Chapter 4 Philosophers, a Material, and Desire as Form
4.1 Nebulous Landscapes – Nature[1]
I analyse physical forces in action during glassmaking, and I discuss psychological forces within the maker. I explore how the nature of both these fields can be harnessed by the artist in a collaboration that through romanticism can take works beyond cliché and into the new.
The seeding of Australian studio glass with a belief in the artist as an individual led the studio glass community to make originality an imperative. The other imperative for studio glass is the material at its centre: glass. It is reasonable to conclude that a productive methodology for studio glass practice is creative originality driven by forces intrinsic to glass and its processes. In glass we find nature, and in using visual form to explore its landscape, we might find religion. The landscape of glass moves beyond description or categorization. It introduces the poetic imagination to become the territory of emotional responses. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote of forces. [2] In the spirit of Romanticism, the forces to which Deleuze referred were the primordial forces of the world – the force of its rhythms that we sense within our bodies and in the chaos beyond.
As artists our domain is aesthetics, and there we struggle to create works that stimulate an emotional response through our medium. This returns us to those two questions driving this thesis: How might glass, as a material used by artists, facilitate an aesthetic engagement? and, What might the nature of this engagement be?
Cliché
On the side of the predictable or mundane Deleuze argued that clichés define our existence.[3] These standard units of exchange are as ubiquitous as they are useful, but they have a cost, because clichés become the warp and weft of our thought, weaving limited patterns for our existence. Yet we function using these pre-conceived cultural constructs. Because this is so, what we see is what we are taught to see. There is a banal helplessness in an existence built within the parameters these pre-packaged understandings. Clichés are insidious and become binding constructs constraining our understanding of the world. The major problem is that this way of being, which we accept as is, prevents us seeing what we truly can be.
The cost of our acceptance of cliché is pervasive mediocrity, brought on through a spiritual blindness. This blindness stifles and ends engagement. Infected by ubiquitous cliché, possibility stagnates, or contracts. However, this does not need to be the case. As Stephen Procter wrote, “… the relevance of any situation expands or contracts according to our thinking. What may at first appear to be a limitation, may be altered by replacing it with a new concept. Time changes nothing. It is only a change of thought, a change of spirit, a change of consciousness that can change anything”[4].
To achieve this change of consciousness through the artist’s quest to create affective experience, there is a need for the artist to provide an original perspective. How can this perspective be obtained and cliché defeated? We need means to move beyond what is known and understood and onto what is yet to be known. If the artist’s work is to evolve as a new direction, it requires the unexpected to happen.
While discussing his own methodology, artist Brenden Scott French spoke with enthusiasm of his experience of the unexpected – the thrill of creation – when he referred to, “the chance occurrence … where the brave act is to go where you have no idea of the where, or why of outcomes”.[5] As Scott French explains, “You try to work out a new scenario, a new structure in how to think and what to express”.[6] Truly, this might simply be a willingness to follow the chance occurrence. It is an accepted part of the studio glass practice to take advantage of the serendipitous. However, if the new, the unknown, is to be consistently realised, a facilitating methodology is required.
Collaborations – Material and Artistic Sensibility
Forms of collaboration – associating, conversing and working with others – can synthesise diverse experiences, thus creating the new. That is, elements that are in action and effecting influence on each other may arrive at a position they would not reach when acting independently. Specifically, there is one alliance that is very close to the hearts of creative glassmakers (as well as to the hearts of makers in other mediums) and that is the alliance we form with our material. It is a relationship bound to us through the processes we choose to use. Our relationship with our material and its technical processes returns us to the concept of forces. The question is now, how do these relationships introduce creative forces into the equation? This question becomes the core of our concern with materiality, and materiality brings into play the huge potential of the physical world.
Scott French spoke of being amused when others admire the fine detail in his kiln-formed work, for he sees this detail more as an outcome of his process – a consequence of the fast flowing and fluid way he uses molten glass. His fine detail is a result of the union between his gesture – which for him is fluid, immediate and intuitive – and the physicality of glass under heat. Scott French uses his haptic sensibility as an experienced artist to navigate the deliberately introduced chaos of his chosen technique. This chaos smashes cliché, delivering ambiguity and openness. Ambiguity and openness become the means of introducing a feedback loop between viewer and object as the work delivers meaning interpreted within the context of the viewing.
