Paul O’Kane August 2004
“The weakness of the epistemology of the 18th and 19th centuries was that it based itself purely upon a narrow formulation of sense perception. Also, among the various modes of sensation, visual experience was picked out as the typical example. The result was to exclude all the really fundamental factors constituting our experience.”
(A.N. Whitehead Nature and Life Cambridge 1934 p. 83)
haecceity
\H[ae]c*ce`i*ty\, [L. h[ae]cce this.] (Logic) Literally, this-ness. A scholastic
term to express individuality or singleness; as, this book.
haecceity
n : the essence that makes something the kind of thing it is and makes it
different from any other.
(Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary.)
When I phoned ‘S’ one day in 1995 and asked what he’d done
that day he said ‘taken a photograph’, ‘of what’ I
asked, ‘of the moment it started to rain’ he replied. S was always
well ahead, cruising through ‘Logic of Sense’ when most of us
were negotiating Baudrillard, Benjamin and T.J. Clark, but his temporal logic,
whereby we must use a camera not to record a particular place or object but
primarily an event, a moment that renders visual content almost arbitrary,
was perhaps illustrative of a whole generation’s mind-set.
About 6 year’s before that phone call I’d been discouraged from life-drawing classes, just as I had once been withdrawn from Maths for drawing all over my desk, but this time it was for using car paints on bin bags instead of charcoal on fine papers. The results were literally flaky and so became fleeting moments of expression rather than considered constructions of seeing proudly crafted for posterity. My bad attitude was partly endorsed and inspired by a certain immediacy in Hip Hop, Haring and Basquiat, a few of the redeeming features of a 1980s that seemed to have driven a lot of us mad.
It was only during that decade that the word ‘paranoia’ became truly common currency and not just the vocabulary of doctors and hippies. Meanwhile we all mal-adjusted to the no-alternative, no safety net Reaganomic individualism and athletic consumerism, while reluctantly giving up the ghosts of 70s isms that had edged capitalism’s brutal highway with a verge of grass-roots hope and humanism.
When I finally interviewed for BA as a mature art student hoping to rescue some shreds of soul from that rampant aggression, I recall the tutor holding up my ephemeral experiments as their figures literally peeled away from their grounds, and saying sarcastically ‘what’s this then, yesterday’s painting?’
Of course he was right, that I had been more interested in moments than images, and I certainly had no sympathy at that barbaric stage with any art of museums or history, but what he didn’t understand was that I was in a hurry and that art had to come and go in a flash for me. In a subsequent dissertation, written in a 24-hour gush, I announced my method as ‘writing the way you would if the cops were after you’.
Art in London, post 1987, had to be an art in sneakers, and Hip Hop, Haring,
Basquiat -but also T.J. Clark - would eventually allow me to justify my hurried
and volcanic frame of mind. Basquiat, by his frenzied painting that even
appeared on his refrigerator door like there was no tomorrow, no breakfast
even! Meanwhile, T.J. Clark suggested that an artist like Courbet, Daumier
or Manet could confirm Baudelaire’s call to capture the rush and tear
of modern life in all its rumbustious effervescence. Impressionists were
seen to have left well-planned history paintings and fruity nudes behind
for the wild world of street, crowd and demi-monde and to have thereby captured
the nervous impulse of all those either in flight from the Haussmanian tsunami
or riding its wave. At the end of the 1980s, where we saw ‘Haussman’ we
read ‘Thatcher’ or ‘Reagan’ and that was exactly
what Clark intended.
Paul O’Kane ‘No Cure’ 1992
During my degree (1991-3) I made large wall signs around the college’s shared spaces that lasted for a day or a week and operated as a cross between Weiner, Haring, Advertising, and Derridean or Joycean wordplays. These aimed to transform the institutional environment while making political or philosophical points and competing –like Holzer and Kruger- with the big bad capitalist sign machine.
I also made a photograph of myself at this time holding up a small black sign with the words ‘Last Piece’ chalked on it. This shows the degree to which I was involved in ideas rather than objects or images, but more importantly that I was self-consciously documenting my own ephemerality, biography, and the historical presumptions of a practice, oeuvre, career etc. Kris and Kurz’s notion of ‘Enacted Biography’ had impressed me.
