O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies

Issue 1: Object/Ecology (Summer 2013)

ISSN 2326-8344

Becoming-objects

Gregory Minissale

The properties of the object and the intentions of the subject . . . are not only inter-
mingled: they constitute a new whole.
~Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception

In this short thought experiment, I look at a number of ‘special objects’ in

contemporary art that scramble automatic object recognition and appraisal
processes. Psychology and phenomenology presuppose that object identification is
a natural, evolutionary function of a rational subject’s faculties, helping to orient
and constitute subjectivity.1 With the use of some aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s
process philosophy I suggest that the effect of these ‘special objects’ is not so much
to integrate the viewing subject’s experience and sense of self-constitution but
affords a momentary dispersal of these customary certainties into wider ecological
contexts.
Michael Tuffery is a New Zealand artist with a mixed Samoan, Tahitian, Cook
Island, and European heritage who has created a series of large, colourful metal
sculptures of bulls which are life-sized and imposing, with sharp horns and fiery
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
1
In this regard, Deleuze writes: “The object that agrees with my nature determines me to
form a superior totality that includes us, the object and myself. The object that does not
agree with me jeopardises my cohesion, and tends to divide me into subsets, which, in the
extreme case, enter into relations that are incompatible with my constitutive relation” (1998,
21).
 
2 GREGORY MINISSALE
 
temperaments. On closer scrutiny, each sculpture is welded together by metal
plates made of a large number of used cans of imported corned beef, the brand
logos creating a repeating pattern. The beef is a popular food product in Pacific
Island communities. The sculptures indicate how traditional healthy diets of fish
are being replaced by imported beef that causes various health problems in Pacific
communities. It is well known that European colonisers of Aotearoa New Zealand
completely altered the eco-system by introducing cattle as well as sheep, clearing
forests for grazing, changing diets, and creating an extensive and powerful
economic system centred on the dairy and livestock industries. The bull is therefore
a powerful symbol of colonization and globalization, yet the sculpture’s localised
features—tins of corned beef—remind us of how this animal is processed, packaged,
and distributed amongst local Pacific communities. There is also a curious effect
whereby the animal is made up of the discarded cans of food that it will ultimately
‘become’. It is thus not only a symbol of colonization but of consumption, or even
self-consumption; it is an animal yet is also a product, a work of art as well as an
assemblage of detritus. Tuffery subverts the global shape of the animal and any
naive admiration of it from an aesthetic point of view with fine-grained cultural and
ecological messages. The sculpture is equivocal, representing a food product as
well as a kind of ‘poison’: an unsustainable consumption. Other works by Tuffery
explore similar themes of environmental damage; for example, the drain on natural
resources through mass consumption and overfishing is suggested by using other
globally recognisable percepts such as tuna fish or crabs and turtles which, on
closer inspection, are revealed to be assembled from discarded cans of tuna fish or
crab meat. In many of these works the sculptural object’s ambivalent ontology
points to molar ecological and cultural shifts and processes within broader
transformations of power. The switch from coarse- to fine-grained vision is not only
psychological and perceptual; it is also political and connected to the wider world.
It is remarkable that enabling this range of experience is a simple visual
mechanism used by many contemporary artists. The mechanism involves an
instant recognition of a shape, object, or scene, known as ‘coarse-grained vision’
(sometimes called a global view or whole-view), and a fine-grained perceptual
vision of the smaller details (a local or part-view). In psychology, it is widely held
that, in apprehending a scene or an object, the human visual system proceeds from
an instance of general scanning and shape recognition in split seconds (“It’s a bird.
It’s a plane”)—this is the stage at which the percept is identified—to a localised,
more finely focused and temporally extended inspection.
Another example of this kind of ‘problematic object’ is the work of Brian Jungen
from British Columbia, of Swiss and Dane-zaa First Nations ancestry. He takes
mass-produced sports trainers or professional NBA basketball shirts—icons of
consumer identity—and methodically strips them to their constituent fibres or
‘molecular’ subunits (threads, seams, the tongue of a shoe, the arch of the sole). He
then stitches or weaves them back together again in the style of Dane-zaa garments
or blankets normally used for ceremonial rituals. In the case of Nike Air Jordan
 BECOMING-OBJECTS 3
 
