Dissertation report

Introduction

I

Aesthetics, being a branch of philosophy, attend philosophy questions through theory and art practices differing especially in practical applications.

One may say art practise is always ahead theory. As if artworks reveille a starting point of ideas that later will be transformed in concepts.

In this work I’ll try to look at the world through the prim of art, in order to try to do what Nicolas Bourriaud calls a world art criticism, where artworks dialogue with the context where they were created.

Being this paper a first approach to my research, this work will be focused on analysing the thesis developed by Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.

According to him, the end of the world theory has its ‘prequel’ with the Anthropocene period, when, around 1960, started to be clear the notion that humans had a significant impact on earth’s ecosystems. Morton, member of the OOO (object-oriented-ontology) proposes a non-anthropocentric philosophy through hyperobjects theory. Starting from the point that hyperobejcts are objects with large scale that we can’t reach, and that changes drastically the aesthetic dimension of the world we live in.

The corpus of my work will be divided in three main parts: the first one is dedicated to understand what was the aesthetical dimension of world during modernity. The second is to understand the arrival of the end of the world theory in postmodernism. And the third is about understand what hyperobjects are and how they can contribute for the emergence of a new aesthetic approach. I’ll argue that this new approach is influenced by concepts developed today and through new art practises.

In 1998 the movement OOO (object-oriented-ontology) was created. Later in 2007, took place in Goldsmiths College in University of London a conference that originated the movement of contemporary philosophy Speculative Realism. Both movements are related to a negation of anthropocentric viewpoint, arguing that nonhumans (objects) should be considered as part of the world we live in. This new branch of philosophy is inviting many areas to re-define their concepts.

To focus on my argument, I intent to explore the difference between a Subject and a Thing, arguing that aesthetics from the XX century were all based on ideals, and therefor Subjects.

In this work I’ll try to argue the emergence of a new era of aesthetics, through the perspective of the hyperobjects theory. Then, through the concept of Hyperbjects and the analysis of some active groups working on contemporary art, I’ll try to understand this changing of perspective, based on, the refusal of anthropocentric view and the integration of objects and phenomenon’s in today’s thinking.

In terms of art practise, by using some examples, I want to understand how artworks respond to this change of focus/perspective that is being discussed.

II

In the first part I’ll try to proof that modern aesthetics were grounded on progressivism and evolutionism theories and that both were highly engaged on the anthropocentric point view that believed that planet earth resources were infinite. In the second, I’ll introduce the arrival of Anthropocene period in 1960, and argue that these universal theories lost their power. I will try to dug up when was the first appearance of end of the world theory. Starting from the assumption that the end of the world theory comes across with the end of ideology brought by post-modernism deconstruction.

Finally in the sixth part of the work, I’ll introduce which processes of art are related to the inclusiveness of nonhumans (objects). So to distinguish a Subject from a Thing, I’ll try to understand two ways of thinking: the idealist and the materialist. 

In the seventh part I’ll start with the study of hyperobjects theory in order to understand what they are and which concepts could be interesting to explore and address to art practise.

In the final chapter I’ll conclude some points of departure for my research.

The Consequences of Modernity

Modernity is one of the most influential periods in our century. Although it discourses are already part of the past, we have the feeling there’s still a lot to discover about it.

Anthony Giddens, in Consequences of Modernity proposes a re-evaluation of modernity. He argues that rather then being in a period of post-modernity, we are moving into high modernity, in which the consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalized and universalized then before. But to which consequences Giddens is referring to?

The last two centuries, XIX and XX, were periods in which more then ever, the history of humankind suffered structural changes.

Technique achieved a level of importance that changed our everyday life, our relationship to work, to violence and risk. Socially, the world in general, lived abyssal transformations since the beginning of the liberalism until more recently the independence of colonies. Social changes had their effect immediately, but the effects of technological and geological changes are yet to find out, now and in the future.

In modern aesthetics, technology advance phenomenon was also creating a narrative based on the assumption that the world was infinite in resources and richness of materials. The idea of inexhaustibility of reserves was influenced by this believe in humans and planet earth. This believe in progress was completely immersed in the consequences of the scientific revolution. As we can see in all the XX century art manifestos, there was a claim for the new, for the recent renovations. There was a believe in the future, a future that artists during all modernism were fighting for. This believes were strongly motivated by the idea of progress, caused by an evolutionist way of seeing history.

