Talking About Painting: a Deleuzian lens to Sensation
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| Luis Felipe Noé. El incendio del Jockey club |
After
Deleuze (who based his theory on Spinoza’s concepts), a the notion of affect
and its implications have been elaborated from many different perspectives. As opposed to emotions, which, according to
Brian Massumi, are qualified and can be inserted into social conventions,
function and meaning (27), affect has been understood as a free- floating event
(Zizek 21), unlocatable (Seigworth 81), non-subjective (Terada 110 ),
unqualified and thus, not ownable or recognizable (Massumi Parables 28). Considering this elusiveness, how could we
talk about affect in concrete objects such as works of art?
Deleuze’s
theoretical works about aesthetics, as well as his critical writing on painting
and cinema, suggest sensation as the entrance point for approaching affect,
especially in relation to art. Although
both terms are not equivalent, they keep an unbreakable link in the sense that
affect is necessarily felt, being that sensed aspect of affect, the only we can
access from empirical experience. But as a bodily experience, affect goes
beyond a single sensation; it is “synesthesiac more than sense-mode specific”
(Seigworth 81), involving several or all senses in a way we cannot easily
unravel. Thus, more than analyzing, for
example, the potential of a painting to cause a visual sensation, we should
focus on its power to move us from a visual sensation to a tactile one, or to
create several sensations simultaneously.
Deleuze
considered sensation as the basis for any possible aesthetic since it combines
both objective and subjective elements of perception, including the possibility
to “perplex the soul and set it in motion” (Smith 30), which seems very close
to his own notion of affect. For him,
the aim of art would be to produce a sensation, and instead of representing the
world, it should represent a sensation:
“The work of art is, as it were, a ‘machine’ or ‘apparatus’ that
utilizes these passive syntheses of sensation to produce effects of its own”
(39).
In
accordance to this radical position, his critical works about painting just
focused on explaining how works of art functioned toward the production of
sensation. Because of the relationship
between sensation, movement and change, Deleuze was interested in all that
could produce movements, contrasts and variations that could be felt. Hence, his analyses focus on lines and points
of flight (explored at other levels in his notion of deterritorialization), on
colors and shapes and the relationships they keep within the frame of the
painting. His essay Cold and Heat about
Gérard Fromanger’s paintings, and his book The Logic of Sensation, which uses
Francis Bacon works for theorizing on sensation, are good examples of his
method.
From
these works, I would like to emphasize several notions and ideas that I find
illuminating for the ‘affective reading’ of contemporary paintings. In relation to color, the focus should be on
relations of temperature, in gradation and superposition, and also on the
relationship between the color of the painting and the referent. In the essay about Fromanger, Deleuze shows
how his works become vital through the variations in color temperature, and the
coexistence of different circuits of color, from which vitality is the
result. In his study about Bacon, he
also positions color as a primordial category, being it “the differential
relation upon which everything else depends” (46). From this relation, which can be associated
to a single sensation, he derives the concept of vibration.
Other
interesting notions proposed in The Logic of Sensation, are ‘resonance’ and ‘forced movement’, which take us a step
closer to the conception of affect as a more complex event, that is felt across
senses (Seigworth 81). Resonance refers
to the convergence of at least two series or sensations, which in the paintings
could be the relationship of two figures that appear confronted or entangled,
“in such a way that the bodies themselves are rendered indiscernible, and are
made to resonate together” (Smith 46).
Not only shapes resonate, but also volumes and the materiality of the
bodies that are painted. When figures
resonate, the global configuration of the painting changes and new presences
come to existence. On the other hand, forced movement, which deals with
multiple syntheses or series, is the movement opposite to resonance. Here figures deviate, separate from each
other, breaking the limits of sensation and giving place to other categories
such as rhythm and movement, which compromise our body in a more global
way.
Until
this point, the Deleuzian theory of sensation as a way of approaching affect,
seems convenient, not only because it offers a solution for the problem of the
ambiguity of affect, but also because it makes us leave our tendency to observe
fixed qualities, and forces us to see the work of art from the perspective of
relations and potentials, movements and transformations. The categories I summarized before – color as
a source of sensation; vibration, resonance and forced movement as effects
produced by the work of art – are revealing for an operative analysis of
sensation in painting. However,
Deleuze’s concepts are all headed to answer only one question about the work of
art: “How does it work”, while another question: “What does it mean” is
completely rejected (Smith 47).
This
rejection of interpretation is visible in all Deleuze’s writings about affect
and sensation. This gesture is coherent
with the general approach of his theories, which look for an alternative to
social conventions, order and significance.
But he takes it to the extreme, and ignores anything related to ideology
or subjectivity. In his analyses of painting, the inclination
toward functioning implies an exaggerated attention to what is seen within the
frame of the painting. Referents are
divested of their symbolic value.
Pictorial procedures are considered only as contributions to a certain
effect, never as decisions that may respond to subjective, political or
historical reasons.
