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18 Visual Arts Research Volume 39, Number 1 Summer 2013

2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

In the EventThat Art Occurs

e compelling collaboration between American artist Wendy Osher and Egyptian art-ist Nouran Sherif entitled Swarm() will be discussed in terms of its performativecorrespondences with revolutionary movements and body politics in the Middle East; in

relation to the affect of the spectacle, the sublime ideology of the mass media, on thosemovements; and the networking spectacle of social media that aggregated the insurgen-cies. ese events in art, politics, and mass mediation will be further discussed accord-ing to Deleuze and Guattaris swarm, which the philosophers characterize as a plane ofconsistency, Body without Organs, and rhizomatic assemblage. e objective in doingso will be to conceptualize the creative research and practice, the incipient event of artas a politics and pedagogy of imperceptibility.

Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / ere is a crack, a crack

in everything / ats how the light gets in / ats how the light gets in / ats how thelight gets in / Leonard Cohen, , track

An event . . . signals the crossing of a threshold that subtracts predictability to thefuture creating a moment of unbinding where experimentation takes the place of rep-etition and reproduction, demanding that we reformulate our relationship with theworld. Enrica Picarelli,

e network is live, the revolution is live. e energy that causes the network to circu-

late stems from the great performative moments in the streets, but it can be intensifiedas it passes through the network. Nicholas Mirzoeff,

Charles R. Garoian

Penn State University


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Introduction: A Fugitive Art

Whhrr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-

rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr-rr. . . . Walking along the hallway

of e Mattress Factory Art Museum annex in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I heard

a faint low-decibel sound, a whirring sound that seemed to be coming from one

of the galleries down the corridor. Its familiar hum having piqued my curiosity, I

continued walking in its direction until I came upon the space from where it was

originating. ere, in an unassuming gallery, a small room of the annexs previ-

ous incarnation as a general store,its dimensions approximately feet, bare

white walls with a couple of windows to the outside, and an empty floor space, Idiscovered a remarkable installation of kinetic art (Figure ).

Figure 1

Charles Garoian In the EventThat Art Occurs


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20 Visual Arts ResearchSummer 2013

Suspended from what appeared to be the droning motor of a bladeless ceil-

ing fan oscillating in the center of the ceiling of the gallery, the sheer fabric of the

artworks whirling conical material fluttered, its hemline flapping and quivering

from centrifugal force as it spun around its central axis. Accompanied by themuddled din of a crowd, its seductive, centripetal gyrations lured my body into

its orbit, to circumnavigate its twirling form, to explore its milieus, to lose myself

by intermingling with what appeared to be a flurry of fugitive images, a winding

montage of color photographs patterning its fine fabric.

Was it a revolving cabinet of curiosities or a rotating Panopticona mul-

tiplicity of images daring my gaze or gazing back at me? As I circled, a constella-

tion of incipient associations generated in my mind: a swirling skirt, a whirling

dervish, a spinning hijab, a winding cyclone, a rotating spit of shawarma, a flyingcarpet, a twisting tornado, a wisping phantasm. . . . At several points along my

trajectory, just when I thought I had captured even a hint of their content, the

speeding images blurred, streaked, and mutated any ideological coherency. Nei-

ther voyaging clockwise or counterclockwise around the revolving artwork slowed

its anamorphic velocity. e drawn out, protracted stainof its anomalous, un-

canny spectacle merely spun by me imperceptibly.

It was when I stopped circling to prevent my loss of balance and vertigo

that I noticed a counterpoint to the furtive images. ere, in an opposite corner

of the gallery, a small monitor was stationed. It displayed a continuous loop of

video footage, samplings from the mass mediathat reported news of theArab

Spring (Figure ).

Finding myself in a Janus-like position of inter-mediacy, in-between the

spinning fabric and the looped video, offered multiple ways of reading and mis-

reading their respective turbulences, their continuous flow of pictorial fragments

and sounds as bodies in motion in relation to the spectacular uprisings of body

politics in the Middle East; in relation to the affect of the spectacle, the sublime

ideology of the mass media, on those uprisings; and the networking spectacle ofsocial media that aggregated the insurgencies.

