TIME TRANSCENDENCE PERFORMANCE PROCEEDINGS: PAPER

Author

Cassandra Barnett

Lecturer, School of Design and Visual Art, Unitec New Zealand

PhD student, Film, Television and Media Studies Department, University of Auckland

Title

Art out of step, art out of time: a Simondonian aesthetics

Abstract

The hylomorphism dominating Western aesthetics suggests that art is comprised basically of

matter and form, yet contemporary art can be temporally and perceptually slippery in ways that

exceed the explanatory powers of hylomorphism. Fluid, amorphous qualities are evident for

instance in the recent works of two Australasian artists: Daniel Crooks’ disorienting timeslice

videos, and Lisa Benson’s evanescent drawings on unfixed photographic paper. This paper

argues that Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, which was developed in the 1950s

and constituted a sustained critique of hylomorphism, can help us to appreciate such artworks

emphasising imperceptible processes and disorienting transformations. The concept of

individuation, like that of becoming, restores attention to the ontogenetic forces preceding and

exceeding the appearance of ‘matter’ and ‘form, and underlying the operation of perception

itself. The paper ends by speculating that perception, and the viewer, may gain something

important from art that does not produce individuated forms at all.

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Keywords

Gilbert Simondon, individuation, Lisa Benson, Daniel Crooks, aesthetics

Paper

Becoming exists as one of the dimensions of the being… it corresponds to a

capacity beings possess of falling out of step with themselves, of resolving

themselves by the very act of falling out of step. (Simondon 1992, 300)

This paper tests the potential of Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation for aesthetics,

via an engagement with single works by two current Australasian artists. Simondon was a

student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; his works on individuation and the philosophy of technology

were written in the late 1950s, and these works were influential, in particular, upon the late

twentieth-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Simondon’s works have more recently been

revisited by philosophers Bernard Stiegler, Brian Massumi and Elizabeth Grosz to name just a

few.1 I will first introduce the two artworks and describe some of the tensions they give rise to. I

will then outline Simondon’s concept of individuation. Finally, I will bring the art and the

individuation together, explaining why I think an art of individuation can offer something novel

and important to perception, and something meaningful to the lives of its viewers.

Pan No. 2 (One step forwards, one frame backwards) (2007) is a video work by the New

Zealand-born, Australia-based artist Daniel Crooks. At one level, the work presents us with a

fairly mundane urban scene: a cosmopolitan array of people (some besuited, some capped and

skateboarded, some resplendent in designer logos), a variety of vehicles, roads and tramways

and train tracks, and the odd pigeon. All these elements are bathed in the crisp, blue-skied

1 As further evidence of his growing relevance to contemporary thought, in 2009 a special issue of Parrhesia: A

Journal of Critical Philosophy was devoted to the work of Simondon.

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brightness typical of a hot day in Melbourne, and there is a continuity to the movement in the

scene that is vaguely suggestive of real time, of a single-take slice of life. However, none of the

elements I’ve mentioned are behaving as you would expect them to. Instead, their slow, fluid

movements are inventing new relations between space and time and perception with each and

every frame of the video projection.

The people’s ambulations appear arbitrary, ludic, sometimes occurring on the spot, only

occasionally actually propelling them through space. Even when the figures are displaced, they

drift according to some remote locomotive power quite disconnected from the laws of physics.

And at times they drift in several directions at once, thus also upsetting our temporal

assumptions. For irrespective of whether they are moving or still in the extensive sense, the

figures are continually subject to another, intensive movement, causing them to stretch then

dwindle, implode then bloom forth in a perpetually renewed interrogation of their own shape,

their internal organisation, their very existence. (The still-sequence in Figure 1 gives a rough

idea of the work’s transformations, though of course to experience their full effect one would

need to watch the video itself.)

