Collaborating with Objects, Stardust and Billion Year Old Carbon A paper in support of the thesis exhibition by Stephanie Cormier In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts May 8, 2014 Narrative I pursue an aesthetic that seeks to integrate the body, its environment and its products, dissolving the boundaries between humans and their surroundings. I use synthetic materials and processed plastics, substances found both in contemporary everyday life and within our geological period, the Anthropocene, a term coined in 2002 by the Nobel‐Prize‐winning chemist Paul Crutzen. This period has been proposed as a new epoch in earth’s history, one characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force. It has gained acceptance “as evidence has increasingly mounted that the changes wrought by global warming will affect not only the world’s climate and biological diversity, but its very geology — and not just for a few centuries, but for millennia.”1 My work suggests a fusion of materials resulting in posthuman forms, fictive ‘beings’ or structures that might exist after the extinction of the human. I find myself in the position of a 21st century Cassandra, recognizing a posthuman future and the reasons why we will arrive there, but accepting the fact that my warnings will go unheeded. So I make things that I label art out of the fragments of that projected future and use speculation as an imaginative and generative process. I choose to play inside a structure of thinking that I regard as the enlightened entropic. Through my work I challenge the commonly held assumption that human beings are moving farther away from nature. Rather, I am investigating the possibility that nature is beginning to resemble us in its continual adaptation to our industrial modifications. This could lead to the simultaneous creation of two similar fabricated beings: the human body and the earth. It is only a matter of time before they become one. Like the science fiction creation of Dr. Frankenstein, a figure that we both delight in and fear, our new technology is creating hybridizations that are changing life as we know it: Most major scientific theories rebuff common sense. They call on evidence beyond the reach of our senses and overturn the observable world. They disturb assumed relationships and shift what has been substantial into metaphor…When it is first advanced, theory is at its most fictive. The awkwardness of fit between the natural world as it is currently perceived and as it is hypothetically imagined holds the theory itself for a time within a provisional scope akin to that of fiction.2 1 In the above quote from Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction, Gillian Beer suggests such theories are necesssary and close to fiction, especially in their first stages. Conversely, I can look to the work of writer and poet Diane Ackerman who talks about the realm of the scientific in art. “I’ve always been baffled by people who write about nature only in terms of, say, junipers and cornfields, eschewing all things so‐called ‘scientific,’ as if science were, per se, the spoil‐sport of feeling. So wonderless a view of nature really doesn’t appeal to me; I don’t see the Universe divided up that way, into ‘The Junipers’ on the one hand and ‘The Amino Acids’ on the other.”3 Similarly, my work is influenced by speculative fiction and speaks to a wondrous scientific hypothesis of a melded future. The narrative element in my work informs the formal. Everyday objects transition from conditions of use or value to roles that are either archival, aesthetic or that insinuate new ‘forms of life’. My narrative foregrounding is also influenced by other contemporary artists whose work blends fact and fiction. For example, I am drawn to the atmosphere of Mike Nelson’s immersive installations that, although empty of people, evoke the lives of the loner, outsider or outlaw and their apocalyptic surroundings. However, the environment I am creating no longer contains the architecture that we inhabit. I am presenting a situation where we are given the opportunity to visit a world deserted by humans. Instead we witness the results of humans as a geological force. The futuristic artifacts I am exhibiting tell of a hypothetical way of seeing the world. This perspective can offer a vision that is relevant to our lives now since speculative fiction doesn’t tell us as much about the future as it informs our present circumstance. Depending on speculative narrative to inform the viewer opens the work up to an ‘invisible’ reference. To demonstrate this, I will refer to Pascal Pique’s The Invisible in the Art of Jessica Stockholder. Picque suggests that Stockholder’s work acts like a (thin) skin between what is visible and what is not. Although the artist uses familiar domestic items, Pique characterizes her environments as, “seemingly devoid of meaning and whose logic eludes us.” 4 Objects here have taken on a different status. He elaborates on Stockholder’s use of fluidity and porosity to alter our perceptions. 