Gilles Deleuze

On Deleuze, Death and Dilligence

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I have been thinking of Deleuze a lot lately. His influence on my work has been instrumental, his presence in my life constant. Can I speak of his work in a coherent philosophical discourse kind of way? I don’t think so. But then I don’t think he would have wanted that anyway. I think his work was about moving away from the jargon and weight of history and moving towards the body’s presence in text and in imagination.

I can go on and on about rhizomes and plateaux and folds and repetitions but I really do not think that will help anyone access the universe that he opened for me.

I was a lowly first year grad student at Concordia (back when that meant something), I came from a hole in the wall in New Brunswick and knew I was out of my league. But I was determined… still am. We were given reading after reading of Barthes, Irigaray, Levi-Stauss, Deleuze-Guattari; when, in a moment of rare illumination, I realised I could read in French, after all I am French. So I began to visit all these readings in the language they were written. I quickly realized that the translations lacked the subtlety and playfulness these authors intended in their work.

I became a language nut.

Derrida, who has been dubbed the ruler of meaning (for a while anyway) was the most playful of the bunch. He began a paragraph saying one thing and finished it hinting that he may be full of crap. I absolutely loved this way of writing and it gave my own ideas the legs they needed to stand on.

In 1996, I was invited to meet with Christian Gattinoni of the École Nationale Supérieur de la Photographie while he was on a visit to Halifax NS. So I got in the car around 5 in the morning for the 3 hour drive from Moncton to Halifax, good tunes in the tape player (Psychic TV) and the perfect mind set to go show my work. Halifax was gray, drizzly and mean. I got to Gattinoni’s door, knocked, knocked again, to be greeted with a middle-aged man with glasses on his forehead (nice glasses at that) wiping tears from his eyes. I had entered the Twilight Zone. He simply told me that Deleuze had defenestrated himself. I started crying too, for no good reason. It was just too much. I don’t usually cry at dead stuff, human, animal or machine. So it was a big moment.


That is when I realized my work was going to be dedicated to Deleuze. Hence the Cantos for Gilles Deleuze.

Isle Aux Morts 03

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What a day! Finished printing last season’s photographs. All in all, there are about 130-140 eight by ten “work prints”. The time spent in the darkroom is a most interesting place to consider when doing work.


A portion of the time/space spent is within a tightly concentrated space, keeping track of seconds, minutes, time in, time out. Something quite interesting about this duration of time is that, while being intently conscious of seconds and minutes the mind looses track of “watch time”. The idea of loosing track of time by being fully immersed in its minutia is something I need to develop further, maybe video or sound (but that is for another blog).

Another part of this time/space, is where attention is a little more diffused, where something seen in a print in one of the baths stirs a thought, recalls another photograph. This is where the editing begins, and it is not always done in a very deliberate manner; it is simply a question of seeing the prints in the red light and submerged in liquid seems to make certain details, textures or compositions enter into a system of meanings that is absent in “perfect lighting”. It is probably a variation of the old design school trick of studying your compositions upside down in order to see if there are any problems.

Then there is the time/space of imagination. Ideas enter into a free association with the print in the tray. For an instant a multitude of cross-referencing images and sounds fill the imagination, it is the moment of possibility as such it is virtual.

Isle Aux Morts 02

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I am presently trying to complete my printing from the 2008 shooting season. This is keeping me quite busy and I am not posting as often as I would like. This post will be mostly images. Writing does not always come easily, at times it is as if I am trying to say everything in one fell swoop; not taking the time to let the narrative unfold, let the idea come through in the words.

As this year’s printing draws to a close, I am starting to think more and more about what the edited suite of photographs will look like. This can serve two purposes; firstly, it encourages me to continue working and plugging away at the subject matter. Secondly, it will make this second season of shooting more efficient as I will hopefully have a quicker sense of what I am looking for as I arrive on a new site.

This second effect can be dangerous. An ever-present risk for an artist is the possibility of getting ahead of an idea. Thinking that one knows what one s looking for can lead to imposing meaning on a subject; effectively taking away the subjects voice in the process. This is something I am constantly struggling with what I am working with a more “documentary” approach.

