Q

CSPA
uarterly
FIFTEEN
2016

QUARTERLY 15
HYPEROBJECTS
A LOOK AT VISCOUS, MOLTEN,
NONLOCAL, PHASED
AND INTEROBJECTIVE THINGS

»
THE CENTER FOR SUSTAINABLE PRACTICE IN THE ARTS
CSPA Q /// 2

CSPAQuarterly
Issue 15
Published Fall 2016

»»»

EDITOR: Meghan Moe Beitiks

DESIGN & LAYOUT: Stephanie Plenner
BRANDING: Amanda Gartman

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 CSPA Q /// 3

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 7
HYPEROBJECTS
»»»
Timothy Morton

10
CON T E N T S

COLLAPSE, DECAY, OBFUSCATE:

THE WORK OF SARAH KNUDTSON
»»»

20
FIDELITY TO THE EARTH-BODY:
VIOLETA LUNA’S 35TH FLOOR
»»»
Jessica Santone
28
THE BIO QUILT PROTOTYPE
»»»
Carol Padberg

30
RIVER UNRAVELED
»»»
Bethany Taylor

36
CSPA REPORTS: EDINBURGH FRINGE
»»»

38
CONVEXITY/CONCAVITY
»»»
Liz Ensz
CSPA Q /// 6

From
Editor
THE
Photo by Alex Priest

Dear Reader,

Division has been a persistent cultural issue lately. The 2016 American presidential election has been
exhausting in its divisiveness. Ironically, this makes our current issue theme, Hyperobjects, a word which
congeals, connects and conflates, all the more fitting.

Coined by Timothy Morton, the term hyperobjects describes a thing that is: viscous, molten, nonlocal,
phased and interobjective, impossible to understand from a single point of view. Borne out of the recent
thinking in Object-Oriented Ontology, and influenced by the work of Graham Harman and Jane Bennett,
the hyperobject takes on things beyond everyday, recognizable thingness— like tables or widgets—and
engages with expansive and complex things like climate change.

Morton’s poetic language (excerpted in this issue) does a beautiful job of embracing the ugly, unclean
and contradictory in its articulation of interconnectivity. This issue of the Quarterly includes a number of
artists who are taking an expansive view of landscapes, ecologies, and human systems—including that
which we may not normally consider to be poetic or sublime.

Carol Padberg creates a large Bio-Quilt, covering an open site with blanketed fodder for rich soil. Jessica
Santone describes the complex work of Violeta Luna and its dialogue with that of Ana Mendieta. Sarah
Knudtson and Bethany Taylor reflect on landscapes and sites through multiple lenses in their practices.
The issue concludes with Liz Ensz’s unpacking of the creation of Convexity/Concavity, a large-scale
sculpture made from local trash piles, epic and unexaminable from a single point.

This issue provides a complicated look at landscape as memory, as dialogue, as having emotion, as
complex, as contradictory, as pristine, as forgotten, dismissed, discarded, and yet beautiful, compelling,
important, and fundamentally inseparable from ourselves, our histories, our actions. It seeks to unite, not
through a singular viewpoint, ethos or gesture, but by recognizing the mess of connectivity.

Thanks for reading,

Meghan Moe Beitiks

Quarterly Lead Editor
The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts
HYPEROBJECTS
By Timothy Morton

