The question we must now ask, and it is the condition of a polit-ical art practice, is what is a sensation? For Deleuze and Guattari it involves composing lines and colours, an activity they usually fi nd in painting. Here we fi nd the full scope of our problem, because given that Deleuze and Guattari predominantly dis-cuss visual art in terms of colour and painting, how can this be understood in relation to contemporary art – precisely art after Minimalism and Conceptual art – where neither colour nor painting are important concerns? To answer this question we must return to What Is Philosophy? in order to extend Deleuze
and Guattari’s concept of ‘sensation’ across the break with painting achieved by Minimalism and Conceptual art.
Deleuze and Guattari are formalists fi rst of all: ‘Composition is the sole defi nition of art’ (1994, p. 191). Art composes mater-ial expressions – sensations – of differenciating forces, and so it is a formalism of forces, a forming of abstract and yet material movements or vibrations into an individuating sensation. Here art becomes indiscernible from Nature as a process that con-tracts, or ‘contemplates’, the movements composing it, and by which it is composed ‘with other sensations that contract it in turn’ (1994, p. 212). Art constructs sensations that express the becoming of the world. ‘We become Universes. Becoming ani-mal, plant, molecular, becoming zero’ (1994, p. 169). In Nature-Art the ‘Thought-brain’ becomes subject in inhuman sensations (1994, p. 210). This brain is a ‘ “true form” as Ruyer defi ned it:
neither Gestalt nor a perceived form but a form in itself ’ (1994, p. 210). This form ‘remains copresent to all its determinations without proximity or distance, traverses them at infi nite speed, without limit-speed, and makes of them so many inseparable vari-ations on which it confers an equipotentiality without confusion’
(1994, p. 210). Sensation turns this ‘true form’ into a quality, a material expression of a plane of composition. This aesthetic event expresses its real conditions, conditions that defi ne an experience’s genesis and not its conditions of possible experi-ence. These real conditions are expressed in sensation’s trajectory beyond the phenomeno-logical. ‘Trajectories constituted within a fi eld of forces proceed through resolution of tensions acting step by step [. . . as] a survey of the entire fi eld. This is what Gestalt theory does not explain’ (1994, p. 209). This plane of composition and the sensation that surveys its fi eld enables art to ‘create the fi nite that restores the infi nite’ (1994, p. 197). These asubjective individuations (sensations) are events that convulse the force fi eld, the Thought-brain, at once expressing and constructing the infi nite movement of this living, material and inorganic Nature. In this sense, Éric Alliez writes, ‘art opens onto cosmic-forces it both contracts and modulates’ (Alliez, 2004, p. 75).16
Despite this sounding very far from the concerns of contem-porary art, it in fact outlines an ontology of art which has the
Deleuze, Guattari, and Contemporary Art 185 avant-garde at its core. For Deleuze and Guattari art is always immanent with life. ‘Perhaps art begins with the animal’, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, the becoming-animal of the (avant-garde) artist whose ‘expressiveness is already diffused in life’ (1994, p. 183). This animal-artist ‘becomes constructive’
by celebrating qualities ‘before extracting new causalities and fi nalities from them’ (1994, p. 84). Art is here a question of ‘nat-ural technique’ (1994, p. 185) where ‘it is always a matter of free-ing life wherever it is imprisoned’ (1994, p. 171). This political dimension to art is at once personal and social, at once singular and cosmic. ‘It is a question only of ourselves, here and now;
but what is animal, vegetable, mineral, or human in us is now indistinct – even though we ourselves will especially acquire dis-tinction. The maximum determination comes from this bloc of neighborhood like a fl ash’ (1994, p. 174). Art is neighbourhood politics, and as we’ll see it involves building houses. But it does so entirely on its own terms, because art only ever constructs social housing through a sensation. It remains to be seen what form this sensation could take in contemporary art.
This question rings all the louder given Deleuze and Guattari’s formalism, and an unapologetic commitment to
‘Modernism’ that implies the uncomfortable return to a trad-ition whose rejection could almost be thought of as the foun-dational moment of contemporary art practice. Minimalism and Conceptual art are both vituperous in this sense. As good modernists however, Deleuze and Guattari’s avowed taste in art more or less ends with their rejection of the ‘ “fl atbed” plane’
(1994, p. 198), a term that refers to the proto-postmodern style of Rauschenburg, and its horizontal organization of readymade information.17 Deleuze’s claim that Greenberg and Fried ‘took the analysis of abstract expressionism very far’ refl ects his and Guattari’s interest in both Pollock, and the Americans’ reading of his work (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, pp. 646–7), an inter-est that goes as far as to claim that the Americans’ ‘creation of a purely optical space’ – a space Deleuze and Guattari deny – was simply ‘a quarrel over words, an ambiguity of words’ (Deleuze, 2003, pp. 106–7). This very sympathetic reading refl ects Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in Greenberg’s connection of
Kant’s immanent critique to the sublime in modern painting.