2 The shifts between the abstract and concrete (especially when they are obliterated by a uniform swatch of paint) remove them from both their function and from the material world. He states that there is porosity between what is rational, logical and formal, and what is not, a difference that opens up the meaning of things as opposed to closing them down. In looking at how the visible and invisible communicate, we acknowledge that vision relays language and expression. When thinking in the realm of the two‐dimensional (depictive, evoking the mind) and three‐dimensional (more embodied viewing), Stockholder’s worlds are constantly shifting between observation and engagement, narrative and form. At the perceptual stage, the artist seeks to leave room for the imagination, phantasm and fiction. Quoting Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Picque elaborates on the ideas and emanations of the invisible remarking, “We do not possess them, they possess us.”5 In the sculpture, Tool To Plant Flowers in Your Uterus, I made an imaginary device that suggested an interaction with the body. Although this is a small hand‐held sculpture, it serves to prove my interest in evoking the invisible and providing a context for narrative, imagination or speculation. The sculpture is the size of a kitchen tool and is shaped like a divining rod. Black vinyl tubing attaches to painted black sticks. Fixed with a loop that allows it to be hung on the wall, it contains two fleshy pink stubs (made from duct tape) at the bottom ends of the tubes. The title is important, as it communicates a fantastical proposition, evoking the supernatural. This work appears to be a ‘relic’ suggesting that it was used in a performance. I wanted to make something that implied a symbiotic connection between myself and the earth through the impossible idea of planting a uterine garden. The tool supposes a uniting of the human and the natural world, in part because both parties are increasingly modified by technological and industrial processes. Craft (Making Is Thinking) In assessing the current art world my aim is to bring together the object and the experience. As in the practice of alchemy, I want to combine both exoteric and esoteric elements to produce my sculptures. I am intrigued by the extraordinary potential power of the object. The mundane materials I use around the home carry 3 the immanence of the quotidian as opposed to the transcendence of the monumental. My work is influenced by the material and the everyday and carries the intimation of metaphysical acts of mysticism. What this combination produces is both the unmonumental (salvaged garbage) and the monumental (posthuman alchemical manifestations). The narrative of the artwork’s materialization and the implied performance of its creation lies in the object’s connections to the body, in processes of transformation, and in its own new material form. I am interested in how the act of making can generate meaning. I often include woven and crotcheted plastic material in my works. In addressing the practice of craft, I want to refer to an exhibition that was held at the Witte de With Gallery In Rotterdam, Making Is Thinking, that offers a view on art making that I share. By using craft, I hope to ingrain my objects with some of these ideas. The catalogue argues that in recent years craft has re‐emerged as a way of making that offers an alternative set of values to industrial production, global capitalism and mass consumerism. When I weave plastic bags that are industrially produced, and that exist solely for mass consumerism and global capitalism, I directly subvert those values. In the catalogue curator Zoe Gray looks largely at Richard Sennett’s observations in The Craftsman explaining how much we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things. She states: Craftsmanship is anything that involves a literal connection between the hand and the head. There is an analysis of the process of creation, and its transformation into a new moment of creation...There is the avoidance of conscious thinking and the emphasis on intuition, instinct and tacit knowledge, meditative qualit(ies) due in part to their labor‐intensive production and almost psychedelic patterns. 6 Sennett helps in understanding what I mean by describing my actions as a collaboration with objects. Focusing on the role of craft in the tradition of women’s work and the domestic realm, I am taking weaving (as one example) in a direction that can offer new possibilities. Since our human legacy may be largely dependent on the objects we produce and leave behind, I am embracing the malleable potential of these synthesized products, materials that are manufactured in a factory, but whose basic elements came from nature. This practice of engagement with materials speaks to making as thinking by supporting the idea that the only way we can 4 possibly come close to knowing the non‐human object is to engage with it primarily through active touch and collaboration, and to do this in time. Time is a measure of making as well as a future projection. This becomes important in my project, as I want to instill my human interaction and presence in these materials, acknowledging them as things that have individual properties and an existence that will outlive me. As Cassandra, I can safely conspire with these objects knowing they will be around for a while; the speculation that these materials will outlive me, and the rest of humanity, is perhaps a last grasp at human lineage. The knots and patterns I ingrain in this material will lace through and combine with the earth. This process metamorphisizes, ever so slowly, with the gradual movement and deterioration of matter. In addressing metamorphosis, Sennett