Bedlands, Nonsites, and Unreal Realities
December 2024
Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. [Deleuze, Guattari, p.271].
Fictioning is commonplace in literature, but rarely activated within actual, empirical experiences – not since animism (in its traditional definition) was outgrown. Although reality seems fixed, what if it was intentionally – and frequently – reimagined? What if the world, with its familiar contours and habitual meanings, could be speculated, remade, or unravelled into something strange, new, and inaccurate?
Mythologising might be a better name; there is a level of passivity to this elusive process by which reality can be stretched and rewoven. To mythologise is to participate in the world differently: to see the edges where it frays, the gaps through which the unreal may bleed, and the possibilities these openings hold.
Speculative thought – particularly Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysics – sees relational theory become a kind of magic, out of which a mythologising may emerge – a mode of both existence and aesthetic practice; to undo and redo, make sense and make nonsense. It calls forth new modes of being and new relations, enacting a ‘mythopoesis’ (as in Simon O’Sullivan’s use of the word: ‘a sense of collective enunciation’ which leads to ‘a concomitant disruption of the more dominant fiction of the self’).[1]In relation to art practices this may prove useful, as a method of reasoning with what we have and what might be missing.
So we’ll take a brief journey – through the bedlands, nonsites, and unreal realities: three fictive sites where a mythologising may occur within an artist’s practice. The hypothesising of these ‘sites’ are not simply tests in theory, but acts of mythologising in themselves; imaginary and ongoing, they ask: what new realities might we summon if we were compelled to imagine the unreal?
1. Deleuzian magic:
a. relationality
Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus proposes reality as rhizomatic rather than dichotomous and hierarchical. It is a decentred network of connections that resists linearity, instead emphasising the dynamic relations between heterogeneous elements to form temporary assemblages. Implicit in this metaphor, is the notion that reality is a multiplicity, as are the things within it: individuals, experiences, and the unconscious. A relational ontology is hence affirmed, where being is always in process and defined by its connections.
The metaphysics of a relational ontology recognises a reality wherein distinctions between the subject and object are dissolved, and where the human and non-human (lands, peoples, animals, and objects) exist on equal ontological footing upon a flat plane.[2] Rousing an animism similar to that put by Isabelle Stengers – where the essentialmode in the world is in recognising a dynamic web of relationships – the world becomes alive rather than dead at the stems of binary distinctions.[3]This is a resistance: to the immobile, the fixed, and the harnesses that bind beings to a place and an individuation.
b. modes of participation
This understanding of reality materialises a mode of participation: a becoming (how one entity relates to, evolves, or coexists with another in a non-static way) embodied by a ‘sorcerer’.[4] This could be someone or something. It is a process, not an identity – a total manifestation of reality. It is to be(come), engage with, and facilitate:
1. multiplicities (not attempting to unify them, but intensifying their relations) [5]
2. anomalous forces at boundaries and thresholds (which draw you into new relations, temporary assemblages, and movements) [6]
3. and haecceities (moments of a ‘thisness’defined by spatiotemporal strata; they consist of a capacity to affect and be affected). [7]
Sorcery is a kind of weather or weather report; forces come together randomly to create a vibrating ‘state’ of atmosphere. Moments, happenings, assemblages. Reportage is analogous to a spell – a summoning – in which one follows lines of flight (imagining) to become intense and imperceptible (morphic, aetheric). This is a magical or metaphysical mode of being. It is engagement and participation; a disembodying and rebodying, a deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Being participatory means being as animated as the space around us.
A mythologising is hence an occurrence; moments, whether in empirical experiences or active practices, that have both been affected by and still actively affectreality. It is the animist’s ‘original magical unity’, something fundamentally inherent, yet persists as a future-orientated reminder that gestures towards imminent possibilities.[8] It is emerging right now. It is always emerging right now. And this too, is a resistance: to the present, the known, and the ‘real’.
c. hesitating, fictioning, imagining
Where a flat ontology dissolves boundaries between matter and non-matter (i.e. consciousness and the imagination), the unreal can be considered part of reality itself. Fictioning and worlding are therefore acts woven into the fabric of empirical experience; they allow reality to become animated.
Mythologising could be the pause or hesitation during which, experiences – and creative practices alike – reclaim the animist mode and transcend foreordained dispositions and understandings of the world.[9]It is a willingness to fiction, undo, and imagine.
Pause – hesitate.
2. Sites of mythologising:
Three mythological sites can be visited in a manner of a passage, emblematic of the process of creating. However, knowing them as well as I do, they certainly welcome overlap and will greatly benefit from a speculative imagination.
