ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities volume 16 number 1 march 2011

he task undertaken in this essay is to give an account of the disordering effects of matter made evident through the work of materiality in the context of art. This endeavour responds to the insistent provocations arising from matters agency in relation to the way it is conventionally understood. Rethinking the relations of matter, otherwise than within an oppositional logic, necessitates challenging not only the hierarchies of oppositional thinking but also the very nature of oppositionality.1 It is here that Jacques Derrida locates the latency of undecidability that resists and disorders oppositions from within. Derrida, however, is wary of utilizing the concept of matter, preferring instead to refer to the work that matter yields.2 This reluctance, he argues, is due to the concept too often being reinvested with values aligned with presence in general, or being presented as a fundamental principle exterior to a relationship with, and dependence on, the language of Western metaphysics. Bearing these cautions in mind, I draw on the writings of Andrew Benjamin, who focuses on the operations of materiality and productivity of techniques in artworks, to insist any account of content begins with detailing the material presence of the work of art.3 Utilizing this approach, I argue that the work of the work of art is the activity of its materiality that yields the disordering effects of matter. It is these effects that unsettle conventional hylomorphic understandings that regard matter as inert and passive, as a vehicle for expression or medium for signifying something external to itself. Through these destabilizing effects, the work of art exercises its potential to expose heterogeneity and provoke difference. This is not difference understood as an opposition between two terms; on the contrary, it is the production of difference as divergence, a

terri bird FIGURING MATERIALITY

differentiating force aimed at interrupting the circular economies of representation. Rethinking the relations of matter has been the focus of feminist theory seeking to overcome mind/body dualisms, particularly in terms of problematizing understandings of the body and its associated materiality. Luce Irigaray, for example, maintains the need to reconsider the negation of material specificity in general, in order to re-imagine the sexual specificity of bodies. There can be no change to the social order, she points out, without socializing in a different way the relation to nature, matter, the body, language, and desire.4 For Irigaray this transformation is crucial to alter the dynamics between men and women, and challenge the

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/1 1/010005^11 201 1 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.564360

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sexual indifference that fortifies discriminatory economic and social structures. What she exposes is the need to reconfigure linguistic practices to enable a feminine relation to language, and representation more broadly, to retraverse differently the matter/form dyad, the power/ act dyad, and so on.5 Through an extensive examination of the history of philosophy, Irigaray demonstrates the way it forgets the mediums through which its representations take place. Drawing attention to the unconsciously repressed procedures at work in philosophy, she refers to these unacknowledged passages as its scenography.6 The architectonics of this theatre, including the geometric organization that frames its spacetime, remain, Irigaray suggests, so long as they are uninterrupted. A transformation in this spatio-temporal economy calls for a change, she argues, in the relations of matter and form and the interval between.7 To formulate an imaginary structure within which women have a nonrecoupable place, Irigaray proposes this interval as a reserve for the irreducibility of the other, inhabited by the unpredictable forces of desire, unhinged from the familial arena of Oedipal sublimation. She insists that for there to be an ethics of sexual difference this interval needs to facilitate womens autonomy, allowing them to take a proper place. Elizabeth Grosz characterizes the place proposed by Irigaray as the in-between, an indeterminate space of undecidability, a tear in the fabric of dualism.8 Reconfiguring understandings of space and time, and their connections to a concept of corporeality, have been key concerns for Grosz since her initial encounter with the work of Irigaray, amongst others, in the 1980s. In recent writings Grosz focuses on what she describes as the messy biology, matter, materiality of bodies, to draw attention to aspects evaded in much of the theoretical analysis that centres on questions of the body, gender and identity.9 Grosz turns towards an exploration of the modes, forms and effects of temporality on bodies, both living and non-living, to pursue the more elusive dimensions of the force and difference of matter. One of the challenges that Irigaray issues, according to Grosz, is to understand womans relation to temporality based on an understanding of time as not subsidiary to space. This is crucial to Irigaray for the work of sexual difference to begin, as she advocates, [p]erhaps we are passing through an era when time must redeploy space?10 Such a realignment requires an ontology of becoming, Grosz maintains, constituted by a paradoxical conception of time modeled on an unknowable future, matched by a correspondingly paradoxical conception of the relations of subjects and objects.11 In her project to rethink the openness of material variation, Grosz proposes a reinvigorated appreciation of the future based on an understanding of time as the force of differing.12 This force is the movement that makes any becoming possible through the capacity to transform, and Grosz claims, to unbecome, the apparent givenness and inertia of material objects and to give these objects new virtualities, new impulses and potentials.13 Also responding to the potential force and dynamics of matter, Brian Massumi suggests provocatively, matter is self disclosing rather than waiting passively to be given meaning or form; maintaining matter passes through contexts rather than being disclosed by them.14 Positioning matter as a complex site of activity allows for processes of making to be understood, not as an imposition of ideas, form or meaning, but as movement through matter. This movement entails a transposition of one material force to another as interchanges of form, surface and effect. In this space between processes of receiving and responding there is a domain of instability, where matters self-disclosing and divergent possibilities emerge. This is the province of what is to come, a reserve of excess, described by Grosz as, accommodate[ing] not just otherness, but the kind of otherness that is beyond the limit, outside the definition and control of the self-same and the self-identical.15 By inhabiting this undecidability art remains open to the force of differing, an incalculable exteriority in excess of what is knowable. This openness to an outside is produced as an effect of the work of the work of art with the possibility of provoking thought. Reconceiving the relations of matter as an encounter with an outside that