The artist’s action might be accidental, but significantly that action is intuitive and of the artist’s hand. A chaotic fall is prevented by the artist’s haptic sensibility now freed from set preconception by the action of the material processes. There could still be the need for containment. As an element of artistic practice there is a responsibility to know from where an accident comes, and to recognise its potential. Doubts about the direction taken can be overcome through the strong relationship the artist has with the material and the artist’s solid conviction in the processes used, which have been developed by the artist during his or her technical and aesthetic evolution. That is, the artist and the work are supported in the net of embodied aesthetics inherent in the artist’s practice. Non-representational marks resulting from the process provide the artist with suggestions of new possibilities, which emerge into the world as a rebirth. Now free of the perception that was, the new can grow from the seeds planted by the artist’s work.
In materiality lies both constraints to originality, and, through synthesis with artistic sensibility, the means to new understanding. There is constraint, because the material itself carries clichés. What has been made before pre-empts every action exerted upon the material. Yet materiality is of the world, and the forces of the world brought into action by chance, present the artist with infinite possibilities, as untamed and as they are plentiful. So the chosen material, as replete as it can be with its own history, also gives the artist and the viewer access to new perspectives by providing a means to re-create their perception of the world.
Sensuous Creatures
The artist’s relationship with their material and its technical processes is a creative collaboration, which reveals and harnesses forces – heat, light and time – that flow through the natural world. Such forces are made evident to the artist through his or her body, and in his or her collaboration with his or her chosen material. Artists may find themselves in a quandary, feeling protected within the clichés with which they have built their understanding, while at the same time desiring (yet fearing) the release of the forces of the world that move within them.
Deleuze suggests that beneath the organizing intellect man is an animal body subject to animal forces.[7] In the infinite space within our being, in that central essence of us, we are sensuous creatures. At this emotional depth we react with our senses. The forces referred to above are intuited as sensations, rather than conceptualisations, in that they are felt rather than thought. Our feelings are phenomenal reactions to our world, and as raw sensation they are the antithesis of the cliché. Raw sensations provide access to the real for both artist and viewer as both enter the materiality of the work. The result of this encounter is to feel and experience in a way more direct than when being shown, or given another’s illustration, or by accepting another’s narration. The experience does not pass through our intellect – rather it is felt. This is romanticism, the domain of the visceral. This is being – the direct experience of the world that is phenomenological, and this experience is brought into play by Deleuze’s zone of “indiscernibility, or objective indetermination”.[8] We access that zone through ambiguity and openness to meaning. Through felt experience, the artist leaves the tame world of platitudes to enter the wilder landscape of a contemporary Romanticism.
Capturing Forces
With sensation as guide, creativity operates within the affective domain where Deleuze writes that it is “not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but capturing forces”.[9] For a literal example, artist Jessica Loughlin, at the time I interviewed her for this project, was interested in the action of elemental forces on the landscape and was experimenting with the action of water and evaporation on glass powder placed on glass.[10] Loughlin is controlled in the discipline of her technique, yet she provides an example of making the intangible elemental forces that are the pulsing of the world tangible. Loughlin does not represent these elements through figuration, but rather attempts to create visual triggers that generate in the viewer the emotive response Loughlin herself originally felt within the landscape. The works that result from her abstraction illustrate the demarcation between a demonstration of spectacle and the felt experience of sensations. Here lies the difference between being told about or of being shown a feeling and actually experiencing feeling through contact with the work.
In the recognition and acknowledgement of elemental forces such as light, air, water, heat and time, we affirm our existence as creatures of this world. This is not to fear, but to accept our mortality and to rejoin those forces of the universe. It is our integration into the world, the union of the outside and inside of our existence. Stephen Procter wrote of that being “the flow of thought through limitless space, as far as our consciousness allows, becomes the space, the inner space” [11].
Using my collaboration with casting in glass as an example, I am led to know what was previously unknown to me. Casting is about the materiality of glass. My experience agrees with that of the artist Deb Jones who speaks about the casting process as being about “the fundamentals of glass … the physics of colour (depth equals colour saturation)”. She says it “is about access to the internal of a solid and it is light and transparency”[12].