Beginning in the (multiplicious) world itself, we may encounter a moment of intensity or a haecceity: this might be called a ‘bedland’. Further on, acts of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation may occur within the studio to create what Robert Smithson calls a ‘nonsite’. A final espousal of fiction and reality then culminates in an artwork which, given the implication of a flat ontology, can be considered an ‘unreal reality’.
Consider this passage as speculative; allow it to perform a
fictioning – a mythologising.
a. Bedlands
Weather report from a bedland: 56.7523960, -4.9599970 2
°C 15:09:36
I am being pulled down—very slowly, it seems— but it hasn’t been happening for long and I am nearly on my knees, so that’s that.
My fingers are solid now because of the cold. They have always been solid. Especially solid.
There might’ve been a question of how it all began. I can’t remember.
And a puddle is almost touching the tips of my shoes
growing bigger, bigger still.
The edges have disappeared, or sunk, or something-
I can feel a warming swarming buzz and hum of things mixing together underneath somewhere in the middle all around, and all I can tell is that it’s today and I am imperceptible.
I am being pulled down—very slowly, it seems— but it hasn’t been happening for long and I am nearly on my knees, so that’s that.
My fingers are solid now because of the cold. They have always been solid. Especially solid.
There might’ve been a question of how it all began. I can’t remember.
And a puddle is almost touching the tips of my shoes
growing bigger, bigger still.
The edges have disappeared, or sunk, or something-
I can feel a warming swarming buzz and hum of things mixing together underneath somewhere in the middle all around, and all I can tell is that it’s today and I am imperceptible.
A bedland is not quite a place, but a space: temporal as much as it is geographical. It is somewhere where forces and intensities (which make up the stratification of the rhizome) pile up and expel themselves, perhaps onto (or into) a visitor. It is where the unconscious of matter (because without subject-object distinctions, matter can exist unconsciously) might reside or call forth an unconscious experience. It is a kind of total haecceity, because a haecceity is a multiplicity which consists of a capacity to affect and be affected. What is in the bedland, or what encounters it, therefore makes up the bedland. However, this place isn’t any ordinary fragment of reality. Something happened here, or is happening here, that gives it an anomalous attribute.
This might be described more effectively through a storyteller’s words, because bedlands often occur in stories. Take to Halldór Laxness’ ‘Independent People’ in which his main character finds his wife half-submerged in the ground, unconscious, having potentially followed or been conjured by a ghost named Gunnvör, who – rumour has it – resides at the same location.[10]We never learn the truth, whether something within her raised her toward this weathered bed, or whether she had been kidnapped. But the word of a ghost, regardless, signifies that temporal traces – both fictive and real – arrange into potential happenings within a relational, magical world. Whatever led her to this bedland, has nothing to do with reason, but something to do with everything that exists in both the ‘reality’ and the ‘unreality’ of the space, every force within an assemblage, or within the wider world.
Whatever resides in a location – in the past or present, or in the imagination of its inhabitants – makes up a residual power, which informs what Gilbert Simondon describes as ‘privileged points’. A ‘magical landscape’ (or relational space) is doubled in its territorial mapping, quantified both spatially and temporally. Although matter is ontologically-equal, privileged moments arise to form a singularity: ‘points of exchange between the being and milieu’. A bedland is a privileged point, ‘a place that has a power’, which ‘draws into itself all the force and efficacy of the domain it delimits.’[11]These points are ‘foregrounded from a background’[12]and encompass a mass of reality:
…just as the most impenetrable
part of the wood is where all its reality resides.
The magical world is in this way made of a network of places and things that have a power and are bound to other things and other places that also have a power. [13]
The magical world is in this way made of a network of places and things that have a power and are bound to other things and other places that also have a power. [13]
Boundaries, borders, thresholds, and traces sink away. It is not a place, which is familiar, mapped, and structured, it is a space, which is fuzzy, abstract, and oneiric. Endowed as a haecceity, it is a multiplicity within which a becoming can occur, perhaps unwillingly. It is a kind of portal between ‘human and world’, a ‘passage between two realities’.[14]
You might come across a bedland on a walk, in lands haunted by the past or crowned by prehistoric stones. It might be in the city, or in a dream. You could let it perform in front of you, or you could participate through sorcery. At the very least, ‘a hesitation, or pause’ is encouraged, as this ‘allows other times to be ‘accessed’’.[15]
b. Nonsites
Weather report from a nonsite: 55.8690116, -4.2644850 21°C 18:16:21
1. water is still on my shoes
2. I filled up a body of water
(it was a large sheet of pvc which was superglued to create a bag. I filled up this bag with water - from the tap, not from the same source as the water on my shoes. It would be impractical to carry that back)
3. when I was trying to make the body of water sit up it kept slipping down – strange floor island
4. I picked it up and jerked it down to make it stay. It was like moving terrain but of course it was not terrain, it is water.