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provokes thought exposes the political potential of art practices. This potential is oriented towards configuring new ways of thinking together with new modes of subjectivity and inhabitation. Pursuing a similar argument with regards to arts political potential, Simon OSullivan asserts that a transformation in how we think about art will necessarily alter the topology of how we think ourselves and vice versa.16 Furthermore, I would maintain that these transformations emerge from the productive tension of an openness to a nonmanifest exteriority at the limits of knowledge as the work of matter. Of particular significance to the understandings of matter outlined by both Grosz and Massumi, and the approach towards art practices developed by OSullivan, are the writings of Giles Deleuze. Deleuze cites the revolution in art that leads to abstraction in his appeal for a theory of thought without images.17 Art brings into play forces of difference, Deleuze argues, through repetitions that have the possibility to disrupt a representational model of thinking based on the primacy of identity. Deleuzes understanding of arts potential to provoke thought is considered in this essay through an account of the activity of materiality, by focusing on the productivity of repetition evident in the practice of Melbournebased artist Fiona Abicare.18 Abicare utilizes sculptural techniques of reproduction, such as modelling, moulding and casting, to engage processes of repetition along with various modes of doubling, such as pairs of photographic images, to induce heterogeneous relationships between patterns and replicas. An initial fascination with a family collection of figurines not only motivated Abicare to Lladro investigate processes of copying and duplication but also the settings of their display. This questioning of display brings into play the dynamics of spatiality through the elaborate inventions of matter with the prospect of suggesting new modes or styles of inhabitation. Abicare explores these prospects by deploying style as a procedure to mark out specific territories in response to the complexity of existing amid a world of objects and others. This is the primary gesture of art, according to Grosz, on which she notes Derrida and Deleuze are in rare agreement, the construction or fabrication of the frame.19 Grosz sketches a relationship between Derridas investigation into arts various frames, in The Truth in Painting, and Deleuzes discussion of art, written together lix Guattari in What is Philosophy?, with with Fe particular reference to their understanding of arts territorializing as sensory. The following examination of Abicares practice responds to this understanding of art as differentiating planes of coherence in which to think and act. These zones of consistency are filtered and composed from an incalculable exteriority comprised of the indeterminate forces of chaos that encompasses all possibilities. This discussion is framed primarily by the writings of Deleuze who asks, as Claire Colebrook notes, just what style of life something a political form, a work of art or a philosophy enables.20 The deliberate styling of Abicares installations exceeds the conventions of cor and decorum as they flirt with the libidinal de forces of chaos loitering on their edges. What they enable is the interruption of routine modes of inhabitation by confounding customary ways of encountering the world. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze asserts, a fundamental encounter is not an object of recognition, rather [s]omething in the world forces us to think.21 The claim that Deleuze makes rests on a distinction that Plato identifies between two types of things, and the sensations they provoke. These sensations are characterized on the one hand by that which is harmonious with what is conceivable, imaginable or somehow already known. These sensations leave the mind calm and inactive; as Deleuze writes: [t]hought is thereby filled with no more than an image of itself, one in which it recognises itself the more it recognises things.22 On the other hand, opposed to this is an encounter with what can only be sensed or grasped as a range of affective qualities that resonate without being recognizable. What is grasped is not a sensible being, as Deleuze states, but the very being of the sensible.23 The irreducibility of this sensation disrupts the habitual range of experiences, or otherwise challenges customary ways of being in the world, such that they demand further enquiry or compel thinking.

