Simon

O'Sullivan

Art Practice as Fictioning (or,

myth-science)

4 March 2015 23:20

 Art Practice as Fictioning (or, myth-science)

…theres some thing in us it dont have no name…it aint us but yet its
in us… (Russell Hoban, Riddly Walker)

1. Introduction: Art and the World (or, that which is in the world but not of
the world)

When art engages directly with the world as-it-is it already surrenders some
of its power. It needs must use more or less recognizable forms, languages,
narratives – even if these are idiosyncratic and/or marginal in nature.
Another way of saying this is that such art is both of and for the world in
which it is situated – or, which amounts to the same thing, it already has its
audience in place. Jean-Francois Lyotard says as much in his claim that art
can simply ‘multiply the fantasies of realism’ rather than, precisely,
disrupting them (which, in Lyotard’s view, is art’s true avant-garde
function).

In its engaged and oppositional form – institutional critique, for example –

such art is still precisely about the world. Indeed, the more engaged it is,
the more it must mirror, however critically (or negatively), its object. Such
critique, again as Lyotard once remarked, is trapped by its target, which it
must, to some extent, adjust itself in order to engage. This kind of critical
art practice can operate as a kind of melancholic echo chamber in this
sense.

The so-called ‘archival turn’ within contemporary art would be a softer

example of this logic. Here, art practice becomes an archiving gesture, a
framing and presenting of a subset of the world. An archive practice is first
and foremost curatorial in this sense; it gathers together hitherto separate
elements under a banner (a concept, a theme, a name, and so on), but,
crucially, it does not necessarily transform these elements. Indeed,
ultimately, it offers nothing more than a product (or a series of products)
designed to meet the desire for knowledge – when the latter is understood
as knowledge of the world as-it-is.

As has oft been pointed out, the ‘Art World’ is insatiable in this respect; it
requires evermore banners just as it creates ever more artist-archivist-
curators (or, simply, new products and new consumers). Novelty here
consists of new groupings of the what-already-is, the trumping of one set of
knowledges with another, the identification of counter or dissonant or
secret knowledges, and so forth. Indeed, knowledge becomes the currency

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of such practices (knowledge is power as the saying goes – at least power of

a worldly kind).

On the other hand, can art ever be anything but the presentation of a subset
of the world, seeing as it is a practice that takes place in that very world?
Here, the definition of a world – what it includes and what it excludes – is
crucial insofar as we might make the tentative claim that art can be
specifically other-worldly without meaning it is somehow outside the
world-as-is (indeed, how could it be?). In fact, an art practice that attempts
to operate completely divorced from the world – understood here as our
contemporary conditions – runs the risk of irrelevance, escapism or simply
being a sophisticated form of withdrawal.

Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that art’s ‘materials’ are not simply of
the world as constituted. As such, it follows that its audience – an audience
adequate and appropriate to it – is not always already in place. Art, in this
sense, can be understood as untimely, or as in time, but also out of time. It
is, as it were, future-orientated. Gilles Deleuze’s writings on art foreground
this strange temporality of art – that ‘its people are missing’.

But how might this untimeliness manifest itself? What form might it take?

One thing is clear: it will not be easy to understand. If it is a

communication, it will be one without meaning (to paraphrase Lyotard
once more), when meaning is understood as a register of knowledge – or, to
introduce another term, as part of the code of the world as-it-is. Hence the
important idea that something might be of the world but not of the
(dominant) code of that world. This might mean that such practices – that
communicate without meaning – are not taken seriously or simply frustrate,
bore, annoy or irritate. At an extreme they will be imperceptible, at least,
according to dominant regimes (and codes) of visuality (hence the
importance of learning to see, or, which amounts to the same thing, of
attending to our own particular production of subjectivity).

