(on) diffracting

(ON)

DIFFRACTING

Written by: Liza Prins

Supervised by: Miriam van Rijsingen Master Artistic Research

University of Amsterdam

C O N T E N T S

INTRODUCTORY

:

Desires and hopes 9

Methods and structure 10

Three chapters 10

Cases and literature 11

ONE

:

Untitled: Dock 13

Introducing the performative installation 14

Performativity’s transformative moments 15

How works of art come to matter 19

Do artworks die? or Phyllida Barlow vs. the otsuka museum of art 24

TWO

:

Objectivity 28

Knowing subjects in agential realism 30

No more god tricks: towards a Situated and partial perspective 31

“jennifer tee” 35

Reconfiguring space/the installation 39

THREE:

Wandering, straying, writing Tee’s univerese 43

Apparatuses 45

Time and ethics 47

Star crossed lovers: the academia and the artist 48

Star crossed lovers: Bologna 50

Star crossed lovers: exegesis-practice relation in the work of Stephen Goddard 51

A performative research paradigm 53

AFTERWORD(S) 57

Re-turning 58

Diffractions 60

I N T R O D U C T O R Y

L E T M E T E L L Y O U A B O U T

D I F F R A C T I O N ( S )

With her book The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti offers a profound investigation in what she describes as the posthuman predicament, of living in a time in which (human) subjectivity is radically re-conceptualized and non-human entities are increasingly granted their own form of agency. She makes clear that we need to think beyond humanist limitations and not eschew the risks that a process of becoming-other2 _{might bring.}

After three chapters that map the breaks with individualism and human exceptionalism, both implied by a posthuman turn, Braidotti devotes one chapter to theory and methodology. As the quote above illustrates, Braidotti is looking for a non-linear method, a (Deleuzian) rhizomatic style of thought that can map the connections and interactions that posthuman subjects engage in.3

Braidotti is not alone in her quest for new methods, that are suitable for a time in which it turns out that ‘the autonomous individual’ was a myth and the human subjectivity is instead reinterpreted as an interconnected, multi-layered and complex entity, that is always extremely indebted to the many ‘others’ of this world. One of the first theorists to call for new ways of understanding the relationality of humans and other entities, was Donna Haraway. For her “theory is bodily, and theory is literal. Theory is not about matters distant from the lived body; quite the opposite. Theory is anything but disembodied.”4 _{As early as}

1992, she calls for diffractive (as opposed to reflective) academic practices, “as a tool for feminist research into the material-semiotic reality of technoscience”5_{. Haraway explains diffraction as a mapping exercise that}

1 _{Braidotti 2013:165}

2 _{The terms ‘other’, ‘otherness’ and ‘othering’ are often used in post-structuralist, feminist and postcolonial discourse to refer to a}

process that centralises a normative identity (the self) to contrast it to the identities of the ones that do not conform the norms of a given society (i.a. women, persons of colour, people with disabilities, people with non-normative sexual preferences or sexualities, but also animals and other non-human entities), while privileging the former group. The posthuman turn that Braidotti describes revolves around discontinuance of such divides. According to Braidotti subjectivity is not given, but concerns instead a continuous process in which diverse human and non-human entities are entangled and therefore the other is always already implied by the self. There is no distinction to be made and neutral identities do not exist.

3 _{Braidotti 2013} 4 _{Haraway 1992:299} 5 _{Van der Tuin 2014:234}

makes visible the (personal) interference patterns, that insights from different practices, embodied positions, schools of thought or even disciplines can induce together. In this way, a diffractive methodology can account for what she calls the situated knowledge of the researcher.6

Haraway’s notion of diffraction gets special attention in and is further developed through the ideas of Karen Barad. Barad works out a theory in which the idea of posthuman performativity7 _{of matter becomes}

essential. Through the insights she has gained from her backgrounds in quantum physics and feminist studies, Barad creates a theoretical framework that helps to account for the active role that matter (in her case electrons) plays in the formation of discourse. For Barad, the physical phenomenon of diffraction8 _is

“an apt metaphor for describing the methodological approach […] of reading insights through9 _{one another}

in attending to and responding to the details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter”10_{. Diffraction, therefore, entails a reworking of the (material and theoretical) elements it touches; It}

is attuned to differences. However, a diffraction pattern does not simple show where differences are present “but rather maps where the effects of difference appear”11_{. This means that a diffractive strategy should show}

where difference is differing; It should be performative.

As an artist, I have learned a lot through the materials and the processes that have led to works as well as through the artistic practices around me. The agential character that matter acquires in Barad’s ideas, cannot be denied in connection to the constitution of my own thoughts. The way I think about the relations between matter and meaning, human and non-human, organic and inorganic is undeniably influenced by my experiences as a maker. Moreover, the installations I have been creating often depend on a form of

reading certain elements through others, or in other words: on diffraction patterns; Through my works I wish

to create a platform on which the -or my- differential sources and interests can come together and enter into a conversation, so I can investigate the performative interactions they engender together. Hence, I came to the belief that there are many similarities between an (academic) method of diffraction and certain artistic practices. This thesis will explore the resonances between diffraction and certain artistic working methods, while it will also argue that practitioners have developed a special sensitivity in responding to and analyzing the differences, or diffractions, that are engendered in their work. Through their practices artists have developed a special attentiveness to diffractions in material processes and this is why I am convinced it is important that a method of diffraction is not only formed by academics, but also by those with tangible practices.

6 _{Harraway 1988: 575-599.}

7 _{This is the title of an important essay by Barad published in 2003 in Signs} 8 _{See images 5 and 6 https://pottery.hotglue.me/}

9 _{My emphasis} 10 _{Barad 2007:71} 11 _{Haraway 1992:300}

I do not think it is a complete coincidence that I, as an artistic researcher, am interested in formulating a diffractive methodological approach. First of all, the interaction between academia and the arts may indeed turn out to be very important in the formation of such a method. But secondly and maybe more importantly, this very interaction between academic research and artistic practice in many praxis of artistic research might very well be diffractive in itself.

DESIRES AND HOPES

Through this text, I hope to develop a convincing (artistic) reworking of Barad’s method of diffraction, that does not only take artistic practices seriously as knowledge producing enterprises, but that can also bring their performative workings into an academic thesis. I would also like to expand on the question of why the development of a diffractive research paradigm is necessary in a post human era and how artistic research specifically might play a part in this process.