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It is sensations of the second type that Daniel W. Smith argues constitute for Deleuze the basis of an aesthetic.24 This is not to suggest that Deleuze proposes a general theory for the reception or interpretation of art, as his focus is on the conditions for the creation of the new, which maintains the distinctiveness of each art form and singularity of each artwork. As Smith notes, Deleuze understands each artwork as utilizing its particular materials and techniques to confront its own problems, through the invention of different procedures in response to an array of intensive forces. Through these various procedures Deleuze and Guattari describe art as throwing a plane of composition over chaos to yield its force as sensation. This is the peculiarity of art for Deleuze and Guattari, to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite, which in turn, through the action of aesthetic figures, bears monuments or composite sensations.25 It is this aim that all the arts share, to incorporate something of the vibratory forces of chaos, without fixing or commemorating them as their continuous mobility means they are always becoming other.26 The composite sensations, or blocks of sensations, produced by art are a compound of autonomous percepts and affects, existing independently from the experience of a viewer. As Deleuze and Guattari write, The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.27 At the same time, sensation, as Smith stresses, must not to be confused with the material in which these syntheses are effected.28 To this end Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two types of relationships between sensation and material. In the first instance, they write, sensation is realized in the material and does not exist outside of this realization.29 In the second instance, one they associate with modernist painting, sensation is no longer realized in the material, rather it is, as they state, the material that passes into sensation.30 Whilst sensation exists in principle in itself for Deleuze and Guattari, it is in the interplay between finite occurrences materialized as works of art and the infinite that sensation is suspended momentarily as material and through which material is intensified. Through its capacity to transform into a sensory experience forces lying at the limits of sensibility, forces of the outside or the virtual, art as an encounter with these intensities compels us to think. An understanding of the work of the work of art, as a block of sensation that compels thinking, is evident in Abicares 2008 installation COVERS.31 This installation formed a scenography that brought together sculpture and photography, with interests in fashion, interiors and display, to produce an arena of intensified sensations. These sensations were activated across multiple surfaces: not just those of the artwork but the gallery itself, with its polished concrete floor and irregular angled walls and ceiling, brought into play through the work of art. The apparent architectonics of this theatre engaged with investments of desire, libidinal forces erupting through crusts and bloodless skin, to destabilize and disorder its space of appearance. This space was styled as an interior accommodating a place of seemingly silent reception in perpetual anticipation of an amorous encounter. The characteristics of this encounter, as proposed by Irigaray, are the basis of an ethical love relation between women and men, one that acknowledges the irreducible difference of each, in which each has a proper place. In the absence of such a place this amorous encounter is forestalled, and in COVERS, without a threshold to grant entry, the viewer was caught in the circularity of its plan. Primarily two devices activated the plan of this installation. Firstly, an almost opaque full-length curtain veiled one corner of the gallery, obscuring it from view. This softly billowing surface intensified the gallerys spatial dynamics at the same time as incorporating the angular ceiling to operate as an extension of its verticality. Secondly, a centrally positioned screen, standing approximately eye height, interrupted the viewers movement through the space, contributing to the plans circularity. This screen created two very distinct milieus, different in both size and character. The larger, more public side of the screen was faced with a faux-rock fac ade cast from a mould taken off the surface of volcanic rocks. The smaller, more private side of the screen was faced with white gold leaf under glass, creating a

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Fig. 1. COVERS 2008. Heide Museum of Modern Art. Type C photograph, aluminium, 530 mm 500 mm. Copyright Fiona Abicare (the artist). Photographer John Brash.

