Christopher Braddock (Eds.) - Animism in Art and Performance (2017, Palgrave Macmillan)

EDITED BY
CHRISTOPHER
BRADDOCK
ANIMISM
IN ART
AND
PERFORMANCE
Animism in Art and Performance
“What beings are alive? What constitutes ‘alive’? Timely questions, in particular
to the notion of nonhuman lifeforms in a time of mass extinction; the ecological
resonance of the term ‘survive’, which is often mistaken for ‘alive’, and the ques-
tion of how indigenous cultures matter today, cultures where the concept ‘inani-
mate object’ don’t hold sway. Where such questions start and stop, who gets to
have them and why, are the subject of this wide ranging and learned book”.
—Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University,
USA, and author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence
“It’s imperative that contemporary discussions of the ‘liveliness’ of the nonhu-

man world come to terms with indigenous epistemological frameworks. Putting
the practices of contemporary art and theory based in European traditions to the
test of rigorous dialogue with Māori ways of seeing and knowing, Animism in
Art & Performance advances the conversation considerably, making terrific con-
tributions to art history, cultural studies, and the range of theoretical tendencies
grouped under the heading ‘new materialism’”.
—Rebecca Zorach, Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art and Art History,
Northwestern University, USA, and author of The Passionate Triangle
“Animism in Art & Performance demonstrates a unique instance of dual sover-

eignty emerging in academia. By engaging Māori, Pacifika and other academic
frameworks (of interpretation, of embodiment, of performativity, and of material-
ity), this book offers the reader a model for critically engaged, culturally entangled,
art writing. In arguments that demonstrate time and again the anti-humanism of
the subject/object divide, and the anti-ecological practices that necessarily derive
from that inherently exploitative relationship, several authors deploy Karen Barad’s
provocative question, ‘Who gets to count as one who has the ability to die?’ The
answer, in this case, is a constellation of artworks that shimmer with life”.
—Hannah B Higgins, Professor of Art History, University of Illinois,
USA, and author of The Grid Book
Christopher Braddock
Editor
Animism in Art and

Performance
Editor
Christopher Braddock
School of Art and Design
Auckland University of Technology
Auckland, New Zealand
ISBN 978-3-319-66549-8 ISBN 978-3-319-66550-4 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950690
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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Cover credit: Shannon Te Ao, Follow the party of the whale, 2013. Two channel video, colour
and sound, 12:51, 2:49 min. Cinematography Iain Frengley. Courtesy of the artist and
Robert Heald Gallery
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to the artists represented in this book; for your cooperation
and enthusiasm, and for discussing manuscripts with your corresponding
authors.
Kōrero (talk) with my colleagues-in-writing is an animating force that
altered the course of this book. This began at the conference Animism
and Material Vitality in Art & Performance, 11–12 June 2015, hosted
by the Art and Performance Research Group, Auckland University of
Technology (AUT). Thank you to the Session Chairs: Leali’ifano Albert
Refiti, Caroline Vercoe, Victoria Wynne-Jones, Misha Kavka, James
Charlton and Eu Jin Chia. Thank you to the School of Art and Design
Research Committee (AUT) for Research Capability funding.
Olivia Webb has been an outstanding research assistant, and I thank
the School of Art and Design (AUT) Research Task Force for her
funding.
Thank you Cassandra Barnett (Ngāti Raukawa) for invaluable editorial
advice and assistance.
I thank the two anonymous reviewers for Palgrave Macmillan who
gave clear and critical feedback.
Our network of authors and artists has grown out of a pedagogical
community. The Art and Performance Research Group (AUT) activi-
ties, including studio critiques, reading groups and supervisions, inform
this book. I thank in particular Darcell Apelu (Nuie–NZ), Cora-Allan
Wickliffe (Ngapuhi, Tainui/Alofi, Liku), Layne Waerea (Te Arawa
and Ngāti Kahungunu), John Vea (Tonga–NZ), Kalisolaite ‘Uhila
v
vi Acknowledgements
(Tonga–NZ), Louise Tu’u (Samoa–NZ), Abby Cunnane, Ziggy Lever,

Lance Pearce, Olivia Webb, Ruth Myers, Lucy Meyle, Julia Holderness,
Elliot Collins, Bobby Luke (Ngati Ruanui) and Lesieli Finau (Tonga–
NZ). Thank you co-supervisors Rachel Shearer (Ngāti Kahungunu),
Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou), Cassandra Barnett, Janine Randerson
and Andy Thomson.
Preliminary research for this book took place during my 2014
International Artist in Residence at Sydney Artspace. Thanks especially
to Blair French, Caroline Rothwell, Mark Feary, Lizzie Muller, Bec
Dean, Bianca Hester, Su Ballard, David Cross, Anna Munster and Prue
Gibson.
Thank you to my family, Esther and Eva, for your ongoing tolerance
of time-consuming research projects, love and encouragement.
Contents
1 Introduction: Animism and Animacies 1

Part I Indigenous Animacies
2 Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels 23

Cassandra Barnett
3 Activating Photographic Mana Rangatiratanga Through

Kōrero 45
Natalie Robertson
4 Dark Sun: Solar Frequencies, Solar Affects 67

Janine Randerson and Rachel Shearer
Part II Atmospheric Animations
5 Language as a Life Form 91

Anna Gibbs
vii
viii Contents
6 The Storm and the Still in the Art of Bridie Lunney 109
Simone Schmidt
7 Animate Atmospheres: Art at the Edge of Materiality 131

Edward Scheer
Part III Animacy Hierarchies
8 Intra-inanimation 153
Rebecca Schneider
9 Animacies and Performativity 177

Amelia Jones and Christopher Braddock
10 Animism, Animacy and Participation

in the Performances of Darcell Apelu 191
11 Exploring Posthuman Masquerade and Becoming 213

Martin Patrick
Part IV Sensational Animisms
12 The Animist Readymade: Towards a Vital

Materialism of Contemporary Art 235
Stephen Zepke
13 Sound Fossils and Speaking Stones: Towards a

Mineral Ontology of Contemporary Art 253
Amelia Barikin
Index 277
Notes on Contributors
Amelia Barikin is a contemporary art historian and Lecturer in Art

History at the School of Communication and Arts, University of
Queensland. Her work often focuses on the relation between art and
time.
Cassandra Barnett (Ngāti Raukawa) writes ficto-poetry, ficto-criticism
and scholarly essays exploring contemporary art, cultural multiplic-
ity, Maori cosmologies, and molecular and decolonising philosophies.
Cassandra holds an M.A. (Continental Philosophy, Warwick) and a
Ph.D. (Media, Film and Television, Auckland). She is a Lecturer in the
School of Art at Massey University, Wellington.
Christopher Braddock artist and writer, is Professor of Visual Arts
at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), New Zealand. He co-
leads the Ph.D. and M.Phil. programmes and the Art & Performance
Research Group. He is author of Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual
Participation in Contemporary Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See
www.christopherbraddock.com.
Anna Gibbs is Professor in the School of Humanities and
Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. A
member of the Writing and Society Research Centre, she publishes across
textual, media and cultural studies with a focus on affect theory and
feminism.
ix
x Notes on Contributors
Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor, Roski School of Art &

Design, USC. Recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History
and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012), and, co-edited
with Erin Silver, Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories
(2016). She edited “On Trans/Performance,” special issue, Performance
Research (2016).
Martin Patrick is a writer for many international publications. His
research involves critical writing on interdisciplinary practices. He is the
author of Across the Art/Life Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social
Practice in Contemporary Art (forthcoming). He is a Senior Lecturer at
Whiti o Rehua School of Art, Massey University. See http://www.mar-
tinpatrick.net.
Janine Randerson is a media artist, curator and writer. She is currently
the Ph.D. programme co-leader in the School of Art and Design at AUT
University, Auckland. A thread in Janine’s work is the technological
mediation in ecological systems. She is writing a book on meteorological
art practices.
Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou, Clann Dhònnchaidh) is an artist
and Senior Lecturer at AUT University, Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland).
Robertson’s practice is mainly based in Te Tai Rawhiti, her East Coast
Ngati Porou homelands, using photography and video to respond to the
mauri (life force) of the Waiapu River and surrounding land, to commu-
nicate tribal narratives.
Edward Scheer is Professor and Head of the School Art and Design
at UNSW, Australia. He has contributed to ten books, including
William Yang: Stories of Love and Death (2016); The Dumb Type Reader
(2017); and New Media Dramaturgy (2017). He is a founding edi-
tor Performance Paradigm journal, and was President of Performance
Studies international (PSi) from 2007 to 2011.
Simone Schmidt has recently completed her Ph.D. on the voice in art
at Monash University, where she also lectures in Design Theory. She
is interested in the intersection of aesthetics and ethics and her current
writing, informed by her yoga practice, concerns a material–energetic
interplay.
Rebecca Schneider is Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance
Studies at Brown University. She is the author of The Explicit Body in
Notes on Contributors xi
Performance, 1997; Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of

Theatrical Reenactment, 2011, and Theatre and History, 2014, as well
as editor and author of numerous anthologies, essays, and journal special
issues.
Rachel Shearer explores the medium of sound through a range of prac-
tices—experimental music, installation, academic research, audio visual
projects and collaborations with practitioners of moving image and per-
formance. Rachel’s iwi affiliations are with Ngāti Pākehā, Te Aitanga-a-
Māhaki, Rongowhakaata and Ngāti Kahungunu.
Stephen Zepke is an independent researcher living in Vienna. He writes
on the intersection of aesthetics, contemporary art and political philosophy.
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Terri Te Tau, exterior installation view of Unwarranted

and Unregistered: Te Āhua o te Hau ki Te Papaioea, 2015.
Multimedia installation. Courtesy of the artist 28
Fig. 2.2 Terri Te Tau, interior installation view of Unwarranted
and Unregistered: Te Āhua o te Hau ki Te Papaioea, 2015.
Multimedia installation. Courtesy of the artist 34
Fig. 2.3 Bridget Reweti and Terri Te Tau, still from Ōtākaro, 2016.
HD Moving image, 40 min. Courtesy of the artists 38
Fig. 3.1 Natalie Robertson, Pokai looking out to Waiapu Ngutu Awa,
Tīkapa-a-Hinekōpeka Marae, 2010. Courtesy of the artist 46
Fig. 3.2 James Ingram McDonald, Peter Buck, and others, setting
a trap in a fish weir, Waiapu River, 1923. Courtesy
of the Alexander Turnbull Library Ref: 1/2-037936-F.,
Wellington, New Zealand 53
Fig. 3.3 Natalie Robertson, Waiapu Ngutu Awa, Te Tai Tairawhiti,
2014. Courtesy of the artist 59
Fig. 4.1 Ralph Hotere, Requiem, 1973–1974. Oil on board.
Collection of the Whangarei Art Museum, New Zealand.
By permission of the Hotere Foundation Trust 74
Fig. 4.2 Rachel Shearer, Wiriwiri, 2017. Stereo audio, photovoltaic
panel, customized electronics. 22 min. plus ongoing variables
due to light and heat. Photo: Rachel Shearer. Courtesy
of the artist 76
Fig. 4.3 David Haines, Transmission to the Sun (detail), 2016.
Ultrachrome pigment print on Canson Rag Photgraphique.
Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery 82
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 Lynne Barwick, Like A Structured Language, 2014.

Soft pastel, Marrickville Garage, installation dimensions
variable. Photo: Felicity Jenkins. Courtesy of the artist 92
Fig. 5.2 Lynne Barwick, Like A Structured Language, 2014. Soft
pastel, Marrickville Garage, installation dimensions variable.
Photo: Felicity Jenkins. Courtesy of the artist 98
Fig. 6.1 Bridie Lunney, This Endless Becoming, 2013–2014.
Steel, concrete, stainless steel fittings, rigging rope,
tiles, leather, bluestone, strapping with performers
James Lunney and Lily Paskas. In Melbourne Now, 2014,
National Gallery of Victoria. Photo: Timothy Herbert.
Courtesy of the artist 110
Fig. 6.2 Bridie Lunney, This Endless Becoming, 2013–2014. Steel,
concrete, stainless steel fittings, tiles, leather, rigging rope
with performer Shelley Lasica. In Melbourne Now, 2014,
National Gallery of Victoria. Photo: Timothy Herbert.
Courtesy of the artist 119
Fig. 6.3 Bridie Lunney, Desire Will Not Hold, 2015. Hide,
sump oil, steel, brass, 100 black t-shirts with performers
Shelley Lasica and Brooke Stamp. Artspace, Sydney.
Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy of the artist 124
Fig. 7.1 A Two Dogs Company /Kris Verdonck, MASS, 2010.
Smoke, mixed media object, dark space. Kaaistudio’s
Brussels. Courtesy of A Two Dogs Company 134
Fig. 7.2 Axel Antas, Cloud formation suspended, 2006. C-Type,
114 x 90 cm, edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist 139
Fig. 8.1 Living Rock in “The Savage Curtain”, Star Trek, Season 3,
Episode 22, first broadcast March 7, 1969 156
Fig. 8.2 Pech Merle Hand, Paleolithic‚ Lot‚ France. ART
Collection/Alamy Stock Photo 161
Fig. 8.3 Kirk‚ Uhura and Lincoln in “The Savage Curtain”,
Star Trek, Season 3, Episode 22, first broadcast
March 7, 1969 167
Fig. 8.4 Lincoln in “The Savage Curtain”, Star Trek, Season 3,
Episode 22, first broadcast 7 March 1969 169
Fig. 9.1 Cassils, Becoming An Image Performance Still No. 3, 2013.
c-print, 22 × 30 in. National Theatre Studio, SPILL
Festival, London. Photo: Cassils with Manuel Vason.
Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts 179
Fig. 9.2 Christopher Braddock, Take series, 2007–2013, Epoxy clay,
trestle table. Above, 2007, Video installation, 28 min.
In Material Traces: Time and the Gesture, 2013, Galerie
Leonard and Bina Ellen, Concordia University, Montréal,
List of Figures xv
Québec, Canada. Curated by Amelia Jones. Courtesy

of the artist 180
Fig. 9.3 Paul Donald, Would Work, 2011. Detail of performance/
installation. In Nothing Like Performance, 2011, Artspace,
Sydney, Australia. Curated by Blair French. Courtesy of
Artspace and Silversalt Photography 182
Fig. 10.1 Darcell Apelu, still from Reaction to Insults, 2013.
From the Response Series #1, moving image on tablets,
5 min. Courtesy of the artist 193
Fig. 10.2 Darcell Apelu, still from Musu, 2013. From the Response
Series #2, moving image on tablets, 5 min. Courtesy
of the artist 195
Fig. 10.3 Darcell Apelu, performance view of Reaction to Insults,
2013. From the Response Series #1, moving image on
tablets, 5 min. Photo: Chris Braddock. Courtesy of the artist 206
Fig. 11.1 David Cross, Bounce, 2005. Performance/installation.
Photo: Steven Rowe. Courtesy of the artist and City
Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand 216
Fig. 11.2 Catherine Bagnall, Feeling the wind with my ears, 2015.
Photo: Julian Bishop. Courtesy of the artist 220
Fig. 11.3 Shannon Te Ao, two shoots that stretch far out, 2013–2014.
Single channel video, colour and sound, 13:22 min.
Cinematography Iain Frengley. Courtesy of the artist
and Robert Heald Gallery 225
Fig. 13.1 Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, four pendants
from Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald),
2009–2014. Audio interviews, electroplated records,
diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, 22 carat gold,
and texts contributed by an actress, an artist, a curator,
a geologist, a hypnotist, a psychoanalyst, a singer and
a writer after contact with the objects. Dimensions and
configurations variable. Courtesy of the artists and Audio
Visual Arts, New York 257
Fig. 13.2 Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, electroplated master
disc recorded with emerald stylus (detail), from Making a
Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald), 2009–2014.
Courtesy of the artists and Audio Visual Arts, New York 259
Fig. 13.3 Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, actress Elina
Löwensohn wearing the emerald pendant from Making
a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald), 2009–2014.
Worn in a performance in Rennes, France, 2014. Courtesy
of the artists 269
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Animism and Animacies
Positioning Animism
Exploring the interconnecting fields of visual arts, media arts and
performance art, this book investigates scholarship that might be under-
stood as corresponding with the term ‘animism’ along with a question
of ‘who’ or ‘what’ is credited with ‘animacy’. We are seeking out a loosen-
ing of the tenacious dualisms of the animate/inanimate in order that who-
ever or whatever might appear gains animacy. We explore this rich but
also contested area of scholarship through the discussion of potentially
controversial themes organized into four interrelated parts that address
Indigenous Animacies, Atmospheric Animations, Animacy Hierarchies
and Sensational Animisms. Using animism—and the interrelated notion
of animacy as a central construct—rather than, say, new materialism,
the post-human, the anthropocene, performativity or liveness (though
these remain part of the conversation in this book), helps us explore
ideas often discredited in Euro-American thought and scholarship. These
ideas include an acknowledgement of the personhood and hau (life
breath) traversing art and other treasured things (taonga) in te ao Māori
C. Braddock (*) 
School of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland,
New Zealand
e-mail: chris.braddock@aut.ac.nz
© The Author(s) 2017 1

C. Braddock (ed.), Animism in Art and Performance,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_1
2 C. Braddock
(the Māori world) (Cassandra Barnett), kōrero (talk) with the dead
through photography (Natalie Robertson), the sun as an animate being
with mauri (life force) (Janine Randerson and Rachel Shearer), life in the
algorithm (Anna Gibbs), breath as mobile energy (Simone Schmidt),
atmospheric communities (Edward Scheer), intra-inanimacy in queered
and raced formations (Rebecca Schneider), feminist new materialism
and interanimacy (Amelia Jones), pure and present action-at-a-distance
(Chris Braddock), posthuman animalistic play and ritual (Martin
Patrick), art as hylozoic convulsive matter with spiritual movement
(Stephen Zepke) and a mineral ontology of contemporary art (Amelia
Barikin).
But before continuing, I need to point out that there is a problem
with the title of this book. And it’s not the sleight of hand that separates
art and performance. Animism is the problem, and what it summons up
for the shores of Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). It’s good to talk about
problems. Māori call this kōrero. I find myself saying to students on an
almost weekly basis, ‘In every problem there’s a gift, so let’s talk about
it.’ In the chapters that follow, Cassandra Barnett (Ngāti Raukawa),1 and
Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou), explore kōrero as a vehicle of mauri
(life force); a force that travels between people, people and things. But
Māori would not call this animism.
As Cassandra has noted, there is a wider philosophical and cultural–
political question hovering over parts of this book which percolates into
the rest. The question circulates around when and how it is appropriate
to use Māori concepts such as ‘mauri’ in the discussion of non-Māori art
practices—and more generally within Western discursive paradigms such
as animism—without misrepresenting the cosmology they come from
(while always reminding ourselves that there is no one Māori and no one
West). We don’t expect this book to answer that question, but we feel
obliged to raise the issue. And since the book is clearly a participant in
that debate, it’s good to be witting rather than unwitting about these
problems. This book was never conceived as a book uniquely concerned
with Māori world views about, for example, taonga and mauri. However,
stemming as it does from the shores of Aotearoa NZ, we necessarily need
involve, even be guided by, those indigenous frameworks (and clearly
state why, when we appear to be eliding those indigenous contexts).
From this perspective, the conceptual arc of the four parts of this
book is informed by mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge and educa-
tion) and Pasifika knowledge. Consequently, a number of chapters
1 INTRODUCTION: ANIMISM AND ANIMACIES 3
reinforce how indigenous world views and approaches are significantly

inflecting and subtly realigning current non-indigenous debates and dis-
cussions around material vitality. But given our mix of local (Aotearoa
NZ) and international authors, this was never declared as an exclusivity
but, rather, grew naturally from underneath, fanning the embers of a
growing conversation between us.2
For international readers, I might equally explain that, as a Pākehā
academic,3 I am ethically obliged to uphold mātauranga Māori—forms
of indigenous engagement that might be of value to Māori and Pasifika
according to the obligations inherent in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.4 It
follows from this that editing a book on animism in Aotearoa NZ is dif-
ferent from editing it elsewhere. These are the positive signs of a bicul-
tural sovereign system trying to work in academia.
Within this immensely treasured entanglement of indigenous and
other world views—and under the auspices of a name as powerfully pro-
vocative and misleading as animism—I also need to signal what we are
not doing in this book. We are not focusing on discussions about ‘tradi-
tional’ art and cultural practices, and neither do we single out artists who
directly respond to animism as a concept and/or its ethnographic and
museological framing.5 Furthermore, we especially want to avoid fram-
ing indigenous artists as practising hybrid or contemporary versions of
animist practices, for this might risk reiterating modernist primitivist the-
ories from the early twentieth century. Accordingly, we deploy animism
as a critical tool in discussing a wide range of transdisciplinary artistic
practices and media.
Ethnographic Animism
The reason for prioritizing a term such as animism—and questions of
human and non-human agency that arise from its critique—is strikingly
clear for writers in this book who address issues of indigenous culture.
This may be because the term animism arose directly from late nine-
teenth-century ethnographies on so-called ‘primitive’ indigenous peo-
ples. Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) was where the
term was reintroduced. Tylor understood the concept of animism as
a belief in a soul that could leave the body as an ethereal or vaporous
materiality and survive beyond death as souls or spirits belonging to all
manner of things, including ‘rivers, stones, trees, weapons’ that he notes
‘are treated as living intelligent beings, talked to, propitiated, punished
4 C. Braddock
for the harm they do’ (1920, 426, 457, 477). In this context, Tylor said
of Māori that they consider ‘the dreaming soul to leave the body and
return, even travelling to the region of the dead to hold converse with
its friends’ (1920, 441). And four pages later he notes that ‘spiritual ani-
mism’ crosses into a problematic lack of distinction between subjects
and objects: ‘Even in healthy waking life, the savage barbarian has never
learned to make that rigid distinction between subjective and objective,
between imagination and reality, to enforce which is one of the main
results of scientific education’ (1920, 445).
We will return to the evidently racist and evolutionist theories of Tylor
in a moment. For now, however, it is apt to point out that Ngā Puhi
tōhunga (expert) Māori Marsden is on record as saying that he disagreed
with early anthropological notions of animism. Marsden mentions ani-
mism during his conversation about the Māori idea of tapu, which he
defines as the ‘sacred state or condition of a person or thing’ (1992,
121). He criticizes early anthropologists for their view ‘that primitive
man held an animistic view of nature, by which they meant’, he quali-
fies, ‘that primitive man believed all natural objects to be animated by
its own spirit’ (1992, 121). Marsden does not cite which anthropologi-
cal viewpoint he is referring to, but he clearly puts forward a view that,
for Māori, ‘all the created order partook of mauri [which he defines as
life force and ethos] by which all things cohere in nature’, to which he
adds the addendum that ‘in human beings this essence was of a higher
order and was called mauriora (life principle)’ (1992, 121). Elsewhere,
he defines this life force or ethos in almost ecological terms:
An animate and other forms of life such as plants and trees owe their con-
tinued existence and health to mauri. When the mauri is strong, fauna and
flora flourish. When it is depleted and weak, those forms of life become
sickly and weak. (Marsden and Henare 1992, 18)
Tylor’s insistence on a clear and rational division between what he calls

‘subjective imagination’ and ‘objective reality’ clearly puts him at odds
with a world view that attributes a life force and ethos to all living beings
and things. From this perspective, Animism in Art and Performance
aims at reclaiming ethnographic animism, sometimes reflecting on how
indigenous thinking and making inflects transdisciplinary artistic prac-
tice without rendering it other to ‘the contemporary’. Above all, this is
an opportunity to provocatively reveal that the ‘magic’ of animism exists
where one might least expect it. Talking about the impossibility of going
back to what the notion of animism might have once meant or stood for,
Isabelle Stengers states that ‘Reclaiming means recovering what we have
been separated from, but not the sense that we would just get it back. It
means recovering, or recuperating, from the very separation, regenerat-
ing what it has poisoned’ (2012, 187).6
Contagious Animism
This project of retrieving and regenerating animism in the context of
art and performance was central to my exploration of what I call ‘con-
tagious animism’, which was put forward in my Performing Contagious
Bodies: Ritual Participation in Contemporary Art (2013). In that book
I focused a good deal on those outmoded tropes of Western animism in
late Victorian anthropology on magic. I was keen to explore the incred-
ible history of Western perceptions of magical ritual and, in turn, their
relationship to art. What struck me was the equivocal manner in which
some late nineteenth-century British anthropologists—such as Tylor,
Henry Balfour (1863–1939) and James George Frazer (1854–1941)—
dealt with their ethnographic material. They seemed bemused by the
continuation of so-called ‘savage’ beliefs and practices in their own
contemporary societies. For example, Tylor chooses to overlook a his-
tory of the Protestant Reformation with its prohibition of Catholic
sacraments because transubstantiation was, in part, viewed as magical
practice. Tylor’s ability to disavow evidence of animistic practices in his
lifetime extended to his own experiences of English spiritualism and in
the seances that he sometimes attended, as noted in his diary of 1872
(Stocking 1971). In an 1869 paper titled “On the Survival of Savage
Thought in Modern Civilization”, Tylor equates what he calls folklore
traditions with the female, the lower classes and the infantile (Braddock
2013, 164–165). Yet his diary notes indicate that he is clearly bewil-
dered at how prominent members of society (such as the lawyer Edward
Cox, who founded the Psychological Society of Great Britain in 1875,
and General Augustus Pitt Rivers, founder of the Pitt Rivers Museum
in 1884) could take spiritualism seriously (see Stocking 1971, 102;
Braddock 2013, 165–166). Tylor’s perplexing analyses are standard for
a late nineteenth-century Victorian ethnographic separation of culture
and nature, in which a white, male intellect was seen as having evolved
to a superior cultural understanding separate from the natural and
6 C. Braddock
non-human world; a category which at times included the indigenous

‘other’. This heady mixture of disavowal and ‘academic’ persistence was
fuelled by a racialized and evolutionary-driven concept of civilization.
In Performing Contagious Bodies, I wanted to explore some com-
mon ground between the invisible vaporous film or shadow (Tylor 1871,
429), which Tylor feared so much in animism, and more contemporary
deconstructive thinking—especially Jacques Derrida’s notion of the trace
structure. With this in mind I wrote:
What those anthropologists observed in ‘savage’ magical practices was a

breakdown in oppositional structures of life and death, organic and inor-
ganic, subject and object, linked to the possibility of a ‘force’ that precedes
those terms related and contagiously infiltrates all materiality beyond rea-
son. This, it turns out, is a staple of Derridean deconstruction and the
notion of différance. (2013, xiv)
From this perspective, notions such as ‘contagious animism’ (and ‘apha-

sic participation’, influenced by Roman Jakobson’s work on aphasia,
magic and art) became a means to think about live art, its material traces
and what ‘participation’ might mean (see also Braddock 2011, 2012).
Here, the concept of ‘contagion’ is synonymous with a liveness that does
not reside in bodies or in things, but rather operates as an atmosphere
or ‘effluvia’, as Marcel Mauss calls it, which ‘travel about’ (1975 [1902–
1903], 72). In this way, contagious animism operates outside strate-
gic communication and suggests forms of unwitting participation, not
unlike the unseen networks of disease that might seem to infiltrate with-
out reason. This, I argue, paves the way for academic scholarship to con-
sider ideas of temporality, action-at-a-distance and telepathy, to name a
few examples.
Important to this approach is the idea of a field of affectual poten-
tial—like a force field of affect—‘that precedes the oppositional structures
of people and things, life and death, presence and absence’ (Braddock
2013, xvi). This discussion is important for Amelia Barikin in Chap. 13
of this book, when she remarks:
For Derrida, the trace is much more than the remainder of that which was
(for example, the trace fossil of a dinosaur footprint preserved in stone).
Rather, the trace calls up a spectral ‘absent presence’ that is also an ‘absent
present’, implicated in what Derrida calls the ‘becoming-time of space and
the becoming-space of time’ or espacement. (see Derrida 1984, 8)
In this endeavour, I was careful to concentrate on a history of ‘Western

perceptions of magical ritual’ (2013, xvii) rather than refer to indigenous
artists from Australia or Aotearoa NZ. Given that the ethnography on
animism is embedded in racism of one kind or another, I didn’t want to
situate Māori or Polynesian artists once again as ‘Other’ (2013, xviii).
But along with this decision came my gnawing concern that I was adopt-
ing a theoretical formalism unrelated to the indigenous customs and rit-
ual practices that spur the enquiry.
As an overall strategy in thinking about animism, I wanted to de-
historicize and de-naturalize the term ‘savage’. In the unlikely event of
eliminating a volatile term such as this from all discourse, an alternative
would be to apply it well beyond and in excess of those ethnographic
and historical constraints.7 To this end, I put out a twofold provocation:
either there are no savages (and there never were), or we are all sav-
ages (2013, xvii–xix, 7). This approach correlates with scholars such as
Christopher Bracken who writes: ‘There is no such thing as a savage soci-
ety, nor has there ever been. Savage philosophers are the outgrowths of
discourse, and they dare us to think more by daring to enrich signs with
a principle of change’ (2007, 21). Bracken offers a revealing account of
how strands of what he provocatively terms ‘savage philosophy’ are pur-
sued and articulated in the work of influential Western thinkers such as
Marx, Nietzsche, Proust, Freud, C.S. Peirce and Walter Benjamin. As
Bracken calls attention to strands of ‘savage philosophy’, he wittingly
pays attention to lingering racism and evolutionism that motivate dis-
tinctions between the animate and the inanimate, the real and the ideal,
between signs and things, and ultimately between who matters and who
does not:
For centuries, but with particular intensity in the later nineteenth century,
scholars in the so-called Western tradition have taken it for granted that
some concepts are not just culturally but racially superior to others. Do
not pretend, then, that the philosophy of language is not a racial project.
Prejudice is at work not only in the application but in the production of
categories of thought. ‘When we do philosophy,’ says Wittgenstein, ‘we are
like savages [die Wilde], primitive people.’ Philosophers are comparable to
‘savages,’ in his view, because they pay too much attention to what words
mean and think too little about how they are used. Tylor affirms the oppo-
site. Savage philosophers, by his account, are too preoccupied with how
words are used and pay too little attention to what they mean. It does not
8 C. Braddock
matter who is right. The point is that a difference between races has been
projected onto an enduring scholarly debate about the relation between
signs and things. (2007, 6)
Entangled Animisms
All these entanglements are approached differently in the book you are
holding.8 As Barnett notes, within te ao Māori, animism is a practice to
be activated for its efficacies, rather than a term to be understood, cri-
tiqued or explained. In line with her comment, she offers an important
opening thought when she writes:
Such proximities and interleavings afford closer enquiry into where recent
Western animisms (as enabled by new materialisms and philosophies of the
posthuman and anthropocene) and indigenous world views meet—and
where they part ways. Like Māori taonga, contemporary art can invoke a
cosmic vibrant materialism, an interconnectedness of all things, and a con-
cern for the role/responsibility of the human within this. But somewhere
around the assigning of ‘anthropomorphic’ personalities and behaviors
(and even names) to things, the Western philosophies still tend to become
troubled. Taonga Māori land us in a place where ‘animism’ has profound
efficacies, yet does not exist as a critique-able term or concept.
Barnett’s approach differs from some current scholarship on animism

that is somewhat hostile to the animating possibilities of spirit or soul
(Bennett 2010, xvii)—with the addendum that these are Western terms
and that Barnett speaks of hau (life breath) and mauri (life force). From
this perspective, Anselm Franke endeavours to avoid something very
provocative in Barnett’s chapter—a question of whether ‘things’ pos-
sess anima, subjectivity or life (Franke 2012, n.p.). In this vein he writes,
‘Animism is thus not a belief in inert objects “having” a soul, it is a way
of knowing by way of subjectification—a practice that accounts for the
primacy of communication and relationality, and the designs that things
have on us’ (Franke and Folie 2012, 172). While Barnett systematically
avoids using the term ‘belief’ in her discussion (favouring the ‘effica-
cies’ of hau and mauri in contemporary art-taonga and thus avoiding a
‘one-truth’ epistemology (2017))—and acknowledging that she may
sympathize with Franke’s call for relationality and Jane Bennett’s ideas
of ‘material vibrancy’ intrinsic to things in themselves (2010: xii)—she
significantly reclaims and recuperates (to use Stengers’s words) a Māori
concept and practice of taonga (treasured things) considered, as she says,
‘animate and alive because they instantiate ancestral hau (life breath),
mauri (life force) and mana (spiritual power) in the present’.
Barnett’s indigenous world view prompts a few more preliminary
observations about this book. As already emphasized, many of us are
writing from the shores of Aotearoa NZ. This fact pervades even the
style guide for this book, where Māori terms such as wairua (spirit) are
not written in italic because they are not ‘foreign’ words to Aotearoa NZ
as te reo Māori (Māori language) is the founding indigenous language.
From these shores, an idea that mauri pervades the atmosphere and land,
with a capacity to move through people and things, is not a concept (not
a ‘representation’) that signifies or stands for something else (Henare
et al. 2007, 2, 12). As with what we are slowly learning from the onto-
logical turn in anthropology, instead of asking, for example, ‘can mauri
move through photographs of the dead?’, we take this as something that
is. Accordingly, the ‘can’ question about mauri turns to a question of
how we might kōrero this phenomena and its efficacy as an experience
encountered. The editors of Thinking Through Things suggest this as a
heuristic approach that seeks to animate possibilities (2007, 6) in a shift-
ing focus from questions of knowledge and epistemology towards those
of ontology (2007, 8). They go on to write:
So, if the first step to ‘ontological breakthrough’ is to realise that ‘different

worlds’ are to be found in ‘things’, the second one is to accept that seeing
them requires acts of conceptual creation—acts which cannot of course be
reduced to mental operations (to do so would be merely to revert to the
dualism of mental representation versus material reality). (2007, 15)
This is to reiterate Barnett’s assertion just mentioned that taonga Māori

take us to a place where something we might call animism has profound
efficacies, yet is neither critiqued nor questioned, as this involves episte-
mological mental operations at odds with a taonga’s animating possibili-
ties. And taking heed from Zoe Todd’s indigenous feminist critique of
the ontological turn, this at least tries to make space for other indigenous
ontologies ‘outside of the rock-star arenas of Euro-Western thought’
(2016, 8). Here, importantly, I am not making a claim that this book
avoids the problem of European thinkers replicating indigenous thought
(2016, 14) with its distributed entanglement of different authors, but it
at least foregrounds some important indigenous artists/writers, giving
attention to the decolonial project.
10 C. Braddock
As Natalie Robertson considers viewer–image relationships and the

role of representation in photography (Chap. 3), she explores a series
of Māori protocols, permissions and conversations around photography.
Our knowledge of these forms of protocol extends a kōrero that acti-
vates mauri. Kōrero—including hongi (sharing breath), touching, kissing
and speaking—keeps photographs of people, things and places impor-
tant to Māori warm. In this way, Robertson argues how photographs
may ‘carry’ spiritually as taonga that are living embodiments of tipuna
(ancestors). Accordingly, we can kōrero with the dead through photog-
raphy. This describes a flow of Mauri cosmology that is different from
a Eurocentric notion of photography that is sometimes segmented off
from its referent. This enables a fascinating discussion about the reso-
nance of these images over time, and through different viewing encoun-
ters in the everyday and in more ritualized viewing contexts. This opens
up a multi-layered relationship to perception over time that relates to
indigenous concepts about time and space.
This animating power of language, noted in Robertson’s chap-
ter, is taken up differently by Australian scholar Anna Gibbs in Part II
‘Atmospheric Animations’ (Chap. 5), where she argues that the language
of data and the algorithm infiltrates all materiality as if an atmosphere
animating a liveness and new nature. Exploring the installation practice
of Sydney artist Lynne Barwick (an artwork consisting of 215 phrases
scrawled over the four walls of a small garage space), Gibbs explores the
debates that language engenders as it shifts across different registers of
annunciation, iteration and context. She references Harry Matthews as
saying ‘we think we’re using the language, but language is doing the
thinking, we’re its slavish agents’ (1988). In the context of the algo-
rithm, Gibbs explores the animating power of the word and the ways
in which entangled bodies depend on media as a ‘data-driven life-form
with its own kind of (nonhuman) consciousness’. Something comes to
life in language, not so much out of a necessity for strategic communi-
cation but, with reference to Roland Barthes, from its breath, repeated
and overlaid such that it is not about the individual ego but about lan-
guage itself as a ‘conduit or collaborator’. Given this emphasis on the
breath of language activating collaboration beyond reason, the structure
of this book allows readers to make up their own mind about the animat-
ing characteristics of language/kōrero across different cultural registers.
This idea of sharing breath and the sound of the voice as mobile
energy is taken up by Simone Schmidt, also in ‘Atmospheric Animations’
(Chap. 6). She concentrates on a question of how animated matter

is ‘opened’ to a heightened and expanded temporality. In discussing
Melbourne-based Bridie Lunney’s sculpture and performance practice,
which uses the operations of suspension (human bodies suspended on
pseudo gym-like sculptural forms which are then left ‘absent’), Schmidt
explores modalities of suspension, waiting and absence through the
body’s inhalation and exhalation of breath that, in turn, impacts on our
(the viewers) witnessing and the space we occupy. In this context, anima
is seen as an essential force with a nomadic energy, not unlike Edward
Scheer’s emphasis (Chap. 7) on the fabrication of atmospheric commu-
nities. Numerous writers have contextualized links between the Latin
anima, as a mobile energy or soul, independent from the bodies it perme-
ates and thus associated with wind, breeze, breath or air in relation to the
notion of animism (Papapetros 2012b, 186, 188). In this context, Spyros
Papapetros writes: ‘The value of the anima, or soul, lies in its endless
promiscuity, its inability to be permanently attached to any person, thing,
or concept’ (2012b, 186). This is, in turn, indicative of Marsden’s empha-
sis on Hau-Ora as ‘the breath or wind of the spirit which was infused into
the process to birth animate life’ (Marsden and Henare 1992, 8).
Concluding ‘Atmospheric Animations’, Scheer (Chap. 7) foregrounds
an aesthetics that results from a physical encounter or experience with
‘atmospheres’ and suggest a shift away from a ‘desire for sensorial stim-
ulation’ to a kind of direct experience of matter. His chapter spins on
this subtle shift from a ‘matter of experience’ to the ‘experience of mat-
ter’. As is the case with the previous chapter by Schmidt, this power-
fully echoes the language of animism, downplaying subjectification and
emphasizing in its place contagious, permeating and infiltrating atmos-
pheres; in other words, something we encounter even if we don’t know
we’re encountering it. Scheer notes this as an important new direction
in contemporary art as an exploration of vital matter enabled through
technological means, that is, the manufacture of atmospheres ‘as enti-
ties in themselves rather than aesthetic by-products’. In this context, the
cloud and fog formations produced by artists such as Axel Antas and
Kris Verdonck reclaim the vaporous and film-like phenomena that Tylor
referred to in the late nineteenth century, which, as Papapetros notes,
‘does not refer to a singular object’. This atmospheric value, he contin-
ues, ‘is produced not by the fixation of power on a single object, but
instead by its constant redistribution among a collectivity of persons and
things’ (2012b, 187).
12 C. Braddock
With reference to Peter Sloterdjk, Scheer proposes this reimagin-

ing of atmospheres as something that could potentially change public
understanding of climate change resulting from human activity into an
urgent ethical and political task. Again, recalling the powerful operations
of contagious animism, this is the reimagining of an immersion (literally,
in some of the artworks discussed) that is neither material or immaterial
and that we have no control over. As Papapetros writes: ‘The anima is a
mobile energy that is independent from the bodies it infuses’ (2012b,
188). But, in turn, this traditional view of animism that Papapetros is
referring to can be critiqued and expanded through Sloterdijk; that is,
the overwhelming effort made to technologize and engineer these
‘atmospheric communities’ reveals that these mobile energies are not
independent from our bodies. And, for the artists discussed in Scheer’s
chapter, this ‘experience of matter’ is a question of survival, because sur-
vival may depend on the artificial reproduction of atmospheric commu-
nities (Sloterdijk 2011, 245). Is this a bit like technically recreating the
atmospheric ghosts of our past and future?
Returning to Chap. 4 of Part I, Janine Randerson and Rachel Shearer
(Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Kahungunu) explore both
Māori and Pākehā artists in the context of the sun’s explosive and unpre-
dictable atmosphere. The idea of atmosphere is transposed through the
tremoring hand (wiri) and vibrational voice of Māori karakia (incanta-
tion, prayer) corresponding with Shearer’s solar-powered responsive
soundworks such as Wiriwiri (2017). In this crossover between indig-
enous animacies and atmospheric animations (indicative of the intercon-
necting sections of this book), the artists they explore generate sensory
understandings of the sun’s forces in our ecosystem. But Randerson and
Shearer focus on the Māori sacred ancestor Tamanuiterā, the son of the
sun, thus, through Māori cosmology, acknowledging the sun’s subject-
hood. This is similar to Terri Te Tau’s (Rangitāne, Ngāti Kahungunu)
artwork with its live ‘tupuna gaze’ (ancestor gaze)—discussed by Barnett
in Chap. 2—mingling its hau (life breath) with the hau of the living peo-
ple and lands it encounters. Guided by indigenous thinking, this resists
‘old’ animisms (i.e., the assigning of anthropomorphic personalities to
things) in favour of allowing pre-existing forces (hau and mauri) that
we do not control (Barnett 2017). (And whether or not this could, or
should, be contextualized through Western deconstructive analysis i.e.,
force fields of affect and/or Derrida’s notion of the trace, is a ques-
tion, as said, that is part of the complex entanglement of this volume).
If the solar is Tamanuiterā, a taonga whose ‘objectness’ can be desig-

nated neither person nor thing, following Barnett’s argument in refer-
ence to Henare (2007), we can’t continue ‘to treat our solar system and
climate as controllable’, Randerson and Shearer argue, urging a call to
reestablish ‘the human as part of nature, and nature as part of ourselves’.
Our exploration of indigenous perspectives spreads beyond the shores
of Aotearoa NZ in chapters by Rebecca Schneider and Amelia Jones. Not
unrelated to Gibb’s focus on linguistic hierarchies within the algorithm,
Schneider opens Part III, ‘Animacy Hierarchies’, in Chap. 8 with a focus
on an extended animacy of encounter, asking ‘who’ or ‘what’ is included
in the ‘now’ of this encounter? This relates to one of Schneider’s over-
arching questions: what extension of liveness is possible? This question of
who and what gets to matter gives rise to the question of animacy. In this
respect, Schneider (like Braddock, Jones and Patrick) builds on impor-
tant recent scholarship such as Mel Chen’s 2012 Animacies: Biopolitics,
Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect which questions the ‘production
of humanness in contemporary times’ (2012, 3) and what Chen calls
‘dominant animacy hierarchies’ that are above all political and ‘shaped by
what or who counts as human, and what or who does not’ (2012, 30).
In this way Chen troubles ‘stubborn binary systems of difference, includ-
ing dynamism/stasis, life/death, subject/object, speech/nonspeech,
human/animal, natural body/cyborg’ (2012, 3).
In a brilliant transition from mineral animism to questions of ani-
macy, Schneider explores a truly bizarre episode of Star Trek titled
“Savage Curtain” from 1969, in which a planetary rock turns into
Abraham Lincoln and is beamed on board Starship Enterprise. With ref-
erence to Chen’s ‘leveraging animacy toward a consideration of affect
in its queered and raced formations’ (2012, 11), Schneider observes
the uncanny transformation of Lincoln into a Native and/or African
American. In her words: ‘Lincoln’s makeup inexplicably blackens as the
episode progresses’ until he regards his own raised ‘black’ hand and
recounts past wrongs. This builds on Schneider’s 2016 keynote lecture
for PSi#22 in which she interjected images of Native American peoples
‘captured’ in a hands-up gesture of vulnerability. As Schneider says, this
is a crisis of leading and/or following: ‘Reverb-verb-verb-berations as
stories of calls for justice’.9
What Schneider calls a ‘Star Trek mineral-human intra-inanimation
[that is] cross-temporal as it is intra-planetary’ demands, she says, ‘simul-
taneously travelling both temporally and spatially across or among vast
14 C. Braddock
intervals we had hitherto habitually held to be non-traversable’. Her

challenge has profound resonance with the quantum physicist and phi-
losopher Karen Barad, who throws out a compelling provocation for
thinking through what she calls ‘one of the most stubborn of all dual-
isms—the animate/inanimate dualism’ that places ‘inorganic entities on
the other side of death, of the side of those who are denied even the
ability to die’ (2012: 21). In the context of commenting on the quan-
tum eraser experiment in an interview for Women, Gender & Research,
Barad seeks out a reading of the data in terms of phenomena, rather than
in terms of things, allowing what she terms ‘performing the labour of
tracing the entanglements, of making connections visible’. In doing so,
she continues, ‘you’re making our obligations and debts visible, as part
of what it might mean to reconfigure relations of spacetimemattering’
(2012, 20). I quote Barad at length because she begins to articulate what
is meant by animism for the purposes of this publication:
The inanimate is always being shoved to the side, as if it is too far removed
from the human to matter, but that which we call inanimate is still very
much bodily and lively. It may seem perverse, unimportant, or meaning-
less, to attribute memory to an inanimate happening, but that speaks of a
failure of imagination that gets stuck at the threshold of one of the most
stubborn of all dualisms—the animate/inanimate dualism—that stops
animacy cold in its tracks, leaving rocks, molecules, particles, and other
inorganic entities on the other side of death, of the side of those who are
denied even the ability to die, despite the fact that particles have finite life-
times. Who gets to count as one who has the ability to die? A rock, a river,
a cloud, the atmosphere, the earth? How about viruses, brittlestars and
other boundary-crossers? What about the fate of carbon and phosphorous?
And if these concerns sound silly, why? (2012, 21)
Barad’s final question as to whether her concerns sound silly reflect an

ongoing suspicion about ideas expressed in this book. These ideas, she
continues, are ‘about boundary drawing practices and how they matter,
and who and what gets to matter’ (2012, 21).
Barad’s feminist new materialist work is important for Amelia Jones in
Chap. 9 of Part III, ‘Animacy Hierarchies’, where she discusses feminist
performativities and interanimacy. Springing from ideas about the bind-
ing power of performatives to make things happen, Jones talks about
Barad’s relational ‘intra-activity’ and ways in which saying something, or
making something, reshapes materialities and thinking across all bodies,
not just human bodies.
Jones is currently engaging in a number of new research projects that

trace a historiography of notions of queer and performativity, as well as
an interweaving with pedagogical issues. As part of this research, she
will visit Aotearoa NZ during 2018, interviewing some key Māori and
Pacifika artists and exploring their relationship to queer and the perform-
ative. In her work on theatrical embodiment linked to ‘the “animation”
of aspects of corporeality and subjectivity’, she writes:
I am very interested in troubling this reciprocal ‘inter-animacy’ whereby

bodies enact genders/sexualities and discourses describe embodied modes
of gender/sexual being in mutually determining ways. What happens to
these terms (how do bodies animate gender/sexuality) elsewhere, out-
side my zone of theorizing and practicing gender performance and queer
performativity (North America, or more specifically urban centers in the
United States)?
In a continuing discussion about animacy hierarchies, my contribu-

tion (Chap. 10) explores the performance practice of New Zealand–
Niuean artist Darcell Apelu who provocatively performs what she calls
a ‘savage’ self-portrait or face in live and recorded performance. Apelu
is responding to the ways in which Polynesian culture has been framed
by European ethnographers as dysfunctionally passive. The chapter
reaches back into the ethnographies on animism through an explora-
tion of Emmanuel Levinas’s writing on the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-
Bruhl (1875–1939). This is done as a face-to-face encounter that mimics
some of the power of Apelu’s performances and takes into account some
of the postcolonial entanglements the study of animism evokes. While
Apelu’s performances involve ironic protest, I argue that she proposes an
ethics of radical passivity or participation (which is how Levinas contex-
tualizes Lévy-Bruhl’s work on animism). The way in which Apelu’s per-
formances reorientate ‘passivity’ enables a critique of ‘dominant animacy
hierarchies’ that are above all political (Chen 2012‚ 30). Furthermore,
my contention is that attention to theories of animism and animacy
opens up current debates about what constitutes participation in art and
performance.
Part III, ‘Animacy Hierarchies’, concludes with Chap. 11 by American
writer and academic Martin Patrick (living in Aotearoa NZ), discussing the
winner of the 2016 Walters Prize,10 Shannon Te Ao (Ngati Tūwharetoa),
and the idea of discussing ‘with’ and ‘becoming’ animals as well as notions
of play. Shannon Te Ao’s thinking about indigenous concepts such as mauri
16 C. Braddock
help Patrick think through how animistic notions might provocatively coin-
cide with ‘posthuman’ ideas on the fringes of science and spirituality. With
reference to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this chapter explores a quasi-
animist speech effect and the possibility of becoming animal. In thinking
through animism and subjectivity the question is asked, ‘how might certain
beings stop being human’? This spills over into a discussion of Australian art-
ist David Cross and New Zealand artist Catherine Bagnall. Together with
Te Ao, each of these artists uses masquerade and disguise in the form of
dressing as animals, becoming and addressing animals, and exploring child-
like modes of play and games. This chapter reminds us of Papapetros’s writ-
ing on cultural reactions to animism (in the context of Darwin’s dog and
the parasol), where he writes about ‘the sudden reappearance of the animal
within the territory of the human’ and the way in which ‘animism becomes
animalism’ (2012a, n.p.).
For Chap. 12 of Part IV, ‘Sensational Animisms’, Stephen Zepke sets the
scene by unpacking Deleuze and Guattari’s slogan that ‘representations are
bodies too’ (and Bergson’s argument that images are things), making con-
temporary art a form of animist expressionism. Zepke recounts Deleuze and
Guattari’s interest in the Romantic sublime, and more specifically the hylo-
zoism of Romanticism which gave rise to the term animism across numer-
ous disciplines. Hylozoism—the philosophical point of view that matter is in
some sense alive—allows Zepke to map out an alternative animist genealogy
for contemporary artistic practice that connects the hylozoist tradition to the
production of the new at the core of Modernism. In this light, Deleuze and
Guattari are romantic animists who allow art an expressionism and autopoie-
sis that convulses matter with spiritual movement.
Both Zepke and Amelia Barikin are troubled by the state of the art
world—in crisis partly because of an emphasis on the autonomous art
object and the pressures of the art market, and because artworks are lim-
ited to representing conceptual conditions. In placing emphasis on sensa-
tion as the realm of art, both Zepke and Barikin align art with nature,
which, Zepke reminds us, Deleuze and Guattari say is not a teleological
conception. In other words, it has no apparent purpose, more aligned
with experience than representation. As Zepke says, nature is ‘perversely
hylozoic … because it is composed of utterly inorganic, contingent and
non-teleological force animating all matter’. Interestingly, Tylor places
belief in animism squarely in nature’s zone, in conflict with what he sees
as the civilizing evolutionism of modern culture.
From this perspective, for Chap. 13 of Part IV, Barikin argues that if
art is simply made by humans, for humans, then its status is only relevant
as art. With reference to Elizabeth Grosz, she builds an argument that

art and nature share common ground with sensation as non-organic life.
Critiquing Derrida’s notion of the trace structure as overly anthropo-
morphic, she develops the idea of the trace structure of ‘non-living, not-
yet-living or never-living forms’. In this respect, the trace structure needs
to include not just all living things but all things in time. Accordingly,
Barikin invites us to think about the animacy of minerals including stones
and fossils, drawing attention to double ontologies as she writes:
Paying attention to the stoniness of stones or the thingness of things forces

a confrontation with art’s material conditioning. There are ghosts here of
a Post-Minimalist sensibility in which representation gives way to presenta-
tion. An object stands. It doesn’t stand in.
Barikin’s exploration of a ‘double ontology of materiality’ has some-

thing in common with Schneider’s transition from mineral animism to
questions of animacy. For Barikin, this double ontology means that the
material itself speaks. But she wants to try and avoid the idea of put-
ting words in the mouths of stones: ‘The stone can just be there but it
doesn’t have to be allegorical or symbolic. There can be potential for
the stone to “be” in its stoniness.’ And this also means, she continues,
‘thinking about time and to be serious about the idea that the world
doesn’t need us’.11 This is to highlight, she says in her chapter, the ‘indif-
ference and ambivalence that the trace bestows on the binary between
the living and the dead’. Barikin extends this mineral trace structure
dynamically as she asks us to think about what a sound fossil might be. In
doing so, she compounds non-organic and organic materials in searching
out what she calls a mineral ontology of contemporary art.
Barikin’s imperative to leave open the possibility of a mineral ontol-
ogy—one that ethically respects the lifetimes of stones and fossils—has
a profound resonance with Barad’s provocation just cited: ‘Who gets to
count as one who has the ability to die? (2012, 21). Writing on the art-
work of Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, Barikin asks us ‘to take
seriously the possibility of non-human knowledge, and how might this
knowledge be accessed. How might the stones ‘speak’? What kind of lan-
guage is consecrated for such use? How is it made audible, and for whom?’
In doing so she invites us to think about a different ‘ethics of being in
which the living–non-living binary might no longer apply, and to see what
this might teach us about the new materialisms of contemporary art’.
18 C. Braddock
These objects and atmospheres swing around to concerns put forward

by Barnett, Robertson, Randerson and Shearer in Part I, ‘Indigenous
Animacies’, contesting modes of anthropomorphism in old school animism
and favouring instead no division between persons and things in what
Barnett calls in Chap. 2 a ‘“subjectless object” … that is “impenetrably”
alive and connected to everything else’. Like the ‘sound fossils’ of Dubbin
and Davidson just mentioned, Rachel Shearer’s Wiriwiri (2017) sonically
images (and imagines) the shimmering and quivering heated air that rises
from the ground on a hot summer day. That art–taonga does not represent
or signify. Its trembling call is ‘te haka a Tānerore’ (the dance of Tānerore).
Notes
1. Ngāti is the prefix for a tribal group. In this case, ‘Raukawa’ indicates that
Cassandra is part of a tribal group from the Maungatautari-Tokoroa area.
Thank you to Cassandra Barnett for her editorial guidance and critique in
writing this Introduction.
2. This book began in earnest with the workshop/conference Animism
and Material Vitality in Art & Performance, 11–12 June 2015, hosted
by the Art and Performance Research Group, Auckland University of
Technology (AUT), Auckland. See https://artandperformance.word-
press.com/.
3. Pākehā is a Māori term for New Zealanders of European descent.
Recently the term has encompassed any non-Māori New Zealander.
4. Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) is the ‘founding document’ of
Aotearoa New Zealand, signed by representatives of the British Crown
and Māori iwi (tribes) on 6 February 1840.
5. This is a marked difference from Anselm Franke and Sabine Folie’s 2012
exhibition (at the Generali Foundation, Vienna, 15 September 2011–29
January 2012) and catalogue Animism: Modernity through the Looking
Glass, which incorporates artists who reference animism directly in their
artistic practices thus creating a project about animism (see Franke and
Folie 2012, Franke 2012).
6. See Rane Willerslev, who discusses a move away from the study of so-
called old animism toward what Graham Harvey refers to as ‘the new
animism’. Willerslev foregrounds the need to take indigenous thinking
seriously (2012, n.p.).
7. The term ‘savage’ has been activated by a genealogy of often feminist
performance in Aotearoa NZ. This goes back to the Pacific Sisters collec-
tive formed in 1992 by Selina Forsyth (Samoan), Niwhai Tupaea (Ngāti
Katoa) and Suzanne Tamaki (Tūhoe, Te Arawa, Ngāti Maniapoto).
The sisterhood also includes Rosanna Raymond (NZ–Samoan) who

has since established the SaVAge K’Lub). For further reading see: Lisa
Uperesa (2016), Karen Stevenson (2008) and Martin Nakata (2007).
8. See Sarah Nuttall, whose detailed exploration of entanglement points to
a set of cultural and social relationships that are ‘complicated, ensnaring,
in a tangle, but which also implies a human foldedness. It works with dif-
ference and sameness but also with their limits, their predicaments, their
moments of complication’ (2009, 1). See also Ian Hodder’s work on
entanglement referenced in my chapter for this book.
9. Rebecca Schneider, Keynote lecture, ‘Extending a Hand: Gesture,
Duration, and the Posthumous Turn’, Performance Studies International
(PSi#22), The University of Melbourne, 9 July 2016.
10. New Zealand’s largest contemporary art prize hosted by the Auckland Art
Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
11. Amelia Barikin expressed these views at the Animism and Material
Vitality in Art & Performance conference, 11–12 June 2015, hosted by
the Art and Performance Research Group, AUT University, Auckland.
See https://artandperformance.wordpress.com/.
References
Barad, Karen. 2012. Intra-active Entanglements—An Interview with Karen Barad.
Interview by Malou Juelskjær and Nete Schwennesen. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning
NR (Women, Gender & Research): 1–2 (Feminist Materialisms): 10–23.
Barnett, Cassandra. 2017. Email communication with the author, 22 June 2017.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Bracken, Christopher. 2007. Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage
Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Braddock, Christopher. 2011. Contagious Participation: Magic’s Power to
Affect. Performance Research 16 (4): 97–108.
Braddock, Christopher. 2012. Contagious Animism in the Artwork of Felix
Gonzales-Torres and Dane Mitchell. Drain: A Journal of Contemporary Art
and Culture, 13: n.p. (online journal).
Braddock, Christopher. 2013. Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual
Participation in Contemporary Art. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1984. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Franke, Anselm. 2012. Introduction—‘Animism’. e-flux Journal, 36 (July). Accessed 1
May 2017. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61244/introduction-animism/.
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Franke, Anselm, and Sabine Folie (eds.). 2012. Animism: Modernity Through the
Looking Glass. Cologne: Walther Konig.
Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds.). 2007. Thinking
Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. New York: Routledge.
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Hurihuri – Aspects of Maoritanga, ed. Michael King, 117–37. Auckland: Reed
Publishing Group.
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Introduction to the Holistic World View of the Māori. Ministry for the
Environment, Wellington. Accessed 1 May 2017. http://www.marinenz.org.
nz/documents/Marsden_1992_Kaitiakitanga.pdf.
Mathews, Harry. 1988. City Limits. London, 26 May.
Nakata, Martin. 2007. Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines.
Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Nuttall, Sarah. 2009. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-
Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Papapetros, Spyros. 2012a. Darwin’s Dog and the Parasol: Cultural Reactions to
Animism. e-flux Journal, 36 (July). Accessed 1 June 2017. http://www.e-flux.com/
journal/36/61250/darwin-s-dog-and-the-parasol-cultural-reactions-to-animism/.
Papapetros, Spyros. 2012b. Movements of the Soul: Traversing Animism,
Fetishism, and the Uncanny. Discourse 34 (2–3): 185–208.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2011. Neither Sun nor Death. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Stengers, Isabelle. 2012. Reclaiming Animism. In Animism: Modernity Through
the Looking Glass, ed. Anselm Franke, and Sabine Folie, 183–92. Vienna:
Generali Foundation.
Stevenson, Karen. 2008. The Frangipani is Dead: Contemporary Pacific Art in
New Zealand, 1985–2000. Wellington: Huia Publishers.
Stocking, George. 1971. “Animism in Theory and Practice: E. B. Tylor’s unpub-
lished ‘Notes on “Spiritualism”.” Man no. 6 (1): 88–104.
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‘Ontology’ is Just Another Word for Colonialism. Journal of Historical
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Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom,
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of a Samoan Savage, edited by Andrew Clifford, 8–11. Auckland: Te Uru
Waitakere Contemporary Gallery.
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Being Taken too Seriously? e-flux Journal, 36 (July). Accessed 1 June 2017.
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siberia-is-animism-being-taken-too-seriously/.
PART I
Indigenous Animacies
CHAPTER 2
Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels
Cassandra Barnett
The tale has been told before. This time begin with the eels. Eels, who
came from the stars. Some are getting ready as I write this in February
and March. They lurk fat and heavy, gathering strength amongst the
whitebait and raupō (bulrush) along the muddy banks of Ōtākaro.
There’s one right under the edge where Pani went in—her legs just mil-
limetres from its tail. It breathed faster, then slower, when Rosalyn’s
mākutu (magic) retrieved Emily from the whirlpool of time. There’s
another feeding on worms in the grass near where Te Aitu and George
jumped into lake Hāpuakorari—retrieving a pile of pāua-shell eyes. There
are a hundred and more in my own ancestral river, Waikato. Still or slow
but on their way, pulled to their swarming cousins and the ocean. Soon
they will navigate by floods, stars and moons, magnetics and tempera-
tures, pheromones and salinities to their deeper, wider home to spawn.
They will be seen off, some of them, by people who count them as
family. Slithering in their waterways past sacred, erect wharetupuna
(ancestral meeting houses), past abandoned, submerged wharetupuna,
past buried carvings with shining eyes, past motorways and railways and
dunes and pīngao grasses, down to the smells of the sea. And in the rain
and dark of Hinepouri the new moon they pause, then rush and converge
C. Barnett (*) 
Critical and Contextual Studies, Whiti o Rehua School of Art,
Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
e-mail: C.Barnett@massey.ac.nz

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_2
24 C. Barnett
and tumble suddenly in one tightly knotted ball over the bar. Push across
the sand and now surge forward in their separate bodies again, on differ-
ent waves, through competing swells, into a newer, vaster sea. Called on,
past pāua in the shallows, keeping silent company with snapper, stingray
and sharks, towards a watery sonar of whalesong, petrel squawks, oars,
propellers or engines … Swim, tuna, swim.1
Sea Change
This chapter has two main aims. First, to outline a Māori concept and
practice of taonga. Loosely translatable as valuables or treasured things,
taonga can be considered animate and alive because they instantiate
ancestral hau (life breath), mauri (life force) and mana (spiritual power)
in the present.2 Hau, mauri and mana, and hence taonga, have enduring
force and efficacy—they may amend the course of things here and now
in unpredictable ways. Second, to ask how taonga might be found tra-
versing contemporary art discourse and practice, holding a space there.
I will examine in depth a set of works by Terri Te Tau (Rangitāne, Ngāti
Kahungunu), and briefly touch upon additional works by Bridget Reweti
(Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) and others.3 I will attend to the taonga
in the artwork, asking the following questions. What (or who) is it? Who
is it encountering—and where do I fit in? What stories are told of it?
What whakapapa (genealogies), trajectories, contexts and currents are
concentrated within it?
The term taonga is commonly applied to taonga tuku iho (mate-
rial objects passed down from our ancestors), such as carved or woven
tools, weapons and adornments; also to tribal resources and territories
including customary food gathering areas, fisheries, flora and fauna; and
to more abstract cultural entities such as waiata (songs), pūrakau (leg-
ends) and whakapapa. You might also hear many modern and post-
modern Māori artworks referred to as taonga—and some of them no
doubt are, through their animations and activations of taonga processes.
Nonetheless, according to my argument, though taonga-things may trav-
erse art-things, they will not bear the exact same forms, contours, con-
figurations and ‘objectifications’ as those art-things. For they arise from
(and sustain) different conceptual-cosmological universes.
Taonga can include both contemporary things and customary things.
They continue to function beyond the bounded horizon of pre-colonial
Māori life, and beneath the surface of other more visible or dominant
2 TE TUNA-WHIRI: THE KNOT OF EELS 25
currents, systems and dynamics—including global, capitalistic, corporate

and aesthetic ones. (‘More visible’ to some, that is. For Māori of course
the taonga system with its ebbs and flows is part of the weave of everyday
discourse and practice, though this too encompasses invisibilities.) Like
the tuna (eels) insinuating themselves upon my writing mind, taonga can
survive as taonga at a great distance from their whānau (family/familiars),
viewers or thinkers. This is in part a matter of hau, as will be seen. And
even at that distance they can—like all things, on a Māori understand-
ing—call us to attention. As Carl Mika writes in ‘The Thing’s Revelation’,
‘things are not just passive … they are instead animate and creative, hav-
ing a much greater impact on the self than would be credited in dominant
rational discourse’ (2015, 63); and things are ‘capable of provocation;
they can “call forth” … something in us through their own language
or expression’ (2015, 64). Taonga can indeed insist upon our attention,
our custody, our care of them—as seen in this example from Rangihiroa
Panoho:
In a very matter-of-fact manner, a tino matua keke ‘great aunt’ from a

community along the Whanganui river, informed me that a carved ances-
tor told her to buy him pāua ‘abalone’ eyes so that he, Pāmoana, could
see his uri whakatipu ‘descendants’ inside their ancestral meetinghouse.
(2015, 250)
It is often argued that kaupapa (foundationally) Māori ‘art’ practices

should not be confused with contemporary art. I agree, but am arguing
that the two can hold their differences yet coexist, overlap or intersect
in certain places and times. When they do coincide, taonga-objects and
contemporary-art-objects bring into proximity their different worlds of
meaning, creating potential for new questions, new understandings and
new dynamics to form—depending on the taonga, and the people they
encounter.
Such proximities and interleavings afford closer enquiry into where
recent Western animisms (as enabled by new materialisms and phi-
losophies of the posthuman and anthropocene) and indigenous world
views meet—and where they part ways. Like Māori taonga, contempo-
rary art can invoke a cosmic vibrant materialism, an interconnectedness
of all things, and a concern for the role/responsibility of the human
within this. But somewhere around the assigning of ‘anthropomorphic’
personalities and behaviours (and even names) to things, the Western
26 C. Barnett
philosophies still tend to become troubled. Taonga Māori land us in a

place where ‘animism’ has profound efficacies, yet does not exist as a
critique-able term or concept.
By Smell and Starlight
Unwarranted and Unregistered (2013) and Unwarranted and Unregistered:
Te Āhua o te Hau ki Te Papaioea (2015) are two versions of a multime-
dia installation by Terri Te Tau. It consists of a 1986 Suzuki Carry 410
van—restored and reinvented by the artist as a high-gloss, black-cherry,
window-tinted surveillance van, parked inside the gallery—and a video work
projected onto the interior of the van’s windscreen. To experience the work,
viewers must clamber inside (usually through the back hatch), and sit in one
of the van’s seats gazing ‘out’ through the front windscreen, or rather ‘at’
the video projected onto that screen. The work is an artistic response to
‘Operation 8’, the 2007 dawn raids by over 300 New Zealand Police on
60 homes across the country, mostly the homes of indigenous activists. The
raids occurred after a year of covert surveillance, and police subsequently
attempted to lay charges against 12 people under the Terrorism Suppression
Act 2002. As activist Valerie Morse notes, ‘The people targeted were over-
whelmingly Māori’ (2010, 11).
I saw the first version of the work Unwarranted and Unregistered
in the group exhibition ‘Surveillance Awareness Bureau’ in Wellington
in 2015. There, the windscreen-film took us on a journey through
Greytown, a small town in the Wairarapa region near the artist’s marae
(tribal home). As we drive by streets and buildings, the naturalistic view
on screen is gradually overlaid with accruing head-up display (HUD)
digital surveillance data pertaining to the people and cars we pass. Thus
the transparent windscreen showing the scene ‘outside’ gives way to a
more opaque computer screen, as perceptual information is mediated,
obscured, then obliterated by information flows from other sources—
from rationalized data-mining systems and graphics-generating soft-
ware. This thickened vision generates a range of grim paranoia affects:
the helpless paranoia of the surveilled upon discovering their surveillants’
determined (and well-resourced) penetration of their worlds; and the
controlling paranoia of the surveillants, fearful enough of the surveilled
to invest untold resources in ceaselessly scrutinizing them. If the allu-
sion is primarily to our state-level surveillance regimes (capitulating to an
international War on Terror), gaming interfaces are also evoked by this
graphically data-mapped screen. Gaming often plies a paranoid subjectiv-

ity by peddling, in various guises, panoptical search-and-destroy opera-
tions. What are our avatars here? Are we police, gathering data, getting
ready to pounce? Objects of surveillance taking refuge? Disaffected
gang members counter-patrolling their turf? Are these our streets, our
‘hood’—or someone else’s?
I saw the second version of Te Tau’s work, Unwarranted and
Unregistered: Te Āhua o te Hau ki Te Papaioea, at Te Tohu o Uenuku
Māngere Arts Centre, Tāmaki (Auckland), in June 2016, during
Matariki—the season when Matariki (Pleiades) appears in the sky herald-
ing the Māori new year. Not knowing the work had been altered since
my last viewing, I again climbed inside the van, sat quietly and watched
the streets pass by. The view was soft and contemplative, the pace slow,
a leisurely suburban daytime cruise. Somehow the sinister vibe I remem-
bered had dissipated. There was an ambient soundtrack featuring taonga
pūoro (traditional Māori wind instruments made of bone and wood) and
other instruments,4 while the drive-by footage of streets and houses was
misted over with pastel swirls of green and purple, pink and blue. Like the
fine film of oil on a puddle’s surface, these prismic swirls lent a strange
beauty to the mundane street scene. Of course, a disquieting undercurrent
remained. The cruising van still made of me a watcher. And the gallery
wall text informing me that these streets of Te Papaioea were the sites of
four of the 2007 terror raids kept that other watchful entity, the White
supremacist state, in the room. But who was I now, and what and why
was I watching? Was I looking for trouble, or—as I settled into the more
benign atmosphere of this van and made a home there—just gazing lov-
ingly at the neighbourhood and my mokopuna (grandchildren), watching
them play and grow? A different, warmer avatar animated the van now.
Our journey was still troubled, but through the pink and blue swirls our
ride quietly emerged as a different kind of object, differently inhabited,
drawing on different resources  (Fig. 2.1).
Taonga Trench
To shift from this initial, percept-based reading of Te Tau’s work we
need a fuller understanding of taonga.5 For this, I draw in part from Paul
Tapsell’s now classic 1997 account, but primarily from Amiria Henare’s
more contemporary, politically enabling account in ‘Taonga Māori:
Encompassing Rights and Property in New Zealand’.
28 C. Barnett
Fig. 2.1 Terri Te Tau, exterior installation view of Unwarranted and