Moreover, the context of the Museums small gallery, its row house history,

and the Museums main building itself, which was in its previous manifestation

a working mattress factory, also offered multiple associations. Museums + mat-

tresses? Places that collect, conserve, and exhibit + places to sleep? Places where

cultural bodies go to rest? Such anomalous, destabilizing questions entangled the

unrest of the installation with the unrest of the uprisings, stirring history and mat-

tress factory alike. Hence, the eventof the installations whirling sensations, affects,and movements abounded, deterritorializing and reterritorializing my body and

mind as a swarming assemblage of memory fragments that resonated with the pul-

sating occurrences in the Arab world (Figure ).


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Suspended, fluttering, flapping, quivering, winding, twisting, wisping, fur-

tive, and fugitive: these and others were the contingent mutations of the artworkentitled Swarm(), a modest installation comprised of a suspended and motor-

ized silk fabric on which digital images were printed, a video loop, and layered

audioall of which were activated by a motion detector as visitors entered the

space of the gallery.A compelling collaboration by American artist Wendy Osher

and Egyptian artist Nouran Sherif,the work constituted a vortex of contiguous

juxtapositions that is homologous to the dynamic ontological and epistemologi-

cal processes of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari. In what follows, I will explore

the performative correspondences between the complex disparate and disjunctivealliances and movements that were constituted by Osher and Sherif s installation

artworkSwarm, and Deleuze and Guattaris concept of swarm, which the philoso-

phers characterize as aplane of consistency, Body without Organs (BwO),rhizomatic

Figure 2



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assemblage, disjunctive synthesis, and a multiplicity. My objective in doing so is to

conceptualize the creative research and practice, the incipient event of art as a poli-

tics of imperceptibility.

The Arab Spring6as Deleuzoguattarian Rhizomatic Assemblage

e multiple insurgencies in the Middle East commonly referred to as the Arab

Spring, which began in December , multiplied throughout , and contin-

ues to augment as of this writing, constituted a wave of mass demonstrations and

protests that ousted corrupt, despotic rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen

from power. Inspired by these upheavals, civil unrest subsequently broke out in

Bahrain, Syria, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Oman, which in turn

affected lesser protests in Lebanon, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and WesternSahara. Several of these uprisings were responded to with extreme violence by riot

police and security forces loyal to their respective regimes, as in the examples of

Figure 3


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Libya and Syria, and in some cases, protestors restored to retaliating and defend-

ing themselves through force in order to move forward their cause for social, po-

litical, and economic justice.

In Deleuzoguattarian terms, the civil unrests that swarmed and desta-bilized ontology, the beingof institutional power throughout the Middle East

within the span of a year, constituted a rhizome, a tangled, reticulated system of

events the logic of which is based on the conjunction and . . . and . . . and . . .

(Deleuze & Guattari, , p. ). Unlike the vertical, signifying stratifications

of hierarchical power, the asignifying power of the rhizome is destratified, it has

no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, in-

termezzo. . . T]he middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where

things pick up speed (p. ). Indeed, the speed did pick up as a multiplicity ofprotesting citizens in one Middle Eastern country mobilized and inspired pro-

testing multiplicities in the next, and the next, and, and. . . . As the uprisings

intensified throughout the region, they attained a plane of consistent non-con-

sistency,a multiplicity of incommensurable occurrences that Deleuze and Guat-

tari characterize as a virtual, incorporeal BwO that is opposed to the organism,

the organic organization of the organs (Deleuze & Guattari, , p. ).

rough an interminable process of deterritorialization and reterritorializa-

tion, the BwO disarticulates organisms of power, the majoritarian, organizational

body politic of oppressive regimes into asignifying, minoritarianparticles, which

constitute the unprecedented and unfamiliar, contiguous and corresponding char-

acteristics of the rhizomatic assemblage. It is within the rhizomatic middle, the in-

between with no beginning and no end, where nullification occurs; nullification

of organizational power that constitutes the BwO. e middle is what poet Leon-

ard Cohen is suggesting by a crack in everything / thats how the light gets in,

which is the first epigraph at the beginning of this article. is zero, n-dimension

of the BwO is where ontological and organizational impediments are reconsti-

tuted inexorably as difference, subjects-in-process, as nonstratified, heterogenousbodies (Garoian, ). Moreover, this in-between, incorporeal dynamic of the

