Comment to Stephen on Form

I decided to post this comment as a post so I could include images (see Stephen's post on form).

There is so much here, Stephen - thank you! I just skimmed the article - looks interesting. Reading-with (thinking-with) the sentence above ""In a given culture of circulation, it is more important to track the proliferating copresence of varied textual/cultural forms in all their mobility and mutability than to attempt a delineation of their fragile autonomy and specificity" (391) I want to post a few thoughts. I think what Fred is wanting us to help us think is the relationality of all processes, even those that seem solitary. In my book Relationscapes, I write about an exquisite artist, Dorothy Napangardi (Australian Aboriginal) and her engagement with form through her art. Hers is both a solitary practice (as a visual artist) and a deeply relational one (for Australian Aboriginal Artists, art is part of the wider practice of the collective, of ritual, of what they call the Dreaming, or the Law). Some passages (happy to send the whole pdf to anyone who is interested).

What I am trying to get at below is the way art in its history has been allied to form, which has, by extension, allied form to representation. Form tends to connote structure. A question came up this week about form and structure, and it is this that I attempt to speak to below (focusing on fact and form). Form is itself a process. It is a "taking." To have form is an impossibility. We move through form and form moves through us.



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[From Relationscapes]

Dorothy Napangardi’s Salt on Mina Mina (2001) measures 244 x 168cm. Stately, Salt on Mina Mina (2001) moves with an intensity of quietude across a tall, vertical rectangle. The maze of dotted pathways at first evokes a grid. Lines of force make forays into conjunctive patterns only to deviate at the very moment of encounter. As with each of Napangardi’s evocations of the salt lines at Mina Mina, the dotted lines ultimately defy the grid, finding passageways more or less straight across the teeming array of activity, forming intensive zones on the canvas where a dance of meeting-points creates a background for the almost-meeting of the dotted lines in the foreground.  The backgrounded lines of the grid make way for the intensive zones of the foregrounded force-field that ultimately make the work resonate. These are zones of intensive magnitude where a movement-toward alters the composition of the work-as-grid.  Transductions from path to force, these zones of encounter are intensities in the making [insert image 60 – salt on mina mina 2001].

Salt on Mina Mina dances. It dances its trajectory, its story, it future-past passage into the present. Like all evocations of Dreamings (Jukurrpa), this painting refracts a sacred story.  Dorothy Napangardi's work around Mina Mina tells a story of digging sticks, of women dancing, and of a meeting place for spirit ancestors both human and animal.  It is the story of a rhythmic pounding of the earth with digging-sticks emerging from the ground like moving trees. It is the story of Ancestral women dancing the digging-sticks’ formation across the curved root systems of the yams and other ground vegetables. It is the story of dust rising in the wake of long flowing lines of earth dancing, of women moving through, weaving in, flying above. It is the story of a snake billowing up into the sky on a magic carpet of dust, almost unnoticed by the dancing women. It is the story told around a snake ancestor – Walyankarna – who rests today at Yaturlu Yaturlu (The Granites).

Napangardi is a custodian of the story of the Ancestral women with the digging sticks. Her telling of the story keeps it alive as it keeps her Dreaming: the Dreaming fashions her even as she recreates its eventful momentum in the future-past. Dreamings meander, alive with elements of futurity even as they continue to lay down the Law for generations to come. Like all stories, they are told again and again, taking form in their journey from one iteration to another, inviting the past into a present of its own making. This doesn’t make them any less factual: Dreamings constitute facts even as they express the force of change.

Salt on Mina Mina reverberates with the movement of digging sticks dancing. It is one iteration of a story she will tell many times in the years to come. In this painting, the pathways are multiple, their meeting points infinite. Up and down and across, the dotted lines transverse the cloth, populating the canvas with a thousand potential convergences. And yet, despite the majestic quietude of the work, it will not sit still long enough to allow us to determine exactly where the encounter takes place.