But the idea of recording the event of an idea, as a minimum material practice must have frustrated me as something still too petty and proud and which prescribed and predicted certain historical values. The questions I next asked were: ‘why is the document important?’, ‘why document this event rather than any other?’ and ‘which of my acts constitute art?’ etc. Prompted by these questions, soon after graduating I unwittingly pre-empted Michael Landy by placing my entire archive of objects, images and documents, along with everything else I owned, into a skip during the course of a night.
It wasn’t until the post-BA, pre MA years (1993-1999) that I ever came to experience anything like falling-in-step with myself, or matching pace with myself. To do this however, I had to live like a hermit, away from the turbulence of others’ needs of me and images of me, while slowly boiling art down to its barest bones to see how it worked, how I worked and what, if anything, art and me could do for each other.
My newly aristocratic and anachronistic pace could only be achieved via
strategically sustained unemployment, interspersed with un-strategically
hellish temporary jobs that levelled out each financial tailspin. Pace, I
realised, was everything, and here I began to coincide with a Deleuzian and
Bergsonian understanding of qualitative temporality and a way of understanding
art, the world, and myself in terms of speeds rather than forms.
Paul O’Kane ‘Papers’ 1995-6 Photograph
I introduced a more considerate form of documentation with a medium format
camera who’s larger negative seemed to care more for the light oozing
into it. More and more, the work became valued as event, and, as the studio
was part of my flat, art and life quickly fused and my work often arose from
whatever daily life produced, requiring little more than a moment of re-framed
perception to be recorded as art. Hence the portfolio of this period contains
images of washing-up, towers of newspapers, a meditation on the landlord’s
furniture.
Paul O’Kane ‘SATORI’ 1995 Photograph
I was so wrapped-up in what I now call ‘eventhood’ that I also
have images from this time of home-made bread with the words ‘First
Loaf’ written beneath it – a kind of corollary to ‘Last
Piece’ which showed I’d moved on from the arch conceptualism
of the college laboratory at least as far as a heightened perception of kitchen
life.
Paul O’Kane ‘First Loaf’ 1994 Photograph
There’s also a photograph of a coffee machine brewing, a telephone handset and a packed bag by a door, and this is evidence of a concurrent obsession with the profundities and intensities underlying the most ordinary events, like ‘how do we make a decision?’ a decision such as ‘should I stay or go?’ and at what precise moment is a decision made, can you map it? Are you in it or outside it? Is it measurable? Photography grants us the illusion of being outside the event and thereby becomes a crude sign of Representation itself. It misleads us into believing we know by seeing, but can photography really record an event? Can events be visible? Don’t they precisely elude Representation, anticipating and mourning themselves while never coming to light? Is it possible to record with a camera a feeling of Satori by which the experience of light seems qualitatively transformed? Where should you point the camera to record this? -perhaps only at ‘the moment it started to rain’?
Paul O’Kane 1995 ‘Decision’ Photograph
The mind investigating its temporality soon becomes semi-detached; the frame of Representation is not that of paper, canvas or the camera but of the event. When does the event begin and end? becomes the difficult and perhaps impossible question as we attempt to apply spatial logic to elusive temporality. Intuition and fortune later led me through Deleuze to Bergson and Whitehead to begin answering these questions.
During my 6 years of Robinson Crusoe-like life cast away at the top of a house on the top of Brixton hill (1993-99) I wrote a mental monologue of a man contemplating the back of a ticking clock while procrastinating about the immediate future. But this was only a fraction of a large portfolio of prose which took the form of detailed descriptions of events detached from any contextualising narrative, and some things like poetry that listed events as a barrage of urban experiences who’s proximity couldn’t be accorded a taxonomy or justified even as a Dadaist assemblage. A traditional Historian might call these works juvenilia but we can no longer make such hierarchical judgements about elements of an oeuvre based on their place in a temporal procession. The event is a great equaliser, valuing only difference, while maturity and achievement can never award us the innocence or naiveté we cherish in our early works. Indeed, it is a kind of child we aspire to as an ideal.