faceted reflective surface. Other elements inhabited the space of the installation, principally a life-size truncated or headless figure of a woman, partially modelled, partially moulded, and cast to appear clad in a pair of linen trousers and silk blouse of a style fashionable in the 1940s. This figure gestured towards the entrance of the gallery, greeting the viewer with all the proficiency and grace of an accomplished hostess, seemingly unaware of her faceless presence. The other prominent element was a pair of photographic images featuring a young woman seated at a shelf observing herself in a mirror. She was dressed in an identical outfit to the headless figure, and the mirror also reflected the faux-rock surface of the screen and part of the curtain. However, exactly where she was seated was uncertain, as was her relationship with the headless figure. Even though the face in the photographic images may have revealed the identity of the headless figure, they functioned as part of the ` ne, as much as they furnishings of this mise-en-sce did a portrait. This was reinforced by the detailing of the images aluminium frames echoing the framing of the screen, as well as the frame of the chair on which the young women was seated. The exaggerated performativity of these photographs, involving not only the figure in the images but the styling of the setting, complicated their apparent indexical function. Operating within the realm of portrait photography, the images ostensibly recorded a young woman, selfabsorbed with her own appearance and the styling

of her hair. However, she was at the same time disguised, masked amid the surfaces within which she was framed. These surfaces enmeshed the young woman in ornamentations, supplementary trappings that enfold and envelop her in a place not of her own making. From this perspective she appeared constrained within the styling of this display. The repetitions evident in the pair of photographic images augmented the intensification activated by the curtain, screen and figure. This intensification was further embellished by two supplementary elements, rock objects on the shelf in the photographic images, which were also present in the installation. The smaller of the rocks, a gilded aluminium cast modelled after a gold nugget, was positioned on top of the screen in the installation. The larger rock, revealing odd eruptions resembling almandine garnets, was on the floor of the installation behind the screen. This rock was partly wrapped in a loosely folded cast of the blouse from the featured outfit. A crumpled cast of the trousers of this outfit was also discarded on the floor nearby. The apparent casualness of this placement contrasted with the generally restrained style of the installation. However, this was not the only place where the veneer of propriety was punctuated. Protruding from beneath the faux-silk blouse of the headless figure, erect nipples gave this avatar an animated quality otherwise absent. Similarly, in the photographic images a slight shadow in the blouse indicated the young womans breast pressed against the shelf. This inkling of her sexuality,

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Fig. 2. COVERS 2008. Heide Museum of Modern Art. Forton, aluminium, steel, gold leaf, Georgette, dimensions variable. Copyright Fiona Abicare (the artist). Photographer John Brash.

Fig. 3. COVERS 2008. Heide Museum of Modern Art. Forton, aluminium, steel, gold leaf, Georgette, dimensions variable. Copyright Fiona Abicare (the artist). Photographer John Brash.

along with her bare feet exposed below the trousers, disturbed the veil of reserved decorum. These hints of the disconcerting force of desire, a reservoir of sensations barely contained, troubled the prevailing stillness and restraint of the scene. Amid the mutations of the various elements, both in the images and amongst the other components, multiple foldings were generated that also unsettled the outwardly opaque and

silent matrix. These folds amplified the installations constitutive differences, enabling numerous assemblages to form across several topographic fields, facilitated by the use of shared techniques and materials. Fields such as that formed by the folds, pleats and creases in the faux-volcanic rock surface, itself an archive of countless forces, working together with the folds of the rock objects, curtain and numerous versions of the outfit. The outfit in itself mapped material

