brogan bunt

Guy Debord, in a very Platonic fashion, contrasts the realm of images (within the context of consumer capitalism) to the terrain of authentic experience. Baudriallard imagines he has taken an additional step with his conception of the simulacrum – no reality at all only images. Yet now the space of imagery has become unclear – its autonomy far from certain. It is as though the image itself has broken down the cave walls or was never actually in a cave at all. It has descended down (or up) into reality. It is co-extensive with the real. It is just as material as it is abstract. And it doesn’t rely upon anybody to see it. There is no longer the necessity for spectators – no longer the need for chained slaves staring at walls. Whether people are still imprisoned or not is neither here nor there. Images circulate like blood. They are no longer, conveniently, a form of pollution. They are no longer extraneous. They cannot be simply expelled or set aside. They cannot be regarded as some alien figure of absolute loss. Our relation to images has become intimate.

Very careful. Something about flat ground does not suit me.

My mind is like the autumn moon
Shining clean and clear in the green pool.
No, that’s not a good comparison.
Tell me, how shall I explain?¹

Han-shan (or Hanshan) was an early Chinese Buddhist poet writing during the T’ang dynasty in 800 or 900AD. He was a wealthy and well-educated man who, having missed out on a senior government appointment, withdrew from the active public world to live a simple rural life in the mountains.

Despite the vast cultural distance, this poem by Han-shan seems relevant to my current work. At the most obvious level, and not at all metaphorically, I am concerned with the moon and our backyard pool. And if not with the moon and the pool, then with dusk on the escarpment, with clouds and dwindling light, and with minor activities such as walking and running. And in the same way as Han-shan, I am uncertain about these images and this space of experience, not, however, because they fail as metaphors of spiritual clarity, but because they signal an awkward romanticism and quietism. Or perhaps a recourse to a very conventional order of poetry, which nonetheless deeply holds me – although I do my best to approach it lightly, to tie it to the ordinary and prosaic, to non-descript leisure, suburban rooftops and weed-infested trails.

Full circuit again:

Water tower: six mins
Mt Nebo top clearing: 14 mins
Four ways gate: 18 mins
Waterboard gate: 23 mins
Rough trail start: 29 mins
Steep drop: 39 mins
Coal mine: 49 mins
Robertson lookout: 54 mins
Byarong park: 1 hour 16 mins (?)
Finish: 1 hour 28 mins

An obvious criticism: I am reducing the experience of running through the escarpment to an athletic event – a sad after-image of the conditions of mechanised labour. Lacking any capacity to imagine a genuine alternative, I render my space of freedom in terms of the very constraints that, at another level, lend the activity meaning. If I argue that here the conditions of time are my own, that I set them myself, then it becomes even more plainly evident how effectively I have interiorised the larger social system – how unfree and compromised my running actually is.

Without wishing to deny this criticism altogether, it naively imagines the possibility of a purely oppositional practice – one that does not in any way partake of given social forms. The subjection to clock time here lends the activity a specific formal coherence. It is a matter of pursuing and pushing back limits. Last week, when I’d finished some ten minutes slower, I doubted that I’d ever complete the run in under and hour and a half. I was very surprised when I managed to do it this week. The strange play between physical places and temporal targets. The sense of movement itself (with all its complexities of perceived effort, pace and recovery) and the sense of clock-time passing. And then the relation to the escarpment, which no amount of slowness of movement, no suspension of clock time, can ever adequately represent. It is a real space. It is a dream space. May as well pass through it quickly as slowly. There are correspondences to be discovered at any pace – in terms of any experiential conceit.

Saturday – late afternoon.

Tuesday – early morning, moon.

Art does not describe an order of phenomena, but rather an associated characteristic or quality of phenomena. It does not take its place in a concrete taxonomy. There is nothing that is substantively (and exclusively) art or not art. Art is always added to something. It is not an order of thing that can be distinguished from the order of non-art things. It is something that can be flexibly associated with any phenomena. Of course there is a need to say something about this super-added quality. What is it that distinguishes it from any other number of qualities? Once again, I doubt that any final determination can be made – the quality of art is multiple, historically variable and inchoate – but we can probably point to some key identifiers. Art relates to the promise of freedom – and to the rhetoric of freedom. It lends possibility – the exploration of possibility – a distinct, yet always contingent, shape. It is also linked to a motion of displacement – a work of reflection, entailing both engagement and distancing, the characteristic and the surprising.

