moves towards the incomprehensible wild[1]

01/10/2012 14:34Moves towards the Incomprehensible Wild

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ART&RESEARCHART&RESEARCHA Journal of Ideas, Contexts and MethodsA Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

Volume 4. No. 1. Summer2011

ISSN 1752-6388

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CONTENTSCONTENTSEditorialArt and the AnimalRevolution

Giovanni AloiDifferent Becomings

Susan McHugh andSteve BakerStains, Drains, andAutomobiles

Helen BullardFostering Pidgins

Emma CockerMoves Towards theIncomprehensible Wild

Roz CranAm I leopard?Seeking Animationand Other Possibilities

Maria FuscoFieldnotes fromthe Urban Pastoral

The trees are dense nowwith singing birds,whitethroats, titlark,yellowhammer and thecooing of wood pigeons[…] In the centre of thewood there exists anatural clearing,perfectly level andsmooth with glassylichen, a dark emeraldcovering […] A wild deerwalks out of the trees,crosses the clearance,and stops to snuff theground. Large brighteyes search. […] Iwatched its glitteringbrown eyes watching me.The deer’s presenceannounced a far deeperand stranger reality thanany classification ofplants and animals […]The deer momentarilyawoke my own wild-side,

itself a startled animal …1

In this semi-fictionalized account,artists Dutton + Swindells describe anencounter with a deer in a woodland,where the unexpected meeting withthe wild operates as a moment ofrupture or breach capable of

Fig.3. Dutton + Swindells, StudioProduction with Plants, YASS Studio,Sheffield, March 2010. Imagecourtesy of the artists.

For Dutton + Swindells, collage isused as a strategy for bringing thingsinto proximity, to create moments ofunexpected collision where two whollyunrelated things meet andacknowledge their difference, theirunlikeness [Figure 3]. For Dutton +Swindells, ‘the notion of collage issomething that is in the throws ofpossible conflation whilesimultaneously maintaining asuspended and frozen position of

indelible difference’.15

Collage is amode of contiguity rather thancontinuity; touching surfacesinevitably create a line that in turnreinforces the conditions of theirseparation. This line of separation isone of differentiation, marking the

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Moves Towards theIncomprehensible WildEmma Cocker



Ron Broglio andFrederick YoungThe Coming Non-Human Community

Ingvild Kaldal andNigel RothfelsReflections onthe Vitrine

CaroleeSchneemannApproaching Animality

BryndisSnæbjörnsdóttir /Mark WilsonIn Conversation withKate Foster

Jan VerwoertAnimalisms

Alan CurrallCat Stuck in Organ

ContributorsNotes on Contributors

awakening a different kind of subjectstatus. Though allegorical, thedescription itself is based on an actualevent, where both artists attest to aseparately but similarly experiencedencounter with the woodlandcreature. For Dutton + Swindells, theencounter with the deer wascharacterized by a sense of theunfathomable or incomprehensible,where in that moment ofincommunicable proximity they wererendered instantly and unexpectedlydumbstruck, as existing language andknowledge no longer sufficed. Re-contextualized within theircollaborative art practice, this sharedexperience has come to stand as aform of shorthand for articulating theaspirations for their activity as artists.Moreover, it was the recognition andnaming of this shared encounter thatenabled the artists to newly conceiveof their practice in such a way. Withintheir practice, Dutton + Swindellsattempt to create the conditions for anencounter not dissimilar tounexpectedly coming across a deerwhilst walking off the path in a woodor forest. Their activity is shaped bytheir hope of producing the conditionsof an event, which they conceive as anencounter with a particularmanifestation of wildness.Withintheir work they attempt to prepare theground or set up situations whereinthe event of an encounter withwildness might occur, which in turn,might have the capacity to breach orrupture habitual ways of being andthinking. The artists’ practice ismotivated by the question of whetherit is possible to every truly encounteror indeed produce something wild,something that has not been alreadycaptured and classified, already

tamed.2

What follows is an attempt to criticallyinterrogate whether – or indeedhow –the event of an encounter withwildness might be encouraged orprovoked through a form of critical(artistic) practice. In order to do so,Dutton + Swindells’ practice isbrought into the proximity of AlainBadiou’s philosophicalconceptualization of the event (asdetailed in Being and Event); whilst

limits of one thing from thebeginnings of another—the boundarythat separates ‘me’ from ‘you’, fromeverything else, ad infinitum. Oneentity bumps into another,simultaneously attracted and repelledby the experience of contact. Meetingsoccur but there is no dialogue to behad, no common ground to bereached. Seams form points at whichdifferences can be only registered,unable to be reconciled or resolved. Inthese terms, collage is consideredanalogous to the artists’ muteencounter with the deer in thewoodland. Two things come face toface and are rendered dumbstruck,impotent. Each remains unable tovoice itself in any coherent manner,for its own language is inadequate forinitiating the necessary conversation.What exists between is nothing—except perhaps the immeasurable voidof dissimilitude, a wordless vacuum.Through collage, Dutton + Swindellscreate conditions analogous to thissuspended mode of incommunicableproximity. They set up encountersbetween things in order to renderthem mute [Figure 4]. However, thisdeadlock is not one of resignation ordespair, but rather it is from theexperience of stalemate that theartists hope to force somethingelse,some other way. Stalemate can bebroken if one side of the struggle isprepared to give or yield, however bydisabling the efficacy of existingpower relations, Dutton + Swindellsattempt to provoke or call analternative logic (or ethics) into play.

Fig.4. Dutton + Swindells, Dept. ofCelestial Mechanics 2 Wall-Installation (in-progress), YASSStudio, Sheffield, July 2010. Imagecourtesy of the artists.