Contemporary culture’s obsession with “the documentary” is rife with the conflict between “truth” and “opinion”. The concept of objectivity has been central to the discourse of the photographic image since its invention. It has shifted from total objectivity to total subjectivity with very few stops in between. Like in many things, the objective and the subjective are two poles with an infinite number of grey zones in-between. As surfaces they can even overlap as is described in “Mille Plateaux”, Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s landmark exploration of the schizophrenic impulse in contemporary society. But I digress.

The tension between giving voice to the subject and allowing one’s subjectivity to interact with it is often where all the interest lies in a work of art. A truly engaging piece of work will inevitably play the ideas off of each other and invite the viewer to add more levels of interpretation to the mix.

Diamond Cove 05

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Sometimes, an artist looses sight of the project they are working on. This has been the case for pretty well two weeks now. It is not a big problem, as I continue to print and continue to experience the work. But two weeks ago I could see the completed work before my mind’s eye, there were clear ideas for sequences and presentation. These are important moments in the production of work as they allow the artist to approach the idea from other angles, by leaving preconceptions aside. This is a normal part of the process.

What is this attraction to industrial architecture? What is this sense that what is human-made and, by default, transient is worthy of attention?

In Kant’s “Critique de la Faculté de Juger”, the idea of artistic beauty is derived from and cannot be separated from the philosophical concept of the sublime. In Gilles Deleuze’s analysis the sublime “is explained by the free agreement of reason and the imagination. But this new “spontaneous” agreement occurs under very special conditions: pain, opposition, constraint, and discord. In the case of the sublime, freedom or spontaneity is experienced in boundary-areas, when faced with the formless or the deformed.”1 [The word “entendement” is translated as “agreement” which is perhaps accurate in literal terms but lacks the subtle second meaning of “listening” which is pivotal in Deleuze’s use of language.]

Paraphrasing Gilles Deleuze, in order to understand how the cultural aesthetic can fit within Kant’s three critiques, one has to come to grips with the relationship between natural beauty and artistic beauty and how each relates to reason. He uses the notion of the sublime to bridge this gap, as its relationship to reason is spontaneous and direct because the abject occurs in both modes of expression.

If the sublime exists as a free agreement (entendement) between reason and the imagination it makes it possible to analyse artistic beauty as the free accord of agreement (entendement) and the imagination. The two concepts are inextricable in this view of beauty. Form and expression are functions of the formless and deformed and create a free and open discourse that can appear to be based in sensibility (taste) but that can be deduced logically and thus find a place in a more global construct of taste. It is possible to arrive at cultural agreement (entendement) on matters of taste and beauty. This, in very broad strokes, forms the basis for Kant’s analysis of beauty and its role in the faculty of judgement.

It would follow that the artist could be described as having an acute sense of the relationships between “entendement”, imagination and reason as well as a desire to express these ideas visually and publicly. The search for the abject or the sublime would obviously be part of this process. Examples of this can be found throughout the history of art, from classical to romantic to current periods. An interesting example comes to mind. Edward Weston, who, with his contemporaries, helped create the template for formal photography in North America, is particularly known for exquisitely rendered landscape and still life photographs but there is one image that seems to create context for his work. It is Dead Man, Colorado Desert, 1937. In this image, the sublime (abject) and beauty are articulated with incredible sensibility.

The attraction to industrial architecture and abandoned places is in accordance with a long history of aesthetic thought. The immediate link to reason presented by a reality that can be best described as political (the placement and use of fish plants) can be mediated through agreement and imagination to present yet another series of meanings that operate on reason in a wider spectrum of thought.

These are the last few images from Diamond Cove; starting with the next installment we will begin a visit to Isle Aux Morts.

1. Revue d’esthetique, vol. XVI, no. 2, avril-juin (Paris: PUF, 1963), p. 113-136. This translation borrowed from a 2004 Semiotext(e) translation of L’ile déserte, 2002 Éditions de Minuit.