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Figure 1Daniel CrooksPan No.2 (one step forwards, one frame backwards), 2007video still sequencedigital video, 4:43 minutes, 16:9, stereo soundcourtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery

So instead of the distinct bodies and opposing forces of Newtonian motion, we seem to be

witnessing a different dimension of melding bodies and unified forces. Subjects and objects of

action are hard to define. Figure and ground are not always distinguishable. Events can’t be

lined up chronologically. And since single-source perspective isn’t quite working, our own

position as viewer is also destabilised. Witnessing this familiar-yet-unfamiliar scene, viewers

may be forgiven for feeling similarly amorphous, for falling out of step with themselves. What is

this space that will not be walked over? What is this time in which individuals may be doubled,

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halved, multiplied, dispersed, co-existing with themselves and travelling in numerous directions

at once? What is this flickering, floating world of extinctions and rebirths? I’ll come back to

these questions.

Another artist whose works pose temporal and perceptual paradoxes is New Zealander Lisa

Benson. Compared with Crooks, Benson’s tools are rudimentary and her results are often

fugitive and lo-fi, but the parallels between their work offer an interesting seam for

investigation.

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Figures 2-4Lisa Benson Fade, 2008Work featured in group exhibition atmos, MIC Gallery, Auckland, 2008Antique black and white photographic paper and gathered light from the artists studio and MIC Gallery for the duration of atmos courtesy of the artist and Antoinette Godkin Gallery

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Benson’s work Fade (2009) was installed at the Dancehouse Gallery in Melbourne for the

duration of the Time Transcendence Performance conference. (An earlier incarnation of the

work was shown in 2008 as part of atmos, a group exhibition at MIC Gallery in Auckland; the

installation shots printed here as Figure 2, 3 and 4 are taken from that show.) Fade consists of a

series of rectangular ‘drawings’, as Benson calls them, of various sizes, scattered across a wall

of the gallery – a wall adjacent, at one end, to a vertical sliver of window. The initial impression

is of a candy-coloured sprawl of restrained geometric abstractions. But if you take a closer look,

it is pretty clear from the velvety sheen of the emulsion and the curling edges that these

drawings are in fact images made with light on traditional photographic paper.

The idea of photographic abstractions may pose a mild conundrum for old-school art historians,

but the more interesting paradox is one that takes a while to dawn. To see it, you need to stick

around for a while, or make repeat visits to the gallery. For, in fact, the works are unfixed and

still gathering light, and hence quietly, slowly expiring before your eyes. The process may speed

up or slow down depending on the quality of light on a given day, but either way it is gradual

enough to only be detectable after a period of time has elapsed.

Having discovered this fact about the works, viewers often start to ‘look for’ the change,

wanting to bear witness to it, to ‘see’ the art for once and for all. Some viewers (especially the

buying kind) even want to prevent the change by fixing the images and preserving their fragile

beauty. Yet we can’t prevent it and we can’t see it – at least not without looking away for a time

and back again. In a sense, to see it, we must miss it. If sensitive to such things we may find

ourselves moved, for the work is subtly lifelike: moving, changing, dying, eluding our grasp.

Whatever we see is instantly gone forever, we have no time to get acquainted with the work in

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its current form, our thought can’t keep up with what we’re seeing. One way or another,

Benson’s work, like Crooks’s, throws us out of time, out of step with ourselves.

I will now turn to Simondon’s theory of individuation. For those unfamiliar with the concept, it

bears some relation to the notions of ‘becoming’ and ‘emergence’. Simondon theorised

individuation in a number of texts devoted to different levels of reality, from technological

invention to human psychic individuation. As Elizabeth Grosz points out: “Individuation is in no

sense tied to the human: it is what characterises cloud formations, the formation of crystals, the

currents of oceans, as well as the development of cells, and the creation of individuals” (Grosz

1998, 38-55).

For ease of explanation I am in this paper focusing on Simondon’s account of the individuation

of a brick, one of his more concrete objects of investigation. This account opens Part I of his

1958 thesis, published as The Individual and its Physico-Biological Genesis (1964). I will then

introduce a few concepts from Part II, published as Psychic and Collective Individuation (1989),

in which Simondon analyses the individuation of the living.2

In theorising individuation, Simondon wished to challenge our abiding tendency to think in

terms of discrete, fully-constituted, separate entities or individuals, be they bricks or humans, as

though they are simply given. For instance, where the brick is concerned, we might describe its

production hylomorphically, in terms of some matter (clay) being given some geometric form (a

cubic rectangle) via a mould. But matter and form, clay and rectangular mould, are all discrete

individuals, so we still would not have explained the dynamic process whereby these individual

2 The majority of Simondon’s work has not yet been translated into English; hence I rely on unpublished

translations for my quotations in this article. I would like to acknowledge the generosity of Taylor Adkins in

providing these.