The importance of these kinds of practices is then that they offer something
different to the what-already-is. This might be simply a diversion – or, at
any rate, dismissed as one (not part of the dominant code (or, apparently, a
threat to it), hence, ultimately unimportant). But in other cases, and for
different subjects, they are points of inspiration and radical difference that
might then be developed and mobilized into a different way of being in the

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world. Here an art practice presents something more germinal than

parasitic. It can be the seed of something genuinely new. In an increasingly
homogenized and homogenizing neoliberal present that offers only more of
the same – a present that overcodes all options – these points of difference
can themselves become politically charged. Indeed, when the political
scene offers no new models, art steps up. Here, in fact, it might be less a
case of already worked out models than experimental probes, affective
scenes, proto subjectivities, and such like. Art can generate the feel of
something different in this sense.

But to construct a genuinely new form of coding one needs material, hence,
also in this task, the importance of the scrambling of already-existing code
or the importing of more alien code from elsewhere (outside of typical art-
world culture)…at least as a first step. This is a mixing that is both spatial
and temporal in nature (more on this below). Ultimately an art practice can
then take off from this hybridity and begin to work on its own terms,
producing its own (autonomous) coding. For example, it might throw up
images or forms that seem to come from a ‘somewhere else’, but that also
have some kind of strange relevance to the world as-it-is. Untimely images.
It might also begin to recycle and re-use its own motifs, nesting one set of
fictions within another, so as to produce a certain complexity – a density
even. The idea that a practice might involve moves in a game for which one
does not know the rules echoes this logic of strangeness and autopoietic
functioning.

2. Fictioning: Synchronic and Diachronic Operations (or, speaking back and

speaking in tongues)

One way of articulating this particular logic of art practice is as a

‘fictioning’: the production of untimely images – that speak back to their
producer (1); and the layering of motifs to produce an accretion of sorts,
resulting in an opacity (2).

(1) As far as the first of these goes, it might be that a practice just presents
the result: the final image (or images). Here the relative strangeness of the
image (its difference to the what-already-is) is foregrounded. On the other
hand, it might lay out the procedure and protocols that allow this image to
step forth from its dark background. Indeed, it might be that a practice
stages this event, or even that practice is a name for it. Performance can
involve what we might call this magical function: the summoning forth of

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something hitherto unknown and unseen. Collaboration, or more

specifically, collectivity – a scene of some kind – is also crucial for this
operation. How else can one make something that is of one but not of one
at the same time? That is intended but produces the unintended? For I is
indeed a stranger, but it is only through a specific practice that this stranger
can foreground itself from the habitual and familiar. It should be pointed
out here that collectivity (again, a scene) need not involve more than a
single individual. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari remark at the
beginning of A Thousand Plateaus, we are always already more than one.

Art speaks back in this sense. It is both cleverer and dumber than its
progenitors. This is not to evacuate the subject from the picture. Indeed,
such art – like all art – is made for subjects (images and objects made ‘for’
other images and objects may be many things, but art is not one of them –
although see my comments below). Nevertheless there is something about
this fictioning – this production of something non-subject – that is
specifically object-orientated, to use the current valence. It is as if the goal
here is to extract a certain objectness (something non-human) from an all-
too-human subject.

This is the synchronic aspect of fictioning.

(2) In terms of the second aspect, time itself becomes a material insofar as
the accretion happens through time…across a work, or across multiple
works. It might be that this passage is imperceptible, only able to be
tracked by the recurrence of the motifs – or avatars – that appear, disappear
then reappear (perhaps in a different form), each with their own operating
logics, their own speeds (and slownesses). An art practice has a certain
duration in this sense – or even multiple durations. A kind of aesthetic
ecology is produced which means the practice has more in common with a
series, or again, a scene, than with an object per se.

The elements of an art practice travel in this sense. Fragments of previous

codes make a re-entry, spliced with other more recent experiments. Such
work is a palimpsest even when it looks relatively simple. Another way of
articulating this logic is that a practice nests its own fictions within itself.
This kind of temporal density comes from the fact that any given moment –
any given image of the practice that we see – is an extraction from a process,
even a narrative (at least of a kind), that goes from the depths of the past of
the work, towards a future that the work itself helps to bring about.

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This is the diachronic aspect of fictioning.