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displacements, replicating silk and linen in cast acrylic resin that mimicked ceramic with matte finish. Through these processes the materials where transformed into blocks of sensations, assemblages of flesh, fabric and stone. The productive instability of these fields set in motion compound relations that proliferated difference by denying the primacy of an original over a series of copies. This is the effect of the simulacrum that, Deleuze argues, seizes upon the constituent disparity in the thing from which it strips the rank of model.32 The interest that Deleuze has in the simulacrum is tied to his enquires into Platos theory of Ideas, the relations of essence and appearance, original and copy, model and reproduction, identity and resemblance. This enquiry is undertaken in association with his larger project of overturning Platonism and subverting the domain of representation. Overturning Platonism is the task that Deleuze assigns to modern philosophy in Difference and Repetition, which, as Paul Patton notes, carries with it the ambiguity of the French word renverser in the sense of overcoming or reversal.33 Gregory Flaxman also takes up this ambiguity to argue convincingly that Deleuze is engaged in much more than simply inverting Platonism in that he wants to overcome it from the inside, to challenge its oppositionality, through the production of simulacra, beginning with the simulacrum of Platonism itself.34 In Deleuzes earlier writings, in particular, this project involves examining Platos texts in which he tries to distinguish true claimants, or authentic well-grounded copies or resemblances, from false inauthentic semblances or simulacrum. What Plato discovers, according to Deleuze, is that the simulacrum is not simply a false copy, but that it places in question the very notations of copy and model.35 The predominant techniques used in the production of Abicares installation modelling, moulding and casting convey imprints of matter on matter, transcribing events and working to extenuate the relationships of pattern and replica. Whilst appearing to faithfully reproduce a pattern, these processes of repetition generate variations and divergences rather than sameness. Each process of repetition, with its associated shifts in material and procedure: exchanges from pattern to mould, mould to replica, modified replica to mould back to replica, introduced modulations and deviations that work to undermine the presence of a grounding identity. In effect, the work of this work of art, the site of its activity, was its materiality effectively abandoning any notion of an authenticating original in favour of endless variations. Its work was the elaborate invention of matter actively engaged in processes of formation, calling into question the relation of model and copy through the production of multiple differences, semblances and simulacra. The repetitions of elements in COVERS had a relation similar to that described by Deleuze: [r]epetition is truly that which disguises itself in constituting itself, that which constitutes itself only by disguising itself.36 Deleuze argues that this is the productive chaos out of which the positive power of the simulacrum is set in motion: the return and affirmation of the different. The simulacrum works against the illusion of unmasking which for Deleuze presumes, as Smith notes, a face behind the mask, an original model behind the copy.37 Any attempts to fully comprehend COVERS or unmask its meaning were short-circuited through complicated processes that utilized the constituent disparities within the photographic images, and between these images and the other elements in the installation. In the photographic images the young womans face was pleated between the reflected surface of the faux-rock screen and curtain, and the folds of her hair, folds repeated in the rock objects on the shelf and in her trousers. These folds disguised her as yet another surface that at the same time engaged processes of repetition in a productive dispersal of sensations traversing the surfaces of these images. This dispersal of sensations also permeated the installation as an unpredictable libidinal force that eluded demands seeking an authenticating original. Where the Platonic inclination to cast out simulacra entails a subjugation of difference, Deleuze redeploys its nomadic distributions, emphasizing the inclusion of difference in the movement of repetition. Inhabiting the nomadic distributions of COVERS were processes of