BwO isfigural. It refuses to aggregate the representationalfigurationsof bodies

with organs. Given its perpetual movement, it is unstable and irreducible. Cul-

tural theorist David Norman Rodowick () describes the realm of the figural as

that of incommensurable spaces, nonlinear dynamics, temporal complexity and

heterogeneity, logic unruled by the principle of non-contradiction (p. ). Such

characteristics of the figural correspond with occurrences in each of the countries,

and throughout the Middle East, as they did in Osher and Sherif s Swarm. Majoritarian power was also evident in the presumptive systems and cor-

porate arteries of the mass media through which incoming reports about the



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idiosyncratic characteristics of revolutionary movements in the Middle East were

synthesized and elevated to the level of spectacle as headline news. e medias

global distribution of events stratified and molarized the flux and molecular

characteristics of the uprisings in each of the countries in the region and in doingso, treated them as a single cohesive event. And while there is consensus among

scholars that the Internet and social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube

networked and quickly mobilized dissenters in destratifying the monolithic glo-

balizing discourse of the media, and those of the oppressive regimes, their diffusive

impact would not have been possible had it not been for the social, political, and

economic grievances in each of the countries that ignited the great performative

moments in the streets that cultural theorist Nicholas Mirzoeffdescribes in the

third epigraph. In challenging inflated assumptions about the global impact of the Internet

and social media in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, for instance, Lisa Anderson (),

President of the American University in Cairo, argues that the important story

about the revolts is

not how the globalization of the norms of civic engagement shaped the protes-

tors aspirations. Nor is it about how activists used technology to share ideas and

tactics. Instead, the critical issue is how and why these ambitions and techniques

resonated in their various local contexts. e patterns and demographics of theprotests varied widely. (p. )

Anderson debunks and demystifies claims that the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt,

and Libya constituted a cohesive Arab revolt (, p. ) orchestrated by the In-

ternet and social media. She instead argues that the social, political, and economic

peculiarities of each country were differentially constituted even before the revolts

broke out.

In a recent lecture entitled Not in the Age of Pharaohs about pre-revolu-

tionary demographics and art in Egypt, for example, Bruce W. Ferguson (),

Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at American University in

Cairo, described the depraved conditions that precipitated the uprisings in that

country of million people: are below the poverty line, are

under years of age with a median age of years, are unemployed,

are illiterate, and among women illiteracy is at . Moreover, there are million

homeless children and another million between years of age working. Ironi-

cally, of the Egyptian people own cell phones, which is an indication of their

access to and use of social media for emancipatory purposes. Andersons character-ization of cultural singularities in flux across the region, and Fergusons example

in Egypt are, as of this writing, still evident as citizens in every sector, private and


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public, in every culture, are attempting to forge and re-forge infrastructures that

were heretofore nonexistent or dominated and corrupted by despotic rulers.

Ferguson went on to describe the pre-revolutionary work of artists like Amal

Kenawy and Ahmed Basiony, and the harsh consequences of their critical addressof injustices in Egyptian society. During an unspoken public performance entitled

Silence of the Lambs (), Kenawy and her fifteen collaborators were humili-

ated by spectators, arrested by security forces, and briefly imprisoned for having

crawled on their hands and knees across a major intersection, jamming midday

traffic and drawing a large, volatile crowd in downtown Cairo (Wilson-Goldie,

). While passersby focused their irritations specifically at the disruption in the

street, within the larger context of Egyptian life, the performance tapped into the

destabilizing sentiments and undercurrents in the country and the region. In , a year prior to the uprisings in Tahrir Square, Basiony performed