5. movements, even when performed in secret, can be symbolic.
6. earlier I was in front of a big puddle. I never moved that puddle, but I did when I sat my body of water down. They are the same.
7. if the puddle was poured into a bag of water it would become an island too
8.but it is here, it is mythopoesis, it is this and that island, this and that water
More strategies will come now. Ways water can move and disperse and so forth.
1. water is still on my shoes
2. I filled up a body of water
(it was a large sheet of pvc which was superglued to create a bag. I filled up this bag with water - from the tap, not from the same source as the water on my shoes. It would be impractical to carry that back)
3. when I was trying to make the body of water sit up it kept slipping down – strange floor island
4. I picked it up and jerked it down to make it stay. It was like moving terrain but of course it was not terrain, it is water.
5. movements, even when performed in secret, can be symbolic.
6. earlier I was in front of a big puddle. I never moved that puddle, but I did when I sat my body of water down. They are the same.
7. if the puddle was poured into a bag of water it would become an island too
8.but it is here, it is mythopoesis, it is this and that island, this and that water
More strategies will come now. Ways water can move and disperse and so forth.
Coined by the artist Robert Smithson, the term nonsite usually refers to an artwork in which materials from specific, often remote landscapes (sites) are re-contextualised within a gallery (nonsite). Rather than forming a representational ‘logical two-dimensional picture’, the nonsite is a displacement of matter, a ‘three-dimensional logical picture’ that is ‘abstract yet represents an actual site.’[16]The actual site is never fully present in the gallery but becomes a metaphor between ‘the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas.’ Smithson believed that in lacking logic, expressive art was not truly abstract, but abstraction is derived from semiotic metaphors, ‘free of natural or realistic expressive content’. Within this metaphor – and departure from the real – a mythologisingoccurs:
Between the actual site … and The
Nonsite itself, exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could be that
“travel” in this space is a vast metaphor. Everything between the two sites
could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and
realistic assumptions. [17]
The viewer’s trip to this non-site would be an act of fabulation, fictioning, and potentially an empirical animist experience.
Emphasising the agency of matter, the act of displacement within the nonsite relates to the sorcerer’s deterritorialization and reterritorialization, in which one embodies relationality through bending intensities and assemblages, dissolving distances. Considering the continuous-state of a studio as a nonsite reamplifies this act of mythologising. Dissolved boundaries yield to a worlding: a specific engagement with experience to produce a space of constant processual emergence. Through ongoing interactions, it is never fully present but always in a becoming, of being made and remade.[18]
As a site to form and deform assemblages between material relations, rather than create stark place-representations, the studio could be considered a space of becoming, a nonsite which makes room for new relations and mythic spaces. This decentralises both the flight from world to making (where objects are typically defined by what they should be), and the distinction between a work and its maker.
Perhaps the nonsite could be considered as a privileged point. Embodying reality as an active verb through such generative becomings and worldings may lead to moments in the studio in which objects, assemblages, or spaces, draw forces and intensities into itself. A significant question here is whether these forces are from an original site, or new and borne of the studio. Does it become a point of exchange or a portal like that of a bedland? Or does it inevitably consist of enough structure to be distinguished from such a fuzzy reality?
Operative as a site of mythologising, the nonsite entails a space of potentiality and sorcery; to keep it fed, intense, and impelling rather than static and constricted, might be the way to answer these questions.
c. Unreal
Realities
Weather report from an unreal reality: 50.6274862, -3.666340 10°C 08:59:12
Here, inside, there is a teeming vibration coming from a corner of linen—intense.
A pulling, so it murmurs. This place is barren, desolate, drifting still.
<Can wind swarm, seethe, surge, and seep from afar>
Here, outside, the surface stretches and opens, its weight pressing on my movement, I do not move.
Something else is humming, interfacing.
Now everywhere all the time. Weighted interference, realming, overlapping,
calling each other into being: the seen, the felt, the imagined. Around the corner is there
anomalous and abounding; this dimension stretched to ours, summons ours, and is here now.real time
An unreal reality is a kind of threshold or opening in which an imagination, metaphysicality, or ‘function of unreality’ is regarded as real through a new kind of materiality. It is ‘real’ to the degree that we see it as real, treat it as real, and allow it to act as real. Anything that instinctively reflects the unreal could be considered an unreal reality, a painting for example.
Arguing for the semantic reality of the imagination, Gaston Bachelard’s precursory materialism compliments a reading of Deleuzian magic in its metaphysical weight. It is his fundamental assertion that matter is metaphysical and intertwined with consciousness: ‘[reverie] gives us a cosmos and assumes the whole universe in its images’; it leads to a level of ‘inductive magic’ in its poetic application. The semantic properties of language ‘cannot be separated from physical properties’ in so far as language itself embodies a metaphysicality of the matter it describes. If a poem speaks on a stream, the water exists – in some form – in its language.