In the Futurist manifesto, there’s undoubtedly the believe that humans could control time and space. That XX century was the promontory of the centuries that was guarantying that humans were living in the absolute speed that created their omnipresence in earth.[1] Futurists were completely fascinated with the idea of going through the ultimate progress of human species. 

This fascination to achieve a new social order, free from the past, was the modern dream. In this sense, I’ll try to proof how art was engaging this believes that were centred on an anthropocentric view.

Post-modernism – The Consciousness of the End of the World

Post-modernism started to be discussed in 1970, when Jacques Lyotard wrote about post-modern condition. Responsible for creating bridges between political and aesthetic thinking, in La Condition Postmoderne, Lyotard distinguishes the oil crisis (1973) has a starting point to the consciousness of, what was later called, the end of the world. This crisis suddenly made all the Western countries conscious that the energies reserves were not infinite. Before this crisis, no one was really aware of it. The idea of future, for the first time in humankind was threatened.

According to Jacques Lyotard the impact of postmodern condition provoked scepticism about universalizing theories.

So the dominant narratives that had a central role in determining the focus of modern art were no longer taking in account in this period. With no believe in the future and therefor the impossibility to continue a sequential view of history, post-modernism saw a solution in the theory of deconstruction.

 In terms of practise, post-modernism brought an equivocal: the idea that deconstruction and fragmentation will make us close to what we might thought was the way to jump out of dominant narratives. These theories in art practise gain form in meta-language discourses. Those were always about trying to understand a new organization of thoughts, systems and societies.

Theory of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida separate and divide subjects by putting them into boxes, so is extremely inclusive to all type of discourses like: homophobic, racist, sexist phallocentric. But this inclusiveness runs the risk to exclude a big number of other discourses and at the same time closes the possibility of an interaction between them. Post-modern art brought integration but not dialogue. When meta-language started to be used, in a way, artists were trapped in a cobweb they started themselves. With the obsession to find an ideology (that reflected their era and gave sense to their fight) they started reflecting on their practise always trying to find a space to their ideas.

In terms of art practises, how this problem was being approach?

Nicolas Bourriaud presents a group of artists that, in order to answer to this problem, started to work with the idea of past. As if past substituted the future, being now an object of interrogation. He gives the example of the obsession with traceability of objects and destinations. This way, artists were digging the past in order to discuss our present, lead the uprising to the figure of the archaeologist in art.

He points out the work Hotel Palenque by Robert Smithson. This work is a serie of slides the artist documented, from the hotel where we was living in Mexico. In this work, Smithson appears as a pure archaeologist but with the idea of traceability of the present. Also Smithson, by explaining some failures of modern architecture is changing the focus of the past and making us understand a totally different way the present.

Under this perspective also can be seen the work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. The movie Over Our Cities the Grass will Grow, is a documentary by Sophie Fiennes about Kiefer’s work in an old brick fabric in Barjac, in France. Kiefer’s actually move to the fabric and settled his studio there. Through the ruins of the place, and everything that was left there like archives, documents, all kind of tools, he builds his artworks. He transformed a 35-hectare studio in what he called a gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art).

“Artists today are using historical fragments, elements from the past, documents, coming from the past in order to address issues, which are in the present. There was a swift; it’s not the future that leads the efforts of the artists to make us understand our present, it’s the past. As if the future is shrinking and the past is growing more and more." [BOURRIAUD, 2011]

This was the way artists found to answer to the fact that was no future anymore.

From subject to thing in the artistic practise

“Science is cognition: therefore is not ideology. Artistic cognition is different in its nature from scientific cognition, but in so far as literature, music and the visual arts are cognition of reality, they also do not belong to the sphere of ideology. Art as means of expression, have not an ideological origin and generally develops free from ideological influences.” [FISCHER 1969]

Louis Althusser, through a very banal image, distinguished the materialist from the idealist philosopher: the idealist thinker is a person that enters in the train knowing where it comes from and where it goes and a materialist, enters in the train without knowing where he is and where he is going.

This can be directly related to artistic processes. When we start with an idea willing to find results drawn beforehand in our heads, the experience itself, if taken, is driven to a result that avoids any interaction with other material, rather then the initial idea.   

These two ways of thinking can be found in all Art and Philosophy history, but somehow today, there’s field inviting us to experience the materialist process today.

Until recently philosophy has been focused only on human’s perspective of the world, being under the conviction that " we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other." [Quentin Meillassoux]

This critique of correlationism started being developed by the movement OOO. This movement, being focused on overcome anthropocentric thinking, started working about what we can call democracy of objects.[2]

This democracy of objects recalls the fact that objects should be included in philosophy thinking, such as humans. Also relations between objects and humans and phenomenon’s should be considered.

