The Life of Forms: An Indirect Commentary via the Sea

In her intimate piece below, Jessica Webster explores the shifting moods of the sea alongside questions of formlessness.

I have always had some misgivings about the sea. These misgivings are more or less the same when someone speaks to me of the ocean. Or not less, only that there is a difference in how I have misgivings between the sea and the ocean. When someone speaks to me of the ocean I think of much wider expanses of sea seen from a plane or satellite photographs of the earth. Here the ocean gives contour to continents with flats expanses of cerulean blue between. Shadowy darker blue dots certain places; we are told that some of these places are seep that they have never been visited by man. Human beings have achieved higher altitudes than deeper depths.

From a high viewpoint or a satellite photograph these deep areas look like shadowy ink blots and the flat expanses which span continents can be measured between my fingers. From where I am the truth of the ocean is an utterly different thing. I have to imagine how far the flat expanses stretch and how deep the deepest canyons hollow. The responsibility for this imagining is as big and serious as the ocean, and this causes me some misgivings, because I am bound to leave something out. That I leave something out unnerves me, because there is a sense that that something may be what is most important. The sea, as it is a part of but different from my image of an ocean, gives me a similar ambiguous sense. I am missing something important. This thing causes me to have misgivings.

Corey Arnold, The North Sea, 2011

Others have found a satisfying form in the sea by documenting in precise detail all the empirical data to be had of the sea, and can therefore largely shrug off the weight of the sea in imagination. They document how far the sea stretches from bay to bay, how the sea is the ocean by dint of its precise location on a carefully detailed map, how deep its crevasses hollow, how high its mountainous ridges rise, how much water that is seawater weighs, why it is so salty, a measure of the strength of its tides, precisely what type of creature lives in salted areas, what type of person lives off what sea creature, what type of person has access to certain parts of the sea, what happens when certain people fish in dangerous areas. We have a lot of data on this issue of the sea, and it ranges all over, and it is imbricated in complex structures. The sea goes on regardless.

From the porch of my seaside cottage the view out to sea is high enough for the press of the ocean. If I place a colossal image of myself standing in front of where I sit on the porch, the shore stretches just to the point below my kneecaps. In the area of my kneecaps, rocks and swirls of white foam spoil each other. But from the roots of each kneecap stretches upward a large expanse of sea which folds over the top of my shoulders, cutting off my neck and head, which are lost in the clouds. The sea is the trunk. If I place an image of myself standing in front of where I sit, I am truncated by the sea such that the sea is my trunk. The trunk is, as we all know, the place where all the meaty stuff is set. It is set there in the trunk in such a way that it can remain largely inert and unaffected by the sweeping actions of the limbs. The meaty stuff, in their thanatotic rhythm, have their own life independent of a movie on a Sunday evening, or a call from your mother. To be sure, what you eat affects the machinations of the organs but these are affected by whatever you eat – they have value for the level of nutritional substance absorbed but otherwise your trunk has no time for meaning whatsoever. 

The sea is largely the same. There is an original dependence on the sea for the functioning of life. We plumb its depths for oil to make our rollercoasters faster and guns penetrate harder. We fish all sorts of fish so that someone with pertly held chopsticks and neat ankles can say ‘I luurve sushi!’ We ride its shoreline peaks with long and short, body, knee, and kite boards all carefully rubbed with beeswax. If you are carried along by a wave towards the shore you feel very comforted and loved by the brilliance of ‘your’ wave, as if you are in togetherness, a working in concert to achieve a given aim of riding, as if on a rollercoaster. Here nature is kind and supportive of your desire to be held, to be carried swiftly, lovingly. When you are being drowned by the sea in a tidal wave or undercurrent, you feel as if the sea has something terrible against you, nature has colluded in air and water to suck you down against your will. Nature is wild and unkind.

People say, ‘I love the sea’ and ‘I am happiest when I am near the ocean’ and other things that assert an attachment to these waters. They assert this humble attachment by pronouncing it to others. It affirms a value of connectedness to this most primordial form of nature, the origin of life. People feel humbled by this awareness and via this connection feel themselves to be humble. But even as we view the sea humbly and acknowledge with gravity the ocean beyond it, the sea lives on regardless. It pulls and pushes its mass, churns and whips along. The sea does not love or hate, it has neither love nor hatred in any of its parts, if indeed there is anything of the sea to partition.