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recomposition that, as Deleuze and Guattari advocate, disrupted by activating clandestine flows forming new assemblages. These assemblages were effects of simulacra operating in this installation to create an immanent network, circuits of relations forming alignments, connections and disjunctions that emerged from the work of matter. Whilst this work yielded recognizable objects, such as the headless figure, the immediacy of their affective qualities contested the hold of representational form. What was resisted was a form/content duality typical to understandings of art tempted by the illusion of transcendence that configures art in a relationship to truth, as a representation of a prior presence. In asking how transcendence is constituted Deleuze maintains, as Colebrook notes succinctly, transcendence emerges from immanence.38 This is not to suggest that transcendence is within immanence; for Deleuze the relationship between self and world, inside and outside, is a differentiation that emerges from the dynamic of life. This relationship should not be mistaken, Colebrook argues, as some original difference which might explain life.39 Life is not full and present to itself, Colebrook maintains, a being that then evolves or differs.40 Nor is there a consciousness that then comes to know a world outside of itself. Life is, for Deleuze, the potential to differ, as Colebrook emphasizes, precisely because something is only its responses.41 Similarly, the understanding proposed by Deleuze and Guattari with regards to how matter comes to be formed is one that assumes its dynamic potential, challenging a devaluation of matter typical of dualist philosophies. Advocating the inherent flux of matter, they insist it is less a form capable of imposing properties upon a matter than material traits of expression constituting affects.42 Matter is in continuous movement, as Deleuze and Guattari write, a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression . . . this matter-flow can only be followed.43 As such, matters capacity to differ is not determined in advance; instead, this potential is activated in connections and relations through displacements and deviations as a response to encounters with outside forces. This is an outside, or relation to exteriority, that is produced through processes of differentiation, rather than existing prior to an act of differentiation or having a presence that is knowable or in some way locatable outside these processes. An understanding of exteriority as an effect of difference challenges conventional understanding of matter, which presumes it receives form, content and meaning from elsewhere. Underlying this habitual comprehension of matter is an opposition of the intelligible and the sensible residing at the core of conceptual categories that structure hierarchies and determine relations. This restrictive framework not only structures the presumed secondariness of matter, but nature, bodies, women, etc. It also contributes to the detrimental social, cultural and political consequences that ensue from these conceptual hierarchies. This legacy simplifies conceptions of what is, to how we know. As Grosz maintains, it reduces ontology to epistemology, with the consequence that materiality is similarly reduced to the function of representation. The constitutive difference proposed by Deleuze, and shared by Irigaray and Derrida, a difference that preexists the entities that it produces, Grosz writes, leads to a more abstract approach to the ontological questions raised by the problems of matter.44 These questions inform all practices influencing not only how we think about art but also, as Grosz insists, those that concern subjectivity and politics. Configuring matter as force and difference as Grosz does has the potential, she argues, to bring about new frames of reference and new kinds of questions.45 If matter is not simply a vehicle for conveying intentions or meanings, then attention needs to be paid to the form that its force of differing takes in each specific instance. This is the work of the work of art, the mode of its differentiation, the style of its cut that negotiates the relations of inside and outside operating in any particular artwork. The limits of any differentiation or demarcation are only ever partial, and the incorporation of forces of an outside in excess of what is knowable is inevitability incomplete. It is from the subversion of this excess, the latency inherent in the dynamics of matters provocations to conceptual hierarchies, that the

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potential for the new, as Grosz comments, is welcomed as an indeterminable future.46 This is a project shared with Irigaray and Deleuze, as dissimilar as their approaches are; as Tamsin Lorraine remarks, both evoke a future that diverges from and exceeds the customs and habits of the present.47 Through vastly different frames of reference Irigaray and Deleuze similarly question forms of representational thinking and explore zones of indiscernability, that acknowledge the dynamic processes of subjectivity and other forms of relationships in ways that formulate new questions. Through their engagements with the forces of life, Irigaray and Deleuze chart the possibilities for conceptual and corporeal transformations. Despite their differences, each in their distinct manner confronts the limits of what is perceivable . . . and conceivable, as Lorraine maintains, lead[ing] us to an infinite beyond both that is our most important resource in the rejuvenation of human life.48 Maintaining an openness to this excess or exteriority at the same time as fabricating a frame, which enables an intelligibility that comes with recognizable boundaries and contextualizations, is the territory of arts political potential. Situated in this zone of undecidability are practices that experiment with resisting and disordering oppositions from within. They manoeuvre in the space between a materials becoming and its processes of formation, inserting the disordering effects of matter that compel thinking. These practices do not seek an effective relation to the political through direct forms of political expression, imagery or actions. This potential is not conveyed in terms of what they represent, but in their openness to something beyond. Arts relation to the political resides in its effects, the leap it takes into the unknown in bringing about something new, as Grosz suggests, through a dislocation of and with the present that produces the world it figures.49 By inhabiting the uncertainty of the incalculable qualities of matter, its residues that resist incorporation as an excess beyond the knowable, art practices experimenting in this territory produce contexts that allow for the maximization of difference. It is in this manner, for example, that COVERS activated the disordering effects of matter harbouring forces of desire to menace the demands for pragmatic or calculable ends. These effects troubled normative positions attributed to the feminine other as trapped, mirroring forms of identity she can never satisfy. The circularity of the installation, in plan and also in part elicited by its mobilization of matters difference described above, instigated an interval. In this interval, embellished by a disquieting intensification, the viewer was detained, unable to locate the illusive figure or subject of the work. Fashioned in its place were crusts of representational form across whose surface matters difference traversed a difference that generated aberrations in place of answers, deploying objects to disperse the figure between multiple platforms. This staging challenged a simplification of what matter is to unbecome, as Grosz suggests an apparent givenness, via a ceaseless interchange across the thresholds of surface and depth, face and mask, ornament and decoration. Through a play of repetitions and simulacra, COVERS mimed distinctions between matter, form and content to navigate differently their dualistic configurations. Constituting itself through a masquerade of disguises, it undermined the certainty of these designations. In their place it signalled the potential to rethink the topology of material relations and their associated social, cultural and political formations beyond an oppositional legacy.