Language is an entity capable of mythologising. Writingsummons, casts spells, and realizes a becoming through its material imagination. The writer, and surely the reader too, is a sorcerer, as Deleuze told us. It is a ‘demiurgic activity’ that, following an acceptance of a relational ontology, must be as much the work of nature as it is the work of man.[19]
Given ontological equality, the unreal develops its own haecceity and reality. Painting is no different; it too contains a power of inductive magic that realizes the unreal. Vija Celmins perhaps describes this best:
… to make a work that was
multidimensional and that went back and forth in space, yet remained what it
was: a small, concentrated area that was essentially flat…
I thought of painting as building a dense and multileveled structure. … you could say that it alludes to a denser experience of life. You have to reimagine it in other terms, which is lead, paper, paint and canvas. [20]
I thought of painting as building a dense and multileveled structure. … you could say that it alludes to a denser experience of life. You have to reimagine it in other terms, which is lead, paper, paint and canvas. [20]
This sense of density and stratification also hinders upon Simondon’s privileged point, perhaps even a bedland. Like the forest in which all reality resides, a painting contains intensities and forces from both real (the medium) and unreal (the holistic image) dimensions. It encloses its own reality, haecceity, and a very special, but altogether interdiscernable kind of space: neither geographical nor temporal, but something else entirely. And yet, it still consists of its own agency no less than that of something fixed, tangible, and logical. An unreal reality might therefore be a privileged point, and a privileged point might be unreal, but the two are not synonymous every time.
However, if it were: think of an unreal reality as something which radiates from the centre and contains within its smallness the potentialities of immense expansion. In concentrating both the past and the present (as well as the whole world) in its surface, it will be open to a kind of becoming.
In this notion of fictioning, and this particular site of mythologising, a rationale emerges in relation to how we experience and interact with reality. Assembling unreal realities is a way of calling forth new modes of beings, that are (theoretically) possibilities of nature. They permit a position of magical speculation that is animist, and accordingly intrinsic in the ontological nature of human consciousness. In dissolving the authoritarian limits of perception, participation, and empiricism, a sensitive imagination can arise that has been long suppressed by static and binary structures of modern thought.
3. Epilogue
A mythologisedworld might be less about answers than invitations – to hesitate, fiction, and wander where reality frays. This essay is not a conclusion but a spell, cast not to finish but to perpetuate: a worlding, always emerging, always unreal, and always ready to be summoned again.
To imagine is therefore
to encounter…
[21]
[1]Simon O’Sullivan, ‘Mythopoesis or Fiction as Mode of Existence: Three Case Studies from Contemporary Art’, Visual Culture in Britain, (2017). DOI: 10.1080/14714787.2017.1355746.
[2] In later developments of speculative thought this has been re-established as a ‘flat ontology’. See Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, a branch of ‘Speculative Realism’.
[3]Isabelle Stengers, ‘Reclaiming Animism’, E-Flux Journal, Issue #36, July 2012), <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/>.
[4] Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, p. 264.
[5]Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, p. 239.
[6]Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, p. 268.
[7]Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, p. 290.
[8]Gilbert Simondon, On The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. N. Mellamphy, D. Mellamphy, and N.B. Mellamphy in Deleuze Studies 5:3, (2011), p. 408.
[9]Simon O’Sullivan, ‘Myth-science as residual culture and magical thinking’, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, (2018), p. 4.
[10]Halldór Laxness, Independent People, trans. by J. A. Thompson (London: Vintage Books, 1946), p. 51.
[11] Gilbert Simondon, p. 412.
[12]David Burrows, Simon O’Sullivan, Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), p. 89.
[13]Simondon, p. 412.
[14] Burrows, O’Sullivan, p. 90.
[15] Burrows, O’Sullivan, p. 91.
[16]Robert Smithson, ‘A Provisional Theory of Nonsites’ (1968) in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. by Jack Flam (University of California Press, 1996), p. 364.
[17] Smithson, ‘A Provisional Theory of Nonsites’, p. 364.
[18]Helen Palmer, Vicky Hunter, ‘Worlding’, New Materialism, 16 March 2018 <https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/w/worlding.html> [accessed 16 August 2024].
[19]Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, ed. by Colette Gaudin (Spring Publications, 1971), pp. xxxix-liii.
[20]Vija Celmins, ‘In Conversation’ with Chuck Close (1992), Documents of Contemporary Art: Painting, (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), p. 85.
[21] Bachelard, p. xlii.