Art is simple but complex in this sense. It inserts itself into a variety of
registers (signifying and asignifying), but it also refers to itself (it is, as it
were, inward looking). Or, more accurately, it works on itself…follows lines
of enquiry, repeats certain moments, accelerates some motifs…slows others
down… In so doing, art itself constitutes a world – its own world (as well as
the terms in which it may be ‘understood’). And this, ultimately, is its
power.

3. From Collapsing Worlds to Points of Collapse (or, a holding pattern of

minimum consistency)

In a way, both of the above modes of fictioning involve a layering. Again,

the first is spatial, the second temporal. It is this spatio-temporal density –
which results in the production of a different space-time – that constitutes
art when it is a practice rather than simply the production of a commodity.

The increasing availability and relative affordability of digital imaging and

editing technology means that there is now the possibility of a more
accelerated mixing of temporal and spatial worlds and, as such, of
increasing this density – and, with it, producing ever stranger spatialities
and temporalities. Such technology also allows its user to alter the speeds
of the different images and sequences being deployed. This might mean the
introduction of a different character (or a different speed) into a different
scene that has its own duration, or, indeed, the insertion of one scene into
another. In this strange dream-time a virtual ‘third thing’ is introduced
between the two. A no-place and a no-time. An ‘erewhon’ when and where
other things become possible. This is an indirect answer to the ever present
now of commodity culture insofar as it often involves recourse to a recent
past, to that which has been too easily and eagerly forgotten in the ever
increasing and insatiable desire for the new.

This collapsing of hitherto separate worlds – and the concomitant

production of a ‘new’ landscape, a new platform for dreaming – is another
definition of fictioning, especially when it is no longer clear where the
fiction itself ends and so-called reality begins (or where reality ends and the
fiction begins). Fictioning inserts itself into the real in this sense – into the
world as-it-is (indeed, it collapses the so-called real and the fictional), but,
in so doing, it necessarily changes our reality. This is fictioning as

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mythopoeisis: the imaginative transformation of the world through fiction.

This particular sense of fictioning dovetails with the idea of post-internet

art, or art that is made from and for the web of images that now doubles our
own world of things. As such it might be said that the collapsing worlds we
produce have their own life outside of our control, or, indeed, that of
anyone else’s. Ultimately, they do not rely on being seen to operate as
agents (after all, who, nowadays, can see all the images that are generated?).
They are already in contact and ‘communication’ with image-worlds that are
increasingly not of human generation. Once again the question here is
whether such worlds that operate divorced from any kind of subject can be
called art (who, afterall, is there to call them anything?). It is perhaps more
accurate to say that they become art when confronted by an interlocutor
(although this will not necessarily be a ‘human’ in the sense of a particular
historical diagram, with an inside and outside, a centered ‘self’, and so on.
More on this other subject below).

Is art the only place where we find this logic of collapsing worlds? Or,
indeed, the spatial and temporal layering laid out in the above section?
Certainly other aspects of culture utilize the latter, albeit only partially and
somewhat reductively. Fashion, for example (as spatial layering), or the
mini-series (as a form that involves longer durations than the typical film
or, indeed, the novel). In terms of collapsing worlds we need only look at
the post-continuity cuts of recent pop videos (but also note that a strange
continuity is maintained ‘behind’ the videos themselves in the ‘lives’ of the
celebrities as narrated on-line and on TV). This amounts to saying that the
world (or let us now give it its other name: capitalism) generates its own
experiments outside of art – experiments that in some senses doubles art’s
own probe-heads.

But in art, the processes outlined above are accentuated beyond the
reasonable. Art is like a joke pushed to an extreme in this sense. From a
certain perspective it is like an ongoing absurd repetition, a gesture beyond
the logics of the market. Indeed, art does not have to maintain even a
modicum of good/common sense in this respect – or, to say it again, is not
necessarily involved in the production of typical knowledge.

Crucially, with art, this often means that something unrecognizable – often
accidental – is introduced into the mix. Chances can be taken (afterall, there
is no audience to please, except for the very specific audience that is

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looking for something that does not please them). This is the introduction
of something random, something that is, as it were, unwelcome and spoils
any ready made and too neat schema or logic. It is the introduction – or
excavation – of rupture, a point of collapse.

