This month our contributors talk about houses, silver vanity mirrors, cell phones and plots of land. In an issue devoted to the “not for sale,” it’s a surprising focus. But it seems that, even in the wake of the immaterialized art object, people still want something to have and to hold. So our writers decided to make objects their subjects. At least we needn’t worry about running out of material, because “the world of things never ends.”

Penny Leong Browne has case studies scattered throughout. The objects speak for themselves, quite literally. Click on the images and see what they have to say. In each case study, Leong Browne traces the particular transformation of an object. A vanity mirror purchased on Craigslist hosts a poetic reconsideration of anonymity; an abandoned toy in an antiques shop bears witness to the futility of attentive parenting. Regardless of any discounts, Leong’s analyses solidify that any purchase comes with priceless implications.

We hope that you’re looking at Leong Browne’s art project somewhere interesting, and preferably on your phone. More and more these days, art viewers are trading in aura for a little augmented reality, which is a decent exchange if you aren’t a fan of leaving the house. As Christopher Williams-Wynn notes, the phone in your pocket mediates experiences with art more than ever before, and increasingly defines the limits of exhibitions. In the past, exhibitions needed a space, something to ground them. Today they only need a receptive pair of eyes.

But increased mobility doesn’t always signal increased freedom, as images accrue value in relation to one another, and in relation to the contexts in which they are viewed. So pick your place wisely, and do this issue justice.

But if exhibition space in particular, and physical space more generally, continues becoming less and less important, what about those spaces that were already unimportant? The gutterspaces, the non-places? No one seems sure about their status now, but several decades ago they were being purchased by Gordon Matta-Clark.

Greg Blair dissects the precursors to Matta-Clark’s (in)famous cut pieces. Looking at prior works that could be considered metaphoric ‘cuts,’ he counters criticism that Matta’s cuts were explicitly destructive, overly masculine gestures.

Matta-Clark’s purchases and actions point to the intangible: experience. But where does experience lie on the continuum of the “not for sale”? Adam Barbu would suggest that, increasingly, it lies squarely in the commercial end. He looks to Alain de Botton’s recent curatorial interview at the Art Gallery of Ontario, “Art as Therapy,” and tries to determine what, precisely, is at stake.

Leong Browne purchased some of her objects second hand, the phones in Williams-Wynn’s article certainly don’t come for free, Matta-Clark bought the plots of land to enact the metaphoric cut and de Botton’s therapeutic experience requires the price of admission.

The resulting art might not be for sale, but make no mistake: it isn’t cheap.

Over the past decade, developments in information technology, understood as the combination of telecommunications and computing technology, have accompanied an increase in the ubiquity of devices for mobile computing. The most prevalent device, the smartphone, combines a range of functions: its users can make calls, send messages and access the Internet, all through a small touch screen. And the ascendency of the Internet itself as a means of networked communication has fuelled the popularity of these devices. A growing set of artistic projects and practices can be located at the nexus of these developments: the motility of viewers meets the mobility of images. This double action recalls Nikos Papastergiadis’s thesis that mobility, whether of individuals, cultures or ideas, constitutes a precondition for the production of art.Nikos Papastergiadis, “Cosmopolitanism Assemblages Art,” in The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, ed. Saloni Mathur (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2011), 149-173.[1] More recently still, David Joselit argues that contemporary art has been transformed by the rise of digital networks, such that artists (and architects) are constantly reconfiguring and disseminating material, both using and producing networks.David Joselit, After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).[2] As these artistic works can be readily viewed online, they invite reflection upon the status and location of the exhibition, understood as a place or site for the viewing of art. Viewing a work no longer seems tethered to any particular site as spectators can encounter works in a range of potential conditions and locations, stemming from the impact of digital, networked technology.

In a previous age of image circulation during the early twentieth century, Walter Benjamin discussed the mechanical reproducibility afforded by technologies such as film and photography, and its effect upon the art object. For Benjamin, the original work of art possesses an aura, a form of authenticity and value that accrues on account of its location within a specific spatiotemporal setting and its particular material qualities. Mechanical reproduction, he writes, threatens to destroy this auratic component of the work of art for two key reasons. Firstly, mechanical reproduction is “more independent of the original than manual reproduction,”Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 220.[3] because technologies such as photography are able to detect and convey aspects of the image not usually perceptible to the human eye. Secondly, mechanical reproduction “can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself.”Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 220.[4] These possibilities enable the work of art to be removed from its dependence upon tradition and ritual.

Positioned within its spatiotemporal context, the work of art was previously bound up with ritual and cult acts; its aura was “never entirely separated from its ritual function.”Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 224.[5] In contrast to this cult value, Benjamin advances the concept of exhibition value. Although vaguely defined, he associates the exhibition value of a work of art with its being on view, as opposed to being used in ritual. In this focus upon visibility exists an implied turn towards the conditions of display, while noting that mechanical reproducibility allows the work to appear in multiple exhibition contexts. Unhinged from specific spaces and particular uses, the exhibition value of the circulating image seems analogous to exchange value. That is, images accrue value in relation to one another, and in relation to the contexts in which they are viewed. Despite the potential for mass reproduction and a desire, on Benjamin’s part, for their appearance in multiple contexts, one circles back not towards a specific instance of spatiotemporal surroundings, but towards a specific type of spatiotemporal experience: that of the gallery or museum.

