A working definition of duration ‘is the immediate awareness of the flow of mental life’1. This involves an immersion within the constant flux and fluidity of time, and an attentiveness as to how this immersion produces particular situations. Gilles Deleuze states that the problem is that we spatialise time, reducing it to points in space, and then regard time as movement from one point to another. In contrast, the concept of duration offered, is an opportunity to think in time, and then, to spatialise it.2 Hence, the opportunity of creative practice opens out by foregrounding the concept of duration as one of immersion in time as flow. As creative practitioners, we need to ask then, how do we practice in time [a foregrounding of duration], in relation to space, place and site [spatial practice]?
Material, whilst also inherently the immaterial, entails this immersion in time as flow, and is in a constant state of becoming / unbecoming, responsive to a confluence of forces. Creatively producing the new then, “does not arrive from some ‘other place’ (transcendence), but is produced from the very matter of the world, after all what else is there? And where else can the new come from? The new then involves a recombination of already existing elements in and of the world (a new dice throw as Deleuze might say). The new would then be a repetition, but with difference.”3
Yvette recently spent three weeks in Detroit, USA undertaking an artist residency, and I observed her repetitively ‘throw dice’, exploring and experimenting with material immersed in time as flow. Her arrangements of found objects, steel and magnets momentarily deferred these materials’ forces in flow, highlighting the notion of creative practice as a ‘recombination of already existing elements in and of the world’ in order to produce the new. These material ‘disruptions’ if you will, resisted temporarily their own immersion in time as flow, materialising immateriality and spatialising time.
The works in this exhibition utilise and interrupt material all in states of flow; be it more apparent in some than in others. Steel mesh has gone through a manufacturing process of raw material, to liquid, to solid. A rock suspended from the ceiling wrapped in fabric, ash from Yvette’s mothers’ fireplace, pieces of leather, fixings, eyelets, pieces of steel, and nuts and bolts, all have gone through, and are continuing to go through, their own processes of immersion in time as flow. It is just in this moment of an exhibition, that Yvette has meticulously assembled and suspended them into a composition, allowing access and understanding into these temporal, material and spatial immersions.
The most immediate however sees engine oil drip from one funnel to another, a tension of sorts between liquid and gravity, material pulled ever closer to the surface of the earth. Which makes me think that if, due to the earth’s rotation, your head has travelled further than your feet and therefore, that time is slightly faster above the ground [head height] as to opposed to the surface of the earth [your feet], does that mean your feet are slightly younger than your head?
1. Stagoll, Cliff ‘Duration (Durée)’ Parr, A (ed.) The Deleuze Dictionary Edinburgh University Press 2005. p.81.
2. Deleuze, Gilles Bergsonism Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Zone Books, New York, 1991.
3. O’Sullivan, Simon ‘The Production of the New and the Care of the Self’ O’Sullivan, S and Zepke, S (eds.) Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New. Continuum London 2008. p.91.
Essay that accompanied Yvette James’ exhibition ‘As We Pull the Earth Toward Ourselves’ at BLINDSIDE, Melbourne 18 Sep – 5 Oct 2019
image courtesy Yvette James