Badiou’s theory of the event issimultaneously re-considered throughthe specific prism afforded by theircollaborative work. What motivatesthis enquiry is the seeminglycontradictory assertion that the event– which in Badiou’s terms cannot bepredetermined or planned for – canbe conceived within or as part of apragmatic model through which wecan attempt to provoke it into being orbecome its cause. With reference tothe work of Dutton + Swindells, myintent is to explore whether – andindeed how – the event of anunexpected encounter with somethingwild can ever truly beproduced orwhether it must remain a force whosecapricious logic we can only everhopefor. The article asks whether it ispossible that through an art practice,something unexpected can also beanticipated, the unplanned forsimultaneously brought about. Artand philosophy are thus broughttogetherin dialogue in ordertoinvestigate art’s potential forproducing evental conditions – ofbreach or rupture – wherein thepossibility of a different (potentiallyradical or dissenting) model ofsubjectivity might arise. However,before turning to Badiou’s writing, Iwant to discuss how the event isconceptualized within Dutton +Swindells’ art practice, since it isthrough the specific prism of (art)practice that my own enquiry takes its

initial direction.3 As such, art sets up

the conditions into which furtherthinking is then invited, called.

Whilst Steve Dutton and SteveSwindells have been collaboratingsince 1998, it was from 2005 that themotif of the deer in the woodlandbecame adopted purposefully toindicate the intentions for theirpractice. This conceptualizationbecame more fully formed during athree-month long residencyundertaken as part of an InternationalResidency Program at Ssamzie ArtSpace in Seoul, South Korea, 2008,where Dutton + Swindells foundedthe Institute of Beasts. The residencyenabled the artists to move beyond anunderstanding of their work as arepresentation of the animal

In recent work, separation is usedtactically in order to create a notionallimit or edge, which can then beinterrogated or put into question.Limits are drawn attention to suchthat they might then be transgressed,disrupted or rendered porous, wheresomething unexpected might bedrawn from the fissures occurringbetween the lines, between existingdemarcations. Dutton + Swindellshave explored the potential of usingseparation as a device through whichto create and then interrogate thelimits of a particular structure ofcategorization or classification. Theirsis a gesture of tilting, a process ofpushing something until it no longerappears to behave according to theterms of its designated name ordefinition. Within their work, wordsare pressured towards painting andbeyond the realm of language;paintings become perches upon whichchickens roost; roosting livestockassume their positions—as theunwitting initiates—within undeclaredritual performances where they aresubjected to the endless loop ofpower-point lectures. At times, theanimals that inhabit the architecturesof the work appear haunted by humansubjectivity—bored, melancholic, lost,disappointed—whilst culture in turn isrendered bestial—degraded, brutish.It tries relentlessly to inculcate theanimal with its logic, its values, butthe animal stands indocile, indifferentor immune to its intendedindoctrination, for its priorities arebased on more immediate—bodily—concerns [Figures 5 and 6]. Culturalproducts—including art and also theartists—function as little more thanprops or objects or the backgroundupon which other activities occur.Again, what is at stake in thesecategorical shifts and transformationsis the question of what defines andconstitutes particular forms of being,specifically perhaps what it mightmean to be human. Singular subject-hood deliquesces into the rapturousstate of dissolution. Categories quiverat the point of collapse.



encounter, towards conceiving of it asan attempt to become one. Since thisresidency, Dutton + Swindells havecontinued to develop the frameworkof the Institute of Beasts as a way of‘housing’ or ‘managing’ a range oftactical– if somewhat unruly–methods. It is through the testing ofthese tactical methods that the artistsattempt to set up the conditionswhereby the event of an encounterwith something wild might beunexpectedly produced within theirpractice (as the woodland or forestsets up the conditions for a possibleencounter with a deer), or such thatthe work itself might begin toapproach a state of wildness, becomeanimal. Conceptually, the Institute ofBeasts does not differentiatehierarchically between the activity ofthe studio and the site of exhibition,but rather conceives of practice as acritical and nomadic operation thatperpetually moves between thesespaces. The artists describe the‘pathology of “setting-up” studio’ as ‘ametaphorical forest or animal habitatin which the animal-object might

exist.’4

The studio – whatever orwherever that might be – functions asthe situation against which certaintactics, approaches and materials aretested. As such, this article focuses onDutton + Swindells’ practice as itispracticedbroadly under the auspicesof the Institute of Beasts, rather thanas it is specifically materialized assingular artworks that are resolvedwithin the context of a discreteexhibition. Similarly, my aim is not tofocus on those moments whensomething approaching an animalencounter is actually produced withinDutton + Swindells’ work, but ratherto excavate a sense of the recurrenttactics used by the artists as part oftheir attempt to produce or cause theconditions wherein the event of anencounter with wildness might occur.

For Dutton + Swindells, the eventcorresponds to an encounter with thewild – something unlike, unfamiliaror incomprehensible – which in turnhas the capacity to breach or rupturehabitual ways of being and thinking.The phrase ‘beyond comprehension’ isoften used pejoratively, as an

Fig.5. Dutton + Swindells, StudioProduction with Dog, Rabbit andDuck, S1 Artspace Studios, Sheffield,July 2004. Image courtesy of theartists.

Fig.6. Dutton + Swindells, StudioProduction with Ducks, Psalter LaneStudios, Sheffield, July 2005. Imagecourtesy of the artists.

Dutton + Swindells insist that thecategories which demarcate one thingfrom something else are oftenarbitrary and easily transgressed.However, rather than wanting toabolish such systems of classification—which are perhaps inescapable—they propose that these insidiousmodes of capture in fact mightinadvertently produce the veryconditions for an unexpectedencounter with somethingincomprehensible or wild. Workingwithin the logic of classification, theirquest becomes one of pushing at theedges of one meaning whilst holdingback the terms of another. They try tolocate the fulcrum point where it ispossible for something to appearmomentarily unnamable orunclassified, no longer and not yetknowable. The challenge for theartists, however, is one of preventingthese nascent assemblages or genericsets from being identified or