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units came together to generate something new. To really understand how a brick takes form,

says Simondon, “one would need to penetrate inside the mould itself to follow the operation of

the capture of form to the various levels of the dimensions of physical reality” (Simondon

2007a, 8).

And this is what Simondon does for us: he takes us ‘inside the mould’ to follow the ‘operation

of the capture of form’. During this operation, he explains, clay is pressed into a mould by the

energy of a worker, the malleable clay becoming a vehicle for that energy. Meanwhile the mould

opposes the energy carried in the clay with its own weaker force, limiting where the clay can go.

Individuation occurs when the energetic potentials of disparate elements (clay, mould) are

brought together and actualised in this way. They create a metastable state of tension that, for

the duration of the operation, is unified as a single system, a reciprocity of forces. “So that there

is a single system of forces”, says Simondon, “it is necessary that matter and form both play a

dynamic role; but this dynamic equality is only true in that moment” (Simondon 2007a, 5). The

individual brick that results is the unpredictable product, the once-only actualisation of this

dynamic energy system, mediating between the clay and the mould and the worker.

But that’s not all. For this highly charged and instantaneous clay+mould+energy system to

become possible, whole series of prior energy transfers and physical transformations were

needed:

To give a form, it is necessary to construct such a defined mould, prepared in

such a fashion, with such a species of material. There thus exists a first advance

which goes from the geometrical form to the concrete material mould […]. As

for clay, it is also subjected to a preparation; as a raw material, it is what the

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shovel raises to the surface at the edge of the marsh, with roots of rush, and

gravel grains. Dried, crushed, sifted, shaped, lengthily kneaded, it becomes this

homogeneous and consistent dough having a rather great plasticity to be able to

embrace the contours of the mould in which one presses it, and firm enough to

preserve this contour during the time necessary for that plasticity to disappear.

(Simondon 2007a, 2)

Once we start thinking in terms of these long chains of physical transformations and transfers of

potential forces, we start to understand how separate individuals like rectangles or moulds or marsh

clay or brick-making dough are in fact the ‘by-products’ of imperceptible processes of energetic

mediation; of individuation.

During such processes, great temporal distances are collapsed. The time of the worker and the time

of the marsh and the time of the thought of a rectangle attain a shared time, in which past and future

intermingle. The extraction of clay from the marsh contained a premonition of the brick-making

operation; the brick-making operation now activates some of the potentials in the marsh.

Individuation is this simultaneous discovery of both a problematic (great physical or temporal

incompatibilities) and a solution to that problematic (a common order, of forces and potentials,

where incompatibilities may be resolved).

Simondon wants us to see the ‘more-than-this’ that is individuation: the hidden aptitudes of clay and

mould; the potential they contain to connect, to communicate, to processually resonate with each

other. For Simondon, this communication is the real individuation, and “the form that we see is only

the vestige of the individuation that was formerly achieved in a metastable state” (Simondon 2007b,

4).

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Moreover, those forms, the products of individuation, are not only individuals. For, like each

transmutation of the marsh clay, they continue to carry forward within them potential forces that

may become joined to other forces to produce other individuations. The brick may join with cement

and bricklayer and other bricks to compose and sustain a tower; or it may come together with an

arm to break a window.

