This post documents two different forms of intervention/contribution to the LAMELLA:// project.
I asked a fellow MA student who had provided feedback on an earlier iteration of the LAMELLA:// site if he would mind looking at it again and providing feedback. Stefan J Schaffeld is doing an MA in Intercultural Practices with CSM and studied with the Open College of the Arts as I did. We have worked together on projects before. He is an artist and an art-therapist, familiar with my work, the themes, language and strategies I employ. He provides robust feedback and appreciates the concept of art as inquiry. He was happy to oblige, which pleased me, as this is an important element in the work, not only as a function of making work in general, but also because one of my aims was to encourage interventions and suggestions as an integral part of the project itself. This is my attempt to overcome subject/object distinctions and to acknowledge how “the self […] is shown to be itself a copy” (Crimp, 1980; p. 98) or an assemblage of becoming/s.
However, it is a difficult ask. I have to hope people are willing and able to engage. I have to hope people care enough. I have to overcome shyness and hesitation and force myself to invite others into the work and be open to the surprising gifts, or ‘trolling’, that come my way.
CSM friend Anastasia also read LAMELLA://’s Tarot cards.
Stefan’s Feedack
Stefan sent me an excellent document filled with thoughts and questions. Here are a few:
What is the dynamic between the blog (sketchbook) and the website –
I thought originally about Delueze and Guatarri’s plateaus and wanted to have several spaces online that ‘represented’ different plateaus linked to one another with various climates. However, lately I’ve been concerned about the over-literalness of my understanding. What’s more, I have long thought the networked links we see so clearly nowadays always existed, even before the internet came along. The internet made them visible (and does a whole bunch of stuff like preventing the usual breaks and gates we took for granted from functioning as they once did). Stefan’s question was probably the final prompt to separate the site – allowing it autonomy. The WordPress site still exists, of course, and people can visit it should they wish. As does my Instagram which records sketches and thoughts.
I am aware that the research/practice – practice/research dichotomy may not be overcome and have been concerned about that for a while – again perhaps I am being overly literal. I try to hold Natalie Loveless’ (2019; pp.107) thoughts in mind nevertheless:
“Research-creation*, at its best, has the capacity to impact our social and material conditions, not by offering more facts, differently figured, but by finding ways, through aesthetic encounters and events, to persuade us to care and to care differently.”
I suspect my ambition towards ‘research-creation’ has a way to go yet. Perhaps the website, now autonomous, and the WordPress site with all my notes – is good enough and that’s fine. Perhaps by unlinking them so obviously, I acknowledge the disparate and unbounded nature of self and the illusion that it is otherwise.
Who is the audience?
Good grief – I have no idea. I’m certain very few people are interested in this work, and it’s mainly a small group of people who I have worked with before and one or two from the course. Perhaps they are the only audience! I’m not sure that matters. One of the nice things about being 52 while studying (and there are some horrible things too) is that the yearning for fame and fortune is not quite so prominent as it may have been, had I been doing this in my twenties. I’m not being disingenuous. I’d love to be financially more secure than I am (it wouldn’t take much!). I love it when my work receives external validations. But I am quite ambivalent about being seen. It’s not comfortable.
Contextual comment: I am curious to read more on Lacan’s lamella and Ettinger’s response to it. I am wondering how Lacan’s notion of the lamella as a “libido organ” without sex relates to the gendered discourse that SJ is referring to.
I am thinking I might do a kind of newspaper publication to go with the installation or that can be downloaded from the site. I need to get going with it if I am going to do so since it will need to go to print and be proofed etc but perhaps most of the work has already been done. And the task would be more editing than writing. It might resolve the issues I raised above.
SJ mentioned the notion of sound (enough, not enough, too much). Somehow, I expected or preferred to have a sound starting automatically when opening the website. Not sure why though. I have found some pages with image and a sound file that play when I hit the playbar.
This is what I’m am trying to sort out – it’s not quite done yet but on its way (thanks to someone who I sourced code for when I helped a client with his website in my other life).
Anastasia’s Tarot Reading of LAMELLA://
I am far too sceptical to take Tarot readings seriously! And yet there was something in this which forces me to consider what took place and how it relates to the work.
Anastasia drew three cards – The High Preistess, The Hermit and Seven Swords. (I’m sure someone with more knowledge could have a field day interpreting them…) And all of these seemed to be really relevant to the whole idea of lamella and to my handling it. It is interesting to see the first card is described as representing the duality of nature when all my work wants to query and overcome duality (I’m not sure we can, as even when we try to, it is so embedded in our psyches that we simply don’t yet above the language). It also talks about letting go of the intellect and allowing oneself to be driven by intuition – well, that’s always good advice for me and one I am aware of here.
The LAMELLA:// project is an inquiry. Perhaps the inquiry operates as an inflection point – where something significant shifts.
Anastasia asked me why I thought people seemed more drawn to the ‘spiritual’, to superstitions and religions nowadays. I have thought about this a lot and Achelle Mbembe discusses it in a talk titled Negative Messiasm. Simply, I answered, the state of flux we find ourselves in today – triggered or exemplified in the massive structural developments to do with technology – has left us wanting or needing something to cling to. Various superstitions promise to solve something, as we get tossed about trying not to drown.
Saying that – a massive part of my work asks about the split that took place at some point in our history between the rational and the instinctive. I think about Medea which I saw recently (Euripedes changed the story. Medea did not murder her children in earlier versions). And how this relates to Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power in Sister Outsider. Or Cassandra who relied on intuition to tell the truth but was ignored. And about Lamia (who appears in dialogues for one) who is described as baby killer – a witchy murderer of development and innovation. And about the phrase ‘prompt-engineer’ written about here which seems to suggest something about the act of reproduction being appropriated by technology.
I wrote in my reply to Stefan’s feedback:
There are lots of correlations with my project [in relation to Stefan’s CSM assessment work which plays with symbol, narrative and community] although they look very different and you have managed to include your group in the making, and I am the hermit in mine, despite it being online and developing in real time.
There is ennuis in so much photography. Your project overcomes that by providing something more than or an alternative to despair, despondency, or aggression. I like that it includes symbols from all religions. Although I am not religious, I am cognisant that God being dead is not serving us well. We are too fragile it seems to cope and it behoves us to acknowledge the universe is greater than the individual, to be part of our communities and to practice some kind of formal ritual. Gratitude also seems a key tenet of religiosity that helps us – I recall reading an neurology article about how these things help with wellbeing and noticing they were all behaviours common in religion.
Finally, at the end of this long blog, I want to reiterate, I have long been a materialist. And I have never understood why we need fairly tales to ‘magic’ everything up. Emergence is magical enough. It’s incredible that cells or quanta can manifest as love, rage, wonder, clouds, leaves, animals, forest, cacoons, songs, poetry, photography or AI. But I very much do understand why we need narratives which frame existence in discrete pockets of digestible information.
*”Research-creation is a geographically specific term that works in tandem with alternatives such as practice-based research, practice-led research, research-based practice, research-led practice, creative-praxis, arts-driven
inquiry, arts-based research, and, increasingly, artistic research” (Loveless, 2019; pp.4)
Refs:
Crimp, D. (1980) ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’ In: October 15 pp.91.
Loveless, N. (2019) How to make art at the end of the world: a manifesto for research-creation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Achille Mbembe: ‘Negative Messianism in the Age of Animism’ (2017) At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyHUJYfk_os (Accessed 24/05/2022).