Since I came to this project through my practice as an installation artist specifically, I want to speak from this (situated) perspective: The installation format will be given special attention. However, I do not wish to formulate a general theory that will both exclude other art-forms and essentialize the installation format.12 _{I think such a quest would eventually contradict the theoretical framework indicated before, since}

I fear it would be insufficiently attentive to the subtle differences between (installation) practices and their differential developments and therefore it will not suffice in obtaining a critical situatedness, that I seek to practice.

I want to focus instead on the diffractive movements in specific practices, while trying to generate a parallel motion in their written accounts. I will focus on certain practices that are in my opinion telling actualizations of different elements of diffraction. Moreover, they account for my own process as I am finding my way through diffraction; they account for how I came to certain insights. This does not make them the best or only examples, but it makes them part of my personal diffraction pattern and therefore the best cases for this thesis. I am aware of the fact that they remain inside of a western art canon, and that I could have strived to be more inclusive. But such an inclusion would not have been sincere. I do not rule out non-western practices to influence my ideas at some point, on the contrary13_{, but it is important to me}

to try to present my personal interference pattern(s) and account for the sources and practices that have been forming my thought.

12 _{Although I admire the work that has been done on the installation format in an art-theoretical context, by among others Claire}

Bishop, I am criticizing the general statements that these investigations make.

METHODS AND STRUCTURE

Every chapter of this thesis will unfold itself around an important element of diffraction, as theorized by either Haraway or Barad. These theoretical accounts will be placed into conversation with actual material practices as well as with other connections that have been unfolding from my perspective of an installation artist as well as from that of an artistic researcher. In other words, I will read Barad/Haraway through my experiences with (installation) art and artistic research; they will (hopefully) diffract together. The chapters will be interrelated, but they will not necessarily follow a linear logic or work up to one conclusion. I employ such a construction, because I wish to move away from a single narrative towards a multilayered story with overlapping fields, towards a diffraction pattern indeed. You might think that presenting these overlapping fields into relation to one another, is still giving a conclusion in some ways. I want to stress, however, that the chapters are only placed together provisionally. They do not form an order that cannot be disturbed or re-worked. In the words of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s words: “one is constantly confronted with unsolvable questions: thus it has become a choice between not making a choice, on the one hand, not producing a concept, acting from a position of withdrawal; or, on the other hand, making a choice that one know will also partially and inevitably ‘wrong’. The suspension of judgement is not a closure it opens up a space for the propositional.”14

The propositional character of this thesis will rest in the choice to not follow the linear logic of solving one unambiguous question, but instead discuss different aspects of a question on their own terms. The partially and inevitably ‘wrong’ answer lies in the bringing together of these aspects, even though I already made clear that this concerns a temporary connection.

THREE CHAPTERS

The first chapter of this text will focus on the performativity of matter and its consequences. I think it is very important to provide with this part a foundation for an understanding of Barad’s philosophical framework, in which matter receives an active and performative role. Such an understanding will elucidate why performative methods like diffraction are necessary and how they move parallel to the material phenomena in the world around us. Also, this first chapter will thoroughly examine my personal experiences with a specific installation of Phyllida Barlow. Her work especially made me understand that matter is more than a mute substance; that it is actually an agential factor in many phenomena. I will try my best to communicate this experiential knowledge while connecting it to my interest in Barad’s theoretical accounts.

The second chapter will revolve around Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge. It will draw on the practice of Jennifer Tee to present an actualization of Haraway’s concept, while it will also pay attention to

the specific (material and immaterial) techniques that Tee’s installations employ in order to account for the entangled -but partial- perspectives that have formed her work.

The third chapter, in many ways follows from the second, although it is in many other ways a significant deviation on it. It will focus on the situated perspectives that artists can bring into academia and how attempts to actualize artistic methods in written work, might be extremely valuable for the construction of performative methodologies, like diffraction. It will present the practice of Stephen Goddard as an instance in which artistic practice and writing crossed influenced each-other in beneficial and performative ways. This chapter will probably be the most ethical of all, even though distinctions between ontology, epistemology and ethics will be hard to draw.15

Between the different chapters of this thesis there will be overlaps, repetitions, points where conceptual and/or material strands meet. But also, differences, changes or little paradoxes in the moments where the strands part (again). Concepts are never completely stable. They diffract not only through the different theoretical and material practices that I will bring forward, but will also inevitably change through my use and replacement of them.16

CASES AND LITERATURE

With this thesis, I want to attend to the similarities between Barad’s and Haraway’s handling of the method of diffraction and certain artistic practices. Analyses of those specific practices will play an important role in showing how I came to this idea of similarity between them and a diffractive methodology. In other words, they are crucial in presenting my personal diffraction pattern. Besides, I hope that they might add valuable information and insight to Barad’s and Haraway’s somewhat more theoretical accounts.

A special exhibition in regard of diffraction, I have not addressed yet in this introduction, is dOCUMENTA(13), that took place in June until September of 2012 in Kassel. Not only did its curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, work with Barad’s ideas for the conceptual framework of the exhibition, I also think the documenta is an excellent example of diffraction actualized. However, the documenta will not function as a traditional case study, but rather its conceptual aims and material elaborations will be part of my theoretical framework. It feels as if the documenta is another kind of case-study than the personal practices –of Phyllida Barlow, Jennifer Tee and Stephen Goddard- that I will address in this text.17 _{This is not just}

15 _{This is also why Barad speaks of her research as an ethic-onto-epistemological re-interpretation.}

16 _{Gayatri Spivak’s notion of ‘ab-using’ might be very apt here. She uses it to indicate that with every (re)interpretation of}

theoretical concepts they are inevitably changed by the person (re)interpreting them. Ab-using does not so much speak about a violent misusing, but rather refers to another meaning of the latin prefix ab, namely that of a ‘motion away from’. To ab-use is to move away from. (Spivak 2012)

17 _{Although I also very much dislike the notion of the case-study for the other practices that I will discuss. I think the term does}

not suffieciently refer to their complexity and in my opinion does not account for how they played a very active role in the constitution of my thought. They are more than examples to illustrate theory. However, for the sake of explaining the differences here between the documenta and the other cases, I will use the term.

because the former is an exhibition showing works of different international artists and the latter are practices surrounding one person, but also because they respectively influenced my ideas in different ways. I have been looking at the documenta and reading Bakargiev’s accounts simultaneously with Barad’s ideas, so that they now form an entangled strand together in my diffraction pattern, that will interact with the other strands, among which material practices of Phyllida Barlow, Jennifer Tee and Stephen Goddard.