Days of Running in Place, an event during which he dressed in a sensor-fitted

transparent plastic suit with which he collected and measured the amount of per-

spiration and the number of steps that he took while jogging for one hour each

day for thirty days. Data from his bodys energy and perspiration was transmitted

wirelessly onto a large monitor where it was displayed as a grid of changing colors.

e project was intended to represent how thirty years under the Mubarak re-

gime produced no gains, only wasted energy[emphasis added]. [Basionys] workwas among the first of a new generation of young Egyptian artists who use their

work to articulate the political, economic and social conditions that Egyptian

society endured under an oppressive government. (AUC, )

Sadly, a year afterDays of Running in Place, Basiony was killed by snipers bul-

lets during the Friday of Wrath protest in Tahrir Square on January , .

Notwithstanding the individuated pre-revolutionary occurrences as Ander-

son and Ferguson have reported them, the media continues to broadcast cohesive,

hegemonic representations like Arab Spring and Arab World, which is not sur-prising considering the imperialistic, reductive, and normalizing impulses of the

West toward the Arab body that postcolonial theorist Edward Said characterized

as Orientalism (). Said argued that

[t]he challenge to Orientalism and the colonial era of which it is so organically a

part was a challenge to the muteness imposed upon the Orient as object. Insofar

as it was a science of incorporation and inclusion by virtue of which the Orient

was constituted and then introduced into Europe, Orientalism was a scientific

movement whose analogue in the world of empirical politics was the Orientscolonial accumulation and acquisition by Europe. e Orient was therefore not

Europes interlocutor, but its silent Other. (, p. )



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It was against the backdrop of the mainstream medias tele-visual Orientalism that

the Internet and social media played a central role in mobilizing citizens to revolt

in various localities. Mirzoeff() described the subsequent domino effect across

the region and international borders as networked revolutions. Communicationsscholar Phillip N. Howard and his colleagues (), who, after analyzing millions

of data, substantiate Andersons and Mirzoeffs characterizations about the role of

social media:

Although social media did not cause the upheaval in North Africa, they altered

the capacity of citizens to affect domestic politics. Online activists created a

virtual ecology of civil society, debating contentious issues that could not be dis-

cussed in public. . . . [P]eople who shared interest in democracy built extensive

social networks and organized political action. Social media became a criticalpart of the toolkit for greater freedom. (pp. , )

What Anderson, Ferguson, Mirzoeff, and Howard and his colleagues are clarifying

about the Arab revolts is their performative singularities, the affect of their local

domestic politics, which in Deleuzian () terms constitutes their particular

turning points and points of inflection (p. ). As separate yet contiguous events,

these singularities continually deterritorialized and destratified the majoritarian,

ontological assumptions within each country through multiple lines of flightbe-

tween and among citizens, which subtended and spread instantaneously by wayof the toolkit and communication lines of the Internet and social media. Cor-

responding with these scholars assertions, the varied patterns and demographics

of the protests, their virtual social ecology, constituted singularities that were the

source of a series extending in a determined direction right up to the vicinity of

another singularity. In this sense, not only are there several divergent series in the

structure, but each series itself is constituted by several sub-series (Deleuze, ,

pp. ).

Hence, the diverging and converging lines of flight, the perpetual modula-tions that constitute the asignifying, anomalous structure of the rhizomatic as-

semblage, that is the uprisings in the Middle East, evade ontological closure. is

process of incipience, of becoming-intense, that is a becoming other than what

was previously assumed socially, politically, and economically, is suggested by the

winding, fugitive images in Osher and Sherifs installation Swarmand their cor-

respondences with the disparate yet contiguous events in the Middle East. For

Deleuze and Guattari () the anomalous, incommensurable configuration of

a swarm is a position [singularity] or set of positions [singularities] in relation to

a multiplicity (p. ), which they characterize as a contiguity, a bordering phe-

nomenon where there exists an affinity with alliances, with no beginning and no

end, only a becoming as opposed to hierarchical ontologies of filiation (p. ).