refers to the ancient mythological practices of shape‐shifting. This idea is considered magical, but it can be considered more broadly; “Ancient materialists like Heraclitus and Parmenides believed that all physical reality is an endless recombination, an unceasing metamorphosis, of the four basic elements of nature.”7 This expanded field of matter is comparable to the modern science of evolution in its movement towards an increasing complexity. As the ancients noticed, all natural processes, although generative, seem to eventually move toward entropy. In thinking how to avoid this tendency towards decay, Plato addresses the “divided line” in The Republic, acknowledging that although things decay, their form or idea endures. This divides the world into the visible and the intelligible. Referring to theatre, we can see the divide between actor and audience, those who would do and those who could reflect and criticize ‐ the observer as opposed to the maker. Sennett confirms that, “The craftsman, engaged in a continual dialogue with materials, does not suffer this divide. His or her arousal is more complete.” 8 Through the inclusion of craft in my work I am not only engaging in a dialogue with materials in an embodied way, but I’m also acknowledging the temporal metamorphosis of all matter. In my small‐scale home/studio, I mimic what is happening in the larger scale of the world ‐ an integration of mind, body (human and animal) and product (material, thing, commodity). By ‘making as thinking’, I am 5 mixing absence (ideas, human consciousness or unconsciousness) with presence (object). While I see a dichotomy between the human and nature I am attempting a merger where the material is imbued with the human and where it could also potentially contain consciousness. This integration changes the material of the ecological world around us. The plastic that we have produced or synthesized out of nature seeps back into nature and into our bodies, and while this cycle continues exponentially, it makes nature a little more human each time. Ecology and Entropy In thinking about ecology and creative processes on a geological time scale it is necessary to address the seminal work and ideas of Robert Smithson. Smithson was not associated with the romantic rural nostalgia that could be connected to Land Art, rather his interest in the post‐industrial landscape, “in scarred and polluted terrains”9, speaks to a larger context of ecology related to production and human relationships. Max Andrews writes that Smithson acknowledged a complicated and dialectical relationship with nature. Natural actions such as sedimentation, eruption and subsidence proved a foundation of instability, indeterminacy and disruption. These actions, “are frequently conceptualized or actualized against a backdrop of vast stretches of time, those of topological change or the rise and collapse of civilizations”10. This instability could defy specific meaning or result in a refusal to summarize. However, Smithson was dedicated to building or revealing structures or instantiations both with language and real materials to reveal the direct effects of the elements as they exist in our time – day to day. I am aware in my daily encounter with material bodies that, although all matter eventually decays, through their mass production and resilience, the contemporary plastic materials I use will leave behind residues of human ‘culture’, a new type of fossil carrying human traces. Alan Weisman picks up on this in The World Without Us. His book explores how our world might exist and evolve without the persistent pressure of human activity and presence. Weisman states, “Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same.” 11 He is reflecting on all the plastic produced in the last sixty years and how it will affect the ocean, the ecosystem and the future. 6 In his timeline, it is a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up with the materials we are making. “And should biologic time run out and some plastics remain,” he elaborates, “there is always geologic time. The upheavals and pressure will change it into something else. Just like trees buried in bogs a long time ago – the geologic process, not biodegradation, changed them into coal and oil. Maybe high concentrations of plastic will turn into something like that. Eventually they will change.“ 12 My interest in this projected period of time looks at the possibilities for human‐ made objects and nature to combine into new and fantastical forms. I also think of this interim period when, without human force, objects will cease to exist as commodities or mere extensions of the human. They will become the ‘new nature’. In considering the works as relics, it is necessary to address their longevity or how as art objects they evince a history of their making. I may be producing objects that suggest a posthuman aesthetic, but I am also producing art objects for viewing that address anxieties about the future. In an article in the New York Times, Learning how to die in the Anthropocene, journalist Roy Scranton suggests that the greatest challenge is posed in defining what it means to be human: In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality — “What does my life mean in the face of death?” — is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end? 13 Scranton’s framing of the question about what being human will mean