It might not come as a surprise that the most important literature will be papers, essays and other writings by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. Especially Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway will be granted a lot of attention. Besides their work, I will also be drawing on art theoretical literature on the installation format, like the work by Claire Bishop and Juliane Rebentisch. I hope this thesis will unfold to be a critical conversation between the theoretical accounts from these different disciplines as well as with the material sources that have made me excited about diffraction in the first place.

O N E

P E R F O R M A T I V E B E G I N N I N G S

All bodies, not merely "human" bodies, come to matter through the world's iterative intra-activity-its performativity. This is true not only of the surface or contours of the body but also of the body in the fullness of its physicality, including the very "atoms'' of its being. Bodies are not object with inherent boundaries and properties; they are material-discursive phenomena.18

UNTITLED: DOCK

As I enter the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain, on a cloudy day somewhere in May 2014, a strange feeling of excitement and unease creeps up on me. I can see the contours of the first pieces of the exhibition untitled:

dock by Phyllida Barlow, and somehow I already seem to know that this installation will be of great

importance in my own future works and research. A feeling of intimidation, first of all caused by the enormous size of the sculptures, is further sustained by their subtle complexities; Layers of paint, adhesive materials, color-changing processes of the wood and other traces give evidence of the aging processes that all the parts went through. Somehow I begin to wonder which bodies are more substantial in this space that I entered, the seven enormous sculptures in all their material complexity or my own embodied subjectivity? The works make me feel so little; they make me feel so inferior to them. Or maybe, it is not so much a feeling of inferiority that I experience, but instead this is the first time that I consciously question the superior position that I am used to occupy when looking at (art)objects.

Five damaged shipping containers hang from a dynamic construction of timber, constituting the piece 5hungblocks. One can still recognize them as the functional transport or storage units they once were, but their insides are painted in a pinkish color and they are filled with the debris of used styrofoam. Next to it, a 12 meters high cardboard cylinder with colored tape mimics the pillars that are part of the architecture of the Duveen Galleries. Every element in the space starts to resonates with Phyllida’s pieces. A sculpture that also incorporates a usable staircase fills the central rotunda, its rising structure a repetitious system of wooden pallets. One side of this construction is covered with an assemblage of pieces of plywood on which roughly painted geometrical shapes are showing. Another big column hoovers above the ground as if it had collapsed just a moment ago. More timber, clamping straps, polystyrene, trash bags with colored tape, offcuts, rope, fabric, plastic tubing, steel armatures and all kinds of material debris seem to be flying above my head.

18 _{Barad 2007:152-153}

As I spend more time in the space and move through it, I start to realize that I am most definitely also an active factor in this installation. The seven sculptures imply a certain rhythm; although they stand still, their parts look suspended in acts of changing, falling and floating and this vibrant sense of movement is multiplied when I walk in between them, seeing their appearances change with every step. The one sculpture that incorporates the large staircase, makes it even possible to obtain a view from above. In this overview, the pieces are not that enormous and incomprehensible anymore. I move closer towards some pieces of wood of the construction that I am standing on and as I focus on a specific surface of a (re)painted piece of timer, I feel a much more intimate relation with the work is taking shape.20

INTRODUCING THE PERFORMATIVE INSTALLATION

This first chapter is both figuratively and literally a rewritten version of an essay I wrote earlier under the title Thoughts on the Performative Installation. This short text was the first in which I addressed the productive effects of a conceptualization of installation practices by reading them through the theoretical framework proposed by Karen Barad, that she calls agential realism21_{, and it gave rise to my further investigations into}

the field of so-called new materialism. Therefore, it seemed only natural to start my thesis with a (very) reconsidered and elaborated version –hardly any word of the original text is still here- of this older essay. Another reason to start by addressing a performative approach towards matter in general and certain installation practices in specific, is because it will introduce why diffractive methods are needed and how they function with and through the ever changing, intra-active becoming character of the world. In this chapter, I want to look at the concept of performativity, that was first conceptualized by Judith Butler in order to account for the interactive processes operating in the materialization of gendered bodies.22 _Barad,

as we shall see, draws on Butler’s work but also warns us for the (not so) hidden anthropocentric implications in Butler’s employment of performativity. Barad argues we need to develop a posthumanist understanding of performative processes, that can help to account not only for the agential character of human bodies in gendering processes, but also for the active role that all matter plays in the many practices that are constituting our world(s). I want to argue that Barad’s extended conception of performativity, will help to understand how Phyllida Barlow’s installation plays an active role in (at least one) world constituting phenomenon and thus is performative. Yet, it might be better to formulate this the other way around: I want to use Phyllida Barlow’s work to show that (non-human) matter indeed can play an active role in the world’s performative becoming.

20 _{Note that these last two experiences –of the overview of more works and of the specific intimacy with one single piece- are quite}

different. I only noticed this myself while rereading this text after finishing the first draft of the complete thesis. I will not expand on their differences too much here, but I do want to say that a similar distinction will come back in the second chapter when I will discuss new views on objective positions.

21 _{Barad 2007} 22 _{Butler 2006}

PERFORMATIVITY’S TRANSFORMATIVE MOMENTS

I know I might have aroused your curiosity by mentioning already the story of the Chaco meteorite, but I will come to that later in this section. I first want to dive into a short but necessary genealogical exploration of performativity to see how it secures the possibility for changes within structures and how it creates a space for (human and nonhuman) agency in these processes.