If the white walls of the gallery or the controlled conditions of the museum aim to structure the reception of art, and so exert influence over the exhibition value of a work of art, installation practices could be an attempt by artists to re-take control over the conditions of display. Indeed, Boris Groys describes the installation as a mode of art production and display through which the artist attempts to exert control over the conditions of reception. As he writes, the “artistic installation is a way to expand the domain of the sovereign rights of the artist from the individual art object to that of the exhibition space itself.”Boris Groys, “Politics of Installation,” e-flux 2 (2009), accessed June 8, 2014, and Boris Groys, “From Medium to Message: The Art Exhibition as Model of a New World Order,” Open 16 (2009): 56-65, accessed June 8, 2014.[6] The installation, in establishing its presence in a specific place and time, at least for the duration of its exhibition, marks a return to a kind of auratic experience. By permitting entry to a multitude of individuals into the space of the installation, it presents an “aura of the here and now,” an aura reflecting an age of “mass-cultural transitory communities.”Groys, “Politics of Installation.”[7] Despite this type of dynamic, active experience, and although an installation may be staged in different locales, it nonetheless exists as a self-contained space centred on the viewers’ experience of both the installation and themselves.Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate, 2005).[8] Its exhibition value, a quality of visibility associated with an aesthetic mode of perception, is retained in an expanded form. No longer limited to the objects on display, it extends to the individuals circulating within. Exhibition value becomes a process of seeing and being seen.

While such installation work is generally displayed within a gallery or museum, Miwon Kwon has shown that site-specific art, which is created in response to a particular environment, has become increasingly disconnected from the gallery or museum.Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).[9] Beginning with work form the 1960s, she discusses the phenomenological minimalism associated with artists such as Richard Serra and Robert Barry. Although Serra is perhaps best known for his monumental Corten steel sculptures, in the late 1960s he produced more intimate works. To create Splashing (1968) he threw molten lead against the base of a gallery wall. The site of installation therefore directly influenced the form of the work through physical interaction. Although less process-orientated, some of Barry’s installation work, comprising threads of wire and nylon, invites similar reflections on spatial relations. Produced specifically for their sites of exhibition, his delicate threads invite the viewer to examine the material itself and consider the spatial relationship between object, viewer and context. Despite their differences, both these practices appear indebted to the physical object and immediate site of experience.

Later, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, Kwon perceives a shift in site-specific artistic practices. Instead of exploring formal relationships between object and site, artists critiqued art institutions. She associates this intersection of physical and discursive space with, for example, the art of Hans Haacke and Michael Asher. Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970), for instance, established a ballot box to collect visitors’ votes on Nelson Rockefeller’s policies regarding the Vietnam War. At the time, Rockefeller was State Governor of New York and a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. Explicitly linking the art institution to politics, this kind of site-specific work undermines its supposed autonomy. In contrast to these strident statements, Asher re-configures museum space, removing walls and inserting partitions into the gallery. In so doing, he reveals the various display tactics that frame the art object and influence viewers’ perception. Thus, in broad terms, institutional critique examined the particular social, political and cultural structures influencing the reception of art acknowledging the ideology of the museum and gallery setting.

Beyond phenomenological responses to sites and the development of institutional critiques, Kwon notes a further shift towards site-specificity defined in a more intangible manner. This shift in emphasis, she notes, leads to a “discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange, or cultural debate.”Kwon, One Place, 26.[10] The site, therefore, is less about actual space and more about the particular disciplines, ideas or emotions that the artwork engages with or generates. The result of this interaction between real space and discursive concerns engenders “site as predominantly an intertextually coordinated, multiply located, discursive field of operation.”Kwon, One Place, 159.[11] This shift represents a move towards a nomadic kind of art, a dynamic approach in which movement transforms the concept of site. In her analysis, the very concept of site-specificity is contested, for the concept interweaves physical, discursive and dynamic elements.

As this brief account of installation and site-specific practice indicates, there are two counter movements: installation practices reinstate the centrality of physical site, while the history of site-specific work moves towards a concern with discursive frames. At this juncture between physical instance and discursive frame it seems appropriate to consider Internet-based practices together with the mobile screens of smartphones and other electronic devices. They would appear to press against the idea of the exhibition as limited to any particular spatial setting and all the associations that attend it. Work constructed and viewed on the Internet extends the sense of installation as a means for drawing together various elements, while dispensing with the aura proposed by Benjamin. There is, then, no single space or time in which to view the event. Engaging in this purported freedom of access and movement seems liberatory—a kind of engagement unfettered by the demands or impositions of the artist, the gallery and museum space. It signals a loss of control over the conditions of viewing, perhaps akin to the artist’s general inability to control the reception of the art object once it enters the art gallery or museum space. However, with the advent of digital and (especially) public screen culture,Nikos Papastergiadis et al., “Screen Cultures and Public Spaces,” Dissect Journal 1 (2013): 66-83.[12] the range of potential forces and experiences impacting the reception and meaning of an exhibition of work expands, and the limits of the exhibition further unravel.

The role of the frame as a parergon permitting the recognition of the work seems inescapable, even if viewing practices migrate towards mobile electronic devices. However, the terms of the frame itself have changed, for the viewing conditions surrounding this frame are not necessarily controlled or delimited. In fact, these viewing contexts are potentially infinite. If there are two recursive frames, that of the screen and that of the place of viewing, there seems a contrary movement—while the screen has shrunk to the size of a smartphone, the place of viewing has expanded to almost any site the viewer cares to visit (which still allows access to the content). As Adriana de Souza e Silva writes, “[m]obile technologies bring these multi-user and playful experiences to physical space, encouraging users to go out on the streets, and bringing new meanings to familiar spaces.”Adriana De Souza e Silva, “Art by Telephone: From Static to Mobile Interfaces,” in The Mobile Audience: Media Art and Mobile Technologies, ed. Martin Rieser (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi B.V., 2004), 78.[13] While these changes recall Kwon’s shift towards the nomadic and discursively structured site, they also indicate technological circumstances wherein information technology both constitutes and counters the exhibition—it becomes a portal to the work but disperses the viewing context across any number of sites.

This shift can be seen in practices deploying mobile forms of information technology. As mobile devices have become more readily available and affordable, artists have begun to explore the potentials of augmented reality (AR). As a form of practice, augmented reality supplements physical experience with visual (or other) information derived from digital technologies, delivered through mobile devices such as smartphones. In effect, AR combines both virtual and real experience. In this form of art, Amanda Starling Gould explains that “a digital installation e/merges into the physical experience of our bodies as we wander within its invisibly annotated milieu.”Amanda Starling Gould, “Invisible Visualities: Augmented Reality Art and the Contemporary Media Ecology,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20.1 (2014): 26.[14] Reliant upon mobile technology, AR art allows the viewer to circulate through physical space while receiving information created by the artist. Given the prime position of the viewer in such work, it would appear that the viewer adopts a greater degree of responsibility for and control over the specific experience of the work. Rather than acting solely as a spectator in the controlled conditions of the gallery or museum, the viewer becomes an active participant—even crucial—in the production of the work.