AN EXCERPT

Originally published by University of Minnesota Press, 2013

Reprinted with permission from the publisher

p. 171-176
CSPA Q /// 8
Attunement is precisely how the mind becomes congruent
with an object.1 Young and Zazeela bring tuning to the
forefront of art by having the music “tune” itself, insofar
as singers and instruments play a fluid sequence of
adjustments to a drone. Attunement opens the supposed
here and now of light and sound into an infinite “lightyears
tracery” (Young’s phrase), a nowness of harmonic
frequencies, vibration within vibration, the infinite in
matter, on this side of things; an immanent beyond. A sonic
ecology without presence, without the present. Singing the
syllable “AH” (as Young and Zazeela do on 31 VII 69 10:26–
10:49pm: Map of 49’s Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets
of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, side 1
of the so-called Black Album) involves breath, vocal chords,
the air around the body, and so on. This is not a realm of
abstract presence, not a “world,” no Gesamtkunstwerk
phantasmagoria of Wagnerian “total art.” Working directly
on sound and light, on tones as such, reveals the emptiness
and vastness of timbre, its groundless difference. Young’s
and Zazeela’s New York Dream House is not natural, but
super-natural, extra-natural, more natural than natural. It is
bound to its materiality. Young’s art allows us to encounter
the timbre and determinacy of things; and at the very same
time, and for the very same reasons, the depth of things.
The art object strives to attune itself to hyperobjectivity.
One of La Monte Young’s algorithmic compositions from
1960 involves playing a chord “for as long as possible.”
The future that this art opens up is highly relevant to
enabling us to cope with hyperobjects. Art in this mode
approaches an aesthetic transcendence of normative
human limits, yet not as Schopenhauer predicted in his
ascetic and sclerotic version of Buddhism, an escape
from samsara into a realm of soothing contemplation.2
This contemplation is hot, intense, passionate and
compassionate, intimate with death and poison, staking its
place in the charnel ground, coexisting with specters and
structures, with the math sis that tunes human cognition
to the withdrawn thing. Is this not exactly what we need in
order to live alongside hyperobjects? We shall be playing
the game of coexistence for a very long time.
The nonhuman, already right here in social space, is finally
acknowledged in the Age of Asymmetry. The nonhuman
is no longer simply an object of knowledge (calculable
and predictable), but is known by humans as a being in its
own right, through a tricky ruse of reason itself, which now
knows too much about nonhumans. We only hear a limited
amount of the piano string. We only see a constrained
amount of the electromagnetic spectrum. We know that
the sounds and the lights tower into our perceptual realm
through depths and heights immeasurable to our everyday
experience. Thus, we get a somewhat metaphorical, yet
vivid, taste of how all entities are profoundly withdrawn.
The Age of Asymmetry resembles the Symbolic phase,
in that materials now gain a new “life.” But humans can’t
unknow what they know. We know about quarks and
sine waves and Beethoven and the Anthropocene. So the
Age of Asymmetry is not a return to animism as such, but
rather animism sous rature (under erasure).3 It’s called the
Age of Asymmetry because within human understanding
humans and nonhumans face one another equally matched.
But this equality is not like the Classical phase. There
is no Goldilocks feeling in the Great Acceleration era of
the Anthropocene. The feeling is rather of the nonhuman
out of control, withdrawn from total human access. We
have even stopped calling nonhumans “materials.” We
know very well that they are not just materials-for (human
production). We have stopped calling humans Spirit. Sure,
humans have infinite inner space. But so do nonhumans.
So does that piano note at the end of “A Day in the Life.”
So the Age of Asymmetry is also like the Romantic phase,
because we have not lost the sense of inner space. This
feeling of inner space has only expanded, since we
now glimpse it in nonhumans. Some even find it in other
“higher” primates, some in all sentient beings, and some
(the real weirdos such as myself) in all beings whatsoever:
eraser, black hole singularity, ceramic knife, molasses,
slug. From within the Romantic phase, we can already
begin to detect the footprints of nonhumans in the very
fact of irony, the one ingredient that appears to suck us
into the vacuum of our inner space. The default position of
Romanticism—which has been going on from about 1776
to now—is irony. Irony is the aesthetic exploitation of gaps,
or as I have sometimes called it in undergraduate classes,
gapsploitation. To be more precise, irony is the exploitation
of a gap between 1 + n levels of signification. Irony means
that more than one thing is in the vicinity. Irony is the echo
of a mysterious presence. For there to be irony, something
must already be there. We can see in this phenomenon of
irony stemming from an awareness of 1 + n levels the seeds
of Romanticism’s dissolution. But this knowledge is only
available to us now in the time of hyperobjects. Recall the
discussion of interobjectivity. Remember how hyperobjects
point out how things share a weird sensual space in

