One story I like to tell students is one that artist Susan Hiller told when I was a first year art student about Maya Deren. Like Hiller, Deren was also both an anthropologist and artist who’s practices strayed willfully across disciplines and utilised paradigms other to those dominant in regard to discourse and knowledge making. ( - loose cannons in canonical disciplines).
Deren went to Haiti as an anthropologist to study voodoun practices, making ethnographic films and studies, resulting in a book first published in 1953 called The Divine Horseman (my copy is called The Voodoo Gods, it’s on my bookshelf in between Esoteric Buddhism and The yellow Wallpaper - I need IP addresses in my books to find them - which might not be so long now - two of the aforementioned are online. My books are arranged for the most part thematically but not necessarily obviously, the proximities of these 3 in a cluster is a typical accidental shuffling that enables a whole load of marvellous intertextual connections)
The very last chapter of The Divine Horseman, titled The White Darkness, is an account of her participation in a Voodoun practice, transgression out of the ‘observer’ position and that scopic binary structuring stuff) etc. into the mix and fray or a Voodoo practice, allowing herself to enter into ‘possession’. She writes,
‘I have left possession until the end, for it is the centre towards which all the roads of Voudoun converge. It is the point toward which one travels by the most visible, the most physical mean, yet, for the traveller, it is itself invisible. One might speak of it as the area of a circle whose circumference can be accurately described; yet this circumference is not, itself, the circle which it defines. To know this area, one must, finally, enter.’
In Thinking About Art: conversations with Susan Hiller, Hiller quotes Deren’s querying of a Western thinking’s ‘reverence for detactment whether scientific or scholarly’ and suggestion that the artist in Western culture does not necessarily accept that postion. (Hiller quoting Deren, page 31.)
It’s one of my favourite stories as it spoke so wonderfully and comprehensively of a radical departure from the privileged mechanisms of observation, the hierachies of the senses in knowledge production, and also because I’d already encountered Deren via an interest in the occult and the post punk alternative cultures in which her movies and life story figured. At that of listening to Hiller, (a first year art undergrad albeit a late 20’s mature student), I’d not yet joined the dots to ‘Art History’ and the Art Cannon etc. Her practises across dance, film, anthropology and Voodoun Priestess made an expansive and intuitive kind of sense to me.
I love anthropologists, like geographers they crop up everywhere as willing transdisciplinary adventurers, the Cardiff University (Post) Human reading group gave me a chapter of Partial Connections, by Marilyn Strathern - here’s the Amazon Blurb on it.
. . . Marilyn Strathern’s seminal book challenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials, focusing on a problem normally thought of as commonplace; that of scale and proportion. Revealing unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of ambiguous images, Strathern has fashioned a unique contribution to the anthropological corpus.
In her blog Mikala Hansbol writes: Strathern argues that we always only have access to making partial connections. There is (according to Strathern) no such thing as parts and wholes. When enacting the living world, we also enact holes. She argues that the world is always both one and multiply enacted - it is always both a container and what is contained. We cannot see it all at once.
or as mathematician Ralph H. Abraham writes,“the fractal concept of self-similarity across scales is extensively applied to the complexity and quantity of anthropological materials: cultural data, ethnographic recordings, etc.”, Human Fractals: The Arabesque In Our Mind. Inspired by the Cardiff (Post) Human posse, I’ve suggested it to Janet Smith, my bioscience collaborator as a text we might both read, to consider our research activities from. It also to brought to mind the research of Complex systems scientist Sylvia Nagl and her thoughts on how we organise information to structure knowledges and architect meanings:
An enormous wealth of data and knowledge about cancer has been created through research efforts around the globe. This has led to very substantial advances, but we have now reached a fundamental barrier to deriving maximum benefit from this data - the ‘complexity limit’.
Complex systems science addresses open questions that are fundamental to complex systems in general, cutting across particular disciplines, and searches for methods to deal with them. Principles, concepts and methods can then be applied to a particular type of complex system such as cancer cells and tumours.
I seem to be doing a big revisit to reacquaint myself with artists like Deren. Lois Fuller is another thanks to Catherine Hindson at University of Bristol’s Drama Department, who highlighted Fullers widely regarded activities in science, her relationship to the Curies, Edison and other scientists and technologists of the time.
Interestingly both Deren and Fuller were dance practitioners; that possession and hypnosis featured on occasion in both Deren and Fuller’s work respectively is not necessarily a linkage I was initially thinking of but it’s certainly a compelling one and perhaps to do with a series of questions and thoughts I’m trying to form on embodiment, knowledge and bodies, and language and body. This current in both my lab based activities as well as my presence in the larger science domain - and of course the explicit performance works I make. That Fuller was a keen scientist herself and good friends with the Curies is similar to how I feel about Deren’s body of works across disciplines.
In her paper The “Symptomatic Act” Circa 1900: Hysteria, Hypnosis, Electricity, Dance, Felicia McCurran discusses Fuller’s then highly experimental innovations with emerging technologies of electric lighting along side Charcot’s studies and experiments with hysterics in Salpetriere, emergent practices of dance, medicine, science and technologies knotting and constructing altogether other kinds of bodies, representations of bodies and cultural meanings of bodies. Erin Brannigan in “La Loie” as Pre-Cinematic Performance - Descriptive Continuity of Movement writes about
“the interchange between art and science and the centrality of the female dancer, finding in Fuller’s mobility an electrically charged evolution of form that offered an antidote to the popular theme of degeneracy. [Jane] Goodall describes Fuller as perfectly in step with her age; “scientist and inventor, a woman of the future, charged with the energies of an age about to dawn”
from Jane Goodall’s Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: out of the natural order, p.217. In Women in Motion: Loie Fuller and the “Interpenetratio” of Art and Science, Elizabeth Coffman writes:
Fuller’s dancing embodies the intersection, or, to use the historically specific term, the interpenetration of the arts and sciences, and, by connotative extension, the interpenetration of both feminine and masculine codes of performance. As Jonathan Crary argues, “rather than stressing the separation between art and science in the nineteenth century, it is important to see how they were both part of a single interlocking field of knowledge and practice.”
Perhaps it is the interlocking or interpenetration that I’m curious about for myself and my activities across my own practice, and in dialogue with both defined and undefined science practitioners and art practitioners. The discreet disciplines both push and pull into complex engagements materially, metaphorically and conceptually. Ultimately what I am pursuing are critical and cultural questions, of how bodies and knowledge are constructed; bodies of knowledge and knowing bodies, and what are the unconscious underpinnings with their attendant cascades of power within the matter of bodies and the bodies that matter. As an arts practitioner within the science institution, bringing research strategies from my field and personal practice is difficult and fraught, sometimes seemingly invisible, perhaps because I do not participate in canonising, concretising structures, and also because I am maintain a non academic position. Being able to be within and without the institution is a rare and wonderful privilege and a tricky and tough one to navigate. So I’m curious about Deren and Fuller and others like them.
