Today I finished a first reading of Timothy Morton’s Weird Embodiment. I am wondering how waste objects factor in to the vast array of partial things in nowness – the everlasting moment sliding between past and future - in appearance and essence, ambiguous objects in the Mobius strip of reality. It would seem that we are fooling ourselves that objects ever go out of connection with us.
“…things do exist, yet they exist insofar as they are shot through with nothingness.” Is this an agnostic turn?
“Since there are no top, bottom or middle things, there is no whole of which things are all components. Thus things are
necessarily partial.”
"And if you want to think of amalgamations made of partial parts, these form and reform, in a never ending, therefore never beginning, always turning, mobius strip of time."
He has things to say on beauty and Spinach art which make me remember an old crit where I struggled to express myself. There was a hierarchy of beauty that I struggled against too. “Art as disgust maintains a standard of taste, if only in the negative, which is why it is constantly struggling against beauty, against the seduction of the aura, against determinacy and the constraints of form.”
I begin to re-see why I am attracted to litter and waste and see in those abject objects some of the attributes of beauty. Because in waste objects disgust and beauty are joined and the difference between them becomes nullified in the struggle, which holds you in the moment of beauty, oggling at surfaces and lets you see past that to the object. Which becomes a moment in itself defined by its relations to others, both a product of processes and series of past relations, and a cypher of moments where this entity is called non-entity / nothing now and yet holds everything in its past association and lurks in the future as a frame of reference but at the edge of the frame.
Conversing with human litter is to be transported to the past via nothing more than an action of discarding, a leap into a void; a gap when an object moves on from relation with humans as a component part into a new non-human amalgamation, (what we might lazily call nothing). Like old skin, it's there, we just don't want to recognise it as ours.
Which is why litter always strikes us as strange, weird and therefore disgusting – and we impulsively draw away from it. Litter drawn back up and examined, such as art made with found objects or an archaeological dig presents to us a chance to experience a new altercation with nothing, and with the non-human amalgamations that are out of our sphere of experience. It’s like meeting an alien who was once your next door neighbour.
I made a watercolour and pencil sketch of a piece of litter from the collection; a crumpled gold foil chocolate wrapper, the gold exterior flattened around the white paper interior that buds from the centre, unfolding like a pair of twisted grey lips; the lips of the chocolate eater split and ready to eat. The foil shimmers in the close bright light I set to cast a deep constant shadow from which to draw. If I move my view will move, and the foil will shoot off light from its many angles and my subject will not be still and my drawing will be more difficult to achieve. I must be still to control the shimmering. Hold myself constant in relation to the chocolate wrapper.
I started to think of the foil folds as stone surface.
21 February 2021
“embodiment is not a case of being situated constantly and presently, but rather of shimmering or flickering.” T Morton ‘Weird Embodiment’
No comments:
Post a Comment