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The Smooth Space and Event-Time of Swarm

e silk fabric texture of Osher and Sherifs Swarm, and its spinning speed,

blurred asunder and smoothed the mass medias striated, majoritarian spatial or-ganization and representation of the Arab Spring as a homogeneous global event.

In doing so, the blurring in the artists installation constituted a becoming minor

of the major language of mass mediation (Deleuze & Guattari, , p. ). In

other words, the corporeality of the medias striated space, its body with organs,

where complex and contradictory images, ideas, and events are appropriated,

tamed, and conformed to the desiring apparatus of academic, institutional, and

corporate power, was continually deterritorialized and rendered minor within

Osher and Sherifs Swarm.

To disrupt the normalizing visuality of the media, itsmajoritarian language in this way is to allow for an excess of difference to emerge.

As such, the dynamic turbulence of the artists installation corresponded

with Deleuzoguattarian smooth space, the virtual incorporeal space of the BwO

where the heterogeneous multiplicity of the rhizome picks up speed as it continu-

ally deterritorializes and molecularizes attempts at globalizing differential occur-

rences like the uprisings in the Middle East. Postcolonial theorist Enrica Picarelli

() refers to the Internet and social medias heterogeneity in corresponding

ways as a dynamics of online socialization, [which was] at the heart of a revirtu-

alization, that is a re-transmission of the rupturing power of the event away from

the territorializing pull of mainstream media (p. ). In other words, through

perpetual modulation, social medias multiple lines of flight deterritorialized and

molecularized the mainstream medias globalizing representations of events and in

doing so helped destabilize despotism in the region.

While Deleuze and Guattari () designate smooth space as the incorpo-

real space of the BwO where multiple lines of flight move about endlessly unim-

peded by the organizational apparatus of the body politic (p. ), the temporal

complement of smooth and striated space is that ofAionand Chronos. e timeof Chronos is where the present is everything; and Aion, where the present

is nothing (Deleuze, , p. ). Given its preoccupation with present time,

Chronos is corporeal; it measures, classifies, and stratifies the inseparable move-

ments, happenings, and qualities of the body (Deleuze, , pp. ,). In

contrast, Aion is that of incorporeal time, the event of the BwO that is without

beginning or end.

Just as the present measures the temporal realization of the eventthat is, its

incarnation in the depth of acting bodies and its incorporation in a state of af-fairsthe event in turn, in its impassibility and impenetrability, has no present.

It rather retreats and advances in two directions at once, being the perpetual



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object of a double question: What is going to happen? What has just happened?

e agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time

something which has just happened and something that is about to happen;

never something which is happening. (p. )

is paradox of past and future that is Aion constitutes present time out of joint,

a caesura, that of a generative aperture where the representational, abstract, and

reified chronological time of Chronos is molecularized as a temporal assemblage

(Flanagan, , pp. , ). As such, Aion disrupts the movements of measured

time that is Chronos, leaving only an empty form of time that eschews the unity

[representational closure] of the subject (Reynolds, , p. ).

Accordingly, the furtive and fugitive occurrences of the Arab uprisings, and

Osher and Sherif s installation, deterritorialized and reterritorialized exclusionaryand oppressive governmental and mass mediated representations of power, their

state of affairs, within the unimpeded smooth space and interminable time of the

BwO that is Aion. As such, the event-time of Aion was the perverse, live moment

of pure operation of Swarm that perpetually disrupted the representational and

organizational time of the present that was Chronos (Deleuze, , p. ). is

cycle of convergent continuity (conjunctive synthesis) and divergent discontinuity

(disjunctive synthesis)constitutes the movements of difference and repetition,

the eternal return, of the incorporeal BwO that is the refrain, the in-between spaceand time, the intermezzo of art (Deleuze, , p. ).

