>http://noemata.net/formlessinterview.txt
what is the title of this project?
INFORMASJON
formless, informe
formless art
materialisasjon og elektronisk kunst
complexity of waste
default
are there any main art theoretical references?
(yve-alain bois rosalind e. krauss)
what is the main idea behind the project?
georges bataille, informe, as a third, since art theory has
been set up as a battle between form and content; whereas
the formless constitutes a third term which stands outside
the binary thinking which is itself formal.
how does it relate to your artistic practice?
what here is ‘noemata’?
what would be a short description of the project?
“panorama of the formless”
what is the formless?
within a history of modernism that has always repressed
it in the interest of priveleging formal mastery.
in the domain of practice they analyze it as an operational
tool, the repressed structural cunning
neither theme nor form, formless is, as bataille himself
expressed it, a “job”. the job of formless, the power of the informe.
everywhere you look it’s the same
can you elaborate on that?
bataille: what it designates has no rights in any sense
and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or
an earthworm. in fact, for academic men to be happy, the
universe would have to take shape. all of philosophy as
no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to
what is, a matemathical frock coat. on the other hand,
affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is
nly formless amounts to saying that the universe is
something like a spider or spit.
is formless the form or the content of the project?
as a conceptual tool, demonstrate the power, and
also pick apart certain categories that seemed
increasingly useless – ‘form’ and ‘content’
and in the setting of audience subject and art object?
manet’s subject is not located anywhere, not in the
rab world of naturalistic prose, nor in the absurd academic
fictions. rootlessness. uprooting, a slippage, the true goal
of his art is to “disappoint expectations”, or just ‘disappoint’ then.
and each time it so happened that the public’s frustrated
expectations only redoubled the effect of the picture.
its indifference to the subject
it is neither form nor content that interests bataille but the
operation that displaces both of them.
an ‘operation’ – which is to say neither a theme, nor a subject,
nor a concept – in bataille’s thought – scatology or heterology.
piece of shit. attaining piece of shit
these operations split off from modernism, insulting the very
opposition of form and content, which is itself formal, arising
as it does from a binary logic, declaring it null and void.
quack
ink spots
blekkflekk
how can the formless be a project or be exhibited?
the formless is an operation, which support it being a project
and not things or outcome themselves.
no painter more heavily invested the subject, not with meaning,
but with that which goes beyond and is more significant than meaning.
mark of the formless, horizontality, base materialism, pulse,
entropy.
classification to declassify
not fetishization (shit) nor abjects (bodily fluids)
what would the horizontality be?
horizontality – man is proud to be erect, but this is
founded on a repression. vertical, man has no other
biological sense than to stare at the sun and thus
burn his eyes or to contemplate his feet in the mud.
his present architecture, by means of which his
horizontal gaze traverse a vertical visual field,
is a travesty.
marcel duchamp was a pitiless sleuth,
the default and the formless
default
the type of matter bataille wants to speak about is
what we have no idea of, what makes no sense..
matter cannot be reabsorbed by the image (the concept
of image presupposes a possible distinction between
form and matter, which the formless try to collapse)
bataille’s matter is shit or laughter or an obscene
word or madness, whatever cuts all discussion short,
whatever eason cannot drape with a mathematical frock coat.
whatever does not lend itself to any metaphorical displacement,
whatever does not allow itself to be in-formed
according to bataille, matter is seductive waste,
appealing to what is most infantile in us, since
the blow it strikes is devolutionary, regressive, low
luguber
scatology, the science of what is wholly other
, or else map onto an expressionist model.
just as horizontality and base materialism contradict
the myths of human erectness and ‘pure visuality’, so
pulsation attacks the modernist exclustion of temporality
from the visual field. pulsation involves endless beat
that punctures the disembodied self-closure of pure visuality
what about the pulse?
the pulse alone sexualizes the gaze , rotoreliefs
machination, repetition, pulse puts into action an
infinite permutation that annuls metaphor through
metaphoric excess.
what about spam?
entropy, information theory,
run the risk of transforming the formless into a
figure, of stabilizing it. in displacing it
an implicit critique of art – everywhere is the same?
we enter the art gallery as though into a pharmacy,
looking for remedies nicely packaged for admissable
illnesses. whatever its outages, art is the prisoner
of its ancient cathartic function and thus, despite
everything, it remains an agent of social order: it
is at the service of homogeneity.
what is base materialism?
base materialism, of which informe is the most
concrete manifestation, has the job of de-classifying,
simultaneously lowering and liberating from all
ontological prisons, from any role model.
the formless matter that base materialism claims
for itself resembles nothing, especially not
what it should be.
what about the redundant, surplus value of art?
expenditure. freud analyzses s 54 the famous
symbolic transposition of excrement into gold
and establishes the relation between retention
and defecation (appropriation and excretion).
bataille: the jewel is associated with excrement
not only by contrast: they share a condition of
pure loss, the jewel is economic waste by definition.
the jewel, shit, and the fetish are all on the level
of sumptuary expenditure.
furthermore, all consumption of art is at least in
part fetishistic, but this is repressed.
heterological fetishism?
freud . dirt is matter in the wrong place
leiris, end of document : at present there is no
means of making something pass as ugly or repulsive.
even shit is pretty.
exquisite corpse, eros and death, two sides of chance:
endless possibility, and causality/automaton
the exquisite corpse is ruled by form, so much that
it’s being emptied
jeu lugubre – were a structure rules absolutely
over any apparent play of happenstance, a structure
of recurrance and compulsion that “automates” and
programs the field in relation to death.
the mangy lion
Z.O.N.E. Of No Effort, does it radiate or not,
is it formless? would you say recursive is formless