Deleuze and Guattari make this connection a foundation of the sensation, which emerges in a qualitative infi nity – fl ash – exceeding all transcendental faculties of possible experience, whether objective or subjective. But Deleuze and Guattari read the sublime through a Nietzschean fi lter that removes its romanticism, making of sensation the overcoming of the self in an emergence of a new life – and even of a living Nature – that is utterly inhuman.18 At this point they leave the Americans, and their version of Kant, inasmuch as art no longer has any-thing to do with redemption.
Modernism, for Deleuze and Guattari, involves an aesthetic auto-critique that explodes the form of the human subject in launching experience on a trajectory through the cosmic force-fi eld.19 On this trajectory there is no construction with-out destruction, and the modernist artist has become ‘the cos-mic artisan: a home-made atom bomb’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 377). This sublime explosion is how art begins its work of social production. Deleuze and Guattari’s differences from the Constructivists become clear here, because although they share a desire to turn art revolutionary, this will involve making life into art rather than the other way around.20 This is not the same as making Proletarian art, which required, according to the Constructivists, the rejection of both Nature and the auton-omy of art. In this sense Constructivism rejects the political pos-sibilities of art work for Deleuze and Guattari, which rests on its autonomous expression of Nature in visions ‘which have no other subject or object but themselves’ (1994, p. 171).
This inhuman trajectory of art and politics frames Deleuze’s explicit embrace of the avant-garde: ‘There is’, he says, ‘no other aesthetic problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 293). But this embrace of the avant-garde seeks to avoid both the Duchampian reduction of art to a sign of its own concept, and Constructivism’s refusal of any autonomy to art within industrial production. This is the beginning of a genealogy of sensation that takes us beyond the break instituted by Minimalism and Conceptual art, and allows us to come to grips with installation and the sign as
Deleuze, Guattari, and Contemporary Art 187 art’s contemporary realms of research. What must be done is to extend sensation into a contemporary context by following the avant-garde aspirations of performance art, installation and conceptual practice, inasmuch as these genealogies are entirely materialist, and express and construct an inhuman life. This would be to accept, following Minimalism and Conceptual art, the contemporary immanence of capitalism and experience, and an aesthetic plane of composition co-existent with social life.
But it would be strongly critical of both Minimalism’s aestheti-cizing of industrial production, and Conceptual art’s embrace of the dematerialized info-economy that ‘neutralized’ its plane of composition. These strategies have failed because they have not maintained the necessary distance between art and life, the distance that allows art to express, and bring to bear on social production its alterity, its inhuman force. Art must ‘insert itself into a social network’, Guattari says, but only in order to ‘cele-brate the Universe of art as such’, to cele‘cele-brate its cosmic plane of composition. These sublime sensations act micro-politically by ‘rupturing with forms and signifi cations circulating trivially in the social fi eld’ (Chaosmosis, 1995a, pp. 130–1). This rup-ture is an ‘event-incident’ (Guattari, 2000, p. 52) that confers
‘sense and alterity’ to part of the world, it is a ‘mutant produc-tion’ that ‘leads to a recreation and reinvention of the subject itself’ (Chaosmosis, 1995a, p. 131). This is art as intervention, a contemporary art work acting as ‘an aspiration for individual and collective reappropriation of the production of subjectivity’
(Chaosmosis, 1995a, p. 133).
This echoes What Is Philosophy? where Deleuze and Guattari suggest that art is a kind of social architecture, and compare sensation to a house that opens onto the universe and ‘dissolves the identity of the place through variation of the earth’ (1994, p. 187). To build the fi nite that restores the infi nite – this is a utopian politico-aesthetic program by which ‘Constructivism unites the relative and the absolute’ (1994, p. 22). The imma-nence of art and life is expressed and constructed in the quali-tative sublime of sensation, the ‘infi nite fi eld of forces’ (1994, p. 188) where art and life overcome our humanity to create Cezanne’s material plane of composition: ‘the world before man