Unregistered: Te Āhua o te Hau ki Te Papaioea, 2015. Multimedia installation.
Courtesy of the artist
In 1853, Henare tells us (2007, 58), two taonga were gifted to New
Zealand’s retiring third governor, Sir George Grey, by the Māori chiefs
Te Rangihaeata of Ngāti Toa and Taratoa of my own iwi (tribe) Ngāti
Raukawa. These were a whalebone club named Hine Te Ao and a green-
stone ear pendant named Kaitangata. Hine Te Ao, Henare explains, was
a ‘maternal ancestor of the Ngāti Raukawa tribe’ (2007, 59). Kaitangata
was, implicitly, also an ancestor; hence Grey could report that ‘The old
chief then proceeded after the ancient Māori custom of “Hongi” to press
the green stone to his nose, and pass it over his face in token of farewell’
(Henare 2007, 58).6 Hongi is the Māori practice of greeting each other
nose to nose, thus sharing hau (breath). These named taonga are people,
and they have travelled on long journeys, gathering hau. As Henare out-
lines (2007, 59), Kaitangata was found in Te Wai Pounamu (Aotearoa’s
South Island) by Te Ngahue, then taken home to Hawaiki, prior to the
Māori migrations to Aotearoa.
When passed down within iwi and hapū (subtribes), and occasionally
gifted to other groups, taonga are handed over as loved ancestors, thus
binding recipients into a duty of care—and creating a delicate state of
imbalance or indebtedness that calls for ongoing relationality and reci-

procity between the groups. Simultaneously, the ancestor’s hau, and
mauri, mana and tapu (sanctity), meets that of the new holders of the
taonga, joining them all together:
In hongi-ing the taonga, the chiefs were mingling their own hau or breath
of life with that of the ancestor-object, thus binding the intertwined line-
ages of the chiefs and that of Grey together, re-animating the promises of
the Treaty7 and focusing their relationship in the form of their ancestor,
the ancient taonga. (2007, 60)
Henare stresses that taonga, ‘more than simply ‘representing’, ‘signify-

ing’ or ‘embodying’ ancestral efficacy and power, are it in specific form’
(2007, 56); ‘one taonga exchanged for another does not simply carry
the hau of the gift, it is its hau’, thus ‘[t]here is a precise identity …
between thing and spirit’ (2007, 48). Taonga, like people, as people, are
the living presence of ancestral lines of descent and relation. The ances-
torhood or personhood that Henare highlights, via a focus on hau, is
key to the relational function of taonga in Māori social life. This efficacy
of hau is illuminated by Te Tau, who writes, ‘the hau left behind by a
person (e.g. footprints) is also still in them, connected to them’ (2015a,
52). Similarly, Natalie Robertson states, ‘the mauri can’t be untangled or
separated from the image just because the photographer takes it far away
from its source’ (2012, 103).8
The time-travelling relational function of taonga has been thoroughly
delineated in a number of texts by Paul Tapsell—for instance:
Generations of the original kin group may have been born, lived and died
without knowledge of their taonga’s continuing existence in another part
of the universe. Suddenly it streaks back into their lives, often as a result of
some significant life crisis, reaffirming the kin group’s connections to the
ancestors who were originally associated with the taonga. (2006, 20)
But Henare emphasizes that it is by dint of their objectness (which provides

a focal locus for the assembling of mauri and hau) that taonga have the
capacity to produce and reproduce relations: ‘the very partibility and motil-
ity of taonga … their “thinginess” within a general state of flux, is precisely
what makes them indispensable to the work of relating’ (2007, 62).
30 C. Barnett
This shifts attention to the kind of objecthood taonga allow us to

think—one that ‘do[es] not necessarily invoke a subject’ (2007, 61)—
because indeed for Māori there is no ‘ontological apartheid between
persons and things’ (2007, 63). Nor do many other Western metaphysi-
cal dualisms (mind–body, spirit–matter) apply. Henare’s description of a
live yet ‘subjectless’ kind of object is echoed in Mika’s account of things,
which ‘we might call our “whanaunga” (relations), even where these
have been deemed by Western science to be inanimate’ (2015, 61). ‘For
Māori,’ he writes, ‘the thing in its most basic sense is like the self: it is
immediately connected to everything else’ (2015, 61), and ‘[t]he self can
be thought of as amongst those things whilst being constituted by them’
(2015, 64). Following Henare and Mika, I wish to de-emphasize the
agency of a human ‘subject’ and emphasize instead the agency of these
‘objects’ that do not necessarily need subjects to think them (but may
themselves call forth or produce selves—and thought): ‘one is in the first
instance cognisant of a thing through that thing’s choice’ (Mika 2015,
67). This ‘choice’ is linked to the awareness within te ao Māori that all
things live or vibrate: ‘be it rocks or birds, people or trees, “physical phe-
nomena and people are held to proceed from a common primal source”’
(Marcia Browne 2005, 22, citing Anne Salmond). Although I may be
telling the eels here according to my mind’s inklings and leanings, it is
the eels’ prior existence and exigencies, their impenetrable aliveness,
their self-disclosure of wairua, mauri and mana that call me to feel and
think them. From Mika I also borrow the ‘possibility that things that are
imperceptible … may still have an effect on the self’ (2015, 62, emphasis
added). Indeed, he adds, ‘whatever we perceive as Māori … is comprised
of what is not immediately there’ (2015, 62).
As subjectless objects that call for conscious engagement, taonga both
perform and are performed. The ‘performance’ includes the handling,
hongi-ing, sometimes crying over, but pivots on the telling of the kōrero
(talk)—the narrating of a taonga’s whakapapa, people, places, events and
travels near and far. Tapsell writes:
as taonga travel from one generation to the next, so too do their complex,
genealogically ordered histories, or kōrero, which are individually attached
to each item. (1997, 328)
Without kōrero, the item ceases to communicate, loses context, and fails to
link a kin group’s identity to specific ancestral landscapes. (1997, 332)
Panoho quotes Hirini Mead in this regard too—referring to art now, but
clearly activating a taonga view in the process:
Eventually, what invests artworks with meaning are the words and stories
we tell about each one. For the Māori, the words comprise the kōrero …
There are hundreds of stories to tell, there are hours of listening to do.
(2015, 251)
But as you might guess, even when they are not being held, seen, per-
formed and told, taonga’s power is not diminished by this ‘dormant’
state. And if they are dormant because far from home, they are presum-
ably being cherished by their ‘foster holders’9; if anything, when they
return their prestige has grown:
If a taonga does return after being launched by an earlier generation on a

comet-like trajectory, it arrives home carrying an intensity of mana, tapu
and kōrero. (Tapsell 1997, 366)
Taonga not dwelling with their familiars or otherwise held in known

hands are wāhi ngaro (in an unseen place). Panoho writes of the Tainui
taonga Korotangi: ‘there was a period of wāhi ngaro or a phase involv-
ing “the realm of the unknown” … It might be argued [that Korotangi]
was never lost: that it continued within an oral tradition while its physical
form was temporarily not revealed’ (2015, 256). The confluence of this
with Mika’s ‘imperceptible things’ is clear.
Before turning back to contemporary art, I want to reiterate that
almost anything can become taonga. If Tapsell focuses on material
taonga tuku iho, Henare’s essay articulates an expanded field of taonga.
For instance, text ‘enabled a form of distributed personhood involv-
ing the mana, tapu and hau of the person—their ancestral efficacy and
power, in other words—as well as their “thoughts”’ (2007, 54). The
Treaty of Waitangi is a taonga: ‘In drawing their moko marks onto the
Treaty, the chiefs extended their own mana to the document, render-
ing it an instantiation of their personhood, as the “living face” of their
line’ (2007, 52). All the taonga in Wai 262—including ‘indigenous
flora and fauna, genetics and genetic derivatives, silica sands and cultural
motifs’ (2007, 49)—are claimed as ‘distributed parts of persons, and as
persons in their own right’; and thus as ‘fundamental requirement[s]
32 C. Barnett
of relationality’ (2007, 62). Henare also cites references to ‘Māori lan-

guage, Māori knowledge … and processes’ (2007, 49–50), ‘biodiversity
[and] natural resources’ (2007, 51) as taonga. To this latter category, of
course, tuna and pāua belong.
Henare’s expansive definition resists the suggestion that taonga as
a cultural concept has suffered a ‘tragic though inevitable decline into
inauthenticity’ owing to its ‘incorporation by global capitalism and
modernity’ (2007, 63). She argues that instead of hybridizing, assimi-
lating or otherwise ‘working from within a single perspective, Māori
are shifting between registers of value in a move enabled by the encom-
passment of one—that of commodities—by the other—that of taonga’
(2007, 64). She paves a way for contemporary, non-essentializing expres-
sions of tino rangatiratanga (Māori sovereignty) and kaupapa Māori
research (including Māori arts and even Māori art writing) to continue
their operations within not just Pākehā but mainstream international
circuits. This ‘way’ recognizes that we may have ‘(untranslatable) con-
cepts’ and ‘distinctly Māori kinds of objects with a creativity of their
own’ (2007, 63); and simultaneously acknowledges that there may be
positions (perhaps even created objects) that are ‘wholly Māori and also
European’ (2007, 64):
This commensurability is consistent with Māori notions of relatedness, in

that, according to the workings of whakapapa, Māoriness encompasses
other identities without obliterating or diluting them … a majority Irish
ancestry does not make one any less Māori. (Henare 64)
The tuna keep swimming. They have been spirit and matter, subjects and
objects, objects and relations. They have been instantiations of genus and
species; they have been taniwha, named and immortalized in different
kōrero, different stars. It is all kōrero. They pass but live on, still calling us.
Spawning
At Te Tohu o Uenuku I read the wall text again and it clicks: in this van
I am tupuna (ancestor), and these are my pāua-shell eyes. Pāua, a shell-
fish abundant in Aotearoa harbours, is valued by Māori on many levels.
Its meat is delicious creamed or fried. Its iridescent, peacock-coloured,10
shell adorns customary Māori whakairo (carving) and raranga (weaving).

This iris-like, light-reflecting shell was especially favoured for the eyes of
pouwhakairo (carved figures depicting tupuna and gods), and was associ-
ated with the stars, the eyes of our tupuna. Pāua feature in whakatauki
(sayings), pūrakau (legends) and contemporary literature. In the legend
of Tinirau and Kae, the treacherous Kae places pāua shells over his own
closed eyes before sleeping, to trick his visitors (rightly suspected of ill-
intent) into believing he is awake through the night. Patricia Grace, in
her novel Potiki, writes of the kahawai fish, ‘its eye is small and gaudy,
like the pāua-shell eyes that watch unblinking round all the many edges
of the night’ (1986, 113). Pāua, like eels, have whakapapa leading back
to Tangaroa (god of the sea) and, before him, to Ranginui (sky father)
and Papatūānuku (earth mother)—who are our ancestors too, mean-
ing we humans are pāua’s cousins. Our frequent encounters with pāua
are constant reminders of their value not just to us but to our tupuna,
who caught, shucked, ate, polished, cut, narrated and chanted karakia
(incantations) over today’s pāua’s ancestors. As sacred instantiations of
Tangaroa’s own hau and mana, they hold the potential to reawaken us to
our entire complex relationship with the sea if we engage appropriately
with them.
Using Aura Reading Software and Adobe After Affects (Te Tau 2015a,
84), Te Tau has rendered visible the hau of the people and places of Te
Papaioea, in the form of shimmery haloes or auras.11 Simultaneously
she has created a semblance of a ‘tipuna gaze’ (87), for the whole view
is distinctly pāua-coloured (Fig. 2.2). This tupuna gaze is one taonga
traversing the artwork. As pāua-shell-eyed taonga we live, and look, on.
You may need to have some familiarity with pāua-shell-eyed tupuna, as
taonga, to really ‘get’ this experience. Moreover, we who do will each
think of different whakairo, different tupuna as we sit and gaze. I think
of the tekoteko (carved gable figure) in my own wharetupuna (ancestral
meeting house), who was retrieved from a long hibernation in a swamp
before coming to us, whose kōrero still awaits further telling and whom I
now suddenly long to see again. I think of favourite pouwhakairo in other
wharetupuna I have slept in, and of that sense of being cradled at their
feet. I think of tupuna whose names and mana have resonated strongly
for me, though I have never seen them represented visually.
34 C. Barnett
Fig. 2.2 Terri Te Tau, interior installation view of Unwarranted and

Unregistered: Te Āhua o te Hau ki Te Papaioea, 2015. Multimedia installation.
The call to respond to tupuna in their liveness here and now—as a

living face of my own tupuna—is what I experience in Te Tau’s van. I
feel called ‘back’ at the same time as some of my own tupuna are called
‘forward’,12 to co-inhabit this space and join hau and renew the cycle.
It is unnerving and delicious—like being embraced by a long-gone kuia
(grandmother), but simultaneously becoming that long-gone kuia and
feeling the love she feels for the place we are seeing. I feel what this does
to the streets of Te Papaioea—also in need of a good granny hug, and
now getting it.
Of course (deflecting here any hegemonic, recuperative tendencies),
this is not an arrival in individuation, and the tupuna are not accessed as
subjectivities—no more than the passers-by are. I am awakened by this
tupuna-gaze (sharing hau with the hau of ancestral pāua, pāua crafters
and pāua-shell-eyed tupuna) at the same time as it holds me at bay, holds
this as its space, not mine. I see through its eyes for a moment, feel the
abiding hau and mauri of my tupuna and reconnect with them—and
with a great sea of connectivity—but I do not penetrate their interiors,

do not ‘know’ them in that way. (To my mind a ‘subjectless object’ is
precisely one like this that is ‘impenetrably’ alive and connected to eve-
rything else. Another living person or thing can only be known in its
opacity. To penetrate it is in a sense to kill it.) I see through its eyes while
being this living face here and now. I am reminded of the whakaaro
(thinking) without knowing that Mika describes (2015, 66), and the
kinds of things thought in this way:
the spaces of obscurity where ‘whakaaro’ is called by things to speculate

but not necessarily penetrate into;
The … data here … is thoroughly unknowable and crucially its own master;
delight in the thing’s mercuriality may, in turn, promise a counter-colonial
answer. (2015, 67)
Even as I see ‘through’ this tupuna gaze, the mercurial tupuna preserves
its own opacity.13 But I get to feel the aroha (love) of connection.
Meanwhile I am not being subjectivated as an embodied, knowing, see-
ing agent; instead I feel myself encompassed by something bigger that
includes me, moves me and also cares about me. I am not looking at some-
one else’s taonga (or at a contemporary artwork) in a museum vitrine. I
am immersed in a ‘taonga experience’. This cannot be objectified on the
classic Western epistemological orientation of distance and penetration.
Mika one more time: ‘not everything is available to us. The thinker is
therefore not outside matter; he or she is instead within it’ (2015, 65).
This tupuna gaze, this taonga experience, is about producing not knowl-
edge but relationality and aliveness. Indeed the taonga is barely seen—it
is seen through. Te Tau’s invitation, clearly, is to take off the surveillance
helmet and put on a tupuna gaze instead. The van has travelled, and
travels us, into a mode of survey that enhances rather than reduces mana.
A mode of survey that precludes the precise knowing of objects by their
‘interiors’—but lends us the warmth of being known—and loved. A view
vaster and older than the paranoid view, always working to bring things
back into its safe embrace.
The tupuna gaze is one taonga traversing Te Āhua o te Hau ki Te
Papaioea; a taonga that perhaps I had been forgetting for a while. But
the experience it offers could be just a semblance of a taonga experience
36 C. Barnett
(into which anyone can insert their own narratives) until we turn to ways
in which Te Tau’s taonga are performed here. Specific iwi narratives and
whakapapa are not given with the van installation, although the wall text
refers us to Operation 8, and the Māori place name Te Papaioea (instead
of the English name Palmerston North) in the work’s title is enough to
indicate that ancestral narratives exist. However, Te Tau has also written
a novella providing a fantasy backstory about pāua-shell eyes, Beyond the
Corners of our Whare [House] (2015b), copies of which were given out
at the first exhibition of Te Āhua o te Hau ki Te Papaioea. The novella
doesn’t just use the pāua-shell eyes motif familiar to Māori readers. It
doesn’t just offer some context and explanation of the motif’s signifi-
cance, for non-Māori readers. It also holds, restores—and guards—gene-
alogical information belonging to Te Tau’s people. The novella centres
on the existence and traditions of the lake Hāpuakorari, halfway between
Greytown and Te Papaioea, and derives from them a narrative of tupuna,
tohunga (priests, experts) and taonga:
Those people who came up through the lake from the world beyond had
eyes that shone with pāua shell. They shimmered like rainbow trapped
under-water.
Time moved differently at Hapuakorari and they talked for so long that
[the tohunga] didn’t realise he had become submerged in the lake. He
began to drown.
The people pressed pāua shells to his face which buried themselves deep into
his eye sockets in the same way that pāua attaches itself to a rock. (2015b, 34)
Hāpuakorari is a taonga of Te Tau’s Rangitāne iwi. If the book itself

is a fiction, it springs from tribal narratives connected to real taonga-
places, and its kōrero activates the tupuna-gaze-taonga in the van differ-
ently (while the van features large in the novella). That kōrero follows
the intergenerational journey of one tohunga’s pāua-shell eyes (bearing
the gift of hau-sight) through many hands. Emerging from a freshwater
lake, slipping and sliding in the story between wāhi ngaro and visibility,
these eyes, their hau and the whakapapa they accrue, instantiate the sin-
gular, local and ancestrally connective ways in which taonga operate. Te
Tau’s fictionalizing is also true to form, for the real Hāpuakorari (which
may even be two lakes) is ‘full of mystery’ and ‘shrouded in mysticism’
(Potangaroa 2015); no one tells all the kōrero. Tapu tribal knowledge is
not given away lightly.
Meanwhile, Te Tau’s doctoral thesis contains images of whakapa-
koko (carved ancestral guardians with pāua-shell eyes) at Te Tau’s nearby
marae, Papawai (another tupuna). They are another part of the fabric
woven by Te Tau’s many-threaded kōrero as she recites and revives tribal
taonga (Hāpuakorari, Papawai, the whakapakoko, their eyes), and folds
her own work into the narrative too (do not forget that text can also
become taonga). The kōrero is warmed and updated in turn, releasing
and mingling the hau of this post-Operation 8 place and time with the
hau of all those other people, places and times. All these stories swim
across and through Te Āhua o te Hau ki Te Papaioea, putting things back
into perspective.
Perspective: the great healer. But not the god’s-eye-perspective of
distance; rather, a felt ‘midstness’ within a vast sea of connections—
which we might instead choose to call ‘aspective’.14 Mika describes
being ‘amongst’ what he thinks or speculates about—a ‘withinness’
related to whakapapa, ‘which ensures my active participation amidst the
term’ (2015, 65). Again, ‘not everything is available to us. The thinker is
therefore not outside matter; he or she is instead within it’ (2015, 65).
Such ‘withinness’ is surely all the stronger and more embodied for those
who first heard their whakapapa chanted to them as babies, by tohunga,
before they had even acquired language, and who have participated in
its ongoing recitations ever since. This connected, immersed perspective,
approaching an object-oriented ‘aspective’, is there also in Tapsell when
he describes the taonga’s assertion of a whakapapa landscape overriding
any individual human experience:
The performance of taonga by elders effectively collapses time and reani-

mates the kin group’s ancestral landscape, allowing descendants to re-live
the events of past generations [and] … be fused back into a powerful, sin-
gle genealogical identity. (1997, 330)
For these reasons, the semblant taonga-experience Te Tau’s art-

object may offer ‘outsiders’—however affectively powerful—cannot
be equated with the effects of the pāua-shell-eyed taonga for those
fully participant in pāua-shell-eye genealogies. Nonetheless, Te
38 C. Barnett
Tau’s taonga has the ability to fold ‘outsiders’ encountering it now

(in an art-object) into its kōrero. Taonga are always weaving their
connections.
Elvers Swarm
Tribal taonga are similarly activated through kōrero in other contem-
porary Māori artworks. Ōtākaro (2016), a collaboration between Te
Tau and Bridget Reweti, features a mirrored real-time video of the
dawn gradually lighting up the river Ōtākaro (Avon) in Christchurch,
and a voiceover narrating a story that again leans towards fantasy and
futurism yet is anchored in Māori connections to place and taonga
(the river, eels, whitebait). The striking film with its shimmering
black and green geometries echoes the narrative’s futurist sensibil-
ity (Fig. 2.3). If these artists practise their tikanga (Māori ethical pro-
tocols) with care, they are equally steadfast in their refusal of visual
tropes that might trap them in a Māori essentialism. When taonga
collapse time, breathing ancestral hau into the present, the past is
reactivated but does not dominate. Meanwhile, Tirohanga (2016),
a Reweti exhibition of site-specific camera obscura photographs and
video exploring both colonial and Māori views of Aotearoa land-
scapes,15 might remain elusive and opaque to a mainstream public
blind to the work’s irony, until they read the gallery text divulging
snippets of place-based tribal narratives also traversing the work.16
Fig. 2.3 Bridget Reweti and Terri Te Tau, still from Ōtākaro, 2016. HD
Moving image, 40 min. Courtesy of the artists
All these artists are operating consciously on at least two paradigms

(neither of which is static). They are creating artworks grounded in
(a fluid, evolving) kaupapa and tikanga Māori but also able to operate
effectively on contemporary art circuits. It is not cynical to do so; it is
just the Māori reality. The works’ efficacy is not uncomplicated: they
slip and slide between paradigms, and sometimes into eel-knots (like
this essay), their passage activated or disabled according to artistic deci-
sions but also according to their viewers’ background understandings
and assumptions and willingness to engage with the kōrero. As the works
thus shift from freshwater to salt, information is gained or lost; taonga
appear or disappear. But I suspect glimmers of understanding carry over.
Something stays open. The ‘personhood’, hau and mauri of everyone
who ever crafted a pāua-shell gaze has arrived here, however virtually
(but we are experts at virtualities!); reinstantiated in this pāua-shell gaze.
It’s here. We’re back. Hau can’t be shaken off. And the taonga, at first
feeling like an invisible cross-current or undercurrent, comes to wrap
around and encompass the artwork, thanks to its expansive, open-ended
journeying, its inclusion of whomever it encounters—or gazes upon or
breathes upon—within its sphere of meaning.
The potential is here for Te Tau’s activation of hau, grounded in
ancient knowings, instantiated in this object now, to weave people
together in ways that have no concern for the boundaries of the art
object as it is constituted by the gallery, nor for the art knowledge of art-
viewing subjects on that paradigm. The magic of hau is that it bridges
difference, joins what was separate. If the hau of the taonga accompa-
nying this artwork is activated, and felt (as an open-ended obligation to
reciprocate) by new groups of people, then perhaps even the art-object
van itself might be on its way to becoming a taonga too—creating new
allegiances between ‘art people’ and ‘taonga people’. This does not mean
that art people know now what taonga people know—if anything, they
will know better what it is that they do not know. We all get to hold our
opacity, and our tapu knowledges, too, while enjoying (hopefully!) the
encompassment. Bound together in kōrero. This art of cultural multiplic-
ity needs a rhythm for swinging viewers between inclusion and necessary
blind spots or closed doors, and helping them embrace their blind spots
too. We all need to close our eyes sometimes to see.
Terry Smith challenges ‘transnational artists’ to ‘resist the temp-
tation of slipping into a new kind of distracted exoticism, one that
40 C. Barnett
would permit viewers gently guided tours through signs of the Other
rather than obliging them to undergo genuine encounters with its
intractable difference’ (2011, 322). His challenge is contemporary
art oriented, assuming global, not local, viewers; it comes from out-
side. I would hazard that our artists are nailing it. And they are stand-
ing strong in their tino rangatiratanga too. They are artists as uri,
whanaunga (relatives) and hunga tiaki (custodians). In a quite cas-
ual, everyday way,17 they perform their taonga, speaking the kōrero,
breathing the hau, feeling the mauri, handling it with aroha, passing
it on. The about-turn hidden inside their contemporary art objects
is this potential for de-individuation, this subjectless, not-knowing-
but-connected orientation asked of us by the taonga-tupuna. Te Tau
made the art, but she didn’t make the taonga. They—those pāua-shell
eyed tupuna—made her.
For tuna, the rivers of Aotearoa—where they are loved as taonga—
are home. But they also need the ocean deep. Perhaps we all need to
venture into darker waters to regenerate ourselves. The taonga in art
such as Te Tau’s and Reweti’s might become more distant from us as
they journey through international galleries (and less visible, to inter-
national viewers); but there they are, conserving and renewing their
powers while art people gaze. Who is serving whom? Who is parasitic
upon whom? I am much heartened (for all my whanau, Māori and
non-Māori alike) by the idea of a Māori ethos of connection, protec-
tion and care that is only strengthened by its travels, encounters and
colonizations, even if that strengthening sometimes waits decades, or
centuries, to disclose itself. The swim between paradigms keeps us
alive—as taonga, tupuna, journeying hau and whakapapa artists well
know.
It is almost Matariki again, and a few months from now elvers will
pass over pāua-encrusted rocks to gather in the estuaries. Called on by
ancient knowings, preparing to drift upstream—back to our watchful
gaze. We do not know what they are, what they know, what they think.
But there they really are, in their diminished numbers, still taonga peo-
ple. And here we really are, still taonga people, donning pāua-shell eyes,
working hard to shift the timbre of our watch from fear to aroha (love).
Tihei, mauri ora!18
Ko tēnei taku mihi ki a Terri Te Tau, ki a Bridget Reweti, ki ō mātou
tupuna, ki ngā tohunga mahi toi katoa o te ao Māori. Kei te mihi, kei te
mihi, kei te mihi.
Notes
1. Te Tuna-Whiri is a constellation within the Māori family of constellations
Te Awa o Te Tuna, The River of Eels in the sky (Te Ao Turoa 2005,
22). Biologists do not know the exact spawning ground of Aotearoa’s
tuna kuwharuwharu (longfin eels)—thought to be around the Tonga
Trench—nor exactly how they navigate the ocean. I have based my tuna
imagining on a range of kōrero, some current, some less so, without
excessive concern for empirical fact.
2. English terms such as ‘animism’ and ‘spirit’ often invoke metaphysical
dualisms that do not apply in te ao Māori (the Māori universe); and even
when defined differently in non-dualist contexts they hold meanings not
present within the Māori cosmology. The English translations offered for
Māori terms here are mere glosses to facilitate reading.
3. Terri Te Tau and Bridget Reweti are both members of the Mata Aho
Collective, which represented Aotearoa at Documenta 14 in Kassel, 2017.
4. Taonga pūoro played by Rob Thorne, a musician who also uses the
instruments for healing purposes (Te Tau 2017).
5. When reading Western contemporary art, it is not unusual to start from
the perceptual and sensorial experience composed by the artist/s, then
interpret its implications within an expanded geo-socio-political field
through a progression of affects, concepts, semblances and other asso-
ciations. To ‘read’ taonga Māori calls for different start points and end
points, based not in perception and sensation but in whakapapa.
6. Amiria Henare is quoting Sir George Grey’s correspondence with the
Duke of Newcastle.
7. The Treaty of Waitangi: Aotearoa’s deeply problematic ‘founding docu-
ment’, co-signed by the British Crown and some chiefs of some Māori
tribes in 1840. Henare’s discussion focuses on Wai 262, a claim brought
to the Waitangi Tribunal (the commission charged with investigating
breaches of the Crown’s promises under the Treaty of Waitangi).
8. There is a fine distinction between hau and mauri, as Māori Marsden
explains: ‘“Hau-ora”—“the breath of life” is the agent or source by and
from which mauri (life-principle) is mediated to objects … Mauri without
the qualifying adjective “Ora” (life) is applied to inanimate objects; whilst
hau is applied only to animate life’ (2003, 44). I have followed Henare
in focusing on hau, to highlight the ‘peopledness’ or personhood of the
objects (taonga) in question.
9. It has been the source of considerable grief that such gifting, once it
began occurring across cultures, was not understood; expected levels
of care were often not bestowed by Pākehā (settlers) upon the taonga
Māori they received. For the taonga were received into different registers
42 C. Barnett
of value, and entered different economic circuits, often, for instance,

becoming museum ‘artefacts’ in the process.
10. Especially so in Aotearoa owing to their local diet of brown and red algae
and bladder kelp.
11. Te Tau uses ‘aura’ as a translation of hau, the flyer accompanying this
installation stating: ‘Hau is an auric field that encompasses the vitality of
man and the essence of land.’
12. It might be more correct, on a Māori understanding, to say I am called
forward and they are called back, but we haven’t the time here to digress
into Māori temporalities.
13. In using this term I am thinking of Edouard Glissant: ‘A racist is someone
who refuses what he doesn’t understand … Opacity is a right we must
have …Why wouldn’t I accept the other’s opacity? Why must I absolutely
understand the other to live next to him and work with him?’ (2011,
14–15) To me this connects directly to Mika’s comment that ‘there must
be an ethical way to comport oneself towards things so that they are dis-
cussed in a way that does not constrain them’ (2015, 62). One ethical
way to comport oneself is by accepting opacity.
14. In aspective representation, ‘the artist tries to show the object as it is at
all times, regardless of any change in the position of the viewer. In this
way, the object is at the centre of its world, fixing its own viewpoint and
dictating its features to the artist’ (Neich 1993, 134). Although Neich
characterizes aspective representation (in Māori carving) as an attempt at
objectivity (134), I am more interested in the way it places the viewer
(and the artist) ‘amongst’ the object’s world; again, this would be an
object/objectivity without a subject (least of all a transcendent god-like
subject), or perhaps an object that is its own subject. For further discus-
sion of aspective representation in contemporary art, see my analysis of
Alex Monteith’s art practice (Barnett 2014, Chap. 6).
15. For more about this work and Bridget Reweti’s wider practice, see my
Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA) online profile of Reweti, ‘Strange Land
Singing’ (2015).
16. Many other Māori contemporary artists have attended to more or less
distant taonga in different ways in their work, from Fiona Pardington’s
Mauri Mai, Tono Ano (2001) to Lisa Reihana’s He Tautoko (2006) to
Kura Puke and Stuart Foster’s Te Ara Wairua (2014, with Te Matahiapo
Research Organisation), though not all these works perform the taonga
as taonga via kōrero reviving whakapapa connections. A quite differ-
ent case of taonga intersecting Pākehā ‘art objects’ is the Partington
Collection of Whanganui Māori photographs, discovered in 2001 and
put up for auction. The arrival of uri (descendants) of the photographs’
sitters, come to bring home their tupuna, swiftly repositioned the images
on a taonga trajectory (and closed down the auction).
17. Not to be confused with the more formal rituals and karakia (incanta-
tions) of the tohunga.
18. Tihei, mauri ora! A ritual exclamation punctuating beginnings or ends of
whaikōrero (oratory) and ceremonial processes; also used as a greeting.
Commonly translated as ‘I sneeze; it is life!’, a statement of the speaker’s
(ancestrally given) life force or aliveness.
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Room, Christchurch: 4 June–9 July 2016.
Robertson, Natalie. 2012. ‘Can I Take a Photo of the Marae?’: Dynamics of
Photography in Te Ao Māori. In UNFIXED: Photography and Postcolonial
44 C. Barnett
Perspectives in Contemporary Art, ed. Sara Blokland and Asmara Pelupessy,

95–103. Heijningen, Netherlands: Jap Sam Books.
Smith, Terry. 2011. Contemporary Art: World Currents. London: Laurence King.
Tapsell, Paul. 1997. The Flight of Pareraututu: An Investigation of Taonga from
a Tribal Perspective. The Journal of the Polynesian Society 106 (4): 323–374.
Tapsell, Paul. 2006. Treasures of the Māori. Auckland: David Bateman.
Te Ao Turoa Education Kit. 2005. Auckland Museum.
Te Tau, Terri. 2013. Unwarranted and Unregistered. Artwork in Exhibition
Surveillance Awareness Bureau at Modelab, 1 Grey St, Wellington: 27 May–
13 June 2015.
Te Tau, Terri. 2015a. Beyond the Corners of Our Whare: A Conceptual
Response to State Surveillance in Aotearoa New Zealand. PhD dissertation,
Massey University, New Zealand.
Te Tau, Terri. 2015b. Beyond the Corners of Our Whare. Manawatū: Pohangina
Press.
Te Tau, Terri. 2017. Personal communication with Cassandra Barnett.
CHAPTER 3
Activating Photographic Mana

Rangatiratanga Through Kōrero
Natalie Robertson
Introduction
From a high, flat plateau at Tīkapa, south of the Waiapu River,
look towards the mouth where it meets the sea. It is distant, but you
can just see a white line where waves break on the river bar. Inland is
Hikurangi, our ancestral mountain. I stand on the plateau, in front of
Tīkapa-a-Hinekōpeka Marae, the whare tīpuna (meeting house) Pokai
and the wharekai (dining hall) Pohatu. Across the river is another marae,
Ō Hine Waiapu, named for the feminine spirit of the river. These marae
are part of a network of interconnected relationships, named for peo-
ple of an extended family, including our non-human kin. Approaching
Pokai, I step onto the porch, pushing open the unlocked door. Moving
into the dark room, I pause, allowing my eyes to adjust. I approach the
central figure in the middle of the room and crouch down to hongi
him. I push my nose against his, breath in, then exhale slowly. Tēna
koe e Te Rangatira. His carved wooden face is neither warm nor cool.
N. Robertson (*) 
School of Art & Design, Auckland University of Technology,
e-mail: natalie.robertson@aut.ac.nz

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_3
46 N. Robertson
Fig. 3.1 Natalie Robertson, Pokai looking out to Waiapu Ngutu Awa,

Tīkapa-a-Hinekōpeka Marae, 2010. Courtesy of the artist
I turn to the walls and address the people, then walk slowly around the
house, greeting each face. Descended from Pokai and Pohatu, we are all
related, one way or another. Each face in the photographs looks back at
me. Some are over 100 years old, others more recent. This is a house of
images. Once my greetings are concluded, I feel the energy of the house
more enlivened, as if the conversations have woken them from slumber
(Fig. 3.1).
In te ao Māori (the Māori world), whakapapa (a layering of gene-
alogies) locates all relationships through naming in plural matrices
of time–space co-ordinates that inter-connect the phenomenological
world (Roberts 2013). Our journey begins in the spiritual realm, taking
expression in the physical realm in human form. Whakapapa can be ‘an
enquiry into the progression of names as a call to think about Being’
(Mika 2014, 53). The orality of Māori cultural knowledge is a means
3 ACTIVATING PHOTOGRAPHIC MANA RANGATIRATANGA THROUGH … 47
to keep alive connections between all beings, including those who have
passed on but live on as tīpuna (ancestors) in the spirit realm. In this
spiral of time–space, photographs or films made in the distant past are
taonga (ancestral treasures). They may be repositories for the energies
present at the moment of the film negative’s exposure to light. Part of
a performative culture, taonga are living embodiments of tīpuna, play-
ing a critical role in the sustenance of tribal relations. In Te Reo Māori
(the Māori language), the word for photograph is whakaahua. Whaka
activates āhua.1 Whaka calls the word that comes after it into becom-
ing, or being. The activity inherent in the term āhua, and expressly in
whakaahua, asserts from a Māori perspective, that photographs are not
dead or lifeless objects but are constantly in a process of becoming form
as things with their own agency and interconnected relations in the
phenomenological world.
Along with whakairo (carving) and rāranga (weaving), kōrero
(oratory) maintains tribal records of history, including whakapapa.
Photography has brought another dimension to how whakapapa is
maintained and orated. Māori language activist Huirangi Waikerepuru
highlights the value of photography in cultural identity, asserting that
‘photography is like writing stories, recording stories, recording history’,
adding that ‘our mana rangatiratanga is now photographic’ (2009).
Waikerepuru’s perspective of photography as a contemporary expres-
sion of mana rangatiratanga (roughly translated as authority, trusteeship
and self-determination) indicates that photography is now an extension
of Māori cultural assertions. A cornerstone paradigm for Māori, ran-
gatiratanga ‘is a dynamic not static concept, emphasizing the reciprocity
between the human, material and non- material worlds’ (New Zealand
Māori Council 1983). This assertion of what I now term ‘photographic
mana rangatiratanga’ resonates with sovereignty concepts articulated by
two indigenous photographers in the 1990s. Jolene Rickard proposed
‘visual sovereignty’ (1995) and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie ‘photographic
sovereignty’ in 1998 (see Tsinhnahjinnie 2003). Tsinhnahjinnie sees it
as her responsibility as an indigenous photographer to reinterpret eth-
nographic images, recasting them in her own artwork to create a ‘pho-
tograph album full of beautiful brown people, a photograph album of
visual affirmation’ (2003, 41).
As the living face of the sleeping ancestor, the ancestral portrait is
treated reverentially, as if alive, as Māori understandings of whakapapa
command respect for the powerful forces at play between worlds.
48 N. Robertson
Hongi (sharing breath), touching, kissing and speaking with portrait

photographs all express connections with the incarnate ancestral pres-
ence in the image. Paul Tapsell maintains that ‘without kōrero (oratory),
a taonga ceases to be recognised as representing a specific genealogical
position for its descendants’ (1997, 329). In a downplay of aesthetic
significance, it is not necessarily the quality of the image that matters;
it is the kōrero that matters. For example, viewing even a photographic
reproduction or photocopy can be sufficient to set in train the inter-
connecting relational networks, uniting viewer with tīpuna, places and
stories in a time–space collapse. The kōrero that arises out of revisiting
historic images assists in maintaining tribal narratives vital to cultural
survival. In this context, Tapsell positions kōrero as ‘arguably the most
important, element contained within taonga’ (1997, 328). Tapsell out-
lines the meaning of taonga, explaining that, although it defies simple
translation, pivotal elements are whakapapa, mana (spiritual charisma,
power and authority), tapu, and kōrerō. Drawing on Māori Marsden,
Tapsell analyses the qualities that taonga can possess, stating:
Taonga are also valued by their descendants for their capacity to com-
municate knowledge from ancestors on a non-verbal plane … taonga can
exert ihi, wehi and wana on an audience. ihi: spiritual power; spontane-
ous physical reaction; supernatural; to feel an awesome presence. wehi:
to strike fear; awe; spine-tingling; to tremble; to excite. wana; authority;
class; integrity; unquestioned competence. The existence of these elements
within specific taonga not only signifies the artistic accomplishment of the
kin group’s priests, artists or composers, but also reinforces the mana of
direct descendants. (1997, 330–1)
If historic photographs and films are taonga through which we commune

with our ancestors, what are the elements that oratory—kōrero—calls
into being? What Māori spiritual values are understood to be ‘at work’
in photographs of people, things and places important to Māori? What
might historic photographs ‘carry’ spiritually? As taonga, photographs
are activated by kōrero such that they hold mana, wairua (spirit or soul)
and mauri (life force or essence). In my view, mauri is the most impor-
tant element. Through their material vitality, photographs and films
can also communicate ihi (awesome presence), wehi (tingling feeling of
excitement) and wana (unquestioned competence and authority) (Mead
1984). Through this Māori cultural and spiritual rubric—whakapapa,
kōrero, taonga, tapu, mana and mana rangatiratanga, wairua, mauri, ihi,
wehi and wana—I explore photographic filaments, in and across mate-
rial and non-material worlds, with the intention of adding to scholarship
on indigenous photography and photographic sovereignty. Examining an
archive of images from my tribal area of Ngāti Porou—Te Tai Rāwhiti
(East Coast) of the North Island of Aotearoa (New Zealand)—I aim
to explore how Māori concepts and values link with photography and
film. In particular, I consider a series of photographs of fishing and
woven nets to offer a nuanced reading of the complexities of mate-
rial and immaterial vitality. I conclude by aligning these values with my
own learning about how the cultural and spiritual rubric can inform a
contemporary practice that aspires to embody photographic mana
rangatiratanga.
Today in Aotearoa, the Treaty of Waitangi Settlement tribal deed
documents offer a glimpse into how Māori spiritual concepts have been
incorporated into government legal agreements.2 A Guide to Treaty
of Waitangi Claims and Negotiations with the Crown (The Office of
Treaty Settlements, New Zealand 2015) recognizes ‘[Māori] special and
traditional relationships with the natural environment, especially riv-

ers, lakes, mountains, forests and wetlands’ (2015, 90). These long-
established relationships include acknowledgement of both human and
other agent beings who act as kaitiaki, or spiritual custodians, of these
places. Kaitiaki agents may act as interfaces between the human realm and
spiritual worlds. This agency, embedded in tribal lore and histories, is also
recognized under New Zealand law in these government non-tribal docu-
ments. For example, waterways, mountains and other geographic features
are, for Māori, ‘the embodiment of or creation of ancestors’, and can be
‘possessors of mauri, the life force or essence that binds the physical and
spiritual elements of all things together’ (2015, 102). In what follows,
I look to the Ngāti Porou Deed of Settlement Schedule: Documents
(NPDoS) (2010) as a guide to the underpinning values that can bring a
fresh approach to understanding Māori relationships between ‘the world’
and practices of photography and film.
The Waiapu Expedition

In 1923, a series of photographs and films were produced around the
lower reaches of the Waiapu River. Initiated by Ngāti Porou leader Sir
Āpirana Ngata, a Dominion Museum Ethnological Expedition team
50 N. Robertson
travelled to Ngata’s home Te Wharehou at Waiomatatini in the Waiapu

Valley. This was the final of four ethnological expeditions that took
place between 1919 and 1923. The core team was Elsdon Best (eth-
nologist), James McDonald (Dominion Museum photographer, film-
maker and draftsman), Johannes Andersen (librarian at the Alexander
Turnbull Library),3 and Te Rangi Hīroa, also known as Sir Peter Buck
(anthropologist and medical officer). Ngata—along with his wife Arihia,
his father Paratene Ngata and his secretary Te Raumoa Balneavis—
connected the team to the social and cultural world of Ngāti Porou. The
expedition documented ancestral tikanga (correct practices) such as fish-
ing, food gathering, weaving and related activities in Ngata’s own tribal
territory. The photographs covered a wide range of subjects, including
portraits of individuals, whare whakairo (carved meeting house), the
Māori Room at the Bungalow (Ngata’s private study), weaving of tuku-
tuku (latticework panels), woven whāriki (mats), various types of fish
nets and fishing activities, and landscapes of the valley. Scattered across
several institutions, the 1923 Waiapu expedition archive is not a cohesive
discrete entity. The archival material includes photographs or negatives
and surviving nitrate film footage, as well as various artefacts and some
written accounts.4 It may be one of the only archives of photography and
film in the world that was initiated and shaped by an indigenous leader in
a colonial nation. In total, 130 quarter- and half-plate photographs are
recorded in the Waiapu Expedition catalogue, but not all the negatives
have survived the passage of time.5 Some of the photographic prints and
surviving nitrate film have been scanned as a digital compilation of all
extant film scenes. The archive is a source of precious tribal knowledge
for Ngāti Porou, and as such is a taonga.
The Historic Archive of Ancestral Images

Ngata was a staunch advocate of Ngāti Porou cultural heritage and its
role in tribal survival. His invitation to the expedition team was pre-
cisely for the purposes of cultural reinvigoration (Tapsell 1997; Henare
[Salmond] 2007). In the wake of deadly losses of its young men dur-
ing the First World War, and the lethal 1918 influenza epidemic, Ngata
strategized to uplift his people by focusing on preserving ‘taonga tuku
iho’ (treasures to be handed down) and on the continuation of crea-
tive practices. Ngata’s priority was for McDonald to record ngā mahi o
ngā tīpuna (ancestral practices), cultural knowledge and expertise—ngā
mātauranga-a-hapū—demonstrated by Ngāti Porou people, particular to

the communities of the Waiapu River. For Ngāti Porou, fishing requires
an active reciprocity between the human, material and non- material
worlds, with tribal rules that express rangatiratanga. The NPDoS
Schedule affirms that the river has ‘been a source of sustenance for Ngāti
Porou hapu, providing water, and various species of fish, including kaha-
wai’ (2010, 1). Furthermore, it emphasizes that the kahawai fishing
techniques practised at the mouth of the Waiapu River are ‘sacred activi-
ties distinct to the Waiapu’ (2010, 1). Given these historical and legal
interpretations of fishing activity as sacred, it follows that the content of
McDonald’s photographs straddles subjects considered tapu (restricted,
sacred), such as carved taonga and things that have certain restrictions
on how they can be used, an example being fishing nets. Although they
are used for catching fish, and therefore may appear to be an ordinary
daily object, fishing nets come under strict protocols for storage and
usage. Nets should never come into contact with cooked food, so they
are stored in places where they cannot be contaminated. Rituals are con-
ducted prior to fishing to ensure the safety of all involved (Reihana and
Reihana 1958). Under Ngā Ture o Te Ngutu Awa (The Laws of the
River Mouth), when a new net is ready for use, fishermen perform a spe-
cial rite by urinating on the net and sprinkling some onto their bodies
too.6 This has a highly practical purpose of warding off sharks and other
destructive creatures who will not enter the treated net. These practices
are continued today, despite a shift away from net-making and towards
using commercially produced nets.
McDonald’s photographs of net-making were published by Te Rangi
Hīroa as early as 1926, and have been reproduced in numerous publi-
cations since. The practices of net-making, fishing stories and the pho-
tographs have become interwoven with kōrero. In the silent black and
white film (discussed shortly), Panikena Kaa is seen demonstrating net
fishing techniques in a turbulent river mouth. He wears a white shirt,
in a display of modesty in front of the camera. Another scene shows
two men demonstrating a fishing technique and netting an already dead
fish, laughing. Demonstrations of net-fishing for the camera still occur
on occasion, connecting the past images with new ones being made.7
In this way, kōrero of the historic images informs the present day. The
McDonald photographs also depict activities such as weaving and food
gathering, and landscapes including hilltop pā (sites of earlier fortified
villages). Photographic documentation of the construction of fishing nets
52 N. Robertson
and crayfish pots has provided an exceptional record of activities with

their own ancestral tikanga. These include: a tāruke koura (crayfish pot)
in the stages of making from start to finish; a hīnaki pīrangi (fish/eel
trap) under construction, specific to catching Upokororo (New Zealand
grayling); and a fully extended matarau (large seine nets). As the collec-
tion of photographs creates a circuit of supplementary kōrero between
them, they surpass modes of representation, becoming taonga tuku iho
with regard to the whanau and hapū who still practise sacred activities,
techniques and associated rites. For example, a conversation with Pāpā
John Manuel about the fishing photographs opens up his kōrero on
tikanga pertaining to the Ngutu Awa, thus providing a mechanism for
tribal knowledge to be handed down.
During the expedition, Te Rangi Hīroa asked the local Ngāti Porou
people how to catch Upokororo, an amphidromous fish. He wrote
extensive notes, and participated in the building of the fish traps.
Nineteen quarter-plate photographs show the weaving process of making
a hīnaki, then using the hīnaki in the Waiapu River. In these photographs
are Ngata’s father Paratene Ngata, Te Rangi Hīroa and an unidentified
young man. In 1926, Te Rangi Hīroa published a short but compre-
hensive journal article, “The Māori Craft of Netting”, which contains a
selection of the Waiapu River fishing photographs. In the image here, Te
Rangi Hīroa is securing the hīnaki in place with two other men assist-
ing. This late summer photograph hides a gloomier story. Successful in
catching 30 or 40 Upokororo, it was the last ever recorded shoal of the
now extinct fish. The year for extinction was subsequently deemed to
be 1923. As a photograph, it is a reminder of what is missing. It con-
tains the ancestral presence of the Waiapu River in a state of relative ora
(well-being), and yet a species that was once plentiful is now absent.
The extinction of the Upokororo somehow laminates onto the image,
never to be severed. This image recalls unseen beings, out of view, not
yet in view, no longer in existence. I look at the photograph with the
three figures frozen by the camera, caught in a moment of intense activ-
ity. Te Rangi Hīroa in particular is wrestling with a manuka stake, secur-
ing the net. The Waiapu River expedition affords some insights into how
Māori develop specific protocols around photography and, in doing so,
how photographs may carry wairua. Ngata’s invitation to McDonald to
photograph in Waiomatatini follows Māori protocol and, in turn, my
knowledge of this as I engage with the photograph extends a kōrero
that activates taonga, just as the text we are now reading is another
Fig. 3.2 James Ingram McDonald, Peter Buck, and others, setting a trap in a

fish weir, Waiapu River, 1923. Courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library Ref:
1/2-037936-F., Wellington, New Zealand
form of kōrero. It intersects with Ngata’s agenda for the reinvigoration

of cultural ways of being and knowing, and the environmental impacts
of colonization. The presence and absence of constituents of fish, river,
ancestors, elements, cultural practices, values and attributes are all
ensnared in the net. The photograph (and the archive) is now a cultural
taonga in its own category (Fig. 3.2).
Ihi, Wehi and Wana in the Archive

In the 1980s, the Film Unit Laboratory in Wellington duplicated
McDonald’s decomposing and now dangerously flammable nitrate nega-
tive film reels, reproducing them with a new positive 35 mm print. The
available material was cut into a 27-minute film, He Pito Whakaatu I
Te Noho A Te Māori I Te Tairawhiti: Scenes Of Māori Life On The East
Coast. In 2016, all available remnants of the original nitrate film were
54 N. Robertson
digitally scanned, expanding the time to 31 minutes. Composed of

black-and-white silent vignettes, with intertitles, humour and liveliness is
conveyed. The key instigator, Āpirana Ngata, is seen bossing Te Rangi
Hīroa around during the making of tukutuku panels. The fishermen
self-reflexively joke around, and the women are featured putting down
hāngi, digging up kūmara and gathering crayfish. They laugh with each
other and at the camera. The willingness to be participants shows a sense
of agency. In 2007 the film was returned for a screening to Uepohatu
Marae in Ruatoria. At the screening (named Te Hokinga Mai—the
return home, in acknowledgement of the film returning to the commu-
nity), the people greeted those in the images and spoke to them as if
they were present (Kopua 2015). The film sparked debate, laughter and
tears. The silent film has all the qualities of ancestral taonga, transmitting
ihi, wehi and wana. Commenting on the emotional responses to seeing
photographs of those who have died, Ngāti Porou writer and poet Keri
Kaa said ‘for that moment, that person is very alive, a kind of transfer
takes place’ (Kaa 2015). Shown in the community, where direct descend-
ants could view their ancestors, forms a rupture of linear time; the ances-
tors communicate to the audience. The temporal past is brought into
the present moment, and the people and places in images are kept warm
through our attention.
I recently had an opportunity to view film negatives from the 1923
Expedition at Te Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New Zealand). It was
an emotional and spiritual moment, creating a charged circuit like
an earthed wire. For perhaps 1/125th of a second, this negative was
exposed to the bright East Coast light of a day in March 1923. As I
touched the cellulose, for a fleeting moment I stood in McDonald’s
shoes, loading this sheet of film, pulling out the film slide, releasing
the shutter. Normally not seen by anyone other than photographer or
printer, the negative is an umbilical cord back to the exact moment of
exposure of the film to the light and thus the inception of the image.
Silver halide crystals on the cellulose film held traces of light, and
energy reflected off my ancestral Waiapu River and off people from my
tribe. It seemed as close as I could get to being there, much closer than
prints that would be made at a later date. As I looked at the lightbox,
I felt in direct communication with the ancestors through ihi as the
awesome presence, wehi, that tingling feeling of excitement, and wana,
unquestioned competence and authority of the images (Mead 1984).
Their presence is not just to be found in the tangible, technological
sense of materials, but in the intangible, the unseen, through a whaka-

papa, a genealogical relationship to whenua (land) and awa (river). It
is from this perspective that the photographs of the river, our mother,
are equally important as those of people. Accordingly, Barry Barclay
said McDonald’s images were ‘very moving for the Māori commu-
nity who can feel the presence of their immediate ancestors in much
the way they sense their presence in carvings in the meetinghouse—
which to many outsiders are nothing more than sculptures’ (1990,
97). Mediated by Ngata’s guidance, and his own role as an indigenous
ethnographer, McDonald’s photographic and film record have become
significant tribal taonga, despite their geneses in an Ethnographic
Expedition.
Tikanga Māori and Mana Taonga Photographs

In te ao Māori, cultural, philosophical and metaphysical concepts guide
everyday living in a practice and protocol matrix called Tikanga Māori
(Mead 2003, ix).8 Described as ‘the first law of Aotearoa’ (Mikaere 2005),
Tikanga Māori is based on ancestral values, drawing on accumulated
knowledge as tools for understanding and evolving as new technologies
emerge. Photography and film technologies have given rise to new guid-
ing principles. Generally, Māori spiritual understandings of photography
have been based on portraiture, ethnographic nineteenth-century encoun-
ters, cartes-de-visite and customary marae contexts (King 1996, 3). As well
as this, Māori soldiers dying and being buried abroad during the First and
Second World Wars accelerated the use of photographs for funerary events
(Dansey 1992, 113). With its power to memorialize, portrait photography
led to new Tikanga Māori protocols as cultural practices evolved, such as
those outlined here by Matiu Baker:
Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, photography increas-

ingly replaced the role of carved representations of tūpuna [ancestors],
especially as fewer carved houses were being produced. Photographs began
to line the walls of uncarved houses, replacing the carved tūpuna figures.
Māori also adapted photography and portraiture in other media for use
in important cultural events. For example, during tangihanga (funerary
events) images of the deceased, together with portraits of other deceased
near relatives, would be arranged with fine cloaks and other taonga (treas-
ured personal and tribal possessions) around the coffin. (2014, 9)
56 N. Robertson
Some tribal areas use the back wall of uncarved houses as a memorial
space. During various rituals in the whare tīpuna, visitors are invited to
stand before the portraits, as an encounter between the living people and
the represented ancestors. Tapu increases once a person is deceased, so
this experience can be highly charged. During the tangihanga (funer-
ary event), communications with a deceased person in a photograph are
often conducted directly, as if the person is present. Indeed, for Māori,
their wairua is released from the body, remaining present until the tangi
is over. Images of those have passed on are treated with great respect. In
addition to this, places where multiple deaths have occurred, such as bat-
tle sites, are also wahi tapu, sacred restricted sites. From this perspective,
historical photographs and films of people, and of culturally significant
places, are also considered sacred taonga.
In 1991, Ngāti Porou leader, the late Āpirana Mahuika, developed
the term mana taonga for Te Papa Tongarewa, The Museum of New
Zealand, stating that taonga are tapu: ‘They represent part of Māori
history, and as such have religious and spiritual associations’ (1991, 9).
Over the past two decades, Mahuika’s phrase has become widely used in
policy statements in the museum sector in New Zealand. In my view, his
term warrants an extension—mana taonga photographs—as a category
of photographs representing Māori history, especially those in museum
archives. Furthermore, the importance of portrait photography to Māori
is elucidated by Te Papa Tongarewa Kaihautū, Arapata Hakiwai stating
that ‘[t]heir mana power, authority, and significance transcend time and
space, reconnecting present generations to an umbilical cord of geneal-
ogy, history and identity’ (2014a, 145). Hakiwai’s statement elegantly
reinforces the connection between photography and whakapapa. He
discusses the planning of Ka Moe, Ka Puta, an exhibition of Samuel
Carnell portraits of Ngāti Kahungunu people, stating that the tribal rep-
resentatives saw ‘that the whakapapa linked the photos and the photos
made the whakapapa come alive’. He continues, ‘The Iwi Chairperson
felt that the photo collection was a logical and modern extension of
traditional carving techniques’ (Hakiwai 2014b, 179). A precursor to
the public exhibition was held at Mihiroa, a Kahungunu tribal marae.
In this context, Hakiwai says that ‘[h]aving a large number of ancestral
portraits in one place on a marae with descendants greeting and lament-
ing them was both highly emotional and personally transformational’
(2014b, 177).
A photograph may reside in a museum archive, but according to

Tapsell, may still provide ‘an invaluable bridge’ connecting ‘urban-
raised kin’ (2003, 244) with ancestral pasts, facilitating re-engagement,
empowerment and visual repatriation. From this perspective, a Māori
world view places emphasis on connections or genealogies through oral
transmission accompanied by visual mnemonic aids, such as carving and
tukutuku. Ngata’s invitation to McDonald to photograph in the Waiapu
foresaw the genealogical value of photography to hold whakapapa and
kōrero for future generations.
Mana, Wairua and Mauri

If the historic photograph functions as an ‘invaluable bridge’, it is
connecting more than past and present generations. Through kōrero or
oratory, the human voice activates the process of communion with ances-
tors, along with movement, touch and presence. When this attention is
directed towards a ancestral carving or a photograph, we are calling forth
the ancestral presence (human or otherwise). Three metaphysical quali-
ties ‘at work’ in photographs of people, things and places are frequently
identified as mana, wairua and mauri. These are identified by elders in
interviews, reinforced by writers such as Hakiwai, Tapsell and Baker, as
being enmeshed in ancestral photographs.
Mana means spiritual authority, power and charisma that is delegated
to the person or thing from the atua (the gods) (Marsden 1992, 118–
19). For a thing to have mana, it is endued with ‘spiritual power through
the indwelling spirit’ (1992, 121). If this is the case, the elders I spoke
with (Huirangi Eruera Waikerepuru and Hohi Ngapera Te Moana Keri
Kaa) note the potential risk and spiritual harm that could come from
being photographed. Māori will speak of losing one’s mana, or having
one’s mana trampled on. It is the quality that is hurt or damaged by
ill treatment of a photograph. In this way, mana can be amplified and
diminished.
Wairua is considered mobile in that ‘it can detach but never stray too
far away’ (Mead 2003). For instance, it is believed that it can leave dur-
ing dreams, then return upon waking. Wairua is therefore vulnerable
to capture. The straying quality of the wairua is ‘at risk’ at the moment
the photograph is taken. Kaa suggests that this is because wairua may be
segmented. She indicates that giving away images is akin to giving away
your mana:
58 N. Robertson
Once upon a time, the old people, I’m talking about my great grandpar-
ents’ generation, they objected to cameras because they found them intru-
sive, because you had this cold, round, glass eye staring at you. And they
perceived them to be thieves of images. Many people felt that when you
take a photograph of somebody that you are actually capturing and tak-
ing parts of somebody’s wairua and that’s not something you give away to
people. (2010)
In a similar way, Waikerepuru ponders the purpose of photography

and, in particular, the hesitancy in taking photographs of elders, say-
ing that ‘the purpose is to capture the character, the spirit, the pres-
ence that person may be reflecting, but whether or not it is capturing
in a possessive way. Is it possessive?’ (2009). Waikerepuru explains
this as ‘he kāpō i te wairua i te tangata’ which essentially means to
snatch the spirit or soul. This snatching camera is commensurate with
wairua being caught. And he continues, saying that elders ‘strongly
objected to photographs, and [they] strongly objected because, I sup-
pose, the newness of photography. Taking a photograph of somebody
and suddenly it appears, as though it was real, the person themselves’
(2009) (Fig. 3.3).
Marsden defines mauri as a key element in the ‘genealogical table of the
birth and evolution of the various stages of the cosmic process’ (Marsden
and Henare 1992, 7). He maintains that mauri is a form of energy that
originates in Tua-Uri, ‘the real world of the complex series of rhythmical
patterns of energy which operate behind this world of sense p erception’
(Marsden and Henare 1992, 8). Marsden illuminates the connection
between whakapapa and patterns of energy, saying that Mauri radiates
outwards from Tua-Uri into Te Aro-Nui, the world before us, the one
apprehended by our senses.9 Comprehending mauri as a radiating energy
clarifies how it might come to reside in inanimate objects, such as photo-
graphs. Taina Pohatu describes three main states of mauri. Mauri moe is
latent, untapped potential, mauri oho is a proactive state of being awoken,
and mauri ora is in an active state of transformative potential (Pohatu
2011, 4–7). If mauri is an element most frequently attributed to being in
photographs, it could be as a consequence of the various states of mauri.
For example, moe, which means sleep, is the most likely state of mauri
in a photograph. The various states can be activated and deactivated and,
if we interact with an image through kōrero, we can awaken the resting
Fig. 3.3 Natalie Robertson, Waiapu Ngutu Awa, Te Tai Tairawhiti, 2014.

mauri. Just as the ancestral portraits seem to wake upon being greeted,
mauri may reside in the image, in a state of mauri moe, until it is activated
as mauri oho. Thus it is the encounter with the image that elicits Māori to
communicate with an ancestral presence.
The River
One morning at dawn, I go to the Waiapu Ngutu Awa, the mouth of
the river, seeking permission to photograph. She is Waiapu Kōkā Huhua,
Waiapu of Many Mothers. In voicing my proposal, I begin to tangi—to
weep. When acknowledging death or loss, it is appropriate etiquette in te
ao Māori to weep and wail. The excretion of tears and mucus to express
inner grief is one of the roles of Māori women: Te roimata i heke (the
tears which fall), Te hupe i whiua ki te marae (the mucus which is cast
on the marae), Ke ea Aitua (avenge death) (Te Rangi Hīroa 1950, 418).
The hūpē, or mucus from the nose, can be considered a cord that creates
60 N. Robertson
a circuit of connection between the human body and the ground.10