I will now go over the individuation of the living, which Simondon explains in Psychic and

Collective Individuation partly in terms of the operation of perception: the perception ‘by’ subjects

‘of’ forms or objects. Clearly, though Simondon doesn’t discuss it, this relates to the viewer and the

work of art. Considered as individuals, subject and object, or viewer and artwork, are as disparate,

heterogeneous and incompatible as clay and rectangle. Perception is the individuating operation that

brings these elements together. Perception, like the brick, results from a metastable state of tension

between heterogeneous elements. But in the case of the living, the tension or incompatibility exists

between a subject and the milieu it finds itself in. The operation of perception discovers, within that

state of tension, within the energetic potentials carried by a subject and a milieu, an internal

resonance, a compatibility between them. This compatibility manifests as the form of an individual

object now perceived by an individual subject. Simondon writes:

Perception is not the grasping of a form, but the solution of a conflict, the

discovery of a compatibility, the invention of a form. This form that constitutes

perception not only modifies the relation of object and subject, but also the

structure of the object and that of the subject. (Simondon 2007b, 3)

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The degree of intensity of the tension or metastable state underlying the perception influences the

kind of subject and object produced by the perception. Simondon gives the example of a child’s

aptitude for recognising parts of the body when encountering a specific animal for the very first

time:

[In this] situation strongly developed by fear, sympathy, or terror […it is] the

tension, the degree of metastability of the system formed by the child and animal

in a determined situation, which is structured in the perception of the corporeal

diagram of the animal. Here perception not only grasps the form of the object,

but its orientation as a whole, its polarity which makes it lie down or draw up on

its legs, makes it fight or flee, or makes it adopt a hostile or a trustful attitude

[…] (Simondon 2007b, 4)

So, what the child experiences is part of what the child then perceives: not just an animal shape but

its orientation, as well as the child’s relative orientation, in a dynamic relationship. The greater the

dynamic intensity between subject and milieu, the more ‘pregnant’ the resulting objective

perception. For in the act of perception, not only is the form of an object discovered; its orientation

or polarity is too. And simultaneously, in this moment of perception, the subject is also oriented.

The subject perceives, Simondon says, so as to be oriented, and each form or object perceived is in

fact an intermediary, enabling a coupling of the subject and the world. The act of perception is this

reorganisation of a structure or relationship, incorporating subject and object and world. Simondon

clarifies, “it is not the object that is perceived, but the world, polarized in a way such that the

situation has meaning” (Simondon 2007b, 9).

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So how might these ideas of Simondon’s help us when viewing the two artworks I showed earlier?

I’ll start with Lisa Benson. Like Simondon, Benson directs the viewer’s attention towards the whole

process of individuation, which is in excess of the individual units produced. The real work of art

Fade is not the drawings/photographs/images, but the whole operation of the capture of form: the

mediation between the photographic paper’s potential and the light’s force, occurring on a

dimension where paper and light, despite their heterogeneity, engage in a singular, reciprocal

communication. Benson reminds us that the forms we see (colour, tone, two-dimensional shapes)

are merely a vestige of that encounter, that meeting of forces; and that these forms are already

feeding into new individuations, new forms.

Like the prepared, malleable clay, the art you see now contains inexhausted potentials carried

over from past transformations; in the work’s seeming ‘aliveness’, its metastability, we sense the

level of indeterminacy whereby any visitor to the gallery could yet lay a hand on one of these

images and irrevocably alter its evolution. At the same time, the artwork’s potential is delimited

by its current form. Here, darker marks framing the edge of the paper index its earlier position in

a stack whose sides alone were susceptible to the light. There, cloudy forms record the presence

of mould on the aged paper (see Figure 4). These individuations cannot be undone. The

imperceptible swelling of future possibilities is a part of the work now; the forms perceived

today contain in some part the work’s future. At the level of force these temporal distances can

be bridged. Whenever you see the work it reveals the potential for forms to appear, and

disappear.

In a moment I will attend to the effect of all this on the viewer, but first I would like to return to

where I started, to my questions regarding Daniel Crooks and his world of disorienting

movements, spaces and times. What is this world Crooks has created? Perhaps it is a world of

individuation. I think that Crooks, like Benson, alerts us to the whole process of individuation,

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and not just its products. But with Benson we ‘see’ what we can’t see – the invisible dimension

of potential – when we look away from the work’s present form. Crooks, instead, performs a

sleight of hand that makes the invisible presently visible. If spatially and temporally disparate

elements attain a common dimension during individuation, Crooks literally pictures this for us.