expression of disbelief or frustrationwhen something cannot be madesense of or appears to lack meaning orrationale. However, there is also anarchaic meaning for the term where itdescribes the condition oflimitlessness or the state of beingboundless or unrestrained; ofsomething existing beyond one’sgrasp, beyond capture. Theincomprehensible is thus that whichfails to communicate or be clearlyunderstood at the same time as thatwhich resists or exceeds existingdefinition. It is marked then by thedual possibilities of deficit and excess,refusal and promise. Dutton +Swindells play with these dualpossibilities, attempting to harnessthe affects of the former in the hope ofconjuring the latter. They make workthat is tactically incomprehensible inthe attempt to summon or create theconditions for an encounter with thatwhich is beyond the terms of what isalready known. They attempt to turnthe incomprehensible (opaque) intothe incomprehensible (beyondcapture) – to perform a classificatoryshift. However, the artists’ pursuit ofthe incomprehensible should not beconfused with the fetishisticfascination with all that is strange,irrational or eccentric, nor thesignaling of art as conduit orcommunicating vessel for some formof transcendental power or privilegedsubconscious imaginary. Rather, forthe artists, the possibility of anunfamiliar or incomprehensiblewildness becomes located at the heartof an ongoing material investigationof ethical and epistemological import,where ideas pertaining to theformation of both subjectivity andknowledge are put into question orchallenged. Dutton + Swindells’search for the incomprehensible wild– that which remains beyond captureor measure – is marked by a desire torupture or destabilize the familiar,habitual or homogenized; to bring itinto doubt or crisis. The artists’ labouris one of attempting to bring about theevent of something unexpected orunrecognizable – which might in turnbe constitutive of something else orother – whilst simultaneouslyblocking or thwarting the path of(re)cognition, the gesture of taming

assimilated all too quickly back intomeaning, from becoming classified or(re)claimed swiftly by the existingencyclopedia of what is known andalready named. In their work, Dutton+ Swindells attempt to resist theterritorializing tendency of languageor rather they stymie its associativechains of relations, its forms ofgrammatical and classificatorybondage. Speechlessness isrecuperated as a critical position, forwhilst that which has no languagearguably has no power, certain formsof muteness can equally beunderstood as an articulation ofprotest, as the refusal to communicateor play according to the terms ofexisting power—or linguistic—relations. Without dialogue there canbe no negotiation, no compromise, nobreach of promise made. Even thesmallest child grasps theunfathomable potency of wordlessrefusal, a silent resistance that cannotbe bargained with nor eroded by thelogic of rational coercion. Wordlessencounters remain wholly at the levelof aura or affect—in the realm of thecorporeal, a touch … animal.

Speechlessness is the impotent stateof not being able to make oneselfunderstood, of being stripped of one’scapacity to communicate. However, tobe ‘lost for words’ simultaneouslydescribes both the limitations oflanguage and the limitlessness of thatwhich it attempts—and fails—to name.Here again, Dutton + Swindellsharness the possibilities of one formof incomprehensibility in their pursuitof its more elusive other. Theychannel the dissident potential ofvarious speech pathologies, whosebucks and stammers become devicesthrough which to remain stubbornlyincomprehensible, or for preventingemergent languages becomingreconciled within existing systems.Dutton and Swindells attempt tocreate ‘inconsumable languages’whose words lodge in the throat ofreason and remain guttural, or elsethey appear more like shapes orstructures, stumbling blocks againstwhich cognition slips or crashes. ForBadiou:

[T]he meaning of a



and naming the unknown. In theseterms, the incomprehensible wildfunctions as an obstacle or blockage inthe smooth flow of what is alreadyknown or recognizable, whilst creatinggerminal conditions for the possibilityof something new or different.

In one sense, the production ofdifference or heterogeneity can bethought of as art’s promise, itspotential to produce the elusivesimultaneity of the ‘that’s it’ with the‘what’s that’. For artist, Ben Judd thisexperience (or art encounter) can bedescribed as a ‘blind-spot’, where:

There is this thing thatyou are experiencing butyou can’t quite see it or itis slightly out of yourvision … there is a set ofexperiences that arecoming together to formone experience, and Ihave never had thatcombination ofexperiences before, so Idon’t know how todescribe it … It is almostso new that I can’t quite

see it.5

In turn, this capacity of art to produceheterogeneity or the new reveals thelimits of existing systems ofclassification, jeopardizing theauthority and proposed omnipotenceof these nominal modes of capture bycreating an anomaly that momentarilyexists outside or beyond theirterritorializing grasp. The rareencounter with somethingheterogeneous means to come face toface with what is wholly ‘unlike’ you;to experience a wild thing that has yetto be broken in, broken down orassimilated. Dutton + Swindells’search is for a curious kind of wildhowever. Theirs is not the romanticlonging for some uninhabitedwilderness beyond the limits ofhuman reach, but rather for a form ofwild that emerges unannounced fromwithin the very terms of cultivation orcontrol. It is an occurrence thatDutton + Swindells liken to theirshared – yet separately experienced –encounter with a deer in a urban

subject-language isunder condition.Constrained to refersolely to what thesituation presents, andyet bound to the futureanterior of the existenceof an indiscernible, astatement made up of thenames of the subject-language has merely ahypothetical

signification.16

For the faithless, such speech acts arewholly empty, akin to the ‘infantile

foolishness’ of a ‘lovers’ babble’.17

InDutton + Swindells’ ‘subject-language’syllables of spoken sentences clutterand overlap, their distinctions blurredas each utterance is accelerated toabnormal rapidity (or rabidity), thefeverish twittering of undecipherablephonemes and vowels. Recordedspoken language is often digitally spedup; for example, during the SsamzieArt Space residency the artists workedthe spoken script fromThe Exorcistuntil it sounded like twitteringbirdsong. The textual fragments fromword association games are presentedas isolated words that appearrandomly with no apparent meaningor relationship attached: lost, road,emergency, spunk, Fleetwood, wet,setting sun, bored, classical music,holes. Excerpts from spam emailspushing Viagra are enlarged intothrobbing neon signs or assembledinto incoherent narratives. Singlewords often appear as large-scale walldrawings, whose font appears liquidor unreadable, or alternatively thedrawing is cut up and reassembled asform rather than sign [Figures 7 and8]. Polemical or political texts operatecovertly within the work, where thespecificity of their content remainsundercover, often disguised, only everglimpsed. The artists’ textual tacticspresent like a litany of schizo-aphasicsymptoms: excessive use of personalneologisms; errors in pronunciation;inability to name objects;agrammatism; dysprosody;incomplete sentences; failure to speakspontaneously; persistent repetitionof phrases. Words are wrestled fromsignification, catachrestically