In this moment, my salty tears join briny water where river meets ocean.
I acknowledge the protracted injury caused to the whenua and awa. I
look for affirmative signs.
Since 1890, mass agricultural deforestation has led to irrevers-
ible changes to the Waiapu Valley and river. She no longer has the rich
diversity of species it once had. Thirty-five million tons of soil flow out
annually from the Waiapu to the sea, making it one of the most silt-
laden rivers in the world.11 Since I began photographing and video-
ing my ancestral homelands, the river has continued to widen. So too
have the beaches on both sides of the river mouth, resulting from sedi-
ment dumping on the shore. The driftwood from deforestation is knee
deep at times. As an environment, it is constantly changing, season to
season or flood to flood. The river mouth shifts and swings, some years
to the south, sometimes towards the north. My photographs and videos
respond directly to the resultant eco-crises. Visualizing the slow catastro-
phe (Nixon 2013) seems such a slight gesture towards healing the mauri
of the river, a place that has had its entire ecosystem massively disrupted.
I make the images with the intention of creating a visual repository to
be handed on to tribal descendants, so we have a record of the river for
the future. The feminine taniwha (water spirit) of the river is Ō Hine
Waiapu. Her response is quiet, but without resistance. The outpouring
of unexpected tears is my small kōha (offering).
Kōkā Keri Kaa advises me to collect water from the river, to take to
Pāpā Morehu Boycie Te Maro for blessing. ‘Be careful where you walk,’
she says. ‘Use the water for you and your photographic equipment.’
Pāpā Boycie tells me many stories about the river, eels and the land that
has gone, consumed by the waters. Pāpā John Manuel, Pāpā Wiremu
and Kōkā Jossie Kaa all remind me not to go near Te Ana-a-Mataura
where Taho the chiefly taniwha lives, to respect the taniwha and the
beings who dwell in the river’s perilous places. When I review my pho-
tographs and video footage, I scan for hints of their presence. Each elder
gently instils in me Tikanga Waiapu—a series of protocols and practices
specific to Waiapu, to be aware of when photographing, and that the
images produced must also be treated respectfully. Made in a precarious
environment replete with taniwha and other beings of the unseen realms,
the images may hold a spiritual ‘something’ that the elders allude to in
their guidance. Just as the mucus that falls to the ground is a cord that
completes a circuit, it could be that there are other cords that create or
complete pathways between visible and invisible worlds in the photo-

graphic image. What I have proposed is not offered with any certainty
that the mysteriousness of cords, circuits and energies can, or should, be
apprehended.
At a time when Ngāti Porou are working on the Waiapu River Accord
(2014)—an ambitious one hundred-year plan to restore the ecology
of the Waiapu River—showing the McDonald films and photographs
to people within the community will enhance their vision. While being
viewed, the photographs and film essentially shift from a state of mauri
moe (untapped potential) into the proactive state of being awoken, mauri
oho. Any direct address to the images enhances this awakening. Kaa
makes the point that it depends who is gazing at the image: ‘some peo-
ple have immense power and vision to see what cannot be seen by oth-
ers’ (2015). In the moment between the lens making the image and the
viewer looking at it, almost 100 years later, there is a collapse in time and
space—a space between mauri moe and mauri oho—bringing the long
past subjects back to life. When we touch or kiss a photograph, when we
use a photograph ceremonially and ritually, weeping tears over it, we are
activating our mana rangatiratanga photographically. When we photo-
graph land, sea, waters, as well as people, we give rise to the potential
for the transfer of mauri to be held in a latent state of mauri moe, to be
awoken into mauri oho when we connect and give it our attention; our
kōrero. Mauri ora!
Notes
1. A carved figure has its own āhua, further extending this concept beyond
the human person. Whakaahua means to form, to shape, to transform
and to photograph. It also means to form or fashion, therefore implying
activation by the hand of a maker. As a noun, whakaahua refers to the
thing that has taken or been given form in the photograph, film, illustra-
tion, portrait, picture, image or photocopy.
2. Te Tiriti o Waitangi, written in Te Reo Māori (the Māori language) was
signed by Māori rangatira (chiefs) and representatives of the British
Crown in 1840. The essence of Te Tiriti is the continuity of Te Tino
Rangatiratanga, Māori independence and sovereignty. An English ver-
sion claimed a transference of sovereignty that the Māori version did not.
‘Historical claims are made by Māori against the Crown for breaches of
the Treaty of Waitangi before 1992. Historical settlements aim to resolve
62 N. Robertson
these claims and provide some redress to claimant groups. When a settle-
ment is reached, it becomes law’ (New Zealand Government 2017).
3. Johannes Anderson was responsible for making wax cylinder recordings
on this expedition. These are held at the University of Auckland.
4. These institutions include: Te Papa Tongarewa (The Museum of New
Zealand, formerly the Dominion Museum, holding photographs in the
form of prints and negatives), the Alexander Turnbull Library (holding
notes, diaries, and loose prints), Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision (holding
films), the University of Auckland (holding wax cylinder recordings) and
the Bishop Museum in Hawai’i.
5. Compiled by Ross O’Rourke at Te Papa Tongarewa, the catalogue is a
photocopied document.
6. This ritual is only performed by men. Women are not permitted to be pre-
sent. According to John Manuel, who was raised only metres from the
river mouth, to ease any concerns that a kete (woven bag) or any equip-
ment had been in contact with cooked food, it would be urinated on
(Manuel 2005).
7. John Manuel demonstrated the fishing nets at the Porou Āriki Reo
Wananga (Ngāti Porou language meeting) at Rahui Marae (Manuel
2015).
8. See Edward Durie, who describes tikanga practices as ‘proper and merito-
rious conduct according to ancestral law … necessary for good relations
with people and with the land on which they live’ (see Mead 2003).
9. See Māori Marsden for a more detailed outline of the three-world view
of Māori according to Tane’s pursuit of the three baskets of knowledge
obtained by Tane, and which were named Tua-uri, Aro-Nui and Tua-
Atea (Marsden and Henare 1992, 7–10).
10. See Courtney Sullivan, citing Anthony A. Voykovic (1981): ‘During
mourning, hūpē is shed and when this reaches the ground, it is said that
this “circuit was complete”’ (2012, 133).
11. See the Waiapu River Catchment Study which states: ‘The suspended sedi-
ment yield of the Waiapu River is 20,520 t/km2/yr, which is equivalent
to an annual sediment load of 35 million tons of sediment being delivered
to the ocean every year’ (Barnard, et al. 2012, 4; see Hicks, et al. 2000).
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Hurihuri—Aspects of Māoritanga, ed. Michael King, 117–137. Auckland:
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CHAPTER 4
Dark Sun: Solar Frequencies, Solar Affects
Janine Randerson and Rachel Shearer
Upane, Kaupane, whiti te rā

Tenei to wahine te aitia nei
E te ngārara nui, e te ngārara roa,
Upoko, upoko, whiti te rā.1 (Best 1904, 130)
Our common inheritance of a changing climate is at the epicentre

of a growing number of art projects this century that treat the sun as
alive, a life force and a threat to life. In this chapter, we suggest that the
sun’s energy, mediated through artworks, produces transformative solar
affects. The focus is on contemporary artworks that draw on the fig-
ure of the sun as an animating energetic force. Australian artists Joyce
Hinterding and David Haines’s project Earthstar (2008–ongoing) dis-
tils frequencies from the sun through electromagnetic radio instruments
and a hydrogen-alpha telescope. Rachel Shearer engineers solar-powered
responsive soundworks, such as Wiriwiri (2017). Charged and activated
by the sun, and with many of the aural components derived from the
J. Randerson (*) · R. Shearer 
School of Art & Design, AUT University,
Auckland CBD, New Zealand
e-mail: jranders@aut.ac.nz
R. Shearer
e-mail: midget@ihug.co.nz

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_4
68 J. Randerson and R. Shearer
immediate environment, Wiriwiri inhabits an environment where elec-

tronics behave organically. The sun oscillates between a subject position
in indigenous cosmologies and an object in the dominant languages of
politics and science, while in contemporary art the sun can shift between
an observed entity through instrumentation and an animate being with
mauri (life force, vital essence), when drawing on Māori cosmology.
Artworks that generate solar energies destabilize traditional divisions
between knower and known, phenomena and apparatus.
The opening karakia (incantation, prayer) in this chapter exhorts
the sun ancestor Tamanuiterā to shine brightly on the heads of human
beings. The chant was recited by Hoaki and Taukata, ancient Polynesian
voyagers who were found after their vessel was wrecked near Whakatane
on the east coast of Aotearoa New Zealand. The sun was summoned to
warm their cold bodies after the extreme hardship and exposure to the
elements during their epic voyage.2 The tangata whenua (local people)
passed on this karakia through twenty generations of oral story-telling,
prior to ethnographer Eldson Best’s written recording in 1904. The sun
has preoccupied humanity for centuries as the animating life force par
excellence; it gives life and takes it away. The sun suffuses astrological
doctrines of planetary influence across cultures and religions. While the
heliocentric universe of Enlightenment science has been surpassed, the
rhythms of our quotidian existence are governed and sustained by our
closest star. In contemporary scientific terms, the sun is a violent star,
producing the most powerful and violent eruptions in the solar sys-
tem (Green 2016). Yet the sun’s explosive and unpredictable atmosphere
has only become knowable since remote technologies of solar observa-
tion were developed. Scientific knowledge depends on instruments for
understanding the sun’s invisible qualities of light and heat. New tech-
nologies such as helioseismology bring us inside the sun by using sound
waves observed in the photosphere to study the solar interior. These
same technologies are increasingly employed by artists, and in addition
artists build or customize their own solar instruments to signal, pay hom-
age or reflect the anxieties associated with the figure of the sun.
The burning of the fossilized remains of the sun’s light in the form
of carbon continues to push the world beyond the tipping points that
the planet’s atmosphere can sustain. We turn to the sun to locate the
cause and the solution to climate change in Big Science propositions.
Ecological discourse has previously been framed in terms of endanger-
ment to biotic life: humans, animals and plants. In the current era we
4 DARK SUN: SOLAR FREQUENCIES, SOLAR AFFECTS 69
also engage with abiotic forms, including the ‘carbon and chemical
interactions with the solar and terrestrial environment and with the
live energy system necessary to reach a survivable, dynamical homeo-
stasis on the earth’ (Kahn 2013, 17). We argue that artists can gen-
erate sensory understandings of the sun’s energies in our ecosystem.
In part, this is through the solar affects that emerge in alternative
cosmological narratives to the science of technical data collection.
As it is beyond the scope of this chapter to give an account of the
significance of the sun in art, philosophy and religion, we focus on
the figure Tamanuiterā, the sun atua (a sacred ancestor with continu-
ing influence over a specific domain) in Māori cosmology as our local
representative.
The Sun in Māori Cosmologies

In te ao Māori (the Māori world), inanimate cosmic bodies, such as the
sun, are spoken of as if they are human or superhuman. Papatūānuku is
the personification of the earth as the primordial mother; her partner
and co-parent of all earthly beings is Ranginui, the sky father. As the
Māori universe is a genealogical network within which humans inter-
connect with the non-human, personification emphasizes the natu-
ral world as ancestors/extended family members. Empirical knowledge
is found within the allegorical language of Māori cosmologies. Bruce
Biggs (Ngati Maniapoto) cites a nineteenth-century text written by
Hamiora Pio (Te Ati Awa, Tuwharetoa), in which he explains the sun’s
relationship with the children of the sea, Hineraumati (Summer Maid)
and Hinetakurua (which means both the star Sirius and Winter Maid).
He writes, ‘The sun married both of them—the two wives have differ-
ent homes. Hine-takarua live in the sea. Hine-raumati lives on the land’
(Biggs 1994, 7). Biggs explains that from Hamiora Pio’s home district
the sun rose from the sea in winter and over the land in summer. In this
case the relationship between the allegory and empirical facts is clear.
Tamanuiterā and Hineraumati, the sun and the summer, together cre-
ated Tānerore. The shimmering heat of the sun is described as ‘Te haka
o Tānerore’ (the dance of Tānerore). Tānerore is still referred to in and
associated with the Māori performing arts, as we examine further in rela-
tion to Rachel Shearer’s soundwork.
According to Manuka Henare, a Māori vitalism can be located in the
belief that an immanent life force ‘imbues and animates all forms and
things of the cosmos’ (2001, 204). A philosophy of vitalism is expressed

in the concepts of mauri, tapu (sacred, prohibited, restricted, under atua
protection), mana (prestige, authority, control, power, influence, sta-
tus), hau (breath, wind, vital essence) and wairua (spirit/spirituality),
where each concept is imbued with many layerings of meaning and reso-
nance. Mauri is a key attribute under discussion in this chapter, but it
works within an intricate relationship with the other metaphysical con-
cepts (Henare 2001). In te ao Māori there is mauri between atoms and
space. Mauri is the life force, passed down through the genealogies of
the atua to provide life to all known phenomena creating a holistic unity
within diversity (Marsden 2003, 95). It binds the physical and meta-
physical together. Mauri indicates a person is alive. Once a body dies,
the mauri for that body no longer exists. Though mauri manifests in
all things, animals, insects, rocks, mountains, oceans, rivers, trees, for-
est, grudges, buildings and artworks, Ngā Puhi tōhunga (chosen expert,
priest, healer) Māori Marsden distinguishes between the essence (as spe-
cific forms of mauri) of the animate and inanimate and the realm of the
spirit (Marsden 2003, 6). The maintaining of mauri is an ethical practice
that informs reciprocal interactions with the entities and ecologies that
share existence. It is integral to a culture whose traditions are committed
to a sensitive awareness of the well-being of the environment (Marsden
2003; Moon 2005; Mead 2016). Mauri is a living concept and has con-
temporary applications in environmental protection as seen in response
to the October 2011 grounding of the ship MV Rena off the coast of
Aotearoa NZ and the subsequent oil spill causing Aotearoa NZ’s worst
environmental disaster. The Ministry for the Environment responded
with the Rena Long-Term Environmental Recovery Plan to ‘restore the
mauri of the affected environment to its pre-Rena state’ (MfE 2011, 3).
Although mauri is different from the concept of affect, the sun helps
maintain the mauri of all living beings. We propose that solar affects can
be understood as relational processes that exist between entities, people
and phenomena through the maintenance of mauri; ecological balance is
aided and abetted by tapu, wairua, hau, mana and tauutuutu (reciproc-
ity). As well as possessing mauri, artworks and performances are experi-
enced and judged aesthetically through the ideals of ihi, wehi and wana.
Ihi is a psychic power from the performer/artwork that elicits a positive
psychic and emotional response from the audience. Ihi also means a ray
of sun or a beam of light. Wehi is the reaction to the power of the per-
formance/artwork, and wana is the reactions and aura created during
the performance that encompasses both the performers and the audience
(Kruger 1984). Wana occurs during an active engagement of both par-
ties and so is not generally attributed to ‘inanimate’ artworks (Matthews
2004). These definitions of ihi, wehi and wana resonate with common
understandings of affect.
Solar Affect
Our sense of affect connects to ihi, wehi and wana, as always existing
in relation; affect is neither housed in the human body nor in the sun’s
physical manifestations. For the purposes of this chapter, we propose
solar affect as a certain kind of affect; a quality that exists between art-
works and our attunement to solar energies. Solar affects manifest as
we are ourselves blends of sunlight, air, water, micro-organisms, animal
and spirit. The sun becomes part of the body, warming us, burning our
skin, nourishing us, blinding us, frightening us and awing us. To follow
Spinoza on affect, ‘There is no longer a subject, but only individuating
affective states of an anonymous force. The plane is concerned only with
movements and rests, with dynamic affective charges’ (see Thrift 2010,
13). As a dynamic affective charge, solar affect exists in our perceptual
and sensory responses to the sun and in the frequencies sent and received
through light and heat.
In addition, solar affect can be situated politically and spatially in
the context of our warming planet. Cultural geographer Nigel Thrift
describes affect as ‘a key element of a politics that will supplement the
ordinary’ (2010, 25). The artworks discussed in what follows generate
exceptional experiences outside the quotidian and, we argue, have the
capacity to draw attention to urgent ecopolitical issues. Affect emerges
through the bodily blendings that embody shifts in intensity (Chen
2012, 40). We connect solar affect to theories of animism through the
concept of mauri. For gender studies theorist Mel Chen there is ‘leakage’
between the strict hierarchies of what is animate and what is inanimate,
which relates to questions of biopolitical governance and the cultural
policing of these leaky bounds. Solar affects are the product of worldly
matterings, cultural beliefs and the physical omnipresence of the sun.
In the animacy hierarchy proposed by linguist John Cherry, and
expanded on as a form of biopolitics by Chen (2012, 26), the sun may
be considered near the apex of the hierarchy, even though it is non-
living. Cherry suggests that in European culture, animism, associated
with the sun and moon, persists because ‘their movements are grand,
apparently autonomous, and appear to accord with an intelligent rou-
tine’ (1992, 54). Although the sun is a non-human actor, it possesses
motility and life-giving energetic force. For example, ‘the sun is trying
to break through the mist’, according to Cherry, ‘is an animistic and
dynamic way of speaking, and moreover takes no account of the distance
which in reality separates the sun from the mist and suggests they are
actually engaged in conflict’ (1992, 36).
Aristotle’s De Anima proposed that ‘soul’ could be an animating prin-
ciple for humans, animals and vegetables, but not ‘dead’ matter such as
stones. As the sun is made of gas and minerals it falls into the latter cat-
egory, which runs counter to the Māori understandings of the sun out-
lined above. For Plato, the sun embodies goodness, and an embodied
understanding emerges in his ‘Analogy of the Sun’, in Book Six of The
Republic. The Platonic sun illuminates the intelligible with Truth. Plato’s
brother Glaucon realizes, through dialogue with Socrates, that sight is
produced in relation with its divine source; without sunlight there would
be no colour or vision. The eye is described as sunlike but not identi-
cal with the sun. Glaucon asks, ‘So the eye’s power of sight, is a kind of
infusion dispensed to it by the sun?’ (Plato, Book Six). As well as acting
as a symbol of truth, the sun also infuses the human in this foundational
account. In this tradition, Jacques Derrida locates the heliotrope as ‘the
father of all figures of speech’, where the sun is the ‘essence of that which
is’ (see DeLoughrey 2011, 237). Counter to this perspective, we resist
the dominant narrative of the central position in European philosophy of
the sun as king of reason and truth to offer indigenous alter-narratives.
The dark side of the heliotrope is discussed by postcolonial literary
theorist Elizabeth DeLoughrey in the form of nuclear testing, which
she traces through Pacific literature with a brief reference to Māori artist
Ralph Hotere (2011). Several of Hotere’s paintings made in the mid-
1980s specifically reference the apocalyptic nuclear sun. In addition to
the changes brought on by climate warming, the sun as emblematic of
the nuclear threat also hovers in this chapter, as we shortly discuss in ref-
erence to several of Hotere’s works. Digitality and solar technologies in
contemporary art have opened new approaches to mediate the sun and
to create bodily resonances. Solar energy as media in art performs com-
plex functions, producing new objects and sensations, and draws atten-
tion to agencies of observation and knowledge production. We offer that
mauri exists in creative outcomes from paintings to sound installations,

engendered by the mediations of the sun.
Hotere’s Dark Sun

We preface our examination of solar affects through the paintings of
Hotere. The corona-shaped disks in the series Black Painting (1969) and
Requiem (1973–1974) suggest the spherical form of Tamanuiterā. While
it has been argued that the circle in Hotere’s painting ‘remains resolutely
itself’ in the absolutist language of geometric form (Pound 2000, 23),
we link the circle to the mauri of the sun atua in the spiritual realm. Poet
Cilla McQueen also finds in Hotere’s circles that ‘the background radi-
ation of the universe is still tingling’ (2000, 460). Rangihiroa Panoho
connects the black and red colour that features in these circular abstrac-
tions to fire, smoke and blackness at the core of Hotere’s Te Aupōuri
identity (2015, 105). He suggests that, for Hotere, fire has regenerating
possibilities and the blackness is suggestive of te kore, the nothingness
which is all surrounding and ever-present in the endless cosmos. The fine
red rings resonate at the level of a fundamental allegory of wholeness in
many cultures. To experience these paintings is to move from te kore to
an awareness of the mauri that emanates through the galaxies in Māori
metaphysics (Fig. 4.1).
By the 1980s the false sun of the nuclear test in Mururoa atoll was
specifically referenced in Hotere’s work, where he used solar images
to political affect. In Black Rainbow (1986) and in Dawn/Water poem
(1986) we confront the melancholy spectre of the death of species by
nuclear annihilation. DeLoughrey argues that the persistent use of solar
metaphors for understanding nuclear weaponry has been vital to natu-
ralizing global militarization (2011, 237). She writes that in American
post-war propaganda, ‘weapons of mass destruction were naturalised by
likening them to harnessing the power of the sun, and their radioactive
by-products were depicted as no less dangerous than our daily sunshine’
(2011, 236). In Pacific literature, such as Hone Tuwhare’s poem ‘No
Ordinary Sun’ (1959), and Hotere’s paintings, DeLoughrey locates an
alternative ‘solar ecopoetics’ in resistance to nuclear testing.
Dawn/Water poem series (1986) is a collaboration between Hotere
and New Zealand poet Bill Manhire. The violent red painting is a politi-
cal statement that equates the solar dawn with the nuclear sun. The
solar optical effect of a rainbow is also a dark allegory in Hotere’s Black
Fig. 4.1 Ralph Hotere, Requiem, 1973–1974. Oil on board. Collection of the

Whangarei Art Museum, New Zealand. By permission of the Hotere Foundation
Trust
Rainbow series (1986), which explicitly connects to the bombing of

the Greenpeace anti-nuclear protest ship the Rainbow Warrior in 1985
by French foreign intelligence services. The scrawled X used in both of
these paintings means ‘keep away’ in nautical terms. It is a sign of dele-
tion that is ‘all-cancelling and all-refusing’ in Hotere’s visual language
(Pound 2000, 23). To Manhire’s repeated word ‘Sunrise’ Hotere has
added ‘Mururoa’, using redness and blackness to signal the nuclear apoc-
alypse. DeLoughrey suggests that the black rainbow demonstrates the
destruction of the normal visual spectrum of light by nuclear radiation
(2011, 242).
The blackness and redness in Hotere’s painting resonate with the mel-
ancholic mode described in Julie Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and
Melancholia. In reference to the psychological struggles of poet Gérard

de Nerval, she discusses the black sun metaphor in his writing as follows:
Beyond its alchemical scope, the ‘Black Sun metaphor’ fully sums up the
blinding force of the despondent mood as—an excruciating, lucid affect
asserts the inevitability of death … which is death of the loved one and of
the self that identifies with the former (the poet is ‘bereft’ of the ‘star’).
(1987, 151)
For Kristeva, ‘Melancholia belongs in the celestial realm. It changes

darkness into redness or into a sun that remains black, to be sure, but
is nevertheless the sun, source of dazzling light’ (1987, 151). When the
Sun is dark, in the black sequence in Hotere’s black paintings, certainty
is obscured and equivocal; the nuclear black sun threatens the capac-
ity for Tamanuiterā and all his family to sustain human and non-human
mauri. The nuclear shimmer of waves of radiation threatens to supplant
Tānerore’s ‘tremble of life’, discussed next in Rachel Shearer’s sound
practice.
Affecting Frequencies: Rachel Shearer’s Wiriwiri (2017)

The trembling hand, iconic in the Māori performing arts, is called a
‘wiri’. This is an acknowledgement of Tānerore, who is the shimmering
heated air that rises from the ground on a hot summer day, personified
as ‘te haka a Tānerore’ (the dance of Tānerore). As the son of the sun,
Tamanuiterā, and summer, Hineraumati, Tānerore is an expression of
heat and also offers a performative guideline for traditional Māori dance.
As the Ngāti Kahungunu website for the 2017 biennial national kapa
haka (Māori performing arts group) competition invites:
Haere mai koutou ngā kanohi ora o te haka a Tāne-rore o te motu.

Come and be the nation’s face of Tānerore’s haka.
Ko koutou mā ērā i poipoi i te kārohirohi o te haka a Tāne-rore.
You are necessary to nurture the shimmer of Tanerore’s haka.
(Te Matatini 2017)
Performers attune their bodies and minds to the light energetic shim-
mer of Tānerore. Wiri is performed as a vibrato in the voice as well as in
the trembling hands. The upper body is grounded by the stamping of
Fig. 4.2 Rachel Shearer, Wiriwiri, 2017. Stereo audio, photovoltaic panel, cus-
tomized electronics. 22 min. plus ongoing variables due to light and heat. Photo:
Rachel Shearer. Courtesy of the artist
feet on the earth.3 Wiriwiri is to tremble, shiver, quake. The doubling of

the noun demonstrates a repeating and ongoing action. Dancer Cathy
Livermore describes wiriwiri as a quivering activation that heats and
expands the body, lighting the ihi up from inside, activating the nervous
system and heightening presence in the ‘now’ (2017) (Fig. 4.2).
Shearer’s installation Wiriwiri (2017) consists of a photovoltaic sys-

tem powering digital audio playback, reproduced through two sus-
pended speakers. The photovoltaic system, via electronic processing,
oscillates the volume levels in response to variable intensities received
from the sun. More heat, more light, more noise. The sound signal itself
consists of two prepared aural motifs. One is the gesture of the wiri, fur-
ther resonating in this work as an idea of vibration at the core of the
material world, performed as a field of trembling shimmering shift-
ing textures of sound. Since all matter ‘naturally vibrates in an elastic
medium’, even at subatomic level, it can be argued that all matter pro-
duces sound, whether or not the human ear is capable of perceiving it
(Hainge 2013, 1). Mauri is also evoked here, ubiquitous as vibration, a
life force that imbues the material world binding our listening to meta-
physical realms. The conceptual loop of vibration as matter as sound as
vibration, and the presence of mauri permeating all elements of this pro-
cess, is presented here as a sonic imagining of the sound of Tānerore’s
shimmer.4 This arrangement is gently oscillated between the two speak-
ers, creating a continual movement of energetic exchange. At times over-
laying and overtaking is a sonic motif evoking cicadas, taken from field
recordings of cicadas which were processed and augmented until the
original sonic elements were transformed. What remains is an imprint of
the cicadas within a thin band of brittle frequencies shaped into sizzling
electronic textures of sound. Wiriwiri’s cicadas are meant not only to
recall the familiar sibilant stridulation of the Kihikihi Wawā (Amphipsalta
zealandica), the loudest and most common of the forty-two indigenous
species of cicadas in Aotearoa NZ (Crowe 2015), but to complement
their dense chorus. As their singing builds in volume in response to the
intensities of the sun, so too does Wiriwiri’s simulated cicadas. Heat and
light responsive electronics adjust the volume levels of Wiriwiri’s cicadas
so that they sing not just with the sun and summer’s shimmering son,
Tānerore, but in response to the increasing heat of our current epoch.
Sustained, like the rest of life on earth, by converting the sun’s energies,
the installation seeks to inhabit its own ecological niche; where electron-
ics behave organically.
Conceived long before global warming or nuclear suns were of con-
cern, Tānerore is heat made visible caused by light refracting as it reflects
off the earth and passes back up through air of different thermal densi-
ties. To make the sun’s affects perceivable through sound, technological
transduction is required, a rich area of exploration for scientists and

artists alike. Sound as a creative practice is able to tap into the hid-
den vibratory structures of the sun—both literally and imaginatively.
Heliophysicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center collect record-
ings of electromagnetic fluctuations of the sun’s magnetic field via satel-
lites. These recordings are converted into sound through custom-written
computer algorithms. These scientists listen to the ‘soft white noise’,
waiting for anomalous sounds to help explain energetic patterns ema-
nating from the sun and their subsequent effects on earth (Patel 2014).
Likewise, astronomers at Stanford University audify recordings of acous-
tical pressure waves on the sun’s surface by speeding them up 42,000
times, with forty days of vibrations compressed into a few seconds
(Stanford Solar Centre 2008).
Sonification of data to explain anthropogenic change is the focus of
artist Andrea Polli’s sound works for Heat and the Heartbeat of the City
(2004). The data, provided by scientists Cynthia Rosenzweig, David
Rind and Richard Goldberg, is based on temperature measurements
taken in New York’s Central Park that were over 90 degrees F/32.22
C during consecutive summers in the 1990s (Polli 2017). Using global
warming projections that anticipate average temperatures in New York
increasing by one to four degrees fahrenheit by 2030, and up to ten
degrees by 2100, with devastating impact on the region, Polli’s sonifica-
tions allow you to listen to the increasing temperatures on fast forward
through time with heat represented by an increasingly noisier and louder
signal. ‘The noise was designed to be somewhat uncomfortable, to try
and make people feel the difficulties, the discomfort, the actual problems
that will result from global warming’, writes Polli (2016, 5). The sonifi-
cations are supported by visual data to contextualize the sounds in their
online, multi-channel, stereo speaker and headphone installation forms.
Wiriwiri’s concern is with the activation of body and space through
visceral and vibrational affection. Following the Law of Conservation,
thermal energy cannot be created or destroyed but can be transferred.
Wiriwiri’s sonic elements transduce the sun’s energies through solar
technology into the various energetic becomings of a listening audi-
ence affected by their engagement with the work. Through the forces
and energetic potential of heat, sound and listening body, a relational
space is formed from which new creative configurations are activated.
Bodies can inhabit the same affective environment, but there is no cer-
tainty they will respond alike. If we understand affect as a non-conscious
experience of intensity, a moment of unformed and unstructured poten-

tial that occurs in the dynamic unity of an event, affect is not cultur-
ally specific (Massumi 1987). In interpreting the sensations of intensity
via embodied remembering and previous understandings, the response
becomes a dynamic expression of that affect. An activation of this expres-
sion through te ao Māori involves specific codes of embodied memory
and understandings of relational forces, such as those related to whaka-
papa (genealogy), of whom Tāmanuiterā, Tanērore and Papatūānuku are
part of the listener’s own extended family, connecting the listener to the
entire universe and past, present, future time simultaneously. If wiriwiri
is perceived as possessing ihi, understood as ‘possessing affective power’
in this context, the wehi or activated response of the listener creates a
dynamic within the relational space which becomes a space of remem-
bering and becoming at the same time. Within the dynamic of ihi and
wehi there is a simultaneous exchange, an acknowledgement and inten-
sification of the mauri inherent and inherited within the immediate
physical environment and the metaphysical realm of the ancestors/atua
(Livermore 2016).
The placement of the speakers over a public thoroughfare might asso-
ciate the work with the kind of background music peddled by the Muzak
company, albeit a noisier version.5 Muzak promoted sound as a sublimi-
nal aid in encouraging specific responses; in their case, mood music to
relax and uplift the shopper, thereby potentially increasing their spend-
ing, or to encourage workers to produce faster (Lanza 1994, 47–49).
For Wiriwiri, though, if conceptual associations are linked to the exces-
sive warming of the sun, there is the potential for solar affects to be
amplified.
Sound practices of ethical listening can be traced back to the Acoustic
Ecology movement. Founded by R. Murray Schafer,6 Acoustic Ecology
studied through the World Soundscape Project the ways in which
soundscapes were changing and the effects they had upon their inhab-
itants (Schafer 1994). Their work relied on documenting environmen-
tal sounds through field recordings to provide material that could be
studied and catalogued. The field recordings were a tool to enhance
a focused listening to the environment with results in both politi-
cal activism and musical experimentation, including soundscape com-
position. Unlike its French cousin musique concrète, whose founder
Pierre Schaeffer sought to disassociate sounds from their real-world
sources through a process of phenomenological reduction, Soundscape
Composition aims to retain its environmental context, no matter how

transformed the sounds become (Gilmurray 2016). Wiriwiri seeks to
shift the process of mere hearing into an engaged listening for passers-by.
This shift opens listeners to consider not just the sounds of the instal-
lation, but their immediate surroundings and the sounding world, as it
resonates through, in and around them.
Solar Energies: Hinterding and Haines

In recent physics, the hypothesis has been proposed that all life forms
might be the product of the cosmos and nature’s drive to dissipate
energy in new forms.(Pasquinelli 2015, n.p.). According to this theory,
formulated by Jeremy England at MIT, life on earth emerged under
the pressure of the irradiation of sunlight. Sun molecules were pres-
sured into forming more complex structures in order to channel and dis-
perse energy more effectively. Drawing on England’s theory of energy,
Matteo Pasquinelli notes, ‘The multiplication of different species, and
evolution itself, was just a more efficient strategy to broadcast energy,
not just to accumulate it’ (2015, n.p.). Living things are not simply ‘an
organism that emits, receives, stores and processes information: Energy
and light shape this very living matter from the outside, and they inner-
vate it so it can multiply exponentially’ (Pasquinelli 2015, n.p.). Joyce
Hinterding and David Haines capture and broadcast the sun’s energies
in their major project Earthstar, a work first exhibited in 2008 with sub-
sequent iterations continuing around the world. In 2016 they produced
a ‘Transmission to the Sun’, a sound composition for sending signals
back to the sun and a live version of this event ‘Transmission from the
Sun’ was performed at Te Uru in Auckland (19 February 2017) during
the exhibition Heat: Solar Revolutions (Randerson and Yates 2017). The
solar affects experienced in Earthstar emerge from our very core as living
beings, as we ourselves are more effective forms of broadcasting the sun’s
energy than inorganic matter.
Hinterding and Haines physically produce visual and aural sensations
through both commercially available instruments (a hydrogen-alpha tel-
escope) and custom-made radio antennae. Hinterding has researched
electromagnetic energies in various forms from charges through graph-
ite to long coils of copper wire which conduct electromagnetic signals
through Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio antennae. The performance
‘Transmission from the Sun’ (2017) is ‘a composition between earth
and sky’ (Haines and Hinterding 2017) that involves the manipulation
of live transmissions of radio waves using custom-built antennae. Under
the open-domed ceiling of Te Uru gallery at sunset, Hinterding wielded
a large square coat-hanger-like antennae with copper coils that attuned
to the sound of the solar interaction with the ionosphere within mag-
netic field lines. The background noise of the Milky Way and the local
electromagnetic environment of the gallery manifested in crackling and
popping sounds. The circular sounds are the sounds of sferics (short for
atmospherics) and descender notes that viscerally resonate through the
body as low rumbles. Media historian Douglas Kahn describes the slid-
ing tones of sferics and the glissandi of whistlers as semi-musical prop-
erties of natural phenomena (2013, 31). These sounds picked up by
Hinterding’s VLF are modulated by the lines of the magnetosphere.
The installation Earthstar consists of three elements: a pair of custom-
ized VLF antennae tuned to the radio bursts emitted by the sun and fed
through an amplifier to provide real-time sounds of the sun; a single pro-
jected image of the solar chromosphere captured using a hydrogen-alpha
telescope; and aroma molecules that approximate the ‘scent’ of the sun.
The radio antennae are laid out as tight coils of copper wire around a
long pipe, supported by two long wooden tables. The amplifiers beneath
the table produce a continuous soundscape of hisses, pops and scratches
that ebb and flow in intensity as they pick up the sun’s frequencies. The
electromagnetic frequencies from the sun that create sound are produced
by the same type of radiation as ultraviolet light revealed by the hydro-
gen-alpha telescope, although with differences in wavelength and fre-
quency. Rather than ‘hitchhike’ on existing scientific images of the sun to
animate, Haines purchased a hydrogen-alpha telescopic lens for his cam-
era. This instrument enabled solar activity to be observed, as revealed by
hydrogen. The telescope produces a red solar disc by shifting the ultravi-
olet light to the red part of the visual spectrum. The hydrogen-alpha tel-
escope contains a filter-gel that only allows light from the sun centred at
6563 angstroms to reach the human eye, also known as the ‘hydrogen-
alpha line’. Each image leaves an after-image on the retina, a perceptual
effect that suggests the intensity of looking at the sun with the naked
eye. Haines has also produced a series of ultrachrome pigment prints as
a visual score for Transmission to the Sun (2016), a project conceived as
a radio broadcast. Haines’s series of hydrogen-alpha images were taken
from the roof of Hinterding and Haines’s house in the Blue Mountains
outside Sydney (Fig. 4.3).
Fig. 4.3 David Haines, Transmission to the Sun (detail), 2016. Ultrachrome

pigment print on Canson Rag Photgraphique. Courtesy of the artist and Sarah
Cottier Gallery
Media theorist Mark Hansen suggests that visual culture is now heav-
ily reliant on computer-based image processing signals, where ‘visual
images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a
real, optically perceived world’ (2006, xiii). Yet in the work of Hinterding
and Haines, solar signals from the sun are both received and indeed sent
back to the sun without recourse to the numerical channels of the sci-
ence of solar data-collection. Machinic vision, originating in military
applications and science, has been argued by writers, prominently Paul

Virilio in the 1980s, to decentre the human in place of the sightless
vision of the machine. As Jonathan Crary predicted, visuality is ‘increas-
ingly situated on a cybernetic and electromagnetic terrain’ where ordinary
functions of the human eye are becoming supplanted (Crary 1998, 1–2).
Earthstar exemplifies Hansen’s speculation that in the post-industrial
age we must formulate a new set of techniques for decoding sensations,
which are augmented, rather than displaced, by abstract regimes of com-
puter code or electronic signals. In Earthstar, instead of digitized abstrac-
tions of the remote satellite-observed space phenomena, the emissions of
the sun become rematerialized as sounds to the ear and animated light to
the eyes. In this respect, artists are central to reconnecting us to physi-
cal phenomena by resisting the disassociation of the technical image from
the body. The solar vibrations of instruments in Earthstar, in a process
that is usually concealed, signals a reinvestment in the bodily basis of per-
ception. These tremblings are connected, for the purposes of this chapter
at least, to the revealing and intensification of mauri, where mauri can
be understood to express the ecological well-being between humans and
non-human entities. There is a visceral solar affect in Earthstar where we
sense that the sun is alive and simultaneously part of us.
Hinterding and Haines bring out the sun’s embeddedness in the
body. According to Spinoza, when we look at the sun we imagine
it to be close, less than ‘200 feet away’; and even when we learn from
Enlightenment physics that it is much further away, we nevertheless
persist in imagining it as near. He writes, ‘For we imagine the sun so
near not because we do not know its true distance, but because an affec-
tion of our body involves the essence of the sun insofar as our body is
affected by the sun’ (1985, n.p.). The audience/participant is placed in
an affected position in Earthstar and Transmission to the Sun, where the
source of the sounds of the solar body resonate through the human body
and permeate our solar imaginary. When we are confronted with new
ways to listen to the sun, custom-made antennae become causal agents in
generating solar affects together with our sensory and psychic responses.
Drawing on Bergson, Hansen argues that there is no such thing as inde-
pendent machinic perception as any ‘real’ act of perception is always
simultaneous with ‘affection’ (2006, 100). Hansen finds that nothing
less than a reconfiguration of the human senses will enable the human to
meet the challenge of machinic augmentations to reorganize ourselves.
The primary ontological unit in this artwork is not the eye, the nose or
other sensory organs, the sun, or the invented antennae instruments and
telescopes, but the co-performance of each of these elements.
Conclusion
The karakia (incantation, prayer) that forms the epilogue of this chap-
ter ‘was once declaimed in order to cause the sun to shine’ (Best 1922,
16). Karakia are believed to possess mauri, infusing a collection of words
with affective agency. Te reo Māori is a language with no consonant clus-
ters and whose syllables all end in a vowel, producing its own specific
resonance and vibrational form. This resonance and vibrational form is
also manifest in the embodied memories and understandings of rela-
tional fields, reinforced through oral dissemination through subsequent
generations over millennia, a resonance also expressed in the gesture of
the wiri. Karakia are a means of achieving oneness with the atua, ances-
tors and past events in the ‘ritual world of the eternal present’ (Shirres
1997, 89). The effectiveness of the karakia depends on the energetic
balance between the atua and those voicing the words. Tūhoe tōhunga
Hohepa Kereopa instructs that the request of the karakia needs to be
balanced with a deep commitment to the issues from those incanting
(Moon 2005, 80–81). What is required is an alignment with the vibra-
tional affect of the performance of the words, their meaning and inten-
tion. These are entwined with the physical energies of the elements being
addressed, upholding and affirming energetic balance towards a state of
mauri-ora (the well-being of the mauri, a state of well-being).
Our relationship with the sun as life force or divine being is inextri-
cable from social, political and economic forces. Solar affects connect us
beyond the spatio-temporal and conceptual limits of the terrestrial realm.
They affect how society assesses social impact and assigns who takes
responsibility for environmental change. The suns of Hotere, Shearer
and Hinterding and Haines have political resonance within the context
of the increasing desertification of the Australian continent, the nucle-
arization of the Pacific and the warming of the oceans that encroach
on Aotearoa NZ and all island nations. The imposition of a false sun
as a form of neo-colonial violence is evident in the continuing nuclear
threat and in Big Science speculation on technologies to rechannel the
sun’s rays to ward off global warming. Hotere’s nuclear sun resists read-
ings that would naturalize nuclearization. Instead, the ‘X’ in his paint-
ings scratches out of this horrific aberration from natural daily rhythms
that are governed by the sun’s light and heat. By contrast, in Hotere’s
Requiem (1973) the dark sphere is an analogy of loss but also of poten-
tial regeneration.
Hinterding and Haines keep a watchful eye and ear on the sun, which
is increasingly a figure of anxiety. To send and receive signals back at
sunset in sonic form in the live audio performance Transmission from
the Sun (2017) and Transmission to the Sun (2016) could also be under-
stood as a ritual form of supplication, whereas the cicadas in Wiriwiri
function as a biopolitical alarm; a fundamental role of our hearing is as
an alarm system. In the performance between technology, the sun’s radi-
ance and audience in these works, we find an animate sense of the solar
being Tamanuiterā. We continue to treat our solar system and climate as
controllable when we turn away from indigenous cosmologies, or from
the increasingly loud call to reestablish the human as part of nature, and
nature as part of ourselves.
Artists can perturb narratives of ecological and postcolonial violence
by invoking the animate sun. Creative visualizations and sonifications
reveal the potential of technologies, such as telescopes or antennae or
solar-powered speakers to expand our perception and our ethical reach.
Solar affectivity in art reminds the human of what it shares with eve-
rything else, ‘a bringing out of its inclusion in matter, its belonging in
the same self-referential material world in which every being unfolds’
(Massumi 2002, 128). The heat of Tānerore, understood as part of the
interconnected family of the Māori universe to which we belong, serves
to invoke the cultural practices that manage the ecological well-being,
the mauri ora of the natural world.
Notes
1. The literal translation of this karakia, by Rachel Shearer, is: ‘A step upward,
another step upward, the sun shines. This is the woman who was con-
ceived, by the great reptiles, the long reptiles. On our heads, our heads
the sun shines.’ The metaphorical translation is more complex and varies
according to context.
2. The wider significance of Hoaki and Taukata’s story relates to the intro-
duction of the kumara (sweet potato) to the Bay of Plenty. Hoaki and
Taukata disclosed the existence of the kumara in Hawaiki to the tangata-
whenua (local people) of Whakatane. This led to the building and voyage
of the ‘Aratawhao’ canoe to Hawaiki, which in turn influenced the voyage
of waka to New Zealand in 1350 (Best 1904, 121–138).
3. Haka is an art form with various classes and subclasses, the form and func-
tion of which are dependent upon a number of situational factors.
4. A ‘sonic imagination’, as described by Jonathan Sterne is an engagement
that holds ‘sound, mind/perception, imagination and culture all as one’
(Sterne 2012, 6).
5. Muzak Holdings founded 1934 in the USA. Trading since 2011 as Mood
Music.
6. Along with colleagues at Simon Fraser University through the World
Soundscape Project (WSP) established in 1972.
References
Best, Elsdon. 1904. Miscellaneous, Art II. Notes on Ancient Polynesian
Migrants or Voyagers to New Zealand, and Voyage of the Aratawhao Canoe
to Hawaiki. Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand,
37: 121–138. Accessed 1 June 2017. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/
periodicals/TPRSNZ1904-37.2.11.1.2.
Best, Elsdon. 1922. The Astronomical Knowledge of the Maori, Genuine and
Empirical. Dominion Museum Monograph, 3. Wellington: W.A.G. Skinner,
Government Printer.
Biggs, Bruce. 1994. Knowledge as Allegory. Science of Pacific Island Peoples:
Education, Language, Patterns & Policy 4: 1–11.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Cherry, John. 1992. Animism in Thought and Language. Ph.D. thesis, Berkeley,
University of California.
Crary, Jonathan. 1998. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in
the Nineteenth Century. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Crowe, Andrew. 2015. Which New Zealand Insect?, 2nd ed. New Zealand:
Penguin Books.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2011. Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific
Radiations. In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.
Gilmurray, Jonathan. 2016. Introduction to Environmental Sound Artists by F.
Bianchi and V.J. Manzo. New York: Oxford University Press.
Green, Lucie. 2016. 15 Million Degrees: A Journey to the Centre of the Sun.
London and New York: Penguin.
Hainge, Greg. 2013. Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise. New York and
London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Haines, David, and Joyce Hinterding, Joyce. 2017. Transmission From the
Sun. In Exhibition Heat Solar Revolutions: Performance Programme,
curated by Janine Randerson and Amanda Yates. Auckland: Te Uru Public

Gallery. 18 Feb 2017. http://teuru.org.nz/index.cfm/whats-on/events/
heat-performance-programme/.
Hansen, Mark B.N. 2006. New Philosophy for New Media. Boston, MA: MIT
Press.
Henare, Mānuka. 2001. Tapu, Mana, Mauri, Hau, Wairua: A Maori Philosophy
of Vitalism and Cosmos. In Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing
of Cosmology and Community, ed. J. Grimm, 197–221. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press for the Centre for the Study of World Religions.
Kahn, Douglas. 2013. Earth Sound Earth Signal. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1987. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Kruger, Tāmati. 1984. “The Qualities of Ihi, Wehi and Wana” In Nga Tikanga
Tuku Iho a te Māori, Customary Concepts of the Māori, ed. H.M. Mead.
Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington.
Lanza, Joseph. 1994. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening
and Other Moodsong. New York: Picador.
Livermore, Cathy. 2017. Email communication with Rachel Shearer.
Livermore, Cathy. 2016. Dancing from Te Kore into Te Ao Marama. Te
Kaharoa, e-journal of Indigenous Pacific Issues, 9: 55–63. Accessed 5 May
2017. doi: 10.24135/tekaharoa.v9i1.9.
Matthews, Nathan. 2004. The Physicality of Māori Message Transmission: Ko te
tinana, he waka tuku korero. Junctures, 3 Dec. Accessed 5 May 2017. http://
www.junctures.org/index.php/junctures.
Massumi, Brian. 1987. Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements. In
Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
ed. A. Thousand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation.
Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Marsden, Māori. 2003. The Woven Universe. Otaki: Te Wananga-o-Raukawa.
Mead, Hirini Moko. 2016 [2003]. Tikanga Māori: Living By Māori Values. 2nd
ed. Wellington: Huia Press.
McQueen, Cilla. 2000. Dark Matter: Ralph Hotere and Language. In Ralph
Hotere: Black Light: Major Works Including Collaborations with Bill Culbert.
Wellington: Te Papa Press.
Ministry for the Environment (MfE). 2011. Rena: Long Term Recovery
Environmental Plan, December 2011. New Zealand Government. Accessed
5 May 2017. http://www.mfe.govt.nz/sites/default/files/rena-long-term-
environmental-plan.pdf.
Moon, Paul. 2005. A Tohunga’s Natural World; Plants, Gardening and Food.
Mangawhai: David Ling Publishers.
Panoho, Rangihiroa. 2015. Hoeroa: The Long Traveller. In Maori Art: History,
Architecture, Landscape and Theory. Auckland: Bateman.
Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2015. On Solar Databases and the Exogenesis of Light.
eflux. Accessed 10 April 2017. http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/
on-solar-databases-and-the-exogenesis-of-light/.
Patel, Kasha. 2014. More Than Meets the Eye: NASA Scientists Listen To Data.
NASA website, 4 Sept. Accessed 10 April 2017. https://www.nasa.gov/
content/goddard/more-than-meets-the-eye-nasa-scientists-listen-to-data/.
Plato. 1987. The Republic. Translated with an Introduction by Henry Desmond
Pritchard Lee. London and New York: Penguin Books.
Polli, Andrea. 2016. Sonifications of Global Environmental Data. In
Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words, ed. F. Bianchi and V.J.
Manzo. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Change in Sound. Artist’s website. Accessed 8 May 2017. http://www.
andreapolli.com/centralpark/main.html.
Pound, Francis. 2000. Tiger Country. In Ralph Hotere: Black Light: Major Works
Including Collaborations with Bill Culbert. Wellington: Te Papa Press.
Randerson, Janine, and Amanda Yates. 2017. Heat: solar revolutions.
Exhibition at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland, 14 Feb–
17 April. See http://www.teuru.org.nz/index.cfm/whats-on/calendar/
heat-solar-revolutions/.
Shearer, Rachel. 2017. Wiriwiri. Solar powered sound installation at Heat:
Solar revolutions. Exhibition at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery,
Auckland, New Zealand, 14 Feb–17 April.
Schafer, R. Murray. 1994 [1977]. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and
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Complete Digital Edition, trans. and collected by Edwin Curley. Princeton,
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http://solar-centre.stanford.edu/singing/.
Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. Sonic Imaginations. The Sound Studies Reader, ed. J.
Sterne. Oxford and New York: Routledge.
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Retrieved 7 April 2017. http://www.tematatini.co.nz/festival/host-and-venue/.
Thrift, Nigel. 2010. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Oxford
and New York: Routledge.
PART II
Atmospheric Animations
CHAPTER 5
Language as a Life Form
Anna Gibbs
In a small concrete-floored garage in Marrickville, Sydney, a text has

been scrawled around the walls in a continuous line of capitals covering
all four walls in their entirety. At first you stand back and just look at
this writing on the wall in this cell-like space. It is as if some child had
been forced to write lines of punishment, or perhaps as if a maddened,
obsessed prisoner had passed the sentence imposed on them by turning
passivity to activity, measuring it out in a continuous sentence of their
own authorship.
Then a word catches your eye and you are drawn in closer to the writ-
ing. It’s overwhelming in its sheer, relentless quantity and its dubious
legibility, so that you simply stand in front of a block of text and read
more or less at random, letting the detail develop into an idea of the big
picture. This writing is alive, so you decide to begin at the beginning,
from where you are compelled to turn slowly round and round in the
small space to follow the line as each phrase displaces the previous one,
making a jerky shift in meaning, a small jump like a cinematic cut, or
something a little like moving from frame to frame of an animation—
only slower, much slower.
A. Gibbs (*) 
School of Humanities and Communication Arts,
University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia
e-mail: a.gibbs@westernsydney.edu.au

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_5
92 A. Gibbs
Fig. 5.1 Lynne Barwick, Like A Structured Language, 2014. Soft pastel,

Marrickville Garage, installation dimensions variable. Photo: Felicity Jenkins.
Titled Like a Structured Language, this work, by Sydney artist Lynne

Barwick, consists of 215 short phrases, all beginning with the word ‘like’
and followed by a noun phrase, so that there is a slippage from one phrase
to the next, conjuring the slippage of signifier over signified in the famous
Saussurian chain of signification. Yet here there is no ‘point de capiton’, no
point of referential anchorage, no attachment except ever so tenuously to
the work’s title, itself of course already a part of the work and yet standing
also just a little apart from it, not so much capable of commenting on it,
given its mimetic relation to the milieu of the writing that composes the
work, but at least situating it as well in another milieu: that of linguistic
theory, the philosophical presuppositions it entails, the debates it engen-
ders and its relationship (by virtue of the fact that this is a work of con-
temporary art) to what we so reductively call the visual (Fig. 5.1).
Reading these phrases in sequence produces a sense of something
like a process of approximation. It is as if one phrase attempts to trans-
late the previous one in an endless attempt to find an analogue for it,
5 LANGUAGE AS A LIFE FORM 93
or an exact resemblance to it. Yet each attempt at translation displaces

what it translates, so that each new attempt or iteration produces a shift
in meaning, which must constantly slip and escape the grasp of language.
Yet there is also insistence in this reiteration of the form of the simile.
Taken together, the series of shifts performed from one simile to another
becomes like a stream of difference, as if the concept of difference itself
was animated and brought to life in what at first seemed to be a static
text on the walls of a static space. This, then, makes of translation a met-
amorphic practice rather than one embodying a representational relation
to the world (cf. Stengers 2012, n.p.).
It would be possible, I suppose, to read this work in terms of the
‘poetics of the stutter’, which Craig Dworkin elaborates on the basis of
Deleuze’s observation that:
When a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or

stammer … then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its
outside and makes it confront silence. (Deleuze, cited in Dworkin 2009,
167)
Dworkin sees the work of contemporary French writer Pierre Guyotat

as an exemplar of such a poetics of stuttering, but unlike Guyotat, who,
according to the Benjaminian distinction between meaning and ‘the
way of meaning’, translates one language into the grammar of another
(Dworkin 2009, 174), Barwick’s work translates English into itself. Or
perhaps just language into itself, by way of what, as Dworkin reminds us,
Barthes called the ‘sovereign metonymy’ of
a single, endless sentence whose beauty arises not from its ‘message’ (the
reality to which it is supposed to correspond), but from its breath—cut,
repeated—as if it were the entire task of the author to show us not imag-
ined scenes but the scene of language, so that the model of this new mime-
sis is no longer the adventure of a hero, but the adventure of the signifier
itself. (Barthes, cited in Dworkin 2009, 173)
Like this—but not this, like this or this or this. As if something was try-
ing to be articulated and communicated, not by a speaker, for there is
no ‘I’, but by language itself. However, both this process (which, I will
argue, is actually not about the adventure of the signifier in quite these
terms) and this ‘something’ comprise a ‘mimesis’ which is neither the
94 A. Gibbs
traditional mimesis of literary theory nor the ‘new mimesis’ to which

Barthes refers. What it actually is has everything to do with the critical
difference made by the medium of the work—which is not (a) simple
matter—and with the work as medium, a medium for affect, and mime-
sis. As Dworkin writes elsewhere:
No single medium can be apprehended in isolation … [M]edia (always

necessarily multiple) only become legible in social contexts because they
are not things, but rather activities: commercial, communicative, and,
always, interpretive. (2013, 28)
Here the medium of text is intelligible in the first instance through its
relationship with the surface of the wall and the space it delimits, and the
way it makes bodies move within it. But caught up, this immediate set of
relations, its opening and title phrase, ‘Like a word instead of a thing’,
solicits attention to the workings of language and its relationship with
the referent as well as to the surfaces (page, screen, wall and so on) that
language always requires to materialize itself as text.
What Do Words Want?

In an interview with Scott London, ethnographer David Abram asserts
that
[n]o culture with the written word seems to experience the natural land-
scape as animate and alive through and through. Yet every culture without
writing experiences the whole of the earth—every aspect of the material
world—to be alive and intelligent. (see London, n.d.)
Language—like all mimesis—is an abstraction from the world. It is, as

Benjamin famously wrote,
a medium into which the earlier perceptive capabilities for recognising the
similar had entered without residue, so that it is now language which rep-
resents the medium in which objects meet and enter into relationship with
each other. (1986, 334)
Writing takes this still further, externalizing memory of the world in

what he calls an ‘archive of non-sensuous correspondences’ (Benjamin
1986, 334). In alphabetic cultures, suggests Abrams in his interview with

London, it is not the earth that is alive and magical, but writing itself,
in that it allows action at a distance, touching in place of touch, acting
directly on bodies as state-altering Austin-type performatives or simply as
affective media (cursing, shaming, angering, distressing the bodies they
penetrate and transform).1 Reading and writing as corollaries comprise
‘an intensely concentrated form of animism’ (Abrams in London, n.d.).
Literature, and especially poetry, as the art of language, has long (and
more intensively since the invention of printing) been the privileged site
of conscious exploration of this word magic. This magic reconfigures
sensory ratios,2 and human sensoria, and acts affectively on bodies (as
the names of its genres—tragedy; comedy; drama; melodrama—suggest)
to create new dispositions in an extension of the ‘incantatory function’,
which Roman Jakobson explains as the ‘conversion of an absent or inani-
mate “third person” into an addressee of a conative message: “May this
sty dry up, tfu, tfu, tfu, tfu” (Lithuanian spell)’ (1985, 115).
Now, however, the information age inaugurates a major transforma-
tion: the grasp of text on certain worlds has been outstripped by that of
the algorithm, with implications for human language-making. As Justin
Clemens explains:
If almost all inherited elements of human communication have now been

decisively reconfigured by the new technologies, this is on the basis of
essentially technical, trans-human routines of ‘information-as-code’ not
‘language-as-symbolic-exchange’. In other words, human language-use has
itself become a subset of informatics, not a constitutive horizon of under-
standing. (2015, 114)
This marks a radical shift from the situation of the early 1990s, where
the obsession with the signifier and the arbitrary nature of the sign was
arguably overtaken by global events,3 and certainly by feminist theories
of performativity (most notably Felman, Butler and Sedgwick) which
turned critical attention more broadly to the powers of language to cre-
ate new dispositions and bring about new states of affairs in the actual
world.
Paradoxically, in spite of its loss of purchase on critical aspects of the
contemporary world, text abounds: it is still pervasive on the internet. As
John Cayley points out, with the internet we now have ‘close-to-no-cost
access to indexed, mapped, statistically modeled, data-driven views of the
96 A. Gibbs
largest corpus of language practice on the planet’ (2005, n.p.). Now the
internet makes so much text available that it can only be read by com-
puters. This quantity, together with the speed of operations (cutting and
pasting are only the simplest) we can perform with it, leads Kenneth
Goldsmith to proclaim polemically, apropos of the phenomenal rise of
conceptual writing in the USA over the previous decade, that writers
are now no more than ‘uncreative’ information miners and managers
(2010).4
More recently, and from within a more scholarly ethos than
Goldsmith, Brian Reed has argued that, since the 1990s when knowl-
edge work begins to change, conceptual writing in the USA has been
part of a shift from the investigation of language in poetry and an
emphasis on the materiality of the word to the ‘matérielisation’ of infor-
mation: how data rules the world’ (2014, n.p.). With the advent of
conceptual writing, poetry becomes not the language art, but ‘an infor-
mation art’. This is evident, he argues, in such activities as the (very)
large-scale transcription, remediation, appropriation of text that char-
acterize, for example, the work of Goldsmith. It is also evident in the
construction of ‘procedures’ for production which are then pursued to
absurdity (as in performing laboriously by hand what could be done in
seconds with a computer). And it is evident as well in new forms of dis-
tributed authorship (for example, co-authoring with software, or crowd-
sourcing material).
For Reed, conceptual writing is a sign that our sense of what consti-
tutes the poetic is changing. Again. For in the late 1980s it was argu-
ably not poetry but contemporary art, including performance art, that
was the site of some of the most intense poetic activity in the USA, per-
haps especially in downtown New York, so that in 1989 the pre-eminent
American critic of contemporary poetry, Marjorie Perloff, could write:
suppose I were to argue that there is more real ‘poetry’ in Jonathon

Borofsky’s wall panels or in Laurie Anderson’s performance pieces or in
John Cage’s ‘Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake’ called Roaratorio than in X
or Y’s most recent book of poems. If this were a correct assumption (and
it means, of course, that I would be applying different generic markers to
‘poetry’ than is Jonathon Yardley [a columnist for The Washington Post
Book World who averred that the public had no interest in poetry], that,
for example, I would stress the sound features of poetry rather than such
issues as subjectivity, sensitivity, or authenticity of feeling), then it would
be quite untrue to say that in the late twentieth century “no one cares
about poetry.” For Borofsky’s installations, like Anderson’s and Cage’s
performances, draw huge crowds. (1989, 5)
It might be easy to situate Barwick’s installation in the Marrickville

Garage, with its formulaic phrases and its evident repetitive labour, in the
terms of the conceptual writing spelled out by Reed. But I want to argue
that, although this work does need to be understood in the light of the
operations of data on language,5 both the material nature of installation
and the work of the text mitigate against a view of it as absurd(ist) hand
labour, never mind as an assertion of the subject in reaction to the opera-
tions of data beyond the threshold of human apprehension. In spite of
the fact that it is written by hand and therefore retains the indexical trace
of gesture (and indeed the effort of labour is clearly legible in it), the
relentless capitals of the text suggest the impersonality of signage. As the
writing on the wall it points to something, not lying in wait in an inevi-
table future, but as a sign of the times, to something immanent in the
present (Fig. 5.2).
If, in conceptual writing, metadiscourse is indistinguishable from dis-
course, constituting, if you like, a kind of post-fictocritical moment,6 we
could say that conceptual writing is like a fractal of the times: it is in the
now, and of it, reiterating it, not ‘about’ it. Or, as Roger Caillois (1984,
30) might put it, this kind of work is not similar to something, just simi-
lar, coming close to realizing the desire he writes of elsewhere for a kind
of work in which ‘the irrational [would] be continuously overdeter-
mined, like the structure of coral; [combining] into one single system
everything that until now has been systematically excluded by a mode of
reason that is still incomplete’ (2003, 85).
Taking a different view, Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place argue that
conceptual writing is actually always allegorical: referring to its own pro-
cesses of composition or more broadly to the work of ‘writing itself’
(2009, 15). If conceptual writing is always framed paratextually as aes-
thetic practice (in Barwick’s work here, by virtue of its installation in an
artist-run gallery space, albeit that gallery space is a home garage), one
might ask whether this is sufficient to bring about the kind of world-
altering magic that defines aesthetic experience, however small or fleeting
the shifts in disposition it brings about. ‘Prends garde’, the epigraph to
Caillois’s essay on mimicry enjoins us: ‘à jouer au fantôme on le devient’
(1984).
98 A. Gibbs
Fig. 5.2 Lynne Barwick, Like A Structured Language, 2014. Soft pastel,

Marrickville Garage, installation dimensions variable. Photo: Felicity Jenkins.
The Social Life of Language

Digital media revivify the romance of visual art with writing. This has
brought about a shift away from a logophonic view of writing: that is,
away from its relation to speech that the sensuous sounds of poetry fore-
grounded, and towards a logographism, where writing is understood as a
form of imaging. The plasticity, malleability and mobility of digital text,
its animation and architectural form (meaning that we can enter into it),
foregrounds its material qualities (Goldsmith 2010, 27) in ways more
unavoidable because more everyday, more pervasive and easier to pro-
duce than Modernism’s most concerted attempts to do so. Digital media
accelerate an aspect of the materiality of writing that always worked
against the ideology of the transparency of text as words to be looked
through rather than ‘words to be looked at’ (as the title of Liz Kotz’s
(2007) book on language in the art of the 1960s had it).
Nevertheless, it is not simply the renewed image-becoming of writ-
ing that is critical here, but rather computation and the action of the
algorithm that make the real difference. At one level, this is a quantitative
difference that has brought about a qualitative change. Algorithmically
generated poetry was anticipated by the Oulipean discovery of potential-
ity, for example in Raymond Queneau’s famous “Cent mille milliards de
poèmes” (“A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems”). Not simply represent-
ing a disembodied dematerialization of writing, the algorithm points to
the way human processes, when taken beyond a certain limit, can ulti-
mately exceed the human grasp. We struggle to imagine the variations
of the sonnets the way we struggle to comprehend the universe. There is
wonder and enchantment as well as the frustration of impossibility in this.
But when the sonnets are materialized in language (as they have been in a
new computer-generated version of the work) they become less graspable
as an imaginative totality, and are only able to be sampled (that is, digi-
tally accessed) by any one human reader. Moreover in this form, they are
likely to become inaccessible from outside the neo-feudalistic enclosures
increasingly created by corporations such as Facebook and Google.
Once, action-at-a-distance (that is, action beyond the human capac-
ity to apprehend it) was aided by ‘the kinetic unpredictability of oracular
devices: like the twitching of a dowser’s hazel wand, the quivering intes-
tines of a sacrificed bird, the Ouija board’s sliding glass’ (Warner 2008).
If language, and especially writing, devised new ways to do this, the algo-
rithm now outstrips their capacities. In the hands of satanic shamans such
as Google and Facebook, it becomes a form that reduces divination to
the malevolent powers of prediction as pre-emption.7
Beyond that, however, the algorithm opens the prospect of human
agency in writing being subsumed by new machinic forces operating
beyond the threshold of human apprehension. This seems to be distinct
from the ways in which we have always externalized human memory, in
forms ranging from songlines in oral cultures to the book and now the
computer file in cultures of literacy (Angel and Gibbs 2010). On the
other hand, and as numerous thinkers have pointed out, beginning with
everyday habits such as driving, human beings have always compressed
knowing into routines that can be performed automatically. We also, as
Hayek notes,
make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do

not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the
assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. (cited in
Murphie 2014, n.p.)
100 A. Gibbs
At one level, the algorithm simply represents an intensification of this

process, yet the imperceptibility of its action to human perception does
seem to materially alter the situation. While some—such as Sybille
Krämer—see the interface of data-processing systems as mere ‘eyewash’
(2006, 96) for human users, Maria Angel and I have argued (adapt-
ing Elizabeth Grosz’s argument about art) that the interface represents
more precisely the excess produced by the need for seduction: the eye
in the tail of the peacock, in Darwinian terms (Angel and Gibbs 2012).
It is an attractor that conscripts human participation not only into the
toils of Google and Facebook, but also into new forms of creation and
experiment.
To unfold this a little further: the conscription of human sensation,
affect and movement into the digital offers the potential for the remak-
ing, as literacy and printing have done previously, of human sensoria.
‘The human’, was anyway always a historically and culturally contingent
construction, a myth of (masculine) Western humanism. If it is the case
that artificiality (of which digital technology is but one aspect) is ‘natural
to human beings’ (Ong 2002, 82), then this implies that human beings
have the capacity to remake and transform not only our cultures but
with them, ourselves as humans.8 This includes language as ‘the means
by which experiences think within us’ (Johnston 2016, 41). Language
enters into blocs of becoming with voices and accents, with lips, mouth,
tongue, glottis, larynx and lungs, to form speech. This assemblage gener-
ates the sonorous appeal of poetry, and by this means language perpetu-
ates itself, propagating itself through its capacity to seduce humans—for
example, with clichés, whose catchiness outlasts the objects and tech-
nologies to which they so often refer.9 ‘Language is using us to talk,’
writes Harry Mathews: ‘we think we’re using the language, but language
is doing the thinking, we’re its slavish agents’ (1988). (He is referring
here to the way grammar and syntax interpolate us into their structures
and produces us as subjects.) The coupling of language with surface via
alphabetic technologies from scrolls through tablets, pages and walls to
the ‘complex surfaces’ (Cayley 2005) of digital media enable the life of
language to be further perpetuated—and transformed—in writing. The
visual seduction of type and digital textual animation call to the human
eye and ensure human attention. But it is in its encounter with data
that text has made a quantum leap and is now beginning to appear as a
data-driven life-form with its own kind of (non-human) consciousness,

since metadata now endows text with memories of its own itineraries and
allows it to know precisely where it is in the network at a given moment
in time (Johnston 2016).10
As Johanna Drucker writes,
In a cultural world where complex systems theory has emerged as a prop-

erty of the very conditions it arises to explain, and a post-vitalist para-
digm erases simplistic conceptions of an essential property intrinsic to ‘life
forms,’ the idea of the ‘living condition of language’ no longer suggests a
metaphor, but points to an actuality. (2012, n.p.)
We now inhabit what Brian Rotman calls a ‘regime of the enacted’