Consider his technical procedure. To make these works, Crooks takes the digital frames of his

video-recording, ‘slices’ them up vertically, then rearranges these thin strips so that segments

from earlier and later frames now sit alongside each other in a single frame. Through this

rearrangement, disparate fragments of a figure’s successive movements through space and time

are given simultaneously so that, when animated, the figure appears to us to have multiple

polarities; to be moving in several directions all at once. Magicked away is the linear time of

individuals, individuals which are now here and now there but never in both places at once. In

its place is a diagram of the time of individuation.

Thus, in Pan No. 2, we see how a figure’s movement enacts, moment by moment, new syntheses

of its past and future potentials. What for Simondon occurs on the level of force is, thanks to

Crooks, suddenly perceptible at the level of not-so-individual bodies. Instead of individuals, we

see a rising and falling of tensions and resolutions, we see the capacity to individuate.

Finally, I would like to consider the individuation undergone by the viewer of these works of art.

Both Benson and Crooks draw our attention to something we don’t ordinarily see: the realm of

potential, the communication between heterogeneous forces that makes our perception of individual

forms and objects possible. They offer us a kind of perception-plus, a perception that ‘sees’ more

than this, that ‘sees’ the process of individuation. But if we need the perception of forms to be

oriented in the world, as Simondon suggests, what happens to our orientation when we ‘see’ more

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than this, when we see perception itself in its process of emergence or individuation? And what kind

of orientation, what kind of coupling between viewer and world, will result from this kind of

seeing?

Simondon writes: “Every time the tension of the system cannot be resolved in the structure or the

organisation of the polarity of the subject and the polarity of the object, a malaise remains”

(Simondon 2007b, 4). I think that both Benson and Crooks alight on this malaise, only in their

hands it becomes no longer a malaise but an opportunity. To couple with the worlds they offer, to

find an orientation, the viewer must, in a sense, start perceiving differently. The only perceptible

forms an encounter with this art can produce are dynamic forms, forms on their way to becoming

new forms. Thus every orientation is swiftly undone. That is, the only orientation the viewer can

find is one of perpetual disorientation. The relationship with the world encouraged, demanded, by

these works is one in which transformation and disorientation become the solution to the tension of

the system, indeed, they become the only workable mode of coupling with the world.

Such a solution is possible because we viewers already carry within us, at the level of potential,

a wealth of dynamic and disorientating forces – forces retained from our own past individuations

(most likely occurring outside of the gallery) and waiting to be called upon when new

incompatibilities arise between us and our world. What is individuated again and again during

this kind of perception is a new structure for the artwork, a new structure for the viewer, and a

new polarity for the world they share; a polarity which produces transformation and

disorientation as meaningful forms.

Meaningful because when we look at Crooks’s videos, we see the way we too are coming into

being continuously. In Crooks’s blooming, smearing, recomposing forms – as in the unstoppable

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emergence and decay of Benson’s drawings made with light and time – we see something of

what it really feels like to be alive, falling in and out of step, losing ourselves and reinventing

ourselves and losing ourselves again from moment to moment to moment.

Works Cited

Grosz, Elizabeth. 1998. Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought. Symploke 6, no. 1: 38-55.

Simondon, Gilbert. 1992. The Genesis of the Individual. In Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary

and Sanford Kwinter, trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter, 296-319. New York: Zone.

---. 2007a. The Individual and its Physico-Biological Genesis. Trans. Taylor Adkins.

Unpublished translation.

---. 2007b. Psychic and Collective Individuation. Trans. Taylor Adkins. Unpublished translation.

Images

High-resolution images have been provided separately due to their large file sizes.

Image Captions

Figure 1

Daniel Crooks, Pan No.2 (one step forwards, one frame backwards), 2007, video still sequence,

digital video, 4:43 minutes, 16:9, stereo sound, courtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Figure 2 – Figure 4

Lisa Benson, FADE, 2009, installation shot, antique black and white photographic paper and

gathered light from the artist’s studio in Hamilton, New Zealand (2003-2009) and the

Dancehouse Gallery, Melbourne (for the duration of Time Transcendence Performance),

courtesy the artist.

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