woodland or which in turn mightequate to the inexplicable fluttering of

an unbidden love.6

The emergence ofthe wild within is also ultimately asign of hope, for it reveals thepossibility of rupture or openingwithin situations or states that appearalready fixed or determined(including that of being human). Inone sense, the wild or unrecognizableis that which has not been tamed ordomesticated, a state of being thatcannot be wholly determined – ordiscerned – by the terms of existingactuality (of a given situation). Dutton+ Swindells’ work functions as ademonstration of their endeavour toremain faithful to the radicallyconstitutive potential of a particularsingular event (their encounter withsomething incomprehensible, like thedeer in the woodland), at the sametime producing the possibility offurtherevental-sites to which as yetunknown others – an audience ‘to-come’ – might become witness anddeclare their faith. Dutton +Swindells’ practice is a demonstrationof fidelity to or belief in the promise ofart to produce the event of anunexpected encounter with the unlike.And yet theirs is an ambivalent formof faith that perpetually hovers at thethreshold between hope and doubt; itis born of an irrefutable convictionthat nonetheless still needs to befurther convinced. As Steve Duttonasserts, ‘I don’t think I am trying toremain faithful to the event itself, butto remain faithful to having faith inthe event … I suppose it is more like Ineed to be convinced about that

encounter again’.7 It is about having

faith in – but also needing to beconvinced of – the possibility of anencounter with something wild orunrecognizable, and – perhapsparadoxically – of being able to findan adequate way of recognizing this(or ‘naming’ it), without rendering itunder control.

Dutton + Swindells’ practice is thusunderpinned by the seeminglycontradictory endeavour of being ableto recognize something that isunrecognizable – or indeed namesomething that is unnamable – that isalready within the terms of, but which

recalibrated into strainedarrangements or misapplied withincomplex malapropisms that resisteasy translation or decoding. Wordsare no longer organized according tolinguistic conventions (forming thesmooth flow of meaning), but ratherbecome assembled through thepractice of collage (as collidingsingularities which refuse to becomesynthesized into language).

Fig.7. Dutton + Swindells, Death toFascist Text Wall-Drawing (in-progress), Huddersfield UniversityStudios, February 2009. Imagecourtesy of the artists.

Fig.8. Dutton + Swindells, EmergencyText Wall-Drawing (in-progress),Huddersfield University Studios,February 2009. Image courtesy of theartists.

In a manner similar to the way inwhich Badiou theorises the subject,Dutton + Swindells practice might beconsidered as a ‘local configuration of

a generic procedure’.18

Here, art itselfmight echo or actually share theterms of Badiou’s definition of thesubject, as ‘the localstatus of aprocedure, a configuration in excess of

the situation’.19

The possibility of thisshared definition (for both art +subject) perhaps implies an intrinsic



remains imperceptible to, thesituation. In turn, these descriptionsof an art practice resonate withcertain philosophical theories of theevent and its capacity for producingcritical forms of subjectivity (of beingand thinking). For Alain Badiou, theincomprehensible or indiscernible(and the promise of the new – criticalsubjectivity – therein) is alreadypresent within the existing ontology

(for there can be nooutsideof it).8

Heargues that the production ofsubjectivity – of a subject – emergesautonomously at the point wherehuman life demonstrates that it iscapable of supporting a new chain ofaction or of reality; which can onlytake place in response to a chance‘event’ that opens up the possibility of‘something new’. Badiou asserts that acritical practice – indeed the processof subjectivization – requiresattending to those evental momentswhen the incomprehensible orindiscernible momentarily rupturesthe logic of what is already known,and in then sustaining the obliquetrajectory of investigation which is setin flight by such a breach. It is amatter of learning how to tune in tothe virtual wavelength of being that isinaudible or imperceptible to the logicof reason or knowledge and itsubiquitous modes of capture. ForBadiou, the practice of naming (oreven autopoesis) —at an event-site—isthe primary act performed within acritical process of subjectivization.The event is the encounter withsomething unpredictable, whichcannot be comprehended by the termsof the existing ‘situation’.

In Badiou’s terms, ‘situation’ is usedto describe the experience of a givenor presented ‘reality’; the illusionaryunity created by the operation of‘count-as-one’. A situation consists of‘multiple multiplicities’ (or elements)that have been counted as somehow‘belonging’ to or within its structure(as counting-as-one). Once, organized(or captured) through the operation ofcount-as-one, the multiplemultiplicities gathered within itsterms are deemed to be a ‘unifiedpresented’ or ‘consistent’ multiplicity.However, for Badiou there is also the

relationship between a creativepractice and the process ofsubjectivization, where a practice doesnot produce a subject as such, rather

it is through one that the subject is.20

The relationship of practice to anemergent subjectivity is co-existence,the mode of production one ofreciprocity— they produce oneanother simultaneously. These localconfigurations (of both subject andart) present as the faithful butperhaps futile evidence of a genericprocedure underway. The futility ofthe endeavour relates to what Badioudescribes as the aporetic dilemma atthe heart of the truth procedure. Thesubject and its enquiry are only ever apartial (finite) or local configurationof the infinite trajectory of a truth-procedure — the quest is performed infidelity to a truth that they will neverknow (for it is infinite and they areinescapably finite). The truth willalways remain indiscernible, alwaysout of reach, an ‘unfinishable