With relative freedom of movement, AR art expands upon the mobility of the spectator that informs exhibitions of both installation and video art. Whereas Liz Kotz argues that contemporary video work often reiterates the methods of mass entertainment,Liz Kotz, “Video Projection: The Space Between Screens,” in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, second ed., ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 131-145.[15] it also retains the potential for intervening in contexts beyond the museum or gallery, as in cases of public display.Scott McQuire and Natalia Radywyl, “From Object to Platform: Art, Digital Technology and Time,” Time & Society 19.1 (2010): 5-27.[16] AR art, however, shifts the display screen from the architecture of public space onto the body of the viewer, meaning that both the screen and the viewer are mobile. This shift is evident in the work of Dutch artist Sander Veenhof, whose practice combines physical movement with personal digital technologies. In his work (2012-ongoing), GPS tracking technology embedded in smartphones allows participants to locate each other within their physical vicinity. Upon ‘finding’ each other, their smartphone will display a physical gesture pattern that they must use in order to identify each other as participants. As Veenhof explains, the “visible gesture overcomes—in a very analogue way—the impreciseness of GPS technique [sic].”Sander Veenhof, “Locally global,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20.1 (2014): 11.[17] Cognisant of the limitations of digital technology, Veenhof’s work conjoins both physical and virtual interaction, and points to their imbrication within contemporary social experience.

This merger of virtual and physical environments, and the associated movement of participants, signals the possibility of further challenging established modes of exhibition value. With the viewer roaming over potentially loosely defined sites and subject to the contingent circumstances therein, AR art such as Veenhof’s marks a shift in exhibition value. Incorporating social and virtual experience while also distributing it spatially, the actual exhibition site is more difficult to define and delimit, sapping the kind of control Groys identifies as part of installation art. Indeed, the significant reliance upon technology, and its propensity for glitches and failure, further curtails the limits of artistic control. Whereas exhibition value fundamentally turns on the visibility of the generally discrete art object, and may encourage phenomenological responses (as in Minimalist art), AR work centres on a triadic relation between digital information, physical environment and bodily experience.

While contingencies within the environment cannot be controlled or predicted by the artist in advance, AR art nonetheless attempts to shape the contours of experience within a certain physical area. Other practices are less dependent upon a given exhibition site, because the exhibition site itself is seen as inherently a product of networked communication facilitated by the Internet. As the Internet forms an integral component of such works, whether for distribution or reception, they may be termed “Internet-aware.” Engaging with the networked world of image circulation, such work further transforms the concept of exhibition value. In a world of hypervisibility, of status updates and Twitter posts, a glut of images appears a given. Discussing the prevalence of digital forms of image editing and recombination, Jos de Mul posits that exhibition value has been transformed into “manipulation value,”Jos de Mul, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination,” in Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, ed. Marianne van den Boomen et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 95-106.[18] which refers to the capacity for a virtual object to be altered by users. However, for de Mul this shift is limited to online and digital experience. Given the reliance upon the Internet for all manner of services, communications and transactions, it appears that its logic of exchange is not limited to a purely virtual experience. It is not simply that images are circulated and altered online, but that they inform and structure the experience of both online and offline contexts.

In a similar vein, albeit more directly concerned with the cultural effects of networked capitalism, Hito Steyerl writes that the Internet gives rise to circulationism.Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” e-flux 49 (2013), accessed June 9, 2014.[19] Moving beyond the production of unique objects and accompanying notions of authenticity and originality, this form of (artistic) work centres on postproduction and distribution, a form of output stemming from the manipulation of extant content and reflecting its online existence. Although the potential for supposedly equal access and the sharing of content echo the remix culture of deejaying advocated by Nicolas Bourriaud,Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2005).[20] she extends her analysis by considering the risk that such forms of content creation will be co-opted by corporate interests and bent to the demands of “productivity, acceleration, and heroic exhaustion.”Steyerl, “Too Much World.”[21] In order to avoid this outcome, Steyerl proposes that “[i]f circulationism is to mean anything, it has to move into the world of offline distribution, of 3D dissemination of resources, of music, land, and inspiration.”Steyerl, “Too Much World.”[22] Circulationism thus renders possible a set of intersecting conditions: both the artistic work and the viewer are drawn into a web of circulation, a twinned movement between offline and online domains of experience. The work exists in neither individually, but in both spheres.

Recent practices, especially those associated with the erstwhile REFERENCE Art Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, explicitly engage this link between online and offline practices through their use of the Internet. From 2009 to 2012, REFERENCE presented a programme of exhibitions investigating contemporary forms of image circulation with a particular focus upon the Internet as a distribution platform. These exhibitions presented physical objects, but added attention to their existence as images circulating online. As co-founder and artist Conor Backman explains, although the physical space was a primary site of display, he “became increasingly interested in the problems of online viewership as we realized the majority of our traffic existed here.”Conor Backman cited in Robin Peckham, “Post Internet and Post Galleries. Conor Backman and The Reference Gallery,” Digimag no. 72 (March 2012), accessed 10 June, 2014.[23] Recognising this entwined relationship between online and offline domains, Artie Vierkant produced his Image Objects (2011-ongoing). Beginning with a digital file, Vierkant renders these images as UV prints on dibond, adding a sculptural quality to the physical work. After photographically documenting the installed works, they are then altered to include digital watermarks and other effects, before being distributed online by the artist, viewers, the press and other institutions. Although Vierkant displays his works as physical objects within the white walled enclosures of the gallery, his images also proliferate online. The viewer is thus able to alter and re-circulate them through any number of networks and contexts. In its formal contingency, Vierkant’s work points towards the distributed form of exhibition value, even if it does not achieve lofty goal of social change sought by Steyerl.Joselit has also recently argued that the circulation of images must not obstruct or mystify the precarious and repressive conditions facing many individuals across the world. See David Joselit, “On Aggregators,” October 146 (2013): 3-18.[A]

Vierkant’s ongoing project demonstrates a concern with the existence of images and objects between online and offline domains, such that the actual site of exhibition cannot be definitively located. The physical exhibition venue can be visited, but the works on display will not necessarily match those seen online or in print. Yet even those works are liable to change as they circulate through networks of online exchange, where viewers are able to introduce their own alterations.Concerned as much with the image as with its distribution, Vierkant’s project might also be seen in relation to Dan Graham’s early work that took the format of magazines as its object of critique. On Graham’s work, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Moments of History in the Work of Dan Graham,” in Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 179-201.[B] Existing as images online, a given ‘exhibition’ of these works can effectively be anywhere, so long as there is an available Internet connection and computer screen. Not so much copies as versions or instances of an absent and invisible digital file,Boris Groys, “From Image to Image File–¬¬And Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization,” in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 83-91.[24] these works incorporate the logic of alteration and circulation that constitutes their conditions of visibility. These practices point towards an expanded concept of the exhibition itself. Indistinctly defined, the exhibition space as a context for viewing becomes widely dispersed in both physical and virtual terms.

Despite the potential for reconfiguring exhibition value, such practices remain ambivalently linked to contemporary forms of information capitalism. After all, these works crucially depend upon their circulation through the Internet, despite circulation being among their central concerns. By placing the issue of circulation at its centre, Vierkant’s project indulges in a form of outsourced promotion whereby viewers distribute images that refer back to the objects on display and for sale in the gallery space. Online circulation circles back to the realm of commercial exchange. This inability to abandon the physical object can be viewed, notes Claire Bishop, as symptomatic of an art market still in the thrall of the unique and physical object, as opposed to the multiple and digital object.Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide: On Contemporary Art and New Media,” Artforum 51.1 (2012): 434-441.[25] This focus links such work to sociologist Manuel Castells’s observation that contemporary capitalism is marked by its networks of circulating information, a “space of flows.”Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, second ed. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 230-231.[26] The growth of the capitalist network society crucially depends upon telecommunications technology to facilitate the rapid exchange of information.Castells, Rise of the Network Society, 96.[27] More than an economic phenomenon, information technology also effects cultural changes, as it is used to produce and mediate cultural objects and images. Thus, while Vierkant’s project recognises and renders explicit the liminal boundary between online and offline forms of exhibition value, in doing so it echoes the structures of contemporary network capitalism.

Both AR and Internet-aware art multiply the potential range of viewing contexts. The exhibition is, in other words, no longer limited to a museum or gallery site, nor a spatial area bounded by the artists, nor even a stationary screen. The mobility afforded by smartphones and similar devices allows art to be viewed in almost any context. This change represents a further transformation of the nomadic and discursive site-specificity identified by Kwon, as well as the attempts at aesthetic control advanced by Groys. Rather than the artist elucidating the discursive frame for the exhibition in advance, the viewer transplants the work into his or her own frame, which both physical and virtual environments. Exhibition space becomes potentially unbounded in terms of both discourse and site.

With a frayed concept of the exhibition space, Benjamin’s concept of exhibition value becomes similarly dispersed. With exhibitions distributed across real and virtual domains, exhibition value is less a matter of visibility alone and more one of experience, circulation and manipulation. The work is still, of course, to be seen, but the point remains that its conditions for viewing have been dispersed. Work will still be viewed in the traditional spaces, as the museum construction boom indicates,Martha Morris, “Museum Building Boom or Bust?” Museum Management and Curatorship 22.2 (2007): 101-108.[28] but the coherency of the very term exhibition, in the sense of a delimited site for viewing art, is at issue. How this dispersal will affect the conditions of art remains to be seen, for, as the twentieth century has shown, art retains a remarkable capacity to persist despite numerous challenges to its constitution and presentation. While wary of trends towards an experience economy and informational capitalism, this less strictly defined concept of the exhibition may lead to further reconsiderations of art and its relation to sites of display, whether online or offline.

REFERENCES

1. Nikos Papastergiadis, “Cosmopolitanism Assemblages Art,” in The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, ed. Saloni Mathur (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2011), 149-173.
2. David Joselit, After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
3. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 2007), 220.
4. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 220.
5. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 224.
6. Boris Groys, “Politics of Installation,” e-flux 2 (2009), accessed June 8, 2014, and Boris Groys, “From Medium to Message: The Art Exhibition as Model of a New World Order,” Open 16 (2009): 56-65, accessed June 8, 2014.
7. Groys, “Politics of Installation.”
8. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate, 2005).
9. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
10. Kwon, One Place, 26.
11. Kwon, One Place, 159.
12. Nikos Papastergiadis et al., “Screen Cultures and Public Spaces,” Dissect Journal 1 (2013): 66-83.
13. Adriana De Souza e Silva, “Art by Telephone: From Static to Mobile Interfaces,” in The Mobile Audience: Media Art and Mobile Technologies, ed. Martin Rieser (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi B.V., 2004), 78.
14. Amanda Starling Gould, “Invisible Visualities: Augmented Reality Art and the Contemporary Media Ecology,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20.1 (2014): 26.
15. Liz Kotz, “Video Projection: The Space Between Screens,” in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, second ed., ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 131-145.
16. Scott McQuire and Natalia Radywyl, “From Object to Platform: Art, Digital Technology and Time,” Time & Society 19.1 (2010): 5-27.
17. Sander Veenhof, “Locally global,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 20.1 (2014): 11.
18. Jos de Mul, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination,” in Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, ed. Marianne van den Boomen et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 95-106.
19. Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” e-flux 49 (2013), accessed June 9, 2014.
20. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2005).
21. Steyerl, “Too Much World.”
22. Steyerl, “Too Much World.”
23. Conor Backman cited in Robin Peckham, “Post Internet and Post Galleries. Conor Backman and The Reference Gallery,” Digimag no. 72 (March 2012), accessed 10 June, 2014.
24. Boris Groys, “From Image to Image File And Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization,” in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 83-91.
25. Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide: On Contemporary Art and New Media,” Artforum 51.1 (2012): 434-441.
26. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, second ed. (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 230-231.
27. Castells, Rise of the Network Society, 96.
28. Martha Morris, “Museum Building Boom or Bust?” Museum Management and Curatorship 22.2 (2007): 101-108.

NOTES

• Joselit has also recently argued that the circulation of images must not obstruct or mystify the precarious and repressive conditions facing many individuals across the world. See David Joselit, “On Aggregators,” October 146 (2013): 3-18.
• Concerned as much with the image as with its distribution, Vierkant’s project might also be seen in relation to Dan Graham’s early work that took the format of magazines as its object of critique. On Graham’s work, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Moments of History in the Work of Dan Graham,” in Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 179-201.

In displacement, we are given space to rethink our axioms. We learn what we have chosen (not) to believe, and can begin to interrupt previously unmarked or seemingly inevitable ideas surrounding our experiences.Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke UP, 2006), 56.[1] “Art as Therapy,” a curatorial intervention into the Art Gallery of Ontario’s permanent collection by Alain de Botton, provides the discursive space to theorize new forms of resistance around the intersections of aesthetic value and cultural capital.

Now in its fourth month of display, “Art as Therapy” has garnered vast amounts of press. Some might claim that a continuation of coverage effectively beats a dead horse—but it seems troublesome, if not altogether inconsistent, that much of the discourse surrounding the exhibition, whether in print, dialogue, or passing commentary, has focused on de Botton as the ‘lost pop philosopher,’ rather than critically addressing the basic methodological impetus of his approach. Perversely, “Art as Therapy” has given the art community a moment to self-congratulate—that ‘this’ is somehow not ‘us.’

Today we see a growing interest in practices that blur the lines of art, culture and commerce, which necessarily intersect at the crossroads of aesthetic value. The intersection is perhaps most visible among popularized forms of contemporary art that are grounded in both canonical art historical knowledge and celebrity artist culture. Enter the ‘McGuggenheim,’ the globe-trotting, flaneurial, Instagramming art stars Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach, and the Oedipal tragedy of Shia Labeouf and his symbolic mother Marina Abramović. It is a paradox built into the impossible promise of aesthetic value (however articulated, and for whatever political and economic ends) that the desire to keep creating continues, despite the actuality of attaining visibility in the public realm.

I have had many conversations with AGO visitors who found the collection more accessible, and their experiences more enjoyable overall. However, as other critics have outlined, these responses come at a costly price. They are correct in pointing out that art is a practice of means rather than ends—that “Art as Therapy” is overly didactic, making art ‘manageable’ when it shouldn’t be. $20 buys your chance to tap into the mysterious realm of aesthetic experience. These critics have also outlined the performative authority de Botton assigns to the text, which forms this plane of consistency among viewers. De Botton assumes that a consenting public facilitates a system of exchange that extends along a utopic view of ‘democratization’ itself. We can begin to see how this interpretive gesture, based upon the idea of an untapped ‘public,’ directly serves neoliberal rhetoric of the richness of cultural capital.Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 15.[2]

From a view of the statistical measurements that govern public art institutions—numbers of attendees, the wealth of patrons, etc.— we see the categorization of aesthetic value as a calculated effect of the administration of the product. The basic orientation and trajectory of the values attached to aesthetic experiences shifts in accordance with flows of capital—in short, of where and how this aesthetic becomes materialized, grounded and communicated—is an instrument of the State’s cultural message.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987).[3]

Here, we can begin to locate and interrupt our position as consumers of the ‘not for sale’ artwork with new criticality. In the symbolic space of the public art museum, the climatic moment of “being with” art operates as a kind of civilizing ritual,Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 23.[4] delivering histories to visitors as ceremonious abstractions of lineage, consensus and progress. In this context, aesthetic value is not limited to the current market value of the object, but the overarching social framework upon which the experience depends. In short, the transferable value of the object is no less constructed than the historical burden of the experience.George Dickie, “The New Institutional Theory of Art,” Proceedings of the 8th Wittgenstein Symposium, 10 (1983): 59.[5] Experience, then, is just as easily exploited along economic ends: the construction of the idea of the event—that something will happen—maps out an imagined space of exchange.

The exhibition subsequently erases the AGO as a site of social, cultural and economic tension. The fetishization of the historical depth of Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge, Fog (1902), for example, imbues it with a sentimental warmth. It does not ask for a single dollar, only your attention. This rhetoric renders “Art as Therapy” as a troubling theatre of morality. However, we must be consistent: even a ‘proper’ formalist method of analysis would fall into this general trap, as it pertains to a far wider problem of selling ideas—the academic and/or market thrust of ‘original research.’ For evidence, we would need to look no further than Clement Greenberg’s descriptions of some distant yet authentically American aesthetic value that (his brand of) mid-century abstraction works towards.Thierry de Deuve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 28.[6]

This overall system of exchange is enacted, as critic Dave Hickey writes (drawing on Deleuze), alongside the masochistic “contract” of our submission to the image.Dave Hickey, “After the Great Tsunami: On Beauty and the Therapeutic Institution,” in The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 65. [7] Importantly, so-called “therapeutic institutions” might use the rhetoric of beauty as a tool to draw viewers in, and instruct them on the narrative ‘ends’ regarding the virtuousness of art.Dave Hickey, “After the Great Tsunami,” 66.[8] In the case of the AGO, then, these assumptions cannot be easily relinquished since the illusory mutuality and consistency of this ‘public’ is a financial target. Visible or not, the manufactured desire for virtue—the value of aesthetic experience—is built into the price of admission.

In her particularly iconic essay of formalist criticism, “Against Interpretation” (1966), Susan Sontag critiques practices of interpretation that depend on certain codes or rules to read the ‘content’ of works of art. For Sontag, any attempt to read or understand content in works of art is bound by “the perennial, never consummated, project of interpretation.”Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001), 6.[9] She continues that, “By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.”Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 8.[10] Sontag’s text does not work to reinforce some absolute distinction between form and content, but introduces an approachable, critical framework that avoids the easy seduction of attributing unifying symbolic virtues to works of art. But what does “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself”Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 13.[11] mean if the work exists within the social and economic context of the museum?

Perhaps, in a contemporary art theory context, one would trace how conventional dichotomies of form/content, or “formalism”/other have become both unproductive and radically misunderstood. Still, it remains that the work of de Botton and Sontag extend along two very different bodies of thought. In this difference there are considerable stakes. I connect “Art as Therapy” to “Against Interpretation” not to trace them in seamless opposition, but to figure the tensions between them as a way of interrogating prevailing contradictions in attributing value to aesthetic experience. The comparison highlights the unwritten assumptions that underlie polemical art writing, which intersect at this very idea of aesthetic value.

For Sontag, no singular affective truth exists for any given work, as it would rely on an already failed interpretative gesture. It might at first seem that Sontag distances herself from stable meaning in works, in particular when she writes, “I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, ‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’”Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 5, 12.[12] However, she does hint towards a method of arriving at formal truth. It is the meaning a work appears to have, which would be ‘clear’ to the viewer. In other words, there is a meaning behind the interpreter’s interpretation, but he misses it in the method of his approach.

Conversely, de Botton suggests that the truth in any work is precisely that subjective interpretation brought onto it. The truth at stake here is that the work can offer something more: that you might see yourself in it. But this position does not live up to its offer. In the gallery space, what extends from the gesture is only a rigid, pseudo subjective interpretation that de Botton prescribes to the viewer. Viewers are stripped of agency, and are configured as something, fixed by some mode or principle of the activity itself. Still, ideological baggage aside, the critical distinction in de Botton’s method is that this ‘public’ exists first—that aesthetic value begins and ends with viewer. In a paradoxical turn, aesthetic value is sold back to us in a kind of contractual obligation. De Botton assigns value to art through this supposed lack, as if had ever been taken away.

Between Sontag and de Botton, we can trace a relatively clear distinction between aesthetic value as something that exists within the work versus something that viewers attribute to it. Sontag makes it clear that any method of interpretation that directly depends on the attribution of detached symbolic content would negate critical thinking about the object or experience at hand. De Botton, then, is entangled in what Sontag labels the “regime of interpretation.”

I find it particularly interesting that most critics of the exhibition seem preoccupied by de Botton’s supposed misinterpretation of the works, when the idea that aesthetic truth resides within the work was never at stake in his project. To trace a brief example: of course viewers know that Agnes Martin’s grids are not about “the stress of receiving too many emails.” For anyone to assume that the viewer cannot make this very distinction, and to suggest that de Botton takes advantage of this ignorance, is highly condescending.

Today, the name “Agnes Martin” itself carries in its very utterance a particularly heavy, perhaps burdensome, weight of scholarship that extends on clearly defined, rigid categories of minimalism, conceptualism and, to a varying degree, institutional critique. In this context, de Botton’s curatorial intervention could be seen to interrupt a learned, detached mode spectatorship, which depends on a clearly defined art historical context, and tap into some other interpretive order in which both historical and contemporary aesthetic forms are figured as always already intersecting. In short, the reading allows us to unveil the imagined distances between the knowable ‘self’ and the work as ‘other.’ The displacement felt throughout “Art as Therapy,” then, emerges from this rather ambiguous, yet distinct digression from how we believe aesthetic evaluations should be carried out.

Still, it would seem that any prefiguration of aesthetic truth (whether ‘attainable’ or not) necessarily stifles the work in question. In other words, if viewers approach a work with some supposed truth at stake within the experience, they have already rendered it a static thing. The ‘experience’ has stopped in the process of its own becoming; to briefly draw on Deleuze, viewers are operating on “striated” rather than “smooth” space.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “The Smooth and the Striated,” 474-501.[13]

In her 2013 documenta essay, Carolyn Chistov-Barkagiev outlines a thoughtful position that questions the divide between these systems of value. She writes that within a process of spectatorship works of art necessarily maintain a kind of “precarity,” from which a highly contextual, shifting, both ‘there’ and ‘not’ tangible meaning can be traced.Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “The Dance Was Very Frenetic,” In dOCUMENTA (13): The Book of Books, Catalog 1/3, (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 37. [14] She suggests that the dichotomies of a viewer’s experience centre, on the one hand, on abstaining from making a choice, and, on the other, on making a choice that will be wrong. Aptly, Christov-Barkagiev refigures the philosophical tradition of skepticism towards a particular context of art viewing where “the suspension of judgment is not a closure—it opens the space of the propositional.”Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “The Dance Was Very Frenetic,” 37.[15] And, although her concept specifically pertains to the geopolitical, shape-shifting character of documenta, this “precarity” stands at the ideological fault lines of both “Art as Therapy” and “Against Interpretation.”

Of course, the basic problem remains: how do (Canadian) curators and art administrators work to engage new audiences and simultaneously give the ‘product’ the critical attention and care it deserves? We stand at a crossroads between attempting to encourage a greater degree of self-reflexivity around spectatorship within museum spaces, and offering basic entry points into art for those who might be curious (but are not interested in reading Adorno or Derrida along the way).

This is not an impossible task. But balancing these disparate needs will never emerge from didactic aesthetic theory that proclaims certain truths of spectatorship guide the value of experience. We might ask: what does it mean to speak about an intermediate territory between the two—between ‘form’ and ‘interpretation’? Thus, returning back to Christov-Baragiev’s skepticism, what does it mean to cultivate the precariousness of aesthetic experience in the context of (grounded) public institutions?

In de Botton, and perhaps only to a degree in Sontag, the attempt to trace a particular way in which art should be read puts a tremendous burden on that work to perform according to some imagined higher principle. I make this distinction not to distance Sontag from her formalism, but to emphasize that, in her later works, she explicitly outlines the importance of approaching works, in particular photographs, with a certain criticality to the ways in which they are manipulated to project a kind of truth through form.Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).[16] Of course, Sontag would argue that ‘people’ (read: philistines) need to be guided, and that they cannot be left to their own interpretive devices because this risks devaluing the very practice of ‘advanced art.’ Whether working towards formalist or interpretive ends, this search for truth frames the quintessential red herring of ‘aesthetic value.’ It erases the tenuousness of what it means to be an active receptor of art historical knowledge, and, most critically, what it means to slip from this knowledge.

The search for a stable method presupposes aesthetic value as something that is surmountable. The attempt to stand deliberately anterior to this tendency, to attempt to look deeper, might require us to tell ourselves and others to stop looking entirely. The (imagined) binary of the interpretive and the formal allows us to consider the ways in which value judgments about aesthetic experiences manifest institutionally. To return to the earlier point, this initial pleasure in feeling unsettled extends from very the possibility of acting self-reflexively—in the context of both our viewing experiences and curatorial practice in general.

NOTES

1. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke UP, 2006), 56.
2. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 15.
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987).
4. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 23.
5. George Dickie, “The New Institutional Theory of Art,” Proceedings of the 8th Wittgenstein Symposium, 10 (1983): 59.
6. Thierry de Deuve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 28.
7. Dave Hickey, “After the Great Tsunami: On Beauty and the Therapeutic Institution,” in The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 65.
8. Dave Hickey, “After the Great Tsunami,” 66.
9. Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001), 6.
10. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 8.
11. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 13.
12. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 5, 12.
13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “The Smooth and the Striated,” 474-501.
14. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “The Dance Was Very Frenetic,” In dOCUMENTA (13): The Book of Books, Catalog 1/3, (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 37.
15. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “The Dance Was Very Frenetic,” 37.
16. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).

Precious Salvage (2009—ongoing)

The salvaging, reassembly and/or transformation of used, everyday items re-presents them as precious objects for social contemplation. By grouping the re-presented objects in serialized and categorical displays, the ready-mades are repositioned as artefacts for creative research. “Precious” may mean rare, valuable, unique, even fragile and ephemeral. Salvage is a noun but also an action word for reclaiming loss and recycling material value from capital to new social values of affect, identity and cultural practices. Following the lines of Félix Guattari’s idea of the ethico-aesthetic that proposes new collective subjectivities, the body sensorial and affect as ways towards difference, Precious Salvage approaches material things through a praxis-oriented aesthetics emerging out of social thought and action.

Precious Salvage materializes these socially creative acts, investing a new logic of the abject in which mass consumption and production give way to singular objects of individuated consumption. By disrupting the ontology of commodified goods, the various assemblage works are intended to redefine the abject through a process of renewal and regeneration into difference.

Precious Salvage: Silver Vanity Mirror

(object and text) (2014)

The silver vanity mirror was purchased through Craigslist from a man who inherited it from his recently deceased aunt named Juliet. The silver mirror is categorized under the indexical word, "Silverly.” The space on the mirror that is typically reserved for a personalized engraving of some kind, such as a person’s initials, has been left blank. I chose to work with this “blank” space, translating this absence into the idea of anonymity. This idea of an anonymous person symbolically parallels the absence of personal claim inherent in dispossessed objects. It also functions literally in the material sense of the object as in the blank space of the mirror. I was also juxtaposing the name of the aunt, Juliet, with a well-known name from the canon of Western literary works, specifically the story of Romeo and Juliet. The intent here is to stage the object in a paradoxical gesture of anonymity: how one can be known yet unknown—in this case, respectively, as an iconic and individuated “Juliet.”

Anonymous Juliet
seeking reflection
in the silverly light
waning

Precious Salvage: Silver Vanity Mirror
(object and text) (2014)

Precious Salvage: Toy Lamb

(polyester fibre from stuffed toy) (2009)

The stuffed toy lamb was acquired from a second-hand antiques shop that was filled with a miscellany of Victorian and English silverware, furniture and small objects of both a decorative and domestic nature. The toy lamb was in good condition, its polyester fleece coat worn yet fully intact. Its eyes, nose and mouth were constructed out of brown stitches. There were no hard materials in the soft toy. The body of the lamb was firmly constructed into a fixed sitting pose with its front legs splayed in front, and its hind legs folded underneath.

The toy lamb was meant for a child’s possession, a soft comforting thing functioning as Winnicott’s transitional object. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971).[1] Symbolizing a child’s psychological dependency on a parent for emotional security, the toy lamb takes on the role of a surrogate parent with the promise of everlasting comfort and security.

The inanimateness of the toy lamb, however, inserts a shocking paradox into the object, exposing itself as a surrogate parent providing solace to its human child. The toy lamb, all polyester stuffing and artificial fleece, with stitches for its doe-like expression, reaffirms this paradox. Its materiality becomes its undoing. Winnicott’s transitional object deconstructs into a heap of stuffing and fake fleece.

A child’s possession once valued for providing comfort, it becomes, through its inversion and destruction, a dispossession fraught with betrayal.

polyester stuffing
moating
inside out
fake fleece
pattern parts
of limbs
of torso and head

Precious Salvage: Toy Lamb
(polyester fibre from stuffed toy) (2009)

Precious Salvage: White Blouse

(cotton blouse reconstituted into paper) (2009)

A woman’s blouse made out of cotton is shredded into bits of cloth that are soaked in a mixture of water and disintegrating agent. After a rigourous churning in a large rotating mixer, the soaked bits of cloth are transformed into a pulpy liquid that resembles the colour of milk and the fine consistency of creamy rice porridge. The pulpy liquid is then poured one thin layer by one thin layer into a flat rectangular sieve that has a fine mesh weave. These sieves clinging with wet fibre are then laid out to dry. After the drying time, the layers are then carefully peeled from their sieves. The layers, sheets of white paper that grow thinner with each consecutive pour, are stacked according to the ascending order in which they are poured, the last pour being the top and final layer. Due to the lack of pulpy liquid to fill the entire sieve, the final sheet is only a partial sheet, thinning and furling from an unrealized corner.

The slightly translucent paper, each sheet threaded with its own fibrous pattern, is presented as a delicate stack. This stack represents a record of transformation of an object materiality: from object-blouse to object-paper. Through Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of everyday objects this object materiality can be viewed as a change in the “rationality of the object,” or what he calls the “objective technological structure” of the object in which the technical and construction/production aspects of the object are made apparent. Through reconstituting cotton cloth to pulpy liquid, the technological or material structure of the blouse as woven cotton fibre is revealed. This transformation enacts an abstracting process of the object in which the original object, both its technological and functional meaning becomes unstable.From Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 2006). Baudrillard, however, makes a clear distinction between what he calls the “technological sphere” of the object and its “psychological or sociological sphere of needs and practices.” The “technological structure” is what he calls the “objective technological structure” of an object in which the object itself is described as existing in its own right. It is the “technological plane” that is the abstraction, a “technological reality of objects” that he states we as consumers/users are unconscious of in ordinary life due to the fact that the technical aspects of the objects are “never directly experienced.” It is only by starting with objects described through technological language as in technical manuals that he says we can reach an understanding of what “happens to objects by virtue of their being produced and consumed, possessed and personalized.” See pp. 3—5.[1] What was once a blouse functioning as clothing is now paper as blank surfaces possessing the potential functionality for writing or drawing. While both object-blouse and object-paper are themselves part of what Baudrillard calls the “system of objects,” or objects existing within the realm of socio-cultural practices and discourse, the transformation of object materiality reveals that our everyday objects are not as stable as they seem, but are ultimately mutable, changing in both their technological and symbolic status.“System of objects” is defined in Baudrillard’s The System of Objects as “the study of the more or less consistent system of meanings that objects institute” that are not so much “defined by their functions or by the categories into which they might be sub-divided for analytic purposes, but instead with the processes of human behaviour and relationships that result therefrom.” For further reading, see Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 2006), 2.[2]

Precious Salvage: White Blouse
(cotton blouse reconstituted into paper) (2009)

Precious Salvage: Wooden Blocks as Linguistic Object (3 of 12 blocks): “submodalities”

(three wooden blocks, text on paper) (2014)

The three wooden blocks are from a set of twelve found in an early to middle years school in Vancouver, B.C. The school teaches an innovative pedagogy based on self-directed and collaborative learning within a community that fosters and promotes sustainable and ecological practices. The blocks were found with tiny sheets of white paper, each printed with one of the following words/phrases: universals, kinesthetic predicates, subjunctive “as if,” submodalities, positive intent, chunk up meta, break rapport, exclusive language, outcome frame, pacing leading. Nothing more is known about this particular find other than its discovery in a place of learning for young people. From this contextual information, this particular acquisition is re-presented here as a linguistic object that possesses a physical material existence as “wooden blocks and text on paper” in which the words and blocks work together in a pedagogical exercise of processual thinking and dialogue. The aim of combining the words into various arrangements of the blocks, by pattern or number, is to facilitate not so much pathways, but a “field of discursivity” Louise Phillipes and Marianne W. Jorgenson, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage Publications, 2002) 27.

In their book Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method, Louise Phillipes and Marianne Jorgenson describe Ernesto Laclau and Chantall Mouffe’s term, the “field of discursivity,” as a “reservoir for the ‘surplus of meaning’ that is, the meanings… [that] are excluded by the specific discourse[s] in order to create a unity of meaning.” This is opposed to discourse as fixed pathways of thinking and/or dialogue or what they describe as a “reduction of meaning.”[1] that could open up innovative modalities of thinking and dialogue. Referencing Felix Guattari’s call for a need of a “mental ecology” as a way out of our continual environmental degradation and social disparity, these wooden blocks and text (as enacted through these “pedagogical exercises”) may be thought of as material agents for the nurturing of this “mental ecology.”Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Continuum International, 2008) 4–5.

In his book, The Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari describes the ill effects of the mass media on our individual selves and suggests we can resist this dominant force through a “mental ecology.” He argues that the mass media produces a “collective mass media subjectivity” controlled by “Integrated World Capitalism” (IWC), which, despite being “delocalized and deterritorialized, is nevertheless achieving social control over the promotion of market capitalism, which he considers the source of the world’s environmental and social ills. Subsequently, he believes we are at risk of losing our individual thoughts and ideas—what he describes as our “human subjectivity, in all its uniqueness.” He argues that with a “mental ecology” we can “resist this mass-media homogenization… and instead invent new ways to achieve the resingularization of existence.”[2]

The wooden blocks and text are re-presented here in various configurations, from random piles to deliberate patterns. In contrast to the physical solidity of wood, the wooden blocks as “linguistic object” may be considered objects that possess a fluidity in which their meaning is constantly changing depending on their configurations. Through their temporary arrangements and reconfigurations, the wooden blocks as “linguistic objects” are objects becoming, possibly transversing even the realm of the ephemeral.

In Wooden Blocks as Linguistic Object (3 of 12 blocks): “submodalities,” three blocks are arranged in a random triangular pile. The printed text word, “submodalities” is selected to accompany this configuration. What follows is a “pedagogical exercise” based on this configuration.

Pedagogical Exercise:

Wooden Blocks as Linguistic Object (3 of 12 blocks): “submodalities”
Number of wooden blocks: 3
Pattern: random triangular pile

Submodalities can lead to productive thinking
Various solutions
Breaking down headings
Categories
The risk remains, however, that “sub” becomes “subject” to the modality.
To Type
There is a hierarchy
What happens when the hierarchy is destabilized
As in a random triangular pile?