When Butler starts using the concept of performativity for the purpose of conceptualizing gendering practices, the term already has its history. Performativity’s roots can be found in the ‘speech act theory’ of John L. Austin’s. In this context, the adjective “performative” is assigned to a group of utterances that instead of describing actions or states of affairs, already imply (or indeed perform) the acts they talk about (e.g. the words “I do” in a wedding ceremony).24 _{Influenced by Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, Butler extends}

the use of performativity beyond its application for determining utterances and makes it into a powerful tool to understand workings of power-relations through human bodies. Very simplified, we can say that Butler argues that binary gendered individuals are not a-priori entities, but neither does she imply that gender is merely a cultural inscription25_{. Instead, it can be seen as the result of complex and interactive}

phenomena between social practices and the embodiment of such practices. Performativity is thus not performance; gender is not a roleplay. On the contrary, gendering processes are embodied as they are acted out.26 _{Therefore, they depend on continuous interaction between material bodies and cultural articulations.}

Gender is a doing, not a condition. But, Butler also stresses that one will never be able to act out gender norms perfectly. This point is crucial, because it allows performativity to bring about new (gender)configurations. It allows performativity to be creative. And this is where a transformative nature of performative practices can be located. Small mistakes that individuals make in their gendering processes become the loci for their agency. No longer is a conscious decision-making process necessary to secure agential (human) activity.27

23 _{Bakargiev 2012:31} 24 _{Austin 1976}

25 _{Thereby, Butler moves not only beyond ideas of a (natural) dichotomy between man and women, but also beyond social}

constructivists models that understand gender as a merely social construct.

26 _{I am also thinking here of the work of Katherine Hayles on inscriptive transformations (For example: Hayles, 1997)} 27 _{Butler 2006}

In Butler’s work, the human body is granted an active role in the development of (imperfect) gendered individuals. Words (describing the body) and matter (of the body) exist in a continuous interaction with each-other. Therefore, a representationalist belief in the ability of words to refer to (already existing, unchanging) bodies is highly troubled. Barad draws on this specific characteristic of performativity. However, she also points out, that Butler does not go far enough; since it only focusses on human practices and bodies, her idea of performativity does not account for the productive nature of all material elements (also in gendering processes).28

The posthumanist performativity29 _{that Barad proposes “calls into question the givenness of the}

differential categories of human and nonhuman”30_{, that Butler (strategically?}31_{) ignores. It accounts for the}

agential character of nonhuman materialities next to that of human bodies. Thereby, Barad’s re-interpreted version of performativity challenges not only the power of words to describe (pre-existing gendered) human individuals, but language’s capability to describe pre-existing entities in general. Barad’s background in quantum physics has taught her that no “individually determinate entities with inherent properties”32

pre-exist the events in which they manifest themselves. Instead their boundaries and properties come into existence through the very relationality in these events, through their intra-activity.33 _{While shining a light}

on Niels Bohr’s “philosophy-physics”34 _{and sharing her insights in the ontology of the electron, Barad helps}

us to understand that the primary building blocks of reality are not bodies, atoms, electrons or other individually determined entities, but phenomena in which human and nonhuman agencies intra-act. 35

This is also where she parts from Austin’s speech act theory.

28 _{Barad 2007:45-46, 209-210}

29 _{The title of a paper by Barad from 2003} 30 _{Barad 2003:808}

31 _{During a summerschool with Rosi Braidotti that I attended, I remember that Braidotti made a comment about Butler}

strategically ignoring non-human entities. It somehow stuck with me and later on I read more about Gayatri Sipvak’s idea of

strategic essentialism. With it, Spivak stresses the importance for “subordinate or marginalized social groups” to “temporarily put

aside local differences in order to forge a sense of collective identity through which they band together in political movements”. (Dourish 2008:1). In other words, forming groups that exclude others can be politically necessary to address certain problems. I am still wondering if the exclusion of non-human entities might have been indeed necessary in Butler’s work so that specifically human influences on human gendering processes could be exposed.

32 _ibid.

33 _{Barad introduces the term intra-action to refer to the entangled nature of phenomena. While interaction is based on the}

existence of individual entities with inherent properties, intra-action happens in the moments when boundaries between bodies are nog yet drawn.

34 _{Barad 2007:24}

35 _{Barad uses the well-known “two-slit experiment” to support this stand. She explains how this experiment makes visible a}

discrepancy between the electron behaving as a particle and the electron behaving as a wave and therefore it troubles the belief in pre-existing entities with inherent properties. A simple experiment can find out whether an entity is a particle or a wave, and this is the two-slit experiment. When particles are shot against the two slits, most of them will end up right across from the slits; a scatter pattern will appear. When waves, however, are directed towards the openings they will bulge out on both sides of the slits as concentric circles that will overlap or interfere, simultaneously enhancing each other at some places and cancelling each other out at others. This gives a whole different pattern on a screen, namely a diffraction pattern.

The weird thing is, that electrons, which are tiny particles, give a diffraction pattern when tested with a two-slit apparatus. But how do they interfere with each other when they are particles? They cannot overlap. And it gets even stranger, because when we sent one electron trough at the time, a diffraction pattern still appears. This seems to imply that the electron interferes with

“Matter comes to matter”36_{, it participates in the performative phenomena that constitute reality and}

can contribute to transformative moments in this process. Now we can move back to the beginning of this section. The story of the meteorite, El Chaco37_{, is exactly an example of a moment where matter did matter.}

El Chaco, one of the first commissioned artworks for dOCUMENTA(13) and the second largest meteorite in the world, was supposed to be transported from the north of Argentina to Kassel. There it would function as an “temporary point of reference and meditation of objecthood, time, and place… as a gigantic transitional object”38_{. El Chaco is the biggest fragment of a much larger meteorite that exploded above}

ancestral territory of the Moqoit tribe about 4000 years ago. Since then, El Chaco and the other remains of the explosion have become objects of spiritual value for the Moqoit people. The displacement of this extraordinary heavy rock was proposed by the artists Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolas Goldberg, who had already worked with casts and originals of other meteorites from the Chaco region. However, the only original pieces these artists had transported before - the both sides of the meteorite El Taco - where already cut apart decades earlier and one piece was already permanently moved to Frankfurt. The memory of what had happened to El Taco might have contributed to the fact that the Mosqoit were not so enthusiastic about the proposal and opposed to the move of El Chaco. The Mosqoit were supported by a group of local and international astronomers and anthropologists, who deemed the proposal expressive of a colonialist attitude and backed up the Moquiot’s statement that a 4000-year-old meteorite should not be moved. The artists and the curatorial team of the documeta felt obliged to reconsider the plan and finally decided to not move El Chaco to Kassel. 39

This happening shows that matter, El Chaco (and El Taco in some sense), can intersect with human relations and meaning making processes. El Chaco stands not only in a continuous intra-active relation with cosmological discourse of the indigenous people of the Moqoit, but also with the curatorial (discursive) decisions for the documenta. And maybe more importantly, by being an actor - or in Bruno Latour’s words:

itself.Bohr and Einstein thought out an experiment that would detect through which slit the electron went. Einstein predicted that through this experiment it would be possible to catch the electron behaving like a particle and a wave at the same time. Bohr, however, disagreed and said there would be no diffraction pattern in this scenario, but a particle pattern. Years after both Bohr and Einstein died, it became actually possible to do the experiment and it turned out that Bohr was right! This is quite stinking because “what this is saying is that the ontology of the electron is changing depending upon how I measure it” (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012:61) When I know through which slit it goes, the electron is a particle, when I don’t the electron is a wave. It turns out that the electron is not either a particle or a wave. Instead, it performs as one or the other depending on the apparatus it is presented with.