condition’.21

For Badiou,

([E]very finitepresentation falls underan encyclopedicdeterminant. In thissense, every local state ofa procedure – thus everysubject – being realizedas a finite series of finiteenquiries, is an object ofknowledge […] If thesubject is purely local, itis finite, and even if itsmatter is aleatoric, it isdominated by aknowledge. This is aclassic aporia: that of thefinitude of humanenterprises. A truth aloneis infinite, yet the subjectis not coextensive with

it.22

Subjectivization is the quest of thefaithful who strive to gain access tothe infinite and indiscernible truth ofbeing, whilst also comprehending theimpossibility or fallibility of such anendeavour. The subject (and artpractice) is ‘both the real of theprocedure (the enquiring of the



possibility of a situation existingwithoutthe count-for-one operation,which is understood as a ‘non-unified’or ‘inconsistent multiplicity’, a state ofbeing ‘something’ that remains‘undecidable’ (perhaps even wild). Thethought of this inconsistentmultiplicity cannot be articulated inany direct way because to do so wouldmean to bring it (tamed) within theterms of an existing situation (tobegin to count it as part of thesituation – as part of the one).‘Inconsistent multiplicity’ describesthe state of being stripped bare of itsidentity, presenting as unrecognizablewithin the terms of any single count-as-one structure. The event howeverreveals the ‘truth’ of the existingsituation—the ‘truth’ of theimperceptible inconsistentmultiplicity—and in turn becomes agerminal site or opening for theproduction of ‘new multiples’. The‘new multiple’ or situation—if it isdeveloped through fidelity to the truthof the event – would remainindiscernible within the terms of theexisting situation (or language); itwould emerge Badiou asserts(borrowing from mathematical settheory) as a ‘generic set’ or as‘indiscernibility’.

The challenge then is one ofrecognizing the event as an event, andof deciding how to act (differently) inaccordance. The event must berecognized as an event and named,which Badiou describes as an‘intervention’, the first act of a ‘generictruth procedure’ performed by‘militants’ or the faithful – the‘operator of faithful connection’ – whoact in fidelity to the ‘truths’ revealed

by the event.9

Dutton + Swindells’work has the properties of a ‘generictruth procedure’ in that it is a form ofpraxis based on fidelity to an event,which they describe – partiallyallegorically – as an encounter withthe deer in the woodland, but which inturn might equate to an encounterwith and faith in art’s capacity toproduce the new. In one sense, thework can be understood as theendeavour to produce new multiplesor ‘generic sets’ (art-forms) whichremain indiscernible or

enquiries) and the hypothesis that itsunfinishable result will introduce

some newness into presentation’.23

Without any certainty of everproducing the sought after ‘truth-event’, the artists’ project is a mode ofconviction where the work isperformed blindly in the hope of orbelief in the presence of someindiscernible truth therein. Thecommitment to the ‘generic set’ ortruth procedure is based onconfidence in a ‘future’ or ‘anterior’moment (to-come) where the eruptionof a truth-event or the new willretroactively ‘prove’ the ‘veridity’ ofthe those actions (performed) by the‘faithful’, the indiscernible truthspresent within ‘the enquiring of theenquiry’. Articulated through theterms of an art practice however, atruth procedure also produces thepossibility of surpluses or residuesthat whilst visible to the ‘situation’still do not necessary fit easily within(or remain wild to) the order ofknowledge [Figure 8]. Here, artpresents as a fragment that (inBadiou’s terms) ‘materially declaresthe to-come — because even though itis discernible by knowledge, it is afragment of an indiscernible

trajectory.’24

Whilst the objects orencounters produced within an artpractice are ultimately finiteassemblages that will inevitablybecome absorbed by the encyclopediaof what is known (become part of thecounted-as-one of the situation), ifthey are ‘veridical’—truly part of ageneric truth procedure—they willalso contain ‘something’ indiscernible,something in excess which cannot bewholly described by the language ofthe situation. This perhaps is theblind-spot or even wildness, whichmight not function as an event inBadiou’s terms as such, but mightrather exist as a form of shimmeringiridescence—or ‘perceptual flickering’for Dutton + Swindells—where itbecomes possible to recognizemomentarily the presence ofsomething indiscernible.

Art presents the contradictoryconditions where it is possiblefleetingly to ‘see’ something that isimperceptible or indiscernible, to



incomprehensible within existingmodes of representation andsignification (that operate like anencounter with wildness). The‘generic set’ operates then like a blind-spot. The production of a ‘generic set’or a wholly new assemblage – trueheterogeneity or the blind-spot – is anact necessarily performed blindly, for,as Badiou asserts, the generic set isindiscernible and can only beproduced through an enquiry which is‘entirely aleatory in its trajectory. Theonly empirical evidence in the matteris that the trajectory begins at theborders of the evental site. The rest is

lawless’.10

The task then is one oftrying to produce or force something

that cannot yet be known.11

Dutton +Swindells describe the process oftrying to locate the generic set as oneof ‘testing out combinations of thingsto explore entirely different affects.Then the question becomes one ofwhich of these things is the thing wefind … most truthful […] that is themost unknown, or the least

familiar’.12

The generic set – a newmultiple of an art practice – is thething most truthful, a new situationthat cannot be described by the termsof what is already known. In theseterms then, not only does art presentthe possibility of the rupturing forceof the ‘incomprehensible’ and thepromise of the new, but also the(artists’) endeavour (ofautopoesis andnaming) can in itself be understood asproductive of a radically different oraugmented form of critical being.Here then, the labour of studiopractice is recuperated as havingautonomous critical value, where it isno longer considered as part of ateleological process leading to thecompletion of resolved and namedwork, but rather is in itself aconstitutive act.

