While we may think of language and philosophy as tools for
interpreting art, Elizabeth Grosz observes in Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze
and the Framing of the Earth that
philosophy and art stem from the same drive to form cohesion and consistency
from “chaos,” or what Grosz calls “not…absolute disorder but rather…a plethora
of orders, forms, wills—forces that cannot be distinguished or differentiated
from each other” (5). Just as art
is described as an action that regulates and organizes its own materials (4),
the organization of the world’s “chaos” is also looked at as an activity to
make order of nature’s uncontrollability.
When we look at what makes up our cultures, we can see that they are often defined by their
different arts – style of dress, cuisine, architecture, music, literature, and
of course art – which we then try to explain or give reason for with
philosophy, so it makes sense then that Grosz examines the very specific forces
by which cultural formation is enacted, beginning with “framing” or the
creation of territory.
When a culture forms, its formation is most likely to occur
within some kind of boundary. No
culture that I know of has ever formed over vast distances spanning continents
and oceans. Since we feel the urge
to organize our space, it is logical for us to form boundaries of living space,
constructing frames and territories that provide a specific terrain on which
sensation can have significance and “meaning.” Thus, by constructing the space around us into a more
workable and familiar frame, we make order out of chaos. To create a territory is to create a
set of constraints and rules: “Territory frames chaos provisionally, and in the
process produces extractable qualities, which become the materials and formal
structures of art” (16). Grosz
goes on to point out that while we all construct our spaces for the same
reasons, “each form of life, and each cultural form, undertakes its own modes
of organization, its own connections of body and earth, its own modes of
management of intractable problems that impose themselves on the living”
(16). Problems is right.
According to Grosz, art elevates and generates new
sensation, while at the same time both territorializing and de-territorializing its framed chaos, letting the chaos
be both free and ordered: “There can be no art without the materials of art,
but the artistic is an eruption, a leap out of materiality, the kick of
virtuality now put into and extracted from matter to make it function
unpredictably. Sensations,
artworks, do not signify or represent…they assemble, they make, they do, they
produce” (75). She makes art sound
unlimited, like there are no
boundaries when it comes to art and its sensations, saying, “Art is that which
brings sensations into being when before it there were only subjects, objects,
and the relations of immersion that bind the one to the other” (75). However, didn’t she begin the book by
showing how art is born out of boundaries? If the artistic is truly
an “eruption, a leap out of materiality,” it is a contained one. We are strongly subjected to our own
cultures. I can try and be as
worldly as I can, exploring the world and observing, learning, even living
other people’s ways of life, criss-crossing through boundaries all day long,
but at the end of it all, I am still in some way restricted in my creativity by
my culture(s). Boundaries organize
chaos, create culture, and allow for the production of art, but even though we
can see now how territory is important to artistic creation, we must still
recognize that a boundary, a territory, is a limit, and it limits everything that occurs within it, including the
sensations and artworks it produces.
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