See also material 16-17 on https://pottery.hotglue.me/ for further (more visual) elaborations on the two-slit experiment.

36 _{Barad 2007:152}

37 _{Image 18 on https://pottery.hotglue.me/} 38 _{Bakargiev 2012:30}

The term transitional object is originally used to describe an object that engenders a change in a child’s sense of individuality. The object helps the child to move from a “symbiotic identity with the mother” to an “autonomous identity”. But Bakargiev extends the notion of the transitions to social-cultural changes on a larger scale. In this way, El Chaco could have functioned as an object to engendered moments of transition, moments of differences or diffractions, in the visitors of the documenta.

an “actant”40_{- in both discursive environments El Chaco also establishes a relational network between the}

two. El Chaco - as fundamental part of an artistic proposal, a sacred object in the north of Argentina, once part of a larger meteorite moving through space, maybe it had a life as part of something bigger before that - is not a pre-existing entity, rather it is (re)defined and assigned its boundaries by the contexts in which it functions. In Donna Haraway’s words: "bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; ‘objects’ do not pre-exist as such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies. Siting (sighting) boundaries is a risky practice.”41

Matter and meaning, or material practices and discursive practices42_{, are two sides of the same coin.}

They exist in a continuum and constitute (temporary) boundaries between entities. It is not so much Barad’s (and dOCUMENTA(13)’s) goal to “discard signification but rather” to direct “it to its proper place”43_{. To}

do right to both the material and the discursive influences in boundary-making, and world-constituting, exercises, Barad uses the term material-discursive practices. The primary building blocks for reality are no longer separate, predetermined entities, but phenomena in which human and nonhuman bodies, organic and inorganic entities and matter and discourse act. Agency is no longer an attribute that someone or something has. Instead, is produced but not necessarily located (inside of the human subject for example) in phenomena. Agency cannot be attributed to subjects or objects, since they simply do not (pre)exist as such.

Diffractive methods need to account for the agential character of the phenomenon as a whole. It needs to take into consideration all the active factors, not merely the human ones. It needs to look at intersections: at the moments when “matter comes to matter”44_{, as well as when discourse comes to matter}

40 _{quoted after Bennet 2010:viii}

Latour uses the term “actant” for nonhuman agential entities. He says we need a new vocabulary that can refer to and help to conceptualize affairs in which not only human actors are active.

41 _{Haraway 1988:201-202.}

Boundaries are never stable, so when one tries to determine them the possibility that they shift during or after this process is still very present.

42 _{Barad makes clear that her agential realist account of discursive practices goes beyond human based or linguistic interpretations}

she says: “Discursive practices are not speech acts, linguistic representations, or even linguistic performances, bearing some unspecified relationship to material practices. Discursive practices are not anthropomorphic placeholders for the projected agency of individual subjects, culture, or language. Indeed, they are not human-based practices. On the contrary, agential realism's posthumanist account of discursive practices does not fix the boundary between human and nonhuman before the analysis ever gets off the ground, but rather allows for the possibility of a genealogical analysis of the material? discursive emergence of the human. Human bodies and human subjects do not preexist as such; nor are they mere end products. Humans are neither pure cause nor pure effect but part of the world in its open-ended becoming.” (Barad 2007:149-150)

43 _{Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2010:166} 44 _{Barad 2003:801}

and it has to be attentive to the transformations and differentiations that are produced as the results of these processes, affirming the becoming character of the world.

HOW WORKS OF ART COME TO MATTER

Although I very much admire Barad’s ambition to create a framework in which matter is active in the formation of discourse as well as in the constitution of reality, she does not address different mechanisms

through which matter makes itself felt.45 _{Of course, she talks at length about the performative relations}

between the discourse of quantum physics and the particles it investigates. However, she does not say anything about other material-discursive entanglements that are just as well performative in nature and built on a similar relationality between matter and discourse, but do not intra-act by means of scientific experiments. I do not want to say that this is a flaw in her theory. On the contrary, Barad, because of her background in quantum physics, might only be capable to talk about the specific material (re)configurings that she is a part of. Indeed, she will not be able talk from an ‘outside’ about other material-discursive practices (such as those in art).

Artworks are different from quantum particles; they engender changes differently and give rise to different discursive responses. Because I cannot turn to Barad to find an answer to the question of how art functions in material-discursive phenomena, I want to look at some of the ideas of someone who can provide some answers, namely Estelle Barrett.46 _{In her contribution to the book Carnal Knowledge: towards a 'new}

materialism' through the arts, she conceptualizes artistic practices as knowledge engendering enterprises, that

produce new understandings of reality in a different manner than the (social) sciences do. Barrett argues that the material and experiential character of artistic work produces an affective dimension, that she calls the “aesthetic image”47_{. This image breaks through already known and conceptualized symbolic codes and}

sign-systems. In other words, it continuously produces new ways of understanding, it repeatedly generates a different logic, it is transformative and therefore, Barrett says -and I could not agree more on this point- it is performative in its workings.

I do not wish to fetishize the artwork as some sort of mystic object, that has the unique capacity break through ruling knowledge systems, while every other object stays mute. On the contrary, I am convinced that other objects -like electrons- can do the exact same thing, but the difference lies in how they do it. If

45 _{I use the term mechanisms here to already refer to Barad’s conception of apparatuses that will be worked out in chapter 3. Also,}

Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s idea of an abstract machine might have influence my phrasing here (i.a. Deleuze and Guattari 1977).