(2002, 427) in which notational or symbolic media are being replaced
by motion capture technologies for storing and retrieving informa-
tion (or, more simply, by technologies for performance). Under this
regime and in its conjunction with the algorithm, writing has become
a technology which produces a happening event, generating live-
ness and duration as a form of habitat or milieu. This represents a
new nature, which mines—including literally, in its dependence on
minerals—the natural world to take it into its own perpetual life. At
this point, Friedrich Kittler claims, we ‘can no longer dream of writ-
ing as the expression of individuals or the traces of bodies [because
there the] very forms, differences and frequencies of its letters have
to be reduced to formulas’ (1990, 16). Lynne Barwick’s work quali-
fies that view, insisting on physical space on a human scale and on
human readership—though it stretches the latter to its physical limit,
turning and turning with increasing dizziness and trying not to jump
lines as we turn, trying to follow a line as we are also fuzzily aware of
other bodies, turning dizzily in the same space, until the space itself
seems animated with these turning bodies, dervish-like in their singu-
lar absorption, set in motion and enchanted by the dictates of the text
in its relationship to space. We are not so much walking a visible line
here as turning lines, or having them turn us in their visibility, their
sonority and all the affective resonance of the sense we make of them.
These lines are turning us, but into or towards what?
102 A. Gibbs
To stave off such dizziness, another way to read this text is to sam-
ple it digitally just as we must do with the digital instantiation of
Queneau’s potentiality. What draws our attention—the affective force
of a particular phrase or the distorted and very particular shape of let-
tering on just that part of the wall level with our eye—will also affect
the way we sample. The phrase I used earlier, ‘the writing on the wall’
which directs us to the context of ‘the present’, also assumes the actual
wall as passive material support for inscription, even while, the longer
one looks at the work, the wall’s capacity to modulate the formation of
letters and determine the wavering direction of lines of text becomes
more and more visible. I say visible, but of course what happens is that
we apprehend mimetically the nature of the effort involved, abstracting
from the visible trace of the gesture of writing in all its awkwardness
and translating it into incipient motor organization in our own bod-
ies so that we feel (not just see) something of the effort involved in
negotiating this uneven surface that directs and redirects the gestures
of both writing and reading. It is not simply that the text takes on the
shape of its supposed support—a glitch here, a barely legible word
or jumpy letter there—but rather that the assemblage of wall, crayon
and writer produce words and letters in singular forms. These are the
result of negotiations between the surface of the wall and the gestural
rhythm of the writer, and they inflect our apprehension of the text,
giving it, at certain moments, a very particular affective colouring. Our
own movement also increasingly inflects it the longer we watch, so that
we are participating in it, part of the assemblage, not simply standing
outside it to get a handle on it, to comprehend it and thus to capture
it. With this text, we are in the dynamic flux of reading, and what it
means to read has been transformed—or rather, revealed. This is what
writing can do.
The insistence on materiality and corporeality distinguishes the
work not only from conceptual writing as Reed describes it, but also
from accounts of conceptual writing—such as those of Goldsmith—
that see it, on the model of the conceptual art of earlier decades, as
needing to be ‘got’ in the way one gets a joke, rather than actually
read in the way one might read a poem or a novel (Goldsmith writes
that he wants a thinkership rather than a readership for his own work,
as if the two were mutually exclusive.) Barwick’s work seems to me
to resonate more with the ethos of the new materialisms, in their

engagement with the action of the heterogeneous (human and non-
human) assemblage. While Mel Chen (2012) argues that the powers
of language have been underestimated, Karen Barad (2007), taking
exception to the linguistic turn of the late twentieth century in its
relentless human exceptionalism (buoyed by the idea that language
is defining the human), suggests that we have paid too much atten-
tion to language and not enough to the performativity of material-
ity itself. This work offers an antidote to that unqualified assertion,
as it offers a demonstration of the animating power of the word, its
entanglement in the materiality of bodies and its dependence on the
media with which it must couple to come into being. If the writing
exists at the limit of communicability, Dworkin argues that this is a
zone in which other things become audible: when ‘speech intransi-
tively reaches the limit at which its communication becomes silent,
we can hear the body speak’, he suggests (2009, 168). But in con-
juring the idea of ‘the body’, he automatically writes it into a fantasy
of a cultural and historical universal, and thereby into the masculine
as its representative. Given the history of the metaphorization of
the feminine as passive surface, aligned in the antinomies of Western
thought with ‘nature’ as resource, it’s perhaps not by chance that this
work, Like A Structured Language, so alive to the powers of agencies
beyond ‘the human’, is signed with a woman’s name.
From ‘Like a word instead of a thing’ to ‘Like an acknowledged
hazard’, it seems that something is trying to come to life in the signs
of a language that can only stutter in a procession of steps towards it.
This something is not a being but a force. In this, the writing hand is
a conduit or collaborator, not an authenticating originator. The pro-
cess of continual variation through repetition of the simile form only
ceases at the point where there is no more surface for inscription,
coming to an otherwise arbitrary stop on the opposite side of the
garage door from where it began, leaving us in front of an opening;
through which we leave, with the experience of the work still within
us. Perhaps, finally it is this point, or possibility of departure, that the
work actually investigates: like a structured language (but not a struc-
tured language).
104 A. Gibbs
Notes
1. See Gibbs (2006).
2. Because words are supramodal, having a weak relation to each of the
senses, which they can then reconfigure in relation to each other, as
W.J.T. Mitchell (2005) recognizes in his discussion of ekphrasis: ‘One
might call ekphrasis a form of nesting without touching or suturing, a
kind of action-at-distance between two rigorously separated sensory and
semiotic tracks, one that requires completion in the mind of the reader.
This is why poetry remains the most subtle, agile master-medium of the sen-
sus communis, no matter how many spectacular multimedia inventions are
devised to assault our collective sensibilities’ (2005, 404, my emphasis).
3. For example, Jan Verwoert (2010) argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall
in 1989 ushers in a new concern with what words actually do. I think he
misses the fact that feminist work had already gone there.
4. Although Goldsmith writes that the typewriter didn’t encourage transcrip-
tion work, it actually did: for example, Australian artist Barbara Campbell
retyped Conrad’s Heart of Darkness over and over again almost six times
on Chinese rice paper scrolls as part of her installation Conradiana
(1994), in a feminist intervention which, among other things, drama-
tizes the work performed by women in the service of artistic production
by men.
5. There is also support for this in some of Lynne Barwick’s other recent
work, which more explicitly makes reference to digitality: the place-
ment of painted phrases such as ‘Like A Discharged Subject’, ‘Like An
Unregulated Sense’ or ‘Like A Word Instead Of A Thing’, Like A Token
Memory’ in diptychs interrupting single canvases along the wall of her
2014 exhibition ‘Afterimage’ (Damien Minton Gallery) and more direct
reference of her 2015 work Protocol Malady.
6. The dismantling of the discourse/metadiscourse distinction was
already undertaken by fictocriticism from the 1980s, where the col-
lapse of ‘critical distance’ (or, as Barbara Johnson has it, ‘critical dif-
ference’) interrupted the usual hierarchical relationship between
fiction and theory in which fiction functions as the object of the criti-
cal or theoretical metadiscourse (see Gibbs 2005). Though of course
we continued—and still continue, in many contexts—to pretend this
didn’t happen. While fictocriticism did exert a real pull on academic
writing, changing what counted as theoretical writing, its most radical
forms remain marginal.
7. I refer here to Roger Caillois’s distinction between satanic and Luciferian
(the angel who wanted knowledge) shamanism.
8. If in this respect we are, perhaps, unique, that is not, in my view, a legiti-
mate basis for human exceptionalism as an ideology.
9. ‘Catchiness’ is a term I prefer to the ubiquitous ‘stickiness’ with its origins
in marketing, because to my mind it better captures both the contagious
and ephemeral qualities of what is caught.
10. W.J.T. Mitchell writes that ‘images [and writing as image] are life-forms
… objects are the bodies they animate, (and) media are the habitats or
ecosystems in which pictures come alive’ (2013, 198).
References
Angel, M., and A. Gibbs. 2010. Memory and Motion. In Beyond the Screen, ed.
Joergen Schaeffer and Peter Gendolla, 123–135. Bielefeld: Verlag.
Angel, M., and A. Gibbs. 2012. Geospatial Aesthetics: Geo-spatial Aesthetics:
Time, Agency and Space in Electronic Writing. In Sprache und Literatur, ed.
Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla, Special Issue 108, 42: 13–21.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1986. On the Mimetic Faculty. In Reflections, 333–336. New
York: Schocken.
Caillois, Roger. 1984. Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia. October 31:
16–32.
Caillois, Roger. 2003. Letter of December 27, 1934 to André Breton. In The
Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, 84–86.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Cayley, John. 2005. Writing on Complex Surfaces. www.dichtung-digital.
org/2005/2-Cayley.htm. Accessed 15 May 2017.
Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Clemens, Justin. 2015. Boom Boom. Australian Humanities Review 58:
111–119.
Drucker, J. 2012. Beyond Conceptualisms: Poetics After Critique and the End of
Individual Voice. Harriet: A Poetry Blog (Apr/May): n.p. https://www.poet-
ryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/conceptual-writing-was-intriguing-and-
provocative/. Accessed 20 July 2012.
Dworkin, Craig. 2009. The Stutter of Form. In The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry
of Sound, ed. Craig Dworkin, and Marjorie Perloff, 166–183. Chicago:
Dworkin, Craig. 2013. No Medium. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fitterman, Rob, and Vanessa Place. 2009. Notes on Conceptualisms. Brooklyn:
Ugly Duckling.
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Gibbs, A. 2005. Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: Engendering Differences. TEXT

9 (1). www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/april05/gibbs.htm. Accessed 1
May 2017.
Gibbs, Anna. 2006. Writing and Danger: The Intercorporeality of Affect. In
Creative Writing: Theory Beyond Practice, ed. Nigel Krauth, and Tess Brady,
157–168. Tenerife: Post Pressed.
Goldsmith, K. 2010. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New
Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jakobson, R. 1985. Metalanguage as a Linguistic Problem. In Selected Writings,
VII, 113–121, ed. S. Rudy. Mouton: Paris.
Johnston, David Jhave. 2016. Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry’s Ontological
Implications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kittler, Friedrich A. 1990. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Krämer, Sybille. 2006. Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On
Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media. Theory, Culture, & Society 23 (7–8):
93–109.
Kotz, Liz. 2007. Words to Be Looked at. Language in 1960s Art. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
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http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/abram.html. Accessed 15 May
2017.
Mathews, Harry. 1988. City Limits. London, 26 May.
Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. There Are No Visual Media. Journal of visual culture
4 (2): 257–266.
Mitchell, W.J.T. 2013. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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v11i2.3407. Accessed 1 May 2017.
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Terence Hawkes, New Accents Series. London and New York: Routledge.
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Perloff. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press.
Reed, Brian. 2014. Conceptual Writing: Poetry as Information Art. Paper pre-
sented to the seminar of the English Department, University of Sydney.
Rotman, Brian. 2002. The Alphabetic Body. Parallax 8 (1): 92–104.
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www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/. Accessed 21 May
2017.
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in Contemporary Art. Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and
Methods 1 (1): 1–7.
Warner, Marina. 2008. The Writing of Stones. http://cabinetmagazine.org/
issues/29/warner.php. Accessed 15 May 2017.
CHAPTER 6
The Storm and the Still in the Art of Bridie

Lunney
Simone Schmidt
A woman balances on the tip of her toes on a rock. One arm is raised
high above her as she grasps a steel ring suspended from the ceiling.
A man lies sleeping on the floor. A concrete object moulded in the form
of a lightshade hangs from the ceiling and hovers just above his chest.
There is an accord between the suspension of the woman and the object;
they are the material and poetic extension of each other. They echo each
other in their weight and tension, both charged with an anticipation of
their impending collapse. A skin-coloured leather square hangs from
the wall and meets the ceiling. It seems to float in space and counter-
balances the gravitational pull of the woman and the concrete form.
Every so often the woman releases her grip and moves off the rock to
wander slowly around the room. At some point she crawls on the floor,
then curls into herself echoing the form of the rock. After some time
she returns to her rock and state of suspension. She continues to shift
between suspension and trance-like movement for four hours (Fig. 6.1).
Bridie Lunney’s This Endless Becoming (2013–2014), Any Second
Now (2014) and Desire Will Not Hold (2015) concern movement and
S. Schmidt (*) 
Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University,
Caulfied, VIC, Australia
e-mail: simonepersoglia@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_6
110 S. Schmidt
Fig. 6.1 Bridie Lunney, This Endless Becoming, 2013–2014. Steel,

concrete, stainless steel fittings, rigging rope, tiles, leather, bluestone,
strapping with performers James Lunney and Lily Paskas. In Melbourne
Now, 2014, National Gallery of Victoria. Photo: Timothy Herbert.
6 THE STORM AND THE STILL IN THE ART OF BRIDIE LUNNEY 111
stillness. Yet even in stillness there is movement. The concept of ekstasis

can be understood broadly as a movement out and enstasis as a movement
in. I employ these concepts to consider Lunney’s practice in two distinct
ways throughout this chapter. Firstly, the relation between ekstasis and
enstasis registers life as movement: a pulse that animates all life. These
concepts relate to the idea of anima as life force: ‘a mobile energy inde-
pendent from the bodies it infuses’ (Papapetros 2012, 188). They speak
to the breath—the ceaseless inhale and exhale and the formal realiza-
tion of this movement. They concern a muscular conception of matter
(Deleuze 2006, 7): contraction, expansion, tension, release, suspension
and collapse. Secondly, I employ these terms in contradistinction to each
other to differentiate that which Lunney signals from the method in
which it is signalled. Lunney’s configurations of body–object–space ges-
ture to ekstasis as suspension, displacement, excess, seizure and antici-
pation—the self’s entanglement in the world. However, these ekstatic
states are evoked through a mode that I conceive of as enstasis—a medi-
tative state where the self turns inward and is simultaneously integrated
with the world. Where ekstasis signals disturbance, enstasis transmits
calm. Thus, I propose that Lunney gestures to the storm through the still
of feeling.
In Lunney’s art temporality is opened out into a slow motion of
moments. The opening up of time is articulated by the muscular con-
sciousness (Bachelard 1994, 11) of the performers who slowly move
between suspension and collapse, tension and release, contraction and
expansion. Lunney’s objects are the formal effects of this muscular con-
sciousness; they are animated presences that capture an unfolding and
enfolding continuum of feeling–movement. In movement and in stillness
Lunney’s bodies and objects are extensions of each other that render the
life force that unites them visible.
Ekstasis as Suspension and Inter(in)animation

Stasis is a slowing, a stoppage of flow, a standing still in place, a stand off
of forces, or rest. Lunney’s performers lying, standing, hanging, balanc-
ing or sitting in stillness, and their slowly unfolding movements, evoke
stasis. Yet a poetic interplay between bodies and objects, which con-
jures images of tension, suspension, disturbance, unravelling and release,
gestures to an intensity of feeling that moves beyond stasis to what
I refer to as ekstasis. I employ the Greek term rather than its English
112 S. Schmidt
equivalent—ecstasy—to separate it from its conventional meanings and

account for its conceptual nuances. Ekstasis, from the Greek ek, out, and
stasis, to stand in place, refers to the state of moving outside oneself. It
speaks to what is critical to Lunney’s practice: displacement, excess, tran-
sition and transformation.
Teresa D’Avila and John Donne understand ekstasis to involve
suspension as the feeling of moving outside the self and how the body
is stilled in this state. D’Avila describes her ekstasis as the experience of
being ‘beside [her]self’ (Zimmerman 1995, 267) in ‘trance’ and ‘trans-
port’ (Howe 1981, 30). She explains: ‘in rapture … the body remains
like a corpse’ (Howe 1981, 33). Donne, in his poem The Ecstasy (1633)
writes: ‘Our souls (which to advance their state were gone out) hung’
twixt her, and me. And whilst our souls negotiate there, we like sepul-
chral statues lay … love, with one another so interinanimates two souls’
(1968, 88–90). For the mystic and poet ekstasis both animates and ren-
ders inanimate—the spirit soars and the body is frozen.
Ekstasis is commonly understood as extreme pleasure and release—the
Dionysian state of erotic force. But in ekstasis, as in eros, pleasure is often
partnered with pain. In D’Avila’s experience pain and pleasure are fused:
The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the
sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it … The
pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a
large one. (Zimmerman 1995, 267)
Donne writes ‘as, ’twixt two equal armies, fate suspends uncertain vic-
tory’ (1968, 88). The uncertainty of the fate of lovers places them in a
state of suspension, which produces pain. His conflation of lovers with
‘armies’ infuses his image of ekstasis with a threat of violence. The con-
nection between the erotic and sacred evident in D’Avila’s description is
also evoked in Donne’s imagery.
These accounts of ekstasis as an intermingling of extreme sensation
and lifelessness (where the body is rendered like a corpse or statue),
of trance and transport, pleasure and pain, erotic and sacred, provide
a portal to Lunney’s work. They speak to the stillness of the perform-
ers—their slow movements, suspension and prostration. They also
speak to the relations between the performers’ bodies and the objects—
the weight of the concrete form suspended above the man, and the
tension in the woman’s body as she hangs from a ring and balances on
a rock. The relation between the performers and the counter-balance
of the suspended leather square evoke that aspect of ekstasis where, like
Donne’s souls, something is released from the static grounded bodies to
mingle with the atmosphere.
These relations between bodies and objects in Lunney’s art evoke a
play of forces that can be termed, after Rebecca Schneider, an inter(in)
animation. Schneider develops this term from Donne’s idea of love that
interinanimates two souls (see Donne 1968, 90). She considers the rela-
tion between the stone statues of the lovers and their souls that have
been released above them. Schneider writes, ‘the live and the stone are
inter(in)animate and the liveness of one nor the deadness of the other
are neither decidable nor relevant’ (2011, 7). Perhaps the distinction
rests not so much in liveness or deadness, but in movement and stillness.
The bodies of Donne’s lovers are still, but the energy that unites them is
dynamic. In Lunney’s practice the relation between bodies and objects,
whether articulated by movement or stillness, is charged. Schneider’s
concept of inter(in)animation accounts for a slippage between the ani-
mate and inanimate and a lack of hierarchy in the body–object relation in
Lunney’s practice. Indeed, Lunney has referred to the body in her work
as a prop and thus likens it to an object (Lunney 2015).
To continue with Schneider’s understanding of inter(in)animation,
the body and the object in Lunney’s practice co-constitute each other
(2011, 7). They are the echoes and extensions of each other, and thus
can be referred to as body-objects. Their relation creates a feedback loop
of mutual poiesis. The relationship between the suspended woman and
concrete form signals the tension of a feeling state—the quality of hold-
ing. The relationship between the rock and woman curled on the floor
gestures toward a state of caving into the support of the ground. The
particular feeling-state that is evoked is the result of the inter(in)anima-
tion of body and object. The body and object’s co-constitution destabi-
lizes the boundary between the animate and inanimate. The performers’
movement animates the objects, as does their stillness, and the objects
both animate and still the performers. The performers are charged with
the qualities of the objects’ forms, materiality and placement in space.
Thus, it is important to stress Lunney’s objects are just as vital as bodies
in their gesturing toward feeling states.
114 S. Schmidt
Ekstatic Objects
Ekstasis concerns displacement, disturbance, movement and change. The
ekstatic object is displaced from a utilitarian context and its identity is
subverted. A concrete object moulded in the form of a lightshade hovers
above a man sleeping on the floor. Four drinking glasses hold the weight
of a rock. Another lies on the floor releasing a frozen black bronze seep-
age. The same object recurs in multiple installations.1 In each installa-
tion the object enters a new body–object–space configuration, and often
throughout the duration of a show Lunney will move the object in the
installation so that its configuration will change once more (Lunney
2015). The ekstatic object moves and exceeds a fixed identity through
its relation to a continuum. Although this object has no essential nature,
it evokes a quality of sensation in its particular body–object–space con-
figuration. A concrete form hanging over a man’s chest and four glasses
under the weight of a rock are gestures of suspension with the sense of
impending collapse and destruction. A fallen glass with bronze seep-
age gestures excess. These objects evoke intermediary states—states of
transition and transformation.
Lunney amplifies the vibratory potential present in matter (Bennett,
2010) through its association with other materials and particular forms.
A charge is produced in bringing two distinct materials and forms into a
relationship to each other—glass in relation to rock, concrete in relation
to the human body. Echoing Elizabeth Grosz, Lunney’s practice ‘enables
matter to become expressive … to intensify—to resonate and become
more than itself’ (2008, 4). Composed of the energetic relation between
material and form, I position the ekstatic object in a lineage that begins
with the surrealist object and develops into eccentric abstraction. (It is
no coincidence that etymologically eccentric and ekstatic share the pre-
fix ek.) For example, Meret Oppenheim’s Déjeuner En Fourrure (1936)
and Eva Hesse’s Contingent (1968) gesture from the body to the body
with a visceral, erotic language. Both displace the material (porcelain,
fur, latex) or form (tea cup) from their utilitarian context and amplify
libidinal energy. The ekstatic object shares all these aspects. Like surreal-
ism and eccentric abstraction, Lunney’s practice merges the everyday and
that which exceeds it. Lunney continues their legacy of the animation of
the inanimate object through its association to the body and the activa-
tion of a dialectical economy bringing together disparate materials and
forms.
Lunney understands her objects as fetish objects where they function

as markers of libidinal obsession (Lunney 2015). However, the ekstatic
object exceeds fetishism, for, to follow Spyros Papapetros with reference
to Edward Tylor, where fetishism invests one object in isolation with
value (2012, 187), in Lunney’s practice we encounter multiple objects
where no one is more important than the other in terms of its evocation
of energetic states. Further, as mentioned, it is critical that these objects,
as ekstatic objects—markers of movement and transformation—are
understood within a continuum. From this perspective, Lunney’s objects
can be understood in relation to animism. According to Papapetros,
again following Tylor, animism does not involve the object as identity,
but is a continuum composed of a material–energetic interplay articu-
lated by constant movement. Papapetros states that, in the operations
of animism, ‘Value is produced not by the fixation of power on a sin-
gle object, but instead by its constant redistribution among a collectiv-
ity of persons and things’ (2012, 187). In this way anima/animism does
not attach itself to subjects and objects but rather is ‘Like a permanently
migrating no-body, [where] the anima traverses the physical and meta-
physical world.’ Papapetros emphasises movement as ‘key for the percep-
tion of anima’. He continues, ‘movement is an essential vital force and
therefore coincides with life’ (2012, 187).
As an abstraction of feeling–movement through body–object configu-
rations Lunney’s work resonates with Papapetros’s perspective. However,
rather than a permanently migrating no-body redistributed amongst per-
sons and things, Lunney’s practice concerns a constantly moving body—
a body that has no boundary, or fixed essence that is traced through the
co-constitution of human form and object. The etymological significance
of anima as breath is important here. Breath signals life as the contin-
uum of constantly changing states articulated by the endless inhale and
exhale. Within this continuum are the dialectics of tension and release,
opening and contraction, and all the variegated rhythms of the breath
that compose its oscillation. The body understood as a continuum of
movement–transformation is an extension of the breath. The breath
creates the (trans)form(ation) of the body—its material–energetic inter-
play. From this perspective, the flaccid leather that is draped over a body
curled on the floor or hangs from the wall and the black seepage from a
glass are the languid exhale. The rock that balances on the glasses, the
toes that balance on the rock, the concrete form that hovers over the
human chest are the holding of the breath. Every gesture has a particular
116 S. Schmidt
quality of breath that can be intuited at the level of the body. Lunney’s
body–object configurations make the breath visible.2
Movement and Temporality
In Any Second Now (2014) a man stands beneath a concrete elongated
cone-shaped form that hangs from the ceiling. Occasionally he moves
away from this object: his body becomes loose and deflated and his head
and limbs hang as gravity forces their dissension. He very slowly drops to
the concrete floor to writhe in slow motion. He then rises to again stand
beneath the pointed tip of the object as if the force of this object keeps
his previously loose and deflated body upright. He then moves away
from the object to gradually descend to the floor once more. He repeats
this process of standing still beneath the object, which gestures the hold-
ing in of the breath, to moving away and slow falling—the release of
breathing out. As his body moves from suspension to collapse it traces all
the subtle variations between these states. Behind him a woman puts on
T-shirts one after another and then takes them off one after another. She
moves at the same slow pace as the man. The everyday task-like nature of
her action is extended through repetition and signals excess. The woman
and man are bound by the repetitions of their actions and the falling of
the loose materiality of the T-shirts echoes that of the falling man. They
perform for two hours.
Lunney stands rooted in a mound of sand facing a black vertical form
produced from a folded sheet of steel that measures 2400 x 1200 mm.
Her static verticality mirrors the form before her. Encasing her body
into its corner structure, she sings an extended note, sending the sound
into its surface to reverberate back into her body and the surrounding
space. Lunney holds the note for as long as her breath allows and then
repeats this process over and over, improvising with the sounds of trains
as they pass (Lunney 2017). To return to Papapetros, it is in sound that
one can more closely perceive anima (2012, 187). If anima is that ethe-
real, constantly migrating substance of the quality of air as Papapetros
describes, the voice is the medium most able to transmit this. The voice
is the ekstatic medium par excellence. It escapes the confines of the body
and travels in space. Its vibrations merge with those of other bodies and
objects; it sonically realizes the ekstatic body as a body–object–space con-
tinuum, articulated by the constant inhale and exhale.
From an existential perspective, ekstasis refers to the constant

movement and transformation that is existence. Alphonso Lingus notes
the etymological equivalence of ekstasis and existence.3 Echoing the ety-
mology of ekstasis, existence, from the Latin ex, out, sistere, to stand, con-
veys the idea of that which comes into being through standing out from
itself. Of being, Lingus writes,
casting itself out of its own given place and time … each moment it pro-
jects itself—or, more exactly, a variant of itself—into another place and
time … [This] is not ideality, defined as intuitable or reconstitutable any-
where and at any moment. Ex-istence, understood etymologically, is not so
much a state or a stance as a movement, which is by conceiving a diver-
gence from itself or a potentiality of itself and casting itself into that diver-
gence with all that it is. (1994, 6)
This perspective of existence as ekstatic is echoed in Papapetros’s dis-

cussion of animism. He writes: ‘Everything remains living by changing
place’ (2012, 188). In this regard, in Lunney’s practice the idea of exist-
ence as movement can be extended to the idea of the body’s continual
variance in time. The body–object articulates feeling as movement, trans-
formation and an intermediary state and thus performs the ekstatic body.
Any Second Now evokes ekstasis, as understood by D’Avila and
Donne, as suspension and inter(in)animation. The man is held under
the force of the cone, the woman gestures her entanglement in her end-
less (un)dressing, and Lunney’s vocalic emissions resonate into the steel
and back into her static body, whilst punctuating the other body–object
configurations that surround her. To follow the existential perspective,
the movement of the body and voice articulate the ekstatic body. This
movement also gestures to suspension—the repetitions of the perform-
ers signal an experience of being held in time, in an intermediary state
that one cannot move through despite one’s continual movement. For
Martin Heidegger, being in relation to time is, in his words, ‘the ecstatic
of ek-sistence’ (Sallis 1990, 194). He understands temporality as ekstatic
because past, present and future are experienced as standing out from
each other as seizure and displacement. According to Heidegger, being
is dominated by a future ekstasis: one is thrust out of oneself towards
the horizon of expectation.4 Temporal suspension is partnered with the
anticipation of what will come. In ekstasis becoming is endless and being,
to follow Heidegger, is projected in its future of any second now.
118 S. Schmidt
Ekstatic Aesthetics
Lunney draws from minimalism, conceptual art and performance art.
She develops minimalism’s phenomenological engagement of the viewer
where objects gesture toward the viewer’s body and implicate them
within installation space. The rock or concrete lightshade subvert the
idea of an ordinary interior, and draw attention to the viewer’s inhab-
itation of space. The viewer’s implication within the aesthetic frame is
heightened by the presence of a performer. The viewer can move in close
to the sleeping man, the woman balancing on the rock or the man fall-
ing to the floor, and may empathically respond to their positioning in a
state of balance, reach, contraction, collapse and prostration. From con-
ceptual art, Lunney takes the critical function of repetition: the woman
takes off and puts on her T-shirts, the man rises and falls, the note is
sung over and over. However, Lunney’s practice departs from conceptual
art’s effect of desacralization. Repetition in Lunney’s practice involves a
material–energetic interplay rather than a conceptual economy. This rep-
etition, as I discuss below, takes the quality of ritual. Further, Lunney’s
objects are infused with a psychic force that contrasts with the neutral-
ized and desubjectivized nature of minimalism. The vital poetry that
unfurls in Lunney’s practice demands another frame of reference that
I refer to as ekstatic aesthetics (Fig. 6.2).
I draw this phrase from the title of Mieke Bal’s essay on Louise
Bourgeois’s translation of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa
(1647–1652). Bal describes the ekstasis of both artists as ‘the entangle-
ment of the body and its dissipation, the volo of the subject doing the
abandoning’. Of the Baroque point of view, Bal states that it ‘establishes
a relationship between subject and object, and then goes back to … a
subject that is changed by that movement and goes back in its new guise
to the object, only to return to its ever-changing self’ (2000, n.p.).
This explication speaks to the inter(in)animation of body and object in
Lunney’s work that gestures ekstasis as continual movement and trans-
formation. The woman and man move to and from the rock and cone.
Their movements form a slow drawn-out to and fro, in and out. They
articulate an expanded pulsing that can be connected to breathing and
extended to anima understood as transformative life force. The body-
object signals an ever-changing self.
Bal states, ‘Bourgeois translates Bernini’s project in order to release
from it what matters most: not meaning, not information … but the
Fig. 6.2 Bridie Lunney, This Endless Becoming, 2013–2014. Steel, concrete,

stainless steel fittings, tiles, leather, rigging rope with performer Shelley Lasica.
In Melbourne Now, 2014, National Gallery of Victoria. Photo: Timothy Herbert.
tensions, the thresholds’ (2000, n.p.). This idea of an intermediary state

is a critical aspect of ekstasis as understood by D’Avila and Donne. It is
this quality of tension, the threshold—the transitional state—that con-
cerns Lunney’s practice. In Bourgeois’s Femme Maison (1983) (which
translates Bernini’s Ecstasy) the merger between flowing folds that are the
body and the architecture registers the self in excess. This inter(in)anima-
tion between body and architecture that is the ekstatic body is critical in
Lunney’s work. Lunney’s performers are not only inter(in)animate with
specific objects, but also with the interior. They slide along walls, fall
to and crawl on the floor, hang suspended and stand balanced in space.
Wall, floor, ceiling, space and body co-constitute each other and gesture
suspension, tension, transition, displacement and collapse.
For Lunney the body is the starting point; it is her tool for under-
standing the world (Lunney 2015). In relation to its world the body
is always already ekstatic. To return to the existential perspective,
which could also be the Baroque perspective, identity is subverted
120 S. Schmidt
by existence as movement. In Lunney’s practice the ekstatic body

is body–object–space. This body traces the intermediary states and
moments of transition between suspension and collapse, tension and
release. It is attuned to a muscular consciousness–a consciousness that is
an ever-expanding and contracting differentiation and repetition. I draw
the phrase muscular consciousness from Gaston Bachelard, who employs
it to describe how the body is awoken by the road that it has travelled
many times. For Bachelard this consciousness is not solely the property
of the body, but also of the road. He writes, ‘when I relive dynamically
the road that “climbed” the hill, I am quite sure that the road itself
had muscles, or rather counter-muscles’ (1994, 11). Thus, Bachelard’s
muscular consciousness involves the mutual poiesis of body and world.
I develop his perspective in order to account for the ekstatic body’s rela-
tion to the world as figured through dialectical movement.
Gilles Deleuze writes, ‘This muscular conception of matter inspires
force in all things … folding is not opposed to unfolding, such is also
the case in the pairs tension-release and contraction-dilation’ (2006, 7).
Within a muscular consciousness, which Deleuze expands to a conscious-
ness at the level of materiality, the states of expansion and contraction,
tension and release, suspension and collapse are necessarily in relation.
They are part of a continual evolution and transformation that is life.
In relation to Lunney’s practice, Deleuze’s expansion is important. In
working from the perspective of the body as feeling–movement, Lunney
is working from a subjective position. However, the fact that she maps
this perspective through a muscular conception of matter means that
the material–energetic interplay she engages is not limited to the sub-
jective position, but speaks to the movement of all life. Thus, Lunney’s
ekstatic aesthetics, to return to Papapetros, evokes anima as the ‘vital
force’ that moves ‘the rivers, the stars, the sea, the sun, [and] ... moon’
(2012, 187).
Ekstatic Enstasis
Lunney gestures to ekstasis as suspension, anticipation, tension, transi-
tion, transformation, disturbance, displacement, excess and collapse
through what I conceive of as a mode of enstasis. Enstasis refers to
the state of going inside oneself. Mircea Eliade describes enstasis as ‘a
direct … intuition of being’ (2009, 93). In enstasis consciousness is not
abstracted from temporal continuity (Friesen 2011, 83–84). Enstasis
produces a stilled and integrated experience of time that departs from

Heidegger’s concept of ekstatic temporality experienced as the projection
of the self in relation to past, present or future. Eliade conceives ensta-
sis as a movement inwards in the context of yogic meditation—samadhi.
In this stilled state consciousness becomes one with the life force—that
which moves the stars, the sun, the moon and sea.
Eliade distinguishes this process from shamanism, which he under-
stands as ekstasis. He explains, ‘the shaman specializes in a trance dur-
ing which his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky
or descend to the underworld’ (2004, 5). Earlier and later theorists on
the relation between enstasis and ekstasis see these two states not as
polarities—as does Eliade—but as fundamentally related states of con-
sciousness.5 One can more generally understand this relation as the
movements out and in that are, to follow Deleuze, necessarily in relation
(2006, 7). As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, I employ
this relation between ekstasis and enstasis to understand the movement
of Lunney’s body-object and the pulsing movement of all life, more gen-
erally. However, I also distinguish ekstasis as disturbance from enstasis
as calm in order to convey how Lunney’s practice signals intense expe-
rience—seizure, anticipation, rupture and so on—through meditative
movement and stillness.
Lunney gives her performers certain directions in terms of the feel-
ing state they are gesturing and the objects they move in relation to.
Within this structure the performers improvise their movements in real
time (Lunney 2017). In order to improvise, which involves creation
rather than automation, one must move toward a condition of enstasis—
go into oneself in a state of extreme concentration. The performers go
inside themselves in order to generate their movement. Anna Halprin’s
approach to dance as a movement meditation and ritual provides insight
into this aspect of Lunney’s practice. Both Halprin and Lunney work
with dancers and non-dancers to articulate feeling through movement,
which is also a form of meditation that extends into the space of ritual.
Halprin understands dance as ritual where the viewer is shifted from the
position of spectator to one of witness (1995, 14). In ritual, actions are
performed not as automated habits but through a conscious awareness,
and objects take on a significance that exceeds their everyday utility.
From this perspective, Lunney’s practice performs the effects of ritual.
For Halprin, the shift of the viewer from spectator to witness is the result
of kinaesthetic sense that is activated through the performer’s movements
122 S. Schmidt
and then awoken in the viewer. She states that the kinaesthetic sense is
the sense ‘of being aware of your own movements’ and is the ability to
empathize with another’s movements (1995, 33). This kinaesthetic sense
is realized in Lunney’s performers’ movement-meditation and perhaps
also awoken in her viewers. Viewers who can empathize with the per-
formers’ heightened movement consciousness might move towards a
condition of enstasis.
Lunney’s performers and viewers relate to particular spatial configu-
rations of objects. Thus, at play is, in Luce Irigaray’s words, an ecstatic
enstasis. Irigaray employs this phrase in relation to arriving at samadhi
(moving inwards, enstasis) through contemplating the other (moving
outwards, ekstasis) (2008, 41). As much as Lunney’s performers move
inwards in their movement-meditation, they move outwards in relation
to objects, space and witnesses. T-shirts and leather are animated by
Lunney’s performers and become second skins that extend into space.
The bodies of the performers are in turn animated and stilled by the
presence of the objects. In this way, ekstatic enstasis involves a condition
of reciprocity between body and object—a mutual poiesis. Donne’s lov-
ers arrive at Irigaray’s ekstatic enstasis through their mutual contempla-
tion. Although Lunney’s performers form a material–energetic interplay
with other performers and witnesses, their ekstatic enstasis is primarily
in relation to objects. They are absorbed in their spatio-temporal rela-
tion with objects. The woman who takes off and on the T-shirts, and the
man who is held up by and then moves away from the cone, are enstatic
in their movement-meditation, and ekstatic in their relation to these
objects. Ekstatic enstasis also speaks to how the viewer might receive
what they witness as a mode of contemplation that returns them to
their own body as both ekstatic, unfolding in relation to the world, and
enstatic, enfolding in relation to themselves. The viewer who is sensi-
tive to this folding out and in might register this in the intimacy of their
breath, which in turn might make them aware of anima as that ‘enig-
matic buoyancy’ and ‘mobile energy’ that infuses all things (Papapetros
2012, 186, 188).
Desire and Suspension
A woman puts on one T-shirt after another, and then takes them off
one after the other and lets them drop to the floor. The fallen T-shirts
pile around a pool filled with sump oil. On the other side of the room,
a woman lights matches one after the other, and flicks them from her
chest to hit the black steel structure before her. The matches mark
the structure then fall to the floor. The futility of lighting and flinging
matches and endless (un)dressing signals disturbance. The women slowly
perform for four hours. There is a discord between them: they have their
backs to each other; each are captured in their own duration. Yet, as with
Donne’s lovers, their armies are suspended and their energies are drawn
in relation to each other. There is a sense of impending destruction, as if
the flame of the match could set the sump oil ablaze. Ominous anticipa-
tion is evoked not only by the sound and quality of lighting and flinging
matches, but also by the drips of sump oil that fall from a hide hung over
the pool. When these drips hit the pool and catch the light they spark.
Through a material–energetic vocabulary of viscosity, friction, dripping,
sparking and excess, this work evokes the desiring body (Fig. 6.3).
The desiring body is an ekstatic body. Patricia McCormack states
that this body is ‘in a perpetual state of suspension and immanence …
which takes the body outside of time into a space’, into a ‘voluminous’
condition (2011, 204). The ekstatic body is ejected from clock time.
In Lunney’s practice suspension gestures to the ekstatic body’s habita-
tion of an expanded temporality. This temporality, and the voluminous
condition that McCormack speaks of, is evoked not only through the
performer’s body literally held in suspension, but also in all its subtle var-
iations as it moves both ekstatically in relation to its environment and
enstatically in relation to itself over a duration of several hours. Energy
is traced and held in the path of its flow within the frame of stilled time,
suspended in a moment that is opened out—stretched—so that a thresh-
old is registered.
The experience of time is critical to Lunney’s practice. Its impor-
tance is registered in the titles of her work discussed in this essay: This
Endless Becoming, Any Second Now, Desire Will Not Hold. Lunney’s
work concerns the intensity of the moment experienced as anticipation.
Heidegger’s understanding of kairos in relation to ekstatic temporal-
ity provides insight into the idea of an expanded temporality where the
moment is seized in anticipation. Ekstatic temporality is neutralized by
clock time that chronologically organizes experience. However, in kai-
rological temporality chronos (clock time) is suspended. In the time of
kairos, ekstatic temporality is amplified and one’s ability to map the
transition from past, present to future is stalled. In ancient Greek kairos
means the opportune time to act, and for Homer it refers to the gap
124 S. Schmidt
Fig. 6.3 Bridie Lunney, Desire Will Not Hold, 2015. Hide, sump oil, steel,
brass, 100 black t-shirts with performers Shelley Lasica and Brooke Stamp.
Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy of the artist
in the armour that makes the body vulnerable to attack. Kairos as the
moment is ambivalent in terms of what it will bring—pleasure or pain,
joy or sorrow. Felix Ó Murchadha writes, ‘Kairos is an intensification
of the everyday and a stepping outside of the everyday’ (2013, 27).
Lunney’s work performs this intensification of the everyday and a stepping
outside of the everyday. Putting on and taking off T-shirts and lighting
matches are ordinary actions. But these actions are abstracted from the
everyday and are intensified through their repetition and in their relation
to other objects and materialities such as the dripping sump oil and the
black steel structure. Lunney’s practice evokes kairological temporality
through gesturing to the moment experienced as suspension and antici-
pation. The ekstatic body held in suspension is marked by the time of
kairos—the intensity of the moment that may bring pleasure or pain, joy
or sorrow.
Longinus celebrates Sappho’s fragment of c. 600 bc, which he under-
stands as an account of ‘erotically passionate madness,’ as exemplary
of the sublime (1985, 65). Sappho writes: ‘Sweat runs down in rivers,
a tremor seizes … Caught by menacing death, I falter. Lost in love’s
trance’ (Freeman 1995, 14). She images the desiring body’s ‘dissipation
… volo’ (Bal 2000, n.p.) and its inter(in)animation with its world and
sounds like the original source to the echoes of D’Avila’s and Donne’s
ekstases. Her ekstasis, to return to Schneider, signals the intermingling
of the live and dead. The desiring body experiences the sublime where
it is caught in a dynamic that risks annihilation or ‘the horror of noth-
ing happening at all’ (Zylinska 2001, 175). Citing William Blake, Joanna
Zylinska writes,
‘The most sublime act is to set another before you.’ … the self is
motivated by the promise of redemption from … stasis, even though
its salvation were a mere instant … [In the erotic relation there is no]
guarantee of intimacy … The self has to abandon the fantasy of the ever
after union for the sake of temporary event. Yet the uniqueness of every
moment pose the self with a task of exploring them ad infinitum (every
encounter as if becoming the whole world). (Zylinska 2001, 82, 175,
emphasis added)
These ideas of salvation in the instant and the infinity of the moment
return to my proposal that Lunney’s practice gestures to a kairological
temporality through its evocation of a temporal suspension and anticipa-
tion. Francois Lyotard states that the sublime ‘is the feeling that some-
thing will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void, that
something will take place and will announce that everything is not over’
(1991, 84). The repetition of Lunney’s performers signals the experience
of moving through or towards something. The ekstatic body projects
itself into the horizon of its future and its movements function to bridge
the temporal abyss of anticipation.
126 S. Schmidt
The raw hide is dipped into the sump oil each morning. At the
beginning of the day oil drips from the hide at short intervals; by the
end of the day the drips have slowed. This material movement and those
of the taking off and putting on of T-shirts and the lighting and flicking
of matches evoke an experience that cannot be contained: desire will not
hold. The dripping hide that moves from a quick to slow tempo marks
the durational quality of this experience, the fact that this moment has
been stretched to the point of exhaustion. On the other side of exhaus-
tion is renewal. Through their concentrated repetitions, the performers
dissolve into their actions. Their tempos mirror each other and are main-
tained at a constant pace throughout their performance. Whilst the per-
formers’ repetition gestures to excess and disturbance, realized through
movement-meditation, it has the effect of a slowly unfolding ritual.
Ó Murchadha’s description of kairos as ‘an intensification of the every-
day and a stepping outside of the everyday’ (2013, 27) could be a defi-
nition of ritual. Ekstasis folds into enstasis. Disturbance and excess are
mediated through the frame of stillness and the storm of moving outside
the self in relation to the other transforms into the calm that comes from
a standing in oneself in a direct intuition of being. First comes the storm
and then arrives the still.6
In stillness one can perceive the dynamism of the world—the vital
force that animates all things. The ekstatic body and existential subject
are without identity or essence and constituted through constant move-
ment and transformation. To return to Lingus, this body/ subject is not
‘intuitable or reconstitutable anywhere and at any moment’ but is ‘a
divergence from itself or a potentiality of itself and cast[s] itself into that
divergence with all that it is’ (1994, 6). Antonin Artaud states, ‘Feelings
are nothing, nor are ideas. Everything is movement from which human-
ity has taken nothing but the ghost’ (see Kristeva 1984, 170). Though
this movement may be understood as feeling and ideation, it is in fact a
product of anima as that ‘mobile energy that is independent of the bod-
ies it infuses’ (Papapetros 2012, 188). Lunney’s practice harnesses move-
ment as the formal realization of the breath, and more generally the
vital force that is the basis of all being. Her practice maps the movement
of the ekstatic body through a material–energetic interplay of a body–
object–space continuum. This movement belongs to neither body nor
object but is a mobile energy independent of, yet uniting, all that it infuses.
Lunney gestures to ekstasis as intense disturbance, displacement and sus-
pension, but does this through enstasis—stilled, meditative movement.
Through ekstatic enstasis, Lunney’s art offers a space to experience

movement in stillness.
Notes
1. For example, the black steel structure, which I refer to below, occurs in
all three installations that I discuss in this chapter. The drinking glass with
black seepage occurs in Desire Will Not Hold (2015), discussed below, and
also There Are These Moments (2014). It is also important to note that not
only do Lunney’s objects recur in multiple installations, but Lunney also
works with the same performers who often repeat actions, such as the tak-
ing off and putting on of T-shirts.
2. I have drawn this phrase from the title of the documentary on Anna
Halprin (Gerber 2009).
3. On this equivalence Alphonso Lingus draws from Martin Heidegger who
draws from Aristotle. David Krell writes, ‘Not only “ecstasy” but also the
very … thing called “existence” must have Aristotle as their origin.’ In his
discussion of ekstasis and existence in Physics Aristotle employs the terms
‘alteration’, ‘change’, ‘sudden change’, ‘the moment’ and ‘the instantane-
ous’. Krell explains, ‘[t]he “sudden” seems to occur somewhere between
motion and rest … In his essay on the soul he uses the word [ekstasis] to
mean “departure” or “displacement”: “All movement is displacement of
that which is moved”’ (2015, 16).
4. On Heidegger’s ekstatic temporality see, for example, Krell (2015) and
Dastur (1996).
5. For example, Freidrich Shelling sees ekstasis as a type of meditation, thus a
type of enstasis (Krell 2015, 23). For contemporary examples on the con-
nection between ekstasis and enstasis see Sarbacker (2002) and Connolly
(2015).
6. This perspective resonates with that of Julius Langbehn, who in reference
to the music of Bach that follows that of Wagner states: ‘One speaks of the
stillness before the storm; but … [there is] the storm before stillness …
after ecstasy comes enstasy’ (Friesen 2011, 27).
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CHAPTER 7
Animate Atmospheres: Art at the Edge

of Materiality
Edward Scheer
A discourse on animism in aesthetics, especially if it is located in the

mediated and non-human climacteric of art, complicates the old dual-
isms of presence and absence, of appearance and disappearance, human
and non-human and so on. Importantly it also reanimates the old ques-
tion as to the extent to which the vital forces framing the experience and
the significance of live cultural expression are material or immaterial to
that which animates and that which is animated. This, it seems, has been
Some of the material in the present chapter has appeared in an earlier version
in the publication New Media Dramaturgy: Performance, Media and New-
Materialism by Peter Eckersall, Edward Scheer and Helena Grehan (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). New Media Dramaturgy was a project undertaken
by myself at UNSW, Prof. Helena Grehan at Murdoch University, and Prof.
Peter Eckersall at CUNY and ‘partner investigators’ Marin Blažević and Maaike
Bleeker. It was funded by the Australian Research Council. The research for this
chapter formed a part of that project and Kris Verdonck’s work also formed a
major part of this study.
E. Scheer (*) 
School of Art and Design,
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
e-mail: e.scheer@unsw.edu.au

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_7
132 E. Scheer
settled in favour of embodiment as the site for vitality and intelligence,

for intuition and affect. But we can ask whether this force to generate
and to experience the aesthetic is a material effect derived from the desire
for sensorial stimulation—we might call it the matter of experience; or is
it the result of the encounter we have with a particular object, image or
being—the experience of matter?
In this context, Spyros Papapetros writes:
Unlike fetishism, animism does not refer to a singular object; instead, the
anima is a property common to all natural bodies: human, animal, vegetal,
and mineral. Value is produced not by the fixation of power on a single
object, but instead by its constant redistribution among a collectivity of
persons and things. (2012, 187)
We might consider the aesthetic of such a dynamic space, and in one par-
ticular genre of art-making these questions are confounded by the mate-
rial or, rather, the immaterial nature of the object that the work seeks to
animate. In this chapter I will investigate some recent experiments in the
art of atmospheres; that is, in the practice of manufacture and design of
artificial environments which seek to engage the concept of atmospheres
and raise questions about their meaning and potential agency.
The implications of this kind of experiment with the state of the
atmosphere range from the apparently trivial desire of people of a certain
age to talk about the weather, to the entirely consequential fact that we
as a species have failed at the sort of atmosphere maintenance that sus-
tains life. The reimagination of atmosphere might be useful if, as the phi-
losopher Peter Sloterdjk argues, we will all end up living in the ‘human
park’ in which the management of atmospheres will be a way of life and
a key form of social governance and politics. These ‘insubstantial’ art-
works might even contribute to a public understanding of the imminent
changes in climate and social systems brought about by and within the
anthroposcene. This urgent ethical and political task may involve letting
go of a notion of ‘live cultural expression’ as either material or imma-
terial, but perhaps something like the reimagining of an experience of
immersion, an experience over which we have no control (just like our
encounter with the weather).
The non-human turn in performance has been marked by the appear-
ance of a variety of urgent and emerging life-forms: images, substances
and objects performing alongside humans in ways that refuse old binaries
7 ANIMATE ATMOSPHERES: ART AT THE EDGE OF MATERIALITY 133
and notions that position the human in opposition to the object, animal
or even the immaterial. The very same technical elements which carry
the enhancing effects of close ups, amplified sounds, high resolution
projection, haze effects and other developments are no longer simply
scenographic elements or techniques but core components of the drama-
turgy of the production, such that the making of the work depends as
much on non-human as on human agency. It is an agency that operates
through—or often mobilizes collaborations between—artists and things:
things that have developed their own modes of existence that influence
the work they are conscripted to do in unforeseen ways. In what follows
here, we see artists engaged with the materiality of the non-human in its
atmospheric form and with extending the exploration of materiality into
its least representable state.1
For example, the first Act of Kris Verdonck’s ACTOR#1 stages an
encounter with what the programme notes describe as ‘a poetic land-
scape of constantly moving sculpted mists in which chemical and physical
processes are taking place’ (Festival a/d Werf 2011). MASS is installed
in a darkened room in which a large pool is almost but not quite over-
flowing with what appears to be smoke. The spectators stand around
the edge and stare into the billowing cloud of gas that is seemingly on
the brink of dispersing around the space but is held in place by fans and
ventilators contained in the substructure of the tank. There is an accom-
panying ambient soundtrack but no development, no drama, no action
and no story: just a situation in a state of dynamic equilibrium and the
atmosphere it generates. This is the performance. There are no human
actors present apart from the spectators, and so the question arises as to
the ways in which this form might be considered as an agent in the per-
formance. Can an atmosphere be a subject or even a proto-subject?
Gernot Böhme notes:
atmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by

things, and yet they are something thing like … (N)or are atmospheres
something subjective, for example, determinations of a psychic state. And
yet they are subject like, belong to subjects in that they are sensed in bod-
ily presence by human beings and this sensing is at the same time a bodily
state of being of subjects in space. (1993, 121–2)
Neither subject nor object, the indeterminate ontology of MASS—where

we are unsure whether it is acting on its own or following a script—is of
134 E. Scheer
Fig. 7.1 A Two Dogs Company /Kris Verdonck, MASS, 2010. Smoke,

mixed media object, dark space. Kaaistudio’s Brussels. Courtesy of A Two Dogs
Company
course part of what it is about, because no performer enjoys ontological

certainty. Performance is itself a highly unstable platform for questions
about the nature of the essence of things, since its primary methodology
consists in putting identities in play. Verdonck points out that the smoke
in question refused to co-operate with his team and would not behave in
the way they anticipated (2014b). Despite their best efforts and the use
of industrial strength fans, the smoke in MASS always swirled in its own
particular way. In this respect, then, Verdonck’s ideas align fairly closely
to new materialist claims as to the agency of materials, even a material as
hard to pin down as smoke (containing, as it does, solid, liquid and gase-
ous elements) (Fig. 7.1).
The Sense of Something Happening

Kathleen Stewart provides an interesting approach to this question
of the status of such matter and how we might relate to it in her essay
‘Atmospheric Attunements’, in which she says that, ‘Instead of assert-
ing oppositions between material and representational things, or hold-
ing objects in abeyance in order to evaluate them as good or bad’ we
can think of them in terms of ‘a horizontal plane of incommensurate

elements hanging together in a compositional atmosphere’ (2010, 19).
Like smoke. Or a cloud.
What is distinctive about the atmosphere in this type of work is not
only where and how it is made but also what it does. Atmosphere is the
feeling we have when we enter a space, and it is also the way in which
both we and the space are altered or changed by this experience. It can
also be a public feeling that we share with others or even a material force
that emerges to alter our mood. As in the other components of non-
human art, not to mention the anthroposcene in general, the atmos-
phere has agency. As Stewart puts it:
An atmosphere is not an inert context but a force field in which peo-

ple find themselves. It is not an effect of other forces but a lived affect.
A capacity to affect and to be affected that pushes a present into a compo-
sition, an expressivity, the sense of potentiality and event. It is an attune-
ment of the senses. (Stewart 2010, 14)
Stewart’s language allows us some room to imagine the different shapes

and tones that an atmosphere might create. It could, for instance,
emerge from the much-abused notion of ‘energy’, the term actors often
use to try to describe the particular valency of the live situation. The
atmospheric attunement Stewart encourages us to make involves the per-
ception of a mutual ‘capacity to affect’, which puts this actorly dynamic
more clearly and frames it within the language of composition, expres-
sion and even presence. In the flux of the performative moment the
atmosphere denotes the moment that something around us has changed;
we can detect an ambient shift but it is hard at first to identify it.
In her essay, Stewart is concerned with more everyday atmospheres
that groups of people experience as a social force, a public feeling or
mood, as a sense that something around us in the environment has
changed and has now taken new form. She asks how new concepts, cit-
ing the example of Attention Deficit Disorder, arrive in our midst with
such force, ‘how they accrue, endure, fade or snap. How they build as a
refrain, literally scoring over the labor of living out whatever’s happen-
ing’ (1). Her approach is ethnographic, but there is also an emergent
aesthetics to it since she also wants to deal with what these new con-
cepts become when ‘they constitute a compositional present, pushing
136 E. Scheer
circulating forces into form, texture and density so that they can be felt,
imagined, brought to bear or just born’ (2).
Stewart is not the first theorist to attempt to account for the power
of atmosphere, but her attempt to become ‘attuned to’ the dynamics of
atmosphere as a combination of ‘material and representational’ forces
(19) illuminates the non-human theatre and artwork I am dealing with
here. As she explains:
In these little scenes, the senses sharpen on the surfaces of things taking
form. They pick up texture and density as they move in and through bod-
ies and spaces, rhythms and tempi, possibilities likely or not. (2010, 18–9)
In the little scenes that follow I want to focus on projects that materialize
the concept of atmosphere in the sense of things taking form, assuming
a texture and a density. In particular I want to examine the way artists
attempt to create atmospheres, to design an experience of the ‘composi-
tional present’ through the construction of diverse natural forms such as
clouds, fog, mist, haze and smoke. In harnessing such formless entities
these artists engage with natural atmospheric systems, developing models
of the formless spaces where clouds and weather systems circulate even if
only within the gallery walls. In tracking changes in the artificial weather
and the shifts in our moods and behaviours as we navigate the micro-
climates of art, we follow the non-human turn in installation into some
of its more elusive manifestations. The efforts of artists to operationalize
atmospheres, to actualize them and to model them in different forms,
might be seen as an effort to render them more explicitly available to the
senses and to spectatorial experience.
Looking at Clouds
One of the interesting items on Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde’s curricu-
lum vitae is that his series of artworks under the collective title Nimbus
was one of TIME magazine’s ‘Top Ten Inventions of 2012’ (Smilde
2016). The Nimbus series stages and documents the construction of
indoor clouds in different interior environments ‘from coal mines to
cathedrals’ as the Wired magazine article about him states (Slobig 2015).
His clouds are perfect miniatures only a few metres in length and they
exist for only around 10 seconds before they break up and disperse.
Unlike MASS there is no attempt to contain the image spatially other
than via its indoor setting, but instead the temporal duration of the event
is limited. Like a performance artist, Smilde ‘is interested in the ephem-
eral—impermanent states of being which he documents through photo-
graphs’ (Saatchi 2012). He selects a space for its dank and cold air and
sets up his lights, laptops and cameras and the smoke machine.
In New York for Frieze in June 2015, he invited the public to attend
the Neuehouse to witness the construction of the image. They entered
a brightly lit voluminous pop up studio/theatre space and saw Smilde
spray the air in front of the smoke machine with a spritzer, then activate
the smoke machine to produce a small puff of white smog. The result-
ant cloud ballooned, hovered momentarily, then dissipated. The process
is like an audition. Each cloud gets a chance to strut its stuff before the
cameras but not all of the shapes are selected for display. There is a par-
ticular construction and a choreography that Smilde has in mind for the
cloud as it masses and dissolves. If it does not produce the ‘right’ moves
it will not be chosen. The spectators, however, were less concerned, and
they seemed happy to capture any cloud-like image they saw on their
smartphones. These cloud constructions mostly end as photographs, but
they are also live works in which audience members witness the manu-
facture of many more cloud formations than the viewer of the finished
photographic images in the exhibition. Smilde accentuates their mate-
rial quality rather than their purely photographic features. He describes
them as ‘temporary sculptures of almost nothing—the edge of material-
ity’ (Smilde in Slobig 2015). This focus on temporality and materiality in
relation to a decidedly non-human actor also returns us to the discourses
of performance studies and new materialism that we are following in
relation to the New Media Dramaturgy (NMD) project. The clouds,
once formed, take their own path: they decide how they will move and
where they will go during the 10 seconds they exist, in the space of the
photo shoot. The only matter for the artist is whether or not they are
suitably photogenic.
The high profile of this body of work—covered in TIME and Wired
magazine articles—suggests both that Smilde does good public relations
and also, just maybe, that his images have captured a popular mood: a
public feeling. Is this because they so perfectly replicate the form of a
familiar but still mysterious object? Is it the curious antinomy of indoor
work/outdoor phenomenon, or the romantic attempt to capture some-
thing so fleeting? Perhaps it is the radical shift in scale by reproduc-
ing the cloud in miniature? If they were only accessible as photographs
138 E. Scheer
would they have created such interest? The frequency of references in the
reviews of his work to the fact that ‘these images have not been pho-
toshopped’ is worthy of mention here. It is a bespoke—perhaps even
eccentric—transaction with the materials rather than simply a photo
opportunity that might be at the root of all the interest in this body of
work.
For all the media attention, Smilde works in a similar way to Finnish
artist Axel Antas, whose lesser known photographs in the Low Lying
Cloud Formations (2006–2007) series also capture the image of an eva-
nescent sculptural shape but are shot outdoors. In this sense they lack
the stark indoor/outdoor antinomy of the Smilde images, but like the
Nimbus works they are ‘emphatically not part of the “natural order” of
the landscape, but artificially produced’ (Johansson, n.d.). Antas’s clouds
are also generated with a smoke machine in cold, damp conditions, but
his clouds operate less as objects in themselves, with their own status and
more as a kind of blind spot to the landscape, forming part of the image
that interrupts the gaze as it surveys the terrain. In a recent catalogue
essay, Johansson describes them in theatrical terms: ‘clouds like these are
not part of the unbroken landscape experience, they seem to be tech-
nically created non-human actors in the landscape. Artefactual natural
phenomena!’ (Johansson, n.d.). These clouds hover in and out of focus,
disrupting the visual plane and the presentation of ‘landscape’ to include
less tangible elements and accentuate the atmospherics of landscape
(Fig. 7.2).
At ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany, as part of the Global Exhibition (June
to September 2015), an indoor cloud project, Cloudscapes, was pre-
sented as a collaborative project between the Japanese architect Tetsuo
Kondo and Transsolar Klima Engineering. The cloud construction in this
instance had a more formal dramaturgy, as a walkway was constructed
to allow access for the visitors to the upper heights of the two con-
nected atriums in the building (in Lighthouse 8 and 9). The concept was
to enable an ‘experience’ of the cloud beyond the merely visual. Dance
workshops run by Gabriela Lang were also held in the cloud to allow the
participants to engage with ‘natural phenomena’. The exhibition web-
site locates the project within a utopian futurist dramaturgy, ‘where visi-
tors can experience a real cloud from below, within, and above floating
in the center of the Museum ZKM’ (Transsolar 2015). The experience
the designers of Cloudscapes were building on relates to the tradition of
air travel and the desire ‘to touch, feel, and walk through the clouds’
Fig. 7.2 Axel Antas, Cloud formation suspended, 2006. C-Type, 114 x 90 cm,
edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist
brought about by ‘gazing out of airplane windows, high above the earth’
(Transsolar 2015).
The Cloudscapes engineers constructed clouds on a much larger scale
than Antas, Smilde or Verdonck. This work covered the 7000 sq. m. of
the space in the ZKM Museum, and for once no smoke was utilized but
only mist from the combination of saturated air and ‘condensed water
droplets accumulated around condensation seeds floating in the space’
(Transsolar 2015). The designers also sought to achieve a differentiation
of atmospheres above, below and within the cloud so that the visitors
could perceive ‘different qualities of light, temperature, and humidity’
in those three areas, with the spaces separated by an artificial climate-
controlled filter effect in which different air temperatures and humidi-
ties were maintained anthropogenicat the three levels (below, within and
above). In this way the cloud could be felt differently at the different
140 E. Scheer
layers and as the different microclimatic conditions overlapped. The

effect was partly to limit visitors’ vision and encourage a slower ambula-
tion through the space, and also to facilitate a more interactive and social
experience of the museum space.
In another important example, Olafur Eliasson’s installation Din
Blinde Passager (Your Blind Passenger) (2010) at the Arken Museum
near Copenhagen used a 96 m. long box suffused with low level monof-
requency and fluorescent light combined with dense fog to create a simi-
lar effect. Eliasson makes the observation that this restriction in the visual
field creates a ‘nice contract’ between the visitors. He points out that:
we are sort of in the same boat, and we have to kind of renegotiate the
social contract, based on these conditions. You sharpen your ears, you
sharpen your kind of expectations about, do I meet somebody? Am I not
likely to meet somebody? So the presence of other people in the piece
plays a central role for your experience of the piece as well. (Tate 2011)
The aesthetics of participation is of central importance to the dramaturgy

of cloudmakers and fog sculptors, as all these examples indicate. This
combination of sensory restriction and forced social bonding emphasizes
the experiential over the purely visual in a deliberate alignment of social
and environmental concerns.
Thinking About Atmospheres

These excursions into clouds are firstly exercises in the aesthetics of
naturecultures as constructed situations in environmental art, but their
emphasis on atmospheres is also part of a broader effort to resituate
these entities in contemporary political thought. As Sloterdijk argues
‘Society is its room temperature, it is the quality of its atmosphere … and
it is its fragmentation into countless local microclimates’ (2014, 966).
Drawing the frame even more broadly, he goes on to claim that ‘Like
every shared life, politics is the art of the atmospherically possible’ (2014,
967). In gesturing towards the politics of climate change, he is also rais-
ing the political stakes for atmospheres, perhaps revealing why so many
artists are engaging with them:
For present day cultures the question of survival has become a question
of the way in which they are reproduced as atmospheric communities.
Even physical atmospheres have passed to the stage of their technical

producibility. The future era will be climate technical, and as such tech-
nologically oriented. It will be increasingly seen that societies are artificial
from the ground up. The air that, together and separately, we breathe can
no longer be presupposed. Everything must be produced technically, and
the metaphorical atmosphere as much as the physical atmosphere. Politics
will become a department of climate techniques. (Sloterdijk 2011, 245)
The art of atmospheres engages this condition of the relations between

the metaphorical and the physical atmospheres to the point of realizing
what we might think of as pop up ‘atmospheric communities’. These are
relational projects in which the space around human participants is ren-
dered visible and negotiable, animated in ways that emphasize the agency
of atmosphere in determining all our future relations as Sloterdijk sug-
gests. These experiments in technically reproducing such atmospheres
are part of the larger anxiety Sloterdijk is performing in the Spheres
books, a perfectly rational species-wide moral panic at what we are doing
to the planet. The overwhelming effort made to technologize manage-
ment of atmospherics and to engineer these ‘atmospheric communi-
ties’ is to unleash the full potential of animate non-human actors in the
landscape.
This refocusing of built environments, art works and philosophy to
atmospheres can be read as forming a part of the effort in the midst of
anthropogenic trauma to resituate the atmosphere at the forefront of
consciousness and action in all fields. Connecting it to the very notion
of society and the very possibility of culture as Sloterdijk does, ‘the
atmospheric constitution of culture is the properly “fundamental” ele-
ment’ (2011, 245), shifts the balance away from the notion of a precari-
ous planet requiring human care to the precarity of human society whose
representatives, as Sloterdijk describes them elsewhere, are reduced to
playing the roles of febrile weathermen and women trying to warn popu-
lations of impending catastrophic events.2
Atmospheric Architectures
Perhaps the ultimate experiment in designing a pop up ‘atmospheric
community’ was the Blur Building designed by the architects Diller and
Scofidio for the Swiss Expo 2002 in Yverdon-les-Bains. Built on the bed
of Lake Neuchatel, the construction made use of an exoskeleton or steel
142 E. Scheer
frame supporting some 35,000 high pressure nozzles used in irrigation

and cooling technology that sprayed filtered water drawn from the lake.
The building became known as ‘the cloud’, as visitors were required to
walk out to it across the water on a long fibreglass jetty at the end of
which was a circular metal structure producing a constant cloud of water
vapour. Visitors were enveloped in the cloud and, as Sloterdijk noted in
Spheres, they ‘may have realized that, beneath the surface of the light-
handed form, what they were encountering was the technically sophis-
ticated attempt at a macro-atmospheric installation—or rather … that
they were being invited to immerse themselves in a climatic sculpture’
(Sloterdijk, in Wagner 2010). The architects themselves describe the
Blur Building as ‘an architecture of atmosphere’ (DSRNY 2002), affirm-
ing Sloterdijk’s description of the building. But are these terms anything
more than metaphors? Perhaps the building itself is only a metaphor.
The Blur Building has also been described in terms of ‘Brechtian the-
atre’ since it ‘celebrates its status as anti-architecture’ through ‘the rev-
elation of the construction behind the production of effects’ (Fischer
2007, 30). Like all our other clouds ‘it has no definite form, nor size’
and ‘does not exhibit anything, except atmospheric experience itself’
(30). This sense of the project as ‘macro-atmospheric installation’ or as
a generator of ‘atmospheric experience’ is reinforced by the amount of
meteorological information gathered to optimize the cloud formation in
the building. Data on local weather conditions was gathered daily and
assessed to ‘calculate the pressure and distribution of water and the cor-
recting of the artificial fog’ (Fischer 2007, 30).
As in the previous examples of cloud-making, the dramaturgy of
Blur was designed to restrict vision. Obstructing the gaze to enable a
different, more tentative, less ‘ocularcentric’ mode of experience is the
primary dramaturgy of this genre of work. The production of a ‘cloud-
like’ atmosphere for visitors to lose themselves in was also to create a
social space in which spectators, deprived of their vision, have to negoti-
ate their passage through a shared environment. In fact the project web-
site puts it clearly: ‘there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision
itself’ and create ‘an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of puls-
ing nozzles’ (DSRNY). The visitors’ field of vision was restricted to the
walkway and the cloud. This aspect of the encounter with atmospheres
is of central importance for Böhme: ‘to define their character, (atmos-
pheres), one must expose oneself to them, one must experience them
in terms of one’s own emotional state’ (2013, 5). In affirming the role
of the ‘sentient subject’ in the atmospheric encounter, Böhme asserts

the primacy of the role of the human participant in the dramaturgy of
atmospheres in a way which must be contested. While the essentially
intersubjective nature of the encounter of a spectator’s own subjective
and emotional state and the atmosphere should be taken into account,
the larger supra-subjective force of atmosphere, which Stewart describes
as ‘a force field in which people find themselves’, is essential to under-
standing what is at stake aesthetically as well as politically in the produc-
tion of animate atmospheres.
Talking About the Weather