acknowledges we are only a small part of a vast and eternal world. In my assumed role of Cassandra I am aware of the complications of speculating about the Anthropocene. As opposed to being tragic, I choose to engage in a playful speculation with objects and time. As Robert Smithson states in his 1972 interview with Alison Sky, “the entropic devil is more Manichean in that you really can’t tell the good from the bad, there’s no clear cut distinction.” He continues, “ The earth being the closed system, there’s only a certain amount of resources and of course there’s an attempt to reverse entropy through the recycling of garbage.”14 Smithson 7 then postulates that waste and enjoyment are coupled and that there is pleasure involved with a preoccupation with waste. Waste My pleasure and fascination with the process and materials of waste is evident in the Anthropocentric Specimens. For one specimen, I gathered a number of plastic bags I had been collecting, particularly enjoying juxtaposing their colours – pink, grey, green. I ordered them in a pile and rolled them together into a condensed log, tightening it with black and orange duct tape. I took a tube of silicone caulking from the bathroom and by cutting a generous hole in the tube, I repeatedly pushed the silky pungent mixture into a seemingly endless line, creating a blob for my ‘log’. The final pleasure came when I cut into this taped log, revealing a bursting of colourful ‘growth rings’. Pleasure can be related to the objects and commodities produced in the world, and it exists in direct proportion with how much waste we will produce. In a body of work titled The Burden Of Objects, Raphaelle De Groot collaborated with a number of students to investigate our relationship to residual objects. Instead of pleasure, De Groot refers to the instability of their embodied meanings by examining the burden endured in their accumulation. In her performances, De Groot’s body grows with an extension of trash that accumulates and cannot be discarded. My sculpture, Anchor Belt, addresses similar concerns. It consists of three large “strands” (flexible plastic tubes) that come out of a jumbled pile and transform into a more orderly woven pattern. Two of the ends taper into a finer weave and culminate in a belt loop. This object can be interpreted as an anchor to tie me to the ground, or it can be worn and dragged around, similar to the performative work of De Groot. The use of contemporary cheap waste (the sculpture is made primarily out of plastic bags), carries with it an inherent implication of burdening the earth as well as the person. This work then, can materialize the complicated interplay of pleasure, burden and guilt. In my material choices, I have limited myself to found objects and DIY products common to the home. By using materials that are new and synthetic but that are 8 also base, I imbue the sculpture with a certain beauty that I see inherent in such materials. With a simple garbage bag I can evoke the shiny black texture of oil slick. One of these sculptures I made from black garbage bags was created in 2012. I think of Crawl Space, as a portal. I envisioned myself stuck at home and forced to make something to escape. Crawl Space consists of a flattish mountain shape cobbled together from plastic, garbage bags, rubber gloves and duct tape. The work hangs on the wall and can be entered in the same way you would crawl into a sleeping bag (albeit upside down). The under layer has a cushioning secured with metal paper clips that cinch in the plastic material like a quilt. The top layer of this ‘quilt portal’ shows a patchwork of colourful plastic bags arranged in strips reminiscent of layers of sediment and representative of a cross‐section of earth. However, this cross‐section represents the new Anthropocene, perhaps even a futuristic version, and does not display the tones we have come to associate with the earth ‐ browns, burnt umbers, brick reds. Instead it uses colours mixed with synthetic dyes that are created in a factory. These bright manufactured colours are unsettling, both in their obvious “mis‐matching” to a natural palette, as well as in their associative qualities with the absurd or the saccharine. I use bright colours to emphasize the human‐made materials and their individuality (pureness) before they mix completely in the earth to become a murky brew. In other sculptures where I use house paint, a large number of the colours have been found in the mistint pile. I embrace these garish colours. By using tints that others have discarded I am locating them back into the world and emphasizing that none of our waste is invisible. In this act, I refer to Andy Warhol’s position on ‘leftovers’ in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again. He sees the humour in these discards; when you can take what’s leftover from popular taste and turn it into something good or interesting, you are a resourceful byproduct of culture. Living in crowded New York City gave Warhol a special incentive for aligning with bad taste. By this attraction to and use of leftovers (waste) Andy Warhol lived on the outside.15 9 Integration Through Material Bodies The Crawl Space sculpture also refers to an inside/outside relationship. It was the shape of a hood to cover your head, but this one covered almost the whole body. The form was influenced by Lygia Clark’s Mascaras Sensoriais (Sensorial