notes
1 This is the interpretative operation that Geoffrey Bennington identifies in the writings of Jacques Derrida. See Geoffrey Bennington, Interpreting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000) 9. 2 Jacques Derrida, Positions [1972], trans. A. Bass (London: Athlone,1981) 65. Although often characterized as caught in a cul-de-sac of linguistic philosophy, Derridas generalized understanding of writing and emphasis on iterability makes him, as Michael ODriscoll remarks, one of our most important thinkers of materiality. See Envois / En Soi / Encore: Derridas Little Letter, Mosaic 39.3 (2006) 217 .

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3 This understanding of the work of the work of art, as an effect of its materiality, is put forward by Benjamin in various texts, such as Disclosing Spaces: On Painting (Manchester: Clinamen, 2004) 20 ^21. 4 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One [1977], trans. C. Porter and C. Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,1985) 191. 5 Ibid.154. 6 Ibid. 75. 7 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference [1984], trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,1993) 7; emphasis in original. 8 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001) 93. 9 Elizabeth Grosz, Time T ravels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Sydney: Allen, 2005) 171. 10 An Ethics of Sexual Difference 18; emphasis in original. 11 TimeT ravels 178. 12 Ibid. 13 Elizabeth Grosz, Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming, Parallax 11.2 (2005) 10. 14 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002) 228. 15 TimeT ravels 74. 16 Simon OSullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation (New Y ork: Palgrave, 2006.) 16; emphasis in original. 17 Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968], trans.P.Patton (NewYork: Columbia UP,1994) 276. 18 In pursuing this argument this essay engages with the challenge articulated by Grosz regarding the use of the writings of Deleuze ^ to think about artworks that he would have had little time for himself, given his preference for works of high modernism. See Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory , Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New Y ork: Columbia UP, 2008) 18 fn.14. 19 Ibid.10. 20 Claire Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2006) 4; emphasis in original. 21 Differenceand Repetition 139; emphasis in original. 22 Ibid.138. 23 Ibid.140; emphasis in original. 24 Daniel W. Smith, Deleuzes Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. P. Paton (Oxford: Blackwell 1996) 31. 25 Gilles Deleuze and Fe lix Guattari, What is Philosophy? [1991], trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (New York: Columbia UP,1994) 197 . 26 Grosz extends Deleuze and Guattaris interest in musical vibration and connects it to Charles Darwins considerations of musics seductive power to elaborate arts effect as a vibratory force through the materiality of sensation. See Chaos, Territory , Art 61. 27 What is Philosophy? 164. 28 DeleuzesTheory of Sensation 47 . 29 What is Philosophy? 193; emphasis in original. 30 Ibid.; emphasis in original. 31 COVERS was exhibited at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, from 1 November 2008 to 22 February 2009. 32 Difference and Repetition 67 . 33 Paul Patton, Anti-Platonism and Art in Giles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, eds. C.V. Boundas and D. Olkowski (London: Routledge, 1994) 143. 34 Gregory Flaxman, Plato in Deleuzes Philosophical Lineage, eds. G. Jones and J. Roffe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009) 9. 35 Giles Deleuze, Logic of Sense [1969], trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) 256. 36 Difference and Repetition 17 . 37 DeleuzesTheory of Sensation 104. 38 Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed 116. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 6; emphasis in original. 41 Ibid. 6, 5; emphasis in original. 42 Giles Deleuze and Fe lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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[1980], trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,1987) 408. 43 Ibid. 409; emphasis in original. 44 TimeT ravels 174. 45 Ibid.172,173. 46 Architecture from the Outside 94. 47 Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,1999) 215. 48 Ibid.13^14. 49 Elizabeth Grosz, Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Sydney: Allen, 2004) 257^ 61.

Terri Bird Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Art & Design Monash University Caulfield Campus PO Box 197, Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia E-mail: terri.bird@artdes.monash.edu.au

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