As Diller and Scofidio argued during the preparation phase of the Blur
project:
Weather is at center of technological debate. Our cultural anxiety about

weather can be attributed to its unpredictability. As a primary expression
of nature, the unpredictability of weather points out the limitations of
technological culture … At the same time, global warming is proof that
weather and climate are not impervious to human intervention. When we
speak about the weather, it’s assumed that more meaningful forms of social
interaction are being avoided. But is not the weather, in fact, a potent
topic of cultural exchange—a bond that cuts through social distinction and
economic class, that supercedes geopolitical borders? … In truth, contem-
porary culture is addicted to weather information. (Diller and Scofidio, in
Fischer 2007, 30)
For Diller and Scofidio, ‘Blur is smart weather. Within the fog mass,
man-made fog and actual weather combine to produce a hybrid micro-
climate’ (Fischer 2007, 30). Rather than representing ‘weather’ they,
like all of the artists discussed above, are engaged in performing immer-
sive models of weather systems. Their designs can be read as an elabo-
rate dramaturgy of technical materials operating less as substructures for
a presentation and more like interfaces for experience. This approach to
animating atmosphere represents an important new direction in contem-
porary cultural practice, toward an exploration of vital matter enabled
through technical means, such as the creation of material atmospheres as
entities in themselves rather than aesthetic byproducts.
144 E. Scheer
Perhaps the most well-known example of this tendency in relation to

atmospheres remains Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, presented
in 2003 at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, London. Eliasson
famously used this gigantic space to create an extended sunset, lasting
the six months of the project. At one end of the hall a semi-circular array
of monofrequency lamps emitted an orange light, resembling a pleasant
and suitably English crepuscular light.
The Tate Modern’s exhibition information webpages describe the
effect this produced:
A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment

outside. Throughout the day, the mist accumulates into faint, cloud-like
formations, before dissipating across the space. A glance overhead, to see
where the mist might escape, reveals that the ceiling of the Turbine Hall
has disappeared, replaced by a reflection of the space below. At the far end
of the hall is a giant semi-circular form made up of hundreds of mono-fre-
quency lamps. The arc repeated in the mirror overhead produces a sphere
of dazzling radiance linking the real space with the reflection. (Tate 2003)
The famous London ‘pea soup’ fogs of the early years of the twentieth
century have dissipated with the removal of large-scale industrial activ-
ity from inner London (such as the Bankside Power Station that once
occupied the site of the Tate Modern) so the gentle mist from the haze
machines more appropriately approximates local climatic conditions. The
monofrequency lamps are also designed to recreate this ambient effect
as they are used in street lighting. Their narrow frequency range restricts
the colour palette of the emitted light to yellow and black, hence the
orange sunset effect.
Despite the pervasive damp, the mere presence of a weak but reli-
able source of something resembling solar radiation attracted hundreds
of thousands of visitors to the installation. The Turbine Hall was trans-
formed into a ludic social space where ‘non-museum activities ranging
from transcendental perception to talking or having lunch’ could occur
(Fischer 2007, 37). The sophistication of interactions with the installa-
tion was one of its defining features, as more than one reviewer observed:
Visitors respond not only to the circle of light, but also to the mirror
above their heads. Adults and children lie on their backs staring up at the
ceiling, often moving their arms and legs in a sweet, sad effort to find
their own reflections in the swarming mass of undifferentiated shapes in

the distance. It is as though some deep primeval instinct compels us to do
something—waving our hands, scissoring our legs, huddling in groups,
forming shapes with our partners—to reassure ourselves of our individual
existence in the universe. (Dorment 2003)
Such accounts of the event focus on a very familiar kind of theatrical

response in which the subjective comes into renewed focus as a result
of the momentary ritual, collectively undergone—a revitalized human-
ism brought about through the strategic placement of lamps. This may
have been a direct result of the dramaturgy of the piece, since the open
plan design was explicitly arranged so that visitors could view the array
of lamps from both sides. In Ole W. Fischer’s account of the work, he
emphasizes what he sees at Eliasson’s production of ‘body-friendly envi-
ronments’ as linked to Böhme’s thinking about atmosphere as ‘inter-
dependence between the physical perception of an emanating presence
(object) and the realization of the physical presence of the observing
self (subject)’ (2007, 37). This idea of atmosphere as the product of an
object-oriented presencing designed to optimize participation returns us
to the notion of mediation. For Fischer ‘the construction and mediation
of human apperception’ is central to Eliassons’s thinking in relation to
The Weather Project:
Weather in urban societies, he says, is a mediation of indeterminacy, the

unforeseeable, the dialectic of duration and constant movement. The term
‘mediation’ describes the degree of representation that interferes with the
experience of a situation—which can be language, cultural codes, media, or
social, moral and ethical ideologies. Eliasson is well aware, that experience
is mediated per se, but he wants to problematise the subconscious media-
tion (by others). In his works he questions and frames the construction
of accustomed ways of experiencing by inflecting the view of the observer
back on perception: ‘seeing yourself seeing’. (Fischer 2007, 24)
The self-reflexive component of the dramaturgy of atmospheric work is

one of its key elements, but it is properly a question of the mechanics of
vision—that is, actual seeing, rather than a metaphor for perception in
general.
The actualizing of the construction and mediation of sensation and
perception—the materiality of the experience—is vital to understanding
146 E. Scheer
this aspect of animate atmospheres. It is also more than simply a question

of scenography and the placement of mirrors, as Fischer explains:
The Weather Project disclosed its imaginary machinery and was meant to
unmask the artificial aesthetic environment as a constructed experience.
Though Eliasson’s critical inquiry does not halt at his own work, his instal-
lations aim at the frame of the museum as an ‘institution’, not by repeat-
ing formal avant-garde moves, but by taking responsibility of media
reports, public relations, marketing and the museum education of the Tate
Modern. Eliasson believes in the utopian aspect of artwork: ‘museums are
radical’, because they enable alternative frames and constructions of life,
providing evidence, that ‘reality’ is just one out of many possible world
models, and therefore functioning as the ‘immune system’ of society.
(Fischer 2007, 39)
A ‘whole of institution’ approach is in evidence here: the entirety of the

museological apparatus is in play in this project; the back end operations
and public programming were also part of the effort to adjust the apper-
ception of the topic of the weather. As Eliasson himself says, the attempt
to stage weather is ultimately a vital critical gesture because ‘everybody
talks about the weather’ (Eliasson in Fischer 2007, 39) .
Whether it is the staging of an atmosphere (Sloterdijk 2011) or of
‘smart weather’ as the artists of the Blur Building themselves put it, it is
the experience of these animate atmospheres that lies at the core of these
works. An immersion into what Stewart calls a ‘compositional present’,
where forces assume ‘form, texture and density’ not to be represented,
but so that they can be ‘felt, imagined, brought to bear or just born’
(2). It is a form of theatre that integrates a number of contradictory ten-
dencies such as the tension (both dramaturgical and technical) between
the concentration of smoke, fog or cloud, and its dispersal—and the vis-
ibility and invisibility of the building or the apparatus and the environ-
ment. The importance of this work lies not so much in the fact that the
clouds, mists or atmospheres show us things or conceal things, but rather
that they illuminate the production of ways of seeing and not seeing that
have real significance for how we live into the future as life and politics
become ‘the art of the atmospherically possible’ (Sloterdijk 2014, 967).
In its production of an unstable materiality, this type of work is
always in a conflicted state, verging on disappearance and yet also always
in a constant state of production and regeneration. Its dramaturgical
coherence is also a form of careful disorganization—not to create chaos,

but to produce ‘atmospheric communities’ as ways of focusing current
aesthetic production on the future modes of existence in the human park
to come. Walking in these clouds we might like to reassure ourselves
that we are still masters of our atmosphere, and there is a strain of such
thought in evidence in these works: the pleasure of ‘managing’ the cri-
sis. But there is also the equal and opposite sense: that the atmosphere
which we have failed to tend is now doing its own thing and making its
own arrangements. The consequences for the makers and the spectators
in this theatre of animate atmospheres are the same.
Notes
1. As Marianne Van Kerkhoven, an influential dramaturge who worked exten-
sively with Kris Verdonck, explains, they are telling us to ‘listen to the
bloody machine’ (Van Kerkhoven and Nuyens 2012).
2. ‘The enlightened populations of mass democracies who view the election
campaign gesticulations of their parties as a war of weathermen are there-
fore right’ (Sloterdijk 2014, 966).
References
Böhme, Gernot. 1993. Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New
Aesthetics. Thesis Eleven 36 (1): 113–26.
Böhme, Gernot. 2013. The Art of the Stage Set as a Paradigm for an Aesthetics
of Atmospheres. Ambiances: Internation Journal of Sensory Environment,
Architecture and Urban Space. Rediscovering: February. http://ambiances.
revues.org/315. Accessed 28 June 2015.
Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. 2002. Blur: The Making of Nothing. New
York: Harry N. Abrams.
Dorment, Richard. 2003. A Terrifying Beauty. The Telegraph. 12 November.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3606332/A-terrifying-beauty.html
Accessed 15 Mar 2016.
DSRNY. 2002. Blur Building. Diller Scofidio and Renfro Website. http://www.
dsrny.com/projects/blur-building. Accessed 26 Mar 2016.
Eckersall, Peter, Helena Grehan, and Edward Scheer. 2017. New Media
Dramaturgy: Performance, Media and New-Materialism. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
148 E. Scheer
Eliasson, Olafur. 2003. Behind the Scenes. A Roundtable Discussion. In

Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project, ed. Susan May, 65–95. London: Tate
Publishing.
Festival a/d Werf. 2011. Take it Personal. Festival aan de Werf Program. www.
festivalaandewerf.nl/detail.php?id=226. Accessed 5 Apr 2012.
Fischer, Ole W. 2007. Atmospheres—Architectural Spaces Between Critical
Reading and Immersive Presence. Field Journal, 1 (1): 24–41. http://www.
field-journal.org/uploads/file/2007_Volume_1/o%20fischer.pdf. Accessed
15 June 2015.
Johansson, Hanna. n.d. From the Gesture of Breathing to a Mathematical Dead
End. On the Incarnation of the Landscape in Axel Antas’s Art. Axel Antas
Website. http://www.axelantas.net/from-the-gesture-of-breathing/. Accessed
29 Mar 2016.
Papapetros, Spyros. 2012. Movements of the Soul: Traversing Animism,
Saatchi. 2012. Berndaut Smilde. Saatchi Gallery Website. http://www.saatchigal-
lery.com/artists/berndaut_smilde_articles.htm. Accessed 26 Mar 2016.
Slobig, Zachary. 2015. How this Artist Makes Perfect Clouds Indoors. Wired
magazine, June. http://www.wired.com/2015/06/berdnaut-smilde-nim-
bus/. Accessed 30 July 2015.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2011. Neither Sun nor Death. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2014. Globes: Spheres II. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e).
Smilde, Berndaut. 2016. CV. Berndaut Smilde Website. http://www.berndnaut.
nl/cv.htm. Accessed 30 Mar 2016.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2010. Atmospheric Attunements. In Rubric, 1–15. Sydney:
UNSW.
Tate. 2003. Olafur Eliasson the Weather Project: About the Installation. Tate
Modern Website. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/exhibition/unilever-series-
olafur-eliasson-weather-project/olafur-eliasson-weather-project. Accessed 30
Mar 2016.
Tate. 2011. TateShots: Olafur Eliasson. Tate Modern Website, 30 June. http://
www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-olafur-eliasson. Accessed
14 July 2015.
Transsolar. 2015. Cloudscapes | Transolar + Tetsuo Kondo | ZKM | Karlsruhe.
Transolar Website. http://www.transsolar.com/news/cloudscapes-zkm-karlsruhe.
Accessed 15 Mar 2016.
Van Kerkhoven, Marianne, and Anoek Nuyens. 2012. Listen to the Bloody
Machine: Creating Kris Verdonck’s END. Utrecht and Amsterdam: Uitgeverij
International Theatre & Film Books.
Verdonck, Kris. 2014b. Unpublished Interview with Peter Eckersall and Edward
Scheer, 5 August 2014.
Wagner, Thomas. 2010. When Architecture Becomes Invisible. Stylepark,
21 March. http://www.stylepark.com/en/architecture/when-architecture-
becomes-invisible/304534. Accessed 14 Mar 2015.
PART III
Animacy Hierarchies
CHAPTER 8
Intra-inanimation
Rebecca Schneider
Scott: Does that appear human to you Mr. Spock?

Spock: Fascinating. For a moment it appeared almost mineral, like
living rock with heavy fore claws. It’s settling down now to
completely human readings.
Scott: We can beam—it—aboard at any time, sir.
Kirk: Take tricorder readings and see if—it—is human.
[…]
McCoy: Human, Jim.
Kirk: Mr.President!
“The Savage Curtain”, Star Trek, 1969
Liveness is as much a ruse as deadness, animacy as much a ruse as inani-

macy. ‘We’ are only as live, or as non-live, as our habits of parsing such
distinctions instruct. Such distinctions simultaneously delimit an ‘us’
from a ‘them’ or an ‘I’ from an ‘it’. As Mel Chen unpacks in a careful
historicizing of humanist animacy hierarchies, transgressing those limits
or upsetting those hierarchies with something like ‘inanimate life’ queers
both terms—both animate and inanimate (2012, 11, 23–55). Chen sug-
gests that rather than work to reinvest certain materialities with life, as a
great deal of vitalist new materialism proposes (Bennett 2010), we might
R. Schneider (*) 
Brown University, Providence, USA
e-mail: Rebecca_Schneider@brown.edu; simonepersoglia@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_8
154 R. Schneider
instead ‘remap live and dead zones away from those very terms, leverag-
ing animacy toward a consideration of affect in its queered and raced for-
mations’ (Chen 2012, 11). Such a project would take account of what I
elsewhere have termed ‘interinanimacy’.
This chapter is about remapping interinanimacy toward intra-inanimacy.
Here, I wonder whether intra-inanimacy might better touch the slip
and slide of our amongnesses, besidenesses, withnesses and againnesses,
and resist delimiting us, as the prefix ‘inter-’ might be said to do, to an
essentialized ‘betweenness’. Does the prefix ‘inter’ problematically tend
to replay a particular Western agonic relation between traditionally bina-
rized terms, otherwise known as the progress-oriented tool of the dialec-
tic by which dyads such as ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ are continually pitted
in a master/slave battle for hierarchical ‘recognition’?1 Might ‘intra-’
as prefix better disorient habitual relations among binarized terms such
as live and dead, or animate and inanimate, and resist pitting two poles
against each other in agonic battle? But before turning to that question
more fully, let us dwell a little longer with Star Trek, c. 1969/star date
5906.4, to set the stage of our inquiry.
“Savage Curtain”, episode 22 of Star Trek’s third season, first beamed
into American living rooms on 7 March 1969. In that episode, a bit
of rock from a planet deep in space ‘becomes’ Abraham Lincoln and is
encountered by the Enterprise crew as, indeed, their Earthling forebear.
Beyond the comprehension of the crew, Lincoln materializes as both non-
human rock and human life. As the rock become Lincoln steps aboard
the Enterprise, is scanned and read as living, the crew switch from ‘it’ to
‘he’ and the drama begins to unfold. Only the medical doctor McCoy
seems suspicious. As Lincoln and Kirk head from the transporter room
to the bridge, McCoy steps to the side to speak to Scotty:
McCoy: Just what was it you locked onto down there?

Scott: You heard Mr. Spock yourself. Mineral he called it. Like
living rock.
McCoy: And that became Lincoln.2
Scott: I couldn’t tell. There may have been another figure down
there standing by.
This is the most we ever find out about what transpires among rocks and
humans on the planet. McCoy’s word ‘became’ must suffice, toggled
together with Scotty’s strange notion of besideness—or ‘standing by’.
8 INTRA-INANIMATION 155
At the close of the episode, as rock appears to return to rock, we know

no more about it or him or them than the capacity to stand by, and in
standing by, become.
These brief bits of dialogue hail us in the twenty-first century as if
from another galaxy when mid twentieth-century, decidedly liberal
neo-frontierists imagined they could both ‘boldly go where no man has
gone before’ and, in so going, cause no harm.3 They did not, however,
‘leave no trace’. The series, which originally aired from September 1966
to June 1969 on NBC and comprises seventy-nine individual episodes,
is now available for any-time viewing on a variety of internet platforms
(not to mention its many offspring in series spinoffs and feature films).
Star Trek essentially orbits our quotidian neo-liberal lives like fl oating
downloadable detritus of American exceptionalism (Feffer 2015),
still proffering siren songs of a future free of the stains of violence and
injustice—even while making those very historical violences repeatedly
reirrupt across our screens. Indeed, again and again we watch cast as
crew boldly going where no man has gone before, only to find them
repeatedly forced to acknowledge that what they ‘encounter’ as alien is
in fact their own past, which heaves itself to greet them in traumatic fits
and starts, and as, in this episode, geological drift.4
The historical tracks of white conquest and (settler) colonialism
spread the Christo-capitalist world view globally, planting distinctions
between what constitutes live and what constitutes non-live, who con-
stitutes human and who non-human, like flags across capitalism’s creep-
ing, developing, industrializing Anthropocene. Such dyadic distinctions
are deeply racialized, and continually march to the beat of ‘extractive’
exploitation for capital.5 In Star Trek, the supposed opposite of empiric
exploitation is peaceful exploration, and yet episode after episode tracks
the often exploitive interruptions, foibles and sheer inanity of the crew’s
apparent well-meaning missions. They continually encounter, in outer
space, nothing but the fallacy of their own earthbound assumptions (and
this is arguably the great pleasure and promise of the series for its many
fans). In the midst of their incomprehension and their own admitted lack
of any logical explanation, they dig up paradox as deep space theatre in
order to act out, again, the irruptive nature of their ignorance and, con-
tra Spock, indulge their fully human emotions (affect being, here, that
which appears to mark humans as human above all).
“Savage Curtain” finds Kirk and Spock together with rocky Lincoln
beaming back down to the planet to be greeted by a glowing molten
156 R. Schneider
Fig. 8.1 Living Rock in “The Savage Curtain”, Star Trek, Season 3, Episode

22, first broadcast March 7, 1969
rock creature with multiple lightbulby eyes and absurd white-glove crab
claws that it clicks together as it makes historical personages appear. As
Spock says (see the opening epilogue to this chapter): ‘Fascinating. For
a moment it appeared almost mineral, like living rock with heavy fore
claws.’ As the rock draws other historical figures onto the scene, it sets
them all to fighting for their ‘lives’ in what the rock calls, explicitly, a
‘drama’. What do you mean ‘drama’, asks Kirk directly, clearly confused
as his life appears to be at stake. ‘You’re an intelligent life form,’ says the
rock. ‘But I’m surprised you do not perceive the honor we do you. Have
we not created in this place on our planet a stage identical to your own
world?’ Don’t you see that your theatre is your planet and your planet is
alive? (Fig. 8.1)
I start with this rather daft example of a theatre-making, crab-clawed
inanimate life-form from outer space to highlight how absurd the idea
of something/someone being equally inanimate and animate at once
appears to the exemplary space-going liberal humanist trekkers. It’s
strange enough to be presented as precisely that: alien. And yet, at
the same time, that alien becomes ‘us’, both theatrically and in actuality.
Again, in the words of the human/alien Spock: ‘It’s settling down now
to completely human readings’, countering any idea that this Lincoln
might just be merely his own stone statue. A debate about whether the
rock-conjured historical personages were ‘mere’ images runs across the

episode, but ends with Kirk’s resolute and decidedly swooning declara-
tion that, no, he feels that he ‘actually met Lincoln’. The gleam in Kirk’s
eye, captured now in a close-up, is meant to seduce us all to his juicy
sphere of cross-temporal, cross-alien, cross-gender intimacy—a signature
Star Trek swooning that David Greven, drawing on Jack Halberstam, has
recently argued makes original Trek come to seem ‘less like a sexist series
and more like a text that actively solicits the queer eye’ (Greven 2009,
17; Nyong’o 2015). Perhaps it is both/and. In any case, it is curious
that rock become human, and human become rock, is tantamount in this
episode to future becoming past and past future. And indeed the epi-
sode depends on it being unclear as to whether or not the future can
be distinguished from the past, live from non-live, or whether we will
always be greeted by some rocky (as in vertiginous) amalgam. The Star
Trek mineral–human intra-inanimation is at once as cross-temporal as
it is intra-planetary, as if ‘we’ could not touch an inanimate life, or ‘it’
touch ‘us’, without simultaneously travelling both temporally and spa-
tially across or among vast intervals we had hitherto habitually held to be
non-traversable.
So, what might it mean to use the word ‘intra-inanimation’ rather
than interinanimation? Would a move from inter- to intra-make, as Karen
Barad has argued, a world of difference (2003)? To ask this question,
let me first recall the ways I have used ‘interinanimation’ to date. The
tracks of my own thinking about interinanimation were first put forward
in my book Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical
Reenactment (2011). In that book I focused a great deal on US Civil
War reenactments (with plenty of Lincoln doubles of course!) and was
keen to explore how it was that many reenactors believe that they touch
time through their mimetic play. I recycled the word ‘interinanimation’
from two sources that do not cross-reference each other. First, the word
appears in John Donne’s poem The Ecstasy, in which live lovers become
stone statuary and vice versa (as such, the poem is not totally alien to
Star Trek’s “Savage Curtain”, if enormously more artful). I also found
the word usefully deployed in Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of
the Black Radical Tradition, in which different media become themselves
through each other—such as light and music, vision and sound—making
the intervals among media resonant as call and response in the black
radical tradition (2003a).6 In Performing Remains, I recycled the word
interinanimation for its cross-weave of animate and inanimate to suggest
158 R. Schneider
that the live and the non-live become themselves through each other, not
in juxtaposition, and I read such interinanimacy as a basic aspect of thea-
tre as an art form that often plays the dead and the live across each other
on stage. ‘Interinanimation must exceed any mere juxtaposition’, writes
Moten. It requires ‘sustained thinking’ in ‘excess’ of any singular analytic
(2003a, 71)—in excess, as well, he suggests elsewhere, of any binarizing
dialectic (2003b). In Performing Remains, ‘interinanimation’ became a
means to think about the ways in which cross-temporal and cross-media
reenactments allow us to explore the animate and the inanimate as co-
constitutive, and I suggested, as well, that this cross-becoming is a facet
of any reiteration. Anything iterable—gestures, words, and performance
as ‘twice-behaved behavior’ (Schechner 1985, 36)—shares in this interi-
nanimacy as a redoubled or iterative becoming that doesn’t require
that we parse firsts from seconds, originals from copies, becoming ani-
mate from becoming inanimate. In Donne’s The Ecstasy, for example, it
doesn’t ultimately matter whether the lovers are stone or flesh. To distin-
guish stone from flesh definitively, in ultimate juxtaposition, would miss
the means by which the poem dwells in the intervals, lingers with the
interstitial.
Much of my engagement with interinanimacy tracks with the affec-
tive turn to relationality in critical thinking. We might recall with black
feminist theory that intersectionality is a method of thinking about our
relations that is better embraced though logics of both/and rather than
either/or. This both/and should inflect our animate/inanimate distinc-
tions as much as it inflects other culturally hierarchized binarisms. As
Patricia Hill Collins and Selma Bilge explain succinctly:
Relational thinking rejects either/or binary thinking, for example, oppos-

ing theory to practice, scholarship to activism, or blacks to whites. Instead,
relationality embraces a both/and frame. The focus of relationality shifts
from analysing what distinguishes entities, for example, the differences
between race and gender, to examining their interconnections. The shift in
perspective opens up intellectual and political possibilities. (2016, 27)
Alexander Weyeliye similarly reminds us that relationality is always mul-

tiple, and contains constellations of paradox that should not revert to
a dialectic of overcoming but instead open out to the ‘many ways’ for
movement of and in differences, including historical and ongoing prac-
tices (plural) of both subjugation and freedom:
Relationality provides a productive mode for critical inquiry and politi-

cal action within the context of black and critical ethnic studies, because
it reveals the global and systemic dimensions of racialized, sexualized, and
gendered subjugation, while not losing sight of the many ways political
violence has given rise to ongoing practices of freedom within various tra-
ditions of the oppressed. (2014, 13)
Here, focus on violence does not lose sight of freedom, and focus on
freedom does not lose sight of violence. The site of the slash in Collins
and Bilge’s both/and is something of an interval for escape and linger-
ing, affirmation and refusal, sidestepping and standing by. Always there
is opening, for a first time that is also again, of ‘political possibilities’—a
‘shift’ in and of ‘perspective’.
In later thought on the term interinanimation for a publication in
Performance Philosophy, I engaged the word as a way to talk about ges-
ture given that gesture (such as a raised or waving hand) jumps across
bodies and across times to both reanimate and render us in intimate rela-
tion with the inanimate, the live in intimate relation with the bygone.
Gesture, for Marcel Mauss, is essentially iterative: it becomes itself
through its capacities to be reiterated (see Noland 2009, 101), and as
such crosses boundaries that separate us in time as well as in space. In
that publication, titled ‘In Our Hands’ and written in conversation with
Lucia Ruprecht, I gave my interlocutor the example of a waving hand,
reiterating the long tradition of thinking with hands in phenomenology,
to think about crossing time and space through gesture.
I wave my hand and call to you, saying hello. Perhaps only a moment later
you respond. You wave and say ‘hello.’ The time of my hello is not the
time of your hello. And yet, the two times are also imbricated one in the
other. When I call out to you, I extend time in one sense. My word is
a gesture by which I reach across one time, into another time. And you,
in responding, double back (though ‘back’ may not be the only direc-
tion) across my time and respond to me. Our times become one time, one
might say. Or might we say that the time of your ‘hello’ carries, through
reiteration posed as response, my time? Perhaps my ‘hello’ has returned
to me, as one time in another time. My word in your mouth. My wave
in your hand. It might be possible to say, as well, that my ‘hello’ opened
an interval and carried one time (the time of my call) into a future where
it might meet a response—in this case, your response. (Schneider in
Schneider and Ruprecht 2017)
160 R. Schneider
I was interested, in conversation with Ruprecht, to use interinanimation

to think about gesture as enunciating an interval, or recycling call and
‘response-ability’ (2017). Much of my impetus for thinking with and as
gesture grew out of a question about gestural duration. How long is a
wave a wave? And what moves between hand and hand? Moreover, as a
carrier of affect, gesture may be contagious, or always carry more with it
than the so-called intentions of an isolated gesturing body or thing. If we
think of gesture as in any way contagious, or catchable, ridable, or even
riding us, we might ask if gesture ever belongs only to one body or if it
takes up its place as gesture among bodies, among things. This might be
to ask whether gesture is proper to the hand or thing that is waving, or
if, instead, gesture is that which might precede an articulation, and/or
move off the hand and toward the relations it beckons, invites, or oth-
erwise might provoke (whether it succeeds in such provocation immedi-
ately or not)? Might the air that moves as the hand moves also be said to
gesture? Might the stone that leans into a painter or a sculptor be said to
sculpt, or to hail a hand in interinanimation?
My interest in gesture and duration had been sparked years before. In
2013 I had made a trip to witness, first hand, negative handprints made
by humans in the Paleolithic in numerous caves of the Dordogne and
Lot in France. I wanted to ask about the hand as hail, and think about
the duration of gesture and the intervals between gesture’s reiterations.
Might 25,000 years, or 40,000, be traversable hand to hand? If gestures
are primarily ‘iterable techniques’ (Noland 2009, 101), then how could
one iteration (my hand, say, raised in hail) be understood in total tempo-
ral isolation from subsequent (or previous) iterations of a hand raised in
hail? Iterations, after all, require intervals. Iterations necessarily jump—
time, space and bodies—to become themselves as gestures in re-iteration.
Is there a statute of limitation on response-ability? (Fig. 8.2)
Heading to France in 2013 I wondered: if I meet a Paleolithic hand
(a first hand) with a second hand, my own, meeting that first hand first
hand, what would become of first and second? Standing in the cave,
why would I be more ‘live’, more ‘vital’, in responding to, or even in
recognizing, the Paleolithic hand, than the first hand was/is/or contin-
ues to be in making the hail together with stone? In the logic of call
and response, wouldn’t response, in reverse, also initiate the hail as hail?
Which hand makes the hail a hail? That is, even if the cave hand wasn’t
‘originally’ a hail, does it become one—even illegitimately—by virtue of
response? Or does it become, backward, a response by virtue of a hail?
Fig. 8.2 Pech Merle Hand, Paleolithic‚ Lot‚ France. ART Collection/Alamy

Stock Photo
If I fundamentally engage the Paleolithic hand because I also have one,

and respond to the gesture of the upheld palm because I also make one
or might make one, does liveness, as a matter of exchange, exist only
as intervallic reiteration (which is neither sameness nor difference but
both)?7 Is there then a time limit on the interval? Or on liveness?
It may be too easy to think of these teasing questions with human
hands, which conveniently come to us as inversions of one and
another. Can we think about the hail—an inaugurating or recycling of
162 R. Schneider
relation—without the human? We could excise the human from the

hail entirely and ask whether the rock itself (regardless of the trace of
the human) might be approached as performing a hail, moving, in deep
time, with a gesture of its own cast to its own and its others. The hail is,
interestingly, what W.J.T. Mitchell implicitly gives to any and all images
and objects in What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images?
(2005, 37), and Robin Bernstein put it extremely succinctly: ‘Things
hail’ (2009, 69). Certainly ‘things’ hail each other with or without
humans, as Roger Caillois astutely suggested using the word ‘mimesis’
in 1934 to discuss the intrainanimate ricochet among stick insects and
twigs, twigs and insects (1984). I like the notion of the hail because it
opens and perhaps suspends or extends an interval, thereby extending an
opening for response. Even as it activates ideology,8 a hail and its atten-
dant interval might also open worlds for difference, or, as Henri Bergson
might have it, for radical heterogeneity in the otherwise homogenizing
vibrancy of everything (2007).
I am interested to think about the interval as opening in infinite direc-
tions both spatially and temporally, thus offering a continual invitation
for difference. This is because one of my concerns, reductively articulated
here, is an ahistoricity in the new materialist turn that privileges the live-
ness of everything (Bennet 2010). There is a potential essentialism (an
essentializing of potential), and if not anthropomorphizing then a molec-
ularizing that can rush in at the door of a generalized neoanimacy (see
Rosenberg 2014). Rather than generalized animacy, a cross-temporal
and cross-spatial interval would have to invite us to both reencounter his-
tory and open continual emergence. Call and response weave past and
future in intervallic resonance. To call the past to appear for account, or
to be called by the past to respond with account, is to change the past
as a means to change the future, just as change in the future requires
a change in our habituations, our calls to and our response-abilities to
and for our pasts. In this sense, the past is an ongoing performance of
reemergent actuality, full of performance’s potential and performance’s
drag. In the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty from the midst of his
reflections on in-handedness and tactility in the face of the flesh of the
world: ‘the past, then, is not past, nor is the future future’ (2012, 444).
In the words of Christina Sharpe, navigating the historical wake of slave
ships, ‘in the wake, the past that is not past reappears’ (2016, 9). And
obviously, for a ship named Enterprise (few names would sound more
solidly as monikers for capitalism) that sails outer space from the midst
of the Cold War to forge a wake called the future, the past that is not
past reappears as the future that is not future. Past, present and future—
bygone, living, yet to come—are intra-articulate and intra-present, com-
posed in each other through call and response. None are animate nor
inanimate, but a rocking, vertiginous both/and in which ‘matters’ are
both historical and emergent—open, unresolved, indeterminate and in
‘our’ extended hands.
After all: nothing lives alone. Such is the precarity of animacy—its
dependency, its vulnerability, its intra-relation with others—others such
as air, or rock, or water. Bios cannot be separated from necros, animacy
from inanimacy. Like breath carrying inanimacy in animacy, in and out,
in and out, (in)animacy is as much the air that moves across the borders
of a body’s inside and outside as it is the body breathing, as it is the rock
the body stands on, or the water it contains. That which is animated is
thus as much the body that moves as it is the moving rock, the moving
air, the moving water that moves the moving body. Animate and inani-
mate are intra-(in)animate without completely delimitable borders on
the ‘here’ of one or the ‘now’ of another.
For some reason I feel that this is all totally obvious. And yet, by habit
of academic convention, I do not cite the rock I am thinking with here
as co-author. I am not alone in this, obviously. Consider that Merleau-
Ponty described but did not cite the matter of the writing table that sup-
ported his writing hand (over which he obsessed). Neither did he cite
as co-authors those who worked at the kitchen table in another part of
his house, nor those who laboured in the field to bring the food to that
table (Ahmed 2006, 25–64). Nor did he cite the food he ate, nor the
water he drank as it intra-inanimated his writing—dare we say, as they
all wrote? This animacy hierarchy in authorship is not unrelated to the
academic convention that would not find it acceptable for me to cite
my dead great-grandmother. My great-grandmother and her mothers
were so-called ‘illiterate’ and therefore could not ‘write’ for the domi-
nant cultural archive to tell of the legacy of Indian Removal they wit-
nessed, living as they did on the Trail of Tears. Nevertheless, she found
a way to callrespond as a spirit or a ghost—and in that state she was dis-
tinctly animated and seriously articulate. Still, how can I cite a ghost in
an academic bibliography? The story of her visitation must be a story for
another day, but suffice to say here that, indeed, the inanimate ‘write’
(Lakey 1989).
164 R. Schneider
For now, it is enough to keep trying to think with the extended hand
at the scene of cross-temporal exchange as I stand in the cave at Pech
Merle and encounter my first hand live. I want to respond. At the time it
didn’t seem to me to matter what exactly was intended by the so-called
human when she raised a hand to so-called rock. As some paleontolo-
gists have suggested (though others disagree), it may have been the rock
that was hailing and the hand responding, or the hand that was enter-
ing or otherwise intra-inanimating with rock. Cave paintings may have
served as portals, with rock potentially entered through dream states of
trance and by virtue of ritual—the rock, in this case, a kind of curtain or
threshold to alternate galaxies of experience with and through rockhand
handrock.9 So, for me, standing there awkwardly with my own hand,
it seemed moot to decide precise meanings for the hand raised in hail
(hello, goodbye, stop, come close, refusal, invitation, hey, you there!,
or move along). In the (negative) space among hands and among rock
there opened intervals, and those intervals contained multitudes. The
undecidability or indeterminacy of an interval at the extended threshold
of response is perhaps what Andre Lepecki, channelling Erin Manning,
means by the neologism ‘leadingfollowing’. ‘Leadingfollowing’ is how
Lepecki describes Manning’s description of the complexities of intra-
action in much dance practice where follower(s) in fact cue leader(s)
and a follower can be said, as often as not, to initiate (Manning 2009,
108). The same might be said of call and response—where the response
is also a call that invites a change in the meaning of the received or recy-
cled hail. In either case, between the bodies of dancers or in the inter-
val between a call and response, there is both historicity and virtuality:
anything can (have) happen(ed).10 Responding to Manning, Lepecki
posits the undecidability of leadingfollowing as ‘dancing in the interval’
(2013, 36). By ‘dancing in the interval’ Lepecki is leadingfollowing the
thoughts of Jacques Ranciere: The interval, for Ranciere, is the opening
for dissensus and dissensus is the happening, the taking place, the ani-
macy, of politics (2010).
In ‘Living Rocks: Animacy, Performance and the Rock Art of the
Kilmartin Region, Argyll, Scotland’, Andrew Meirion Jones considers
Neolithic rock art to be ongoing performance. But he does not roman-
ticize animacy by virtue of the molecular. Rather, he posits: ‘prehistoric
carvers perceived the rocks—on which the rock art of the region was
carved—as animate’. Rather than assuming that people imbued the rocks
of the region with false agency, he asks that we assume that ‘people were
instead responding to the animacy of the rocks’ (Jones 2012, 79). Jones
is describing an intra-agentic exchange of call and response. In Jones’s
estimation, perhaps the rocks were hailing and Neolithic carvers were
responding, and Neolithic humans and non-humans were actively partici-
pating: call and response with stone that in turn produced another call to
‘successive generations visiting the rocks’ (2012, 86) who might, upon
their visit, submit the scene to ‘re-use’ (Cochrane and Jones 2012, 9).11
Here the emphasis shifts away from a generalized claim about the animacy
of everything, and onto the idea of interstitial relations across varieties
of heterogeneous beings engaging in call and response. In this case ani-
macy, like agency, might be considered to move among human and non-
human in an intra-in-animate weave of call and response-ability. Animacy,
here, might be akin to the cut, or the interval, across which we call to
each other into relations—relations that always open, as Collins and Bilge
suggest, to potential shifts in perspectives and possibilities for politics.
Similarly, animacy, here, might be akin to mimesis—the action of becom-
ing through repetition that is not representation but iteration.
Returning to the question of supplanting inter- with intra- in the
neologism interinanimation, what might be at stake? In her 2003 essay
“Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter
Comes to Matter”, Barad distinguished interaction from intra-action:
The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which

presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a
profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions
that the boundaries and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena
become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become mean-
ingful. A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration
of the “apparatus of observation”) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to
the Cartesian cut—an inherent distinction—between subject and object)
effecting [rather than rendering inherent] a separation between ‘subject’
and ‘object.’ (2003, 815)
Adopting intra- for intrainanimation‚ we might say that animate and

inanimate both differentiate and co-become each other through a cut,
or interval, in and as relation without the resultant distinction among
intra-actants being essentially prior to or inherent in the interval of their
exchange. For example, writing of living with mercury in an experience
of ‘mercury poisoning’, Chen describes sharing animacy and inanimacy
166 R. Schneider
with the mineral that is being hosted. Deciding which was living the
life—Chen or the mineral—becomes impossible to parse in what Chen
hails a queer intimacy (2012). Each becomes the other. Each looks
out through the other’s eyes—not so much interacting as intra-acting.
That our intra-actions may be mimetic (which is not to say representa-
tional) as we cross-become each other across difference is key to thinking
of intra-actions as reiterative. Again Barad: ‘matter does not refer to a
fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—
not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing
and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity’ (2003, 822, original
emphasis). You may note that I used the word ‘reiterative’ in advance of
Barad’s ‘iterative’. I did this because, in fact, the dictionary definition of
‘iterate’ is, precisely, ‘to perform or utter repeatedly’. Iteration is always
already reiteration, and reiteration is iteration. Repetition is a mode of
becoming that pronounces a cut, and, paradoxically perhaps, always (re)
opens a door for difference in and through manifestations of the sup-
posed same. Both/and. The difference (or the alien) that might appear,
however, even in the full-on kitsch of something like Star Trek, may
appear to appear again, inviting ‘us’ to alienate or disorient our habitua-
tions and offer account for our so-called selves in the wake of a future we
hope to change.
Let us return to our future-travelling crew on the starship Enterprise
and the rocklife that resets the human life-forms upon their own histori-
cal stage. Watching the episode, I heard the rock pronounce the planet’s
name as ‘Exculpia’. This turned out to be a mistake. In the screenplay,
I found the name written as ‘Excalbia’—a word easily misrecognized
along the aural fault lines of a homonym. Listening to the actor‚ I took
the planet’s name to be a word play on exculpation, and thus suggesting
‘without fault’ or, perhaps, fault under erasure.
Exculpatory means, of course, evidence tending to exonerate or
remove blame. Why is Abraham Lincoln played out ‘again’ as geological
life, or as ongoing life in geological time? And what part of that replay
concerns fault and its exculpation or reconciliation? Fault, of course, is a
word meaning both an extended break in a body of rock, marked by the
displacement and discontinuity of strata, and the bearing of responsibil-
ity for unfortunate or mistaken action.
At a disarmingly awkward moment early in “Savage Curtain”,
Lincoln, only recently arrived on the ship as a living lump of stone, awk-
wardly apologizes to Uhura for his impulsive use of the word ‘negress’.
Fig. 8.3 Kirk‚ Uhura and Lincoln in “The Savage Curtain”, Star Trek, Season
3, Episode 22, first broadcast March 7, 1969
He quickly says: ‘Oh, forgive me, my dear! I know that in my time some
used that term as a description of property.’ (Fig. 8.3)
Though Lincoln’s gendered phrase ‘my dear’ performs a patron-
izing dismissal that reminds us how far, in fact, we hadn’t come in our
so-called bold-going future, the script clearly intends this cross-temporal
apology to somehow resonate with its audience. But Uhura dismisses his
apology cheerfully, just this side of throwing shade: ‘But why should I
object to that term, sir? You see, in our century we’ve learned not to
fear words.’ Certainly the actress Nichelle Nichols can be seen to be hard
at work in this segment of her script, in which a past that hails her at
the level of skin hails her again in order for Uhura to dismiss them as
‘mere words’. Nichols’s teeth look clenched, however, suggesting it’s not
quite possible to fully pull off, to felicitously perform the future in which,
as she effectively tells Lincoln, ‘words mean nothing’. After all, her dis-
missal of words comes from the bridge of the ship her character serves as
‘Communications Officer’, where she spends her hyper-mini-skirted days
listening for words to translate across the universe in case those words
mean harm! A universe in which, as this and other episodes show, the
past is nothing if not irruptive. In any case, what I also want to point
out is that what we have here is a lump of land apologizing for the out-
modedness of a time when humans considered beings (humans and land
168 R. Schneider
alike) as property. This, in a show beamed into American living rooms

on the eve of neo-liberalism’s extensive privatizations—the becoming
private property of everything—is hard to quite fathom. Is this an acting
out or a working through—completely inchoate though it may be—of
the fact that extractive exploitation of land for capital was and is intra-
inanimated with exploitations of flesh and labour in colonial-capital
formations of empire, now as then?
Stranger still, Lincoln’s makeup inexplicably blackens as the episode
progresses. A troubling growth of blackface occurs incrementally across
the rock-human, like some form of historical creeping lichen. By the
close of the episode, Lincoln is made to appear ape-like (it’s entirely
unclear what the makeup artists were attempting here, though perhaps
it is all meant to resonate with the title ‘savage’ as well as with the allu-
sion to theatricality in ‘curtain’?). At one point, blackened Rock/Lincoln
faces the camera in a full frontal close-up that presents him as a bust. He
is in full blackface at this point, and says, stone still and staring directly at
his future audience: ‘I was reputed to be a gentle man when I was com-
mander in chief during the four bloodiest years of my country’s history.
I gave orders that sent 100,000 men to their death at the hands of their
brothers.’
He has been holding onto a stick fashioned into a spear that has a sin-
gle leaf left, dangling precariously and trembling throughout his speech.
Since he is stone still, the trembling leaf is oddly magnified in the frame.
Just after Lincoln confesses his culpability in the bloodshed, the actor sud-
denly looks away from the audience and stares at his hand, also blackened
inexplicably. The actor performs a kind of gasp and opens his hand across
the screen. In fact, this odd move is performed as if his hand is independ-
ent of his body, as if it might strike him across a fault line in the rock
that is his self, or across the history that is not past. His hand trembles
now like the leaf as he says, simply, to Kirk: ‘There is no honorable way to
kill.’ This bit of confessional, this spoken admission of culpability on the
planet that sounds like Exculpia, reminds viewers of the whiter Lincoln
who opened the episode, and his precedent awkward apology for prop-
erty. Here he is barely able, like the leaf, to keep from trembling, but he
heads into battle (this time to try and fail to save the Vulcan historical
forefather Surak who has also mysteriously materialized from rock), and
we can be fairly sure that this will not be the last time, as it is not the
first time, that ‘Lincoln’ ‘dies’. It is entirely appropriate to ask, of course,
without recourse to a singular answer, whether this is an undoing of
Fig. 8.4 Lincoln in “The Savage Curtain”, Star Trek, Season 3, Episode 22, first
broadcast 7 March 1969
‘civilization’ in the name of the ‘savage curtain’, or a redoing of racializ-

ing tropes, hurtling them into our future unremarked. Perhaps it is both/
and. Clearly, the very racialization for which rematerialized ‘Lincoln’ apol-
ogizes is far from over and gone (it plays out again in the episode itself),
and yet this seems to be part and parcel of what is being ‘explored’ in
an episode that tries to go where no man has gone before.12 Suffice to
say that Star Trek approaches history by standing by, or side-stepping with
it via the future, in an attempt that simultaneously works, faulty though
its attempts may be, to undo the animacy hierarchy between human and
non-human. Perhaps this undoing is undone only for the sake of theat-
rical alienation—the cheap thrills that would, during commercial breaks,
sell hand soap and Jello to mid-century consumers. But we would do well
to recall that, for Bertolt Brecht, ‘alienation’ as theatrical technique could
also work to open the opportunity for critical thought and, in the wake of
that thought, the potential for social and political change—the potential
for queering habit right out of its orbit. (Fig. 8.4)
Fascinatingly, the Enterprise crew’s inability to parse live and non-
live doubles in this episode as an inability to parse past and present,
as well as a challenge to distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. As the
glowing red hunk of molten rock says at the close, challenging dyadic
world views: ‘You have failed to demonstrate to me any difference
170 R. Schneider
between your philosophies. Your good and your evil use the same
methods, achieve the same results. Do you have an explanation?’
And all Kirk can do is point a finger at the rock and shout angrily
that it’s rock’s fault for setting the scene and being the ground of the
repetitive action! Petulant, all Kirk wants are ‘the lives’ of his crew.
And yet, just what is live and what is not, what is human and what is
non-human, are no longer discernible to anyone in the orbit of the
episode.
At the episode’s close, with music gently surging, Kirk enigmat-
ically says: ‘There is still so much of their work to be done in the
galaxy.’ Their work? Mineral work? The work in which mineral life
forces settler-colonial humans with their deadly extraction machines
to account for the violences of our future’s pasts? We might well won-
der at such life, like Lincoln’s, that keeps on living like lichen in the
cracks of our encounters. The wakes of the slave ships of the middle
passage, which keep ‘us’ in their wake. The tracks of the many treks—
the many Star Trek spinoff ships and fandom slash fantasies ‘shipping’
roles that have catapulted off the earth in search of queer alien life—
all seem like waves that keep on waving.13 Quests that keep on quest-
ing. A question Tavia Nyong’o has posed of recombinant Star Trek
fantasies, such as the erotic pairing of Kirk and Spock or Spock and
Uhura, is resonant here:
Are shippers just digging deeper into homonormative pathologies, or are

they displaying the restless and recombinant inventiveness of a connective
generation, when they attempt to resolve the real contradictions of race,
gender, and sexuality by reimagining slash fiction, beyond the erotic dyad,
as a kind of super team? (2015, n.p.)
Might one answer both/and? To boldly ask what we’ve asked again and
again?
Meanwhile, back on earth and deep inside, a 25,000-year-old hand
is held in tandem with rock. A call ongoing, perhaps. Might we think,
with the rockhand handrock, how to handle our planetary relationships
differently? How to approach the matter of intra-inanimacy with respect
for humans, for land and for all lifeways that circulate among us all,
across vast stretches of time, vast stretches of space as well as at the tini-
est increment of a single quivering leaf? Here, still, I might well agree,
even without knowing precisely what such a statement might mean:

‘There is still so much of their work to be done in the galaxy.’ And with
that, the audience stands by as Kirk simply asks Mr Sulu to: ‘Break us out
of orbit.’ If I listen errantly, I might just get it wrong. Break us out of
habit. Break us out of habit. I listen and listen again in the faultlines, in
the shipping, in the break. Break us out.
Notes
1. See Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial
Politics of Recognition, on the dialectic as a tool of settler-colonialism
(2014).
2. DeForest Kelley, who plays McCoy, does not inflect this line as a question
but delivers it as a statement in his performance. In an online script copy-
righted by CBS, the line is followed by a question mark. Kelley slightly
alters other of his lines as well. The dialogue here is lifted from his spo-
ken word in the taped episode. http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/77.
htm.
3. Debates on Star Trek’s politics are numerous. The claim to white nation-
alism is made by Daniel Bernardi (1998); counter-arguments are made
by George A. Gonzalez (2015). For the vexed influence of Star Trek on
Afrofuturism, see the collection edited by Anderson and Jones (2016).
4. From Star Trek’s third season see not only “Savage Curtain”‚ but also ‘The
Spectre of the Gun’ for forced alien history reenactments in the future.
5. Coulthard (2014) always couples the word colonial with the word capital
as he sees the two systems of exploration and exploitation as inextricably
entwined. I follow his lead in this chapter.
6. See also Thomas DeFranz and Anita Gonzalez in Black Performance
Theory on call and response as a ‘continual unfolding of experience’; that
is, expressly, a manifestation of global ‘black sensibilities’ (2014, 8, 11).
7. For Bergson, because multiplicity makes up the unity of duration, dura-
tion is essentially heterogeneous and simultaneous, and thus one must
reverse habitual modes of thought and place oneself within duration by
intuition (2007, 165–168).
8. See Schneider and Ruprecht (2017) for commentary on the hail in rela-
tionship to the activation of ideology.
9. Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams in The Shamans of Prehistory lit-
erally ‘set out to encounter the shamans’ (1998, 23) by visiting the
caves where the ‘shamanistic potency’ of the images is a ‘life force’ (23)
and where the panels are not ‘mere pictures’ but ‘gateways to the spirit
172 R. Schneider
world’, a ‘stage set awaiting the shamanic actors’ (35). Note, they seek to
encounter the shamans themselves by virtue of a live passage through the
‘gateway’ of their art. This view, which is sometimes manifested in writing
that bears the ecstatic flavour of the ‘trance’ it seeks to explore, has been
deeply criticized by Paul Bahn, who writes that it represents a ‘great leap
backwards’ (2008, 15). Useful books for situating heated debates in the
study of cave art are Mats Rosengren (2012) and Gregory Curtis (2006).
Yann Montelle’s Paleolithic Performance: The Emergence of Theatricality
as a Social Practice looks to the artwork for ‘gestural patterns’ learned
through ‘hands on’ experience that can be ‘reactivated’ for excavation by
live bodily knowledges (2009, 50–51).
10. Ironically, the interval is provoked to thought by collapsing the literal
interval between words as in leadingfollowing, callresponse, subjecto-
bject, livingdead, manwoman, interinanimate and so on. This may be a
redistribution of the sensible that invites a queering or disorientation of
normative alignments but also, again perhaps ironically, mirrors modes of
address in the digital age where the size or speed of intervals has in some
cases been rapidly diminishing (think of publicprivate) even as other gaps
have exponentially grown (think of the growing gap between rich and
poor).
11. Jones argues that rock carving is a ‘performance’ and participates in an
‘interconnected series of performances’ (2012, 87). Though he distin-
guishes performance from representation in the introduction to the vol-
ume, co-written with Andrew Cochrane, the suggestion is also made that
such work might be ‘both representations and performances’, stressing the
‘performative nature of representation’ (Cochrane and Jones, 2012, 3).
12. The series Star Trek is also responsible for the first onscreen interracial kiss,
though it is an enforced one, performed through coercion in outer space
between Kirk and Uhura within a reenactment of ancient Greece that
looks more like ancient Rome in an episode titled ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’.
That episode, like “Savage Curtain”, simply boggles the mind.
13. The word ‘shipping’, shortened from relationship, is used in fandom to
signify the desire by fans to place two or more characters or actors in a
relationship, often romantic. This is also known as ‘slash’.
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Press.
CHAPTER 9
Animacies and Performativity
Amelia Jones and Christopher Braddock
Chris Braddock: I’d like to explore relationships between performativ-

ity and animacy. I single out your (1998) book Body Art/Performing the
Subject as marking a critical moment for a reevaluation of the body in
performance art from the 1960s to the 1990s. In particular, I’m think-
ing of your performative understanding of an artist enacted through
processes of commodification and criticism (as art object) and intersub-
jectively related to audiences and interpretation (1998, 10, 12). Fast
tracking forward to your TDR: The Drama Review article in 2015,
“Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic ‘Work,’ and New Concepts of
Agency”, you say about Cassils’s performance, ‘I have a particularly vis-
ceral relationship to this hunk of clay-flesh. Surely it smells of sweat? It
has the texture of skin. It is a body to me. It reanimates Cassils’s actions’
(2015, 20). How are you thinking about objects and their materials as
animating or reanimating performance?
A. Jones (*) 
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
e-mail: ameliagjones@gmail.com; ameliaj@usc.edu
C. Braddock 
School of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_9
178 A. Jones and C. Braddock
Amelia Jones: Thanks for this probing question, which brings

together much earlier work of mine and my more recent work explor-
ing ‘material traces’, which culminated in the 2013 show at the Leonard
and Ellen Bina Art Gallery in Montreal, and which featured your work
and that of Cassils. I think what I say about Cassils here could apply in
a slightly different way to your work in the show—from the Take series
(2007–2013). The clay was animated by you/Cassils (in Cassils’s case
through violent battering, in your case through pressing and squeezing
epoxy clay against your body). The clay then took a final form, harden-
ing over time. The clay bears the signs of what I call ‘having been made’.
In apprehending such materials—with overt signs of the making pro-
cess visible—we respond through a kind of kinaesthetic and sensory but
also psychic process. Whether we are aware of it or not, we ‘feel’ a sense
of the making and this informs how we experience the work—thereby
informing its meaning and value (Fig. 9.1).
What I find so interesting about such material approaches to perfor-
mance, which result in these material effects, is that they provide a totally
different way to think about art as process. This is very ‘visual arts’ ori-
ented as an approach—very different from performance art that is moti-
vated by theatrical or sadomasochistic concerns, to name two other
major avenues often inspiring performance artists.
In turn, as your question suggests, even if we view the clay as an after-
effect of performance—as ‘documenting’ or in some way memorializ-
ing an action—it is still itself a work of art. So your project, and that
of Cassils (as well as that of Paul Donald, whose work inspired and was
also included in the Material Traces show), create a conceptual feedback
loop among artist–material, artist–audience, material–audience. And all
three of you also use representational modes to comment further on the
relationship between bodies (artist/viewers) and materialities—in your
case the video Above (2007), in Cassils’s case photographs made of the
act of pummelling the clay, and in Donald’s case various modes of pho-
tographic or videographic representation that heighten our awareness
of the making process and its relationship to materialities. Performance
becomes the act of making something, but also itself has a profound
relationship to materiality. Donald’s work, which includes performances
directed towards the transformation of materials such as wood, explicitly
foregrounds this feedback loop.
CB: I’m interested in how you view the temporality of these art-
works. Your notion of ‘having been made’, as well as the idea of so-called
9 ANIMACIES AND PERFORMATIVITY 179
Fig. 9.1 Cassils, Becoming An Image Performance Still No. 3, 2013. c-print,

22 × 30 in. National Theatre Studio, SPILL Festival, London. Photo: Cassils
with Manuel Vason. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
‘documentation’ as a feedback loop, seems to call into question a specific

point where the work exists. Certainly, my experience of making the Take
series (2007–2013) complies with this understanding. Because the epoxy
resin clay I use against my body takes about 6 to 8 hours to ‘go off’, I
spent long solitary days in the studio grappling with this warm ‘animate’
material, literally unable to put it down. Then, during the Montréal
exhibition, audiences would pick them up, applying them to their own
bodies, trying to work out some kind of bodily correlation. And in this
sense, participants continually reanimate the work in a very corporeal and
fleshy manner. In your thinking about objects and their materials as ‘hav-
ing been made’, or as reanimating performance, how does this relate to
the temporality or event of performance? (Fig. 9.2)
AJ: I’m not sure what you’re getting at here, but I’ll try to tease out
what interests me—as a performance scholar trained in ‘materialities’
Fig. 9.2 Christopher Braddock, Take series, 2007–2013, Epoxy clay, trestle

table. Above, 2007, Video installation, 28 min. In Material Traces: Time and the
Gesture, 2013, Galerie Leonard and Bina Ellen, Concordia University, Montréal,
Québec, Canada. Curated by Amelia Jones. Courtesy of the artist
(art history)—with these very particular kinds of practices. By animat-

ing materialities in relation to anticipated (and then actualized) experi-
ences, Donald/Cassils/Braddock extend the performative very explicitly
and visibly into the ‘hardened’ or finalized forms that gallery visitors
later encounter. In the projects of Cassils and Braddock, clay is used as
a materiality (moulded, pummelled, assaulted) that literally hardens into

a more or less ‘final’ object. In the work of Donald, wood has recently
been the materiality—marked, cut, whittled, stacked by the labour-
ing body of the artist. The point is that these materialities, encountered
possibly at the moment of their shaping (with Cassils and with some of
Donald’s projects) but more often at a later moment in time, make us
aware, as we experience their physicality, clearly ‘made’ by hand, of the
act of making (or, as I like to say more specifically, of their ‘having been
made’). All art—even the most dematerialized conceptual art—was made
at one time (even if by this we mean ‘conceived’ as an idea). But these
practices are fascinating to me because they are conceptually driven by
an interest in exploring how objects can communicate the performative
labour of their having been made, encouraging us to become aware of
the temporality of the event of making, which (in works that are not live
performances) inevitably took place in the past. The projects are driven
by what appears to me as I experience them to be an acute awareness
of the hinge between material and body (as conceiving and making, but
also as later experiencing).
CB: Can we also return to your comment about how Cassils, Donald
and myself use representational modes to comment further on relation-
ships between bodies (including artists and viewers) and materialities?
In my case the amount of time and strenuous labour involved in mak-
ing sculptural works like the Take series (2007–2013) sparked sound
works and the video Above for which the camera hovers above my body
capturing me in plan view strenuously pushing and slapping some-
thing between my legs. But the image never reveals the product of the
labour—it’s about a staged, almost theatrical, process of making/per-
forming for which I was very cognisant of your ‘Pollockian Performative’
and the ways in which the camera solicits viewpoints: i.e., Pollock shot
from underneath a sheet of glass by Hans Namuth in 1950 and so on
(1998, 103). This staged performance of labour is evident with Cassils’s
arduous pummelling of clay (as you say) that takes place in dimmed
lighting or darkness. In fact, in some images of this process, the audi-
ence becomes revealed through flash photography. And I was thinking
here about Donald’s Would Work, his striking performance/installation
for the “Nothing Like Performance” show at Sydney Artspace in
2011, curated by Blair French, for which Donald attempted to build
an unsupported bridge across the gallery space that held his weight as
he progressed across and through space, and how this process was
Fig. 9.3 Paul Donald, Would Work, 2011. Detail of performance/installation.