This way, this new field of philosophy is proposing a complex overlook to the world we live in. Where philosophies and approaches with a perspective with a centre viewpoint make no more sense, mainly because that type of approaches don’t let the viewpoint be touched or influenced by others, and also have a pre-determinate look that is constituted by an idea.

The materialistic approach is very close to what OOO is looking for. It includes materials and objects in the process of thinking and has no aim to achieve a certain result. Going back to the metaphor of the train, it’s the journey itself. In which the complexity of the situation and space (for the thinker) is crucial to build an argument.

There’s a curious heritage from Greek language in the word “material”.  It comes form the word “matter” that means stuff, wood, timber. That’s why our idea of material is something solid, resistance and difficult to interact with. And therefor our idea of objects and things is the same.

But Material means what constitutes the thing. If we separate all parts of one thing we can understand what is has in terms of substance and to what could it be related to. This process, realms on the material condition of a thing.

Yet, ontology since ancient philosophy only considers the being and existence of humans and how they interact with each other. It completely avoids objects, this way being anthropocentric. Since the human sees himself as a complete indivisible subject, it just interacts with things that are perceived as well as indivisible.

I’ll give the example of two exhibitions, one is based on a subjects, an idea, and the other on a things, the material, the artwork itself: In the art program Next Future that was presented in Fundação Calouste Gulbekian in Lisbon 2014 is very clear right in the curatorial text where the project is presented, that the whole exhibition was based on an idealist process regarding new interesting places for contemporary art practise.

There’s the premise to work about what could be the next future. Inevitability, this choice produces a structured discourse related with post colonial and cultural studies. The narrative behind the cycle Next Future implies the conviction that Africa, South America (ex Portuguese colonies) and Caribbean, are the place where contemporary aesthetics has a better change to be developed.

Relating to the train metaphor, once we visit the exhibition and we read the text on the first wall we know from the beginning what was the starting point of the program, what’s the aim of the project, how should we see the exhibition and what should we conclude.

We are invited thought the text to be passive visitors that are only receiving information and assimilating it. There’s a central idea, related with a certain king of democracy responsibility that is carried on to us from artwork to artwork in the range of the exhibition. This is an example of an art program based on a subject.

As an example of an art program based on a thing, I’ll look up to COM(TEXTO), an exhibition presented in September 2014 in Biblioteca Almeida Garret in Porto. Where what was linking the artworks was the fact that all were using text. Later in the space, with the artworks there was a curatorial process where in dialogue with the artists it was decided in which order the artworks will be placed and therefor which interaction will be provoked. As if the way the exhibition was laid out was discussed during the journey on the rain, the one Althusser talks about.

I intent to explore more both definitions, and relate the difference between these processes to differences between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric, arguing that an art program based on a subject is based on a ideological perspective and the ones based on things are based on material information. There is also an interesting dimension to explore: qualities versus quantities. Also the study cases will be revised in order to try to find two art programs from 2015.

About Hyperobjects

What Timothy Morton calls the “dawn of the Hyperobjects“, is in fact the beginning of a consciousness about their existence.

Hyperobjects started performing years earlier when, around 1900, industrial and technology discovered something strange about objects. Theories like quantum theory, relativity theory, and phenomenology were born then. Morton marks this period as the “prequel“ to the realization of the Anthropocene period. This consciousness, transforms completely our conception of time and space.

When we think about something related to us that will be living 24,100 years (half-life of a plutonium), we lose all self-interest, and once relating to it we will need to forget our conception of time. The same happens with space when, (example) [MORTON, 2013]

According to Timothy Morton, the human reaction to the time of hyperobjects takes three forms. The first form of reaction if the dissolution of the notion of the world. The second reaction is the impossibility of maintaining cynical distance, the dominant ideological mode of our age. The third reaction has to do with aesthetic experience and practise. It’s about this third reaction that I’ll work about. Considering nonhumans, Morton considers hyperobjects the central discussion on today’s aesthetics. What are exactly hyperobjects?

Hyperobjects are extremely complex objects that appeared as a consequence of human impact on Earth such as global warming and the layers of radiation left by the explosions in Nagazaki and Hiroshima in 1945. They are impossible to control: invisible and inaccessible. As if they can reach us, they live under our skin, but we cannot reach them. We note their existence when we experience them in one of these forms of interaction: viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation and phasing.