Schizoanalysis and Its Desiring Syntheses

To repudiate the unification and totalization of the subject by dialectical synthesis,

Deleuze and Guattari () offer a network of three desiring syntheses that con-

stitute the machinic operations of the BwO: connective synthesis, disjunctivesynthe-

sis, and conjunctive synthesis(pp. ). In terms of the installation Swarm, the

montage of fragmented and disparate mass mediated images of the Arab Spring

on its smooth, spinning silk surface constituted connective synthesisinsofar as it

converged and aggregated a homogeneous series, a flow of resemblancesbased

on difference. Connective synthesis was also evident in the disparate resemblances

between the conical swarm of the silk fabric, and that which was looped on the

video monitor in the corner of the gallery. e installationsdisjunctive synthesis

converged and aggregated the fabrics swirling images and their alliances differ-

ently as a blurring swarm of incommensurable singularities and chains of events

without unifying or uniting them (Deleuze & Guattari, , p. ), which incontiguity with those on the video loop, circumvented and disrupted endlessly

any possibility of dialectical synthesis and representation.


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Unlike the endless deterritorializations of disjunctive synthesis, Swarms

conjunctive synthesis converged and aggregated the totalizing mass mediated rep-

resentations of the Arab uprisings as heterogeneous intensities and becomings of

yet unseen and unknown events about to happen. Corresponding with the char-acteristics of smooth space, the conjunctive synthesis of Swarmwas occupied by

events, far more than by formed and perceived things. Its experience was that of

sensations and affects more than properties (Deleuze & Guattari, , p. ).

ese three desiring machines of the BwO comprise the toolkit of schizoanalysis,

a Deleuzoguattarian neologism the description of which corresponds with the

connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive workings of Osher and Sherifs dynamic

installation in disarticulating the monolithic globalizing desires of the mass me-

dias coverage of the Arab uprisings. As in Deleuzes double questionWhat is going to happen? What has just

happened?the title of this article, In the Eventthat Art Occurs, is also double

articulated to suggest that art is an immanent occurrence that remains unseen and

unknown until it is being experienced. e exploratory, experimental, and impro-

visational processes of Osher and Sherifs whirling Swarm, and that of the swarm

of citizens rising up in countries throughout the Middle East, were constituted

through immanence; an imperceptible way of seeing and knowing that is yet to

happen, and inferred virtually as an absence. In other words, experiencing visu-

ally and comprehending conceptually that which is visually imperceptible and

conceptually incomprehensible constitutes the eventof art as an immanent force of

becoming-intense, becoming-other, becoming-political; a moment of unbinding

that Picarelli refers to in the second epigraph of this article, that disrupts, disarticu-

lates, and destratifies the present state of affairs of a body politic. Indeed, Osher

and Sherifs kinetic installation corresponds with Deleuzian thought insofar as it

valorizes those learning experiences that force us out of any such [normative] equi-

librium with our environment; the kind of structural coupling between subject and

world that is pivotal to the constitution of a living-present (Reynolds, , p. ).

Immanence in Art Practice and Its Politics of Imperceptibility

Just as the furtive and fugitive movement of images in Osher and Sherifs installa-

tion disarticulated globalizing representations of the uprisings in the Middle East, a

politics of imperceptibility emerged through immanence, which enabled my seeing

and knowing in ways that were yet unseen and unknown. is new knowledge that

emerges from the dynamic multiplicity of the event that is art denies dialecticalconnectivity and synthesis with existing knowledge. Rather, what occurs in the

event-time of art is a disjunctive synthesis where existing knowledge and knowledge



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that is about to happen in the event-time of Aion are in a contiguous relation-of-

nonrelation, which according to Deleuzoguattarian scholar Brian Massumi () is

aesthetically political insofar as it is based in ambiguity and incompleteness.

Philosopher Jacques Rancire refers to this agonistic process of art as dissen-sus, which is in opposition to consensus processes that aggregate in homogeneous

and hegemonic representations.