The process of casting glass is about the flow of material when subjected to the action of fundamental forces. These forces facilitate my creativity. This thought is supported by the history of studio glass. Susanne Frantz wrote that, whatever other influences Czech artists Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova came under, “it was the physical properties of glass that directed their work more than any other force”[13].
It is the materiality of the processes we utilise that presents us with direct access to the physical forces of the world. These processes are evident in the frozen trace of the flow of a solid made liquid by flame and time. Our technique is thrown against glass and both are synthesised in a creative collaboration, and in so doing we are carried into the new. This is in part reflected in Jones’ statement: “in the cast, the material determines what it is going to be”.[14] Our art is in the event that is our engagement with material as we create the artwork, and it is the affect that this process generates within us which frees us from our clichéd opinion of what is.
Studio glass can be more than the reassuring comfort of the decorative piece. In the resistance of glass, in the demand of its processes and the flow of its possibility, we are given a window into the forces of heat and movement that shape our earth. As makers who cast glass, it is this access that privileges us with a view into the unknown and the opportunity to take our work to places we did not foresee. This is a context for contemporary art practice. It is a context where there are no pre-set rules; for as Jean-François Lyotard says, “those rules … are what the work of art itself is looking for”.[15]
[1] In this case I use the term nature to mean the intrinsic or essential character of a thing or person.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
[3] Ibid., 73.
[4] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 38.
[5] Brenden Scott French, personal interview, 20/10/09, 2.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, 19.
[8] Ibid.,110.
[9] Ibid., 48.
[10] Jessica Loughlin, personal interview, 19/10/09, 3-4, and 11/04/06, 2, 5).
[11] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 55.
[12] Deb Jones, personal interview, 19/10/09, 2.
[13] Susanne K. Frantz, ‘Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova: A 40-Year Collaboration in Glass.’ Craft Arts International no. 31, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1994, 54.
[14] Deb Jones, personal interview, 19/10/09, 2.
[15] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Appendix, 81. See also Mark Eliott, personal interview, 03/04/09, 10.
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4.1 Nebulous Landscapes – Nature[1]
I analyse physical forces in action during glassmaking, and I discuss psychological forces within the maker. I explore how the nature of both these fields can be harnessed by the artist in a collaboration that through romanticism can take works beyond cliché and into the new.
The seeding of Australian studio glass with a belief in the artist as an individual led the studio glass community to make originality an imperative. The other imperative for studio glass is the material at its centre: glass. It is reasonable to conclude that a productive methodology for studio glass practice is creative originality driven by forces intrinsic to glass and its processes. In glass we find nature, and in using visual form to explore its landscape, we might find religion. The landscape of glass moves beyond description or categorization. It introduces the poetic imagination to become the territory of emotional responses. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote of forces. [2] In the spirit of Romanticism, the forces to which Deleuze referred were the primordial forces of the world – the force of its rhythms that we sense within our bodies and in the chaos beyond.
As artists our domain is aesthetics, and there we struggle to create works that stimulate an emotional response through our medium. This returns us to those two questions driving this thesis: How might glass, as a material used by artists, facilitate an aesthetic engagement? and, What might the nature of this engagement be?
Cliché
On the side of the predictable or mundane Deleuze argued that clichés define our existence.[3] These standard units of exchange are as ubiquitous as they are useful, but they have a cost, because clichés become the warp and weft of our thought, weaving limited patterns for our existence. Yet we function using these pre-conceived cultural constructs. Because this is so, what we see is what we are taught to see. There is a banal helplessness in an existence built within the parameters these pre-packaged understandings. Clichés are insidious and become binding constructs constraining our understanding of the world. The major problem is that this way of being, which we accept as is, prevents us seeing what we truly can be.
The cost of our acceptance of cliché is pervasive mediocrity, brought on through a spiritual blindness. This blindness stifles and ends engagement. Infected by ubiquitous cliché, possibility stagnates, or contracts. However, this does not need to be the case. As Stephen Procter wrote, “… the relevance of any situation expands or contracts according to our thinking. What may at first appear to be a limitation, may be altered by replacing it with a new concept. Time changes nothing. It is only a change of thought, a change of spirit, a change of consciousness that can change anything”[4].