In lieu of the contradiction the various gifts the sea can bestow, some people will say with a knowing face, ‘You need to respect the sea’. But the sea has no time for respect. The sea wants nothing of us. It carries on churning and whipping regardless. You cannot measure one’s regard for the sea between your fingers, or in statements that bounce off the surface of the water not even to echo back at you. We can only measure our regard for the sea with respect to the regard held by others (even if in this regard they are drowned); the sea has nothing to do with it.

This clean cut between you and the sea, between me and the sea, requires a degree of imagination in crossing over from where I am writing, a crossing that can take us to the sea. But this degree of imagination, where it takes the form of deciding on your love or hate for the sea, misses something essential when we take into account that the sea has no time for nominations of love or hate. Is there a form free from ‘love’ and ‘hate’? Kant would refer to it as the ability to judge ‘pure beauty’; psychology calls it the unconscious.
People come and watch the sea. People lay down blankets and towels, tents and umbrellas, and day after day we sit and watch the sea: at least, it is a European fashion to congregate at the sea in this way. But people, as a universal principle as much as they are in proximity to it, look out to sea.

I have a past, a collection of memories attached to my sea in one hand. In the other hand, I have a vast array of scientific data about the sea. Between these, there is only my trunk, which carries on churning and grinding regardless of what I hold in my hands. The trunk is what is left when I have sifted all my memories through my fingers, when I pinch large granules of data between my fingers and allow the finer grains of no concern to escape. Yet the trunk is a large area to call a remainder. It escapes my sifting and sieving, because it has no interest in the actions of my hands. It is absent from the entire process.

People stop at car accidents, and they watch the sea.

Jessica Webster is an artist and PhD Student with the Wits School of Arts 

There's too much going on

Comic by Francis Burger, drawn in response to the discussions around 'Is Confusion a Form?', with Jane Guyer, Moises Lino e Silva and Kabiru Salami and others.

The Form of Life in the Studio

Zach Blas seeks to draw out questions of materiality and sociality embedded in studio-space in his response to William Kentridge's "Life in the Studio".

During his 4th Drawing Lesson on “Life in the Studio,” William Kentridge stated that an idea is never enough--one must experiment, make, do. It is through experimentation, Kentridge continues, that one reaches unexpected meanings and new possibilities. But to experiment, the studio must first be a “safe space” for uncertainty. 

Image taken by Matthew Omelsky

Kentridge’s presentation brings forth a series of questions about when experimentation and uncertainty close down or reduce in the artistic process. If the studio is the location of experimentation for Kentridge, the presentation is not quite that. Kentridge works mostly from a site of certainty: he reads and consults a notebook, and there is a visual presentation timed to sync with his words (perhaps operated/advanced by an assistant?). In short, there is a precision at work that is at odds with “life in the studio.” Of course, there is room for a bit of uncertainty in the presentation--but not much. And no questions are taken at the end, which makes the event feel more like a performance than a talk, lecture, or lesson.

What is the studio for Kentridge? In theory, it’s a place of irrational action, where utopia can be found and one can walk in contemplation; the studio is receptive to what might be considered non-knowledge, like stupidity and silliness. The studio is also a materials repository, where paint and paper can be thrown and a multitude of photographic equipment is at one’s disposal. The studio is not a gallery or storage container for finished works but rather a repetitive testing area. In the end, it’s a rather idyllic place for creative research, discovery, and the production of the new.

In practice, (Kentridge’s) studio is more complicated. Of course, it must exist in a specific location, such as a gentrified / gentrifying area that brings along issues of race, class, and displacement. The studio must also be supported by various economic factors to exist as such: a wealthy art career permits the existence of staff and assistants, materials and production equipment, as well as the time needed in the studio to actualize its promise. While the artist studio can conceptually be a laboratory for creative experimentation, it does not exist outside of economic conditions that always bring forth questions of labor, exploitation, alienation, and reification. I won’t say the studio is a factory (although, with some contemporary artists it is exactly that), but the studio unavoidably incorporates aspects of the factory.

Importantly, I am not accusing Kentridge of anything. I am just taking his idea of the studio and pushing it further.

