L'autrice ricerca nel saggio le origini dell’arte. Non le origini storiche o materiali, ma le condizioni in cui nasce l’arte, ciò che la rende possibile a partire da quel turbinante e imprevedibile movimento di forze originarie che chiamiamo caos. Intrecciando le teorie di Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari e Jakob von Uexküll, si delinea un percorso di ricerca filosofica sulle relazioni che l’arte, l’architettura, la musica e la pittura instaurano tra corpo vivente, forze universali e creazione di futuri impensati.
Elizabeth Grosz è docente di Gender studies alla Rutgers University (New Jersey). Insegna inoltre Gender studies e architettura nelle Università di Bergen e di Sidney. Specializzata in filosofia europea, si è dedicata a temi quali corpo, sessualità, spazio, tempo e materialità. Tra le sue pubblicazioni: The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (2004) e Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (2005). Viene qui tradotta per la prima volta in Italia.
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Read Grosz's introduction_on_Choas_Territory_and_Art.pdf
Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth
Elizabeth Grosz, Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, New York
The art of sensation
This paper is about the ontology, the materiality and logical structure of art. While I am not trained in the visual arts or architecture, nonetheless I see there are many points of overlap, regions of co-occupation, that concern art and philosophy, and it is these shared concerns that I want to explore. I want to discuss the ‘origins’ of art and architecture, but not the historical, evolutionary or material origins of art – an origin confirmable by some kind of material evidence or research – but rather, the conceptual origins of art, what concepts
art entails, assumes and elaborates. These of course are linked to historical, evolutionary and material forces, but are nevertheless conceptually, that is to say, metaphysically or ontologically separable from them. Art, according to Deleuze, does not produce concepts, though it does address problems and provocations. It produces sensations, affects, intensities, as its mode of addressing problems, which sometimes align with and link to concepts, the object of philosophical production, the way philosophy deals with problems. Thus philosophy may have a place, not in assessing art, but in addressing the same provocations or incitements to production as art faces, through different means and with different effects and consequences.
In my previous work, I focused on the ways in which bodies, and the forces of space, time and materiality, that is, nature, have enabled rather than inhibited cultural and political production.1 In this paper, I would like to address how these forces cohere to enable the productive explosion of the arts from the provocations posed by the forces of the earth, (cosmological forces which we must understand as chaos or material and organic indeterminacy) with the forces of living bodies, bodies by no means exclusively human, which exert their energy or force through the production of the new, and which create through their efforts, networks, fields, territories that temporarily and provisionally slow down chaos enough to extract from it something not so much useful as intensifying, a performance, a refrain, an organisation of colour or movement. The arts produce and generate intensity, that which directly impacts the nervous system and intensifies sensation. Art is the art of affect more than representation, a system of dynamised and impacting forces rather than a system of unique images.2 By arts, I am concerned here with all forms of creativity or production that generate intensity, sensation or affect: music, painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, design, landscape, dance and so on. What distinguishes the arts from other forms of cultural production are the ways in which artistic production merges with, intensifies and eternalises, monumentalises, sensation. Material production – the production of commodities – while it may generate sensation is nevertheless directed to the accomplishment of activity, tasks, goals or ends. Art is the submission of aims and ends to intensity, the subordination of intensions to sensation. This is not to say that art is without concepts; simply that concepts are a by-product or effect rather than the very material of art. Art is the submission of its materials – paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials – to those constraints and forms through which these materials generate and intensify sensation, through which they impact on bodies, nervous systems, organs. (...)
