
abstraction is not the negation of form, but a dissolution of form that
returns the Figure to its composition and to its structure as matter in
movement where expression refers only to the manner of its folding
and not to any exterior image. As in Klee, the virtual is realized in form
that is folded, and stands on its own "without image".
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze introduces the aesthetic category of
"the possible", in order to conceptualize a body (a life or a universe)
that is neither virtual nor actual (1991: 177). Remembering the lesson
of the cinema books where, in his preface to the English edition
(1992), Deleuze makes it clear that he is not writing a history or theory
of the cinema but isolating certain cinematographic concepts, and the
images and signs that it invents, I understand "the possible" as a
concept produced within art practice (1983: ix—x). Deleuze and
Guattari talk about "possibles" in the context of Proust, and suggests a
"Rembrandt-universe" and a "Debussy-universe" as possibles that give
a body and expression to sensory becoming (1991: 177). The possible
is therefore an aesthetic category that belongs to the work of art: the
1 In the discussion on Dickens in his last published article "Immanence: A
Life ...' (1995), which I mentioned in the last chapter, Deleuze makes the
distinction between the point between 'his life and death' and the moment
when the individual life gives way to 'a life'. 'A life' is impersonal and singular
and releases a pure event freed from subjectivity and objectivity, and from
'what happens'. It is a "singular essence". See: 1995: 5-7.
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CONCLUSION
novel and music as well and painting. "The possible" is a body that is
consistent with the plane of composition and that celebrates the
Event. It does not only make visible that reality but gives it a body and
a life—makes it possible. By not moving to actualization that body
remains has a reality as "the existence of the possible" and confides to
the ear of the future the sensations that it invents (177). Hence,
Deleuze and Guattari's correlation between the affect and the
nonhuman becoming of man (169).
Because "the possible" is an entity preserved in the work of art
Deleuze and Guattari call that work a monument (1991: 167-68,176–
77). The monument does not actualize the Event but gives it a body. It
does not depend on or evoke memory, or refer to the human. The
monument refers only to the virtual conjunctions of its composition,
and embodies the Event of that becoming. It is thus a celebration of
that Event:
Here the monument is not something celebrating a past, it
is a bloc of present sensations that owe their preservation
only to themselves and that provide the event with the
compound that celebrates it. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991:
167-68)
If we accept this definition, the paintings that I have explored in
this thesis can rightly be termed monuments. Each provides the Event
with the compound that celebrates it. Mondrian's tight grids open onto
dazzling spaces of indeterminate depth and the non-pulsed abstract
line. Pollock's action painting creates an explosive and catastrophic
dance in which rhythm and pattern are operative, and where the
material itself becomes expressive and preserves the vibrations of the
Event. In Klee the endless journey is a line that is always in the process
of becoming, an endurance that carries the multiplicity of the 'grey'
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CONCLUSION
point into the line on a walk. That multiplicity is captured in the colour
of Bacon's diagram, that chance throw of paint that is the suggestion
for Bacon's Figures. The portraits—George Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne,
Lucien Freud, Bacon himself—do not move from that virtuality to a
distinct actualization that fixes the face or the figure as lived but,
resisting that representation as identity, work in the opposite direction.
They break through the standard face and, by preserving the virtual
multiplicity of the Event in the radiant compound of splashes and
marks that is the diagram, celebrate man's nonhuman becoming. There
is a new reality that is screaming in paint. In these portraits that
possibility is preserved in a monumental materiality, a monument not
of the past but which celebrates the future. When the artist makes the
leap from representation to abstraction and 'thinks in painting' the
diagram of that possible is made and a new order of space—time and
form mapped out. The creative capacity of painting is thus to
demonstrate new possibilities of existence and to show how we might
"think without image".
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