My question is this: if Kentridge himself said the idea is never enough in artistic life, is “life in the studio,” as presented by Kentridge, more idea than practice? That is, does “life in the studio,” as a model for artistic practice, put forth certain assumptions about artistic production, life, ability, desire, and politics as well as avoid other material conditions of existence? I have already mentioned the economic issues that often remain invisible yet are absolutely necessary for the studio to exist as such, which reminds us that not all artists can / will have studios. However, not all artists want Kentridge’s life in the studio; that model of artistic production--bound within a permanent and enclosed space--is abandoned for something else, such as a street, community, or public site.

Following Kentridge’s description of the artistic process, perhaps today it is crucial to experiment, that is, make uncertain and new, life in the studio. What would this be? To start, paints, papers, pre-cinematic devices, and other common art materials are done away with. What constitutes a material can be experimented with; maybe the presentation, the seminar room, and forms of the public itself become materials. Today, such experimental practices are most visible in art known as social practice, which dramatically shifts the idea of the studio. Examples include autonomous, artist-run schools like The Public School, Women on Waves’ abortion clinic on a ship, and Toro Lab’s community interventions in Tijuana.

In short, life in the studio, as formulated by Kentridge, is the pre-condition to artistic production. It is like Foucault’s episteme or Ranciere’s distribution of the sensible. The form of the studio sets the conditions for what is possible as artistic production.

Thus, life in the studio is a form that must be constantly fractured, re-invented, so as not to stagnate and disappear into the art world. The life in the studio requires many forms, and it is through the many that the artist becomes practical and experimental. 

Zach Blas is a PhD student in Literature, Information Science + Information Studies, Visual Studies at Duke University

Thinking Through Form: Meet the 2013 JWTC Participants

Zach Blas

Zach Blas, Mask-Wearer

Zach Blas is an artist-theorist whose work engages technology, queerness, politics, and experimental research. He is the creator of art group Queer Technologies, a founding member of The Public School Durham, and a PhD candidate in The Graduate Program in Literature, Information Science + Information Studies, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Zach has recently exhibited and lectured at  Beta-Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico; The Banff Centre, Banff, Canada; Center for 21st Century Studies, Milwaukee, WI; Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool, United Kingdom; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, CA; The HTMlles, Montreal, Canada; Medialab Prado, Madrid, Spain; MIX NYC, New York; transmediale, Berlin, Germany; and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, where he co-curated the 2011 group exhibition Speculative. Zach has published writings in Leper Creativity, No More Potlucks, Rhizome, Version, Women Studies Quarterly, and co-edited The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities. He holds a Master of Fine Art,  Design Media Arts, University of California Los Angeles. www.zachblas.info

When Art Meets Revolution

Nancy Henaku contemplates music's transnational resonances and revolutionary role in her discussion of performances by Neo Muyanga and El-Warsha.

The discussion with Neo and the El-warsha theatre company from Egypt was entertaining and yet intellectually provocative. For me, it seemed interesting that in our bid to discuss the significance of art  (in this case music) in revolutions, we ended up creating a form that was totally different from the forms of presentation that we have had so far at the workshop. The combination of speech, music, storytelling and a question and answer session made the session polyphonic in a way that linked up with the discussions we had been having on the multiplicity and dynamism of forms. What we probably did not realize was that in that session we ended up creating a form that exemplifies our discussions on “the life of forms”. 

I found the sitting arrangement particularly striking. With musicians and audience sitting in a circular formation, there was little or no distance between the two. Coming from Ghana, I was quickly reminded of the Akan storytelling tradition in which there exists an intimate and personalized distance between the performer(s) and audience. By using such an arrangement, we (the listeners) became involved in the performance itself even before we became aware of it. For me, my position in the discussion was dual. On the one hand, I was part of the process of production. On another hand, I was a processor and critic of the kind of knowledge produced in and through the discussion. Consequently, one could say that the arrangement tied in perfectly with the hybridity of the session— a combination of a discussion with a rehearsal.