For critical art is not so much a type of art that reveals the forms and contradic-

tions of domination as it is an art that questions its own limits and powers, that

refuses to anticipate its own effects[emphasis added] . . . [that accepts its] insuf-

ficiency . . . that infiltrate[s] the world of market and social relations and then

remain[s] content to be mere images . . . [that] compose[s] propositions on

what it is that is given to see to us and an interrogation into the power of repre-sentation. (Rancire, , p. )

In terms of Osher and Sherifs Swarm, the dissensus and relation-of-nonrelation

that is experienced in-between the installations dynamic form, and the content

of its representational images, constitutes the making of semblances that enable

multiple ways of experiencing and disarticulating power politics such as occurred

with the Arab uprisings, and social medias destratification of global, mass medi-

ated representations. Contrary to political art that is explicit, Swarmsdisjunctive

synthesis and semblances constituted a politics of imperceptibility; an aestheticprocess that disarticulated the power of representational politics.

Artistic practices that explicitly attempt to be political often fail at it, because

they construe being political as having political content, when what counts is

the dynamic form. An art practice can be aesthetically political, inventive of

new life potentials, of new potential forms of life, and have no overtly political

content. I would go so far as to say that it is the exception that art with overtly

political content is political in the sense Im talking about here. When it is

[political], its because care has been taken not only to make sense but to makesemblance, to make the making-sense experientially appear, in a dynamic form that

takes a potential-pushing distance on its own particular content. (Massumi, , p.

; emphasis added)

e event-value of Osher and Sherifs Swarm, what just happened and what was

about to happen by virtue of its blurring centrifugal force, molecularized all rep-

resentational and reified political content reported through mass mediation about

the Arab Spring. From this sundering of images and movements, a making-sense

of events in the Middle East emerged as an anomalous semblance the experienceof which disrupted and challenged the mass medias explicit representations.

is making-sense through semblance constitutes an aesthetic politics ac-

cording to Massumi that is creative to the extent that an emergent experience


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takes offfrom [the art form] . . . that has its own distinctive lived quality, and

because of that its own self-differing momentum (Massumi, , p. ). Accord-

ingly, the self-differing and self-perpetuating momentum that constitutes dissen-

sus, the relation-of-nonrelation politics of the event that was Swarm, re-virtualizedand re-transmitted the virtual representations and viral transmissions of the Arab

uprisings by the mass media. In doing so, its fluttering, flapping, quivering, wind-

ing, twisting, and wisping modulations unleashed the rupturing dynamic of the

event away from the corporeal, territorializing, and institutional pull of museums.

In re-virtualizing the gallery in this way, the event that was Swarmtransformed

e Mattress Factory Museum into smooth space and the exploratory, experimen-

tal, and improvisational event-time of the BwO.

Becoming Political + Becoming Pedagogical

Finally, a misreading of Massumis aesthetic politics of art suggests that my

experience of Osher and Sherif s Swarmalso constituted an aesthetic pedagogy

of art, the making of sense through semblance that constitutes learning as an

imperceptible, immanent event insofar as I learned what was going to happen as

I encountered the installations blurring movement, compared with the experi-

ences and understandings of art, museums, the media, and the events in the

Middle East that I brought into the gallery. Contrary to socially and historically

constructed knowledge, which is currently taught and learned according to the

majoritarian, academic curricula of schools and museums, the imperceptible

pedagogy of the event that was Swarmenabled me to learn through exploration,

experimentation, and improvisation, the incipient processes of art research and

practice from which manifold, minoritarian possibilities for new knowledge

emerge through immanence.

e performativity of Swarm, that which was yet unseen and unknown in

its dynamic form, constituted a curriculum in the makingthat inspired my becom-ing-politicaland becoming-pedagogicalthrough the writing of this article. is in-

between, double-articulated epistemology from which a multiplicity of disjunctive

understandings about art, museums, the media, and the uprisings in the Middle

East emerged from my experience of Swarm, constituted a schizoanalytic process

that incited a crisis in knowledge; that is, a disruption of my academic, institu-

tional, and corporate assumptions, thus enabling me to see and think about them

in new and different ways. In doing so, the installations fluttering, flapping, quiv-

ering, winding, twisting, wisping research and practice enabled becoming-politicaland becoming-pedagogical as contiguous processes of learning differently than

what is currently offered through the overt representational politics of schooling

and museums.