which everything is entangled. When you encounter
a phenomenon in this sensual space, 1 + n entities are
withdrawn in order for this encounter to take place. Irony
is the footprint of at least one other entity, an inner ripple,
a vacuum fluctuation that indicates the distorting presence
of other beings.
So, strangely, irony has not gone anywhere, but has
increased in potency and poignancy. Irony has lost its
“postmodern” (I would prefer to say “late modern”) edge,
its T-shirt sloganeering. Irony has become the feeling of
waking up inside a hyperobject, against which we are
always in the wrong. The full truth of Romantic irony, in
which the narrator realizes that she is part of the story
and that “there is no metalanguage,” is fully born not
in the Romantic period, surprisingly, but in the Age of
Asymmetry.4 Asymmetric irony is when we “save the
Earth” but have no idea exactly why. “They were going to
make me a major for this, and I wasn’t even in their Army
anymore” (Apocalypse Now); 5 or, “The vicissitudes of this
life are like drowning in a glass pond.”6 Irony multiplies
everywhere, since no being’s appearance fully exhausts
its essence. Irony becomes the experience of total
sincerity, of being Jonah in the whale realizing that he is
part of the whale’s digestive system, or Han Solo and Leia
inside the gigantic worm they think is the surface of an
asteroid. Consider the absurd politics of MAD (Mutually
Assured Destruction) that held the world in the weird
oppressive peace of the Cold War. Behind the face-off
between the United States and the Soviet Union, do we not
also glimpse an aspect of the Age of Asymmetry, in which
humans coexist with a hyperobject, nuclear materials?
Have humans not been forced since 1945 to contemplate
a world without them, not simply in the abstract, but next
week, ten years from now, in my children’s lifetime? It is
hyperobjects whose presence guarantees that we are in
the next moment of history, the Age of Asymmetry. With
their towering temporality, their phasing in and out of
human time and space, their massive distribution, their
viscosity, the way they include thousands of other beings,
hyperobjects vividly demonstrate how things do not
coincide with their appearance. They bring to an end the
idea that Nature is something “over yonder” behind the
glass window of an aesthetic screen. Indeed, this very
concept of Nature is itself a product of the Romantic phase.
Hyperobjects likewise end the idea that things are lumps
of blah decorated with accidents, or not fully real until they
interact with humans. Art in the Age of Asymmetry must
thus be a tuning to the object.
CSPA Q /// 9
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (American
Zoetrope, 1979).
Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke, eds., How Nature Speaks:
The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 66–77.
Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? tr. and intro.
Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (Lanham, MD:
Rowan and Littlefield, 2003), 77–91.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, tr. Alan Sheridan
(London: Tavistock, 1977), 311.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Representation tr. E.F.J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York:
Dover Publications, 1969), 1.411–12.
Chögyam Trungpa, “Instead of Americanism Speak
the English Language Properly,” The Elocution Home
Study Course (Boulder: Vajradhatu, 1983).
FOOTNOTES
1
Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? tr. and intro.
Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (Lanham, MD:
Rowan and Littlefield, 2003), 77–91.
2
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Representation tr. E.F.J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York:
Dover Publications, 1969), 1.411–12.
3
This position is somewhat similar to the one found in
Chuck Dyke, “Natural Speech: A Hoary Story,” in Yrjö
Haila and Chuck Dyke, eds., How Nature Speaks:
The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 66–77.
4
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, tr. Alan Sheridan
(London: Tavistock, 1977), 311.
5
Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now (American
Zoetrope, 1979).
6
Chögyam Trungpa, “Instead of Americanism Speak
the English Language Properly,” The Elocution Home
Study Course (Boulder: Vajradhatu, 1983).
The Center for Sustainable
Practice in the Arts
3805 Los Feliz Blvd, #5
Los Angeles, CA 90027

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