sneakers, he refigures them into ‘faces’ by playing a cat and mouse game with
facial recognition processes. Conceptually, the works allude to traditional masks
and fetish objects. On an even larger scale, Jungen piles golf bags upon each other
to form totem poles. He creates interesting hybrids such as a handmade traditional
art object which both indexes his personal identity and references the Canadian
First Nation reservations where poor rubbish pickers routinely refashion discarded
objects. He also brings to mind its opposite: a reconstituted machine-made,
corporate, impersonal, commercial object—in other words, a brand. The global can
be seen through the local, and skilful handmade facture transforms the products of
a mechanised process into a personal statement which can be ‘seen through’ a
marketing strategy. Adidas or Nike mass-produced sports shoes are defaced, torn
apart and reassembled into something unique, displacing ‘natural’ object identi-
fication processes.
The object or brand identification here works on many levels and yet remains
‘dislocated’ allegorically, physically, mentally and emotionally. At the fine-grained
level, the object is identified as consumer durables and goods, sportsgear and
sports icons, products of globalisation; at the coarse-grained level, Dane-zaa
traditional cultural objects emerge. It is as if the artist has yoked a conceptual layer
onto the two kinds of perception. The rivalry between the global and the local also
suggests a nostalgia for traditional crafts that is in conflict with the banality of mass
produced sportswear. The emotion here is quite complex: a longing for, or a
grieving over, lost traditional materials at the local level where the shawl is viewed
as a basketball shirt, and an emergence of a Dane-zaa artefact (with its skilful
weaving) at the global level. As a whole, the object is a performance of Dane-zaa
culture, a particular cultural and conceptual identity that emerges from a mass-
produced, non-biodegradable, nylon substrate. One could say that the work is a
triumph of creativity over materialism. Yet there is also some irony in the fact that
torn up and re-stitched Nike sneakers are displayed as if they were prized ethno-
logical specimens of Dane-zaa culture in a museum. There is also the suggestion
that the futuristic ethos of luxury sports gear and equipment is hubris, for even
these prized fashion items will become tomorrow’s detritus dumped into our
ecosystems. Except here, this cycle of mindless degradation is arrested by art.
These artists are not alone in reconfiguring objecthood to suggest the broader
processes and interactions that are part of an object’s becoming. From Ghana, El
Anatsui is an artist who assembles what seem to be large colourful blankets which
are in fact assembled from the crushed metal tops of thousands of whiskey bottles.
El Anatsui is concerned with showing how a combination of aggressive advertising
campaigns and the promise of a momentary escape from poverty and social
problems open the way for alcoholism to take hold in many marginalized town-
ships in Ghana. His works suggest the scale of the problem of alcohol dependence,
and they do so in a part-whole sense; each bottletop signifies a day spent drinking,
while on a larger scale the blanket’s folds suggest weeks and months of drinking,

 
 
4 GREGORY MINISSALE
 
and the blanket itself, a lifetime thrown away. The molecular view threatens to
overrun measurement and conceptualisation; a perceptual drunkenness turns into
an abject sublime.
These contemporary artists disturb the normative psychological mechanisms
employed by the visual system in scene and object recognition, interrupting their
seamless functioning with political and cultural interventions that concern
globalisation, ecological politics, and systems of power. Many of these artworks
suggest that returning to an idyllic traditional cultural authenticity is highly
problematic. Yet out of the detritus of globalised capital, commodity culture, and
consumables, ‘local’ creativeness and ingenuity emerge in these works to create
eventful singularities. Offsetting stereotypical, traditional images of authenticity
are the fragments of contemporary manufactured goods that have been dis-
assembled and reassembled for creative practice and ‘emancipated’ viewing—that
is, more active, problematic, and critical viewing. This emancipation not only
subverts automatic psychological response but also allows a critical appraisal of
these hybrid objects and their embrace of heterogeneous materials and origins,
which complicates assumptions about cultural identity based on instant object
recognition.2
Such artworks may eventually condition us to have appetites for even more  

bizarre, subtle and improbable combinations of part-whole objects, a new voca-

bulary which stutters on the edge of giving form to a new outline of practice.
‘Stuttering’ is key here, for whereas fluent language smooths over the plethora of
choice and difference, the kind of ‘verbal bedazzlement’ of these experiments in
granularity can leave us tongue-tied, resisting easy object identification, fracturing
the percept and making it undergo change. Such equivocal objects are composite
and unresolved. We are unable to label or fix them easily, as would be necessary in
order for an easy emotional or aesthetic response to be formed. The rapid

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
2
Perhaps a more philosophical appraisal of this shimmering of global and local aspects of
the object is Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, and Nick Srnicek’s (2011) notion that differences
produced by an object can be inter-ontic (made with or in relation to another object) or intra-
ontic (a part-whole series of distinctions premised on the internal constitution of the object).
An interesting parallel with the global and local aspect of the artworks I mention is their
notion of a ‘local manifestation’ of an object’s powers or properties in the here and now. One
would assume that, in this schema, global aspects are those things that subsist before or
after its assemblage but may still be congruent with it in any given situation. These artworks
also show that they have virtual dimensions (they once were, they will become) and actual
manifestations (what they are at a point in time). Although speculative realism suggests that
the object or artwork is in excess of its relations, and, as Bryant (2012) suggests, “can no
longer be thought as having a meaning . . . . because the meaning of the work itself is
indeterminate,” it is important to remember that this should not prevent us from exploring
this indeterminacy and polysemy, even if this polysemy becomes a kind of Heideggerian
strife between earth and world, acknowledging the essential undisclosedness of the object’s
materiality.
 BECOMING-OBJECTS 5
 