Masks). These masks contained different stimuli and the viewer/participant experienced new sensations, which went from integration within the world around him/her, to a completely isolating interiorisation. Lygia Clark often made objects or tools that related to the body (from cheap renewable materials) and used them to address how we experience phenomena. Her objects also offered the ‘viewer’ a participatory or relational experience.16 Although Clark was interested in this isolating interiorisation, she was concerned more with attention than escape. In writing about her sensorial masks, she said she wanted her participants to be taken out of this world and to lose contact with reality. However, she goes on to clarify that this state might also be thought of as, “the immanence of the absolute”17. This loss of apparent reality is, in fact, an encounter with ‘ another type of reality’ that seems to be a form of auto‐affection, or what Clark calls the ‘infrasensorial’. Throughout her work, she repeatedly spoke of the immanence of acts of performance.18 Immanence is a metaphysical theory in both philosophical and theological terms. It can be explained as encompassing, or existing within. Its divine presence is manifest in the material world, as opposed to being transcendent and outside of it. Immanence suggests that the spiritual world permeates the mundane and, as I suggested before, it alludes to a formal inherent beauty. Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in The Second Sex this Pythagoran distinction, "There is a good principle that created order, light and man and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness and woman. Men succeed in the world by transcendence, but immanence is the lot of women.”19 This division is useful in looking at Clark, as well as other artists from this period (such as Martha Rosler or Mierle Laderman‐Ukeles), who question power structures in their work by foregrounding the inherent value of the domestic and the mundane. Lygia Clark articulated what Deleuze came to describe as a jointly ethical and aesthetic project intent on ‘inventing new possibilities of life’ – a project less 10 concerned with making ‘Art’ than with living life as a work of art.20 “The neo‐avant‐ garde and post modern have long been understood in terms of their revealings of modernism and a narrative emphasizing rupture and new beginnings “21. As early as 1956 Clark stated, “ I firmly believe in the search for the fusion between art and life”. Even when making paintings, she was not thinking of them as transcendent entities, which occupied a discrete realm from the observer. She spoke of needing to think of the artwork, “as a living thing”. 22 Like Clark, I am interested in the experiential aspects of form and the eventual nature of objects, a process of affective encounter and becoming that is realized through connections with various material bodies. Some of my objects reference the body through implied interactivity; others are anthropomorphic, and still others connect to the human through the simple fact that they carry human DNA. By DNA, I mean any manufactured object that has been produced through human design systems and labour. The work of Clark allowed people to join in with the creation of the artwork and the ‘event’, whereas my work is a ‘body of evidence’. My objects and images reveal how I have invented new combinations of life, how I have taken readily available materials, made them my focus, and followed the alternative possibilities they suggest. My employment of the metaphor of alchemy to change and create new forms recognizes Clark and Deleuze’s common belief about “unity” or “the whole”. Their definition of unity was not conceived as a totalizing teleology as much as an acceptance of change, movement and topology. Clark declares, “permanent movement is the essence of my work, because everything in reality is a process… there are no static things, everything is dynamics. Even an apparently static object is not stopped”. 23 Clark’s activities were viewed as “attention training” exercises to leap into what Deleuze refers to as “the plane of immanence”. These ontological experiences did not involve a negation of the material self in order to become the adequate vessel for the passage of a dematerialized thought. On the contrary they involved paying attention to the capacity to change and be changed by other material bodies, and an experience of “growing in the midst of things” rather than being irrevocably separated from them. 24 11 In the realm of contemporary art my use of material bodies such as plastic, garbage bags and tape, (materials often used for containing, wrapping, covering or discarding) has been influenced by the artists David Hammons and Kelly Jazvac. Hammons began to make found object sculptures in the late 1970s from cheap and abandoned items such as elephant dung, Afro hair, chicken bones, bottles and bags. Hammons use of these non‐art materials as a marked reaction against what he saw as ‘clean’ art, pointed to precedents in Dada, Outsider art and Arte Povera. 