is this the piece of art for which all previous stages were mere apparatus?  A series of events culminating in an object?  I have decided not to make any more drawings from the sand blasted (particle-collided) block of paper other than this one. This work has coalesced toward this synchronised point with my reading whereby days after finishing this cycle I have learned of Deleuze’s and Artaud’s Body Without Organs, the non-organic body, which I take to mean a body without senses that respond to the material, the non-sensing body, the body itself,  not of and not experiencing the world, but in the world. The body into which one can fall, away from the surface, into the universe AOT the Body With Organs that exists on the surface and is the sensual body that responds to the material, and experiences the universe as an external on the other side of its boundary/skin. I suddenly think as i write – Is the universe an expression or a coalescence? cause and effect or attraction?

to illustrate, I have been making this work, thinking about, for no particular reason, producing an object that shows internal contours of myself (only myself through convenience (is it?) – I am the material with which I can most conveniently work). close behind this in time I am reading Deleuze and stuff about object equivalence. These things COALESCE in the object as after i finish the work i read stuff that seems to comment on it. We in/of the west have a linear thus 1-d causal paradigm. Big bang beginning causes linearity. But whilst (at the same time) we think in terms of cause-effect we also magically think about ‘what would have happened if…?’ or ‘everything happens for a reason’, or ‘if only this had happened then that would not have happened’ for eg in relation to catastrophe that all contradict linearity. Or we ironicise this and fantasise a catastrophic future (potential) in order to ensure it cannot happen. the symptom of this conflict is nausea/ alienation. to reconcile these forces i propose a different paradigm: Coalescence, whereby the primal force is not violent but attractive, not time-causal but gravitational in that as an event it attracts from all directions – past and future though these terms lose meaning outside of 2-d thinking. Big bang coalescence of emergence from centre in all directions simultaneously means linearity is an illusion (look at how language struggles with the non-linear and reaches for metaphor to save it!)

in this body of work i have been attempting to lose the initial cause. But there was still linearity even if circular or maze like. by losing the plot i have stumbled upon  coalescence as an alternative paradigm. we can never know the unknown we can only ‘palpate the unknown’ (Todd May on Deleuze), feel through the skin, especially as our main device is language. but where this phrase relates to doctors palpating the sick body, artists palpate nature because a side effect of consciousness is separation.  art practice coalesces with  individuation. art is the sick body palpating its environment. But that would mean that art is a manifestation of illness and maybe it is in a 1-d sense. but illness/cure/health are equivalent (Deleuze and Schizophrenia?)?

and this object is not a culmination, not even a manifestation, but a coalescence.

Cause and effect suggests a difference between cause and effect, and suggests that effect is somehow an improvement on, or evolution of cause whilst being secondary to it. The effect has evolved from the cause but the cause was the power behind the effect. But cause and effect coalesce and are equivalent. There are never only one cause and one effect though history and language suggests otherwise.  They come from all directions and go in all directions simultaneously. simple complexity/complex simplicity.

what is me-ness or cow-ness or dog-ness or dog-with-cow-ness?

what is the -ness of things?

what is Ness-ness?

manifestations of coalescence – do things happen because of what happened before, or because of what we are now?

is potential a coalescent from the linear future?

coalescing – everything

ness-ness is just produced and we can’t really explain it because language divides by its nature (see journal page Thoughts on Language)

ego and the individuation and consciousness – a manifestation of the ego… me-ness; western immaturity; (eastern maturity – east far more advanced, they have a clear science that describes nature of how you as an individual relates to everything)

western language only really probed such things fully since freud

coalescing is an elegant way to represent how things work – not how things are, but represents how things are – we step back, and with our egos we look out… we are separate – this is a symptom of western consciousness = separateness – atomised? eg) most of romanesque church sculpture was anonymous until a certain period….1250?… one sculptor wrote “Giselbertus made this” – representing immaturity…? (Giselbertus Hoc Fecit)

language tied up with this immaturity

the linear is oppressive, in fact is oppression. it is necessary to liberate ones self from the linear. coalescence is a useful tool in this – intuitive understanding… idea of the linearity, one must set out on a path to get further along it… things coalescing – ‘we can only be here because of what happened before’ – culminative, restrictive, deterministic, imprisoning… not happy, nausea, alienated – and yet we have all these other experiences (non-Hegelian non-marxist?) – lets look at our experience… what is this experience… we always have this ‘experience’ –> being-there

lets look at an anarchist grand unifying theory of existence?

the behaviour of matter is coalescent

an objects presence in a place, in a space, must involve displacement of an equivalent space. Similarly, my work can be seen to be about what material I have removed,  absented or redistributed as much as the material left present or intact or non-redistributed.