El-warsha performing with Neo Muyanga

It seemed to me that the performances were defined by a strong link between expression and experience. For one thing, the texture of the musical performances brought to the fore the centrality of orality in African performing arts. This was in consonance with the oral cultural and literary background of the performers. Also, apart from the fact that the combination of elements from traditional hymns, urban church hymns and traditional South African music, the South African music played and performed during the event pointed to the idea that the elements within the songs are in themselves a means through which these performers or composers expressed the duality inherent within their own identities. Also, as explained in the discussion the unison seen in the South African toitoi music and the performance by the El-warsha company from Egypt is a crucial expression of affective states as well as different cultural modes.

Very central to our discussion was the role of art in protests and revolutions. The assertion that “at the very heart of every revolution is a vast history of storytelling” seemed very profound indeed. Music and the arts have been pivotal in all struggles for liberation across the world. In our discussion, our reference points were the Egyptian revolution and the Apartheid struggles, but I can think of the African American struggles and the roles that negro spirituals, blues, jazz and pop music have played in expressing that experience. Music indeed remains an important form of expression in the African struggle.

I came to appreciate in our discussion that both revolutions (the struggle for liberation) and storytelling (arts) need each other. On the one hand, revolutions have a way of giving life and significance to the arts and providing a whole history of human experiences which are then re-presented/re-created through music and other forms of artistic expression. It seems to me that without history (experience), there can be no arts. On the other hand, without storytelling, revolution is useless because storytelling is not just a means for calling people to action but it is also a repository or a re-enactment of the history created via revolution.

I left the session with the understanding that sorrow is not a negative force and that it is actually through sorrow that the fuel for revolution and change is created. 

Nancy Henaku is teaching assistant in the Department of English, University of Ghana

Thinking Through Form: Meet the 2013 JWTC Participants

RitaGT

Source: RitaGT, Revolutionary- Composition  4 (2008)

RitaGT nasceu no Porto, 1980

Vive e trabalha em Luanda, Angola.

Licenciada em Design de Comunicação (2004) pela Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade do Porto. Realizou o Programa Erasmus na Sofia’s Fine Arts Academy, Bulgária. Realizou o Curso avançado em Artes Visuais, Maumaus — Escola de Artes Visuais, Lisboa e frequentou o mestrado na Malmö Art Academy — Lund University em Malmö, Suécia. Das exposições individuais que realizou, destacam-se: A.I.R - African Industrial Revolution na UNAP em Luanda(2012); Looting (Pilhagem), intervenção de RitaGT no Museu do Traje (2010), Museu do Traje, Bienal de Viana do Castelo; One Night [life] Event, Evento de uma Noite [Vida] (2009), Empty Cube, Lisboa; Made in Europe, 10 Year Warranty (2009), Galeria Reflexus, Porto; e Tropicalismos Luso e outras Naturezas Mortas (2007), PêSSEGOpráSEMANA, Porto. Participa em diversas exposições colecticas, das quais de destacam: Mabaxa (2012), Galeria Soso - Arte Contemporanea Africana, Luanda;  A Filosofia do Dinheiro (2011), Museu da Cidade;  Amalia Nossa (2009/2010), CCB – Museu Berardo, Lisboa; Opções & Futuros: Colecção da Fundação PLMJ (2007), Arte Contempo, Lisboa; Anteciparte’07 (2007), Museu de História Natural, Lisboa; e Prémio Rothschild (2007), Lisboa. Esteve em residência artística no Casino Luxembourg (2005), no Luxemburgo, na ZDB (2007/08), e ao abrigo da bolsa INOV-Art, na residência artística Capacete, Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo.

RitaGT

www.ritagt.com

www.ritagt.net

www.estudiocandonga.com

www.facebook.com/rita.gt1

Grouping Theories

Natasha Vally

Drawing on Jane Guyer's lecture "Is Confusion A Form", Natasha Vally unpacks mathematical group theory as a way of engaging varieties of form and their relationality.

The mathematics department at Wits is somewhere called “the annex” on the third floor of central block “close to Sociology”. It was only in my third year of a mathematics degree that I actually found the department, by chance, and when it really wasn’t needed. The sense of confusion and of the need to find somewhere and something at a relevant time but it being stubbornly out of reach was how mathematics always felt to me.

This blog post won’t deal in any systematic way with today’s not-lecture on “Confusion as a Form”. Perhaps like the speakers, I think that to detail in a linear way the content of a lecture on confusion would be dishonest and ill in formed. There is however reference to and shameless phrase-borrowing from some of the themes, terms and forms that were presented in this morning’s session.