Mine was a Proustian mind, ‘in search of itself’, while admiring that of the itinerant Haiku poets I was discovering in Japanese literature. It was also the mind of a person for whom nothing could be adequately or justifiably managed, evaluated or pinned-down. My writings were illustrations of a Deleuzian mind that kept the faith by replacing the word ‘is’ with the word ‘and’, thereby transmitting ‘a life’ only as event, constituted as events, within events, and thereby enjoying an untimely and disoriented everyday.
When the girls planted
The last rice-seed,
I stepped from willow’s shade.
Basho
It wasn’t until I came down from my ‘Zarathustraan’ mountain and re-joined ‘the herd’ that I consolidated my vocabulary of eventhood by which these practises are now described. My existing interest in Deleuze was fed by Goldsmiths Art History MA but it wasn’t until I met Howard Caygill that the importance of the event in Deleuze became apparent. He pointed me to certain very helpful words that I have since often used in lectures and writing: “We wonder what makes the individuality of an event, a life, a season, a battle, 5 o’clock …” which still move me as I read them and as they equate a life with these other events and thereby dissipate habitual notions of subjecthood – “are we not such (ha)ecceities rather than egos?” Deleuze goes on to say.
(Gilles Deleuze A Philosophical Concept - in Who Comes After the Subject? Ed. Cavafy Routledge –N.B, This statement is repeated and greatly expanded in the Becomings chapter of 1,000 Plateaus)
If their has been an undeniable ‘mystic’, ‘blowing through’ experience,
a ‘mystic’ that sustains the purpose of searching, and if ideas
of soul or spirit are anachronistic and vague, nevertheless a question of
Representation lies at the heart of an artist’s direction and motivation
even if it be the question of how to move beyond Representation, and the
aspect of experience which taunts the ambitions of Representation is temporality,
that which evaporates like perfume as its raison d’etre, that which
can’t be named like Heraclitus’ river. And here, for me, perhaps
lies the continuing mystic in art and in the art or image of thought, lies
its challenge and frustration, its goal and its blind spot.
Deleuze created the right ‘way’ to avoid linguistic rhetoric, bodily discourse and phenomenological conundra and pull physics and metaphysics into the Heraclitan river of nameless change barely Represented by his rigorous vocabulary of ‘event’, ‘difference’, repetition’ and ‘sense’.
The mystic of experience is the ‘transcendental empiricism’ that
knows a life as a jet trail dissipating in an immanent sky. We are events
within events, constituted of events, no I-dentity necessary, bodies pulse
and flow, warm and cool, never re-cognisable as fixed forms but only as tendencies
and differences. Subject-Object problems dissolve into shared eventhood,
events enfold others, grow out of others, Lucio Fontana in a clean shirt
hovers over the canvas, razor in hand, Richard Long goes for a walk, the
Impressionists and Gerhardt Richter celebrate life’s blur, Sarah Sze
or Tomoko Takahashi provide eruptions of readymades read only as contingent
events, performers demand our attention, steal our priceless presence, Brecht
interrupts, the waiting room becomes an appointment, Psycho is stretched
to 24 hours,
At the back of the bus
young girls talk noisily
about dying, I visit the graves of Baudelaire, Wilde, Tzara and Beckett on
the day my niece (named ‘Destiny’) is born, the list is literally
endless, countless, as an experience that substitutes ‘and’ for ‘is’ becomes
a list, a crooked, wayward list …
About 1999 -about the same time I began studying at Goldsmiths- I began teaching at Camberwell college and slipped my favourite Deleuzian refrains into my lectures and tutorials whenever possible hoping they would find fertile responses. In the Sculpture department we discussed ‘becomings’ in relation to process and statuary, and tried to work out how eventhood might inform the discipline’s traditional vocabulary of ‘Objecthood’ and ‘Field’.
A reassertion of Performance was taking place around us, which also inevitably
led to its own valuation of the artwork as event. To assist the confusion
I coined the term ‘Sculperformature’ and looked at examples of
ways in which sculpture had married eventhood or performance, seeing diverse
examples in Kaprow, Beuys, Wurm, Diepens, Nelson, Signer, Hammons etc. (to
name but a few I presently recall).
‘
No Sky’ 2002 with Carina Thorén, Richard Moon, Mark McGowan,
Simon Ould, Amy Sharrocks, Hannah Whitehall, Susan Finlay, Pascale Berthier
and others.