25 More recently he has created large expressionistic paintings on canvas that are almost completely covered by a patchwork of rags, cloth, tarpaulin and garbage bags. There are torn holes in the bags that allow some of the colourful paint to come through. This ‘blanket’ acts not only as something that obscures, but it also creates an interstitial space – a thin area between two surfaces. Jazvac uses vinyl from commercial advertising. She has appropriated thin and slumping discard‐vinyl to create forms that straddle the two‐dimensional and three‐ dimensional. These collapsed, wrapped forms possess both a failure of sculptural integrity and a prostration of two‐dimensional form, albeit two‐dimensional form that comes away from the wall, appearing malleable, and able to be penetrated. Like my sculpture Crawl Space and other newer works such as Childhood’s End (where I create an interstitial space from cobbled together materials), I have used similar flimsy materials that appear enveloping or penetrable. These manipulable materials speak not only to the forms as possible escapes or portals, but also as liminal spaces, ones with transformative possibilities. This transmutation could be compared to an increasing engagement in the home with technology, science fiction, or cyberfeminism (Haraway). The body enters (or imagines entering) liminal space, a place where boundaries begin to dissolve. We stand there, on the threshold, preparing ourselves to move across the limits of what we can be. Perhaps it can imply a transmutation into cybernetic code. Cyberfeminism Symbiotic evolution originated decades ago with the recognition of the posthuman and the cyborg 26. It included a general shift from thinking of individuals as isolated 12 from the world, to thinking of them as nodes on networks. Hari Kunzru suggests that the 1990s may well be remembered as the beginning of the cyborg era. In the essay You are Cyborg; For Donna Haraway , we are already assimilated. Kunzru quotes Haraway’s observation that biotechnology has changed our bodies. I am not sloughing off the modern world to discover my supposed spiritual connection to Mother Earth. Realities of modern life happen to include a relationship between people and technology so intimate that it is no longer possible to tell where we end and machines begin. 27 Haraway acknowledges our evolution with the products of contemporary life and technology. By concentrating on new materials that are human‐made and have changed the make‐up of the world (physically, socially, culturally, intellectually, and spiritually), she postulates the next evolutionary step. “We live in tangled networks amongst complex hybrids”, she writes. “They surround us and incorporate us. They are inside of us, bodies fed on the products of agribusiness, pharmaceuticals and altered by medical procedures.” 28 Kunzru goes on to explain that the posthuman fusion, the cyborg, irradicates the oppositions between nature and culture, and between self and world. When people describe something as natural, they’re saying that’s simply how the world is; we can’t change it. If humans “aren’t natural, but constructed, then given the right tools, we can all be reconstructed.”29 This transformative possibility is echoed by Joshua Simon in his essay, Neo‐ Materialism Part 1: The Commodity and the Exhibition. Simon examines the idea that we may be living in the world of the commodity and are perhaps ourselves, at least part‐commodity. One of these ideas refers to our bodies and their blood sugar levels, kidney stones or cancer caused by pollution. Our genetic (material) makeup has been internally altered by the products we produce and consume.30 Neomaterialism, on the other hand, moves beyond the posthuman because it is still too human. In focusing on the ontology of ‘others’ (others here refers to both animate and inanimate forms) and removing the centrality of human experience, my work aims to concentrate on the transformation and the ontology of objects. Some of these objects constitute a small part of the human in that they are human‐ 13 produced (the Frankenstein effect). The Anthropocene, after all, is named for the anthropomorphic. The Rise of The Object (and Practicing Philosophy) Neomaterialism is an expanded notion of Thingness. Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Braidotti are rethinking the way we view matter, objects and especially the human subject; and how the scale, centrality and pervasiveness of human subjectivity has shaped our understanding of the world.31 It posits the idea that we do not see ourselves as separate from everything. Instead, we equate ourselves with other matter and objects in order to discover new and important ways to understand (art) objects. The ascendence of the object over the human in Neomaterialism supports my practice of boundary blending and blurring. Everyday materials such as dishwashing gloves or garbage bags can be compared to and demand equal attention as flesh, bodily fluids, or organic compounds. Joshua Simon’s declaration that all objects are first and foremost commodities is pertinent in this context. The commodity acts as the great equalizer, turning beings into things and things into beings. This interchangeability has a huge effect on how we view everything around us. Simon points out that most commodities, even a plastic bag, live longer than either the humans who created them or those who will consume them. “As all objects that enter into this world are commodities, we must realize that this is not our world, but rather theirs. We dwell in the world of commodities.” 