Jane Guyer invoked mathematics and a need to engage with the ways in which disciplines that we are less familiar with encounter confusion. I luxuriated in Guyer’s mention of Boolean groups knowing very well that the smugness of understanding something needed to get me through the many anomalies and unknown categories of confusing future lectures. Groups, though, there is a place I can fit in.

Group theory is the conductor in the orchestra of mathematics. It is strictly taught as a method for analysing abstract and physical systems.[i] You spend years solving for x - listening to the music through your headphones – and then you realise that there are organising principles which, baton-wielding, conduct and order the possibilities of x. The x you were solving for could not be any value that fit nicely, instead the possibilities of its existence were bounded. Neo Muyanga, a leitmotif of the Workshop, has an album – Dipalo – where the track names are mathematical equations. He reminds us of the order in the tunes we drift away to and the drifting away in the numbers we are attuned to. The reason many people tell you they like mathematics is that a clear answer is possible. It’s a lie. The axiomatic assumptions and background work allow for the illusion of an unambiguous answer and it is in group theory where some of the foundations which format what is and isn’t possible unfold.

There is something romantic about Mobius strips which several of the talks on confusion elegantly knotted into their analyses. Geometry is a more obviously tangible and visceral mathematics. The lack of beginnings and ends appeals to our attraction to the undoing of binaries. It also makes for the writing of good papers and art because we like punctuation and lists of words: beginnings/ends, rise/fall, day/night, (dis)order. But we should also keep an eye on the beginnings and ends, partly because they are created and movable and thus open to subversion. This too has been a theme of the workshop – what are the possibilities of using the discomfort of anomalous forms to politically intervene to shift meanings and action? These are social and material considerations. 

Source: cdninstructables.com

Avoid the temptation to shut down when you see the letters and symbols below which float outside of words and vocabularies that you may be familiar with. Group theory invokes what Filip de Boeck, in his paper read by Guyer, calls amalgamation, where the theory tries to knot equations into the meta-discourse of the group. There are four rules to qualify something as a group. They display many of the concepts and themes raised when discussing confusion and order. What the overview of group theory is intended to do is to foreground the disciplinary similarities in the categorisations which we use to express belonging and exclusion in numerous fields. It is not in any way mathematically rigorous.

If you can remember, take for example the equation

2 + x = 3

The task is to figure out what x is. Because we need to do the same to either side of the equation (to maintain the equivalence), we get

2 + x -2 = 3 -2

So, x = 1

But this was based on a presumption that we were letting x be a positive number. If x only belonged to the category of negative numbers then there would be no x to satisfy the equation: we couldn’t subtract anything from 2 to give us 3.

What needs to be taken away from this is that a decision is made (provided/accepted/imposed) as to what “things” x can and cannot be.

Now, to generalise this

Say you have a • x = b

Then in group theory you ask these questions: What objects are a and b? To what class of objects is x allowed to belong? What is the operation 

symbolized by the dot (•)?

The four “rules” that a mathematical sentence need to obey to be a group are:

1. CLOSURE: If a and b are in the group then a • b is also in the group.

If two elements are part of a form and you perform an action on these elements then the result is part of the form

2. ASSOCIATIVITY: If a, b and c are in the group then (a • b) • c = a • (b • c).

If you perform an action on elements constituting a form then as long as the sequence of elements remain the same, the order of their grouping does not affect their belonging to that form

3. IDENTITY: There is an element e of the group such that for any element a of the group
   a • e = e • a = a.

There is something in a form that when acting on an element gives you the result of that element itself

4. INVERSES: For any element a of the group there is an element a^-1 such that
• a • a^-1 = e
  and
• a^-1 • a = e

Oi.

The point should be apparent though. These are some of the sorts of questions we ask when we think through forms, their content, their thingness and thinghood, their political and material ramifications and the important question of what happens when they are not actually an acceptable group, what happens to the thing x then? Struggling with different groups of theories may allow for a new way of getting to know the lives of forms we’ve been introduced to so far.

---

[i] Group theory is an abstraction of symmetry, the notion that an object of study may look the same from different points of view. While it is relevant here, it may involve more mathematics than I can remember and more symbols than Word easily makes available.

Natasha Vally is a PhD student at WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand