Matter in Action
Research Summary
Abstract
Seeking to express my sense of wonder at cosmological forces and the interaction of matter and energy, I ask, how can I represent this? My practice is centred around drawing and printmaking, using charcoal, graphite and ink. How do these media and I interact and influence each other? and how can this collaboration act on the viewer? These questions are addressed through an examination of the theory of Agential Realism proposed by Karen Barad. The theory is then related to the creative arts by interrogating the work of specific artists. The practices of Maurer and Cassils in particular, viewed through the lens of Barad’s agential realism, show how multilayered, composite works can operate over extended time, allowing the viewer to be drawn into the unfolding, dynamic, material interactions. The concepts of ‘performativity’ of matter and the indeterminacy of the human body provide a useful creative tool set. The result has been a dramatic change in direction in my Body of Work.
Background
I have always had a fascination with how things work, particularly how nature and natural materials work, both at the smallest scale and at the largest. My art is an expression of this curiosity, a way of exploring, experimenting and recording. Initially, the subject of my body of work was to be astrophysics and the largest scale forces of the universe, bringing my interests as an astronomer into my practice as a artist, in order to communicate my sense of wonder. However, I do not want to make illustrations of galaxies for an audience used to fabulous images from space telescopes. Rather, I need to find a way of expressing matter, force and energy in a way that engages the viewer but also leaves room for them to find their own interpretation.
My practice revolves around drawing and printmaking, but, more fundamentally, around experimentation, gesture and chance. I try to allow my materials to express its own agency, and this essay attempts to answer the question of what this agency is and where it lies within my materials. How do my material and I act on each other? How can my material act with my works? How can my material act upon the viewer?
My research considers the theoretical work of Latour, DeLanda, Barad, Bennett and others concerning ‘material agency’ in which they propose a theory of ‘new materialism’. This has been contextualised by considering the practice and specific works of a number of visual artists to inform how this theoretical framework can be applied practically to the creative arts. A series of physical experiments have been carried out to explore material agency within my own practice.
Barad’s Agential Realism
New materialism or ‘neo-materialism is based on the idea that matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form’ (DeLanda, 2012: para.20). Bennett, in her influential book Vibrant Matter (2010), suggests that we need, ‘a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body’ (Bennett, 2010:xiv). Barad, a physicist turned philosopher, has proposed a new view of material interactions which has gained increasing traction since described in her book Meeting The Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning (2007), as witnessed by the exponential growth in citations (Hollin et al., 2017:5). Barad uses quantum theory as a lever to develop a new philosophy of human and non-human interaction which she calls ‘agential realism’. I have some difficulty with her philosophy, as she presents her ideas as solidly underpinned by scientific theory, leaping from the subatomic scale to the socio-political. I agree with Hollin et al. in being sceptical ‘whether insights from quantum mechanics should be smoothly related to phenomena that occur at the macro-scales’ (Hollin et al, 2017: 6). However, her ideas act as a useful toolkit to think differently about material interactions.
Following the physicist Neils Bohr, Barad contests the belief ‘that the world is populated with individual things with their own independent sets of determinate properties’ (Barad, 2007:107). Latour defined an actant as ‘a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman’ (Bennett, 2010:viii). Barad proposes that all actants are indeterminate, unfixed and in constant flow. In quantum theory, particles are indeterminate because we cannot measure their position and momentum simultaneously; this is Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle. Barad follows Bohr in asserting that these values are not uncertain, just not determined; the ‘issue in not that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously….but rather that particles do not have determinate values of position and momentum simultaneously’, which she says, ‘is making a point about the nature of reality, not merely our knowledge of it’ (Barad, 2007:19). I do not propose to discuss quantum theory in any detail but this indeterminacy is key to Barad’s philosophy.
Barad refutes the view that interactions occur between actors and matter and instead proposes a new fundamental unit, not matter but the point of action between matter (or ‘matters’), which she terms ‘intra-action’. ‘This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. The universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming.’ (Barad, 2007:141). She terms matter’s propensity to intra-action its ‘performativity’, an inherent characteristic and distinct from ‘performance’, an event.
A further concept of quantum mechanics used by Barad is entanglement, the ‘real but mysterious connection between things that are far apart’ (Rovelli, 2019:28). Entangled pairs of particles react to each other’s spin no matter how distant each from the other. This (like indeterminacy) undermines the classical sense of space and time and requires a new quantum space/time in which ‘fixed space, and fixed time disappear and are replaced by quantum dynamic entities’ (Rovelli, 2019:31). One consequence of this new vision is the idea that to measure something is to alter it, as ‘there is no unambiguous way to differentiate between the “object” and the “agencies of observation”‘ (Barad, 2007:114); we cannot act on matter without initiating a reaction. Barad proposes that all matter, at every scale, is both indeterminate and entangled (which is a leap) and that, as a consequence, any apparatus, any arena of intra-action, includes the operating mechanism and the operator of the apparatus. She terms an observation, measurement or momentary operation of such an apparatus an ‘agential-cut’, a snapshot of the dynamic agency.
In creative terms, neither operator, artist nor media, can be passive and independent of the other. A work of art can be seen as an accumulation of agential-cuts. This active entanglement offers an opportunity to reconfigure material hierarchies such that the media acts upon the artist in the way the artist might traditionally have acted on the media. This change of focus onto the action, rather than the actors, deprivileges Man as the main protagonist and initiator. Refuting the notion that, ‘man is the centre around which the world turns… apart from the rest…. a distinct individual’ (Barad, 2007:134), Barad proposes, ‘a post-humanist performative approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism’ (ibid.). This is a useful starting point for considering how I can address my chosen subject of cosmological matter and forces through creative art.
Synthesis
An end product, a piece of ‘wall-hang’ art for consumption though a gallery, is much less important to me than the experience of making and working with materials. I have therefore embraced filming my process and the interactive relationship with my materials. I had thought in terms of the materials having agency in the way their nature cooperated or resisted my intent, recording the ‘hand-to-hand combat of energies’ (Massumi, 1992:14, cited in Bolt, 2007:3). Jones enabled me to see the bigger picture, how and why work operates through time (Jones, 2015), from performance to resulting artefact. The material of the work is co-agential in its making but its material presence exists and persists beyond the moment of making and it retains or even gains its power to involve the viewer long after the act of making, through its visceral record of that action. The power to act on the experiencer (Jones’ term) is most successfully enabled through a hybrid work which involves them in the action of the artist and the material in the making (as Takis would say, creating enough energy to share (Bouisset, 1990:115)) but also has the ability to speak of that making through a series of artefacts, video, photography, retained matter in sculpture or drawing. It becomes clear that time is also a material with agency in this hybrid work as it is played out in performance, the record of performance, the persistence of the work over time and the experiencer’s ability to interact with the work through time. Perhaps a better way of thinking about this is to say that artistic work has material agency because it operates on the experiencer over time, an ongoing, open-ended series of agential cuts.
Jones’ discussion of this performativity has helped me to understand why I have moved from making drawings and prints to filming the process and seeing the video, both sound and vision, as part of a hybrid work with the resulting drawing. My material media (graphite, paper etc.) is co-author, without which the process could not happen, but also they also have a persistent material presence through time and throughout the multimodal work, which my body does not have. As Bennett puts it, they have their own ‘thing-power’ (Bennett, 2004:348). In this way the material is more than an equal. I now understand why this performative element is becoming more and more important in my body of work.
The phrase ‘the performativity within the material’ has gained more and more traction with me through my research and practice. I have also been heavily influenced by the idea of my material acting upon me as much as I act upon my media, coming to consider my body as an additional medium. This has encouraged me to place myself within the work, either through the record of process, using my skin as a support or making body prints. These body prints, and in particular the hand prints, get to the heart of my concerns, expressing the body as matter but also how we understand matter through touch. They give the work scale and significance, visibly placing the human within the apparatus. The body prints convey the indeterminacy of which Barad speaks and express our complex connections to carbon, in particular as the building block of life and supernova debris, constantly being recycled. Most importantly, each print is an agential cut through which I come to matter.
Barad’s view is that, ‘Agency is a matter of intra-acting: it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has’ (Barad, 2007:214). Barad’s assertion that agency is the point of intra-action between matters, and that we measure or record this through an agential cut, points to the relationship between energy and matter. Takis underlines the importance of expressing this energy within our artistic work and I have addressed that by capturing movement within myself, my process and my materials.
Conclusion
My research project began as an inquiry into the large scale forces of the universe, and I proposed a contextual enquiry into process art and the gesture of the artist. The final research has departed completely from my original proposal, and yet seems to have circled around to the same issues although completely reframed. This reframing has been achieved by researching the theories of new materialism and particularly Barad’s agential realism.
This theoretical background has allowed me to distil how specific artists have been able to act upon their audience and carry this through to my own work. In particular, Takis has allowed me to formulate a ‘Takis Litmus Test’ against which to assess my work; if it has ‘enough vital energy…for the viewer to perceive it’ and, crucially, to ‘collect part of it’ (Bouisset, 1990:115). Maurer’s layering, cutting and folding of information has helped me to understand how Barad’s agential cuts and sedimenting of action apply to creative art, and Barad has helped me to understand how Maurer’s work operates on the viewer. Jones’ commentary on Cassils has been very helpful in reformulating my Body of Work as ‘both a performance document and a work of art’ (Jones, 2015:24). Drawing on these artists, I achieved a breakthrough in my practice when I started to place myself within it, expressing a human connection, our intimate relationship with matter around us, without making myself the subject. Suddenly, the work acquired more meaning and more energy.
My original ambition for my Body of Work was to consider matter and forces in the universe as a science/art project. Barad has helped me think about this such that the Body of Work and the Research have become intertwined such that, ultimately, they form a single project. I remain deeply sceptical about her application of quantum mechanics to the macro scale, agreeing with Hollins et al. that agential realism should not be ‘a tome to cling to but a tool to synthesis’ (Hollin et al. 2017: 24). I have, indeed, found it a very useful tool, giving me a completely new perspective on my creative art practice.
A copy of the full research report, including contextual analysis of specific works by Rauchenberg, Takis, Maurer and Cassils, and experimental research, is available on request to the author at steviecussons@icloud.com.
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