As my practice-based painting research has become engaged in the procuring of pigments, the written components of my thesis should reflect the experiencing of matter using its own kind of physical resonance. In this semiotic realm, Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language 1974 and its exploration by Kelly Oliver in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing provide insights into writing as practice.

What approaches are available or possible in writing about material process or analyzing material culture? It is clear that psychoanalytical overtones are always present in exegetic text but need not be explicit, poetic license being therefore invited to allow the “textual presence” particular to a “writing subject” liberty. Leon S. Roudiez elucidates Kristeva’s dialectical notion concerning the nature of a text for the purpose of “textual analysis” in the introduction to Revolution,

The text that is analyzed is actually the effect of the dialectical interplay between semiotic and symbolic dispositions. Here it would be helpful to keep in mind the etymology of the word and think of it as a texture, a “disposition or connection of threads filaments, or other slender bodies, interwoven” (Webster 2). The analogy stops there, however, for the text cannot be thought of as a finished, permanent piece of cloth; it is in a perpetual state of flux as different readers intervene, as their knowledge deepens, and as history moves on. The nature of the “threads” thus interwoven will determine the presence or absence of poetic language. Those that are spun by drives and are woven within the semiotic disposition make up what Kristeva has defined as a genotext; they are actualized in poetic language. Those that issue from societal, cultural, syntactical, and other grammatical constraints constitute the phenotext; they ensure communication. Seldom, however, does one encounter the one without the other…it is often the physical, material aspect of language (certain combinations of letters, certain sounds – regardless of the meaning of words in which they occur) that signals the presence of a genotext.

Finding words that fulfill their role as communicators of matter in its sensual entirety or in addition indirectly relay unutterable (or peripheral) physical or psychological experiences is one challenge (genotext). Conceiving of the structural context in which such words can emerge while enabling understanding is another challenge (phenotext).

In reflecting on the former task, I am tempted to state my dissatisfaction with the English language regarding its combinations of letters and sounds. I have found Magyar and Kunwinjku much more enticing. In reflecting on the latter task, my approach has been that of a diarist, a form of writing practice familiar to me having kept daily diaries from age 12-18. While returning to this practice has not been difficult, the transformation of this unedited vernacular style into something worthy of inclusion in a thesis haunts me.

Materiality is a key concern for many researchers in the painting field as it opens on a discussion of process and what it is that differentiates painting from other cultural activities. There are many angles from which materiality can be discussed, but the nature of my research is the matter itself. What is paint and what can it be? The exploration of pigments and their origins need not be simply a tabular exercise but can be a multi-sensory experience of the sacred within cultural practices of painting. This brief presentation includes my own practical exploration of what paint can be and experiences researching the origins of pigment and their mythical significance in Western Arnhem Land. My particular focus is on naturally occurring pigments and their collection by hand, rather than synthetic simulations, therefore the traditional significance of a substance is integral. The most sought after natural pigments around the world have economic and spiritual power surrounding their cultural and historical story, which contributes to their innate material particularities in their contemporary usage. All factors attributed to the paint itself infuse and enrich the process involved in the production of a painting, which Gilles Deleuze describes as “a being of sensation,” and what is held in the matter of a painting as a state of “becoming” consisting of materials and space. Thus the artist is not the sole agent of transformation but rather the one who collaborates with transforming substances. As Deleuze states “So long as the material lasts, the sensation enjoys an eternity in those very moments.”

Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
———. What Is Philosophy? New York: Colombia University Press, 1994.

Chapter 5 – Sensation: The Earth, a People, Art
Elizabeth Grosz

Grosz begins with some brilliance from Friedrich Nietzsche (Will to Power)
“Art reminds us of states of animal vigor; it is on the one hand a excess and overflow of blooming physicality into the world of images and desires; on the other, an excitation of the animal functions through the images and desires of an intensified life – an enhancement of the feeling of life, a stimulant to it.”

Grosz agrees art is a compulsion of the human animal, a sensation wild and dangerous. “Art is a consequence of that force that puts life at risk for the sake of intensification, for what can be magnified in the body’s interaction with the earth…for the sake of sensation itself.” Sensation sought outside the control of reason. Powerful sensation that consumes reason and regurgitates a stratum of understanding known as superstition. As intensification, sensation is equivalent to magical power so profound is the perception of it and its affect.

Does sensation differ in intensity with an increase in mystery? When the art object reverberating sensation is apprehended in sacred circumstances compared with an encounter with art taken out of context either through time or cultural displacement, or when the process of making is difficult to deduce, the materiality confounding. The “percepts and affects” formed can create a sensation of the supernatural of “inhuman forces from which the human borrows and which may serve in the transformation and overcoming of the human…by his conversion into a being of sensation.” As a connective, radiating and transformational force, sensation generates a relational interpretation of perception often possessing its own form of logic.

“Affects are man’s becoming-other, the creation of passages between the human and animal, cosmic becomings the human can pass through …percepts…are the transformations of the evolutionary relations of perception that have finely attuned the living creature to its material world through natural selection into the resources for something else, something more, for invention, experimentation or art.” The concepts of affects and percepts find parallels with the formation of what the Berndt’s describe in their Anthropological study of Kunwinjku speakers as “the man-myth dimension, which is inseparable from the [man-man or man-land dimension]…It is as if the first two dimensions were combined and resorted, and provided with a series of explanations and relevances.”

Art as sensation can, as intent, be “a premonition of what might be directly inscribed on the body.” Art is then an act of sorcery that conjures and sustains sensation in an art object for the duration of its material existence. “They aim to capture the force of time, opening up sensation to the future, making time able to be sensed, even if that means becoming-other.”