To achieve this change of consciousness through the artist’s quest to create affective experience, there is a need for the artist to provide an original perspective. How can this perspective be obtained and cliché defeated? We need means to move beyond what is known and understood and onto what is yet to be known. If the artist’s work is to evolve as a new direction, it requires the unexpected to happen.
While discussing his own methodology, artist Brenden Scott French spoke with enthusiasm of his experience of the unexpected – the thrill of creation – when he referred to, “the chance occurrence … where the brave act is to go where you have no idea of the where, or why of outcomes”.[5] As Scott French explains, “You try to work out a new scenario, a new structure in how to think and what to express”.[6] Truly, this might simply be a willingness to follow the chance occurrence. It is an accepted part of the studio glass practice to take advantage of the serendipitous. However, if the new, the unknown, is to be consistently realised, a facilitating methodology is required.
Collaborations – Material and Artistic Sensibility
Forms of collaboration – associating, conversing and working with others – can synthesise diverse experiences, thus creating the new. That is, elements that are in action and effecting influence on each other may arrive at a position they would not reach when acting independently. Specifically, there is one alliance that is very close to the hearts of creative glassmakers (as well as to the hearts of makers in other mediums) and that is the alliance we form with our material. It is a relationship bound to us through the processes we choose to use. Our relationship with our material and its technical processes returns us to the concept of forces. The question is now, how do these relationships introduce creative forces into the equation? This question becomes the core of our concern with materiality, and materiality brings into play the huge potential of the physical world.
Scott French spoke of being amused when others admire the fine detail in his kiln-formed work, for he sees this detail more as an outcome of his process – a consequence of the fast flowing and fluid way he uses molten glass. His fine detail is a result of the union between his gesture – which for him is fluid, immediate and intuitive – and the physicality of glass under heat. Scott French uses his haptic sensibility as an experienced artist to navigate the deliberately introduced chaos of his chosen technique. This chaos smashes cliché, delivering ambiguity and openness. Ambiguity and openness become the means of introducing a feedback loop between viewer and object as the work delivers meaning interpreted within the context of the viewing.
The artist’s action might be accidental, but significantly that action is intuitive and of the artist’s hand. A chaotic fall is prevented by the artist’s haptic sensibility now freed from set preconception by the action of the material processes. There could still be the need for containment. As an element of artistic practice there is a responsibility to know from where an accident comes, and to recognise its potential. Doubts about the direction taken can be overcome through the strong relationship the artist has with the material and the artist’s solid conviction in the processes used, which have been developed by the artist during his or her technical and aesthetic evolution. That is, the artist and the work are supported in the net of embodied aesthetics inherent in the artist’s practice. Non-representational marks resulting from the process provide the artist with suggestions of new possibilities, which emerge into the world as a rebirth. Now free of the perception that was, the new can grow from the seeds planted by the artist’s work.
In materiality lies both constraints to originality, and, through synthesis with artistic sensibility, the means to new understanding. There is constraint, because the material itself carries clichés. What has been made before pre-empts every action exerted upon the material. Yet materiality is of the world, and the forces of the world brought into action by chance, present the artist with infinite possibilities, as untamed and as they are plentiful. So the chosen material, as replete as it can be with its own history, also gives the artist and the viewer access to new perspectives by providing a means to re-create their perception of the world.
Sensuous Creatures
The artist’s relationship with their material and its technical processes is a creative collaboration, which reveals and harnesses forces – heat, light and time – that flow through the natural world. Such forces are made evident to the artist through his or her body, and in his or her collaboration with his or her chosen material. Artists may find themselves in a quandary, feeling protected within the clichés with which they have built their understanding, while at the same time desiring (yet fearing) the release of the forces of the world that move within them.
