The last week has been very humid. There have been late storms every day. There is some slight cooling when it rains.
On Tuesday night I attended a lecture/seminar by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. Have heard their names mentioned for some years, but know very little of their work. I was aware that Massumi had translated Deleuze and written influentially on the notion of ‘affect’. I knew that Manning was an artist-theorist. But that was about it. I went along then to get a sense of their work – perhaps even an introduction. I guess I got that, but not quite in the terms I expected.
It was more a performance than a formal scholarly lecture. A bit like Marina Abramovic and Ulay forcing gallery visitors to squeeze between their naked bodies (Imponderabilia, 1977), Brian and Erin stood at the door and offered short written quotes from a hat as attendees entered the seminar room. Additionally these quotes were arranged in patterns on the seminar floor. The quotes seemed to be from a recent theoretical work. They were all about engaging with the concrete materiality of the present moment – yet they were also very abstract.
The seminar began with Manning and Massumi standing about 10 metres apart from one another in the midst of a scattered sea of perhaps one hundred attendees. There was no sense of a neat, spatially delineated gap between speaker and audience. They took turns reading brief sections from their work, leaving pauses between one finishing and the other starting up. After a short while one of the audience members, who was sitting on a stool just near me, seized the pause and read the quote that she had been supplied. Others took the hint and did the same. People read out their quotes in turn (and sometimes in tandem) for close to 45 minutes. People generally stayed true to the words that had been supplied them, but one person (Malcolm Whittaker) declaimed, “Phillip Hughes, 63 not out” (a reference to Australian test cricketer, Philip Hughes who had died from a blow to the head from a cricket ball less than a week before).
I looked at my quote. It said, “Disseminate seeds of process.” I must confess that I had no intention of reading it out. Quite a number of people had the same quote and did read it out. Solemnly intoned, it sounded like a cultish mantra. I couldn’t help thinking of Reverend Jim Jones’ and the poisoned Koolaid.
I should note that both Manning and Massumi have very impressive hair. They have long, curly manes. Hers is red. His is grey-black. At one level their hair suggests an allegiance to the hippie 60s. At another level it celebrates distance from that era – it suggests that they are reinventing long-hair and the hippie counterculture rather than remaining scrupulous to whatever those things represented in the past.
Once 45 minutes or so was up, Manning an Massumi brought the reading to halt. They sat together on stools and suggested a conversation with the audience.
They listened to people’s perspectives on the reading event and talked about creativity in terms of notions of emergence, the senses, abstraction and the like. I was very uncomfortable sitting on the floor during this time, hoping uncharitably that the whole thing would end soon. It seemed to me that all this talk of the specificity of ‘the event’ said nothing at all specific about any specific event whatsoever. Somebody (Sarah Miller actually) had the temerity to mention the long traditions of artistic practice that seemed to inform Manning and Massumi’s approach (from at least Cage onwards), but while they acknowledged all kinds sources of inspiration from Whitehead to Dewey and Nietzsche, they were determined not to refer to actual historical movements within art. Although they were apparently concerned to re-situate philosophy within the contours of the lived event, they seemed to do precisely the opposite – to say nothing at all about anything historically or even experientially concrete. Instead they focused on describing what they regarded as the general contours and generative character of creative practice. This unfortunately ended up sounding like a bad hallucinogenic painting, full of bright colours and spurious circles.
The event ended with the two being introduced or not introduced. It was hard to tell.
In summary, my misgivings with the event:
- Manning and Massumi pretended to create an opening for the audience, but they supplied the words and the audience largely adhered to the script (however apparently scriptless)
- Everything centred on Manning and Massumi – even the conversation
- Gimmicky; no genuine respect for the audience (who, believe it or not, might not be experts in their work)
- Feigned respect for the event; actually plain that every event would be conceived in the same philosophical terms
No fucking storm tonight, just when I really need one.