multiplication of possibilities that these artworks encourage resists a univocal
interpretation and, to a certain extent, any settled kind of subjectivity in response
to form. They suggest that our identities and what we see are both processes that
are intertwined in flux rather than fixed in the cold stare of a positivist unveiling.
These rational, psychological approaches to explaining how we understand
objects may be ‘modal.’ This involves identifying an object with our spatial and
sensorimotor systems so that we may grasp, or imagine grasping, a hammer: the
object is immediately identified for action. Yet we may also have certain emotional
predispositions of aversion or reward that influence such processes. It also seems
that there are ‘amodal’ ways of understanding objects beyond sensorimotor sys-
tems, whereby we understand a hammer to be part of a complex cultural category
of tools we associate with situations (building a house, mending a fence, cracking a
macadamia nut), or even part of a group of cultural artifacts identifying mytho-
logical gods. These understandings and inferences are more like linguistic exercises
that rely on semantic and cultural memory, and may or may not rely on sensor-
imotor action or simulations to ‘grasp’ the concept ‘hammer.’ A more thematic
involvement with feeling the hammer—its weight and design—would lean on
phenomenological approaches to understanding objects.
Illustrating how the human brain integrates multiple types of information for
ordinary object identification to take place are well-documented cases of brain
lesions (apraxia) that do not allow patients to use sensorimotor knowledge in order
to use a hammer or any other tool:

The patient might be able to recount the history of the hammer as an

invention, the materials of which the first hammer was made, or what
hammers typically weigh. The patient may even look at a hammer and name
it without apparent difficulty. But when presented with a hammer, the
patient is profoundly impaired at demonstrating how the object is physically
manipulated to accomplish its function. (Mahon and Caramazza 2008, 67–68)

These psychological and phenomenological approaches to understanding objects  

are highly rational and inferential and do not usually take into account those
‘special objects’ we find in art that do not integrate smoothly in these ‘natural’
ways. In a sense, contemporary artworks often allow us to experience atypical
mental operations similar to apraxia or visual agnosia. Sometimes these art objects
are able to suggest reality matching exercises that don’t work. There is sense that
our egocentric view of the world is somewhat undermined by what we see. This is
because our capacity to bind features into percepts, the basic units by which we
understand the world and ourselves in it, is called into question.
While these artworks can be explained using an art historical comparative
method or psychological models of the mental faculties, a deeper philosophical
challenge is to look more broadly at how a traditional understanding of objecthood

 
 
6 GREGORY MINISSALE
 
and its relationship to the constitution of subjectivity can be challenged, which, I
argue, is an important way that these objects ‘work’: by problematizing objecthood
through objects.
Is it possible for the art object to be complicated in a way that is not primarily
meant to integrate the self as part of the experience of object identification (“I see
therefore I am”)? It seems important that art objects should create a difference, a
momentary rupture in habitual being in the world yoked onto a default anthro-
pocentric view of objects. I want to suggest that helping us to move away from an
automatic humanist viewpoint in the structuration of objecthood are aspects of
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming-imperceptible’—which adapt Whitehead’s
process philosophy—but with the important caveat that it is not the human subject
who observes such fluid processes from a detached position, but is in itself involved
in these very processes of change. Even my understanding is contingent upon these
flows and connectivities. With this view, it is possible to understand objects as
moments of relative stability within broader processes of entropy or trans-
formation, with my body and understanding also subject to various different
speeds and qualities of change in complex networks. These processes are greater
than me; perhaps I will outlive some of them, yet many of these processes will
continue without me. This understanding presents an important opening onto a
wider ecological context. This is what Deleuze and Guattari suggest is part of
becoming-imperceptible: the death of the author and the transcendent ego observ-
ing contingencies from a detached vantage point. What is normally imperceptible is
the simple fact that we are already always immersed physically and temporally in
processes of transformation.
Deleuze writes that the world is “a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where
every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others” (1997, 86). This
configural viewing, which disintegrates the semiotics of the wall for a glimpse of an
ontological flux, is what we see in Olafur Eliasson’s (1994) Moss Wall. This is an
enormous wall set up to look like an abstract painting, with a soft and immersive
olive-green colourfield. On closer inspection, this percept dissolves into a million
tiny focal points, for these are thriving mosses; their slender rootlike filaments hook
into the concrete substratum of the gallery wall. It is a massive living organism, one
and many, taken from the environment outside the gallery, here growing indiff-
erent to the presence of the viewer.
Another work by Honoré d’O (1996-2012), Air and Inner, shown recently at the
Sydney Biennial, consists of many rolls of blank white drawing paper hanging from
the ceiling. These create a maze brushing against the skin and obstructing passage.
Nested amongst these hangings is an old timber log. Outside the maze, dozens of
chairs invite viewers to sit and draw on pads of paper or leave messages. The
gallery is turned into a drawing lesson of sorts—but what are the objects viewers
should draw? The installation suggests timelines that come together outside of the
installation, a virtuality—the paper was once a tree, and it can become art. What
will I draw on a piece of paper with a pencil (that was once also a tree)? What will I
 BECOMING-OBJECTS 7
 