32 I am reminded of Pascal Picque’s idea about Jessica Stockholder’s work being full of objects and commodities that lose their typical associations. Picque supports Simon’s proposal by suggesting we can neither own objects nor possess the ideas or derivations that they emanate. These ideas and derivations would not exist for us without the presence (including the assemblage and composition) of the object. So the ideas are not ours, but are formulated only in engaging with the materials. The objects have communicated these ideas to the viewer. Simon claims that objects in an exhibition are characterized by a suspended duration of being, providing an existence beyond use and exchange value. “As both a 14 retinal and non‐retinal viewing mechanism, the exhibition embodies a much wider aesthetic experience that allows us to view commodities as they are. More than in any other context, commodities are most true to themselves as art.”33 When dealing with objects in this wider context, Ian Bogost in Alien Phenomenology: What It’s Like to be a Thing, questions why we give credence to some things more than others. He admits that as humans we welcome these things into our lives, whether through scholarship, poetry, science or business, only to ask how they relate to human productivity, culture and politics. Modernity has successfully split the world into two halves, human and nature, introducing a system of correlation. Bogost states that human beings need not be discounted to adopt an object‐ oriented position, as human beings are as much of the world as any other entity. He says however, that we can no longer claim that our existence is special as existence. This is true even if humans also possess a seemingly unique ability to agitate the world…If we take seriously the idea that all objects recede interminably into themselves, then human perception becomes just one among many ways that objects might relate. To put things at the centre of a new metaphysics also requires us to admit that they do not exist just for us. 34 Thinking about this returns me to a question I addressed earlier by Scranton and the evolving sense of what it is to be human in the Anthropocene. Bogost, in his suggestions of speculative metaphorisms offers perhaps our only option in dealing with things beyond human comprehension. His suggestion to do this with ‘wonder’ offers a way of thinking that I can align with my own experience of this world. By acknowledging the limits of human comprehension and reveling in the alien‐ness of many of the things around us, I am reminded of ‘simple’ questions I asked as a child like, “Where does the sky end?” Bogost dedicates a chapter in his book to Carpentry. This word is used for the philosophical practice of making things. As he explains, this practice is a perspective on creative work that asks philosophical questions. This process of making things helps philosophers pursue arguments and questions while tangibly working with 15 objects and materials (an easy correlation to Sennett’s ‘making as thinking’), not just illustrations of ideas that ‘really’ live in the discursive realm. With this thought of making and action in mind, I want to return to Robert Smithson writing about the changing suburban landscape of his hometown in New Jersey. I should now like to prove the irreversibility of eternity by using a jejune experiment for proving entropy. Picture in your own mind’s eye the sand box divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a child have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey, after that we have him run anti‐clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy. 35 Like Smithson, I sense a time in history where things have been agitated to the point that they can’t be restored. As Cassandra I warn that we cannot undo this agitation, but we can leave it to nature and to the remnants of human culture to take in another direction. So I can take some consolation in the recognition that the existence of this entropic place in geologic time is inevitable. As Smithson says, “I don’t think things go in cycles. I think that things just change from one situation to the next, there really is no return.” 36 Nor is there any limit on the capacity of the human imagination to trace the procession of its endless becoming. 16 Crawl Space 4.25’x 8’ x4”, recycled plastic bags, garbage bags, rubber gloves, tape, 2013 17 Anthropocentric Specimen 03, 7” x3.5” x2”, recycled plastic bags, tape, silicone, 2013 18 Notes 1. Roy Scranton. Learning How To Die in The Anthropocene, New York Times http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning‐how‐to‐die‐in‐the‐ anthropocene/?_r=2 2. Gillian Beer. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction. Cambridge University Press. 1983. p 3. 3. Maria Popova.http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/19/diane‐ ackerman‐the‐planets‐a‐cosmic‐pastoral/ 4. Pascal Pique. The Invisible In The Art of Jessica Stockholder. Wide Eyes Smeared Here Dear. Musee d‟Art Moderne Saint‐Etienne Metropole. 2012. P 17 5. Ibid., 6. http://www.wdw.nl/wdw_publications/making‐is‐thinking/. Curator and Editor Zoë Gray 2011 7. Richard Sennett. Part One: The Crafstman, Material Consciousness. The Craftsman. Yale University Press. 2008. P.124 8. Ibid., 125 9. Max Andrews. A Dark Spot of Exasperation: From Smithson to The Spime. Robert Smithson Art in Continual Movement. Alauda Publications, Amsterdam, 2012. p.52 10. Ibid., 52 11. Alan Weisman. The World Without Us. St. Martins Thomas Dunne Books. July 2007. p. 128 12. Ibid., 128 13. Roy Scranton. Learning How To Die in The Anthropocene, New York Times http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning‐how‐to‐die‐in‐the‐ anthropocene/?