Rather than conceiving of theirpractice as being realized throughdiscrete exhibitions or pieces of work,Dutton + Swindells consider theiractivity holistically, as a singularcritical operation that remainsperpetually unfinished and consists ofmany interlocking parts. They namesuch an operation theInstitute of

actually encounter that which is alsobeyond the spectrum of one’scognition. The presence of this latentindiscernibility within the tangibleform of art objects perhaps allows fora form of rupture which—whilst not ofthe order of Badiou’s event—mightproduce its own form of‘interventions’ and ‘faithful operators’,the emergence of a nascent subjectprompted by their aporetic encounterwith a work of art (of simultaneouslyseeing/not seeing). Dutton +Swindells’ practice appears to bemotivated by the conviction or beliefthat art has the capacity to producethe conditions of such encounters(even a form of ‘truth’), equivalent toor approaching the speechless modeof incommunicable proximityexperienced in their encounter withthe deer in the woodland, which theydescribe in terms of aura. In a sense,aura is the ‘name’ that they assign tothe ‘wordless authenticity’ of theoriginary event, which again mightequate perhaps to Badiou’s concept ofinconsistent multiplicity or ‘truth’. InDutton + Swindells’ practice, theattempt to produce a ‘generic set’ ornew multiple seems simultaneous tothe desire to (re)produce theexperience of the originary event orencounter. Badiou suggests that thereis a future anterior moment to thetruth procedure where theindiscernible ‘is finally presented as

the truth of the first situation’.25

Thequestion perhaps remains whetherthis presentation of the truth (of thefirst situation) is in turn an event inits own right. The possibility of thisfuture event produced through thegeneric truth procedure does suggestthat an event can actually be preparedfor. In these terms, the generic truthprocedure operates as the pragmaticproject of making a life, an endeavourthat both emerges from and preparesthe ground for the possibility ofsomething new. Within Dutton +Swindells’ art practice, staying faithfulto the originary event a ‘generic truthprocedure’ also has the capacitytoproduce further events, themomentary – flickering – recognitionof a truly ‘generic set’ (experienced asthe ‘blind-spot’ of an art encounter).This event describes those moments



Beasts. The Institute of Beasts is notthe name of an edifice designed anddefined in advance of use, but ratheran unfolding structure (in the processof being) produced by the activities ofits inhabitants. It is a structure thathouses – or is inhabited by – anexpanding menagerie of divergentstrategies and impulses. Consisting ofa number of small departments – FolkArt, Animals and Art, Freeassociation, Modern art, Music andDrawing, Monkey Nuts, SignPaintings and Sentiments – theInstitute of Beasts is a conceptualframework that Dutton + Swindellsliken to an amalgam of the academyand a zoo. The crossing of these twostructures is a deliberate act ofcollage, where neither can retain norremember the logic of its originarycontext, the guiding principles of itsepistemological framework. All thatremains is a suspicion that someunderpinning organizationalprinciples must exist, the same as forgames played when the rulebook haslong since been lost or abandoned.The Institute’s departments fail tomaintain stability or assert control,for they are resolutely porous andunstable divides that cannot fullydescribe or contain the nature of theresearch activity taking place withintheir borders. Work produced underthe auspices of one department isbrought into the proximity of theactivities of another, forcing thepossibility of cross-departmentalcollaborations. The Institute of Beastsdoes not operate according to anysingular disciplinary logic, but neitherit is a wholly interdisciplinaryendeavour. Rather than trying toproduce a hybrid practice which hasinherited the properties ofbothormany, Dutton + Swindellsinvestigate the point that somethingbegins to shift between one categoryand another; they test the limits of asystem of classification until it isalmost breached and cannot hold. Theartists refuse to remain faithful tosingular disciplinary or departmentaltactics but rather it is through theirunexpected combination that theyhope to create a sense of inconsistencyand contradiction, producing thegerminal conditions whereinsomething indiscernible or

of perceptual flickering when itbecomes possible (for both artists andaudience) to see what cannot be seen,when it is possible to ‘know’ thatsomething indiscernible is beingencountered. The production of theblind-spot re-convinces the faithful(artists), at the same time as being anew form of event for prospectivedisciples, in turn producing thepossibility of a faithful community.Here then, perhaps, within the termsof a truth procedure (taking the formof an art practice) the revelation of thegeneric set also has the capacity to beevental.

Fig.9.Dept. of Celestial MechanicsWall-Installation (in-progress), YASSStudios, Sheffield, July 2010, Dutton +Swindells.

There is a sense of this doublepossibility of event in Dutton +Swindells’ practice: the signature ofan originary moment of rupture andthen the endeavour to produce furtherruptures (or event-ripples). The firstevent produces the incentive to act—or believe—whilst the endeavour oftrying to produce subsequent events isborn of a desire to be furtherconvinced (and to convince others).Here, Dutton + Swindells face theirultimate challenge, for the workrequires its disciples, its ownoperators of the faithful connectionwho are willing to open themselves tothe possibility of the indiscernibletruth — the possibility of the event —present within an art practice. Theaudience (to-come) must have faith inart’s capacity to produce theunexpected, the possibility ofsomething unknown or truly wild. We— as the potential audience — arecalled to bear witness to the artists’attempts at conjuring something new,



unrecognizable might arise.

Fig.1. Dutton + Swindells, StudioProduction, Ssamzie Art SpaceStudios, Seoul, February 2008.Courtesy of the artists.

Dutton + Swindells’ practice takes theform of a series of lengthy andindefinite stages or processes, whichare forever changing and mercurial.Resultingworks are the residue ofsuch an endeavour, however, it is thetactics themselves that constitute thework, the artists’ faithful operation.For Dutton + Swindells, the space ofthe studio – which is in turn extendedto the space of the residency – is thesite of practice wherein a ‘generictruth procedure’ is played out. Thehabitually unseen activity of artisticpractice operates analogously toBadiou’s ‘generic truth procedure’ or‘the enquiring of the enquiry’, wherewhat is subsequently made visiblethrough exhibition is perhaps thatwhich is deemed most ‘truthful’ by theartists. This relationship between the‘enquiry’ and its residue can bewitnessed in the documentation ofDutton + Swindells’ residency atSsamzie Art Space [Figure 1]. Theoperational phases of activity aremarked by their formlessness as theartists assemble, reassemble, combineand recombine innumerable elementsin the hope of somehow rupturing thecount-as-one coherence of thesituation, of producing theunexpected anomaly of something‘indiscernible’. Familiar forms areworried until they begin to breakdown and recombine differently.Incongruent components are slowlyreduced to exquisite distillations,unruly half-forms. Half-finishedassemblages, strewn floors and walls,the scattered debris of past