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Acknowledgments

e author would like to thank Christopher Schulte and Kevin Slivka for their

thoughtful reading and feedback about the Deleuzoguattarian concepts that arediscussed in this article, and to thank B. Stephen Carpenter II for his knowledge

and insights about the cultural and political complexity of the world region that is

commonly referred to as the Middle East.

Notes

1. The general store annex has served as an exhibition space for The Mattress FactoryMuseum for the past 16 years.

2. Critical theorist Slavoj iek (1997, p. 32) characterizes anamorphic distortion asa protracted stain that is an uncanny massiveness [in artists works] that per tainsneither to the direct materiality of the . . .[formal properties of their works] nor to themateriality of the depicted objectsit dwells in a kind of intermediate spectral domain(p. 32). For further discussion about ieks protracted stain and anamorphic distortionin art, see Garoian and Gaudelius (2008, pp. 131133).

3. View video documentation of Osher and Sherif s Swarmon YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rguRp5XHzp8

4. Osher and Sherif s Swarmwas part of a group exhibition at The Mattress Factory Mu-seum titled Sites of Passage, which was co-curated by performance artist Tavia LaFol-lette and contracted curator Katherine Talcott. The exhibition featured work by artists

affiliated with the Firefly Tunnels Project, which is an organization that builds metaphori-cal passageways for the exchange of ideas through the language of Performance Artbetween the American and Egyptian ar tists (Michaels, 2011).

5. From this point on in the article, the abbreviation BwO will be used to designate theBody without Organs.

6. While the terms Middle East and Arab World are used somewhat interchangeablyin this article, it is important to note that such use is problematic inasmuch as they arenot synonymous. Art educator B. Stephen Carpenter II, who is familiar with that regionof the world, argues that such molarized terms tend to erase the existence of culturaland geopolitical differences. In an e-mail conversation with him during one of his regularvisits with family in Tunisia, Carpenter characterized those differences with the follow-ing example: Tunisia, while part of the Arab World, is really not part of the Middle Eastgeographically. Similarly, Mauritania, Sudan, Western Sahara, Morocco, Algeria, and Libyaare not geographically par t of the Middle East either. Further, Morocco, Algeria, andLibya are actually North African Arab countries, collectively called the Maghreb. That is,not all of the countries [that are identified as] part of the Arab Spring are Middle Eastcountries, but all are Arab or Muslimand of course Arab and Muslim are not inter-changeable terms, either (B. S. Carpenter II, personal communication, July 25, 2012).

7. Brian Massumi (2011, p. 61) refers to Deleuzoguattarian incommensurability as a rela-tion-of-nonrelation assemblage.

8. In Spring 2012, Ferguson was the Institute for the Arts and Humanities Distinguished

Visiting Professor at Penn State, where he delivered this lecture. 9. Filiation for Deleuze and Guattari is arboreal in the sense that, like the taproot of a

tree, it represents hierarchical lineage as compared with the contiguous alliances of rhi-zomatic assemblage.


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33

10. What Osher and Sherif s collaboration and the uprisings have in common is that boththeir revolutions were facilitated through the Internet and social media. The artistsworked on Swarmin this way because Sherif was unable to travel to Pittsburgh fromher home in Egypt.

11. Massumi refers to Deleuzian eternal return as a true duality, a processual rhythm ofcontinuity and discontinuity (2002, p. 217).

12. Deleuze conceptualizes resemblances in two ways: one invites us to think differencefrom the standpoint of a previous similitude or identity; whereas the other invites us to

think similitude and identity as the product of a deep disparity (1990, p. 261). While ar-guing against the representational and reifying characteristics of the former, he advocatesfor the phantasmagoric, ever-changing potential of the latter.

13. It is important to note that the etymology of schizo-is from the Greek irregular verb tosplit, which was combined with other words of Greek origin in various scientific terms(OED). The three syntheses that constitute schizoanalysisdeterritorialize and reter-

ritorialize pre-existing, reductionist assumptions, representations, and systems of analysisby way of the rhizomatic assemblage and the BwO from which heretofore anomalous,unknown, and unforeseen multiplicities of knowing and understanding difference canemerge (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 18).

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