Sensation
may be a bodily condition, but it is not universal, it can be conditioned by
social realities, personal and collective histories. Ideology also has a role in our sensibility
in the extent that it determines (and tends to naturalize) ideals and
prohibitions, sets hierarchies and classifications, produces images as well as art
trends, topics and even procedures. Thus, when the shapes and order of our known
world is transgressed our body reacts. That is why experimentation in art,
which looks for the renewal of sensations, reaches its maximum effect within a
certain ideology and historical context, in contrast with the established, as a
differential.
On
the other hand, Deleuze refuses the representative function of painting. He thinks there is no representation or
imitation of reality in art, but another kind of alliance. In A Thousand Plateaus, he, accompanied by
Guattari, writes:
Suppose a painter ‘represents’ a bird;
this is in fact a becoming-bird that can occur only to the extent that the bird
itself is in the process of becoming something else, a pure line and pure color. […] The painter and musician do not imitate the
animal, they become-animal at the same time as the animal becomes what they
willed. (304)
From
his point of view, the unique power of art lays in this dynamics of becoming,
of conjunction and continuity between painter, reality and image. Art is not representative since it does not
translate reality, but allows it to transform into a new one. What Deleuze rejects is representation as
imitation (in creation) and also as recognition of a concrete reality (in
observation; an inverse exercise of translation). That is why he points out abstract art as an
alternative to create sensation, as well as the idea of ‘the figural’ in
opposition to figuration.
The
‘figure’ is, as Smith explains, “the form that is connected to a sensation, and
that conveys the violence of this sensation directly to the nervous system”
(44). Figures are bodies on the painting
that provide support to sensations, points where sensation concentrates, knots
of sensorial tension, presences that our entire body cannot but feel. They do not need to be indecipherable shapes;
sensation can dwell in the shape of a concrete object that staying recognizable
has gone through the dynamics of becomings described by Deleuze. However, I do not think that when objects
turn into shapes on the canvas, they become only lines and color. They are unbreakable, tied to models out of
the painting, to the history of those models, to their symbolic values, even to
their own representations. Instead of
dropping representation, perhaps we should ask how it interacts with the
dynamics of becoming in the process of creating sensations.
Contemporary
painting in particular plays with the permanent visibility of its
referents.
Even
if its intention is to make us forget the pain of lived reality,
it frequently does so by transforming known realities through mediations,
deformations, repetitions or mixtures.
Some of them are practiced on the appearance of the objects, but others
take place in composition or in dimensions that are not easily recognizable
(Hyperrealism and simulacrum know a lot about these less superficial
transformations). These gestures produce
shapes and lines, but in order to unfold its potential of sensation, they
require us to recognize the referents and realize how that reality is not the
one on the canvas anymore. When we face
the reality on the painting in its autonomy, sensation takes place. But when we experience the difference between
both realities (less in their appearance than in their global presence) without
being able to say where the difference comes from, sensation multiplies.
The
last aspect of Deleuze’s theory of sensation I would like to discuss is the one
regarding individual experience, specifically with regard to the creative
art. Deleuze sustained that his theory
of sensation was a theory from the point of view of creation (Deleuze Sensation
3). However, in his critical works
creation is limited to the intention and to the actual procedures used by the
painter to create sensation, and the sensations taking place in the act of
painting are put aside. If we want to
understand how a painting works in relation to sensation and affect, we should
approach the creative act as a space where sensations are not only created, but
felt. In the act of painting, mind and body
enter into an indiscernible relationship marked by intensity. Beyond rational intentions, political or
aesthetical reasons, technical and material conditions, there is an
unexplainable impulse – that is why asking a painter how his paintings work results
always in a broken response – , which is followed by a series of sensations
during the process of painting. Of
course there are paintings that are more intuitive and corporal than others,
but even in the most cerebral art, there is sensation occurring in the contact
with color, in the repetitive transit of the painter who paints very close to
the painting and then steps back to see the result. Perspective changes in each movement, as well
as texture, perception of space and time.
All the categories that may cause sensation are thus active in the
pictorial exercise. When finished, a
painting acquires an enigmatic stasis, but while its making lasts it is a space
of permanent movement, futurity and becoming.
As I
have shown, Deleuze’s extreme inclination toward the autonomy of the work of
art entails some limitations for an analysis of sensation in contemporary
painting. However, I still believe that
the right question to be asked is “How the painting works”; it is just that
Deleuze excludes of his model aspects such as representation, interpretation
and individual experience, which also contribute to the operation he is trying
to describe. In the analyses of painting that I will be sharing soon, I take the categories proposed by Deleuze as
a starting point. I analyze color,
shapes and spatial relations between figures, as well as the process of
construction, in which Deleuze was very interested. But I extend the horizon of the operative
model in two directions: toward represented reality, and toward individual
experience in relation to the creative act, where sensation is not only
created, but felt.
Bibliography
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1987.
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2003.
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Gérard Fromanger. Ed. Courtauld
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for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
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-----. Realer
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