We also desire to map, that is, render our non/multi dimensionality as area: the worlds volume and mass as area. That is, multi/non-d as 2-d. In fact our inner volume as area.

Truth and reality do not matter and will continue to shift and change in relation to the thing-in-itself, dasein, haeccaety, paradigm etc. What matters is our interest in, desire and longing for an understanding. Because it demonstrates our outsideness. Our alienation. Our ness-ness.

the work, like the conscious being, is in the material (immanent), on the material (liminal) and outside the material as dust and displaced space (transcendent). Its about in-ness, on-ness and outside-ness. But what is -ness? what is the Ness-ness of ness? : )

‘all things can be easily figured in the form of statues inasmuch as it is possible to orderly explicate all their ways of being as certain hypostatic configurations’  Campagna quoting and translating Giordano Bruno p8

Huyghe is interested in effect. He makes art like one plays chess – “how can I justify this move? Can I justify this move?”. He treats (in the exact sense of that word) the space as his stage and engages in/with scientific discourse as though it is all an experiment in which he is setting up the apparatus and then lets go but really he knows what the conclusions will be: the Witnesses will experience a manufactured encounter with the dog with the pink leg and consume the experience, be made to feel special and changed, and then disseminate their narrative of the encounter. He then harvests their narrative, moves to the next environment and repeats, God-like, playing with automatons that bore him. Its Fried’s nightmare but its also ironically Modernist, employing alchemical technique as though alchemy was proto-science and not an occidental expression of the drive toward individuation. In ‘by-passing the making’ he is a an illustrator of the conceptual, whereas I try to by-pass the concept through behaving (making) in order to discover or look at the nature of desiring/needing to discover.

What does Language do? What is it good at/for?

It works with sensory data which it divides and fractures into discrete packages (I wonder if Language actually does this directly rather than our brains doing it and then turning the data into Language).

It categorises, classifies and defines.

Defining is the act of making distinct from something else (Derrida, La Saussure) – the act of separating, fragmenting, then relating – bringing back into relationship but within categories.

It has evolved, like everything does, as a mutation that favours survival.

In this case it serves to protect from Everything, Reality, or the Real by fragmenting it into words. It protects us, or the Psyche from the Real. The Real is overwhelming to the Ego. Therefore Language will/can not describe the Real, or Everything, only its components that can be apprehended by our senses.

So Language is not the correct tool for apprehending Everything, only its ingredients.

We are necessarily outside of Everything because of Language. Language does this in order to save us from annihilation when confronted with, or finding that we are a part of Everything and therefore we are Everything and not Something (Spinoza’s and Deleuze’s Univocal Immanence?).

On the other hand,  if according to Sufism, the Apparent is a bridge to the Real, and Language describes the Apparent, is Language also a bridge to the Real? Or a path to the bridge?

In fact If we take ‘the Apparent is a bridge to the Real’ to mean that while the Real can not be apprehended directly  but requires the Apparent as a mediator, a bridge (over what? the Void? The Abyss? That is, madness, or oblivion for the Ego?) then can we say the Apparent requires a bridge to the Real made of Language? or is Language a thicket of brambles blocking our path to the bridge? Am i in danger here of only addressing Latin/indo-european language? Are there languages, Arabic, Basque, that are able to make the sounds and shapes of the non-apparent/material?).

Language is, like us, on the outside (transcendent), yearning for the inside (immanent). Or rather, we are on the outside and language is of the outside as inside there is no language. And therefore no art.  The outside is, therefore, a great place to be for an artist. The stresses created by these dynamics form the landscape which poetry describes, and on which we place our sculpture.