In Nothing Like Performance, 2011, Artspace, Sydney, Australia. Curated by Blair
French. Courtesy of Artspace and Silversalt Photography
constantly documented during the show (the process of making the

bridge was filmed in real time, and each day the previous day’s video-
tape was added to a growing series of monitors on the floor in front of
the bridge) (Fig. 9.3). This seems to relate to what you said way back in
1998, that the artist is ‘self-consciously performed through new, openly
intersubjective contexts (including video or ironicized modes of photo-

graphic display) which insist upon the openness of this and all subjects to
the other’ (1998, 67), which relates of course to one of your main con-
cerns, to unravel the systems and structures that allow us to interpret the
objects of performance. This certainly corresponds, in turn, to the way in
which you have always questioned the idea that representation somehow
directly relates to some immutable thing like the artist’s feelings or a ref-
erent in the world. Can you elaborate on what you mean by representa-
tion here?
AJ: This is the paradox. Precisely because they so directly elaborate
and act as ‘traces’ of the processes of their having been made, the objects
and images I exhibited in Material Traces, and Donald’s Would Work,
make explicitly clear the impossibility of connecting the body/mind of
the making subject to the ‘final’ product in an unmediated or simplis-
tically causal way. Donald’s Would Work was brilliant precisely for the
way in which it dramatized and animated the intimate link between
the artist’s making body and the resulting objects. Even as we engage
the objects and images with an awareness of their function as representa-
tion (i.e., as documenting or resulting from previous acts of making) we
become acutely aware that they can never adequately sum up the feel-
ings, thoughts or ‘intentions’ of the artist. Here, the phenomenologi-
cal notion of ‘intentionality’, which has more to do with a purposive arc
propelling an actor (here the artist) towards actions that result in mean-
ingful gestures or expressions, is much more useful than the shallow con-
ventional notion of ‘intention’ that pervades art criticism and curating.
We cannot fully know our own much less anyone else’s ‘intentions’, but
we can and do (and this is precisely the point of the show and of my
choice of works) experience expressions as results of human actions that
are propelled by ‘intentionality’ in this phenomenological sense. My later
apprehension of your manipulated pieces of clay thus precisely points to
some physical action having been driven by thoughts or ideas—but as
I engage with them, I have no final determinant concept of what these
thoughts or ideas were. The ‘representational’ remainders that are the
works in the show are fully expressive in their evocation of embodied
action and yet mute, except in their dramatic pointing to the ‘having
been made’ of the action that created them. And in the case of Donald’s
Would Work this is even more striking—the bridge collapses during the
performative making of it, marking a definitive before and after of the
process, and exposing the sense of failure inherent in all ‘representation’
or acts of representing. And, given the ceaseless video documentation

in Would Work, the project (as with those in Material Traces) brilliantly
puts pressure, precisely, on the hinge between the live body acting and
the representationality of that acting—the hinge that, really, underlies all
art, if we understand art to be something made by someone we believe
to have been motivated to make art (the ultimate tautology).
CB: How might this thinking about objects that animate performance
reflect on your own performative practice as a writer? I’ve heard you say
that you don’t exactly know your own intentionality when you’re writ-
ing. That you may have an idea, but it’s the words you have access to
that end up shaping what you say; that the words find you.
AJ: Yes, absolutely. As you can see from my previous answer, my
relationship to these practices is open ended. I enunciate what they
are doing (or what I experienced them as doing by viewing the perfor-
mance and/or the photographs, video, clay or wood afterwards) as a way
of understanding how they affect me. I love this kind of work precisely
because—and this was the inspiration for the Material Traces show—
they enable and encourage performative viewing and interpreting. They
make us aware of how, even as interpreters and writers, we have embod-
ied relationships to such materialities, which echo back to the bodies and
original materialities of the moment of making/performing. Sometimes
these are imagined (if we didn’t see the actual moment of making, we
will imagine how something was made—particularly if it shows the signs
of its having been made).
In a sense, you could argue that these practices—yours, Cassils’s,
Donald’s—activate what Roland Barthes called the ‘writerly’ in relation
to postmodern texts. The sense given to potential viewers that they are
invited to engage in embodied ways and actively to make meaning in
relation to the performances and to the materialities and representations
that remain.
CB: We’ve all noticed for some time the way in which the notion
of ‘performativity’ has become a catchphrase in art schools, and some-
times people use the term very loosely with too many open meanings.
Considering your interest in the writing of Karen Barad, for whom
performativity might be a rethinking of the notions of discursive prac-
tices and material phenomena and the relationship between them
(2003, 828), can you get specific about how you want to use the term
‘performative’?
AJ: Oh boy, can I. I’m deep into this book project on gender per-
formance or the queer performative. I am constructing or tracing a
genealogy of the terms ‘queer’ and ‘performativity’. The latter of course
came into being through the 1950s lectures of J.L. Austin, published in
1962 as How to do Things with Words. In this narrow context, the per-
formative is a linguistic construction that ‘does’ what it ‘says’, such as ‘I
promise you.’
However, the point of my project is to examine a confluence of com-
plementary developments: most importantly, the term performativ-
ity arose at the same time as the notion of queer we now understand to
relate to an open-ended concept and experience of sexuality, a kind of
experience of gender as performed. This latter concept was crystallized in
the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. As Sedgwick and her co-author Andrew Parker put it
in the introduction to their 1995 book Performativity and Performance,
‘the performative has thus been from its inception already infected with
queerness’ (5).
However, performativity can also be usefully examined in relation to
materialities—per the quite extraordinary feminist new materialist work
of Karen Barad. While I don’t share Barad’s polemical rage against ‘dis-
course theory’ (which, after all, is where performativity became what we
now understand it to be), her notion of ‘agential intra-action’ among
bodies and materialities is extremely useful (2003). Through this concept
Barad points to the way in which concepts (whether words or thoughts)
and materialities are co-constitutive: it is ‘through specific agential intra-
actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phe-
nomena become determinate and the particular embodied concepts
become meaningful’ (2003, 815).
CB: I want to probe further into this question of agency and ‘agen-
tial intra-action’ with respect to a question of animism and animacy. My
question will be: what is your thinking on the idea that words and per-
formance can make things happen? But it’s worth noting that my ques-
tion has an important genealogy that underpins some of the aims of this
book, Animism in Art and Performance. There is a fascinating intersec-
tion with ethnographies on indigenous magic and ritual that take seri-
ously the binding power of incantations and objects to make things
happen through rituals of similarity and contiguity.
Some late nineteenth-century ethnographers took a racist and con-

descending view of the power of so-called ‘primitive’ peoples to make
things happen through language and performance (see Braddock
2013). Through the ground-breaking work of anthropologists such as
Stanley J. Tambiah (1968) and Ruth Finnegan (1969)—who refer-
enced Austin’s ‘performative utterance’ in relation to their work on the
Trobriand Islanders (now known as the Kiriwina Islands in the Milne
Bay Province of Papua New Guinea) and the Limba of Sierra Leone
respectively—there emerged the beginnings of what now seems to be
called the ‘ontological turn’. This is the view that so-called ‘primitive’
ideas ‘were not mere errors, as detected by a finally superior rationality
of which we were the fortunate possessors, but that other civilizations
presented us with alternative categories and modes of thought,’ as stated
by the social anthropologist Rodney Needham (1972, 183). In this vein,
Finnegan and Tambiah ask what we can learn about the agency of indige-
nous magic and ritual as performative. They no longer asked ‘does magic
work’ but rather what does it ‘do’ as a process (Braddock 2013, 3). This
of course has profound ramifications for how we think about contempo-
rary ritual.
There’s a link here to Judith Butler’s assertion that performative
acts can ‘exercise a binding power’. And she continues to say that the
‘power of discourse to produce what it names is linked with the question
of performativity’. ‘The performative’, she states, ‘is thus one domain in
which power acts as discourse’ (see McKenzie 1998, 224). So to return
to my question—can performance really make things happen? How does
Barad’s model of agency really have material effect?
AJ: So if we spring off Barad’s rethink of performativity, we can
understand it as a way of identifying the relational ‘intra-activity’ through
which bodies, materials, concepts, and ‘spacetime itself’ are mutually
constituted. This allows us to see the ‘saying’/‘doing’ model of Austin in
a more profound way—by saying something, or making something, we
are indeed reshaping materialities as well as thought itself, even as mate-
rialities are reshaping us. Or, as Barad puts it, in this model, ‘[a]ll bodies,
not merely “human” bodies, come to matter through the world’s itera-
tive intra-activity—its performativity’ (2003, 823).
Most amazingly, Barad’s model, unlike the theories of performativ-
ity by Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler or Eve Sedgwick (as wonderful
as each of them is), allows us to theorize agency—or how we can act in
relation to things and understand our actions as having material effects.
Essentially, for Barad, our having an effect occurs through ‘agential cuts’,

which ‘effect … a separation between “subject” and “object”’ (2003, 185).
Barad’s model thus describes a situation I have been theorizing in a
different way for years through my work on performance and its materi-
alities and interpretive modes.
CB: You are an art historian who has been profoundly motivated by
feminist and gender politics. I’ve heard you say that nothing is ungen-
dered. How does Barad’s model of agency translate, for you, into some-
thing politically real—the possibility that performance art has a power to
make change?
AJ: I don’t believe in the ‘real’. But if I could reword that in relation
to the question of how performance art can be politically efficacious in
promoting progressive ways of being and thinking … This would then
refer to the crux of much of what artists and art/performance writers
think and hope we are doing: creating through our work some kind of
‘agential cut’ that (even if microscopically) puts a pause or a rupture
between normative modes of selfhood, which (the argument goes) con-
strain or oppress us through policing behaviour and modes of self pres-
entation, and ‘other’ modes of selfhood. A person who writes about
queer and/or feminist performance art hopes either to reread older
performances in ways that allow for this pause or rupture, or to learn
from contemporary performances that can be interpreted in compel-
ling ways as encouraging (through this interpretation) the rupture or
gap. Through performing and/or interpreting performances we produce
the gap even as we are never fully outside the norms we seek to unset-
tle: because so often this policing of gender occurs internally, we have
become interpellated into ideologies of gendered selfhood so that we
willingly reproduce them. So (as Judith Butler has argued many times)
it’s not just a question of deciding to do gender differently by perform-
ing it otherwise. We cannot fully escape our relationship to normative
identifications (and note that gender always already implicates and is
defined by myriad other intersectional identifications). It’s a question
of working within them to denaturalize aspects of them—thus to create
that pause or gap.
CB: We’ve talked about your current interest in theorising pedagogy
as performative. Can you talk about relationships between performativity,
pedagogy and animacy?
AJ: This is a question I’m not fully prepared to answer, except inas-
much as my teaching is definitely relational—more and more, now that
I’m teaching in an art school (rather than a humanities programme as

before), I find myself responding to the students’ interest or lack of
interest, drawing them out in relation to their art or design practice.1
The images, practices and histories and theories I present to them are
with an eye towards the kinds of ‘intra-action’ Barad articulates in her
theory. It’s challenging and fun to teach art and design students—
because of their concern for what and how to make (rather than the
humanities emphasis on modes of theorizing or historicizing).
CB: I love the way your comments on writing—and now teaching
in an art school—suggest this interrelational flow of meaning between
you and the stuff called art (Jones 2015, 25). This is so much the case
with methods of studio critique that involve radical forms of self-reflexive
research and making. The kinds of ‘representations’ being discussed are
continually troubled in these pedagogical relationships and discourses.
And again, this corresponds to how you insist on questioning modes
of artistic representation that somehow directly relate to a referent in
the world. Has your new teaching role at the Roski School of Art and
Design at USC, with its focus on ‘making’ practices, changed the way in
which you write about performance art?
AJ: I don’t think it’s changed it that much (I have always worked
very closely with artists) other than encouraging me to shift my focus
towards the structures of power subtending the art and design worlds
as such and to simplify my language. Not because artists aren’t brilliant
(the ones I teach with and whose work I engage are), but because they
think differently. Although you might not believe it here—due to my
long answers!—my previous tendency towards extremely lengthy schol-
arly elaborations of arguments is shifting towards a tendency to pose
arguments polemically. I still insist on retaining the scholarly (historical
and theoretical) bases and making those very clear, but I subordinate the
scholarly sources to the polemic: I am reacting against the larger cultural
tendency towards oversimplifying and appropriating information without
noting sources or elaborating arguments in a compelling way. It’s impor-
tant to me to work with the students on this, to discourage facile modes
of regurgitating information from blogs or websites without understand-
ing the historical trajectories behind ideas and modes of making.
CB: You mentioned your book project on gender performance or
the queer performative. Amongst what you’ve seen in Aotearoa New
Zealand, are there strong connections between queer performativity and
animacy?
AJ: This remains to be seen. I will be ensconced at the Elam School

of Fine Arts at University of Auckland in the first half of 2018 and hope
to see what artists and performers are doing. I’ve done some preliminary
research, including investigating your work, that shows a very interesting
permutation of performance among Māori and Pacific Islander cultures
that would appear ‘queer’ to North Americans. I’m very keen to denatu-
ralize North American concepts of queer performance through this work
that clearly comes from a very different perspective.
As for animacy, my work on performance and materiality might come
into play in this new project in relation to modes of embodiment that
come to be called ‘theatrical’ in the North American model. Theatricality
is linked to the ‘animation’ of aspects of corporeality and subjectivity that
are very often (again, in North America) linked to queer urban cultures,
most often those of white gay men. I am very interested in troubling this
reciprocal ‘interanimacy’ whereby bodies enact genders/sexualities and
discourses describe embodied modes of gender/sexual being in mutually
determining ways. What happens to these terms (how do bodies animate
gender/sexuality) elsewhere, outside my zone of theorizing and practis-
ing gender performance and queer performativity (North America, or
more specifically urban centres in the United States)?
Note
1. I taught in art history programmes of one kind or another, at University of
California, Riverside (1991–2003), University of Manchester (2003–2009)
and McGill University (2010–2014), before moving to the Roski School
of Art and Design at USC in 2014.
References
Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs 28 (3): 801–831.
Braddock, Christopher. 2013. Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Participation
in Contemporary Art. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Finnegan, Ruth. 1969. How to Do Things with Words: Performative Utterances
Among the Limba of Sierra Leone. Man 4: 537–552.
Jones, Amelia. 1998. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Jones, Amelia. 2015. Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic ‘Work,’ and New
Concepts of Agency. TDR: The Drama Review 59 (4): 20.
McKenzie, Jon. 1998. Genre Trouble: (The) Butler Did It. In The Ends
of Performance, eds. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York
University Press.
Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language and Experience. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Sedgwick, Eve, and Andrew Parker. 1995. Introduction to Performativity and
Performance, eds. A. Parker and E. Sedgwick, 1–18. New York and London:
Routledge.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 1968. The Magical Power of Words. Man 3 (2): 175–208.
CHAPTER 10
Animism, Animacy and Participation

in the Performances of Darcell Apelu
New Zealand–Niuean artist Darcell Apelu provocatively performs what

she calls a ‘savage’ self-portrait or face. Apelu’s 2013 video perfor-
mances, Reaction to Insults and Musu‚ respond to the “Understanding”
pamphlets produced in the 1970s by the Polynesian Advisory Committee
(PAC); a New Zealand-governed committee that had no clear Polynesian
representation (Apelu 2013, 25).1 Designed to foster better understand-
ing between cultures, the pamphlets ended up, Apelu points out, rein-
forcing ‘the very stereotypes they were trying to avoid’ (2013, 26).2
Apelu uses the camera to stare back at her European ethnographers
on the PAC. In her own words, she stares back such that viewers might
be ‘caught in the act of watching the “savage” face’ (2013, 29), ironi-
cally reflecting back the committee’s language that framed Polynesians in
misconceived states of withdrawnness, vacancy and deadpan passivity. For
example, the “Understanding Polynesians” pamphlets published in 1974
included a section dedicated to a Samoan term ‘musu’ described as
C. Braddock (*) 
School of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_10
192 C. Braddock
a widespread phenomenon found amongst Polynesians … People affected

by ‘musu’ become totally withdrawn. They have a ‘deadpan’ look and will
say nothing except an occasional monosyllable. It is impossible to get any
reaction from a person in this state of mind. It is a baffling experience to
deal with and people not used to it eventually tend to become infuriated
which only makes things worse. ‘Musu’ is almost always due to one of four
causes: pure fright in the presence of authorities or strangers; a sense of
shame; sense of guilt: a feeling of injustice.
‘Musu’ is common amongst Samoans and Niueans and relatively common

amongst Cook Island Maoris and New Zealand Maoris. Niueans are par-
ticularly prone to it and this probably explains why they have a reputation
in some circles for being surly or insolent, whereas in many cases the man
is probably suffering from sheer fright or nervousness. (1974, 10)
Grappling with similar sweeping cultural generalizations, Teresia Teaiwa

writes in her 2005 article “Native Thoughts: A Pacific Studies Take on
Cultural Studies and Diaspora”: ‘it becomes evident that Pacific p eoples
are often caught between being idealized and cynically dismissed for
both their competence and incompetence under modernity’s terms and
conditions—conditions, it must be stressed, that are not entirely of their
own making’ (2005, 15).3
Apelu responded to these generalized ‘conditions of viewing’ by
becoming, in her words, ‘the target onto which these “traits” are drawn
upon’ (2013, 29). For Reaction To Insults (2013) Apelu draws a spi-
ral motif in red lipstick on her face, mimicking a spiral design used on
the pamphlet covers (Fig. 10.1). Cropped as portrait image, she slowly
begins tracking her spiral from the centre of her nose, down and above
her upper lip, up and across the bridge of her nose, down across her
bottom lip, back up between and across her eyes, tracing five concen-
tric spirals around her face that finally finish under her chin. As Apelu
assumes the target of the PAC, and our target (she stares and we watch
back), she returns what Māori call an ‘utu’—a reciprocal gesture that
aims at addressing, in this instance, hostilities between groups. As is
the case here, utu can be deferred and applied generations later. In the
2001 New Zealand Ministry of Justice report “He Hīnātore ki Ao Māori
(A Glimpse into the Māori World): Māori Perspectives on Justice”, the
Ministry describes an understanding of utu as shifting away from popular
understanding of revenge, becoming more ‘concerned with reciprocity
and maintaining the balance of social relationships’ (MOJ 2001, 7, 67).4
10 ANIMISM, ANIMACY AND PARTICIPATION IN THE PERFORMANCES … 193
Fig. 10.1 Darcell Apelu, still from Reaction to Insults, 2013. From the
Response Series #1, moving image on tablets, 5 min. Courtesy of the artist
For Musu (2013), the same portrait formalities apply, but this time
Apelu carries an even more unnerving stare that falls slightly short of her
viewer, as if not engaged with our looking at her. For Reaction To Insults
and Musu, Apelu passes these videos of herself on several tablets around
an exhibition opening at AUT St Paul Street Gallery, Auckland. Holding
this moving image of her face in this format—and passing it from hand
to hand amongst the group—feels like a breach of privacy and leaves me
disconcertingly embarrassed to hold her. Apelu says with reference to the
misconstrued phenomenon of musu: ‘This artwork is a moving image of
myself with a “deadpan” look, continuously staring ahead into space. As
the moving image progresses, so does the weight of the stare; it becomes
heavy and vacant’ (2013, 32). As already noted, Apelu speculates that
her viewers might be ‘caught in the act of watching the “savage” face,
an exotic and potentially touristic view’ (2013, 29).5 But it remains
undecided if her face becomes ‘savage’ on viewing or if this is a label she
194 C. Braddock
performs regardless.6 What might follow from this, she surmises, are
misrepresentations that occur ‘in the space of not being able to give one
self over completely to be identified’ (2013, 29). This space of uneasy
identity is enhanced by Apelu’s use of moving image technologies. These
are pre-recorded and looped ‘engagements’ distributed on portable tab-
lets that impose an element of controlled response. Is it ‘live’? She can’t
respond to you responding to her. Where does the power lie? Who leads?
In this sense, the face-to-face encounter is a broken feedback cycle, mak-
ing it more unsettling and compelling.
The nature of this uneasy encounter, and changing understandings
of utu just described, underscore how this chapter grapples with ques-
tions of passivity, radical passivity and participation. There is no doubt
that Apelu draws on these past texts in ironic and political gestures,
but there is also an equally significant aspect to her performances that
reaches beyond irony and protest. Her engaging face-to-face encounter
slowly possesses, haunts and infects us. And as we pass around her image
on tablets, we find ourselves participating in unwitting ways that ques-
tion how and with whom and what we are participating. Her utu is not
just ironic but instructive of a different way of behaving; of being and
of participating with others. Apelu gives us back a ‘savage’ passivity as a
form, or ethics, of radical participation that is active and full of poten-
tial. There is always the question of who the audience is; who the ‘us’ is
(Fig. 10.2).
Musu
In the Basque language ‘musu’ means face or countenance, while in
Samoan tradition musu can refer to a refusal to being ritually sacrificed,
but when a person is sacrificed anyway. In this context, an alternative to
musu would be to offer yourself up for sacrifice.7 This makes Apelu’s utu
all the more intriguing and provocative: elusively positioned somewhere
between refusal and self-sacrifice.8
Dominating these states of refusal and unwillingness are connotations
of deep and irrational withdrawal and passivity. Important to my discus-
sion is the way in which Mel Chen in Animacies (2012) considers a range
of animacy hierarchies across animal and human categorizations. Chen
considers not only ‘nonhuman animals’ but ‘humans stereotyped as pas-
sive’. For Chen this includes ‘people with cognitive or physical disabilities’
(2012, 2) but I would add that such stereotyping extends to indigenous
Fig. 10.2 Darcell Apelu, still from Musu, 2013. From the Response Series #2,
moving image on tablets, 5 min. Courtesy of the artist
peoples characterized in part by lingering Western ethnographies as cog-

nitively underdeveloped and therefore less than human.
As Apelu focuses on words such as ‘musu’ and ‘deadpan’, she high-
lights what Chen calls linguistic ‘failings’ and ‘leakages’ of ‘ambivalent
grammaticalities’ (2012, 30).9 Such moments of linguistic animacy that
fail dominant animacy hierarchies are above all political and are ‘shaped
by what or who counts as human, and what or who does not’ (Chen
2012, 30). From such a perspective, ‘deadpan’ has its roots in some-
thing impassive or expressionless, such as in the phrase, ‘she delivered
her monologue in a deadpan voice’. This is synonymous with being cata-
tonic, blank, empty, expressionless, impassive, inexpressive, numb, stolid
and vacant, as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary contests.
Deadpan’s suffix ‘-pan’ as verb is best identified in the word ‘panned’
in its past participle form; ‘the movie was panned by the critics’, which
is synonymous, according to the Free Dictionary, with savage attack.
196 C. Braddock
Pan- also carries a combining form meaning ‘all’, occurring originally

in loanwords from Greek (panoply), but now used freely as a gen-
eral formative (panorama; pantheism; pantonality, etc.), lending ‘pan-’
connotations of neuter and pan-everything. This leaves us with dead-
attack, dead-savage, dead-neuter or dead-everything.
Radical Passivity
Prompted by Apelu’s deadpan stare back at her 1970s ethnographers on
the PAC, this chapter discusses an historical reassessment of ethnogra-
phies of animacy in the name of ‘animism’ and who or what might be
credited with an ability to participate. As will be seen, this reassessment
of animism explores notions of radical passivity and participation. My
aim is to productively frustrate any sense of clear social phenomena and
hierarchy of encounter in Apelu’s practice and to fundamentally question
what or who matters (where this question of mattering and matter falls
between identity- and substance-provoking questions, in turn, about the
animate and inanimate).
Emmanuel Levinas explores the idea of ‘radical passivity’ with refer-
ence to the writing of anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1875–1939).10
Writing 30 years before the PAC produced their ‘Understanding’ pam-
phlets, Lévy-Bruhl inaugurates a reconsideration of what it might mean
to participate—between humans as well as so-called inanimate beings.
What is striking is that he does so via one of the most compelling ethno-
graphic reassessments of animism in the twentieth century. Thus, a ques-
tion, ‘What is participation?’, is linked to a question of who and what is
considered to be animate or inanimate and, in turn, who or what is cred-
ited with animacy.
Levinas provokes a brilliant atmosphere of participation that helps me
understand a tension in Apelu’s performances just mentioned—between
political irony on the one hand, and a developing, compelling presence
that stops me in my tracks on the other. Via Lévy-Bruhl, Levinas’s con-
cept of participation reaches back and reinterprets ethnographies on
animism just as Apelu’s artwork also reaches back and critiques those
ethnographic histories.
However, importantly, I want to pay attention to the ethnographic
genealogies and entanglements I reference, not least to avoid the risk
of re-ethnographying Apelu’s practice. I will avoid at all cost any sug-
gestion of returning to some questionable primitive ontology that helps
elucidate Apelu’s artwork. Lévy-Bruhl and Levinas, no matter what

their intentions, deploy indigenous ontologies as a resource. Alison
Jones and Te Kawehau Hoskins have recently described this as ‘a kind of
risky “dash and grab” from magical non-modern Others that re-enacts
the colonising imperative’ (2015, 9). We will return to these ‘ethno-
graphic entanglements’ a little later. For now (in my shared association
with Darcell Apelu as her supervisor, and now artist-colleague), I want
to assert that I do not collapse or even compare Apelu’s powerful per-
formance presence with Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of participation or Levinas’s
notion of radical passivity. Instead, these ‘ontologies come face to face,
recognising the other’ (2015, 9), as if applying utu to restore a balance
by responding over time (MOJ 2001, 67). I recognize the politics and
power dynamics at play between Apelu and the PAC (indicative of a vast
array of ethnographic misappropriations), but also between her and me
(as Pākehā scholar editing this book, previous supervisor, etc.). All that
said, my face-to-face encounter with Darcell Apelu is attentive, inter-
ested, even entranced, if not fluid, messy, contradictory, awkward and
never settled (see Hodder 2012, 110).11
During 1938–1939, Lévy-Bruhl criticized as irrational previous
Western ethnographical accounts of Oceanic, African and other so-called
‘savage’ performance rituals. The Victorian anthropologist Edward
B. Tylor had reintroduced the term ‘animism’ into anthropology in his
Primitive Culture of 1871 (1920, 424–427). Understood as a first phase
of development of all religions, animism was a belief in the individual
soul or anima of all animals, plants and inanimate objects (1920, 433,
477). One corollary of this understanding is that someone’s spirit can
exist separately from them and also inhabit an object. Some 30 years
after Tylor’s Primitive Culture, Marcel Mauss called this spirit ‘effluvia’
which ‘travel about’ (1975, 72; see Braddock 2013, xvi, 39, 142–143).
As a scientific rationalist, Tylor believed that the continuation of such
animistic beliefs was infantile, and synonymous with the ‘simplicity and
stupidity of the peasant and savage’ (1892, 391; see Braddock 2013,
164–166).
As Lévy-Bruhl explores what it means to participate with others,
he argues for what now appears a ‘deconstructive’ analysis, suggesting
that participation is not simply a question of cause and effect relation-
ships between people or people and things. In doing so, he proposed
that spirits and effluvia might be understood as an a priori field of affect,
although he will call this field an experience of affective character or
198 C. Braddock
nature (1975, 102, 108). Such a field, for Lévy-Bruhl, exists, at least in
part, outside our control and we participate in it in ways that may be
beyond rational thought. In this way he described a field of partici-
pants already affected rather than a verifiable or rational play between
elements, living or dead or inorganic (Braddock 2013, 64). As Rodney
Needham notes, the overwhelming breakthrough that Lévy-Bruhl
offers at this time was a realization that ‘the strangeness of primitive
mentality were not mere errors, as detected by a finally superior ration-
ality of which we were the fortunate possessors, but that other civiliza-
tions presented us with alternative categories and modes of thought’
(1972, 183).
Levinas recognizes Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of ‘participation’ as mark-
ing ‘the orientation of contemporary philosophy’ (1998, 39) and from
it develops a notion of radical passivity. As will become clear, the con-
cept of ‘animism’ is approached here as a field of experiential affectivity
in which the subject, Levinas argues, loses ‘private character and returns
to an undifferentiated background’ of participation. In this realm, ‘the
existence of one submerges the other, and is thus no longer an exist-
ence of the one’ but of the ‘there is’ or il y a, a Levinasian term we will
return to later (1978, 56). Levinas’s ‘there is’ provokes an atmosphere
where subjectivity becomes enacted beyond someone’s will and intent.
As Megan Craig writes in Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic
Phenomenology: ‘The Levinasian subject has her center of gravity out-
side of herself. Orbiting against her will, she is caught, like a planet,
in the gravitational pull of a distant star.’ She continues: ‘The subject
Levinas conceives begins otherwise and elsewhere—in the dark, bound
and off-center, tied to others who refuse to leave her alone’ (2010, 2).
Accordingly, the way in which Apelu’s performances reorientate ‘passiv-
ity’ enables a critique of animacy hierarchies along with a fundamental
questioning of the cultural and political entanglements that we call par-
ticipation. Furthermore, my contention is that attention to theories of
animism and animacy opens up current debates about what constitutes
participation in art and performance.
Participation
Over the last decade, the concept of participation has emerged as a prac-
tice-based category in art. Artist résumés declare ‘participatory prac-
tices’ amongst a list of key terms outlining their artistic modalities. This
raises questions such as: What does it mean to participate? Do I have to

be participating to be a participant? Can I still be a participant while not
occupied with participation? In other words, does my participation have
to be intentional for participation to take place?
In aligning Apelu’s compelling face-to-face performance presence
with Levinas’s sensibility of ‘animistic participation’, I aim to provoke an
atmosphere that goes beyond Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational
aesthetics’ (2006 [1998]) or the descriptive phenomenology of reciproc-
ity (Jones 1998). In other words, this raises the question: What is offered
by the notion of ‘animism’ that has not earlier been theorized vis-à-vis
body and performance art?
As David Cross has argued, Bourriaud’s emphasis on social participa-
tion in the form of ‘conviviality and friendship culture’ risks downplay-
ing a notion of transformation inherent in performance art in favour of
ideas of ‘interactivity and audience participation’ (2006, 15). In reply to
this, Levinas’s transformation of sensibility in participation goes beyond
social phenomena, which presuppose an ego. He argues instead for what
he calls a ‘dissipation of personages’ (1978, 63). Furthermore, the phe-
nomenological hypothesis is insufficient here because it invokes a lived
incarnate body and reality in which a subject is ‘bound to and produced
within a corporeal and social context’ (Vasseleu 1998, 21). From this
perspective, Amelia Jones, for example, has persuasively argued for a con-
tingency of enactment between the artist/self and audience/interpreter,
displacing claims of ‘disinterestedness’ (i.e.‚ presumed objectivity, dis-
tance and connoisseurship) associated with modernist art history and
criticism (1998, 9). But this may be different from Levinas’s insistence
upon relations as prior to the subject. For example, in Levinas’s work
on insomnia, he shows his resistance to the phenomena of phenomenol-
ogy where a subject can dissolve or hover. As Craig writes: ‘The insom-
niac’s face reads like a place where someone present is, at the same time,
absent—unable to be there’ (2010, 56). This correlates with what I
experience in the extended temporality of Musu as a drawn-out exposure
to Apelu’s presence and where she gradually dissipates, almost losing
consciousness over the five-minute duration of the artwork. As Levinas
writes in Existent and Existents: ‘To be conscious is to be torn away from
the there is, since the existence of a consciousness constitutes a subjec-
tivity’ (1978, 55). And Craig goes on to say that ‘[I]nsomnia detaches
the subject from subjectivity [which] compounds into a loss of distinct
objects, rendering everything unstable and uncertain’ (2010, 56). In this
200 C. Braddock
way, Levinas sees radical passivity as something other than consciousness,

but this in no way undermines the activity of participation.
To summarize at this midway point, Levinas’s animism helps explore
Apelu’s seemingly deadpan but, as I argue, radical engagement.
Levinas’s example of insomnia is useful because of the way it hovers
between presence and absence. He says that its ‘wakefulness is anony-
mous’ as if the night watches rather than the self. This suspension in
insomnia seems to have no support. The ‘I’ is as much an object as sub-
ject of anonymous thoughts, and this ‘impersonal vigilance is reflected
in the ebbing of consciousness which abandons it’ Levinas writes (1978,
63). As I stare at, handle, pass around, look away from and hesitate in
the face of Apelu’s performances, hierarchical presumptions are chal-
lenged, as is our fundamental consciousness of the terms of engagement.
Levinas’s Animism
Levinas borrows Lévy-Bruhl’s thinking on participation as an orientation
toward the other throughout his work. It first appears in his early 1947
version of There Is, or Il y a, and again in the later version of this essay
Existent and Existents. And his 1957 essay dedicated to the subject of
participation is titled ‘Lévy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy’. While
many writers attest to this influence on Levinas (Hand 1989, 32–33;
Robbins 1999, 87; Moyn 2005, 206; Wyschogrod 2006, 500–503;
Craig 2010, 57–58), this chapter offers new emphasis on the fact that
Lévy-Bruhl is grappling with the operations of animism in developing a
concept of participation.12
Levinas credits Lévy-Bruhl with an anti-intellectualism as Lévy-Bruhl
contests classical categories of representation and substance. As Levinas
writes: ‘He describes an experience which makes light of causality, sub-
stance, reciprocity—of space and time—of those conditions of “every
possible object.” The problem of categories themselves is thus raised’
(1998, 40–41; see Hand 1989, 32).
Lévy-Bruhl’s ‘Notebook VI’, written in August and September
1938, attempts to ask under what circumstances and conditions people
‘feel and represent participations’ (1975, 101). This question is all the
more striking because, as he asks this of ‘primitive peoples’, he places
in parentheses ‘and we ourselves’; in other words, not wanting to make
distinction between categories of primitive and civilized. Whatever ‘mys-
tical experience’ might be, according to Lévy-Bruhl, it depends on the
operations of participation (1975, 102). In this way, discussing relation-

ships between a person and things, ‘or between those things’, depends
on abandoning ‘the principle of causality’ and its associations with logic
and cognition (1975, 102). He therefore adopts a theory of ‘primordial’
pre-existing essence of affect that he calls the affective category of par-
ticipation (1975, 104, 106).
In order to question principles of cognition and causality (in favour of
experiential affectivity), Lévy-Bruhl questions the personal subjecthood
of body parts such as fingers, categorizing them as appurtenances—that
is, an accessory or adjunct to the human or animal body. In doing so he
reassesses a finger’s subjectivity, suggesting the idea of a finger as ‘pars
pro toto’ or part of a collective whole (1975, 107). He singles out an
example from Melanesian languages and their names for a person’s finger
(natugu or natuku). Lévy-Bruhl deduces that these terms, while posses-
sive and personal pronouns that attribute the finger as ‘finger of me’, also
mean that ‘this finger is me through participation (in the sense where
to be is equivalent to to participate)’ (1975, 107, emphasis added; see
Braddock 2013, 78). The importance of this inferred meaning is that
participation precedes the identity of the finger and therefore calls into
question any direct causal effect that fingers may generate.
From this perspective, participation might be said to involve some-
thing other than the directive of the personal pronoun ‘I’. In Lévy-
Bruhl’s example, a person’s finger and its identity is not so much
dependent on the personal pronoun ‘my’ but is, rather, given over to
a notion of participation which is ‘non-cognitive’; where knowledge
recedes, giving way to what he calls ‘an experience of an essentially affec-
tive character’ (1975, 102, 108). Such affective experience relies on an
understanding ‘of consubstantiality, of communion, of an identity even
(duality–unity) between things and objects’ he writes (1975, 106). In
short, the finger becomes characterized not so much by a private owner-
ship or existence of the subject but through communally affective and
emotive participation. Importantly, there is no longer an idea of sub-
stance that is permanent and solid with a mastery over attributes and
actions (Levinas 1998, 45). Being is no longer conceived by the ques-
tions ‘what’ or ‘who’, where a name answers these questions in the form
of a substantive noun (1998, 45).13 Lévy-Bruhl reduces ‘substances to
relations’ and thereby embraces what Levinas calls a ‘modern philosophy
of affective experience emancipated from representation’ (1998, 45).
202 C. Braddock
Levinas references Lévy-Bruhl’s “Notebook XI”, written in February

1939, at length to assert that this philosophy of affective experience
(understood in participation) is not ‘a lame thinking nor a shortcut’, but
a ‘sensing’ that is ‘a way of subjecting oneself to a force’ (1998, 46–47).
If subjects and objects are replaced by this force or existence, ‘the idea
of being assumes a new meaning’ (1998, 48). He notes that Lévy-
Bruhl is determined not to take for granted ‘that things are given first
and that afterwards they enter into participations’ (Lévy-Bruhl 1975,
192). Levinas continues that this gives ‘access to a completely different
sphere’ in which objects and appurtenances (‘between different fingers’,
Levinas writes) exist in primeval or a priori participation, which ‘cannot
be translated into thoughts’ (1998, 44, 45). As Lévy-Bruhl continues:
‘In order that they shall be given, that they shall exist, it is already neces-
sary to have participations’ (1975, 192). And he drives home this point:
‘Without participation, they would not be given in experience: they
would not exist’ (1975, 192).14
In this way, Levinas interprets Lévy-Bruhl’s discourse on the fingers
as a loss of the subject that goes beyond a phenomenological encounter
and is entirely contingent on whatever participation might be. Writing
about Lévy-Bruhl in Existent and Existents, he remarks that ‘participation
of one term in another does not consist in sharing an attribute’ because,
as he puts it, ‘one term is the other’ (1978, 55–56). In this sense, Levinas
wants to contest the ‘private existence’ of any one factor, or that it might
be ‘mastered by a subject that is’ (1978, 56). As said, it is this sensibil-
ity or atmosphere that he calls the ‘there is’, or il y a (1978, 56). In this
realm, substance of all kinds is an infinite essence that equals participa-
tion because it is participated in. And with reference to a striking phrase
from Lévy-Bruhl, Levinas pronounces: ‘To be is to participate’ (1998,
45; Lévy-Bruhl 1975, 18).
In this respect, Lévy-Bruhl anticipates the territory of the part-subject
and part-object that Brian Massumi discusses with reference to Michel
Serres’s example of the soccer match. The body of the player is figured
as a part body, or part-object, which is catalyzed into action by the ball
as the part-subject. Here, the ball becomes the catalytic potential of play,
drawing out the foot of the player as the part-object. If she concentrates
too hard on the kick she misses, meaning that she is subject to a myriad
or field of forces beyond her control (Massumi 2002, 72–74).
As Levinas formulates an experiential, sensory and even mystical form

of participation as pure presence, he paraphrases Lévy-Bruhl in a phrase
that is deeply animistic, that for
any given individual, to be alive means to be currently involved in a com-

plex network of mystic ‘participations’ in common with the other mem-
bers, living or dead, of his social group, with the animal and vegetable
groups born of the same soil, with the earth itself. (1998, 49)
‘Mysticism’, in this context, Levinas had said a few pages earlier, is not
‘obscurity or confusion’ but relates to a sphere of experience in which
objects are an extension of existence—not through thoughts, but
‘directly accessible to emotion’ (1998, 44) as a form of what he quotes
Lévy-Bruhl calling ‘experience-belief’ (1998, 46; Lévy-Bruhl 1975,
193). A process of sensing [sentir] which characterizes participation is
not then just a matter of thinking, or a form of knowledge, but of being
subjected to a force that Levinas compares to magical spells; as like an
exposure to ‘a presence in a climate’ rather than ‘a presence of things’
(1998, 46–47).
Levinas equates these ideas on participation with anonymity and pas-
sivity. However, as in the performance practice of Apelu, this passiv-
ity does not equate to non-action or a lack of activity. As said, Apelu’s
lens-based and live performances often question who leads, who has the
power, in a broken feedback loop as if suspending judgement. As Craig
writes, radical passivity ‘becomes coincident with an ethical willingness’
that corresponds with ‘a hiatus of egoistic power and judgement occa-
sioned by the “face-to-face” encounter with another person’ (Craig
2010, 84). And if Apelu’s utu—her face-to-face response to the racist
appellations of musu—does involve such a hiatus of egoistic power and
judgement, then she takes us with her to a forceful trance world, almost
hypnotic, that lends her political critique immense power.
This is similar to the way in which Levinas thinks about images of art
in his 1948 essay “Reality and Its Shadow”: ‘An image marks a hold over
us rather than our initiative [which is] a fundamental passivity’, he writes.
An image’s passivity, he continues, is ‘visible in magic, song, music and
poetry’ (1989, 132). Thomas Carl Wall adds to this list: trance, hys-
terical possession and hypnotic suggestion (1999, 14). For Levinas, our
‘consenting’ to the work of art ‘is inverted into a participation’ to the
point that we can no longer speak of ‘consent, assumption, initiative
204 C. Braddock
or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away’ (1989,

132). As Craig puts it: ‘Images take hold of us. It is no longer a ques-
tion of a subject intentionally confronting or grasping an object but a
situation in which a subject is held, possessed, haunted, or infected by an
image that won’t let her go’ (2010, 145).
If this is my experience of the participatory animism inherent in
Apelu’s Musu, then it takes me beyond irony, which would be incompat-
ible in any case with a Levinasian animism as a form of pure presence:
a non-ironic state of ‘experience–belief’.15 As said, to frame Apelu as
merely ironic would be far too limited an interpretation of her artwork.
Along with the punch of irony (in response to the PAC), she offers us
something that we may not altogether know we are getting: a profound
utu, or call to an ethics of participation, that calls into question unjust
linguistic hierarchies, either historical or still in circulation. This is an utu
as action-at-a-distance across time and space, addressing the obligations
that exist between individuals and groups.
Ethnographic Entanglements
There are problems associated with deploying ‘animism’ as a critical
term. We must be careful, in this shuttling between contemporary per-
formance art and ethnographic/philosophical analysis, not to resuscitate
and reinforce that very ethnographic heritage of primitivization that I am
at pains to critique. By this I mean that the performance art of Darcell
Apelu must not be deployed to redeem past errors of judgement. This
might play out as a patronizing argument that those distant so-called
‘primitives’ can be recontextualized as sophisticated contemporary per-
formance artists after all. And we must also resist the corollary, that the
postmodern artist, in her seemingly animistic performances, returns to
some primordial place of authenticity, for this would simply reiterate
modernist primitivist theories from the early twentieth century.
In short, we must first reassess primitivist understandings of animism
and the category of the primitive itself. Harry Garuba in his essay “On
Animism, Modernity/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge”
provokes this dilemma in a critique of Western knowledge construct as
he writes (tongue in cheek): ‘it is not the “real” animistic practices of
other peoples and cultures that matter; what matters instead is “ani-
mism” as a knowledge construct of the West, and this is what is being
revisited to derive new Western knowledge constructs and paradigms’
(2012, n.p.). And a problem here, as Garuba goes on to state, is that

a study of concepts such as animism becomes ‘a post-modern advance
upon a prior knowledge paradigm and practice rather than an always
already recognized coeval presence … in the lifeworlds of those con-
scripted into modernity’. Thus, a problem associated with a concept of
animism is that, Garuba continues, ‘the West remains the “sovereign
theoretical subject” of knowledge … while the animistic other’s lived
experience and reality is yet to be disciplined into formal knowledge’
(2012, n.p.).16
This dilemma is getting to the crux of how this chapter tries to
grapple with Apelu’s ‘savage’ (self)-portrait. Here, in the first part of
Garuba’s quotation, ‘animism’ is ‘our’ product, it was only ever ours,
and thus we can do what we will with it. But in the second part, animism
is still tied to the ‘others’, and so to make it truly ‘ours’ and run with it
reinforces exactly the evolutionary ethnography I am at pains to critique.
In this respect, we are reminded that ‘animism’ is Lévy-Bruhl’s term, or
my term, not Darcell Apelu’s. To call the performance art practice of
Apelu animist, even in this earnestly self-reflexive way, risks reproducing
the primitivist logic in which we produce a representation of the primi-
tive so that we can understand the modern in margins of difference and
sameness to that representation.17
But again, with respect to Darcell Apelu and her artwork, the ques-
tion remains about who the audience is—the ‘our’ and the ‘other’.
Who does she address or participate with? Such a question probes
even Apelu’s own identity as she grapples with mixed Polynesian and
Pākehā parentage and a question of her own selfhood (2013, 13–16).18
Through this entangled legacy of colonialism, Apelu gives us back
a ‘savage’ passivity, but entwined in a question of who the participants
are—her, me, us (Fig. 10.3).
The restraint and embarrassment that I experience in passing around
Apelu’s portrait on tablets at an exhibition opening extends to my cau-
tion in re-contextualizing old ethnographic tropes. Akin to handling her
likeness, which we must not do, I am caught doing it in order to say
that we must not do it. These chains of entanglement that I find myself
in are long-threaded, unruly, messy and contingent as they play out
across different temporalities (Hodder 2012, 110): ‘[h]umans are for-
ever chasing along the chains to fix things, forever drawn into further
dependences’ writes Ian Hodder (2012, 112). From within this entan-
glement, it may be important to reemphasize that we are not comparing
206 C. Braddock
Fig. 10.3 Darcell Apelu, performance view of Reaction to Insults, 2013. From

the Response Series #1, moving image on tablets, 5 min. Photo: Chris Braddock.
so-called ‘primitive practices’ with ‘contemporary art’. We are witnessing

the profound impact of Apelu’s performances, and through them bet-
ter understanding Levinasian animism, which aims at eradicating catego-
ries of the so-called ‘primitive’, searching out a universal atmosphere that
belongs to no one (Levinas 1978, 53). And here again Apelu is both a
provocation of the stereotypical savage and a stark reminder to avoid a
literal-minded approach toward artists of colour that locates racial differ-
ence as a determinant in one’s relation to notions of the ‘primitive’.19
Darcell Apelu
Apelu’s call for a different ethics of participation was in the forefront for
her live performance at the AUT University Art & Design end-of-year
Festival event on 13 November 2013. As if from nowhere, Apelu appeared
amongst her audience, face to face and combing her dark mass of hair.
Apelu says of this gesture that ‘the nature of my hair, it ties me to my ethnic
background and the “wild” nature of it as a pacific woman’ (2015, n.p.).
In the week before the end-of-year Festival Apelu appeared, like an
apparition, amidst her examination panel with the first version of the
combing her hair performance. They were discussing (and assessing)
Musu on a flat-screen monitor in the foyer space of the AUT St Paul St
Gallery. They didn’t know she was going to appear, let alone perform.
Like all the postgraduate candidates, Apelu was not supposed to be in

the building at that time, especially during the examination panel dis-
cussion of her submission. In stealth fashion, she suddenly emerged. It’s
tempting to say ‘as if using them as a mirror’, but that metaphor is too
reflective in that Apelu seemed to face each individual without facing
directly; without reflection. The first examiner got the greatest surprise.
He was uncomfortable engaging with her eyes directly but remained
adjunctly face to face. Apelu moved from examiner to examiner, then left
as stealthily as she had arrived.
Like the stereotype of Polynesian musu propagated by the PAC,
Apelu ‘will say nothing’ and it was ‘impossible to get any reaction’ from
her (1974, 10). Her deadpan (dead-neuter, dead-passive) stare was, yes,
a judication of her examination panel, yet it provoked a passiveness that
was all invasive. We participated whether we wanted to or not. It was
not us that took the initiative to participate. The performance created an
atmosphere that belonged to no one yet impinged on everyone. Levinas
writes with respect to these modalities of initiative and response in his
essay Existence and Existents, and in response to Lévy-Bruhl’s thinking
on participation:
The disappearance of all things and of the I leaves what cannot disappear,
the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whether one wants to or
not, without having taken the initiative, anonymously. Being remains, like
a field of forces, like a heavy atmosphere belonging to no one, universal,
returning in the midst of the negation which put it aside, and in all the
powers to which that negation might be multiplied. (1978, 53)
As Apelu performs the linguistic ‘failings’ of words such as deadpan

musu, she draws attention to how they politically shape ‘who counts
as human, and what or who does not’ (Chen 2012, 30). Certainly,
she foregrounds the many dangers in oversimplifying people from dif-
ferent cultures into categories such as ‘Pāhekā’ and ‘Polynesian’ (white
and non-white). But this political protest is held in a world of trance.
She performs those hurtful observations about her people in a form
that possesses, haunts and infects us. In the rhythm of this participa-
tion, Levinas says, ‘Their [choosing a suitably plural form] entry into us
is one with our entry into them.’ In this rhythm, he continues, ‘there is
no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage from oneself to anonym-
ity’ (1989, 132–133; see Wall 1999, 14–15). The ‘what’ or ‘who’—the
208 C. Braddock
representation and substance—of the encounter significantly dissolve.

Apelu’s face-to-face encounter with the other as deadpan musu is a radi-
cal performance of anonymity and passivity that asserts an ethics found
not through but in participation. And I finish with a sentence from
Levinas’s essay on Lévy-Bruhl that made me shudder when I read it:
‘The being that is about to be is already a being that has traversed you
through and through’ (1998, 47).
Notes
1. For further information on the PAC see James Mitchell (2003).
2. Monique Redmond and I supervised Darcell Apelu’s 2013 Master of Art
& Design (Visual Arts) at Auckland University of Technology (AUT),
culminating in the performance works discussed here. I am referencing
Apelu’s exegesis and I am grateful for her detailed input on this chapter.
Thanks to Olivia Webb, whose work as research assistant has been thor-
ough and thought-provoking.
3. Darcell Apelu references a shorter part of this quote (2013, 26).
4. Thanks to Natalie Robertson who suggested that these performances by
Apelu be read as utu.
5. The term ‘savage’ has particular connotations for Niueans. When Captain
Cook landed at Opāhi in Niue on 16 June 1774, his journal reads that they
encountered ‘natives’ who came at them ‘with the ferocity of wild boars,
and threw their darts’. ‘The conduct and aspect of these islanders’, Cook
continues, ‘occasioned my naming it Savage Island’ (Smith 1903, 82).
6. The term ‘savage’ relates to a genealogy of feminist performance in
Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) that Apelu’s work relates to. This goes
back to the Pacific Sisters collective formed in 1992 by Selina Forsyth
(Samoan), Niwhai Tupaea (Ngāti Katoa) and Suzanne Tamaki (Tūhoe,
Te Arawa, Ngāti Maniapoto). The sisterhood also includes Rosanna
Raymond (NZ/Samoan) who has since established the SaVAge K’Lub).
For further reading see: Lisa Uperesa (2016), Karen Stevenson (2008)
and Martin Nakata (2007).
7. Albert Refiti expressed this view at the Animism and Material Vitality in
Art & Performance conference, 11–12 June 2015, hosted by the Art and
Performance Research Group, AUT University, Auckland. See https://
artandperformance.wordpress.com/.
8. This traditional definition of musu gives way to more recent understand-
ings of the term. As Caroline Vercoe recalls, ‘I grew up in Samoa and
when we were young and we were sulking my mum would say “stop
being so musu”—it’s about being in a sulk’ (Vercoe at the Animism and
Material Vitality in Art & Performance conference. See footnote 7).
Clearly, the meanings of these words change as cultures and customs do.
Apelu’s interpretation of musu tends toward the definition in the PAC
pamphlet as well as a more traditional definition. Interestingly, the word
does not seem to have been superseded or replaced by another term.
9. Mel Chen does not reference the word deadpan.
10. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was a contemporary of Emile Durkheim and Marcel
Mauss. He taught the history of modern philosophy at the Sorbonne. See
Jill Robbins who points out these connections between Emmanuel Levinas
and Lévy-Bruhl in that ‘[t]wo of Levinas’s most important teachers at
Strasbourg, Charles Blondel and Maurice Halbwachs, were themselves stu-
dents of Lévy-Bruhl’ (1999, 87), and Blondel wrote the Preface to Lévy-
Bruhl’s 1926 edition of Primitive Mentality [La Mentalité Primitive].
11. See Alison Jones and Te Kawehau Hoskins’s summary to their chapter
section ‘Method: How to Proceed?’ which has guided my comments
here: ‘We recognise the politics of the situation: the power dynamic at
work between western and indigenous thought systems. One set of
ontological assumptions has been relegated to the “outside” of schol-
arly thought; the other considers itself, in social theory today, “cutting
edge” scholarship. This fact infuses all our engagements as scholars.
Nevertheless, our calm, interested, persistent, open, face-to-face encoun-
ter is possible. It is fluid, messy, contradictory, impossible, stimulating
and never settled’ (2015, 9–10).
12. I acknowledge the PhD thesis of Brent Harris whom I co-supervised to
completion in 2013. It was Brent who alerted me to Levinas’s writing on
Lévy-Bruhl in Existent and Existents. http://aut.researchgateway.ac.nz/
handle/10292/6058.
13. This is similar to Anna Gibbs’s argument that these forms of transgression
in language act in the bodies of participants through a contamination of
mimetic sympathy (2010, 201).
14. In this paragraph I am using Levinas’s citation of Lévy-Bruhl which some-
times differs slightly from Lévy-Bruhl’s text.
15. Stephen Zepke expressed this view at the Animism and Material Vitality
in Art & Performance conference. See footnote 7.
16. Harry Garuba is referencing terms used by Johannes Fabian and Dipesh
Chakrabarty.
17. The second, third and last sentences of this paragraph are taken from
Michelle Castaneda’s incisive editorial critique of a previous essay I sub-
mitted for a TDR Consortium Special Issue, originally titled ‘New
Animisms/Old Animisms in Performance’, edited by Rebecca Schneider.
18. Pākehā is a Māori term for New Zealanders of European descent.
Recently the term has encompassed any non-Māori New Zealander.
19. I am paraphrasing Coco Fusco’s comments on the artist Ana Mendieta’s
association with rituals of magic (1995, 231).
210 C. Braddock
References
Apelu, Darcell Dorothy. 2013. You Me Them. Master of Art & Design (Visual
Arts) Exegesis, Auckland University of Technology. http://aut.researchgate-
way.ac.nz/handle/10292/5925.
Apelu, Darcell Dorothy. 2015. The Significance of Combing My Hair. [Email
communication with author], 29 May 2015.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2006. Relational Aesthetics (1998). In Participation:
Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Claire Bishop, 160–171. London:
Whitechapel.
Craig, Megan. 2010. Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Cross, David. 2006. Some Kind of Beautiful: The Grotesque Body in Contemporary
Art. Doctor of Philosophy Thesis, School of Visual Arts, Creative Industries
Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane.
Fusco, Coco. 1995. The Other History of Intercultural Performance. In The
Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. A. Jones (2010) 2nd ed., 225–236.
London: Routledge.
Garuba, Harry. 2012. On Animism, Modernity/ Colonialism, and the African
Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections. Accessed 1 May 2015. http://
www.e-flux.com/journal/on-animism-modernitycolonialism-and-the-african-
order-of-knowledge-provisional-reflections/.
Gibbs, Anna. 2010. After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic
Communication. In The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory
J. Seigworth, 186–205. London: Duke University Press.
Hand, Seán. 1989. The Levinas Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Hodder, Ian. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between
Humans and Things. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jones, Alison, and Te Kawehau Hoskins. 2015. A Mark on Paper: The Matter of
Indigenous-Settler History. In Posthuman Research Practices in Education, ed.
C. Taylor and C. Hughes. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jones, Amelia. 1998. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Lévy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy. In Entre
Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, 39–51. New York: Columbia University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1978. Existence and Existents, trans. A. Lingus. Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1989. Reality and its Shadow. In The Levinas Reader, ed.
Seán Hand, 129–143. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1975. The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, trans. P.

Rivière. Oxford: Blackwell.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation.
Mauss, Marcel. (1902–1903) 1975. A General Theory of Magic, trans. R. Brain.
London: The Norton Library.
Ministry of Justice (MOJ). 2001. He Hīnātore ki Ao Māori: A Glimpse into the
Māori World. Accessed 1 May 2017. https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/
Documents/Publications/he-hinatora-ki-te-ao-maori.pdf.
Mitchell, James. 2003. Immigration and National Identity in 1970s New
Zealand. PhD thesis, University of Otago.
Moyn, Samuel. 2005. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation
and Ethics. London: Cornell University Press.
Nakata, Martin. 2007. Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines.
Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Polynesian Advisory Committee (PAC). 1974. Understanding Polynesians, 10.
New Zealand: Vocational Training Council.
Robbins, Jill. 1999. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago:
Smith, S. Percy. 1903. “Captain Cook’s visit to Niue. 1774—vol. II, 1777.” In
Niuē-fekai (Or Savage) Island and its People, as part of Tidal Pools: Digitized
Texts from Oceania for Samoan and Pacific Studies. Accessed May 01, 2017.
http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-SmiNiu-c4-5.html.
Stevenson, Karen. 2008. The Frangipani is Dead: Contemporary Pacific Art in
New Zealand, 1985–2000. Wellington: Huia Publishers.
Teaiwa, Teresia K. 2005. Native Thoughts: A Pacific Studies Take on Cultural
Studies and Diaspora. In Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations, ed. G. Harvey
and C.D. Thompson, 15–35. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.
Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1892. Exhibition of Charms and Amulets. In Transactions
of the International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, 387–394. London: D. Nutt.
Tylor, Edward Burnett. (1871) 1920. Primitive Culture: Researches into the
Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom,
Vol. 1. London: John Murray.
Uperesa, Lisa. 2016. “Of Savages and Warriors.” In Yuki Kihara: a Study of
a Samoan Savage, edited by Andrew Clifford, 8–11. Auckland: Te Uru
Waitakere Contemporary Gallery.
Vasseleu, Cathryn. 1998. Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas
and Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge.
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New York: State University of New York Press.
Wyschogrod, Edith. 2006. Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives,
Embodying Philosophy’s Others. New York: Fordham University Press.
CHAPTER 11
Exploring Posthuman Masquerade

and Becoming
Martin Patrick
In her landmark 1998 text Body Art: Performing the Subject, art historian
and performance theorist Amelia Jones commented that:
younger artists tend to explore the body/self as technologized, specifically

unnatural and fundamentally unfixable in identity or subjective/objective
meaning in the world: indeed, they articulate the body/self as what some
have called ‘posthuman.’ … This mediated, multiply identified, particu-
larized body/self proclaims the utter loss of the ‘subject’ (in this case the
fully intentional artist) as a stable referent (origin of the work’s meaning).
(1998, 199)
In this chapter I explore several of the implications alluded to by Jones

via discussions of a range of recent artworks by Australian artist David
Cross and New Zealand artists Catherine Bagnall and Shannon Te Ao.
Each of these artists has used masquerade, disguise, and distortion in the
context of installations, performances, videos, and photography. This has
taken such forms as dressing as animals (Bagnall), evoking/‘becoming’/
M. Patrick (*) 
Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
e-mail: martinrpatrick@gmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_11
214 M. Patrick
addressing animals (Bagnall and Te Ao), and rerouting childlike modes

of play and games (Cross and Bagnall). Performing as multiple versions
of embodied selves that address ‘otherness’ in an array of modalities,
these artists dissolve fixed normative characterizations of subjectivity,
enacting a series of critical reflections on ‘the real’. The artists discussed
here emphasize through their practices that one body cannot corre-
spondingly adhere to any singular notion of self, selfhood being manifold
and elusive, and their performative gestures only serve to reiterate this.
The term ‘animism’ can be seen to relate closely to multiple themes
involving play, ritual, dress, and liveness. Viewed through the notion
of posthumanism (which as noted involves multiplicity and particu-
larization), a number of these associations both collide and layer upon
one another. I am focusing less on the reading of the ‘posthuman’ as
it concerns explicitly technological extensions of the body; rather, I am
particularly interested in investigating how animistic notions might pro-
vocatively be considered in tandem with posthuman notions in the fol-
lowing interpretations of artworks by Cross, Bagnall, and Te Ao.
This also recalls another comment by Félix Guattari on the active role
of the artist and what he terms a ‘quasi-animist’ speech effect:
The artist and more generally, aesthetic perception, detaches and

de-territorializes a segment of the real in order to make it play the role
of a partial enunciator. Art confers meaning and alterity to a subset of the
perceived world. The consequence of this quasi-animist speech effect on
the part of the artwork redrafts the subjectivity both of the artist and of his
‘consumer’. (Guattari 1995, 131)
I am also intrigued by the related terms ‘pretend’ and ‘pretension’ in

light of the artists/case studies I will be discussing here; in the fact that
each of these artists has used modes of ‘artifice’ and the artificial to enact
their performative creative works. To claim to be something else, or
assert a visual resemblance that is only partially realized, is to operate on
a threshold or perimeter, a boundary that may or may not be fixed, and
might be travelled across or tested in multiple ways.
That we have bodies in costumes that both evoke and manifestly are
not other beings recalls childhood play and the ability to create a vivid
bricolage on the playground. Belief in the ‘reality’ of these actions sus-
tained by the most tenuous of means—bits and pieces of surround-
ing ephemera, clothing, and landmarks—are transformed via acts of
11 EXPLORING POSTHUMAN MASQUERADE AND BECOMING 215
performing/pretending. And to advance a ‘claim’ is a synonym of pre-

tension, as are notions of largeness, vulgarity, and unnaturalness.
Theorist Brian Massumi writes of the phenomenon of animals at play
in his book-length essay What Animals Teach Us About Politics:
The animal in play actively, effectively affirms paradox. This augments its
capacities in at least two ways. On the one hand, animals learn through
play (to the extent that a play fight is preparation for the real combat
engagements that may be necessary in the future). On the other hand, the
purview of its mental powers expands. In play, the animal elevates itself to
the metacommunicational level, where it gains the capacity to mobilize
the possible. Its powers of abstraction rise a notch. Its powers of thought
are augmented. Its life capacities more fully deploy, if abstractly. Its forces
of vitality are intensified accordingly. The ludic gesture is a vital gesture.
Humans may also practice effective paradox, when they permit themselves
to abandon themselves to play. In play, the human enters a zone of indis-
cernibility with the animal. When we humans say “this is play,” we are
assuming our animality. (2014, 7–8)
Indebted to Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi speaks of animality and

humanity overlapping in an inclusion of their difference as a zone of
indiscernibility.
Curator Anselm Franke, in his detailed overview of the history of the
notion of animism and its corresponding relations with Modern visual
culture, argues that: ‘The backdrop against which to understand the nine-
teenth-century conception of animism is ultimately the partition of life from
non-life, and its many offsprings and differentiations’ (2010, 23). He notes
at the same time the very ‘instability’ of this kind of hierarchical division,
which also gives rise to the many imaginative permutations within Modern
fiction and psychoanalytical thought via Freud’s discussion of the uncanny.
From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, curiosity
regarding qualities of the animate/inanimate seems almost never-ending.
The contemporary artists I am turning my attention towards here
partially inhabit, evoke, and play with features of something they are in
some ways definitively not, via performative actions. They simultane-
ously retain their own selfhood, but expand the customary distinctions
that might otherwise be respected of their fleshy, embodied edges. These
artists might also be seen to consider what their unlikely extensions,
costuming, and props might induce in the viewer. What affective turns
do we negotiate in light of these works, and how might we reconsider
216 M. Patrick
Fig. 11.1 David Cross, Bounce, 2005. Performance/installation. Photo: Steven

Rowe. Courtesy of the artist and City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand
our own human (and potentially posthuman) qualities and agency?