46 _{I would like to note here that I could have used other theorists or philosophers to account for my ideas concerning how works}

of art come to matter. I could have used for example the ideas of Thimothy Morton or those of Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. However, I did not choose to draw on their work because I was afraid it would bring up many complexities or even contradictions with the surrounding theory. Because I did not want to spend too much time on addressing these problematics, I decided to work with Barrett’s notions.

electrons can shake our beliefs through scientific experiments, then how do artworks disturb human knowledge systems? I think a big part of our answers lies in the term ‘affect’ that Barrett uses. It is really quite remarkable that Barad mentions this concept not even once in any of the 524 pages of her book or in any of her other writings. The term brings to mind the distinction that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari make between the different planes that art, science and philosophy implement in order to restrain chaos, in which the artistic plane mainly works through the creation of sensation: blocs of percepts and affects. Affections can be understood as resonances between two (or more) entities. Affects are shared in the moments when object and subject coincide, when the boundaries between them fade, or in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s words: when they enter into a mutual becoming. 48

I think this is indeed where the difference between the workings of quantum particles and artworks can be located. Quantum particles, that are measured in scientific experiments are temporarily pinned down - the electron is either a particle or a wave. Artworks, cannot be easily pinned down49_{, and it is precisely}

because of the affective dimension that they remain ambiguous, neither one thing nor another. ‘To become with a work’ means to understand for a short moment its complexity. The artwork is a multiplicity, that has the potential to show what the electron can never show in a single measurement, namely a glimpse of the complex, multilayered and interconnected nature that they both share.50

In order to conceptualize (human) encounters with art pieces, Barrett refers to Julia Kristeva’s account of an “speaking subject”51_{. Hereby, Kristeva presents the human subject as a heterogeneous and relational}

entity that can go through processes of change or differentiation by encounters with an outside world. According to Kristeva such direct encounters can put subjects in a state of “process” or “on trial”52_{, in which}

the responses that human subjects have, are mainly emotional and caused by biological drives and processes. This ‘being on trial’ puts the subject in a state of transition and finally brings about a changed version of the self (however small the changes might be). Through affective encounters an experiential kind of knowledge that does not build on the linear consistency of the rational kind of knowledge that most sciences use, is generated.53

48 _{Deleuze and Guattari 1994}

49 _{A difficulty here is the question what happens when artworks are canonized? Or when they are presented in themed exhibitions?}

Are they not pinned down in those instances in some sense? I think the problem here is not an easy one and the answer to these questions is both yes and no. Yes, the ambiguity of artworks is somewhat neutralized when they are canonized or in themed shows. But no, I do not think that their capacity for affective interaction is therefore completely gone. Later in this chapter I will expand on a quote by Marcel Duchamp about the death of the painting. That part will further explain my stance on pinning down artworks.

50 _{I want to stress here that I do not wish to imply that any other objects in our everyday life cannot do this. I am convinced that}

they can. I only want to show how matter functions differently in art and quantum physics.

51 _{Kristeva 1986 quoted after Barrett 2012:65} 52 _ibid.

However, a question arises: why would objects in an art context (artworks) have a special place in production of experiential knowledge? Can encounters with other, more mundane, objects not be just as affective?54 _{It might indeed be hard to defend the special position of artworks, when - especially after pieces}

of art that have come into being through appropriation techniques - there does not seem to be an inherent difference between objects that are artworks and objects that are not, between let’s say my campbell’s soup can and Andy Warhol’s. But let’s not judge too soon. There might be no difference between the cans, but there is a difference between the phenomena in which they are encountered. And this is precisely what Barad has just taught us; There are no predetermined entities with inherent boundaries and attributes: affectivity might very well be conceivable as an attribute of a Campbell’s soup can in a gallery, but not so much of the can in my cupboard because of the other agential entities in both situations (a material-discursive field surrounding artworks as one of them)55_.

I am aware that I now seem to contradict my earlier statement, in which I said that artworks have the possibility to show a glimpse of their existence as multiplicities; in the can’s case, to show its existence as a food-container in my cupboard as well as of its life as an artwork in a gallery. But in my own defense, the word glimpse was very intentionally used here. One thing that my artistic practice has taught me, is that it is only possible to make a work show a certain amount of the connections they have entered into; therefore, they can give only a glimpse and never a total image of their existence as multiplicities. The relations that are excluded are not unimportant (will see in the last chapter, that they open up the possibility for “future reworkings”56_{) but they have to be excluded in certain instances nevertheless. As a maker, it can be extremely}

frustrating to be unable to show all the relations a work has entered into during the making process, let alone the connectivity of the material before I encountered it, in one show. An exhibition of works or objects functions, in Bakargiev’s words, as a “contraction”57_{. This means it can never show the total web of}

connections, but instead will always express one moment in this web, a certain amount of crossing lines, a partial reality.

Nevertheless, I do think that (exhibited) art pieces, can create different lines of connectivity between the elements that constitute the piece or exhibition; they can still be performative while they are exhibited.58

I want to look shortly at “the brain” of the documenta now - an assemblage of different objects in the most central exhibition venue of the documenta - that Bakargiev employed in lieu of a concept. I will not go into the specifics here, because I will discuss the brain at length in the next chapter, but for now I want to say

54 _{The funny thing is, that as a maker I am much more inspired –or indeed affected- by non-artworks than by artworks.} 55 _{here I might bring the anger of some Deleuze fans upon myself.}

56 _{Barad 2007:205} 57 _{Bakargiev 2013}

58 _{Although I am talking about installation practices in particular, I am sure that the layers of a painting or the images of a collage}

can create a similar fragmented image, but since I am not a painter of a collage maker I find it harder if not impossible to talk about those practices.

that in the brain contained objects stemming from various epochs and cultures that together functioned not so much as an exhibition, but rather as a spatial mind-map for multiple traces of connectivity between the works of the documenta. The brain engendered a growing and differentiating web of relations within the contraction of the exhibition.