something unlike. In return, we areasked to believe, to hold back ourdesire to measure or tame thatexperience by the terms of what wealready know, but rather to conceiveof new names, new languages throughwhich to speak of our collectiveencounters. In these terms, artpresents as the provocation for newenquiries, new truth proceduresoperated by the new faithful. Here,the opening of the new or wild is notso much the perceptible breach orpuncture of the habitual or alreadyknown (of virtuality rupturingactuality) but rather it describes anoblique trajectory of an indiscernible— and perhaps collective — operationperpetually performed at the cusp of agiven situation (along the shimmeringmargins where virtuality and actualityintersect); imperceptible movestowards the incomprehensible wild.

1 Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells,‘Writing Encounters: “Institute ofBeasts” (2008)’, in Journal of Writingin Creative Practice, 2:1 July 2009, p.124. This article has been developedfollowing an extended interviewprocess conducted with the artists(2007 – 2010). I would like to thankSteve Dutton and Steve Swindells forthe provocation offered by their workand our conversations around it. Iwould also like to thank SimonO’Sullivan for his timelyrecommendations and critical advice.

2 The article will explore the ‘event’ asan unexpected encounter withsomething ‘wild’, where the term‘wild’ designates that which cannot befully comprehended or recognized,through existing language.

3 Dutton + Swindells’conceptualization of the ‘event’ in thefirst instance does not explicitlyreference Badiou’s philosophicalwriting, rather, it istheimplicitconnections andresonances between these twoaccounts that this article takes as itsbasis.



experiments abandoned or pausedpart way through. Nascent activitycannot be differentiated from thatwhich has already collapsed orbecome entropic; emergent formsremain indistinguishable from thosealready in ruins. Within this process,certain formulations stay or becomerefined whilst others are erased, sweptaway, forgotten. Badiou describes thevarious combinations submitted toenquiry by the ‘subject’ within a givenmoment of the generic procedure as

the ‘matter of the subject’.13

Dutton +Swindells identify their ‘matter’through a form of endlessexperimentation, the perpetualcreation of situations to which theyadd new or unruly elements in orderto attempt to rupture its status ascount-as-one. The task becomes oneof trying to locate the ‘generic set’ thatcannot be counted-as-one (or perhapsremains wild) within the terms of theexisting situation.

Fig.2. Dutton + Swindells, Installationwith Lovebirds, Ssamzie Art SpaceStudios, Seoul, March 2008, Imagecourtesy of the artists.

Eventually, what is left behind in theSsamzie Art Space included a pair ofinverted photographs of twolovebirds; a birdcage containing thesame; a platform or mat cut from pinkPerspex upon which the birdcagestood, based on a wall-drawing that inturn quoted the infamous SymbioneseLiberation Army’s revolutionaryslogan, ‘Death to the fascist insect thatpreys on the life of the people’. A flashanimation in the corner offered aslowly revolving multi-facetedcrystalline ‘head’ orbited by threespinning peanut-shaped satellites,against the backdrop of a changingspectrum of flat colour. The animation

4 Email correspondence with SteveSwindells (6 September 2010). ForDutton + Swindells, the studio is notseen as a stable base but rather anomadic structure, where theirpractice develops in ‘batches’determined by the specific context ofeach space.

5 See Emma Cocker, ‘Beyond Belief -In Conversation with Ben Judd’,inSomething and Nothing,soanyway,Summer 2010,http://www.soanyway.org.uk/benjudd.htm

Accessed 18 September 2010.

6 ‘Singular love’ is a specific exampleof event given by Alain Badiou inBeing and Event, translated by O.Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005),p. 393.

7 Steve Dutton, in At the Margins ofIntelligibility – Emma Cocker inConversation with Steve Dutton andSteve Swindells, 2008-9, unpublishedinterview.

8 See also Michael Hardt and AntonioNegri, Empire (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000).

9 Badiou outlines this process in hissection, ‘Subjectivization:Intervention and Operator of FaithfulConnection’ in Being and Event, pp.392–394.

10 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 394.

11 Badiou gives an account of thepractice of forcing in the section,“Veracity and Truth from theStandpoint of the Faithful Procedure:Forcing”, in Being and Event, p. 400.

12 Steve Dutton, At the Margins ofIntelligibility - Emma Cocker inConversation with Steve Dutton andSteve Swindells, 2008-9,unpublished.


14 Dutton + Swindells’ statement.http://steve-dutton.co.uk Accessed 18September 2010.



was accompanied by a soundtrackthat consisted of the script of TheExorcist read by a computerized voiceand sped up 2000 times to the pitchof twittering birds [Figure 2]. Afurther animation brought togetherthe textual results of free associationexercises performed as part of theresidency – a series of words,randomly appearing with no apparentmeans of connection. Elsewhere, agathering of giant ceramic monkeynuts rested on a shallow plinth, whilston a bed of straw on the floor twoneon signs flashed on and off,nolens/volens. In one sense, it isimpossible to describe any singular orindividual piece of work by the artists,for their work is the event of variouscombinations of elements, the fleetinginstant of momentary stillness withina never-ending permutational chain ofpossibilities. Description of thevarious elements of their workinevitably slips towards thecharacteristics of a list (ofingredients), spell-like: a pair oflovebirds bring the enigma of thesingular-double bind; liquid languagehovering at the limit of legibility; abear mask (threadbare, worn);embarrassing revelations let slip;livestock (indifferent, beyondaffection); a twittering sound; theslogans of revolution (failed,forgotten, misplaced); a baroqueflourish; acrid pink and shinypolymer, the beat of a pulse.