To develop my work I’ll try to understand how hyperobjects perform in order to understand which possibilities it opens up for aesthetics.

In Timothy Morton conceptions of aesthetic experience through hyperobjects, there are four aspects I would like to develop: interobjectivity, translation, hyperobjects influence on humans body and notion of history.

1.

Since we are always interacting with hyperobjects, their awareness makes us rethink about our interactions in general. To talk about the awareness of this new interaction, Timothy Morton defines the concept interobjectivity. He explains “when an object is borne is instantly enmeshed into a relationship with other objects in a mesh.”  [MORTON, 2013]

But what is exactly interobjectivity? Interobjectivity is what’s between objects, the waves and flows of energy between them, therefor we can say the effectiveness between them and their relationships. Interobjectivity, is not the opposite of intersubjectivity although one is related to the interaction between objects and the other between humans. This means that hyperobjects, being invisible, only appear through their interobjectivity that is embodied in an aftereffect.

 How does this work in art practise? Hyperobjects, being complex bodies can be divided and spread in space and time. What we can reach from them is only a little part of their existence. In art practise, the only way to see them is through their traces. These traces are the aftereffects of their interaction. And these traces once we find them alone, many times, it’s impossible to recognize them as part of the original whole hyperobject.

To our experience, the recognition of the trace is a process of rebuilding the event where they performed. In art practise, the process to understand the event is what Morton calls the process of 2. translation.

This process consists on translating the traces of the hyperobject into a more-or-less perforated version of it. Like editing the being through traces. This way, translating is putting a movement into an action, playing with it records or frequencies or sound, in order to find a form for it. The translating process is in its nature, a searching for new forms.

A mere representation of a hyperobject, like an indivisible form, will probably take in consideration the narratives that constitute our ideas of geological changing, or Earth threatening. These narratives will not see the real scale hyperobjects can reach and also not the materials that constitute them.

Francis Alys in Sometimes Making Something Leads You to Nothing, a performance video-documented where the artist is walking about Mexico City with an ice cube. The performance ends when the cube melts completely.

In this work, Alys is playing with the interobjectivity of the ice cube. In this artwork instead of a process of appearance or revelation, there’s the opposite: a process of disappearance and evaporation.

The artist Xiao Zhu in the streets of Shanghai exhibited images of children crying on factory smoke. This work is a good example for what could be a translation of global warming. The factory smoke (which contributes directly to global warming) is used as a device to project the images. The smoke is nebulous and the image becomes blurry. This way, the material has a viscous interaction, which translates a quality of the hyperobjects. Also is translated the relationship hyperobjects have with human. They affect us in a nebulous way.

3. In this sense, how do human bodies perform in interobjectivity?

“Now since hyperobjects are by definition the largest, longest-lasting objects we know; and since they strafe and penetrate the physical body at every available opportunity, it is not highly likely that the way our minds are is to some extent, influenced by hyperobjects?” [MORTON, 2013]

He gives the example of mind as a part of the human body that extends its performativity to interobjectivity, acting as an interobjective.

 He observes that the processes of mind have to do with interactions between neurons, and other interactions coming from inside and outside the human body. This view, of mind as interobjective is embraced by theories of intelligence that also see the brain as an object inside the human body. This assumption that mind is an interobjective is saying, according to Alan Turing’s (he quotes) that both humans minds and computers are running a software, what’s why they are hidden. This means mind is just attending connections, performing its objectivity.

“This means that your mind is a effect for some observer” Saying that mind is not in anything, rather is an aftereffect. “ [MORTON, 2013]

Mind, being constituted by many complex interrelations not always linked directly, never appears has an entire body, rather appears as an aftereffect seen by the observer.

4. Hyperobjects can bring as well a different notion of history. Since they control time, their performance cannot be seen chronologically Instead, time is marked by an inscription an objects leave in another object and that’s their history. It is not a history based on a narrative of sequential events, as I explored in chapter two as dominant narratives, this history is constituted by traces. It is the history of the material left by an object on another object. “Like raindrops slater on the ground in western California. They record the history of the Ninõ, a massive weather system in the Pacific.” [MORTON, 2013]

This can be been in the work of art Montage of Pages by Xavier Ovídio in which he uses old drawings and random pages that were exposed to different weather conditions (like rain, sun, and humid places). These works absorbed the material elements found in nature. The traces left are footprints of hyperobjects.