Mt Nebo – MtKeira circuit:

Water tower: six mins
Mt Nebo top clearing: 14 mins
Four ways gate: 19 mins
Waterboard gate: 24 mins
Rough trail start: 30 mins
Steep drop: 40 mins
Coal mine: 52 mins
Robertson lookout: 58 mins
Byarong park: 1 hour 25 mins (?)
Finish: 1 hour 37 mins

(After Byarong Park, the path heads down Mt Keira road and then drops off down into the bush near the Bushfire Brigade building. Missed the trail and got a bit lost down there. The ground was loose and spongy, full of rocks and trash. A potential mud slide?)

Nothing of art here, except this.

In November last year I wrote of an unfinished walk. My aim was to head up Mt Nebo, around to Mt Keira and then back down. Unfortunately the track had become overgrown in the jungle section beneath the old coal mine, forcing me to turn back. Since then, however, mountain bikers have re-established the trail. Yesterday I completed the full loop, but in the opposite direction. I started a bit late in the afternoon so didn’t get back home until after dark. As I descended down the last steep slope from the water tank to Valley Drive I startled a small herd of deer. They rushed in all directions. I could hear one of the young deer plaintively calling for its mother as I hurried down the grassy trail.

Up the hill to the same spot – a small clearing before the narrow lantana track. Apparently nothing much to see. Grey sky, a few clouds, a tinge of red in a saddle near Mt Keira. But I hang around anyway, waiting for it to get dark.

Short morning walk.

Back up Mt Nebo in light rain to the new gravel-asphalt road. Then through the gate and down to the small clearing with its chainsawed stumps and small piles of sawdust.

On the way back, an unexpected sunset – lighting up the clouds, the steel works and the distant cargo ships.

Now that I am reduced to walking, it is easy to carry a camera. I only incidentally get some exercise. I don’t bother checking the time or hurrying from one point to another. The photography takes precedence. I am especially interested in the dusk light – in the contrast between the gathering darkness of the bush and the conch-shell tones of the sky. It is evening by the time I stumble down the final muddy incline to my suburban street.

I draw on the technical metaphor of multiplexing to explain an aspect of my current practice (and perhaps a broader tendency within contemporary art) because it responds to the notion of interference. Instead of disrupting and corrupting the signal (from a notionally exterior position), multiplexing suggests an interleaving of diverse signals within an overall signal field. Art loses its heroic autonomy – its sense of innocent distance and alien viral force – and reveals a more mundane, complicit and opportunistic aspect. At the same time, in avoiding the bad faith of an illusory critical autonomy, it comes to recognise its genuine powers of attachment, its actual potential for engagement.

But I could have employed other metaphors. I have already, for instance, spoken of grafting and of piggy-backing. Art could also be positioned as a component (in the sense of the colour components in a RGB signal), or, in terms of the language of computer programming, as an interface, mix-in or trait. The latter are all means of enabling polymorphic entities – entities that are not derived from a single class blue-print, but that reveal a dimension of multiple inheritance, and, as such, a capacity to be both this and that, to be recognised equally as one thing and another. A spaceship entity in a game can both descend from a general spaceship class (and as such be positioned within a set of spaceship objects) and also draw from of any number of more generally defined traits – elusiveness, capacity to animate, capacity to die and be reborn, etc. In a similar manner, I associate the art trait with my walking and running and the latter become polymorphic. They obtain an additional aspect. They no longer simply correspond to the set of outdoor leisure activities, but also to the set of art activities. They demonstrate an integral multiplicity. There is no need to decide absolutely between one mode of categorisation and another. The dimensions are not mutually exclusive but multiplexed.