_r=2 14. Alison Sky. Entropy Made Visible: An Interview with Alison Sky. 1973 http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/entropy.htm 15. Andy Warhol. 6 Work.The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. From A to B and Back Again). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. 16. Lygia Clark. The Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Lygia Clark, Barcelona, 1998, p.221 17. Ibid., 222 18. Ibid., 19. Simone DeBeauvoir. The Second Sex. History, Part 2. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1952. P.90 20. Laura Cull. Paying Attention, Participating in the Whole, Allan Kaprow alongside Lygia Clark. Theatres of Immanence, Deleuze and the ethics of Performance. Palgrave MacMillan. December 2012. P.154 21. Crinson and Zimmerman, Neo‐avant‐garde and Postmodern; Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300166187 22. Laura Cull. Paying Attention, Participating in the Whole, Allan Kaprow alongside Lygia Clark. Theatres of Immanence, Deleuze and the ethics of Performance. Palgrave MacMillan. December 2012. P.156 23. Ibid.,170 24. Ibid.,176 25. Morgan Falconer. From Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press. 2009. http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=2486 26. Donna Haraway. “A Cyborg Manifesto”. In Cyborgs, Simians and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. 1991. P 149 ‐ 181 27. Hari Kunzru.”You are Cyborg; For Donna Haraway , we are already assimilated.” Wired Magazine. Issue 5.02. February 1997 p.2 (7 pages). 28. Ibid. 19 29. Ibid. 30. Joshua Simon. Neo‐Materialism, Part I: The Commodity and the Exhibition. e‐flux November 2010. http://www.e‐flux.com/journal/neo‐materialism‐part‐one‐the‐ commodity‐and‐the‐exhibition/ 31. Neomaterialism. A blog run by Joshua Simon. (http://neomaterialism.tumblr.com/) 32. JoshuaSimon. Neo‐Materialism, Part I: The Commodity and the Exhibition. e‐flux November 2010. http://www.e‐flux.com/journal/neo‐materialism‐part‐one‐the‐ commodity‐and‐the‐exhibition/ 33. Ibid. 34. Iam Bogost. Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. University of Minnesota Press. 2011. P.9(Bogost includes Chapters on Carpentry and Wonder). 35. Robert Smithson. A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. Art Forum, December, 1967. P. 56 36. Ibid. Bibliography Andrews, Max. A Dark Spot of Exasperation: From Smithson to The Spime. Robert Smithson Art in Continual Movement. Alauda Publications, Amsterdam, 2012. Barr, Marlene, S. Future Females: A Critical Anthology. Bowling Green, Ohio : Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981 1981 Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction. Cambridge University Press. 1983. Bogost, Ian, Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. University of Minnesota Press. 2011 Clark, Lygia.The Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Lygia Clark, Barcelona, 1998, Crinson and Zimmerman, Neo‐avant‐garde and Postmodern; Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, Yale Press. 2010 Cull, Laura. Paying Attention, Participating in the Whole, Allan Kaprow alongside Lygia Clark. Theatres of Immanence, Deleuze and the ethics of Performance. Palgrave MacMillan. December 2012. DeBeauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. History, Part 2. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1952. Falconer, Morgan. From Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press. 2009. http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=2486 Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto”. In Cyborgs, Simians and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Kunzru, Hari.”You are Cyborg; For Donna Haraway , we are already assimilated.” Wired Magazine. Issue 5.02. February 1997 20 Pique, Pascal. The Invisible In The Art of Jessica Stockholder. Wide Eyes Smeared Here Dear. Musee d‟Art Moderne Saint‐Etienne Metropole. 2012 Popova, Maria.http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/19/diane‐ackerman‐ the‐planets‐a‐cosmic‐pastoral/ Scranton, Roy. Learning How To Die in The Anthropocene, New York Times http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning‐how‐to‐die‐in‐the‐ anthropocene/?_r=2 Sennett, Richard. Part One: The Crafstman, Material Consciousness. The Craftsman. Yale University Press. 2008. Simon, Joshua. Neo‐Materialism, Part I: The Commodity and the Exhibition. e‐flux November 2010. http://www.e‐flux.com/journal/neo‐materialism‐part‐one‐the‐commodity‐and‐the‐ exhibition/ Simon, Joshua, Neomaterialism. A blog run by Joshua Simon. (http://neomaterialism.tumblr.com/) Siegel, Katy. Worlds With Us. The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics and Culture. July 15, 2013 Sky, Alison, Entropy Made Visible: An Interview. 1973 http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/entropy.htm Smithson, Robert. A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. Art Forum, December, 1967. Wall, Jeff. Depiction, Object, Event. Hermeslezing, Hermes Lecture. 2006. http://www.hermeslezing.nl/hermeslezing2006_eng.pdf Warhol, Andy. 6 Work.The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. From A to B and Back Again). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. 21