I am convinced of the fact that these kinds of rhizomes also unfold around and between objects in our everyday lives.59 _{Moreover, I think the relational webs created in exhibitions actually draw on these}

rhizomes that exist in our everyday worlds. A big advantage that art exhibitions have, however, is that they ask for a certain kind of focus, of their viewers as well as of their makers.60 _{They ask for a different treatment}

than the unambiguous kind granted most everyday objects.61 _{Artworks are often the result of a continuous}

interaction between material62 _{and a maker. The time and energy consumed by the making, selecting,}

recreating or appropriating of a work or exhibition result in a “committed position”63 _{of the artist or curator}

towards his or her work(s) and practice. This commitment is crucial if one wants to be affected. Moreover, through the commitment of artists and curators as well as through a specific historical tradition of showing and theorizing works of art, in which a viewer is asked to spend (at least some) time with (at least certain) works, a committed position is also brought upon the viewer. Again, this does not mean that everyday objects cannot engender experiential knowledge, but rather that they might be less likely to do so at this point in time because of an absence of necessary focus and commitment. So, to come back to the two questions that I brought forward earlier: Artworks do not have a special position in the sense that the objects themselves have a special power that everyday objects cannot ever possess, rather the material-discursive field that works of art have been constituting in interaction and intra-action with discursive ideas has led to a situation in which a more focused and committed position is taken towards objects in art exhibitions than towards everyday objects. Again, I do not wish to imply that this is an absolute rule. On the contrary, I am very much aware of the possibility for (re)configurings to shift, to transform.

Artworks (but not only artworks) can by means of affective charge, engender an experiential kind of knowledge in the subject that encounters it. This is how the intra-actions and interactions between the material of the works and the discursive practices surrounding them come into being and thus how works

59 _{Webs of connections between everydayday objects have always interested me as a maker, and I have been exploring ways to}

account fort hem since early on in my practice, but it is definately the case that the brain of the documenta has made me reconsider these webs as crucial part of exhibitions and artworks.

60 _{Bakargiev 2012:43}

61 _{This idea is probably also influenced by what Martin Heidegger has taught me about human handling of everyday objects as}

mere tools (Heidegger 1993)

62 _{This can be traditional materials like paint and klay, but also images or readymade objects. I do not wish to imply that material}

needs to be physically (re)worked to be the result of an interaction between maker and matter. Rather, I want to say that artistic practices always already exist in a continuous engagement between a maker and the world. Even if an artist presents readymade objects, this practice is the result of continuous experimentations and re-workings (may it be of another kind than physical reworkings).

of art influence discourse. Unlike quantum particles made conceivable in scientific experiments, artworks in exhibitions can remain ambiguous entities that show multiple connections they engage in, but never all of them, never an absolute image. Matter comes to matter differently in art, it is performative through affectivity that can be felt because of a historically committed position towards works of art.

As a way to end this section, I want to shortly say something about the installation format specifically. I think the installation has its particular ways of affecting its viewer and thus it is being performative in a particular way. As Claire Bishop stresses in her book Installation-art a critical history, a viewer becomes part of the web of connections by being physically ‘in between’ the other elements.64 _{The spectator is not a passive}

entity anymore, but becomes activated by his or her physical location between the other elements of the installation. Such an active spectator brings to mind the relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud, in which the artist creates circumstances to make social interaction possible.65 _{I want to argue however, that what is}

happening within the installation practices that I am addressing, exceeds the concept of relational aesthetics. Rather than creating a platform for social interaction, the work absorbs the viewer to a point where he/she is made almost equal to the other parts of the installation. So, where Bourriaud’s definition still seems to presuppose a division between material elements or circumstances and an (active) human spectator, the installations I am talking about create the possibility to unify human spectator and material elements in the coming together of the eventual work. In other words, the work can be better described as a phenomenon than as a static object outside of the viewer. This is an important notion because it means that the work is always becoming and never preexisting separated from the viewer. In other words, a certain instalment of elements might pre-exist the viewer, and this might be an intra-action in its own terms, but actualizations of the work only come into being when the viewer becomes part of it. We could say that the installation is a high lightened or ‘planned’ intra-action. Rather than to just look at the work, it demands of the viewer that he/she becomes part of the work and relates to the different elements in a nonhierarchical way. In determining one’s own position (one’s own borders) in relation to the elements in the space, the installation becomes performative.

64 _{Bishop 2005} 65 _{Bourriaud 2002}

DO ARTWORKS DIE? OR PHYLLIDA BARLOW VS. THE

OTSUKA MUSEUM OF ART

I believe painting dies, if you would understand. A painting dies after forty or fifty years because its freshness has run

off. The sculpture also dies. [. . .] I think a painting dies after some years as does the man who did it; then, it is called art history. [. . .] Art history is very different from aesthetics. For me, art history is what remains of an era inside a museum. . . 66

The question that Marcel Duchamp brings up here is: can the affective dimension of artworks, that I addressed in the former section, disappear when artworks are canonized? I want to go back to my experience of Phyllida Barlow’s work to find an answer to this question and problematize Duchamp’s statement.

In Barlow’s installation, her fascination with the physical experience of handling materials is showing. The resulting sculptures and installations often seem to interrupt or invade the space around them. She “embraces mess, absurdity, chance and precariousness”67_{. She tells us that “very rarely does a work leave the}

studio in a crate and emerge from the crate as it's meant to be in the space”68_{. This seems only logical when}

we consider that the introduction of a space involves an addition of a new intra-acting agencies, that will inevitably create a new phenomenon. This revised situation will trouble the balances between elements in earlier stadia (in the studio) and ask for a reinterpretation and rearrangement of the active elements in the work. We can sense that Barlow works in a way that involves a continuous process of (re)configuring from the vibrant liveliness and space-specific character her material expresses.

Although Barlow creates on a massive scale, her sculptures are often described as anti-monumental, the monument and its downfall contained within a form made of ordinary materials: cardboard, rags, rubber, tape, tarpaulin, paper, polystyrene. "It's that notion of gravity pulling on things, making things collapse, and that potential to collapse"69 _{she says. The potentiality for a downfall is very much showing in}

the work and it presents the sculptures as beings that are affected by their surroundings, by the gravity pulling on to them. It is in being confronted by this physical presence of the works, that they become more than mute material. In an interview Barlow also mentions the connection between the works and the falling monuments we have been witnessing in our era, like the monument of Sadam Houssein or the Twin Towers.70 _{Such connections widen the idea of a surrounding that influences the work. They become part of}

the web of relations that the work generates. Far from being a representation of certain events, or a reading

66 _{Duchamp 1966:67} 67 _{Cochrane 2014} 68 _{Barlow 2014} 69 _{Cochrane 2014} 70 _ibid.

of historical conditions -that is the work is not about the Saddam Houssein statue or the twin towers- it does enter into a relation with these events or in other words, intra-acts with them. Or in the words of Juliane Rebentisch: “Installations are context-sensitive with regard not only to the interior or exterior space in which they are exhibited but also to the social frameworks that influence the reception of art in general. Installation art thus engages society not from a sphere presumably untouched by it and in this sense autonomous; it also always addresses its own social dimension.”71

But Barlow’s material is active in another way as well. The work does not only enter into an entangled presence with the viewer and its surroundings, but it also accounts for its own material history by show something of the process that pre-existed its life in the museum. Up until recently, Barlow’s sculptures were usually dismantled after her shows and the materials were recycled. This began as a completely practical notion, she says, but the act of reworking her material has become a trademark of her pieces. In the redeployment of material, that has gone through different processes of painting, sanding, being part of constructions and/or deconstructions, something is revealed about the life of the material, the states it has been through. Her material or “matter”– and here I quote Barad - “feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.”72 _{Barlow’s work, in its continuous cycle of being constructed and deconstructed, its}

continuous (re)configurings, can no longer be seen as a canonized piece of art but rather as a temporary material assemblage, a temporary contraction.