(Fig. 11.1).
David Cross has described his artworks, without the express intention
of summoning any pejorative connotations, as ‘psychically confusing’
and involving ‘destabilising conditions’ (Cross 2006). This is entirely
appropriate as his projects frequently link the Freudian uncanny with
an in-between liminal space often made manifest in his outsized, inflat-

able structures. If play has functioned as a consistent theme throughout
Cross’s work, he furthermore explores play as labour, work, and ordeal.
In his projects, participants are contracted into the schema that unfolds,
which in turn usually involves contact with the sculptural installation, the
site in which it is located, and with the bodies of others, including at
times that of the artist.
Cross’s multiple hybridized aesthetic draws upon references across a
wide range of the visual culture continuum: minimal, performance, and
pop art alongside direct and indirect references to horror films, chil-
dren’s amusements, sporting events, and even sex toys. The eyes of the
artist that could only be seen through small holes atop his red-domed
installation Bounce (2006) recall the threatening type of masquerade
used in such genre movies as the Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Texas
Chainsaw Massacre franchises. In turn, Cross became vulnerable to the
movements of the participants running, sliding, and jumping onto the
sculpture, at one point suffering a broken nose from one viewer’s espe-
cially avid participation.
As curator Tyler Cann writes in his critical response to Bounce:
while the artist lay impassively below, children played at scrambling and
bouncing, oblivious to their little cruelties. Perhaps this reflection on the
soft spots we overlook and the unnoticed injuries we inflict was precisely
the point. But of course, for the most part, the abuse simply bounced off
the artist’s newfound plastic skin. Enduring this anaesthetic condition for a
full seven hours, for Cross, the distended red tumulus became part coffin
and part cocoon. (see Huddleston 2008, 7)
Cann proceeded to remark upon two of Freud’s exemplars of the

uncanny: ‘when something alive appears dead, and when something
inanimate comes alive. In its stripped-down human encounter, mix-
ing performance, sculpture, and carnival, Bounce managed to do both’
(Huddleston 2008, 7).
I would argue that what Cann describes in his critique as ‘managing
to do both’ is a central aspect of Cross’s work and, more broadly con-
figured, a range of performative art practices that straddle, merge and
evoke contradictory, but rather eerily aligned, spaces and experiences,
where aspects of the human animal and the supposedly inanimate or
non-human are intermingled. The second, mediated skin of the inflatable
218 M. Patrick
body/not body becomes integral to Cross’s practice throughout numer-

ous discrete projects. Moreover, his projects are strongly informed by
notions drawn from the history of body art, correspondingly revised
within the newer contexts of temporal exhibitions and site responsive
practice. This engagement, while historically situated, is driven by exam-
ining aspects of the haptic and the contextual, and with technologically
mediated live performance events.
Although Cross in many works has questioned the assumptions
around both beauty and the grotesque in a very individuated manner,
redolent of his own witty approach to materiality, more recently he has
cast his view more toward the social body and its corresponding logistics.
It could also be significant to note that the ‘skin’ evoked by high sheen
inflatable materials is not only a conjuring which draws upon all manner
of reference points along the arts continuum, from Ellsworth Kelly to
Yayoi Kusama, but that Cross himself as a child was subject to a severe
allergy to medication, resulting in burns across his own body, necessitat-
ing many subsequent surgical procedures. His artworks involve intensely
tactile means, the bright coloration of fairground attractions coinciding
with atmospheres of potential peril and unease. The titles of sculptural
installations exemplify the performative actions taking place: hold, bounce,
lean.
The artist has situated his projects within a nexus of manifold factors,
as when Drift (2011) operated in an urban neighbourhood of Sydney
characterized both by its alternative nightlife and a park frequently occu-
pied by homeless citizens. To locate a site-specific project at the cross-
roads of those often perceived as marginal was important for Cross,
whose work involved a gigantic yellow PVC tunnel installed over the
Taylor Square fountain. In his earlier Hold (2007), participants climbed
one at a time into a large, blue structure needing to reach—and have
confidence in—the artist’s hand extending outwardly from a slit to guide
them each across a high, narrow ledge to the exit on the other side.1
These inflatable works are characterized by their bold visual identity
that simultaneously camouflages the complicated scenarios of interrela-
tion, negotiation and fear that can ensue around, on and within their
confines.
But the notion of play that can go wrong has haunted Cross’s work
with a number of participants undergoing minor accidents, and the
actions of participants in turn putting the artist under near constant
alert, even in the case of comparatively gentle harassment. In an informal
essay, Cross writes about the contextual setting of the Drift project in
Sydney, in terms of the invective he received from passers-by, and the
passage (somewhat ill-advisedly) of intoxicated and mentally troubled
participants through the work, which inevitably required a modicum of
skill and dexterity to negotiate. According to the artist:
The artwork couches participatory art practice in a package of generosity

and civic pleasure, which proves to be a valuable, or more to the point,
essential calculation. Yet to be able to investigate risk: the risk of the audi-
ence not knowing what happens inside the work, the risk of thunderstorms
and wind gusts blowing the object across Darlinghurst, the risk of it being
slashed like a Lucio Fontana canvas for the sheer destructive joy, and the
risk of an inebriated local throwing up in the work, the artwork has to
function as a sort of Hansel and Gretel house of allure. By drawing people
in with its juvenile canary yellow colour, inflated form and the potential
of something fun, the work managed to hold on. Point and counterpoint,
push and pull. (Cross 2017, 27)
What the artist refers to as a ‘Hansel and Gretel house of allure’ is crucial
to the understanding of a practice that recalls and reconfigures childhood
fears and attractions simultaneously. The attraction to the viewer often
results in something more promising than one’s average theme park ride,
more unsettling and rich in implications relating to perimeters, exterior-
ity and interiority in flux, at times becoming evident as different spaces,
at other times a kind of pulsing, writhing creature again.
But here our human surface qualities clash in mighty confronta-
tion with a constructed, sci-fi carapace, as from Cross’s artworks, which
could be interpreted as synthetic bodily surrogates of differing shapes
and scales: ‘real’ limbs protrude, eyes peer outwardly, and people test
limits of the structures to hold and take on their physical weight. The
human confronts the human-like, but in these events a disturbing alterity
is revealed, as our human identification seems to dissolve and be rup-
tured by a fragmenting, distorting experience. We are not mirrored as
whole in Cross’s works. We are shown to be unlike ourselves, disunified,
and potentially ill at ease. But the very fact that such disturbances of our
supposed singular identities are enacted by carnivalesque means may also
elicit as much pleasure as doubt or disillusionment (Fig. 11.2).
Catherine Bagnall’s practice exhibits rather different charms than
the outsized, overt manifestations I have spoken of in Cross’s works.
220 M. Patrick
Fig. 11.2 Catherine Bagnall, Feeling the wind with my ears, 2015. Photo: Julian
Bishop. Courtesy of the artist
That is to say, her artwork and attitude evince a disarmingly modest

quality that lures one in, should one wish to travel in the circles of those
who tread long distances on foot in the wilderness while wearing multi-
patterned, hand-sewn animal hats and tails (for example). Bagnall has
both led group ‘tramps’ in this manner and, on other occasions, scaled
daunting precipices of Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) in cumbersome
Victorian apparel. Bagnall’s art practice enlivens the situations it encoun-
ters, similar to how she embraces both the outdoor landscape and the
actively performative gesture.
Although most often represented through photography, video and
sculptural installation, Bagnall’s concern is very much for the experien-
tial and, in a number of varied types of iteration, she has attempted to
communicate the very feel and ‘liveness’ of her wilderness excursions.
Although whimsical and childlike at times, it also bears a quality of enor-
mous seriousness, and an almost mystical and neo-Romantic view of how
nature influences and intersects with culture. Her work bespeaks, despite
its allegiances to the past, a very contemporary ecological world view.
Ron Broglio’s book Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals
and Art has been informative in tangling with and thinking alongside
Bagnall’s works. Broglio argues for an investigation of animal other-
ness via the cultural realm, specifically the visual arts, asking the ques-
tion: ‘How are we to understand that which differs from our capacity
to comprehend?’ (2011, xvii). For Broglio, ‘contemporary art has a par-
ticular investment with surfaces that is useful in unhinging philosophical
concepts and moving them in other directions’ (2011, xvii). He unpacks
initially the relegation of animals to a limited conceptual construct as he
writes:
What depth they do have is dismissed as lesser than that of humans, or

so foreign as to be untranslatable and not worth pursuing in our human
endeavours. This flattening of animals’ worlds into a thin layer of animal
world as a life on the surface of things has legitimated any number of cruel
acts against animals. (Broglio 2011, xvi–xvii)
Thus Broglio seeks to overturn and reorient this notion of ‘animal sur-
face’ more productively, and he notes that artists’ uses of surfaces are
integral to a different sort of reading, arguing that: ‘Working between
these surfaces, folded within them, artists create works that prompt
thought in new direction’ (Broglio 2011, xvii).
And as Bagnall has commented:
‘Becoming’ another creature began with the idea of using a ‘creature’ to

develop and understand aspects of myself, specifically my relationship to
the environment. The dialectic between human and creature has its basis
in the human psychological self and is used accordingly, this idea feels
respectful to the creatures as well as allowing for the interior fictive process
that goes on in the human imagination. But I don’t rule out the actual
transformation of humans into animals, shamanistic thinking, or at least
trying the potential of that, and we can do it through writing, stories, and
art forms. It is also about how we have placed the non-human animal in
our culture, the awe about otherness. Otherness can be other characters,
people, personae. (Patrick 2015)
This animal–human interface and series of reverberating aspects, dou-

bling and othering of which Bagnall and Broglio are speaking in turn
222 M. Patrick
recall Deleuze and Guattari’s section ‘Becoming intense, becoming ani-

mal’ in A Thousand Plateaus:
The painter and musician do not imitate the animal, they become-animal
at the same time as the animal becomes what they willed, at the deep-
est level of their concord with Nature. Becoming is always double, that
which one becomes becomes no less than the one that becomes—block is
formed, essentially mobile, never in equilibrium Becoming is never imitat-
ing. When Hitchcock does birds, he does not reproduce bird calls, he pro-
duces an electronic sound like a field of intensities or a wave of vibrations,
a continuous variation, like a terrible threat welling up inside us. (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, 305)
And in a videotaped interview transcribed into a series of observations

on the work of Felix Guattari with respect to animism and subjectivity,
anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro states:
the native [Amazonian] myths always begin with a time when every living
being was human. But in the end the aim is to explain how certain beings
stopped being human. These beings left humanity to become animals or
objects. With our myths, it’s exactly the opposite. In the beginning we
were all animals or pure material. Certain of us then became humanized.
So we have the heroic tales of humanity conquering nature, which is an
alterity from the point of view of culture: culture as modern soul, some-
thing that distinguishes us from the rest of creation. Whereas among the
Amazon Indians, it’s exactly the opposite. In their view, we are all in the
world. Humans merely have a particular materiality. What makes us human
as such is our body, not our soul. Our soul is the most common thing in
the world. Everything is animated, you see: animism. (Melitopoulos and
Lazzarato 2012)
From such a perspective, Bagnall’s work asserts an identification with

animals via a kind of empathic imaginative event, that demonstrates affin-
ity with the above description of animism. As the artist has remarked: ‘I
am aware of the problematic nature of using dress to try “becoming”
another creature … If I fully became rabbit I may lose my ability to phi-
losophise about “becoming” rabbit’ (Bagnall 2016, 203–204). But this
act of pretending, asserting a claim that she can learn by ‘becoming’ rab-
bit, is a validation of an undervalued connection: that we are only a few
steps removed from such animal behaviour. How are we to understand
it more intensively without a pretension to fail in the very act of getting

closer, in the vicinity of animalhood? Being and not-being, balancing
atop a philosophical conundrum, while wearing fur and tail.
Bagnall’s approach also summons the work of Charles Foster, who in
the course of his research for his 2016 book Being A Beast attempted,
despite the ridiculousness and folly of the conceit involved, to live
as various animals: badger, fox, deer, otter, and swift. Foster acknowl-
edges the stretching involved in this endeavour with wit and candour,
but still maintains an approach far more idiosyncratic than your average
researcher:
I want to have a more articulate talk with the land … A good way is to go
about it is to have a more articulate talk with the furry, feathered, scaly,
whooping, swooping, screaming, soaring, grunting, crushing, panting,
flapping, farting, wrenching, waddling, dislocating, loping, ripping, spring-
ing, exulting lumps of the land we call animals. (Foster 2016, 21)
In the attempt, however tenuous at times, to reconfigure some version-

ing of ‘animalhood’, researchers such as Bagnall and Foster question our
fixed assumptions around subjectivity, and avowedly desire to redraw our
mapping of self. By attuning awareness to other phenomena apart from
the rational, upright Enlightenment characterization of the human sub-
ject, the latitude of inquiry opens out onto provocative territory. If one
takes on a more incorporative view of animism and how ubiquitous and
enveloping it might be, as Vivieros de Castro indicates above, perhaps
our claims to how specific the human animal is become more and more
precarious.
Bagnall’s ways of using dress also echo mimetic rituals of ‘becom-
ing animal’ conducted in a more ceremonial, indigenous setting, as in
anthropologist Rane Willerslev’s description of the Siberian Yukaghirs:
Watching Old Spiridon rocking his body back and forth, I was puzzled
whether the figure I saw before me was man or elk. The elk-hide coat
worn with its hair outward, the headgear with its characteristic protruding
ears, and the skis covered with an elk’s smooth leg skins, so as to sound
like the animal when moving in snow, made him an elk; yet the lower part
of his face below the hat, with its human eyes, nose, and mouth, along
with the loaded rifle in his hands, made him a man. Thus, it was not that
Spiridon had stopped being human. Rather, he had a liminal quality: he
was not an elk, and yet he was also not not an elk. He was occupying a
224 M. Patrick
strange place in between human and nonhuman identities. (Willerslev

2007, 1)
Moreover, although I would argue that Bagnall’s work operates within

the crux of some vital questions regarding the role of the posthuman,
she herself is more sceptical of blurring boundaries between human/
animal considering that a view of human consciousness and potential
as exceptional allows for an agency, responsibility, and activism towards
improving the current ecological situation.
Bagnall states: ‘I am interested in how one can be a voice with the
other creatures, with the forest’ (Patrick 2015). But arguably again this
is a creative situation that gains its particular energy from initiating a
generative, playful, relational dialogue for such issues to be brought out
simultaneously with a curious tension: being and not being animal; par-
tially becoming, animistically evocative. And it is also democratizing: as
participants don the artifice of ‘silly animal hats and tails’ it is difficult to
distinguish some sort of hierarchy, which facilitates an ensuing dialogue
more quickly. Bagnall’s repeated openings towards play again recall my
citation from Massumi earlier in the chapter, acknowledging the vital sig-
nificance of the ludic gesture and that acts of play summon our animality.
In philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s wide-ranging study The Posthuman,
she writes:
In my view, the point about posthuman relations, however, is to see the

inter-relation human/animal as constitutive of the identity of each. It is a
transformative or symbiotic relation that hybridizes and alters the ‘nature’
of each one and foregrounds the middle grounds of their interaction. This
is the ‘milieu’ of the human/non-human continuum and it needs to be
explored as an open experiment, not as a foregone moral conclusion about
allegedly universal values or qualities. (2013, 79–80)
I would follow this by stating that Bagnall’s work in its invitation to

join and ‘play along with’ its presentation of animality is an open-ended,
thoughtful art experiment, instead of rushing to a conclusion, moving
along the paths of Aotearoa NZ to better formulate new understandings
of human–animal interconnections.
How might an artist creatively contend with multiple entanglements
of past and present, Pākehā and Māori, bicultural nation-state and
indigenous traditions, belief systems, and protocols? Shannon Te Ao’s
Fig. 11.3 Shannon Te Ao, two shoots that stretch far out, 2013–2014. Single
channel video, colour and sound, 13:22 min. Cinematography Iain Frengley.
Courtesy of the artist and Robert Heald Gallery
artworks incorporate locales, traditions, and narratives of Aotearoa NZ

characterized by a precarious balance between ambiguity and specificity.
Te Ao is often the protagonist of his videos, but acts as a kind of inter-
pretative agent of signals wrought by charged cultural sites, involving
contemporary performance interwoven with a poeticism of the everyday
(Fig. 11.3).
Te Ao’s works often contend with darkness, both in terms of that
which needs uncovering and revising in historical terms, and in terms
of actual atmospheric darkness in the compositional registers of video.
Furthermore, such a dark space which, on one level could be read as
‘empty’, might also be considered a void space containing a different
kind of plenitude, as the artist has noted:
Within Maori ideology, Te Kore may describe a point of nothingness—a

void. Similarly Te Kore may propose a primary point of departure, a social
paradox—without reference or resource—of fundamental autonomy and
interminable potentiality. Te Kore and its variant ‘Te Korekore’ suggest
that what we see is not all there is. This state, or state of being, exists beyond
the realm of everyday experience and is commonly linked to narratives of
226 M. Patrick
creation, exploration and uncertainty, and through these mana, tapu and
mauri. (Te Ao 2015, 13)
Such a darkness can be viewed as manifesting presence, as well as a pre-

sent indeterminacy and fundamental point of departure or potential. Te
Ao’s practice is also influenced by notions of cultural identity viewed
as ‘a restless system of flows’ to cite Australian artist and writer Ross
Gibson (Gibson 2013). He also draws upon Pacific social anthropologist
Epeli Hau’ofa’s notion that: ‘Just as the sea is an open and ever-flow-
ing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insular-
ity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming’
(Hau’ofa 2008, 55).
In Follow the Party of the Whale (2013), the artist performs before a
video camera, pacing around a small outdoor area repetitively drinking
from a case of bottled water and spewing sprays of water high into the
air like a whale. Collaborator and cinematographer Iain Frengley’s hand-
held camera hovers not far away, putting us in the place of both uneasy
bystander and intimate spectator. A barefoot Te Ao is wrapped in a wool-
len blanket, placed shawl-like around his shoulders but later abandoned.
In the artist’s words:
Ambling across the cold, wet tarmac I am occupied with intaking fifty litres
of soda water. I intermittently expel each mouthful and, in turn, take in
more. I am invested in the singular, bodily experience; one’s ‘personal’
relationship to a multitude of conflated influences. (Te Ao 2015, 15)
Te Ao’s project references a significant, and highly traumatic event in

Aotearoa’s history: the invasion on 5 November 1881 of Parihaka (a
pan-tribal indigenous community), in the Taranaki region of the North
Island, by over 1500 colonial soldiers and militia. The settlement was a
thriving and self-sufficient collaborative entity. The government’s inten-
tion was to subvert the influence of Māori prophets Te Whiti and Tohu
Kākahi, who were among the arrested, and had been promoting notions
of non-violent and passive resistance in the face of land confiscations.
The settlement had come together in part owing to the increasing force
and oppressive tactics used against other smaller regional communities.
The 2000 residents of Parihaka did not resist arrest, greeting Native
Minister John Bryce in a peaceful manner. Nevertheless, the invading
soldiers completely destroyed the Parihaka settlement and brutally vic-

timized its residents.
The material, physical and spiritual devastation extended to suspend-
ing any due rule of law, as the Maori Prisoners’ Trials Act was introduced
to enable the prisoners to be incarcerated without legal recourse. The
men of the community were imprisoned in different locations on the
South Island. Those transported to Dunedin were conscripted as labour-
ers to construct the harbour wall and other parts of its civic infrastruc-
ture, and the extreme conditions under which they were held captive led
to half of them perishing from tuberculosis (Hohaia et al. 2001; Keenan
2015). Such a devastating illness involves a kind of internal drowning,
connecting with Te Ao’s evocative, spare scene in the video, shot in
a vacant area once used as a bowling green near Dunedin centre, but
more disturbingly a site which witnessed some of the historical events
described above.
In his own ruminative statement discussing Follow the Party of the
Whale, Te Ao writes:
As you attempt to engage with a place or an event—deepen your under-

standing through some activity—over time the things that you might want
to account for, or be responsible to, start to add up. A simple enough
proposition is short-lived. We try to set tasks or propose actions that re-
activate our presence within that process—a different kind of remember-
ing. As it happens, the handling of dark material, complexity, history, and
the insertion of our own agency within that, can be a murky business.
There is no ‘one way’ and so you can never get it ‘right’. If and when the
dust settles it doesn’t stay that way for long (Te Ao 2013, 18).
If our selves are potentially mutable, transitory, and hybridized, this does
not necessarily sit well in relation to traditional protocols and under-
standings that long precede my argument and which I continue to learn
much from. And much contemporary art by Māori artists including that
of Te Ao simultaneously contends with richly inscribed cultural tradi-
tions, and attempts to create intricate responses to those traditions and
more, including the effects of how one’s particular hybridized life expe-
riences intersect with existing systems of belief. Te Ao’s work connects
into a larger continuum of past and present, particularly if one acknowl-
edges indigenous notions of time, and the Māori proverb ka mua, ka
muri (one walks backwards into the future).
228 M. Patrick
Te Ao’s 2016 Walters Prize winning work Two Shoots that Stretch Far
Out is a video which depicts the artist reading an English translation of a
Māori waiata (song poem) iteratively to a number of animals: a donkey,
a wallaby, a swan, chickens, and a few ducks. The conceit is a novel one
and so ingeniously threaded into the project that one is quickly engaged
with a work addressing themes of translation, transformation, and empa-
thy across time, space, and species. The waiata is written from the point
of view of a woman who has been wronged by her husband and who has
taken on another partner; yet it is Te Ao who recites the text, which con-
founds our ability to precisely distinguish his role.
As Megan Dunn has pointed out, Te Ao’s performative actions relate
to his Māori background where, for some Māori tribes, ‘animals are
believed to be guardian spirits left behind by deceased ancestors’ (Dunn
2015). In this respect, and with reference back to Guattari’s ‘quasi-ani-
mist’ speech effect, Te Ao’s art reinvests meaning and alterity to a de-
territorialized part of Māori history and redrafts his own subjecthood in
relation to animality. Furthermore, for the Walters prize installation at
the Auckland Art Gallery, Te Ao included a plethora of potted house-
plants clustered on one’s route to the screening area.
Te Ao had previously experimented with using plants in his I stretch
everything in the end (2013), in which weeds—cultivated for this purpose
in his sister’s garden in large plastic paintbuckets—were transported from
the basement to the rooftop of the gallery on a Sunday afternoon while
the artist recited poetry to the plants. In so doing, the artist enacted acts
of pretending and pretension along the thresholds and perimeters of our
everyday experiences. Te Ao advances a ‘claim’ in the recital of waiata
but does so in the process of talking to animals and plants. Recalling
Massumi’s notions regarding what animals teach us about politics, Te
Ao helps us learn via playful experience, and performs a ‘ludic gesture’,
abandoning himself to play (assuming his own animality) and thus,
through such play, indicates the vitality and importance of his political
action (see Massumi 2014, 7–8).
Not dissimilar from this thread of inquiry, critic Anthony Byrt has
characterized Te Ao’s role as a disruptive ‘shapeshifter,’ noting that:
Two shoots is about a waiata. But it is also about crossing oceans, crossing
genders, crossing between times, between the dead and the living, between
the animal and the human, and between the earth and the stars. Te Ao,
fixed in human form, nonetheless embodies mercurial energy throughout.

(Byrt 2016)
In reference to Jones’s comments that opened this chapter, Te Ao’s

political agility has something to do with his ‘unnatural and fundamen-
tally unfixable’ identity that comes close to what might be called ‘post-
human’. His mediated and multiple identities performed through his
body/self might suggest a loss of the subject (see Jones 1998, 199) but
there is clearly something else gained. If Te Korekore means that what we
see is not all there is, Te Ao deliberately inserts his own murky agency as a
way of creatively exploring mauri (life force), likely never a single anthro-
pocentric embodiment or positioning.
In this chapter, I am using the generative possibilities of contempo-
rary art practice to think through some interrelated aspects of perfor-
mance and play, animism and the posthuman. As performance theorist
Anthony Kubiak writes:
Newer considerations of animism pull together our recognition of the

‘interbeing’ (to use Thich Nhat Hanh’s terminology) of the world—that
even in an empirical sense the world must increasingly be thought of as
interconnected systems and not discrete individuals. This parallels the
increasing sense of the epistemological falsity of essentialized identities and
the fundamental truth of the fluid and porous nature of the world in gen-
eral. (Kubiak 2012, 58)
I am arguing that a notion of selfhood in flux—incorporating simulta-

neously immaterial, not readily quantifiable aspects, and an extravagant,
often vivid rendering of surfaces—is what emerges most distinctly in the
artworks I discuss. These artists’ performative acts that initially appear to
drastically distort, disguise, and mask everyday appearances can be seen
more subtly to serve as conduits toward revised understandings of our
humanness/animality and to heighten awareness of the deep structures
that connect states of beings, which could be read through various com-
parative lenses. In this manner, some highly intriguing reverberations and
synchronicities emerge between anthropological research, philosophical
discourse, indigenous cosmologies, and art criticism.2
Recalling my introductory citation, the works discussed here could
be read as eluding certain of the explicit authorial intentions of the art-
ists into a more indeterminate and unfixed realm. Whether via Cross’s
230 M. Patrick
performance installations, Bagnall’s animal personae, or Te Ao’s evoca-

tive videos, these creative practices relinquish unitary, discrete selves
in favour of a pronounced liminality, and in encountering these acts of
becoming other, we in turn are invited as viewers into a different state
of reception, heightening our recognition of the expanded and elusive
boundaries of both our animated surroundings and dispersed selves.
Notes
1. For more images and writings on David Cross’s practice, please see www.
davidcrossartist.com.
2. Some of my thoughts on artists Shannon Te Ao and David Cross draw
upon my previous writings on their work in the books Unstuck in Time
(Auckland: Te Tuhi Gallery, 2014) and Air Supplied: David Cross (New
York: Punctum Books, 2017), and are also related to the arguments pre-
sented in chaps. 1 and 5 of my forthcoming book Across the Art/Life
Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social Practice in Contemporary Art
(Bristol: Intellect, 2017).
References
Bagnall, Catherine. 2016. Explorations into Creaturely Sensations and Traplines.
The Senses and Society 11 (2): 199–205. Accessed 14 May 2017, doi:
10.1080/17458927.2016.1196886.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Broglio, Ron. 2011. Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Byrt, Anthony. 2016. This Model World: Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art.
Auckland: Auckland University Press.
Cross, David. 2006. Some Kind of Beautiful: The Grotesque Body in
Contemporary Art. Ph.D. thesis, Queensland University of Technology
School of Visual Arts.
Cross, David. 2017. Field Notes: Selected Art Writings. New York: Punctum
Books.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Dunn, Megan. 2015. The Abode of Indifference. CIRCUIT: Artist Film
and Video Aotearoa New Zealand blog, 11 October. Accessed 1 May 2017,
https://www.circuit.org.nz/blog/the-abode-of-indifference.
Foster, Charles. 2016. Being a Beast: An Intimate and Radical Look at Nature.
London: Profile Books.
Franke, Anselm (ed.). 2010. Animism, vol. I. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Gibson, Ross. 2013. Aqueous Aesthetics: An Art History of Change. Wellington:
Victoria University Press.
Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul
Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hau’ofa, Epeli. 2008. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press.
Hohaia, Te Miringa, Gregory O’Brien, and Lara Strongman (eds.). 2001.
Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance. Wellington: City Gallery.
Huddleston, Charlotte (ed.). 2008. Mostly Harmless: a performance series. New
Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
Jones, Amelia. 1998. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Keenan, Danny. 2015. Te Whiti O Rongomai and the Resistance of Parihaka.
Wellington: Huia Publishers.
Kubiak, Anthony. 2012. Animism: Becoming-Performance, or Does This Text
Speak to You? Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17 (4):
52–60. Accessed 15 May 2017, doi: 10.1080/13528165.2012.712252.
Massumi, Brian. 2014. What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Durham, NC:
Melitopoulos, Angela and Maurizio Lazzarato. 2012. “Assemblages: Félix
Guattari and Machinic Animism.” e-flux Journal, 36 (July). Accessed
1 May 2017. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61259/assemblages-flix-
guattari-and-machinic-animism/.
Patrick, Martin. 2015. Interview with Catherine Bagnall. LAR Magazine, 21. http://
www.lar-magazine.com/single-post/2016/1/18/LARMAGAZINE021-Peaceful-
Context.
Te Ao, Shannon. 2013. Reading While Driving. Speaking Poems in the Dark. In
Freedom Farmers: New Zealand Artists Growing Ideas, ed. Natasha Conland.
Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery.
Te Ao, Shannon. 2015. Part Tree, Part Canoe. Master of Fine Arts exegesis.
Wellington: Massey University.
Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among
the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press.
PART IV
Sensational Animisms
CHAPTER 12
The Animist Readymade: Towards a Vital

Materialism of Contemporary Art
Stephen Zepke
‘Representations’, Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘are bodies too!’ (1987, 95).
Echoing Bergson’s famous argument that images are things, this pithy
slogan summarizes Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical materialism, and
alludes to their vitalist commitments. I want to explore this slogan in two
directions, one philosophical and the other artistic, but working towards
a point where they meet in a contemporary aesthetics. On the one
hand, then, is the philosophical tradition of aesthetics as it emerges from
Kant, and as it is immediately read, interpreted and challenged by the
first generation of the Sturm und Drang. These early Romantics intro-
duce animism as a term closely linked to their version of vitalism, and
affirm art as its privileged mode of expression. On the other hand, and
more recently, Deleuze and Guattari have explicitly returned to this tra-
dition, using it to reread Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, and so ground
a genealogy of materialist and vitalist contemporary artistic practice.
Unpacking the claim that ‘representations are bodies too’ in relation to
philosophy and art will therefore require us to understand how concepts
determine intuitions to be representations in Kant, and how concepts
S. Zepke (*) 
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
e-mail: eszed@hotmail.com

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_12
236 S. Zepke
determine an object to be art in Duchamp. More importantly, however,

it requires us to understand how Deleuze and Guattari’s slogan under-
mines the assumptions of both of these traditions, dragging them instead
towards a contemporary aesthetics of the living body that is no longer
understood along subjective or objective lines, but as a form of animist
expressionism.
Let’s begin, as aesthetics effectively does, with Kant. Kant argued
in the First Critique that representations are formed when intuition is
determined by the concepts of the understanding, a ‘Copernican revolu-
tion’ in philosophy which limited ‘knowledge’ to the realm of phenom-
ena, or representation, and condemned ‘real’ bodies to the unknowable
mysteries of the noumena, or thing-in-itself. But Kant’s schematism
immediately raised questions, not least how the determination of intui-
tion by the understanding was possible in the first place. Kant needed
to demonstrate the genesis of the relationships between the faculties,
and this was, in part, the task of the Third Critique, the Critique of
Judgment, which sought to show how their free and undetermined har-
mony was the condition of possibility for all their other determinative
relations.
The genesis of the faculties is the focus of Deleuze’s reading of the
Third Critique, one that suggests that in the sublime we find a Romantic
understanding of the faculties, which instead of grounding the schema-
tism actually unhinges it, establishing a disjunctive synthesis between
intuition and reason—or as Deleuze will put it in Difference and
Repetition the actual and the virtual—from which pre-individual singu-
larities emerge as living sensations, as bodies of pure and repeating differ-
ence. For Deleuze, then, the sublime is what is most interesting in Kant,
because it is what both reveals the limits of representation, and releases
sensation to go beyond those limits in expressing an infinite immaterial
Idea. The sublime, on Deleuze’s account, is what frees Kantian aesthetics
to go beyond its self-imposed conceptual limits and enter into a general-
ized expressionism in which representations become the vital living bod-
ies they always were.1 For both the Romantics and Deleuze and Guattari,
then, bodies are animated by a vital ‘spiritual’ dimension that provides
the virtual conditions of their material existence.2
In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari are perverse inheritors of
Naturphilosophie and Romanticism inasmuch as, for all of them, life is
the materialization of Nature’s vital and creative, virtual and real force.
For Deleuze and Guattari there is ‘a material vitalism that doubtless
12 THE ANIMIST READYMADE: TOWARDS A VITAL MATERIALISM OF … 237
exists everywhere’ (1987, 411), the same material vitalism that was
one of the founding claims of the Romantics—who called it hylozo-
ism—for whom matter consisted of self-organizing and self-activat-
ing living forces. During Romanticism the sciences were shifting away
from the m echanistic physics of Descartes and Newton towards more
dynamic models, many of which drew on the philosophy of Spinoza—
with his first p rinciple updated from substance to force.3 This emer-
gence of Spinoza, against the mechanistic theories of Enlightenment
science,4 gave rise to the so-called ‘pantheism controversy’ and the pit-
ting of immanent teleologies of force or intelligent ends against the blind
necessity of a mechanistic nature.5
The hylozoism of Romanticism gave rise to the term animism as part
of the working vocabulary of numerous disciplines. For biologists, for
example, animism described how the self-organizing power of epigenesis
(such as the regeneration of water-polyps revealed in a famous case-study
of the time) seemed to exceed the limits of ‘life’ as it was understood
by mechanistic science. For philosophers, animism described life in a way
that went beyond the previously impermeable barriers between spirit
and matter, or mind and body, and meant these terms could be under-
stood as different but necessarily integrated parts of an organic and living
whole. For neither biologists or philosophers, then, was animism a ques-
tion of magic or supernatural forces; in fact quite the opposite: it was
an attempt to understand the clearly supersensible aspects of material life
(i.e., vital force) in an empirical way. As we shall see, this will involve, as
Deleuze puts it, a ‘superior’ or ‘transcendental empiricism’ (1994, 144)
that emerges in the sublime and involves a new kind of intuition, one
that leads directly to the Ideas of reason without passing through the
understanding. This, as we shall see, introduces a new kind of thought,
one adequate to an animist aesthetics.
Deleuze and Guattari will develop a perverse, Nietzschean form
of hylozoism in which living force goes beyond any organic teleology,
in a process of creative destruction by which life escapes capture in a
fixed form, and first of all the form of representation itself.6 Nature, in
other words, is not purposive, whether in the regulative Idea of organic
unity discovered by Kant,7 or in the teleological living force animating
organic matter championed by Naturphilosophie. Nature, Deleuze and
Guattari categorically state, is ‘not a teleological conception’ (1994,
185). Deleuze instead begins from the passive syntheses of intuition as
the real conditions of a real—and not representational—experience.
238 S. Zepke
Following the model of the sublime, the breakdown of the synthesis, of

our representational conditions of possibility, allows an Idea to emerge
in a sensation of what ‘is not the given but that by which the given is
given’, as Deleuze puts it (1994, 140). This sensation is therefore an
experience without conditions of possibility, and so is not a representa-
tion, because it emerges beyond the conceptual limits imposed by the
schematism. Instead, it is an experience that expresses its own conditions
(‘that by which the given is given’), or a supersensible Idea of reason.
This is what makes this ‘aesthetic’ empiricism ‘superior’; a sensation is
a reflective judgment (i.e., an intuition) able to think its transcendental
Idea. Deleuze will call this, with some relish, a ‘harmony in pain’ (2002,
62), hardly a surprising formulation given his interest in masochism. The
Ideas—and here Deleuze is following Salomon Maimon’s Leibnizean
reading of Kant—are virtual differentials that are always moving towards
their limit; towards their outside. This makes Nature perversely hylozoic,
as we have seen, because it is composed of utterly inorganic, contingent
and non-teleological force animating all matter, and its genetic and a pri-
ori principle is the overcoming of all forms, all possible conditions and all
other conceptualizations of life.
Deleuze nevertheless retains a ‘critical’ position inasmuch as he seeks
the conditions of thought in the relationship of matter and experience,
but ‘experience’ is liberated from the human and made a universal
condition of ‘relation’. This gives ‘thought’ a kind of Spinozist twist,
inasmuch as it expresses a univocal Nature (i.e., bodies) composed of a
dark and seething difference (i.e., Ideas), the supersensible conditions
of real experience found in virtual Ideas being no wider than the actual
sensations they condition, each sensation expressing but also animating
Nature’s intensive infinity. Guattari fittingly describes this as a ‘para-
doxical Copernican inversion prolonged by an animist revival’ (1995,
77). Instead of everything revolving around the illuminating sun of
human reason, it is reason that twitches and twists according to the
dark spirits of the material universe. These dark spirits are the thoughts
of an ‘animist Kant’.
Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of art is also broadly Romantic and ani-
mist, inasmuch as art is a non-discursive expression of a m etaphysical—
but nevertheless immanent—absolute. This absolute is becoming itself,
and, as in the early Romantics, it establishes creation or production,
rather than the Rationalist law of correspondence, as the criteria for
truth. As Nick Land has pointed out, ‘The ferocious impetus of this
[Romantic] irruption [of art] was only possible in an epoch attempting

to rationalize itself as permanent metamorphosis, as growth’ (2011,
145). While for Land this ‘ferocious irruption’ finds its culmination in
the nihilist dystopias of cyberpunk capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari will
instead locate it in the animist readymade and the materialist vitalism of
contemporary art.
Although these conclusions may seem equally unlikely, the Romantic
echoes in Deleuze and Guattari are clear when they claim: ‘Art wants to
create the finite that restores the infinite’ (1994, 197).8 Art is the pas-
sage from an actual finite to a transcendental infinite, but the infinite is
neither an Idealist Idea nor an organic whole, but a material flux of con-
stant variations or virtualities that is continually emerging from and fall-
ing back into chaos. Chaosmosis. In Guattari’s terms, aesthetic objects
operate through a folding of chaos and complexity; ‘they never stop div-
ing into an umbilical chaotic zone where they lose their extrinsic refer-
ences and coordinates, but from where they can re-emerge invested with
new charges of complexity’ (1995, 111). This echoes the culmination
of Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s sublime: the one hand, as he so beau-
tifully exclaims, ‘My whole structure of perception is in the process of
exploding’, while on the other something is crawling from the wreckage.
From the sublime devastation of my conditions of possible experience a
‘rhythm’ is composing itself, not a body in the normal sense, not a sen-
sation (although sensation will have something to do with it) but what
Deleuze and Guattari will call in their sober moments an ‘existential
territory’, while in moments of pure delirious enthusiasm they cry: ‘We
become universes’ (1994, 169).
The work of art, in other words, vibrates between the chaos of unme-
diated sensation on one side and something emerging from it, a rhythm,
a territory that opens itself onto, and so creates, a universe. Similar to
Romanticism, the absolute produces itself through the genius of the
artist, the artwork being the actual expression or self-revelation of a
supersensible but nevertheless natural force. In Deleuze and Guattari,
however, there is no organic unity and the genius of the artist is in no
way restricted to the human, being a creative and chaotic, a creative
because chaotic force of Nature that escapes the limits of the human, of
the organism and of representational thought. This non-human produc-
tive imagination is the animist condition of art.
In terms of art, understanding the artwork as a representation of its
conceptual conditions has been the hegemonic mode of artistic practice
240 S. Zepke
for the last 50 years. How, then, can this be aligned with Deleuze and
Guattari’s slogan that representations are bodies too? Guattari seems to
directly answer this question when he claims that ‘conceptual art pro-
duces the most deterritorialised sensations’ (2011a, 43). Sensations are
beings, Deleuze and Guattari tell us (1994, 164), individuating bodies
of affects, making conceptual artworks bodies too. What this means will
become clearer, I hope, once we unpack Deleuze and Guattari’s exam-
ple of Duchamp’s readymade, which is not only, they say, an expressive
animal territory, but the beginning of a genealogy of conceptual artistic
practices that must be rethought as materialist, vitalist and finally animist.
Such a view is certainly problematic within the usual understanding
of contemporary artistic practices. These begin with Duchamp’s ready-
made, and the way it turned the question ‘what is art?’ from an ontologi-
cal into an epistemological inquiry. In The Green Box Duchamp argues
that the readymade is a ‘snapshot’ or ‘sign of accordance’ between it
and the laws governing its choice (1973, 27–28). For Duchamp, this
choice is entirely independent of the readymade object, which merely
exists as ‘information’ (1973, 32), indicating that a conceptual decision
(a ‘nomination’ as he called it) has taken place: ‘this is art’. This ‘deci-
sion’ not only liberates art from any medium specificity, but from any
aesthetic conditions at all. Since Duchamp, then, but really since the
late 1960s and Conceptual Art, something is defined as art according to
conceptual rather than aesthetic criteria, and increasingly artistic prac-
tices became concerned with exploring their own conceptual conditions.
In adopting this basic shift in the understanding of art, contemporary
artistic practices are ‘postconceptual’, meaning their organizing element
is conceptual (Osbourne 2013, 10), and employ what Peter Osbourne
has recently dubbed a ‘post-aesthetic poetics’ (2013, 33). This does not
mean, as Osbourne hastens to point out, that aesthetics has evaporated
from art, far from it, but it is to say that the aesthetic realm only exists
inasmuch as it is determined by its conceptual conditions—as it was in
Kant’s First Critique. In this sense the ‘bodies’ of Conceptual Art appear
according to their conditions of possibility (i.e., their concepts), and as
such ‘represent’ them. Art in these terms is no longer aesthetic because it
is conceptually determined, rather than producing a reflective judgement
(which for Kant is based on feeling).
In this regard, ‘postconceptual’ art shares its epistemological conditions
of possible experience with everything else, whether these are understood as
the conditions of possible experience per se (i.e., conceptual determination)
or the decision that something is art. Here art becomes ‘democratic’, inas-
much as its conditions of possibility are simply those shared by any perceiv-
able thing, with the concept of art now added to it.9 An addition able to be
made by anyone. Only with Conceptual Art is everyone able to be an artist!
For Deleuze and Guattari Conceptual Art is not art. Why not? For strictly
aesthetic reasons, as they argue in What Is Philosophy?; because it doesn’t
produce sensations. But, going further, they argue that Conceptual Art is
not just a useless thing, but an actually pernicious one, inasmuch as it dem-
aterializes art by turning it into discursive ‘information’, making its status
as ‘art’ depend on the ‘opinion’ of the ‘general public’ as to ‘what is art?’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 198).
I don’t want to dispute the hegemony of conceptual practices within
contemporary art, which would be reactionary, but I do want to sug-
gest that Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternative genealogy to this
conceptual turn that attempts to put the body back into representations
and their conditioning concepts. This is a strangely depersonalized and
inorganic body, but one composed of sensations nonetheless. They do
so through a distinctly romantic formulation of sensation or affect as
embodying the indiscernibility of Nature and art, one that focuses and
indeed requires as genetic condition the sublime experience of chaos.
This experience is intuition unbound from the understanding, and so
an experience of chaos itself. But as an experience, or sensation, it also
emerges from chaos as an existential territory, as a vector of life animated
by its own differential intensity, its own living Idea that it expresses and
develops.
And who is their paradigmatic artist, their artist-hero? None other
than Marcel Duchamp and his readymade. In A Thousand Plateaus
Deleuze and Guattari claim that ‘Territorial marks are readymades’
(1987, 349; see also 1994, 184), using the English word ‘readymade’ in
order to emphasize its connection to Duchamp (1980, 389; 1991, 174).
The fundamental artistic gesture of the readymade, Deleuze and Guattari
argue, is the appropriation of something that is used in a completely dif-
ferent way from its original function. Deleuze and Guattari’s example is
the stagemaker bird that turns over fallen leaves to mark out the ‘stage’
on which it sings, composing ‘a complex song made up from its own
notes and, at intervals, those of other birds that it imitates.’ In this the
stagemaker bird is a ‘complete artist’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 184),
composing ready-made objects and song into a Gesamptkunstwerk. Here,
and from the beginning, Deleuze and Guattari argue, the readymade is
242 S. Zepke
‘the base or ground of art. Take anything and make it a matter of expres-
sion’ (1987, 349). In this sense the readymade is a technique used to
create a refrain, a material object that expresses (i.e., repeats) a genetic
difference. In the case of the stagemaker bird, it both establishes a ter-
ritory and opens it onto its outside, because the maintenance of one
involves the necessity of the other, as with the drive to reproduction
expressed in the mating call-dance. ‘As thought,’ Deleuze and Guattari
write, ‘the circle tended on its own to open onto a future as a function
of the working forces it shelters’ (1987, 343 emphasis added). But if the
functional purpose of this ‘artwork’ is to perpetuate the species, its aes-
thetic dimension (i.e., the refrain) celebrates the principle of its emer-
gence. While reproduction requires relations with the ‘outside’, this is
achieved by a creative expression that also introduces ‘“lines of drift”’
as Deleuze and Guattari put it (1987, 344). In one sense this reading
of the readymade is familiar, inasmuch as it makes the simple gesture of
appropriation the fundamental creative act and is entirely consistent with
Duchamp’s quip that a readymade is simply an object that has ‘changed
direction’. This makes all of us (even the birds) artists. What is quite dif-
ferent, however, is that the material and aesthetic dimension of this act
carries a transformative potential, a potential no longer limited to the
epistemological and historical conditions of art, but applying to the very
conditions of our existence. It is this transformative potential that the
Romantics and Deleuze and Guattari called ‘vitalist’, and in its material
form (i.e., as hylozoism) appears in animist art.
Duchamp’s readymade rests upon the ‘visual indifference’ of its
ideal act of genesis, an act open to all inasmuch as all it required was, as
Duchamp put it, a ‘complete anaesthesia’, the complete subtraction of
the affect from art (1973, 141). For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the
readymade is a ‘refrain’, as Guattari describes it, ‘a kind of asignifying,
behavioural language’ (2011b, 139) that expresses the two simultane-
ous operations of any living system: on the one hand its ‘territorializa-
tion’ or the emergence and sustenance of its organizational coherence
(in the case of the bird the perpetuation of its species), and on the other
its ‘deterritorialization’ or opening onto new existential universes. In
this sense the readymade refrain is, Guattari says, on the one hand ‘an
existential “motif” (or leitmotiv) which installs itself like an “attrac-
tor” within a sensible and significational chaos’ (1992, 17), and on the
other a ‘contrapuntal’ and ‘polyphonic’ expression launching the terri-
tory on its lines of flight, or ‘drift’. These two moments of ‘homeland’
and ‘cosmic effusion’, as Guattari evocatively names them (1995, 102),

are inseparable. In establishing an existential ‘territory’ the readymade
refrain ‘deterritorializes’ certain materials, congeals them into a new
mode of expression, which then forms relations to the outside, both in
order to survive and to celebrate its own aleatory aesthetic aspects. In
this way, the refrain is the ground of a territory, but also always carries
the potential for an ‘absolute’ deterritorialization that carries it away
and dissolves it. ‘If nature is like art,’ Deleuze and Guattari tell us, ‘this
is always because it combines these two living elements in every way:
House and Universe, Heimlich and Unheimlich, territory and deterritori-
alization’ (1994, 186). This would be how the animist readymade works:
its initial appropriation frees its material from its existing conditions of
possibility, allowing it to explore and express the exterior forces that now
convulse it.
Guattari clearly explains this in his book Schizoanalytic Cartographies,
where he directly discusses Duchamp’s first readymade, the Bottlerack
(1914). The appropriation (or ‘nomination’) isolating it from its context
produces, he claims, a ‘fractal virtualisation’ (2013, 206) of the mate-
rial object, dissolving its previous functions or significance. Guattari is
here drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whom he always men-
tions when he talks about Duchamp.10 This process of isolation produces
a kind of impersonal existential affect, a ‘motif’ or territory formed by
a pathic apprehension of ‘being-in-the-world’ without specific content,
what Bakhtin calls an ‘active indetermination’ (1990, 275) allowing the
aesthetic object to adopt new and undetermined contents.11 This is what
Guattari, echoing the discordant accord Deleuze found in the sublime,
calls the artwork’s ‘completion as disjunction’ (1996, 166). This rupture
with its received meaning turns the material of the readymade expres-
sive, allowing it to explore its complexity, the potentially infinite virtual
transformations through which it becomes something else. Also influ-
enced by Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Bakhtin understands this sort
of aesthetic object to be both a material body and an image, an actual-
ization of the virtual dimension of duration as well as the thread lead-
ing us back into its infinite living force. The ‘artistic act’, according to
Bakhtin, isolates and thereby opens the ‘aesthetic object’ onto an infinity
of subjective ‘meaning’, and encompasses the object and subject in what
Guattari calls a singular ‘existential refrain’ (1992, 15). This readymade
qua refrain continually actualizes a virtual excess, giving it the living force
of constant change. It is this virtual excess that is the animist ‘spirit’ of
244 S. Zepke
the readymade, a demonic and pantheist force that is always seeking to

subvert identity and overcome its own limits. While this animism is what
produces the fractal virtualization of the readymade, and therefore acts as
its vital spirit, it remains utterly material inasmuch as it cannot exist out-
side the object and experience that actualizes it. The animist readymade
is hylozoic, in other words, but unlike the Romantics the artwork under-
stood in this way does not express Nature as an organic whole, but rather
the disjunctive force by which Nature (as both Idea and actual system)
escapes its conditions, actualizes its immanent outside and so continu-
ally becomes something else. This is precisely the political potential of
artistic creations, as Guattari explains: ‘Expressive fractalisation is not just
repetition; it produces an added value, it secretes a surplus value of code.
It is always ready to pull something out of its pocket’ (2013, 134). The
readymade creates, in other words, a surplus that can potentially escape
its valuation within capitalist axiomatics. This is a claim Deleuze and
Guattari have made about art since at least Anti-Oedipus.
The Bakhtinian understanding of the ‘aesthetic object’ is therefore
consistent with Deleuze’s insistence that Kant’s two senses of the aes-
thetic—as a theory of perception and as a theory of art—must come
together. As such, the ‘act’ of the readymade is a ubiquitous (and indeed
transcendental) function producing refrains both in Nature and as art.
In Nature, this function can operate to maintain the species (the ‘stage’
and song of the stagemaker bird facilitates reproduction), while as art,
remembering that ‘art begins with the animal’, as Deleuze and Guattari
tell us (1994, 183), it operates for itself in an ‘absolute’ way. The insepa-
rability of the two moments mean ‘we no longer know what is art and
what nature’, because both, Deleuze and Guattari say, once more in full
Romantic mode, are ‘natural technique’ (1994, 185). The readymade is
a deterritorialized object that passes to its outside, and in so doing estab-
lishes and opens a new territory. But in doing so, it can also carry that
territory away in a movement where deterritorialization becomes reterri-
torialized on itself and ‘variability’ becomes the only norm (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 101).
Returning to the artistic act that Guattari draws from Bakhtin, its
creation of a readymade opens up the object to a ‘polyphonic’ (1996,
193) or ‘multiplicating’ (2013, 211) process operating as an ‘aesthetic
rupture of discursivity’ (1987, 86), while simultaneously actualizing this
process in what Guattari calls a ‘subjectivation’. As a result, the ready-
made’s ‘mutating becomings’ (Guattari 2013, 205) enable the aesthetic
object to, Guattari rather optimistically claims, ‘reappropriate the means

of production of subjectivity’ (1996, 198). In this sense, the poetics of
the readymade are inherently political, inasmuch as they resingularize the
process of emergence by immersing experience in chaos, shaking off its
conditions of possibility and drawing from this sublime moment a tran-
scendental and infinite power of creativity.
In this sense the readymade is what Guattari calls a ‘partial object’
(1996, 198) or ‘enunciative substance’ (1995, 26), ‘an Assemblage of
enunciation with multiple heads’ (2013, 205–206). The aesthetic object
is therefore ‘alive’, according to Bakhtin, because its ‘content’ is in a
state of constant becoming, making it a ‘self-sufficient … segment of the
unitary open event of being’ (1990, 275, 306–307). This is a wonder-
ful formulation of Deleuze and Guattari’s version of hylozoism, one in
which the artwork is alive, inasmuch as its genetic act of appropriation
has animated it with an aleatory and in principle open force of individua-
tion. At this point, Guattari tells us, the artwork has taken on a
vibratory position, conferring on them a soul, a becoming-ancestral, ani-

mal, vegetal, cosmic. These objectities-subjectities are led to work for
themselves, to incarnate themselves as an animist nucleus; they overlap each
other, and invade each other to become collective entities half-thing half-
soul, half-man half-beast, machine and flux, matter and sign. (1995, 102)
Animism, then, would be another name for expression, and as Deleuze

and Guattari write; ‘Only expression gives us the method’ (1986, 16),
because it is only through expression—as the mechanism by which mat-
ter proliferates beyond its conditions of possibility—that singularization
becomes collective. But this does not mean that in it we pass from one
term to the other, singularization to collectivization, but rather that
expression collectivizes singularity. As Deleuze and Guattari’s equation
has it ‘Pluralism=Monism’. This is what Guattari calls the ‘semiotic
polycentrism’ (1996, 153) of the aesthetic sign, and what Bakhtin calls
the ‘immanent overcoming’ of the material object in its transformation
into an aesthetic object or work of art (1990, 297). This proliferating
singularity that is the aesthetic object is what Guattari calls ‘autopoiesis’,
a term he takes from the biologists Varela and Maturana’s explanation
of the entwined development of an autonomous organism and its envi-
ronment. Autopoiesis emerges as a ‘reciprocal relation’ between local
components and their global whole: ‘An entity self-separates from its
246 S. Zepke
background’, Varela explains, and in so doing ‘the autopoietic unity cre-

ates a perspective from which the exterior is one’ (1992, 7). This relation
of reciprocal determination, which is ‘enlarged’ by Guattari beyond the
biological limits of the organism to encompass ‘aesthetic creation’ (1992,
93), means that the readymade is not only an expression of its ‘environ-
ment’ but the environment’s simultaneous (re)construction through,
as Varela calls it, a process of ‘world-making’ (1992, 8). In this it also
echoes some of the aesthetic theories of Romanticism, as Guattari explic-
itly acknowledges: ‘The operators of this crystallization are fragments
of asignifying chains of the type that Schlegel likens to works of art. ‘A
fragment like a miniature work of art must be totally detached from the
surrounding world and closed on itself like a hedgehog’ (2000, 55).12
These fragments act, as we have seen, as autonomous aesthetic catalysts
of existential bifurcations and occupy, according to Guattari, ‘a privileged
position within the collective Assemblages of enunciations of our era’
(1995, 101), a position above, he emphasizes, philosophy, science and
politics.
Let’s go back to Guattari’s example of the first readymade, the
Bottlerack, to try and see how this works. The Bottlerack, he writes,
‘functions as the trigger for a Constellation of universes of reference that
sets off intimate reminiscences—the cellar of the house, a certain winter,
beams of light on the spider webs, adolescent solitude—as much as it
does connotations of a cultural and economic order—the epoch in which
bottles were still washed using a bottle brush …’ (2013, 209, translation
modified). The Bottlerack appears here in the by now familiar double
register of the ‘refrain’, first of all congealing a personal and immediate
assemblage of sensory affects (winter, a ray of light, solitude) that gives a
singular and intimate ‘feeling of being’. This existential affect then opens
onto the outside, in provoking involuntary memories and more elabo-
rate cognitive processes, inducing, Guattari claims, ‘innumerable senti-
mental, mythical, historical and social references’ (2013, 205). In this
way the refrain produces a ‘heterogenesis’ in which an infinity of virtual
‘universes of reference’ blossoms at both an infinite speed and as infini-
tesimal deviations in space. From such blossoms new worlds are born.
The affects generated by the readymade therefore go beyond Kant’s
transcendental Aesthetic, and launch us instead into a transcendental
‘fractalization’ of space and time in and by (real) experience. The ready-
made, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is a machine that synthesizes material
and force, where matter is understood as molecular and force as being
cosmic. This defines, they say, our Modern age, where such machines
have taken the place of the a priori categories of space and time as ‘the
ground in a priori synthetic judgment’ (1987, 378–379). Similarly, the
infinity of heterogeneous durations produced by the readymade go
beyond the form–content distinction underlying discursive represen-
tational schema, because form no longer expresses content but is con-
structed by it. ‘Content’ is thereby understood not as something separate
from matter (i.e., as ‘conceptual’), but produced by its dynamic flux and
vital force. On the one hand the readymade is a process of ‘existential
grasping’ that appropriates material in such a way as to make it open and
expressive, giving it a virtual complexity of chaotic proportions, while on
the other it develops this complexity within a subjectivation that ‘decel-
erates’ (Guattari 1995, 114) and actualizes virtual complexity in an aes-
thetic sensation. The virtual and the actual (reason and intuition) are in
reciprocal presupposition at this point, producing sensations that both
express and construct the transcendental realm of becoming (i.e., mate-
rial vitalism) in and as an actual lived reality. In this sense, then, and
as Guattari puts it, the readymade ‘lives under the double regime of a
discursive slowing down and of an absolute speed of non-separability’
(1995, 115), or in other words (once more Guattari’s) it embodies the
ethico-aesthetic paradigm of chaosmosis. Guattari’s terminology here
suggests that discursivity itself, and in a wider sense conceptual condi-
tions, are not the enemy, only the fact that they try to deny the non-
discursive and vital realm that supports them.
Finally, where does this form of expressive materialism leave us in
relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of contemporary art?
Certainly, their insistence on sensation as the realm of art does not con-
demn it to being a historical relic from the age of Kant. On the con-
trary, understanding art as sensation (i.e., as aesthetic) gives it a direct
role in the production of subjectivity, and thereby places it in relation
to the biopolitical mechanisms of contemporary capitalism. But this rela-
tion can only be truly transformational, Deleuze and Guattari argue,
through the aesthetic autonomy and medium specificity of art, which
insures its antagonism to our human, all too human, conditions of pos-
sibility. Obviously, Deleuze and Guattari’s views on art are unapolo-
getically Modernist. This is where their aesthetics seems to lose touch
with much contemporary artistic practice, not to mention current theo-
ries such as Accelerationism. Art, Deleuze and Guattari insist, is not a
matter of information or its communication; it is instead a ‘vacuole of
248 S. Zepke
non-communication’, the production of a ‘non-sense’ capable of con-

structing an outside to our everyday affections and perceptions, to our
boring opinions and banal thoughts. Expression is the construction of
this outside, of a new future, giving art the utopian function of democ-
ratizing the processes of production, making aesthetic creation not only
an ontological process but the basis of any liberatory politics. This posi-
tion raises significant challenges for those of us who wish to use it to
understand contemporary art. On the one hand, its figures of rhizomes
and nomads, and evocations of constant and creative movement, seem
to appeal to our contemporary experience. But on the other, Deleuze
and Guattari’s equation of art and Nature, and their demand for an
a-signifying and non-communicative expressionist materialism seems
hopelessly Romantic. But perhaps this is as it should be and as Deleuze
and Guattari would have wanted it: a concept of expression that offers
us the method of a minor-art, one that would not be contemporary at
all, but would constitute, as Guattari called it, an ‘A-temporal art, where
the cursor of time is brought to the point of the autopoietic nucleus’
(2011a, 53). Perhaps, then, it is a misunderstanding to see Deleuze and
Guattari’s readymade as the basis for a new animist genealogy of con-
temporary art, because in fact this very genealogy rests upon the radical
deterritorialization of the Bottlerack’s own historical significance as the
beginning of conceptual art. The Bottlerack, Guattari shows us, emerges
as an animist artwork at exactly that moment when we step into ‘the
basement at a time when the bottle rack had not yet been “collectivised”
by Marcel Duchamp, et. al.’ (2015, 73). We are faced here with the odd
paradox that art becomes truly animist, with all the transformative poten-
tial that brings with it, only at the moment when it is no longer an ‘art-
work’ as this is normally understood. Or, perhaps better, it never stops
being an ‘artwork’—the films, paintings and pieces of music Deleuze
and Guattari never stop talking about—but these ‘works’ are always in
process, living lines of transformation and change, both theirs and those
of us who experience them. Art’s work is to convulse matter with spir-
itual movement, to animate it with its outside and to make it live in this
sublime discordance. The Romanticism of this autopoietic readymade,
its hylozoic ontology and aesthetic insistence, seems to remove it from
our contemporary context. But it is precisely this process of removal
that leads, through the readymade, to a radical transcendental and mate-
rial revitalization of our existential co-ordinates, and should not be
ignored for more fashionable, but also more compromised, conceptual

alternatives.
Notes
1. In this sense the Romantics are followers of Kant, attempting to extend
his system to encompass contemporary scientific discoveries. See Beiser,
The Romantic Imperative, The Concept of Early German Romanticism,
and in particular chap. 9, ‘Kant and the Naturphilosophen’ (2003). From
another perspective, John H. Zammito argues that Kant is strictly aligned
with the Enlightenment in the face of Romanticism, and the arguments
in the Critique of Judgement concerning the teleology of Nature and
its possible organicism are an effort to reject, rather than engage with,
Naturphilosophie (1992, 1–3).
2. Like his predecessor Henri Bergson, Deleuze is fond of the term ‘spiritual’
or ‘spirit’, which he uses in relation to the virtual throughout his work.
3. It’s interesting that the recent philosophical movements of Speculative
Realism and Accelerationism have returned to pre-critical philosophy
on the one hand and a self-declared ‘neo-Rationalism’ on the other, to
reject vitalism and a vitalist understanding of aesthetics and art. As ever,
we are returned to the future, this time to be offered the dubious pleas-
ures of a cybernetic neo-Enlightenment. Accelerationism, for exam-
ple, as the authors of its manifesto put it, seeks ‘the completion of the
Enlightenment project of self-criticism and self-mastery, rather than its
elimination’ (Williams and Srnicek 2014, 362).
4. Mechanistic science saw the world as inert matter, which was animated by
the force of an external impact.
5. As Zammito argues: ‘It had become impossible, scientifically or philo-
sophically, to enforce a categorical distinction between matter and force,
between “inert mass” and “active principles”. And no satisfactory mecha-
nistic account could be given for the origin or the nature of “force” as
such’ (1992, 196).
6. As Matteo Pasquinelli has recently pointed out, for Deleuze and Guattari;
‘It is the outside that generates and drives the system, and not simply the
organism that projects and inhabits its own Umwelt (like in the German
Naturphilosophie)’ (2015, n.p.).
7. For Kant, the assumption of the purposiveness of the organic whole of
Nature must only be understood as an ‘as if’, needed for the purpose
of thinking about it, but unprovable in itself. The Romantics wanted to
actualize precisely this point, and give a transcendental deduction of the
Idea of the organicism of Nature, making the concept of natural purpose
(teleology) into a condition of possible experience. That is, the Idea of
250 S. Zepke
the whole precedes its parts and makes them possible, and that these
parts are the reciprocal cause and effects of each other, meaning that their
genesis is autopoietic. The Naturphilosophen wanted to give the Idea of
‘natural purpose’ an ontological status, while for Kant it could only ever
be a necessary assumption in explaining Nature for us (Beiser 1987, 163).
8. As Frederick Beiser points out: ‘Through aesthetic experience, they [the
Romantics] believed, we perceive the infinite in the finite, the supersensi-
ble in the sensible, the absolute in its appearance’ (2003, 73).
9. For Guattari this democratization is fundamentally capitalist because the
systematic dequalification of expression, and its sectorization and bipo-
larization of values in capitalism, treats everything as formally equal and
so ‘puts differential qualities and non-discursive intensities under the
exclusive control of binary and linear relations.’ All this to ensure that
‘language [is] vigorously subjected to scriptural machines and their mass-
media avatars’ (1995, 103).
10. For example, Guattari mentions Bakhtin and Duchamp together at the
beginning of Chaosmosis (1995, 14), and in relation to the practice of
the Butoh dancer Min Tanaka, who closes himself in on his body while
remaining hypersensitive to the surrounding environment (2015, 80).
11. Guattari describes the artwork as having an ‘essential dimension of finitude:
the facticity of being-there, without qualities, without past, without future,
in absolute dereliction and yet still a virtual nucleus of complexity without
bounds’ (1995, 84).
12. While Deleuze and Guattari depart from Romanticism’s understanding of
art as an expression of organic Nature in their emphasis on disjunction as
the artistic/animist mechanism of expression, they nevertheless draw on
many aspects of their aesthetic, both in their insistence on the transcendental
aspect of hylozoism (qua inorganic differential rather than organic Whole)
and, as here, in their use of animals in describing the processes of art.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1990. The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal
Art. In Art and Answerability, Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin,
trans. Kenneth Brostrom, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov,
257–326. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Beiser, Frederick. 1987. The Fate of Reason, German Philosophy from Kant to
Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Beiser, Frederick. 2003. The Romantic Imperative, The Concept of Early German
Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. Mille Plateaux, Capitalisme et

Schizophrénie. Paris: Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature,
trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1991. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?. Paris:
Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.
Duchamp, Marcel. 1973. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet
and Elmer Peterson. New York: Da Capo Press.
Guattari, Félix. 1987. Cracks in the Street, trans. Anne Gibault and John
Johnson. Flash Art, 135 (summer): 82–85.
Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis, an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains
and Julian Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications.
Guattari, Félix. 1996. The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Guattari, Félix. 2000. The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton.
London: The Athlone Press.
Guattari, Félix. 2011a. On Contemporary Art, Interview with Oliver Zahm,
April 1992. In The Guattari Effect, trans. Stephen Zepke and ed. by Éric
Alliez and Andrew Goffrey. London and New York: Continuum.
Guattari, Félix. 2011b. The Machinic Unconscious, Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans.
Taylor Adkins. New York: Semiotext(e).
Guattari, Félix. 2013. Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffrey.
London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Guattari, Félix. 2015. Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan, ed. Gary Genosko and
Jay Hetrick. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing.
Land, Nick. 2011. Art as Insurrection: the Question of Aesthetics in Kant,
Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. In Fanged Noumena, ed. Robin Mackay, and
Ray Brassier. Falmouth: Urbanomics Press.
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solar-databases-and-the-exogenesis-of-light/.
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pub/alife/bmcm9401/varela.pdf.
252 S. Zepke
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Accelerationist Politics. In #Accelerate, the Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin
Mackay, and Armen Avanessian. Falmouth: Urbanomic.
Zammito, John. 1992. The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Chicago: The
CHAPTER 13
Sound Fossils and Speaking Stones:

Towards a Mineral Ontology
of Contemporary Art
Amelia Barikin
What is a sound fossil? The term seems paradoxical, hermeneutically

weird. Can a sound be fossilized, a fossil made audible? Perhaps its fasci-
nation trades on a gap between words—an imagined ellipse between fos-
sil and sound, sound and fossil, where meaning congeals in the proximity
of difference (Sound … Fossil). Part of the strangeness of a ‘sound fossil’
is that sound, whether performed or recorded, demands liveness. Sound
is experienced as an event that takes place in and through time: vibra-
tions that travel down the ear canal and into the inner ear, animating
the ear drum, activating signals that are transferred by nerves for inter-
pretation in the brain. Sonic audibility is a live, real-time phenomenon
inseparable from organic neurological processing in the now. Fossils,
embedded geologically, are instead more frequently appended with asso-
ciations of the inorganic and inanimate; culturally freighted with con-
notations of death, pre-history, stillness, silence, stasis. Fossils preserve
traces and information of the no longer living. Etymologically, the word
A. Barikin (*) 
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
e-mail: a.barikin@uq.edu.au

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4_13
254 A. Barikin
fossil stems from the Latin ‘fossilus’—to dig up—and indeed in its ini-
tial usage a fossil signified anything that was dug up or extracted from
the ground, including gem stones and human-made objects or relics.
Although Aristotle was speculating on the origins of fossilized shell-fish
in the fourth century bc, it was not until the sixteenth century that fos-
sils became more widely understood as the remains or traces of plant or
animal life preserved in geological formations (Rudwick 1986, 24–27).1
In terms of sonic research, a sound fossil refers to an ancient record
of an acoustic activity: a sound trapped or indexed in material form. The
notion is central to the field of archeoacoustics and has also cropped up
in the emergent discourse around paleosonics.2 Archeoacoustics is pri-
marily dedicated to reconstructing aural and audible histories of ancient
sites, focusing on, for example, the acoustics of ancient rock art sites or
the influence of sound in the architectural design of tombs or burial sites
(Eneix 2014). Paleosonics in contrast is committed to ‘hearing’ prehis-
toric environments. In 2012, a team of scientists published an astonish-
ing reconstruction of a song produced by a cricket living in a Jurassic
forest, after finding a pristine specimen of a 16-million-year-old fossil of
the creature (Gu et al. 2012; Keim 2012). By comparing the wing struc-
tures visible on the fossil with those of contemporary crickets, they were
able to calculate and reproduce the frequency of the cricket’s ancient
mating call. In 2016, the discovery of a fossilized voice-box from a bird
living in the age of the dinosaurs similarly provided new insights into a
‘cretaceous soundscape’, and added further volume to the audibility of
the past (Davis 2016).
To think of a sound fossil, then, is to grapple with dialectics: dialec-
tics of life and non-life, organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate.
In drawing out this tension, this chapter has two aims. Firstly, it seeks
to use the sound fossil as a platform for complicating binary framings of
organic and non-organic materials, with specific reference to what might
be called a mineral ontology of contemporary art. Secondly, I would like
to think about how this idea of mineral ontology might contribute to or
detract from concepts of material animism. The aim here is not to claim
for all inorganic material an anthropomorphic quality of ‘being’. I am
not concerned, as medieval gemologists were, with finding the ‘soul’ of
a crystal or uncovering the life essence of rocks.3 This is not about mak-
ing a form of life or of finding life everywhere, even in inanimate things
(sometimes, importantly, the dead remain dead).4 Rather, I want instead
to test out the logic of an ethics of being in which the living–non-living
13 SOUND FOSSILS AND SPEAKING STONES: TOWARDS A MINERAL … 255
binary might no longer apply, and to see what this might teach us about
the new materialisms of contemporary art.
The project that drives this inquiry is a long-duration work by
the American collaborative artist duo Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S.
Davidson, whose practice since 1998 has consistently engaged in pro-
cesses of materializing the immaterial, often with recourse to sound.
In 2005, for a project called Last and Lost Transmissions, Dubbin and
Davidson gathered together an audio archive of last transmissions or
final broadcasts (such as the final radio contact with planes, satellites and
ships; last addresses of public figures; and sign-off broadcasts from now
defunct radio programmes) and paired these with ‘lost transmissions’:
messages that never managed to arrive at their intended destination. The
public were invited to contribute transmissions they had received in error
for broadcast on the airwaves, via radio antennas located both inside and
outside the gallery space. This kind of movement between processes of
transmission and reception, interference and transference, is a constant
structural element of their practice as a whole. The work I want to focus
on here is called Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald),
a multi-faceted enterprise which manifested in various different incarna-
tions and iterations between 2009 and 2014.
Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald)

In Wisconsin in 2009, Dubbin and Davidson recorded a gemologist and
jewellery maker Karen L. Davidson (who is also Aaron’s mother) speak-
ing about the history and the properties of four precious gemstones:
diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald. Weaving a narrative of crystal
structures, inclusions, flaws, myths, history, science, fiction and aesthet-
ics, the gemologist offered a series of short spoken portraits of these
stones, which taken together also formed a portrait of herself, as a spe-
cialist, a collector and a maker.
From these recordings, Dubbin and Davidson produced four unique
lathe-cut dub plates (one-off records). The records were cut using sty-
luses made from diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald, the gems inscrib-
ing Karen’s voice into the surface of the lacquer discs. The sound of each
recording was marked by the ‘grain’ of the stylus—the unique proper-
ties of the stones creating audible differences between each disc. The
background noise left by the process of the record’s creation—an audi-
ble reside, the sonic trace of ‘making a record’—melds with the sound
256 A. Barikin
of Karen’s stories. The voice is heard in and through the stones, while
the stones are heard in and through the voice. After the records were
cut, the precious styluses were then incorporated into four, specially
designed, 22 carat gold pendants, each featuring crystal stones or slices
in their natural state alongside the lithic tools used to cut the records.
The pendants and the recordings were given to a number of different
persons to wear or listen to (a curator, an artist, a writer, a geologist, a
psychoanalyst, a singer and an actress). Each wearer was invited to con-
tribute a response to their encounter with the stones. Pierre Huyghe
offered a poem called “Voice Matter”, geologist Violaine Sautter (who
also works with NASA analysing rocks on Mars) provided an image and
a conversation, and the actress Elina Löwensohn secretly wore one of the
pendants during a public performance, and spoke of her encounter pub-
licly in a Parisian gallery in 2014 (Fig. 13.1).
Despite the complex stratifications and striations that mark the struc-
ture of this project, at its core are some fairly urgent questions: how to
take seriously the possibility of non-human knowledge, and how this
knowledge might be accessed. How might the stones ‘speak’? What kind
of language is consecrated for such use? How is it made audible, and for
whom? My hunch is that Making A Record pivots on a kind of mate-
rial knowledge that remains indifferent or ambivalent to its role within
an art context. The properties of the stones retain an operative function
beyond that assigned to them by the artists. A double ontology is gen-
erated, whereby the inscrutable, inert silence of the inorganic material
persists even as the materials are coopted or activated as props or trig-
gers for live encounters in specific times, and specific spaces, within the
broader frame of art. This double ontology, where things can be made
to stand in for other things while paradoxically standing only for them-
selves touches on important questions of access and autonomy within art
historical discourse. It considers human access to the world, and to the
world of objects, and to the withdrawal of art from the world into the
fiction of a so-called autonomous domain.
Paying attention to the stoniness of stones or the thingness of things
forces a confrontation with art’s material conditioning. There are ghosts
here of a post-minimalist sensibility in which representation gives way to
presentation. An object stands. It doesn’t stand in. Paint is paint, stones
are stones, materials are material. But rather than leading towards a
Frank Stella-esque understanding of ‘flatness’—the famous ‘what you see
is what you see’—my sense is that the new materiality of contemporary
Fig. 13.1 Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, four pendants from Making
a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald), 2009–2014. Audio interviews,
electroplated records, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, 22 carat gold, and
texts contributed by an actress, an artist, a curator, a geologist, a hypnotist, a psy-
choanalyst, a singer and a writer after contact with the objects. Dimensions and
configurations variable. Courtesy of the artists and Audio Visual Arts, New York
258 A. Barikin
art is instead guided by principles of inaccessibility, withdrawal and blind-

ness. As Robert Smithson once commented, ‘to see one’s own sight
means visible blindness’ (1996, 40).
Speaking about Making a Record in interview, Dubbin and Davidson
explained that:
We know that each stone molecularly carries the history of its creation,
how it was produced from the interior of the Earth, even if we can’t
directly access it. By sending this person’s voice through the stone, another
kind of story could be extracted. We’ve made a recording on a mate-
rial that we have devices to play it back from, but should that be lost to
us, the stone and the object itself are another door to access that story.
(Sigurjóndsdóttir 2012, 57)
An intriguing equivalence is here drawn between the messages that

might be communicated by the minerals, in and of themselves, worn
close to the skin on a pendant and whose influence must be surmised or
extrapolated or extracted by the wearer, and the human-specialist expert
knowledge of the gems shared through Karen’s interviews, her voice sent
through the stones to produce a record for future playback.
Imprints on Rocks and Air