The residency itself resulted less in asense of resolved work (which mightbecome portable commodities ortouring works), but rather was used asa specific situational context whereinto pursue and test a number ofpossible tactical combinations, in thehope of producing the event of anencounter with something wild. Theidentification of specific tacticsdeveloped within the context of asingular residency or the space of thestudio, fails to ever accumulate into acoherent sense of method, for withinthis endeavour there can be noretracing of steps. The unexpected orindiscernible is necessarilyunpredictable and must be stumbledupon. New forms of operating areprovoked into being through theencounter with a situation unlike what

15 Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells,‘Writing Encounters: “Institute ofBeasts” (2008)’, in Journal of Writingin Creative Practice, 2:1 July 2009, p.120.



18 For Badiou, the subject is ‘any localconfiguration of a generic procedurefrom which a truth is supported’,2005, p. 391.


20 For Badiou, ‘the subject is“between” the terms that theprocedure groups together’, Badiou,Being and Event, p. 396. In theseterms, the subject is neither theproduct of an art practice, nor an artpractice the product of a subject butrather both are intertwined.








has come before. Each situationrequires its own approach. The artists’enquiry thus remains willfullyerrant,a little blind.It requires a modeof playfulness, voluntary submissionto the capricious rules of chance.However, for Dutton + Swindells, theoperation of chance does not call for arandom or arbitrary approach to themaking of work. Indeed, it is possibleto identify an arsenal of recurringstrategies (the praxis or technologiesof forcing) – including the tactics ofinversion, rotation, free-association,doubling – and a particular repertoryof rhetorical tropes and motifs thatare intermittently brought into play.Particular attention is given over tothe resurrection of emblems orsignatures from within historicalmoments of failed revolution,resistance or even utopianism;doomed projects fueled by the desireto rewrite or re-conceptualize realityas something different to how thingsalready are. Dutton + Swindells siftthrough the fallen ruins of modernistarchitecture or the faded andforgotten slogans of politicalradicalism, in search of unfulfilledproposals, inflammatory manifestoes,impossible visions of a future (nowpast). Such references exist at thelevel of the work’s buried archaeology,a densely layered palimpsest whoseintricate inscriptions are only half-legible but which remain presentnonetheless. The artists’ intent is notto resurrect the cause or specificity ofthe revolutionary’s plight, rather toexcavate a sense of the complexaporetic quality of the deflatedrevolutionary promise, thecoexistence or simultaneity ofconflicting residual affects therein.The failed moments and monumentsof the past are ambivalent sites ofcontradiction and (im)potency;equally charged and depleted of powerlike the refusal suspended forever atthe point where it begins to yield oracquiesce.

The presence of contradiction – ofpotency and impotency, for example –does not lead towards neutralityhowever, nor cause meaning tofluctuate only between the terms ofeither/or. Instead, it is used to createa kind of impasse or barricade against



which comprehension stumbles andcannot move beyond. Inconsistenciesand contradictions are purposefullyproduced by the artists as a way ofattempting to prevent a situation frompresenting as a ‘consistent’ or ‘unified’multiplicity, in order to thwart theoperation of ‘count-as-one’. Theartists assert that, ‘Contradictions area means to an end; united by a senseof expectation and delay of resolution.In turn, this delay allows something tobe understood differently, indeed, itallows the very concept ofunderstanding to be understood

differently’.14

Willful inconsistencybecomes a way of resisting or rejectingconsistency as the desirable paradigm.It reveals the inadequacy or fallacy ofexisting systems of classification orrepresentation, whilst simultaneouslyattempting to rupture such systems inthe pursuit of something new orindiscernible within its terms.Contradiction describes a mode ofrestlessness, of being critical of orfrustrated with existing options; ofrelentlessly searching for or trying toproduce some other way of adequatelydescribing the experience of being,some other ‘name’. It forces astammering or flickering in the pathof understanding’s procedural flight,blocking the possibility of smoothassimilation into an existingcategorical order. Contradictionsrender knowledge impotent,powerless and unable to perform.Impotency, in turn, makes thingsvulnerable, defenseless – a littletender. Meanings flail, become flaccidand unable to hold their shape orform. Impotency, then, has a doublefunction: it renders things formlessbut also produces a molten state outof which new forms might arise – itbreaks things down but also leavesthemopen.

Dutton + Swindells use impotency asa strategy of disempowerment, orrather as a way of discharging orexorcising forms of power that havedeveloped through establishedhierarchies of value and existingsystems of belief, in order to createspace within which something elsemight emerge. Impotency, then,becomes the terrain upon which new



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forces are called into being, for thatwhich is impotent also possesses atremendous latent charge. It wishesintensely for a potency that it islacking, its absence fuels a desire, apowerful longing for. Here perhaps, itis possible to gain a glimpse of a nowobsolete conception of impotency,where it is defined by its lack of self-restraint, even a kind of wildness. Theimpotent thus becomes curiouslylibidinal, ungovernable. Preventedfrom ever fully actualizing its desiresand attaining visible power,impotency remains a form of desert –or wilderness – and yet also the ever-hopeful plane of possibility fromwithin which fledgling forms arecoaxed shimmering—like mirages—tothe brink of being. However, by failingto perform, impotency falls beneaththe radar of what is valued by aculture driven by goal-orientedproductivity and outcome-basedsuccess. In turn, that which isperceived as powerless can become ablind-spot: invisible, exempted orignored. Impotency thus emerges as amode of stealth or clandestineoperation; where it begins toapproach a mode of indiscernibilityperhaps not altogether unlikeBadiou’s ‘inconsistent multiplicity’.Here, Dutton + Swindells’ work can beseen as the attempt to make visiblethe ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ that isthe impotent or imperceptible state ofbeing without the operation ofBadiou’s ‘count-as-one’: being withouta proper name. They attempt to stripthe situations’ elements of theirspecific identity (within the habitualorder of things) in order that they arelaid bare or rendered impotent. Theartists attempt this through theconstant reorganization (division orseparation) of the situation throughdifferent frames of reference in orderto produce different affects.

moves towards the incomprehensible wild[1]

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