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“While I’m doing my paintings […] I have my country in mind” (Napangardi 2002: 11). To have something “in mind” is different from representing it. It is to work with the event of  coming-to-expression more than with a pre-composed image. William James' concept of the “terminus” is useful in understanding the relationship between expression and event. For James, the terminus is “what the concept ‘had in mind’” (1912: 61). The terminus in Napangardi's case is not the image of the Dreaming or its narrative per se, but the force of its becoming through which its current iteration begins to take form. The Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa – a title she gives a number of her works – is the terminus that gives momentum to Napangardi’s paintings. Its function is not of mimesis – her work is not a mimetic transferring of the Dreaming as stable narrative – but of propensity. The Dreaming of the sticks gives the force of form to her work. Napangardi works with Mina Mina “in mind” to create a moving image of the intensive passage from force to form. Each painting is a composition in itself and stands out on its own as an iteration of this “in-mindness.” It is not a representation of the place or a narrative of its history. It is an encounter with its resonance.  Whitehead talks about facts this way. Rather than situating “facts” as the truth-value of an iteration, Whitehead suggests that facts are those occasions of experience that are fully composed and yet stand for more than themselves. “[E]very proposition proposing a fact must, in its complete analysis, propose the general character of the universe required for that fact” (1929: 11). A fact is not self-sustaining – it is a relational co-occurrence that marks the in-practice of an event’s worlding.

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Salt on Mina Mina (2002) constitutes a fact in itself, even as it conserves deep resonances both to Salt on Mina Mina (2001) and to the original site and Dreaming which it had “in mind.” 

A Dreaming is a Whiteheadian fact. It is not a form with a single iteration – it morphs across iterations that exist in time and compose spacetimes of experience. For Whitehead, each fact is more than its forms. “[F]orm ‘participates’ throughout the world of facts” (1929: 20). A Dreaming is a relational network of stories, dances, dreams, images. It is the fact of their eventful reiterability. This morphing force of Law is both definite and indefinite. It has parameters even while it holds within itself the potential for infinite variation. It is a fact of present life with an intensive core that constitutes what it can do,  and a creative force for the future. 

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The Dreaming itself is a force taking form.  Painting the dreaming is a regathering of forces of country for the experience of perception. Force works across strata here, from the contagion of the Dreaming as extensive continuum for Aboriginal culture as a whole to the expression of a singular instance of the force of form in the future-present experience of a painting. For Nietzsche, all things are evocations of a history of forces which struggle for iteration. “The same object, the same phenomenon, changes sense depending on the force which appropriates it” (Deleuze 1983: 3). Force is appetition: hunger for expression. The appetition of an event is the insatiability of its potential. The shift from appetition to form is never a completed passage. In the work's final form, the force of its potential can still be felt. This is the work's diagram. The diagram of the work gathers the work's feeling. The final fact of the work Whitehead calls the “decision of emphasis,” which is the way the work satisfies its becoming. This satisfaction is the present-finality of its current iteration.

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Dreamings are both actual occasion and extensive continuum, the world as it happens and the world as it envelops its happening. Law and event, experience and force of apparition, Dreamings cycle time. Their determinacy is a matter of fact, their indetermination their appetition. Force for expression makes itself felt in the Dreaming’s infinite desire to take form once more. When an iteration of a particular Dreaming takes form – such as in Napangardi’s (2000c) Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa, the continuum of the Dreaming as nexus is altered. The new version of the Karntakurlangu becomes part of the fact of the Dreaming as both event and continuum.  Dreaming in its totality is thus virtually present in every new actual occasion of the Dreaming. In turn, every new iteration alters the intensive magnitude of the Dreaming’s extensive continuum.

This extensive-intensive relation is felt everywhere in Napangardi’s work. It is a tension alive in the lines she carves into the canvas through the digging-stick dots. In Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa (2000c), measuring 122 x 122cm, this tension is foregrounded. Another square painting (in its dimensions), Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa (2000c) evokes a complex surface of dots becoming-squares unbecoming-squares, the tone a rust colour with white on a black background [insert image 66 – Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa 2000c].  This painting that makes the force of the landscape’s curvature felt. Along the edges, the squares are quite uniform, but as they begin to merge toward the middle, the dotted lines seem to bend. The activity of the squares’ deformation is the event of the work. This intensive becoming-topological of the painting’s folding surface draws the gaze to the left-of-center of the canvas, where the squares seems to recede to make space for the painting’s eventual deformation. Here, the painting’s becoming-form pulsates. The dynamic encounter is not between background and foreground, but between curve and line, making felt a qualitative transmutation that morphs the painting from its squareness toward an intensive infinity of infolding. This diagrammatic infolding is less a shape than a feeling of force pushing into the painting’s insistent deformation. The collapse of Euclidean geometry is felt as the tension of topological undoing. Force fights form, exposing the inner relations of tension in the becoming-landscape’s curvature.