Marina Warner, who wore the ruby pendant as part of the project,
offered a short text based on her experience. ‘In the largest ruby of
Karen’s pendant,’ she wrote, ‘the lightly scored marks deep inside its
translucent interior could … be drawings—not from the cosmos beyond
this planet, but from inside its core; but, in this case, in a work by
Melissa and Aaron, the scratches also offer a registry of the sounds made
when the rock was settling and the earth’s body drawing breath’ (Warner
2014, n.p.). Warner’s text explicitly conjures up a mineral or geologi-
cal time, a time before the rock was extracted and cut and polished, a
temporal trace of the movement of the Earth captured in the beds of
corundum in which rubies are formed. In Dubbin and Davidson’s hands,
the gem itself becomes a kind of sound fossil, a sonic imprint of the past,
time crystallized in mineral form (Fig. 13.2).
Reflecting on how these stones might be made to speak, Warner
mused that:
Fig. 13.2 Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, electroplated master disc

recorded with emerald stylus (detail), from Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby,
Sapphire, Emerald), 2009–2014. Courtesy of the artists and Audio Visual Arts,
New York
the collector of stones, philosopher and writer Roger Caillois used to scru-
tinize certain gems and agates he collected. Of a meteorite he wrote that
after cutting and polishing it, ‘then there will appear and glitter different
sparks of the geometry proper to the specimen: interlacings of triangles,
imbricated polygons … These methods will procure the only drawings we
know that are not of this earth.’5 (2014, n.p.)
260 A. Barikin
Caillois is often remembered for his split from the Surrealists in the
1920s, his association with Georges Bataille, his writings on mimesis,
mimicry and play, and for introducing Latin American authors such as
Jorge Luis Borges to the French-speaking world. But he was also an
avid collector of stones and minerals; his entire mineral collection is now
managed by the Museum of Natural History in Paris.
In 1966, Caillois put some of his thoughts on his collection, rendered
in vertiginous, lyrical prose, into published form, in a book called Pierres
(Stones). What Caillois liked most about the stones was their silence and
inscrutability: their refusal to offer up meaning, their deflection of pro-
jections (Caillois, 1966). At the conclusion of his 1970 text L’écriture des
Pierres, which was accompanied by a series of extraordinary image repro-
ductions of minerals, rocks and crystals, he pondered on the hypnotic
profusion of undecipherable, unintentional images that mark the surfaces
of dendrites, onyx, quartz crystals and agates. ‘I could hardly refrain’,
he confessed, ‘from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call
from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a pre-
sentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax’ (1985,
104). This is a syntax that pre-dates human language, close to what
Christopher Braddock calls a ‘contagious field’ that pre-exists all things:
language on a cosmic scale (2013). As a self-titled ‘mystic materialist’,
Caillois exalted in the silence and inscrutability of stones that ‘sleep in
their lair and the dark night of the seam’. He revelled in the ‘nakedness’
of gems before cutting, wherein ‘there lies concealed and at the same
time revealed a mystery that is slower, vaster, and graver than the destiny
of an ephemeral species’ (2005, 90).
Focusing in on this tension between non-human time—the tellu-
ric time of the stones, the glacial slowness of the Earth—and the time
of history, conceived of as the human time of stories, transmitted and
embodied by objects and things, is one way of bringing us closer to the
strange attractions of the ‘sound fossil’. But the idea that environments
and artefacts can unintentionally act as imprints of sonic activity also rad-
ically shifts the balance of agency, foregrounding that double ontology
of materiality in which the material itself operates beyond and outside its
deployment within zones of signification. It is important to note that this
is not a wholly new idea. In 1837, Charles Babbage, in a chapter entitled
“On the Permanent Impression of our Words and Actions on the Globe
We Inhabit”, wrote that:
The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that
man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerr-
ing characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as with the latest sighs of
mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled,
perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of
man’s changeful will. But if the air we breathe is the never-failing historian
of the sentiments we have uttered, earth, air, and ocean, are the eternal
witnesses of the acts we have done.6 (1838, 112)
It is a beautiful concept. Indelibly imprinted with the vestiges of oral tes-

timony, the air itself becomes a material witness to history. But from a
contemporary scientific perspective, Babbage was closer to the mark than
even he might have imagined. Contemporary sound fossils also unearth
the existence of non-human audio-recording technologies, enabling us
to listen to pre-human soundscapes such as, for example, the sound of
the Big Bang.
Audible Materialisms: The Universe as a Box

with the Sound of Its Own Making
In 1965, while studying the radio emissions of the Milky Way, radio
astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson picked up a strange and
unexpected background noise on Bell Lab’s Large Horn Antennae in
New Jersey: ‘No matter where we looked, winter or summer, this back-
ground of radiation appeared everywhere in the sky’ (BBC 2, 1972).
Convinced the apparatus was faulty, the pair took the machinery apart,
investigated possible military and urban interference, and finally cleared
out a host of pigeon shit and pigeons that had made their home in the
antenna. All to no avail. Meanwhile, at Princeton University less than 50
miles away, physicist Robert Dicke had just formulated a hypothesis that,
if the Big Bang had occurred, traces of low-level radiation should be dis-
persed throughout the universe. Before Dicke could confirm his postu-
late, he was contacted by Penzias and Wilson, seeking advice (Peebles
et al. 2009, 204). As it turned out, what Penzias and Wilson had acci-
dentally stumbled across was the audible record of the creation of the
universe: the sound of the beginning of time.7 This 13.8-billion-year-
old sonic residue, or ‘sound fossil’ as it was initially dubbed, was subse-
quently identified as cosmic microwave background noise, and Penzias
and Wilson later received the Nobel Prize for their discovery.
262 A. Barikin
Not far from New Jersey, and just a few years distant in time from
Penzias and Wilson’s serendipitous discovery, the American artist Robert
Morris was in his New York studio, working on his project Box with the
Sound of its Own Making (1961). Morris’s square cube of walnut wood
concealed a tape recorder that played back the sound of the work’s con-
struction: hammering, sawing, nailing, cutting. The time it takes to listen
to the work is equivalent to the time of the work’s construction (it is
said that John Cage was the only person who sat down and experienced
the recording in full, on a visit to Morris’s studio soon after the box was
finished). We might almost suggest then that with Penzias and Wilson’s
discovery, the universe, too, becomes a kind of box with the sound of its
own making, albeit on a vastly expanded scale.
Penzias and Wilson’s story was later taken up by the French artist
Laurent Grasso in his exhibitions “The Horn Perspective” at the Centre
Pompidou in Paris (2009) and “Soundfossil” at Sean Kelley Gallery
in New York (2010). Inspired both by the myth of extracting audio
recordings from ancient pottery and with the possibility of hearing the
Big Bang, Grasso’s work juxtaposed the sonic remnants of the birth of
the cosmos with a model of the antennae used by Penzias and Wilson,
alongside the artist’s own impression of the first wireless radio a ntennae,
designed by Nikola Tesla in Colorado Springs in 1899 (Grasso and
Pierre 2012, 98).8 The sonic trace of the big bang was reconstituted as a
soundtrack for Grasso’s short film The Horn Perspective, which screened
concurrently with the objects on display. The sound itself emanated
from four specially constructed conical speakers made out of copper
and wood, mounted on the gallery walls. In a review of the exhibition,
Arnauld Pierre wrote that ‘the sound coming from [the speakers] is like a
badly tuned radio. Is it the signal picked up by the Horn Antennae? Or is
it the soundtrack of the film projected in front of the model and which,
by association, makes the apparatus look like a movie machine?’ (2009,
54). Describing Grasso’s project as a kind of ‘readymade fossil’, he linked
it to a kind of archeo-modernity in which the speculative dimensions of
magic and occult are no longer occluded by the rationality of scientific
perspective.
From Sound Fossils to Arche-Fossils:

The Ancestral in the Present
There is another way of approaching this material, though, in so far as
the sound of the creation of the universe is exemplary of a kind of fos-
silization that gained prominence in philosophical discourse following
the publication of Quentin Meillassoux’s book Après la finitude (After
Finitude) in 2006. In this text, Meillassoux coined the term the archi-
fossile (arche-fossil) to describe a remnant of the universe confirmed by
science as existing before the beginnings of terrestrial life (Meillassoux
2006).9 As with a geological fossil, the arche-fossil provides information
about a pre-historic condition. However, for Meillassoux the form of the
arche-fossil is not limited to Earthbound matter. It can also encompass
any event or ‘ancestral statement’ about the existence of the universe
prior to human thought (including audible events).
The arche-fossil is useful to Meillassoux because it enables the pos-
sibility, he argues, that ‘everything would not lapse into nothingness with
the annihilation of living creatures, and that the world in itself would
subsist despite the abolition of every relation-to-the world’ (2009, 71).
It is useful, in other words, because it offers a material vehicle to posit
the existence of time without thought. He writes:
The arche-fossil enjoins us to track thought by inviting us to discover the

‘hidden passage’ trodden by the latter in order to achieve what modern
philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossibility
itself: to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether
we are or not. (2009, 27)
Meillassoux’s argument confronts the correlationist circle, or the idea

that one cannot think of something outside thought. If the world is only
ever a correlate to thought, then the world can only ever be thought for
us, rather than in and of itself. It is because of this that one can never
know an object on its own terms (or, as Kant earlier described it, the
thing in itself). We cannot really know what it is like to be a bat, or a
chair, a kiwifruit or a stone, because these experiences are technically
outside thought, unthinkable.10 And even if reality does exist a priori
to human thought, it will never be fully accessible as such. Instead, the
material world is cast as a veil across a higher plane of reality (a tenet
also central to the work of Plato, Descartes and most vociferously Kant).
264 A. Barikin
The counter-argument to the correlationist position is that reality is not

chained to human perception. The world pre-dates the emergence of
thought, and will persist even if there are no humans left to think it into
being. The referent does not need a signifier; epistemologies are not nec-
essarily equivalent to cosmologies. A 3.5-billion-year-old fossil found in
a chunk of Australian sandstone is not ‘created’ at the moment it is dis-
covered, just as the microwaves emitted by a galaxy trillions of light years
away from Earth are not generated at the moment they are ‘heard’ by
radio astronomers.
Elizabeth Povinelli has offered a sharp rebuke of Meillassoux’s use
of the archi-fossile, rightly noting that ‘Meillassoux’s wager works
only insofar as the fossil that sits in the reader’s hand is considered
to be somewhere and sometime else than in that hand’ (2016, 75).
Foregrounding the social, technological and technological media-
tion of knowledge across cultures and times, Povinelli instead argues
for an understanding of the archi-fossile not as an absolute signifier of
the human capacity (or incapacity) to access the absolute (‘internal to
the fossil in the reader’s hand is just the latest object-event in an entire-
series of object-events’), but rather as a prop for Meillassoux’s mainte-
nance of what she calls ‘geontopower’. There is no need, she argues, for
Meillassoux to invoke the fossil in making his argument: ‘He could sim-
ply tell the reader to stretch out her hand and she will feel a trace of
something that exists before it, before her, before what he calls given-
ness.’ For Povinelli, the archi-fossile instead functions as a ‘canny’ mate-
rial mobilization of a widespread ‘self-involvement with things that
existed before we got here because these are the things we have been taught
not to feel responsible for, things that cannot demand accountability from
us’ (2016, 75, italics in original).
It is only by dwelling on the fascination of the radical ‘before’, encap-
sulated in the ‘feeling of being in the presence of something that feels like
it existed before us’ (one wonders if this is similar to the fascination of
Caillois’s meteorite), that Meillassoux is able to maintain the suggestion
that ‘everyone … has the capacity to reach the absolute through what
only some of us created’ (Povinelli 2016, 74).11 It is this accessing of
universals through specifics that Povinelli seeks to resist. Although I am
not precisely in agreement with her characterization of Meillassoux’s
argument, Povinelli’s critique that his invocation of the archi-fossile
hijacks the language of power is valid. If the arche-fossil is instead under-
stood as the product of multiple co-eval events in constant negotiation
and transformation, as Povinelli urges—an object-event that humans are

accountable for and responsible to, rather than the result of a linear dis-
location of past into present—then the pull of the absolute results only
in political evisceration, creating ‘social tenses’ or moral hierarchies that
work in service of what Foucault would have understood as biopolitics.
This emphatic insistence on the materiality of the non-human and
the necessary entanglement of living and non-living entities has pro-
found implications for the constitution of art, and particularly on art’s
relationship to questions of human intentionality and purpose. Art has
historically been understood as something made for humans, by humans,
whose value as art is tied to its status as art. It is because of this that
art is so often used as a limit case by object-oriented philosophers. But
as Elizabeth Grosz reminds us, art is also something that occurs beyond
the point of survival—art is an excess, a surplus, an abundance, an inten-
sifying of sensations and materials (2008). This operation is not simply
something that is exclusive to humans but can also be found in nature,
and in animals, and in the workings of the cosmos. Grosz writes:
Art and nature, art in nature, share a common structure … that of produc-
tion for its own sake, production for the sake of profusion and differentia-
tion. Art takes what it needs—the excess of colors, forms, materials—from
the earth to produce its own excesses, sensations with a life of their own,
sensation as ‘nonorganic life’. (Grosz 2008, 9)
Sensation as non-organic life: this is an extraordinary claim. How might

sensation—commonly figured as inseparable from the vital, animate, liv-
ing processes of thought—find purchase beyond the biological? How can
sensation figure as external to the organic matter from which it is osten-
sibly generated?
It is in part because of art’s potential to manifest ‘sensation as non-
organic life’—a phrase inflected with animist associations—that art can
now only be, as Timothy Morton has noted, an ‘uneasy collaboration
between humans and nonhumans’, not a purely human exploration of
access to non-humans, or the lack thereof (2013, 50). It is here that
we begin to access that same mineral syntax invoked earlier by Caillois.
The mechanism by which this process takes place is the trace: the mate-
rial trace of time-outside-thought, manifested in the present. Povinelli
cedes this to Meillassoux too: ‘he is careful to say that the point is not
the thing in the hand [the fossil], but the arche-fossil as a trace of being
before givenness’ (Povinelli 2016, 74). To this I would add: if iteration
is the possibility of repetition, the trace continues to function irrespective
266 A. Barikin
of whether there is life or not. The sound heard through the Horn
Antennae in New Jersey does not exist in the past or ‘ancestral time’. It
in itself is not tied to a moment before consciousness. Rather, it is appre-
hended as a material trace of the ancestral in the present (Bryant 2009).
Thinking back to Dubbin and Davidon’s gemstones, this is the same
trace described by Warner, when she wrote of the markings left by the
breath of the Earth, indelibly imprinted into the hexagonal structure of a
single ruby, worn close to the throat on a golden pendant.
Traces and Time: Geontologies

In 2013, while positioning the Derridean trace as a platform for think-
ing about the ‘liveness’ of art, Christopher Braddock threw out a com-
pelling challenge to ‘think all signification as delayed trace and all trace
as animate’ (24). Although indebted to Derrida’s vitalist philosophy,
Braddock’s approach also highlighted the indifference and ambivalence
that the trace bestows on the binary between the living and the dead.
His argument pivoted around an acknowledgment of forces that precede
‘the oppositional structures of people and things, life and death, pres-
ence and absence’ (xvi). The trace predates perception. It is a quality of
temporal endurance, structured by temporal succession of the interval.
For Derrida, the trace is much more than the remainder of that which
was (for example, the trace fossil of a dinosaur footprint preserved in
stone). Rather, the trace calls up a spectral ‘absent presence’ that is also
an ‘absent present’, implicated in what Derrida calls the ‘becoming-time
of space and the becoming-space of time’ or espacement (1984, 8).
In considering the implications of this expanded concept of trace in
which the border between the living and the dead is rendered irrelevant
if not entirely obsolete, two speculative potentials arise: (i) the possibil-
ity of being without life and (ii) the possibility of time without thought.
Both address the capacity for being out of time. By definition, the trace is
the constitutive condition of all that is temporal. Thinkers such as Donna
Harraway (2016) or Karan Barad (2007) might argue against this, in
favour of a network of entangled times that sideline the primacy of the
‘interval’, but either way the trace is not tied to the structural logic of
life, but is rather a primary symptom of time. The question being: what
kind of time? Martin Hägglund has convincingly argued for an under-
standing of the trace as a logical structure expressive of any concept of
succession, regardless of whether succession is understood in ontological,
epistemological or phenomenological terms (2011, 266–267). The radi-

oactive isotope ‘survives’ but it is not alive. The sound of the Big Bang
‘survives’ but it is not alive. The door is here opened to a reading of the
trace that takes it beyond the vital realm, and towards the trace-struc-
ture of non-living, not-yet-living or never-living forms. Hägglund seeks
to counter what he calls Derrida’s ‘organic chauvinism’, in which both
language and the trace are viewed as synchronous exclusively with living
beings. He writes: ‘Everything that is subject to succession is subject to
the trace, whether it is alive or not’ (2008, 18).
Hägglund’s assessment of Derrida’s ‘organic chauvinism’ holds up.
In 2003, just before his death, Derrida observed that what unites liv-
ing beings or what produces their commonality is the ‘finitude of their
life’ (2011, 33). Decades earlier, in Writing and Difference of 1967,
he insisted similarly that ‘traces thus produce the space of their inscrip-
tion only by acceding to the period of their erasure’ (2001, 226). This
preference for the living and the vital is a strong thread across the spans
of Derrida’s thinking. His death-bound ontology—clearly indebted to
Heidegger and Husserl, in so far as it is actualized by the horizon line of
its own inevitable termination—is grounded in a time marked by delay
and deferral; not necessarily a linear time, but a time nonetheless shaped
by the logic of the interval and biological finitude. We have here again
the idea of time as a river, but not the rain or the ocean; a model of time
as flow, with little regard to evaporation and condensation. Where might
the condensation collect?
Alien Inclusions: The ‘drusy vein’

When Dubbin and Davidson began to think about how to best present
their project Making a Record, they quickly dismissed the traditional
protocols of the gallery-based exhibition, with its pre-determined dura-
tion and static, unchanging format. Although Making a Record has
been exhibited on several occasions as objects and sound recordings to
be looked at and listened to, its presentation has also been punctuated
by programmes of live events that alter the materiality of the work. In
2014, for example, in an artist-run space in Paris called Treize, Making a
Record was incorporated into Dubbin and Davidson’s exhibition ‘a drusy
vein’. For geologists, the ‘druse’ refers to a coating of crystals. A drusy
vein is a mineral deposit sparkling with glittering crystalline outgrowths.
268 A. Barikin
The format of the exhibition riffed on this notion of a central structure,

embellished or accreted through mineral growth.
In the catalogue essay, curator Maxime Guitton wrote:
The vein originates from the rocky cavities but its presence only manifests
itself to the on-looker through the striation which appears on the surface
of the rock. The trace precedes the inscription. It is to the observation of
this discreet trace, which points to the location of a possible treasure, that
the work of these two artists invites us. Gathering structure and sedimen-
tation, as a natural development, the exhibition takes its rhythm from the
weekly inclusion of works and events (a concert, a reading, a screening,
performances, talks and conversations). By doing so, it continuously modi-
fies the nature of what is exposed and potentially encountered. (2014, n.p.)
Throughout their exhibition, Dubbin and Davidson presented a series of

what they called ‘inclusions’ that both added to and altered the scope
of Making a Record, allowing other breaths and other times to animate
these materials. The word inclusion again borrows from the language
of gemologists, where it refers to a foreign body enclosed inside a min-
eral or rock—for example, a drop of water encased inside a sapphire.
Importantly, an inclusion is always older than the material in which it is
contained. It is an alien intrusion that pre-dates the life of the host.
For one of these inclusions, Dubbin and Davidson invited geologist
Violaine Sautter to give a talk on her research. Sautter took the diamond
as a starting point, a gemstone formed from pure carbon cells under con-
ditions of intense heat and pressure around 150 kilometres beneath the
surface of the Earth. The oldest diamonds on Earth are close to 3 bil-
lion years old, expelled by volcanic activity from deep under the planetary
crust towards the surface of the world. ‘Within the diamond’, Sautter said,
encapsulated in the infinitely small, hides the whole history of the deep
Earth, of the primitive Earth, of its physiology. It suffices that we know
how to shrink down our thought, how to read this minuscule mineral
alphabet, and to us, the diamond will speak the language of the depths,
the language of secrecy, the world of silence. It allows us to penetrate the
impenetrable, to make this impossible journey, the journey to the center of
the Earth. (2014, n.p.)
For Sautter, as a geologist, although the stones may be silent, their

language is comprehensible: the mineral alphabet can ultimately be
Fig. 13.3 Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, actress Elina Löwensohn

wearing the emerald pendant from Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire,
Emerald), 2009–2014. Worn in a performance in Rennes, France, 2014.
Courtesy of the artists
deciphered. The stones teach of humanity’s place in history, revealing the

physiology of that which went before. For Sautter, the diamond is like a
fossil record of geologic time, and it can be made to speak (Fig. 13.3).
For the final inclusion in the exhibition, Dubbin and Davidson
invoked a different kind of mining, this time of the subconscious kind.
270 A. Barikin
They provided the curator Maxime Guitton with the sapphire pendant,
and the recording about the sapphire recorded by Karen Davidson using
the sapphire stylus. Guitton was then hypnotized by a professional hyp-
notist while holding the stones, and a written transcript of the session
was made available in the gallery. The flow of information here moves in
a wave-like pattern, taking on the form of a rumour—the stories of the
stones and their capacity to ‘speak’ is altered through waves of transmis-
sion and reiteration, protention and retention. Under hypnosis, Guitton
spoke haltingly of pyramids and a blue star, of a beach in Sardinia, of
hexagons and a sensation of slipping, and of the stories of the jewel that
he had heard once before. We encounter again the question of access—
of access to information, in the silence of stones. A different kind of
knowledge is thus invoked, a knowledge that is neither transparent nor
rational, but secret and subterranean, ambivalent and contingent. A kind
of knowledge where questions of provenance and origin—what time,
when, who?—are redistributed to encompass lateral sensations of prox-
imity and distance, intensity or indifference.
But it is not necessary to enter a hypnotic trance in order to find mod-
els of thinking about the material world that refuse a hard-line division
between animate and inanimate temporalities. In Australia, one can be
found living on the rocky walls of caves in the Kimberley, in a series of
images known as the Gwion Gwion (Gwion being the Ngarinyn name
of a long-beaked bird). Although estimated to be somewhere between
40,000 and 70,000 years old, the exact age and provenance of these
images is troubled by an astonishing circumstance. In the painted lines
of the figures traced onto the rock, living bacteria and fungi inhabit and
thrive, simultaneously preserving and reanimating the image in an ongo-
ing cycle of preservation and decay. As Minhea Mircan notes, ‘Bacteria
and fungi coproduce a process of continuous restoration, while also etch-
ing the pictures deeper into the rock’ (2015, 14). Because the pigments
are literally alive, all attempts to date these works of rock art through
carbon analysis have been thwarted. In a strange way, this extraordinary
circumstance of self-generation—it might be described as a transference
of ancestral lineages through the continual biological update of living
pigments—mirrors the time pattering of the Ngarinyin and Murabata
peoples of the region. Adam Jasper suggests that ‘these images are not
images of ancestors made by the Aboriginal people, they are the ances-
tors of the people’ (2015, 91). This iconological model of time does
more than simply insist on the presence of the past in the present. It also
renders any attempt to distinguish between the past and the present, the
animate, the mineral and the biological redundant. These ‘lithic assem-
blages’ (Mircan 2015) of minerals, bacteria, time and fungi tell a differ-
ent story about the ways in which we might listen to the earth, through
a network of material animisms.
In 1938, as part of his life-long project seeking out the metaphysi-
cal parameters of ‘world’, the philosopher Martin Heidegger famously
compared a human, an animal and a stone, arguing on the basis of
consciousness that the stone is ‘worldless’, the animal ‘poor in world’,
and the human ‘world-forming’ (2008). But if we cede to an expanded
concept of Derrida’s being-as-trace—an understanding of trace as a struc-
tural logic that encompasses everything that endures in time, not solely
the animate or organic—then the parameters for ‘worlding’ are necessar-
ily widened. Might this leave open the possibility of mineral ontology, an
ontology of the never-living, or not-yet living or already dead? A philoso-
phy of being that encompasses not only animals and non-humans, but
also trees, vaporous condensations, viruses, sonic transmissions, minerals,
rocks and 13.8-billion-year-old traces of radioactive activity? Is this what
it means to call up the writing of the cosmos, or to hear the stones speak?
‘The writer has disappeared’, Caillois (1985, 108) declared of his col-
lection, ‘but each flourish—evidence of different miracles—remains, an
immortal signature.’
Notes
1. Contemporary paleontology has since divided fossils into several catego-
ries, including index fossils (such as an insect trapped in amber) and trace
fossils (such as dinosaur footprints imprinted in petrified mud or rock).
2. I am borrowing the word ‘paleosonics’ from a song title by Brian Eno but
it refers equally well to the kind of research currently being done on pre-
historic soundscapes. The term also appears in Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse
(2012).
3. For three fascinating texts on medieval materialism and the souls of rocks
and minerals, see Kellie Robertson (2010, 2014) and Valerie Allen (2014).
4. Tristan Garcia (2014) makes a similar claim; see also Richard Iveson
(2014).
5. She cites Caillois (1970, 100). Massimiliano Gioni describes The Writing
of Stones as a Rosetta stone for Caillois’s thinking, the sum of his entire
poetic and scientific vision (‘Il represente, en quelque sorte, la somme de
l’entiere vision poétique et scientifique de Caillois, sa pierre de Rosette
272 A. Barikin
pout qui voudrait filer la metaphore glyptique’) (2014, 23). See also
Warner (2008).
6. In his discussion of Victorian soundscapes, John Picker further discusses
Babbage’s idea that the ocean as well as the air might become ‘speaking
waves’ (Picker 2003, 20–21).
7. For more on the antenna, see Kahn (2013, 118–119).
8. On sound fossils captured in pottery, see Woodbridge (1969).
9. The arche-fossil is a contentious aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. As
Justin Clemens argues, ‘the existence of the arche-fossil can only be pre-
sented on the basis of the technologies that function according to physi-
cal theories that strong interpretations suggest contradict the laws of
non-contradiction’ (2013, 62).
10. On what it is like to be a bat, see Thomas Nagel (1974).
11. For Povinelli, this is the logic of imperialism and colonialism: ‘Indigenous
Australians would be aware of this rhetoric [of claiming universals
through specifics] although during the colonial period it came in the
guise of civilizational capacity’ (74).
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Index
A Alien, 13, 155–157, 170, 171, 268.

Abiotic, 69 See also science fiction; Star Trek
Abram, David, 94 Alive. See under live
Action-at-a-distance, 2, 6, 99, 204 Ancestor, 10, 12, 25, 28, 29, 33, 47–
Aesthetics 49, 53, 54, 56, 57, 68, 69, 79,
aesthetic object, 239, 243–245 84, 270. See also Māori - tīpuna
ekstatic aesthetics, 118, 120 ancestor object, 29
ethico-aesthetic, 247 ancestral photographs in Māori
Affect Culture, 57
field of/experiential affectivity, 6, deceased ancestors, 228
12, 197–198, 201–202. See also Andersen, Johannes, 50
Solar Angel, Maria, 99, 100
vibrational affect, 84 Anima, 8, 11, 111, 115, 116, 118,
Agency, 3, 30, 47, 49, 54, 84, 99, 122, 126, 132, 197
132–135, 141, 164–166, 177, Animacy, 1, 2, 13–15, 17, 71, 153,
185–187, 216, 224, 227, 229, 154, 163–165, 177, 187–189,
260 194–196. See also animism; Chen,
Ahmed, Sara, 163 Mel; Schneider, Rebecca
Air, 11, 18, 71, 75, 77, 116, 137–139, animacy hierarchies, 1, 13–15, 71,
141, 160, 163, 226, 230, 258, 153, 163, 169, 194, 195, 198
261, 272. See also breath animism and animacy, 15, 185, 198
as material, 240 inter-animacy, 15
inflatable, 217, 218 and performativity, 15, 177
wind, 11, 27, 70, 219 Animal
Alexander Turnbull Library, 50, 62 animal-hood, 223
Algorithm. See under technology animalism, 16
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 277

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66550-4
278 Index
animality, 215, 224, 228, 229 as Brechtian theatre, 142

animal otherness, 221 as sferics, 81
animals, 15, 16, 68, 70, 72, 194, atmospheric architecture, 141
197, 213–215, 221–223, 228, atmospheric attunement, 134, 135
265, 271 atmospheric communities, 2, 11,
animals in describing the processes 12, 140, 141, 147
of art, 250 manufacture of atmospheres, 11
animal surface, 116, 221 A Two Dogs Company. See Under
beast, 223, 245 Verdonck, Kris
becoming animal, 16, 222, 223 Audiences. See under participation
dressing as animals, 16, 213 Autopoiesis. See under Deleuze, Gilles,
guardian spirits, 228 & Guattari, Felix
human animal, 217, 223 Avatar, 27, 250
non-human animal, 221
Animate/inanimate. See under
animism B
Animism Babbage, Charles, 260, 261, 272
animate/inanimate, 1, 14 Bachelard, Gaston, 111, 120
animism in Aotearoa NZ, 3 Bagnall, Catherine, 16, 213, 214,
animist condition of art, 239 219–224
contagious animism, 5, 6, 12 Bahn, Paul, 172
entangled animisms, 8 Baker, Matiu, 55, 57
ethnographic animism, 3, 4 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 243–245
material animisms, 271 Bal, Mieke, 118, 125
mineral animism, 13, 17 Barad, Karen, 14, 17, 103, 184, 266
neoanimacy, 162 intra-activity/active, 14, 157,
old animisms, 12, 18, 209 165–166, 185–188
participatory animism, 204 spacetime, 186
positioning animism, 1 Barclay, Barry, 55
spiritual animism, 4 Barikin, Amelia, 2, 6, 16, 17, 253
western animism, 5, 8, 25 Barnett, Cassandra, 2, 8, 9, 12, 13,
Antas, Axel, 11, 138, 139 18, 23–44
Anthropocene, 1, 8, 25, 155 Barthes, Roland, 10, 93, 94, 184
Anthropogenic. See under climate Barwick, Lynne, 10, 92, 93, 97, 98,
Anthropology, 5, 9, 197 101, 102, 104
Anthropomorphic, 8, 12, 17, 25, 254 Bataille, George, 260
Apelu, Darcell, 15, 191–200, 203–209 Becoming. See under posthuman
Archeoacoustics, 254 Beiser, Frederick, 249
Aristotle’s De Anima, 72 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 94, 95
Aspective (representation), 37 Bennett, Jane, 8, 114, 153
Atmospheres Bergson, Henri, 16, 83, 162, 171,
animate atmospheres, 131, 143, 235, 243, 249
146, 147 Bernardi, Daniel, 171
Index 279
Bernstein, Robin, 162 Chen, Mel

Best, Elsdon, 50, 67, 68, 84 linguistic hierarchies, 13, 204
Bi-cultural, 224 queerness, 13, 166
Big Bang, 261, 262, 267 Cherry, John, 71
Biggs, Bruce, 69 Clemens, Justin, 95, 272
Bilge, Sirma, 158, 159, 165 Climate, 13, 67, 68, 72, 85, 132, 140,
Biopolitics, 13, 71, 265 141, 203. See also atmospheres;
Blur Building, 141, 142, 146 ecology
Bodies anthropogenic, 139
ekstatic body, 116, 117, 119, 120, climate change, 68, 140
123, 125, 126 deforestation, 60
entangled bodies, 10 desertification, 84
Böhme, Gernot, 133, 142, 143, 145 global warming, 77, 78, 84, 143
Bourriaud, Nicolas microclimates, 136, 140
relational aesthetics, 199 sea change, 24
Braddock, Christopher, 1, 177, 191, weather, 132, 136, 142, 143
260, 266 Clottes, Jean, 171
contagious animism, 5, 6, 12 Cloudscapes, 138
Levinasian animism, 204, 206 Cochrane, Andrew, 172
Braidotti, Rosi, 224 Collins, Patricia Hill, 158, 159, 165
Breath, 1, 8–12, 24, 28, 29, 45, 48, Colonial
70, 93, 111, 115, 116, 122, 126, colonialism, 155, 171, 204, 205,
163, 258, 266, 268. See also air; 272
atmosphere; Māori - hau counter-colonial, 35
breath of the earth, 266 de-colonial, 9
inhale and exhale, 111, 115, 116 environmental impacts of coloniza-
Broglio, Ron, 221 tion, 53
Browne, Marcia, 30 post-colonial, 15, 72, 85
Bryant, Levi, 266 pre-colonial, 24
Buck, Sir Peter (Hīroa, Te Rangi), 50 Conceptual art, 102, 118, 181, 240,
Butler, Judith, 95, 185–187 241, 248
Byrt, Anthony, 228, 229 Connolly, Peter, 127
Contagious, 5, 6, 11, 12, 160, 260.
See also Braddock, Christopher
C animism, 5
Caillois, Roger, 97, 104, 259, 260, field, 260
265, 271 Contemporary art
Cann, Tyler, 217 contemporary art object, 25, 40
Cassils, 177–181, 184 installation, 26, 28, 220
Cave painting, 164 multimedia, 26, 28, 34
Cayley, John, 95, 100 Cook, Captain James, 208
Chaos. See under Guattari, Felix Copernican, 236, 238
280 Index
Cosmology. See under Māori; deterritorialisation, 242–244, 248

indigenous lines of drift, 242
Coulthard, Glen Sean, 171 nomads, 248
Craig, Megan, 198, 203, 204 on Duchamp, Marcel, 235, 240–
Crary, Jonathan, 83 242, 248
Cross, David, 16, 199, 213, 214, readymade, 235, 239–248
216–219, 229, 230 rhizomes, 248
Crowe, Andrew, 77 romanticism, 16, 236–239,
Culture 248–250
bi-cultural, 224 sensation, 16, 236, 238–240
cultural multiplicity, 39 spiritual movement, 2, 16, 248
Curtis, Gregory, 172 sublime, 16, 236, 238, 239, 241,
243, 248
territory/deterritorialisation/reter-
D ritorialized, 239–244
Dansey, Harry, 55 vitalist, 235, 240, 242
Dastur, Francoise, 127 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 72–74
Data. See under technology Derrida, Jacques
Davidson, Aaron S. and Dubbin, différance, 6
Melissa, 17, 255, 257–259, espacement, 6, 266
266–269 trace structure, 6, 12, 17, 266–267,
Davidson, Karen, 18, 255, 267, 268, 271
270 Dicke, Robert, 261
D’Avila, Teresa, 112, 117, 119, 125 Diller, Elizabeth, 141, 143
Davis, Nicolas, 254 Donald, Paul, 178, 180–184
Dead, 2, 4, 9, 10, 17, 47, 72, 125, Donne, John, 112, 113, 117, 123,
154, 158, 163, 196, 198, 203, 125, 157, 158
217, 228, 254, 266. See also live Dordogne, France, 160
already dead, 271 Dorment, Richard, 145
corpse, 112 Drucker, Johanna, 101
deadness, 113, 153 Dubbin, Melissa and Davidson, Aaron
deadpan, 191–193, 195, 196, 200, S., 17, 255, 257–259, 266–269
207–209 Duchamp, Marcel. See under Deleuze,
death, 3, 6, 14, 59, 73, 75, 253, Gilles, & Guattari, Felix
266, 267 Dunn, Megan, 228
never-living forms, 17, 267 Dworkin, Craig, 93, 94, 103
non-living, 17, 71, 267 Dynamism/stasis, 13, 111. See also
not alive, 267 stillness
not-yet-living, 17, 267
Deforestation, 60. See also ecology
Deleuze, Gilles, & Guattari, Felix. See E
also Guattari, Felix Ecology, 61, 79. See also solar
autopoiesis, 16, 245 acoustic ecology, 79
Index 281
eco-political, 71 indigenous feminist critique of onto-

eco-system, 12, 69 logical turn, 9
kaitiakitanga (Māori), 49 Fetishism, 115, 132
Ekstasis/enstasis Film, 6, 27, 38, 47–51, 53, 54, 61,
ekstatic aesthetics, 118, 120 62, 155, 217, 248, 262. See also
ekstatic body, 116, 117, 119, 120, photography
123, 125, 126 black and white film, 51
ekstatic enstasis, 120, 122, 127 Māori relationship to, 49
ekstatic object, 114, 115 silent film, 54
Eliade, Mircea, 120, 121 Finnegan, Ruth, 186
Eliasson, Olafur, 140, 144–146 Fischer, Ole W., 142–146
Ellsworth, Elizabeth, 218 Fitterman, Rob, 97
Embodiment, 10, 15, 47, 49, 132, Folklore, 5
189, 229 Force
Eneix, Linda C., 254 energetic force, 67, 72
Energy force fields of affect, 12
mobile energy, 2, 10, 11, 111, 126 Fossil, 6, 17, 68, 253, 254, 260–265,
Enlightenment, 68, 83, 223 269, 271, 272. See also Povinelli,
Entanglement, 3, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, Elizabeth - archi-fossile
103, 111, 117, 118, 196, 198, arche-fossil, 263–265
205, 224, 265 as remains, 68
Environment, 49, 60, 68–70, 78, 79, earth-bound matter, 263
81, 123, 132, 135, 136, 140– readymade fossil, 262
146, 221, 245, 246, 254, 260. sound fossil, 17, 18, 253, 254, 258,
See also colonial 260, 261, 263, 272
environmental change, 84 trace fossil, 6, 266
environmental disaster, 70 Foster, Charles, 223
prehistoric environments, 254 Franke, Anselm, 8, 18, 215
Epistemology, 8, 9 Freeman, Barbara Claire, 125
Ethnography Frequency. See under sound
evolution of, 58 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 215, 217
heritage of primitivization, 204 Friesen, J Glenn, 120
Expressionism, 16, 236 Fusco, Coco, 209
F G
Face-to-face, 15, 194, 197, 199, 203, Gaming. See under technology
208, 209 Garcia, Tristan, 271
Feffer, John, 155 Garuba, Harry, 204, 205, 209
Feminism Gaze, 12, 33–35, 39, 40, 138, 142.
black feminist theory, 158 See also Māori—tupuna gaze
Gemstone. See under rock
282 Index
Gender. See under performance Hainge, Greg, 77

Genealogy Hakiwai, Arapata Tamati, 56, 57
alternative genealogy, 241 Halprin, Anna, 121, 127
whakapapa (Māori), 24 Hand, 12, 13, 19, 31, 36, 75, 96, 97,
Geontologies. See under Ontology 99, 103, 145, 159–161, 163,
Gesture 164, 168–170, 181, 193, 218,
contagious gesture, 160 264. See also Gesture
hail, 155, 160–167 Paleolithic, 160, 161
reciprocal gesture, 192 Pech Merle Hand, 161, 164
wave, 159–160 rockhand/handrock, 164, 170
Gibbs, Anna, 2, 10, 91, 100 Hansen, Mark, 82, 83
Gibson, Ross, 226 Harraway, Donna, 266
Gilmurray, Jonathan, 80 Harris, Brent, 209
Gioni, Massimiliano, 271 Hau’ofa, Epeli, 226
Glissant, Edouard, 42 Heat
Global warming. See under climate global warming, 77, 78, 84, 143
Goldsmith, Kenneth, 96, 98, 102, 104 temperature, 23, 78, 139, 140
Gonzalez, Anita, 171 Heidegger, Martin
Gonzalez, George A., 171 ekstasis, 117–119, 121
Grace, Patricia, 33 human, animal, stone, 126
Grasso, Laurent, 262 poor in world/world forming/
Greven, David, 157 worldless, 271
Grosz, Elizabeth, 17, 100, 114, 265 Heliotrope. See under solar
Gu, Jun-Jie, 254 Henare, Amiria, 9, 13, 27–32, 41, 50
Guattari, Félix, 16, 214, 215, 222, Henare, Mānuka, 69, 70
228, 235–248. See also Deleuze, Hinterding, Joyce, 67, 80–85
Gilles, & Guattari, Felix Hīroa, Te Rangi (Buck, Sir Peter),
chaos, chaosmosis, 239, 247 50–52, 54, 59
cosmic effusion, 243 Hodder, Ian, 197, 205
existential refrain, 243 Hoskins, Te Kawehau, 197, 209
fractalisation, 244 Hotere, Ralph, 72–75, 84
homeland, 242 Howe, Elizabeth Teresa, 112
hylozoism, 16, 237, 242, 245 Huddleston, Charlotte, 217
lines of drift, 242 Human, 2–4, 8, 12–14, 16, 25, 30,
quasi-animist, 16, 214, 228 33, 37, 47, 49, 57, 60, 68, 69,
semiotic polycentrism, 245 71, 72, 75, 81, 83, 85, 95, 97,
Guitton, Maxime, 268, 270 99–101, 103, 114, 115, 131–
Gwion Gwion, Kimberley, 270 133, 136–138, 141, 143, 145,
147, 153–157, 161–170, 183,
186, 194–196, 229, 238–240,
H 247, 254, 258, 260, 263–265,
Hägglund, Martin, 266, 267 271. See also posthuman
Haines, David, 67, 80–85 consciousness, 10, 101, 224
Index 283
human/animal, 224 J
human/nonhuman, 3, 6, 10, 11, Jakobson, Roman, 6, 95
17, 45, 46, 51, 69, 72, 75, 83, Jasper, Adam, 270
101, 131–133, 136–141, 155, Johansson, Hanna, 138
165, 169–170, 224, 256, 260, Johnston, David Jhave, 100, 101
261, 265 Jones, Alison, 197, 199, 209
inanimate life form, 156 Jones, Amelia, 2, 13, 14, 177, 178,
less human, 103 180, 199, 213, 229
non-human knowledge, 17, 256 Jones, Andrew Meirion, 164
trans-human, 95
Huyghe, Pierre, 256
Hybrid, 3, 143 K
Hylozoism. See under Guattari, Félix Kaa, Hohi Ngapera Te Moana Keri, 57
Kahn, Douglas, 69, 81
Kairos
I kairological, 123, 125
Il y a. See under Levinas, Emmanuel Keim, Brandon, 254
Inanimate. See under animism Kelly, Ellsworth, 218
Indigenous, 1–4, 10, 13, 18, 49, 72, Kittler, Friedrich, 101
185, 209, 223, 227, 272. See also Kondo, Tetsuo, 138
photography Kopua, Huia, 54
alter-narratives, 72 Krämer, Sybille, 100
concepts/notions about time and Krell, David Farell, 127
space, 10 Kristeva, Julia, 74, 126
cosmologies, 68, 69, 85, 229 Kruger, Tāmati, 71
customs, 7 Kruse, Jamie, 271
feminist critique, 9 Kubiak, Anthony, 229
flora and fauna, 24, 31 Kusama, Yayoi, 218
traditions, 5, 224
worldviews, 3, 8, 9, 25
Inorganic/organic, 6, 14, 16, 80, 198, L
238, 241, 253, 254, 256. See also Labour. See under performance
dead Lakey, Elzina, 163
Installation. See under contemporary Land, Nick, 238
art Land, 9, 12, 49, 55, 60, 62, 69, 167,
Interbeing, 229 170, 223. See also ecology; envi-
Internet, 95, 155 ronment; rock
Intersectionality, 158 clay, 177–180, 183
Interval, 14, 126, 157–162, 164, 165, earth, 69, 170, 228, 258
266, 267 earth signals, 69, 272
Irigaray, Luce, 122 homeland, 60
Iteration/reiteration, 10, 93, 158– Language
161, 165, 166, 220, 265 aphasia, 6
284 Index
as a life form, 91 Lunney, Bridie, 11, 109–123, 125,

digital media, 98, 100 126
power of, 10 Lyotard, Jean-François
translation (iterative), 93 sublime, 125, 236, 237, 239, 245
Lanza, Joseph, 79
Lazzarato, Maurizio, 222
Leitmotiv, 242. See also Deleuze, M
Gilles, & Guattari, Felix Magic, 4–7, 95, 97, 185–186, 197,
Lepecki, Andre, 164 203, 237, 262
Levinas, Emmanuel, 196–203, Mahuika, Āpirana, 56
206, 207. See also Braddock, mākutu (Māori), 23, 39
Christopher Manhire, Bill, 73, 74
il y a, 198, 200, 202 Manning, Erin, 164
Levinas’s animism, 200 Manuel, John, 52, 60
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 15, 196–208 Māori
Lewis-Williams, David, 171 atua (gods), 57
Life force. See under vitalism cosmology, 10, 12, 68, 69
Lincoln, Abraham, 13, 154, 166–168 hau (breath, wind, vital essence), 1,
Linguistics, 13, 103, 204, 207. See also 8, 9–12, 24–25, 28–42, 70
Chen, Mel hongi (greeting pressing noses and
linguistic hierarchies, 13, 204 sharing breath), 10, 28–30,
linguistic turn, 103 45, 48
Lingus, Alphonso, 117, 126 ihi (awesome presence), 48, 53–54,
Live. See also rock 70–71, 76, 79
alive, 9, 16, 18, 24, 30, 35, 40, 47, kaitiaki (spiritual custodians), 49
54, 67, 70, 83, 91, 94, 95, karakia (incantation, prayer), 12,
103, 156, 203, 217, 245, 267, 68, 84
270 kōrero (talk), 2, 9–10, 30–42,
life/death, 13 45–61
liveness, 1, 6, 10, 13, 34, 101, 113, mākutu (magic), 23
153, 161, 214, 220, 253, 266 mana (spiritual charisma, power
living pigments, 270 and authority), 9, 24, 29–35,
living rocks, 164 45–49, 55–57, 61, 70, 226
never-living forms, 17, 267 mana rangatiratanga (authority, self-
non-living, 17, 71, 254, 265, 267 determination), 47, 49
not alive, 267 Mana Taonga, 55, 56
not-yet-living, 17, 267 mātauranga Māori (Māori knowl-
Livermore, Cathy, 76, 79 edge and education), 2
London, Scott, 94, 95, 179 mauri, mauriora (life force), 4,
Longinus, Cassius, 125 8–12, 15, 24, 29–30, 34,
Löwensohn, Elina, 256, 269 39–41, 48–49, 57–61, 68–73,
77, 79, 83–85, 226, 229
Index 285
raranga (weaving), 33, 47 Masquerade. See under posthuman

tangata whenua (local people), 68, Massumi, Brian, 79, 85, 202, 215
85 Mata Aho Collective, 41
tangihanga (death customs), 55 Material
taonga (ancestral treasures), 1–2, and immaterial vitality, 49
8–13, 18, 24–43, 47–56 audible materialisms, 261
taonga puoro (traditional music materiality, 3, 6, 10, 17, 96, 98,
instruments), 27 102, 103, 113, 116, 120, 133,
tapu (sacred state or condition of a 137, 145, 146, 178, 181, 189,
person or thing), 4, 29, 31, 37, 218, 222, 256, 260, 265, 267
39, 48–50, 56, 70, 226 material life as vital force, 237
te ao Māori (Māori worldview), 1, medieval materialism, 254
8, 30, 46, 69 traces, 6, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184
te kore (a void, point of nothing- Mathews, Harry, 10, 100
ness), 73, 225 Matthews, Nathan, 71
te reo Māori (the Māori language), Mauss, Marcel
9, 47, 84 effluvia, 197
Tikanga Māori (ancestral values), McDonald, James Ingram, 50
38–39, 50, 52, 55 McKenzie, Jon, 186
tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty), 32 McQueen, Cilla, 73
tīpuna (ancestors), 10, 47 Mead, Sidney Hirini Moko, 31, 48,
tohunga (priests, experts), 36 54, 55, 57
tupuna gaze (ancestor gaze), 12, Meditation, 121, 122, 126
33–35, 40 Meillassoux, Quentin, 263–265
utu (a reciprocal gesture), 192–194, Melitopoulos, Angela, 222
197, 203–204 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 162, 163
wairua (spirit, spirituality), 9, 30, Meta-
48–52, 56–58, 70 communication, 215
wana (unquestioned competence data as nonhuman consciousness,
and authority), 48–49, 53–54, 101
70–71 discourse, 97
wehi (tingling feeling of excite- Metamorphic, 93
ment), 48–49, 53–54, 70–71, Mika, Carl Te Hira, 25, 30, 37, 46
79 Mikaere, Ani, 55
whakaahua (Māori word for photo- Mimesis, 93, 94, 162, 165, 260
graph), 3, 47, 61 Mineral ontology, 2, 17, 253, 254,
whakairo (carving), 33, 47, 50 271. See also cave painting
whakapapa (genealogies), 24, Mircan, Minhea, 270, 271
30–42, 46–48, 56–58 Minimalism, 118
wiri (trembling hand in Māori per- Moon, Paul, 70, 84
forming arts), 12, 75–80, 84 Morris, Robert, 262
Marsden, Māori, 4, 11, 48, 58, 70 Morse, Valerie, 26
Marx, Karl, 7 Morton, Timothy, 265
286 Index
Moten, Fred, 157 O

Movement Object, 4, 6, 11, 18, 27, 30–39,
dance, 121 42, 111–126, 132–134, 145,
Murabata, Australia, 270 162, 165, 177, 179, 181–185,
Murphie, Andrew, 99 197, 201–204, 242–245, 256,
Museological, 3, 146 263–267. See also subject
Music part-subject/part-object, 202
taonga puoro (Māori music instru- subjectless object, 18, 30, 35
ments), 27 taonga (Māori), 2, 8, 13, 24, 25,
Musu (Samoan – withdrawn), 194 27–31, 35, 37, 55, 56
Muzak, 79 Oceanic, 197
Mystic, 36, 112, 220 Oceanic identity, 226
materialist, 260 Ó Murchadha, Felix, 124, 126
experience, 200, 203 Ontological Turn, 9, 186
Ontology
geontologies, 266
N mineral ontology, 2, 17, 254, 271
Nature Oral
art in nature, 265 oral testimony, 261
mechanistic nature, 237 oral tradition, 31
natural body/cyborg, 13 Organic. See under inorganic/organic
nature/culture, 5, 140 Osbourne, Peter, 240
Needham, Rodney, 186, 198 Other
Neich, Roger, 42 alterity, 214, 219, 222, 228
New materialism, 1, 2, 8, 17, 25, 103, otherness, 214, 221
137, 153, 255
Ngarinyin, Australia, 270
Ngāta, Āpirana, 49, 54 P
Ngāti Kahungunu, 12, 24, 56, 75 Pacific
Ngāti Porou, 2, 49–52, 54 nuclearization of the Pacific, 84
Nixon, Rob, 60 Pasifika, 2, 3
Noise. See under sound Pākehā, 3, 12, 18, 32, 41, 42, 197,
Noland, Carrie, 159, 160 205, 209, 224
Nonhuman. See under human Paleolithic, 160, 161
Noumena, 236 Paleosonics. See under sonic
Nuclear Panoho, Rangihiroa, 25, 31, 73
nuclearization of the Pacific, sun, 84 Papapetros, Spyros, 11, 12, 16, 115,
testing, 72, 73 116, 120
Nuttall, Sarah, 19 Parihaka, 226
Nyong’o, Tavia, 157, 170 Parker, Andrew, 185
Index 287
Participation, 5, 6, 15, 100, 140, 145, capturing the spirit in, 10, 58, 243
194, 196–204, 206, 207, 217. See document, documentation, 31, 51,
also animism 179, 184
aphasic participation, 6 film, 11, 26, 27, 49, 50, 53–56, 61,
audiences, 48, 54, 70, 78, 85, 137, 262
167, 168, 171, 177–179, 181, historic, 7, 48, 51, 56, 57
194, 199, 205, 206, 219 landscape, 37, 94, 133, 138, 141,
participants, 54, 138, 141, 179, 220
198, 205, 209, 217, 218, 224 Māori protocol around, 10, 52, 55
radical participation, 194 mauri moe in, 58, 61
Pasquinelli, Matteo, 80, 249 nitrate film, 50, 53
Passivity photographic sovereignty (Māori
musu (Samoan), 191, 192, 203, - photographic mana rangatira-
207, 209 tanga), 47, 49
passive resistance, 226 portraiture, 55
radical passivity, 15, 194, 196–198, whakaahua (Māori - incarnate ances-
200, 203 tral presence in)’, 47, 61
Patel, Kasha, 78 Picker, John, 272
Patrick, Martin, 2, 13, 15, 213 Pierre, Arnauld, 262
Pāua shell, 36 Place, Vanessa, 97
Pech Merle Hand, 161 Plato, 72, 263
Peebles, P.J.E., 261 Play, 2, 15, 27, 214–218, 224,
Penzias, Arno, 261, 262 228–229
Performance Poetry
artist labour, 14, 181 stutter of form, 93
contagious performance, 6 Pohatu, Taina, 45, 58
gender performance, 185, 188 Poiesis, 16, 113, 120, 122
performative labour, 181 Polli, Andrea, 78
queer performance, 189 Polynesia
ritual, 186, 197, 214 Polynesian Advisory Committee
Performativity (PAC), 191, 207
binding power of, 14, 185 Samoan, 191, 194
performative, 15, 47, 75, 135, 177, Polyphonic, 242, 244
180, 181, 183–186, 188 Posthuman, 2, 8, 16, 213, 214, 224.
performative labour, 181 See also human
Perloff, Marjorie, 96 becoming, 6, 15, 158, 166, 168,
Persons, 11, 18, 30, 31, 115, 132, 221–223, 266
256 masquerade/disguise, 25, 217
Phenomenology, 159, 198, 199 posthumanist performativity, 165
Photography temporality, 6, 11, 111, 117, 121,
as a Māori taonga, 8, 25 123, 125, 137, 178–181, 199
288 Index
Post-Minimalist, 17, 256 stones speak, 271

Potangaroa, Joseph, 37 Rosengren, Mats, 172
Pound, Francis, 73, 74 Rotman, Brian, 101
Povinelli, Elizabeth Rudwick, Martin, 254
archi-fossile, 264 Ruprecht, Lucia, 159, 160
Presence and absence, 6, 53, 131,
200, 266
Primitive S
ethnographies, 3, 15, 185, 195, 196 Sacred, 4, 12, 23, 33, 51, 52, 56, 112
primitivist, 3, 204, 205 Sallis, John, 117
Primordial, 69, 201, 204 Sautter, Violaine, 256, 268, 269
Savage, 4, 5, 7, 15, 18, 154, 168,
172, 191, 193–195, 197, 205,
Q 206, 208. See also Star Trek (The
Quasi-animist. See under Guattari, Savage Curtain)
Félix performance rituals, 197
Queer. See under Chen, Mel philosophy, 7
SaVAge K’Lub, 19, 208
self-portrait, 15, 191
R stereotypical, 206
Racism/raced formations, 7 Schaeffer, Pierre, 79
Radiation Schafer, R. Murray, 79
radioactive isotope, 267 Scheer, Edward, 2, 11, 12, 131
Ranciere, Jacques, 164 Schmidt, Simone, 2, 10, 11, 109
Randerson, Janine, 2, 12, 18, 67 Schneider, Rebecca, 13, 17, 113, 125,
Readymade. See under Deleuze, Gilles, 153
& Guattari, Felix; fossil interinanimacy, 154, 158
Reed, Brian, 96 intra-in-animacy, 2, 154
Reihana, Rutene & Hana, 51 Science fiction, 255. See also Star Trek
Reweti, Bridget, 24, 38 sci-fi, 219
Rickard, Jolene, 47 Scofidio, Ricardo, 141, 143
Ritual Sea change. See under climate
Māori ritual (fishing nets), 51, 62 Sedgwick, Eve, 185, 186
Robbins, Jill, 200, 209 Self
Roberts, Mere, 46 in flux, 219, 229
Robertson, Natalie, 2, 10, 46, 59 selfhood, 187, 205, 214, 215, 229
Rock Shaman, shamanistic, 99, 121, 171,
gemstones, 255, 266 172, 221
life-essence of, 72, 254 Sharpe, Christina, 162
meteorite, 259 Shearer, Rachel, 2, 12, 13, 18, 67, 69,
rock art, 164, 254, 270 75–77, 84, 85
silence of stones, 270 Shirres, Michael, 84
Index 289
Silence, 93, 253, 256, 260, 268, 270 Star Trek, 13, 154–157, 166, 167,
Slobig, Zachary, 136, 137 169, 170
Sloterdijk, Peter, 12, 140–142, 146, Stasis. See under stillness
147 Stengers, Isabelle, 5, 8, 93
Smilde, Berndnaut, 136–139 Sterne, Jonathan, 86
Smith, Terry, 39 Stewart, Kathleen, 134–136, 143, 146
Smithson, Robert, 258 Stillness
Solar, 12, 13, 67–73, 79–85, 144. See movement in, 127
also Heat; Sun stasis, 111, 253
affects, 67, 69–71, 73, 79, 80, Stones. See under rock
83–85 Subject
ecopoetics, 73 part-subject/part-object, 202
energies, 68, 71, 80 subject/object, 4, 6, 13, 32, 118,
heliotrope, 72 202
radiation, 144 subjectivated, 35
solar-powered, 12, 67, 85 subjectivity, 8, 15, 16, 27, 96, 189,
technologies, 72, 78 198, 199, 201, 214, 222, 223,
Transsolar Klima Engineering, 138 230, 245, 247
Sonic Sublime. See under Deleuze, Gilles,
imagining, 77 & Guattari, Felix; Lyotard,
paleosonics, 254, 271 Jean-François
remnants/trace, 255, 262 Sun, 2, 12, 67–73, 75, 77–83, 85,
Sound, 10, 12, 18, 62, 68, 73, 77–81, 120, 238. See also Heat; Solar
83, 86, 96, 98, 116, 123, 133, apocalyptic nuclear sun, 72
157, 222, 223, 253–255, 258, as an animate being, 2
261, 262, 266, 267, 272. See also black sun, 75
Music; Silence; Soundscape; Fossil ihi (Māori - ray of sun or a beam of
sound signals, 77 light), 48, 49, 54, 70, 71, 76,
soundwork (art), 12, 67, 69 79
Soundscape, 79, 81, 254 sun ancestor, 68
pre-human, 261 sunrise, 74
Spinoza, Benedictus de, 71, 83, 237 sunlight, 71, 72, 80
Spirit, spiritual, 2. See also Animism; Tānerore (Māori god), 77, 85
Deleuze; Māori Surveillance, 26, 35. See also Terrorism
dark spirits, 238 digital surveillance, 26
indwelling spirit, 57
soul, 3, 4, 8, 11, 48, 58, 72,
112–113, 121, 197, 222, 245, T
254, 271 Tambiah, Stanley J., 186
spiritual power, 9, 24, 48, 57 Tapsell, Paul, 27, 29–31, 37, 48, 57
Teaiwa, Teresia, 192
290 Index
Te Ao, Shannon, 16, 28, 228 269–271. See also Derrida,

Te ao Māori (Māori worldview). See Jacques; Temporality
under Māori ancestral time, 266
Technology as a river, 267
algorithm, 95 geological time, 166, 258
as mediation of knowledge, 264 time-space collapse, 48
data-driven-life, 10, 101 Todd, Zoe, 9
electro-magnetic, 67, 80 Trace, 6, 17, 54, 97, 102, 120, 162,
electronics, 68, 76, 77 253, 258, 265–267, 271. See also
gaming, 26 Derrida, Jacques; rock
hydrogen-alpha telescope, 67, 80, as animate, 266
81 material traces, 6, 178, 180, 183,
matérialisation of information, 96 184
Temporality sonic trace, 255, 262
cross-temporal, 13, 157, 158, 162, temporal trace, 258
164, 167 trace fossil, 6, 266, 271
ka mua, ka muri (Māori, walking trace of gesture, 97
backwards into the future), 227 traces of bodies, 101
temporal past, 54 Transition/transformation, 13, 17, 95,
Te Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New 112, 114, 115, 117–120, 123,
Zealand), 54 126, 178, 199, 221, 228, 243,
Terrorism 245, 248, 265
war on terror, 26 Transmissions/transference, 61, 81,
Te Tau, Terri, 12, 24, 26–29, 33–40 255, 270, 271
Text Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand (Te
dematerialization of writing, 99 Tiriti o Waitangi), 3, 18, 31, 41,
digital text, 98 49
Theatre, 136, 137, 142, 146, 147, rights and property, 27
155, 156, 158, 179. See also settlements, 61
atmospheres—as Brechtian Tremble
theatre shimmer, 75
Things, 1, 6, 8, 10, 17, 25, 35, 49, Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah, 47
51, 70, 80, 94, 103, 115, 122, vibrate, 30, 77
126, 132, 162, 186 wiriwiri (Māori), 18, 67, 75, 77, 85
Thrift, Nigel, 71 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 3–5, 7, 11, 16,
Time, 6, 10, 17, 23, 34–38, 46, 48, 115, 197
50, 54, 56, 58, 61, 79, 111,
117, 121, 123, 125, 155–157,
159, 161, 162, 166–168, 170, U
178, 181, 182, 204, 227, 237, Uncanny, 13, 215–217
246, 248, 258, 260, 261, 266,
Index 291
V ocean, 23, 40, 41, 60, 62, 70, 84,

Varela, Francisco, 245, 246 197, 228, 261, 267, 272
Vasseleu, Cathryn, 199 rain, 23, 267
Verdonck, Kris river, 3, 14, 23, 25, 38, 40–41, 45,
A Two Dogs Company, 134 49, 51–55, 59–62, 70, 120
Verwoert, Jan, 104 salt, 39, 60
Vitalism, vitalist sprays, 226
infinite living force, 243 taniwha (Māori, water spirit), 32, 60
material and immaterial vitality, 49 tears, 54, 59–61, 163
vital forces, 131 water-polyps, 237
vital materialism, 235 waterways, 23, 49
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 222 wetlands, 49
Weather. See under climate
Western culture
W critique of, 12, 30, 35, 103, 154,
Wagner, Thomas, 127, 142 204. See also Animism
Waiapu River, 45, 49, 51, 52, 54, 61, western humanism, 100
62 Wilderness, 220
Waikerepuru, Huirangi Eruera, 47, Willerslev, Rane, 18, 223, 224
57, 58 Williams, Alex, 249
Wall, Thomas Carl, 203, 207 Wilson, Robert, 261, 262
Walters Prize, 15, 228
Warner, Marina, 99, 258, 266
Water Z
flood, 23, 60 Zammito, John, 249
fresh water, 36, 39 Zepke, Stephen, 2, 16, 235
lake, 23, 36, 49, 142 Zimmerman, B., 112

Christopher Braddock (Eds.) - Animism in Art and Performance (2017, Palgrave Macmillan)

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EDITED BY

“It’s imperative that contemporary discussions of the ‘liveliness’ of the nonhu-

“Animism in Art & Performance demonstrates a unique instance of dual sover-

Animism in Art and

ISBN 978-3-319-66549-8 ISBN 978-3-319-66550-4 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950690

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

(Tonga–NZ), Louise Tu’u (Samoa–NZ), Abby Cunnane, Ziggy Lever,

1 Introduction: Animism and Animacies 1

Part I Indigenous Animacies

2 Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels 23

3 Activating Photographic Mana Rangatiratanga Through

4 Dark Sun: Solar Frequencies, Solar Affects 67

Part II Atmospheric Animations

5 Language as a Life Form 91

7 Animate Atmospheres: Art at the Edge of Materiality 131

Part III Animacy Hierarchies

9 Animacies and Performativity 177

10 Animism, Animacy and Participation

11 Exploring Posthuman Masquerade and Becoming 213

Part IV Sensational Animisms

12 The Animist Readymade: Towards a Vital

13 Sound Fossils and Speaking Stones: Towards a

Amelia Barikin is a contemporary art historian and Lecturer in Art

Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor, Roski School of Art &

Performance, 1997; Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of

Fig. 2.1 Terri Te Tau, exterior installation view of Unwarranted

Fig. 5.1 Lynne Barwick, Like A Structured Language, 2014.

Québec, Canada. Curated by Amelia Jones. Courtesy

Introduction: Animism and Animacies

© The Author(s) 2017 1

reinforce how indigenous world views and approaches are significantly

Tylor’s insistence on a clear and rational division between what he calls

non-human world; a category which at times included the indigenous

What those anthropologists observed in ‘savage’ magical practices was a

From this perspective, notions such as ‘contagious animism’ (and ‘apha-

In this endeavour, I was careful to concentrate on a history of ‘Western

Barnett’s approach differs from some current scholarship on animism

So, if the first step to ‘ontological breakthrough’ is to realise that ‘different

This is to reiterate Barnett’s assertion just mentioned that taonga Māori

As Natalie Robertson considers viewer–image relationships and the

(Chap. 6). She concentrates on a question of how animated matter

With reference to Peter Sloterdjk, Scheer proposes this reimagin-

If the solar is Tamanuiterā, a taonga whose ‘objectness’ can be desig-

intervals we had hitherto habitually held to be non-traversable’. Her

Barad’s final question as to whether her concerns sound silly reflect an

Jones is currently engaging in a number of new research projects that

I am very interested in troubling this reciprocal ‘inter-animacy’ whereby

In a continuing discussion about animacy hierarchies, my contribu-

as art. With reference to Elizabeth Grosz, she builds an argument that

Paying attention to the stoniness of stones or the thingness of things forces

Barikin’s exploration of a ‘double ontology of materiality’ has some-

These objects and atmospheres swing around to concerns put forward

The sisterhood also includes Rosanna Raymond (NZ–Samoan) who

Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels

© The Author(s) 2017 23

currents, systems and dynamics—including global, capitalistic, corporate

In a very matter-of-fact manner, a tino matua keke ‘great aunt’ from a

It is often argued that kaupapa (foundationally) Māori ‘art’ practices

philosophies still tend to become troubled. Taonga Māori land us in a

graphically data-mapped screen. Gaming often plies a paranoid subjectiv-

Fig. 2.1 Terri Te Tau, exterior installation view of Unwarranted and

Fig. 2.1 Terri Te Tau, exterior installation view of Unwarranted

Fig. 5.1 Lynne Barwick, Like A Structured Language, 2014.

Introduction: Animism and Animacies

(Chap. 6). She concentrates on a question of how animated matter

Te Tuna-Whiri: The Knot of Eels

Fig. 2.1 Terri Te Tau, exterior installation view of Unwarranted and

Fig. 2.2 Terri Te Tau, interior installation view of Unwarranted and

Fig. 3.1 Natalie Robertson, Pokai looking out to Waiapu Ngutu Awa,

The Historic Archive of Ancestral Images

Fig. 3.2 James Ingram McDonald, Peter Buck, and others, setting a trap in a

Ihi, Wehi and Wana in the Archive

digitally scanned, expanding the time to 31 minutes. Composed of

Tikanga Māori and Mana Taonga Photographs

Mana, Wairua and Mauri

Fig. 3.3 Natalie Robertson, Waiapu Ngutu Awa, Te Tai Tairawhiti, 2014.

The Sun in Māori Cosmologies

Fig. 4.1 Ralph Hotere, Requiem, 1973–1974. Oil on board. Collection of the

Solar Energies: Hinterding and Haines

Fig. 4.3 David Haines, Transmission to the Sun (detail), 2016. Ultrachrome