Recapitulation and Outlook

To conclude, I would recapitulate my major interests of investigation:

Many changes occurred during modernity are becoming clear today. As if the consequences of modernity, like Anthony Giddens argues, were emerging in our life’s today.

As it was mention before, in 1900 the three theories, (quantum, relativity and phenomenology) were under the look of a complex view, which interest was on a redefinition of systems. This changed the relation between humans and objects.

This change, argues Morton, is influenced by today’s awareness of hyperobjects. The consciousness of their existence coincides with the emergence of the ontology of objects.[3]

What some call the end of the world theory (Morton), and some others call it the end of history (Giddens), or the end of the idea of future (Bourriaud), is in fact, the end of an anthropocentric approach that originates a new perspective/plan of aesthetics.

In my work I’ll argue that the contribution hyperobjects have to new forms of artistic experience is huge.

With the hyperobjects consciousness, the body has a new encounter with objects whose materials have different components and scales. As Timothy Morton says: “Irreducibly, it is already happening. We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around the city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before.” Normally in a performatic experience, we don’t consider what’s already in the space. Artists prepare the encounter through a visual or sensitive stimulation, trying to put in evidence especially the encounter between human bodies. If we start considering hyperobjects, there’s an encounter happening with a viscous complex material that exists in the space before a human action. Some artists today are working with the conscience that objects are there first. Even in the case of an empty room, there’s something already there to be confronted with. This is the case of Martin Creed artwork No. 227, The lights going on and off, that was presented in MOMA in 2007.

One might ask if that’s possible: an interaction before an interaction? This consciousness puts aesthetics in a new era caused by this ontology of objects that makes us rethink the ontology of actuality. The preoccupation with actuality was already present in many modern thinkers: “Nietzsche with the “instant”, Baudelaire with “transitory and ephemeras”, Walter Benjamin with Jetzzeit the “now”, Ernest Bloch with notch-nitch, Arent with between-two. We can say “actuality”, the preoccupation of being in the moment, leads the though of our epoch.” [J.BRAGANÇA DE MIRANDA 1998]

In this sense, this work will try to understand the historicity of forms of experience in order to understand in which way this emergent aesthetics, influenced by hyperobjects, explores experience. What could be this new form of experience?

This larger sphere of relations, that including subjects, objects and phenomenon’s, proposed by Speculative Realism, makes us rethink about relational aesthetics.

Relational aesthetics, when was first designed, was only considering the sphere of human’s relationships. A new critic started being developed by today’s philosopher’s, trying to expel from contemporary thought the anthropocentric view which is based on the subject and the human being. Is it possible to expel the subject and the human being from aesthetics? According to Nicolas Bourriaud the concept of art itself is based on a result of a correlation between subjects and objects. So art cannot be possible without a view that doesn’t considers humans and human’s actions. This can be easily explained with the idea that art would not exist without the artist, the person. He argues that this new era of aesthetics should not be about diminishing the presence of the humans, but to show this huge co-activity sphere, which is the world today.

In this work I tried to start to understand how hyperobjects performativity can give us the possibility to understand another scale of sphere of relations. 

In this sense, can be transitional for aesthetics the inclusiveness of humans and objects in the same relational sphere.

The final dissertation will be concerned with the analysis of the contribution of Hyperobjects performativity to a new era of aesthetics.

Initiated by the theory of the end of the world by Timothy Morton, our new aesthetic dimension of the world is significantly changing at this very moment.

Recent groups in contemporary art are exploring the most innovative approaches trying to translate[4] the hyperobjects phenomenon.

This work starts with a curiosity: what can be the contribution of hyperobjects performativity to relational aesthetics?

As a study case, I’ll study Tai Pei Biennale 2014, the exhibition The Great Acceleration, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud. Also a group created in the meetings around the Biennale called Aesthetic Jam that is exploring topical potentialities of an alternative and more strategic manner of dealing with artistic practices.

---

[1] Strong believes in Futurist Manifest

[2] Concept defended by the philosophy movement Speculative Realism. This theory proposes that we break with this tradition and once again initiate the project of ontology as first philosophy. Drawing on the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, as well as the thought of Roy Bhaskar, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhman, Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, Bruno Latour and the developmental systems theorists, Bryant develops a realist ontology that he calls “onticology”. This ontology argues that being is composed entirely of objects, properties, and relations such that subjects themselves are a variant of objects.

[3] This ontology argues that being is composed entirely of objects, properties, and relations such that subjects themselves are a variant of objects. 

[4] Concept of translation, developed by Timothy Morton regarding the representation of hyperobjects.