Talking About Painting: a Deleuzian Lens to Sensation

Talking About Painting: a Deleuzian lens to Sensation

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[1].  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[2].  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[3], 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. 

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[1]   Daniel Smith and Brian Massumi offer complete explanations of this relationship.  From Massumi, we could say that if affect is a potential of movement, the capacity of a body to enter into relations of movement and rest, into “transitions”, what we feel as a sensation is not the capacity itself, but the transitions and also the changes in capacity associated to them (15).

[2]Heat and cold, the essay written by Deleuze about Fromanger’s Works illustrates this fixation toward operativeness in opposition to meaning.  In Fromanger’s paintings has been recognized a strong political voice that reflects on consumer society, on urban configurations, colonization and the idea of revolution.  The fact that he paints shop windows is, for Deleuze, a gesture without much significance, except for the love the painter may feel for the objects he paints.  In contrast, for other critics, it is something explained by the social reality in which he lives, the advances of capitalism and of course, his personal inclination for certain objects.

[3] In El arte y su sombra the Spanish theorist Sergio Perniola analyzes the two trajectories taken by western art and the different functions assigned to art in each one of these trends.  The first trend he identifies is directed to the celebration of appearance and focused on the notions of separation distancing and suspension.  From this perspective, art’s function would be to distance us from reality and relieve us from its weight.  Perniola notices the close relationship between this hedonist vision of art and mass media. The second trend emphasizes the ideas of participation and implication, and sees art as a perturbation or shock.  The task of art would be to provide us with a more intense perception of reality (17).

Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari [1980].  A Thousand Plateaus.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles [1981].  Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Deleuze, Gilles and Michel Foucault [1973].   “Hot and cold”.   Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault: Gérard Fromanger. Ed. Courtauld Institute of Art.  London : Black Dog Publishing, c1999.

Massumi, Brian.  Parables for the Virtual:  Movement, Affect, Sensation.  Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002.

-----.  Realer than real.  The simulacrum according to Deleuze and Guattari. www.brianmassummi.com, March 6^th 2009.

Perniola, Sergio.  El arte y su sombra.  Madrid: Teorema, 2002.

Seigworth, Gregory.  “Fashioning a Stave, or, Singing life”.  Animations (of Deleuze and Guattari). Ed.  Jennifer Daryl Slack.  New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 2003

Smith, Daniel W.  “Deleuze´s theory of sensation: overcoming the kantian duality”.  Deleuze:  A reader.  Paul Patton Ed.  Cambridge Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996.

Zizek, Slavoj.  Organs Without Bodies.  New York : Routledge, 2004