Practices like Phyllida’s trouble the notion of the death of the work of art. Does the work die when the material enters into a new configuration? Or when it has to move out of the place it was created for? Or on the contrary does it do so when it will be installed somewhere permanently?

Although I think there is definitely a difference between Barlow’s works and more tradition practices, and although I am also aware of the fact that commodification of art can form a real threat to them, I also think that both of them can never die properly.73 _{I want to substantiate this statement by making a small}

detour and looking at the Otsuka museum of art. This is a considerable underground museum in Naruto, a small town in Japan, that houses over a thousand ceramic reproductions of major works of art in their original dimensions.74 _{The works are first transfer-printed from photographs before they are being fired and}

retouched. Hour-long informative talks are given by robot named 'Mr Art'75_{. He keeps on reminding the}

visitors that they are allowed to touch the works, because they are allegedly undestroyable. In other words,

71 _{Rebentisch 2012:221}

72 _{A quote by Barad used as the title of an interview with Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin for their book New Materialism:}

Interviews & Cartographies

73 _{I am aware of the fact that the word ‘die’ might seem weird to use in connection to Barad’s ideas. If we take her seriously, dying}

is not a relevant term at all. I am only using it here to refer back to Duchamp’s quote.

74 _{That is to say mainly paintings from before 1970 of which only 1 refers to a work made by a female artist, namely Cantus}

Firmus Bridged Riley

time will not work upon them. A statement from the museum director reads: “While the original masterpieces cannot escape the damaging effects of today’s pollution, earthquakes and fire, the ceramic reproductions can maintain their color and shape for over two thousand years”.76 _{These strange}

reproductions’ aim is to make the artworks accessible in a different part of the world from where the originals are kept. Moreover, the reproductions will most probably outlive their originals. There is even one case in which this has already happened. One of Vincent van Gogh’s sunflowers that was destroyed in a World War II air raid has been brought back to life by a museum. It can be seen, touched and photographed as if the war had never happened.77 _{It is as if the reproductions in the Otsuka museum of art cover up exactly all}

those moments of rupture and transformation that the performative assemblages of the world create.78

If we now move back to Barlow’s sculptures and the many outsides that work upon it, both in the form of traces from its creation processes, but also from the socio-historical events that seem to add an extra layer to them, I cannot help but think that these reproductions that can be touched, but are yet untouchable, are less alive then their originals in permanent collections.79 _{The many human and nonhuman agencies of}

the world will continue to transform Barlow’s pieces. The chance that a piece will be destroyed in times of war, is proof of the fact that it still intra-acts with its many outsides. Therefore, I think that the work in the museum does not die. I might change it pace, but it will never become autonomous from a world surrounding it. In their very materiality, artworks are alive. So, to answer Duchamp, no I would not understand why the painting dies, because I still see its permeability, its power to enter into new connections, its potential to intra-act. It will not lose its ability to engender changes performatively.

76 _{Statement by Ichiro Otsuka on the museum’s website <http://www.o-museum.or.jp/english/publics/index/16> quoted after}

Groom 2016:92

77 _{In other words, although the Otsuka pieces can be touched by visitors, they cannot be touched by them or other socio-historical}

events at all!

78 _{Groom 2016}

79 _{It is not my intention to propose a dichotomous relation between the reproductions in the Otsuka museum of art and the}

original art-works; I am not saying here that the former pieces have died and the latter are still alive. The only reason why I have been comparing the two, is to show how canonical art works are still alive even as parts of permanent collections. This does not mean, however, that the reproductions are absolutely not alive. There are differences, but no absolute dichotomy.

T W O

S I T U A T E D K N O W L E D G E S , P A R T I A L

P E R S P E C T I V E S

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF GRASPING THE WHOLE

WORLD/DOCUMENTA IN A SINGLE CONCEPT

As was introduced in the last chapter, dOCUMENTA(13) was not build around a single idea. Instead, the diverse conceptual threads were brought provisionally together in what Bakargiev named “the Brain of the documenta”81_{, in the central rotunda. This place did not contain artworks per se and functioned not so}

much as an exhibition hall, but rather as a spatial mind-map, that generated multiple traces of connectivity between the works of the documenta. The brain contained objects stemming from various epochs and cultures that “indicate[d] not a history, not an archive, but a set of elements that mark contradictory conditions and committed positions of being in and with the world”82_{. These ‘things’ all seem to show traces}

of an own history; they seem to hint at their own influence in the cultural framework they come from. 83

Like El Chaco, each of these objects has a story of how it is or was part of a matter-meaning continuum. A series of small vessels that the painter Giorgio Morandi used for his still lives, is exhibited in a vitrine. In a photo, made by David Sherman on the 30th _{of April 1945, Lee Miller is taking a bath in Hitler’s}

bathroom. This was after a traumatic day of taking photographs in Dachau. Her dirty boots are next to the bath as is a neo-classical sculpture of a female nude that was approved by the Nazi’s. A feeling of uncanniness is awoken by the way the statue echoes Miller’s own naked body, as well as by the realization that the photo was taken on the exact same day that Hitler committed suicide.84 _{The most admirable objects in the brain}

might be the Bactrian Princesses: little dolls, that have about the size of a cellphone, made out of various detachable stone elements. They are from western Central Asia and they were made between 2500-1500

80 _{Haraway 1992:315} 81 _{Bakargiev 2012:35} 82 _ibid.

83 _{See link 23 in the online material on https://pottery.hotglue.me/ for a visual impression} 84 _{Farquharson and Wilson-Goldie 2012}