#simon o'sullivan

art practice as fictioning (or, myth-science)

simon o'sullivan

Place: Platform Arts Gallery, 1 Queen St, Belfast, Northern Ireland, BT1 6EA

Contact: [email protected]

Time & Date: 6pm, Wednesday 7th February 2018

Weblink: http://www.simonosullivan.net/articles/art-practice-as-fictioning-or-myth-science.pdf

For the first introductory session of T I P we shall be reading Simon O’Sullivan’s essay “Art Practice as Fictioning (or Myth Science)”. In this essay, O’Sullivan advocates the speculative potency of artistic practices, where bodies, matter, and identities gain autonomy from “the-world-as-it-is” and diverts dominant coding.

Bio:   Simon O’Sullivan is a theorist and artist working at the intersection of contemporary art practice, performance and continental philosophy. He has published two monographs with Palgrave Macmillan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (2005) and On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (2012), and is the editor, with Stephen Zepke, of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). His collaborative art practice – with David Burrows and others – comes under the name Plastique Fantastique, a ‘performance fiction’ that involves an investigation into aesthetics, subjectivity, the sacred, popular culture and politics produced through, performance, film and sound work, comics, text, installations and assemblages. Plastique Fantastique have performed and exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and are represented by IMT Gallery in London. O’Sullivan is currently working on a collaborative volume of writings, with Burrows, on Mythopoesis–Myth-Science–Mythotechnesis: Fictioning and the Posthuman in Contemporary Art. 

http://www.simonosullivan.net/

(http://www.plastiquefantastique.org/index.html)

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A typical critique, increasingly made, of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics is that it substitutes a general model of “conviviality” for any criticality, or, more specifically, forms of dissent. My take on this (following Jean-Francois Lyotard) is that such dissent – which critiques of relational aesthetics take as the very modus operandi of a radical contemporary art practice - can be caught by the very thing they dissent from. They are forced to operate on the same terrain as their “enemy” and, as such, these forms of dissent can merely reproduce more of the same albeit dressed up as opposition.

A different take on Bourriaud might be to accelerate his concepts. For example, to articulate, following Spinoza, a kind of super-conviviality that is do with productive joyful encounters that occur when two or more things come together in a relationship of general agreement (this could be an art practice and participant, a collaboration, etc.). This is not to foreground a liberal ideology of consensus - Spinoza’s “joy” is not “happiness” in the sense of an individual ego-state or set of values - but it is to choose affirmation over negation and to understand the former as the basic building blocks for an ethical life and a political ontology - this being the argument of Spinoza’s Ethics and his other more political writings. In passing, it is worth noting that Félix Guattari’s ecosophic paradigm, especially as it is mapped out in his future-orientated book, Chaosmosis, has much in common with Spinoza’s Ethics in that it moves precisely towards this expanded chemistry of subjectivity. “Artistic anthropology” as a name for “novel models” for thinking art practice would do well to attend to this more molecular “relationality and connectivity”, or what we might call simply a register of becoming. This is an ethico- aesthetic model for life as well as art – and for “life as a work of art” (as both Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze portrayed it). Another name for this, following Deleuze and Guattari, is schizoanalysis. Without doubt such practices are occurring all around us; equally without doubt the majority are invisible to an art world and market that trades on atomized and competitive individualism - however, this might be dressed up as “relational”, “participatory”, and so forth.