Completed Painting: 'Territory [Lateral Flow]'

 

'Territory [Lateral Flow]', Acrylic on Panel, 100 cm x 100 cm, 2022

A recently-completed piece of work.  Here are some points to consider:

• The first piece of physical work after a moderate period of reflection/a reminder of the simple pleasures of 'making'.

• Certain continuities of approach prevail [conscious method/many metres of masking tape deployed].

• 'Pure' painting [physical medium/application].

• A possible portal to subject/sub_ject-ivity [realised within a non-expressionistic mode].

• A tension between [a form of] photo-realism/synthesised abstraction [formal].

• A modest [conscious] expansion in scale.

• Philosophical grounding .

• Cartography re_set.

• New ways to access source imagery [mediation = key].

• Repeated visits in space/time encapsulated [actual/virtual].

• Imagery nested/layers acknowledged/locations pin_pointed [over_lay].

• Site-specificity within the drift.

• Zone of trans_formation.

• Local[e].

• A tangent/side-step/run-off [lateral movement].

• Rhizome junctures [ghost trains/lines of flight].

• Inter_ruptions in the flow [pause for thought].

• Stratified space/vacancies en_closed.

• De/Re_territorialization.

• Change in elevation [implied]: via_duct/cause_way/the ramp.

• Death adjacent [with dignity].

• This is/was the place [time-coded].

"A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines... Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome." [1.]

"The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation." [2.]

"One of the basic situationist practices in the derive, a technique of rapid passage through various ambiences. Derives involve playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll... 

"In a derive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain, and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a derive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

"But the derive includes both this letting-go, and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities." [3.]





[1.] & [2.]: Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, 'A Thousand Plateaus' (Trans. Brian Massumi), London/NYC/Dublin, Bloomsbury Academic, 1988/2004

[3.]: Guy Debord, 'Theory of the Derive', (Trans. Ken Knabb) Paris, 'Situationist International #2', 1958

Deleuzeian Diversion 4/Liver_Pool 02

Liverpool Docks, January 2022

"There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome.  These lines always tie back to one another.  That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and bad.  You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify evrything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject - anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions.  Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystalize." [1.]

 

"Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor." [2.]

Central Liverpool, January 2022

"Lines of flight, for their part, never consist in running away from the world but rather in creative runoffs, as when you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system that does not leak from all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid in order to seal the lines of flight.  There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic about a line of flight.  There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among animals and humans." [3.]

Liverpool Docks, January 2022

[1.], [2.], [3.]:  Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, 'A Thousand Plateaus' (Trans. Brian Massumi), London/NYC/Dublin, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021/1988

Deleuzeian Diversion 3 (Fortress)

 

All Images: West Leicester, November 2021

"...the State never ceases to decompose, recompose, and transform movement, or to regulate speed.  The State as town surveyor, convertor, or highway interchange: the role of the engineer from this point of view.  Speed and absolute movement are not without their laws, but they are the laws of the nomos, of the smooth space that deploys it, of the war machine that populates it.  If the nomads formed the war machine, it was by inventing absolute speed, by being 'synonymous' with speed.  And each time there is an operation against the State - insubordination, rioting, guerilla warfare, or revolution as act - it can be said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space or a manner of being in space as though it were smooth [...]  It is in this sense that the response of the State against all that threatens to move beyond is to striate space.  The State does not appropriate the war machine without giving even it the form of relative movement: this was the case with the model of the fortress as a regulator of movement, which was precisely the obstacles the nomads came up against, the stumbling block and parry by which absolute vortical movement was broken." [1.]

[1.]:  Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, 'A Thousand Plateaus' (Trans. Brian Massumi), Chapter 12, '1227: 'Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine', London/NYC/Dublin, Bloomsbury Academic, 1988/2021

Deleuzeian Diversion 2

 

Both Images: West Leicester, November 2021

"Discover the territorial assemblages of someone, human or animal: 'home.'  The territory is made of decoded fragments of all kinds, which are borrowed from the milieus but then assume the value of 'properties': even rhythms take on a new meaning (refrains).  The territory makes the assemblage.  The territory is more than the organism and the milieu, and the relation between the two; that is why the assemblage goes beyond mere 'behavior' (hence the importance of the relative distinction between territorial animals and milieu animals." [1.]

[1.]:  Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, 'A Thousand Plateaus', London/NYC/Dublin, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 (First Pub. 1988).