imagine: a tree, a forest, or a field of seeds? Thinking beyond the retinal object or
objects frozen in one time frame in the gallery installation, we experience the time
of becoming, of creativity and potential, and new possibilities—a wider physical
and temporal ecology).
It is interesting that in many of these artworks, consciousness of the molecular
view questions a strong sense of subjectivity (as well as the object first identified)
by revealing macropolitical systems of power and non-human duration. The
‘becoming’ of the art object consists, first and foremost, of its indiscernibility: not
only that it is a neither/nor but that it is also a bit of this and a bit of that. It
straddles various worlds; in its facture it discloses something of its origins and also
something of its future trajectory. This is important because by having a ‘life-cycle’
of their own, these objects prefigure, and will postdate, the viewer’s experience,
suggesting that there is a process not dependent on the viewer’s subjective
engagement with it. This encounter with the object is one small part of the object’s
history, in which my certainty of knowing, possessing, or fixing, is undermined.
Rather than walking away from such artworks unaffected and detached, the viewer
could go away and convert energies, neural plasticity, and affects into new
configurations of matter; writing on a page, painting a picture, or having a
conversation all continue to transform this process of becoming and differentiation.
Such a continuation overlaps the artificial beginning and end by which we parse
the event of the encounter with the art object.
We favour perceptible objects over imperceptible processes even though every
object undergoes imperceptible processes of change that constitute the object. We
favour identifiable percepts with detached contours and the divisibility of things
not within the continuum underlying these folds. We favour an anthropocentric
view of existence projected and reflected back by these segmentations of object-
hood. Yet the artwork, when configured to reveal fine-grained details, dis-closes
something of its own phenomenology; it anticipates and sometimes scuppers my
attempts at intelligibility. These artworks and their molecular loosening of the
molar object into seriality (or a formlessness) intimates an always seething flux of
materiality underlying the temporary aggregation of objecthood that is held
together by willpower, gravity, and rational constructs. As I have said, objects can
‘shimmer’ between “the no longer and not yet” (Braidotti 2006, 147).
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming-imperceptible’ works both for the object and
the viewer of the object; it works against perceiving objects with common sense.
We are encouraged to understand them beyond perception (becoming-imper-
ceptible), which also encourages us to go beyond the model of ourselves as
constituting and constituted by these perceptions (becoming-imperceptible to
oneself). For Deleuze and Guattari this is ‘molecular’ because it undergirds the
‘obviously’ visible, organised into discrete molar objects. The art object suggests
that objects are generally aggregates of particles that are joined together by a criss-
crossing series of events, forces, and affects between bodies. Objects only appear

 
 
8 GREGORY MINISSALE
 
stable from a fixed viewpoint. These objects are imperceptibly in flux in terms of
time and physics, eroded by the air, sunlight, and micro-movements in the density
of matter, and always in the changing environmental and political contexts they
find themselves in. An object can then be thought of as bringing together different
speeds of change, both external and internal, to the object. Art objects are part of
this process, yet somehow they are also able to make this manifest in unexpected
ways.

REFERENCES

Braidotti, R. 2006. “The Ethics Of Becoming-Imperceptible.” In Deleuze and Philosophy,

ed. C. Boundas, 133–159. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bryant, L., N. Srnicek, and G. Harman. 2011. The Speculative Turn: Continental Mater-
ialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press.
Bryant, L. 2012. “Towards a Machine-Oriented Aesthetics: On the Power of Art.” Larval
Subjects [weblog], September 2: http://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/
02/towards-a-machine-oriented-aesthetics-on-the-power-of-art.
Deleuze, G. 1997. “Bartleby; Or, the Formula.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.W.
Smith and M.A. Greco, 68–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mahon, B.Z., and A. Caramazza. 2003. “Constraining Questions About the Organisation
and Representation of Conceptual Knowledge.” Cognitive Neuropsychology 20: 433–
450.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. The Primacy of Perception, trans. A. Fisher. Boston: Beacon
Press.