Deleuze suggests that beneath the organizing intellect man is an animal body subject to animal forces.[7] In the infinite space within our being, in that central essence of us, we are sensuous creatures. At this emotional depth we react with our senses. The forces referred to above are intuited as sensations, rather than conceptualisations, in that they are felt rather than thought. Our feelings are phenomenal reactions to our world, and as raw sensation they are the antithesis of the cliché. Raw sensations provide access to the real for both artist and viewer as both enter the materiality of the work. The result of this encounter is to feel and experience in a way more direct than when being shown, or given another’s illustration, or by accepting another’s narration. The experience does not pass through our intellect – rather it is felt. This is romanticism, the domain of the visceral. This is being – the direct experience of the world that is phenomenological, and this experience is brought into play by Deleuze’s zone of “indiscernibility, or objective indetermination”.[8] We access that zone through ambiguity and openness to meaning. Through felt experience, the artist leaves the tame world of platitudes to enter the wilder landscape of a contemporary Romanticism.
Capturing Forces
With sensation as guide, creativity operates within the affective domain where Deleuze writes that it is “not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but capturing forces”.[9] For a literal example, artist Jessica Loughlin, at the time I interviewed her for this project, was interested in the action of elemental forces on the landscape and was experimenting with the action of water and evaporation on glass powder placed on glass.[10] Loughlin is controlled in the discipline of her technique, yet she provides an example of making the intangible elemental forces that are the pulsing of the world tangible. Loughlin does not represent these elements through figuration, but rather attempts to create visual triggers that generate in the viewer the emotive response Loughlin herself originally felt within the landscape. The works that result from her abstraction illustrate the demarcation between a demonstration of spectacle and the felt experience of sensations. Here lies the difference between being told about or of being shown a feeling and actually experiencing feeling through contact with the work.
In the recognition and acknowledgement of elemental forces such as light, air, water, heat and time, we affirm our existence as creatures of this world. This is not to fear, but to accept our mortality and to rejoin those forces of the universe. It is our integration into the world, the union of the outside and inside of our existence. Stephen Procter wrote of that being “the flow of thought through limitless space, as far as our consciousness allows, becomes the space, the inner space” [11].
Using my collaboration with casting in glass as an example, I am led to know what was previously unknown to me. Casting is about the materiality of glass. My experience agrees with that of the artist Deb Jones who speaks about the casting process as being about “the fundamentals of glass … the physics of colour (depth equals colour saturation)”. She says it “is about access to the internal of a solid and it is light and transparency”[12].
The process of casting glass is about the flow of material when subjected to the action of fundamental forces. These forces facilitate my creativity. This thought is supported by the history of studio glass. Susanne Frantz wrote that, whatever other influences Czech artists Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova came under, “it was the physical properties of glass that directed their work more than any other force”[13].
It is the materiality of the processes we utilise that presents us with direct access to the physical forces of the world. These processes are evident in the frozen trace of the flow of a solid made liquid by flame and time. Our technique is thrown against glass and both are synthesised in a creative collaboration, and in so doing we are carried into the new. This is in part reflected in Jones’ statement: “in the cast, the material determines what it is going to be”.[14] Our art is in the event that is our engagement with material as we create the artwork, and it is the affect that this process generates within us which frees us from our clichéd opinion of what is.
Studio glass can be more than the reassuring comfort of the decorative piece. In the resistance of glass, in the demand of its processes and the flow of its possibility, we are given a window into the forces of heat and movement that shape our earth. As makers who cast glass, it is this access that privileges us with a view into the unknown and the opportunity to take our work to places we did not foresee. This is a context for contemporary art practice. It is a context where there are no pre-set rules; for as Jean-François Lyotard says, “those rules … are what the work of art itself is looking for”.[15]
[1] In this case I use the term nature to mean the intrinsic or essential character of a thing or person.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
[3] Ibid., 73.
[4] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 38.
[5] Brenden Scott French, personal interview, 20/10/09, 2.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, 19.
[8] Ibid.,110.
[9] Ibid., 48.
[10] Jessica Loughlin, personal interview, 19/10/09, 3-4, and 11/04/06, 2, 5).
[11] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 55.
[12] Deb Jones, personal interview, 19/10/09, 2.
[13] Susanne K. Frantz, ‘Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova: A 40-Year Collaboration in Glass.’ Craft Arts International no. 31, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1994, 54.
[14] Deb Jones, personal interview, 19/10/09, 2.
[15] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Appendix, 81. See also Mark Eliott, personal interview, 03/04/09, 10.
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