It is in this sense the art practice, ultimately, is not the production of

subjectivity. It is not therapeutic, however that might be defined. A practice
certainly needs a sense of cohesion, but it also needs these points of
collapse – or else it risks just presenting more-of-the-same. I have written
about this – with David Burrows – at more length, and in relation to
Guattari (and Jacques Lacan), elsewhere.1 Suffice to say here that an art
practice might be a kind of holding pattern – maintaining a minimum
consistency – for these points of collapse. Indeed, this might, again, be a
definition of fictioning: the production of a myth that binds the holes and
presents and pitches them to an audience.

4. Conclusion: Reclaiming the Unconscious (or, a message not to you but to

something within you)

It is not news to say that Capital has colonized time as well as space, but
this needs also to be thought in terms of more imaginary registers, that is to
say, not just within reality per se with its typical spaces, places, times and
durations, but also in terms of our unconscious worlds. As has also been
remarked often enough, the failure of politics is also the failure of the
imagination. Capital, we might say, has increasingly co-opted even our
dream worlds – that repository of images that give us a life beyond the
plane of matter.

Indeed, this unconscious – understood in a Bergsonian sense (as a virtual

reservoir that subsists, but that is habitually masked by more utilitarian and
pragmatic interests) – is being colonized by commodity culture, and not
least by Web 2.0 and its logics. Facebook and Twitter and all the other
filtering super-nodes of a once wild – and un-enclosed – web offer up a
restricted repository of images – ever available, seemingly varied, but, in
fact, just more-of-the-same. The result of this is not only a poverty in the
sense of the homogenization performed by these image-banks, but also an
alienation: we become the spectators of our own subjection insofar as these
images are not of us, or, at least, are only of a part of us (that part which can
be represented by such images and their attendant algorithms).

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Another way of thinking about the fictioning function of art practice is then
as the reclaiming and unleashing of this unconscious. Art practice – in the
sense mapped out above – can produce new images and sequences – new
myths, new dream worlds. An important aspect of fictioning, in this sense,
is participation in the fiction. This does not necessarily mean that an
audience/spectator is invited into the work – often an artwork is precisely
inhospitable (it refuses to give ground), but it does mean that the produced
fiction offers something. It is from and for a collectivity – albeit one that is
masked by more typical (atomized and hyper-individualized) subjectivity.

It is also in this sense that this fictioning performs its own alienation:
alienation from and for an already alienated subject. Here fictioning’s
difference from the world as-it-is means it will alienate the subject-as-is, but,
at the same time, speak to the subject-yet-to-be. It is a message not to you
but to something within you.

It is also for this reason that difficulty, complexity, the refusal of meaning,
and so on are not always the signs of elitism or a deliberate
mystification/obscurification, but the sign of something that will not give
ground to the world-as-is, will not pander to the demand to make sense (at
least, following the dominant codes of meaning, and top-down decisions
about what should have meaning). It is also, in this sense, that art must
invent the criteria by which it is ‘understood’, when this does necessarily
involve the register of interpretation (to follow Lyotard one last time,
meaning might mean simply that we are ‘set in motion’ by the work). Every
practice, if it is a practice, is its own genre in this sense – and, as such, to
say it again, constitutes its own world. But that other place from where art is
pitched is also a world, one whose edges are now revealed by this doubling.
Indeed, an art practice maintains a critical function in this respect insofar as
it turns away from that other myth-system which it has revealed as such.
Myth-science is a good name for this world-building – and world-breaking
– technology.

1
See David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan,
‘Art Practice as Non-Schizoanalysis’, in
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

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Biographies

Simon O’Sullivan is Reader in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice in

the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London,
where he teaches on the MA Contemporary Art Theory. He has published
two monographs, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond
Representation (2005) and On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of
the Finite-Infinite Relation (2012), and is the editor, with Stephen Zepke, of
both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (2008) and Deleuze and
Contemporary Art (2010). He also makes art, with David Burrows, under the
name Plastique Fantastique (see www.plastiquefantastique.org).

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