The DADA readymade removes an everyday object – say a bucket – from its ordinary context and exhibits it as art. Initially, this works less to claim the bucket for art – to strip away its everyday ‘bucketness’ and make it amenable to disinterested aesthetic appreciation – than to question the nature of art itself. The bucket serves as a provocation. It mocks the bourgeois self-understanding of what properly constitutes the aesthetic realm. Instead of the unique, hand-made object, we have the mass-produced bucket. Instead of an obvious expression of profound and poetic human spirit, we have an abject, functional thing. At the same time, however, precisely through this work of critical self-reflection, the bucket suggests another notion of art – one in which the lines between art and ordinary life are less clearly drawn, and one in which the exploration and breaching of accepted boundaries becomes an integral aesthetic expectation. In this sense then the bucket is also positioned within art.

a bucket filled with art

The problem here is that as soon as the bucket comes to occupy a position within art, as soon as becomes an acceptable aesthetic thing, then it loses whatever it is that lent it initial critical aesthetic force. The genuinely aesthetic moment of the bucket takes shape as a paradox. It is only in its alienation from what is currently given within the aesthetic that it gains the capacity to serve as effective aesthetic provocation. Hence the death of the historical avant-garde. Hence the need for an endless series of neo-avant-gardes.

How then are we to conceive the relation between art and its non-aesthetic other in the readymade? Does it, for instance, take shape as a dialectical relationship, in which the bucket is consumed by art (in the manner of the Hegelian aufhebung)? Is the everyday dross of the particular thing winnowed off in the transition to the generality and alien concrete space of the aesthetic statement? Or alternatively, does the bucket somehow retain its alterity in the midst of this work of aesthetic incorporation? I doubt there is any simple means of resolving this issue one way of the other. Indeed the aesthetic of the readymade would seem to play upon this ambivalence. Incorporation can never become comfortably settled. The bucket is drawn within art, while also resisting art. In this sense, the readymade is constituted aesthetically in terms of its relation to non-art alterity. The paradox of the readymade suggests a fundamental medial dimension within avant-garde art. Rather than having a determinable essence, avant-garde art takes shape in terms of awkward relations, works of perverse montage, modes of parasitical attachment, etc.

The notion of multiplexing engages with this tradition of practice. Art-making is drawn into intimate, coterminous relation with other orders of experience and being, but without dominating them, without claiming them altogether for itself. Furthermore, the art-making never appears as itself per se, but rather emerges in terms of a risky grafting on to other activities, other modes of doing and thinking. In a similar manner then to the readymade, multiplexing shapes what may be described as a relational aesthetics – not in Bourriaud’s sense of fostering social relations, but in terms of a fundamental aesthetic orientation towards non-art alterity, an opening beyond the aesthetic within (and away from) art.

Where multiplexing differs from the strategy of the readymade is that it does not aim ostensibly for incorporation. It does not provocatively position the non-aesthetic within art, rather it explicitly acknowledges the limits of art. It enters into a non-subsumptive relation with other dimensions of existence. It appears as an imposition, a clinging on to, an extraneous adaptation.

In Book X of The Republic, Plato describes Socrates’ rejection of mimesis. Socrates employs the example of a bed. There is, in his view, the original ideal bed created by God. Then there is any particular actual bed created by any particular carpenter. Finally there is the artist’s representation of that bed. The original bed represents a site of truth. The carpenter’s version is modelled on this ideal prototype, so has secondary status. Its construction depends upon an intimate knowledge of relevant materials and bed-making processes, but can never literally attain the singular ideality of the one true bed. Socrates argues that the artist’s representation is yet another level removed from the truth. This thrice-removed version (based on a inclusive count) renders only the appearance of the true thing. Unlike the carpenter’s bed, it does not demonstrate any understanding of wood, nails, or physical principles of construction. It engages only with the surface. It appears then as a parasite of a parasite. As much as this argument no longer holds convincing force, it nonetheless indicates art’s tendency to latch on to other things, to attach itself to them, to prey upon them for its own interests. Mimesis is a basic form of multiplexing – and multiplexing is a form of parasitism.