Territory as a Limit to Unlimited Artistic Creation

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.