Sculperformature meanwhile achieved a high point in a dissertation that
I supervised wherein student Owen Bullet attempted to debate the object-become-event
by using Bergson to argue with Fried the same student scored a degree show
hit with a tense sculpture sprung between its objecthood and eventhood.
I also helped to design artworks as what I later called ‘Collaborative
Public Events’ and these included ‘Silent Seminar’, ‘Dear
Dad’ (letter writing to absent authority), ‘Here and Now’,
and perhaps most successfully, encouraged the students to think not only
in terms of event but of plural economies. This project turned a prestigious
institutional space into a kind of bazaar. Tutors Trish Lyons, Michael Gillespie,
Claudia Wegner, and students Talia Hoch, Kate Lane and others mentioned in
the captions all inspired, motivated and shaped these events.
‘
No Sky’ 2002
These college-based events were followed by public events in the wider world
which included ‘No Sky’ (a march on the local council to protest
about the size of the sky), and ‘ Sunflower’ (the adorning of
a windmill in a zone about to be gentrified with an enormous motif made from ‘Loot’ and ‘Financial
Times’ newspapers.), and, more recently, ‘Is God Under The Table’ (a
human- powered walking conference-table parodying the sedentary and pompous
tendencies of academic procedure upon the inauguration of a new university).
Above- ‘Sunflower’ 2002 with Amy Sharrocks, Alexia Synodinou,
Thomas Poblette, Hannah Whitehall and others. Below- ‘Is God Under
The Table?’ 2004 with Simon Ould, Bada Song, Alexia Synodinou and
Amy Sharrocks.
‘
Is God Under The Table?’ 2004
Meanwhile, I began -again with Howard Caygill’s help- to dig behind the assemblage of Deleuze and study Nietzsche, Bergson and Whitehead, each of whom help to introduce plurality, nuance and finesse into temporal thought. I’m currently moving into third year M.Phil/PhD and this year continuing to map the history of the idea of the event.
Conclusion
People gather around the dead man;
No clouds in the sky.
Santoka
It’s disconcerting to find a personal passion erupting as a popular debate around you, but this is the perennial problem of any practice or research and perhaps the curse of every PhD project. At best, it perhaps shows that you are interested in what is interesting about your ‘interesting times’. Presently. the word ‘event’ is threatened with drowning in its own echoes and being repeated until it becomes emptied of meaning. But even if that is so, I still cherish that first confirming encounter with Deleuze when I was able to better understand my temporal investigations of art and self in terms of eventhood, but I also value another encounter when -again, Howard Caygill- made an incisive reading of Whitehead to point out that for Whitehead what is important is not just that events ‘happen’ –hence their fascination for performance, exhibition etc. - but that they ‘perish’. That is, we should always question the automatic positivity we award to eventhood and acknowledge that the event is mapped and ‘known’ only by its passing. Here perhaps lies the crux of the need to dethrone Re-presentation. Invited to take part in a November show debating events I recalled Howard Caygill’s point and requested that we change the title of the month and the show to ‘Yesvember’ to ensure we always considered at least two sides of the event’s currency.
The event must always evade objective knowledge, it would be ludicrous to enumerate the event or to organise events into a taxonomy, hence it remains identified as singular for each heccaeitie, each differential, experiencing event (we might even substitute an ‘e’ for an ‘I’ when speaking of our experience as event). The two encounters described above, in Deleuze and Whitehead, presently map the event for me as the ecstasy of its confirmation and the melancholy of its inevitable perishing -both in itself and by cultural exploitation.
Since sketching the foregoing biographic essay for inclusion in the ‘Yesvember’ book, I have been teaching modern art history and re-reading familiar territory in terms of eventhood. This leads me to close by clarifying that what remains most stimulating for me about the event can be described by comparison with the Zen conception of Satori, in that once we understand experience comprehensively in terms of eventhood, both everything and nothing has changed. We are significantly enlightened and yet the very universalism of the term finds no position, place, resistance or form by which or from which to appreciate this transformation. And so, as in Zen’s Satori, we have to content ourselves with a profound and yet entirely elusive revaluation. The event is therefore a peaceful apocalypse, a weapon of mass instruction that has rippled through everything and left it intact. It is therefore, above all, an epistemological revolution.
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