I was looking at Jacques Derrida's deconstructed idea he calls "invagination" and wondering how to react to that in an abstract image.
Think of invagination as the folding space between two complimentary systems: the interaction is not simple but keeps folding back on itself in a way that is and isn't. A bit like the crack in the centre of a book which is there by virtue only of the pages around it, but which also inflects on those pages.
I decied to use Photoshop. I used only two colours in each image, and just a large brush. But I set the brush to "difference" mode; which means that where you paint over a colour, you don't get the colour of the brush you are using, instead you get the difference between it and the colour that happens to be already on that part of the image.
Repeating this many times meant that the "seam" in these images became more and more complex.
Invaginations I, II, III
3 comments:
I'm curious as to what you make of your experiment. Did it succeed? And why did you feel impelled to illustrate Derrida in the first place? Was it because, being an artist, that is simply what you do? Or was there some other aim, such as perhaps de-literalizing the referent to the folds of the vagina or the folds of a book by offering a totally abstract illustration? Also, you suggest Derrida deconstructs the idea of invagination, which comes from embryology and is considered by biologists to be an empirical, visible process. How does Derrida deconstruct this biological met, and how do you convey that deconstruction in your illustration?
Well, a couple of comments:
I don't think Derrida deconstructs a biological concept that describes empirically observable events that are 'in-themselves.' Rather, he invents the term. He invents it, not as a concept, but in order to try to find a 'gap' (or a 'jouissance,' if you like) that language-based concepts cannot capture. His idea, as I see it, is that we are living in a game of language, necessarily perhaps. Nothing exists outside language...
When scientific thinkers use terms for concepts like 'impregnation' or 'envelopment,' they are of necessity using all sorts of generalised terms, convenient 'shorthand,' as the American pragmatist William James would say.
Derrida, rightly I think, thinks though that words' meanings are not simply fixed and do not simply point at things-in-themselves. Rather, words' meanings overlap and slip.
When I talk about the dandelions in my balcony planter, a lot rides on whether I call them herbs or weeds... I tell my partner that I'm going to weed the garden, I don't say I'm going to herb the garden.
'Impregnation' also contains all sorts of cultural connotations; so does 'envelopment.' Power plays, for instance, lie not far below the surface of these terms, just as they do in terms like '(wo)-man' or '(fe)-male,' or, for that matter, 'his-story.'
Derrida is interested in 'deconstructing' established, accepted binaries like Male/(fe)-male. He sees that terms like these are loaded; but he does he does not simply want to invert the binary, to turn it upside down -- for to do so it simply to produce another state of the same kind as the first. Rather, he wants to show that the binary can be turned upside down, but then we don't simply have an inversion, but can find a new, complex space, an opening up of a crack that we have become conditioned not to notice.
These images are certainly not attempts to illustrate or literalise either Derrida's words, nor biological concepts. Rather, as an artist trying to think with images instead of words, I'm trying to take up what Derrida says, and run with it.
Are these images abstract? If you want to say that images are crudely divided up into a binary: Mimetic/abstract, then I'd invert that and say that all visual (art) images are in fact abstract, in the conceptual sense of 'abstract' meaning 'to move away from.'
Plato says that a painting of a bed, no matter how convincing, is but a poor copy of a physical bed made by an expert carpenter, and that that physical bed is but a poor copy of the idea of a Bed.
But say that all images are abstract and to stop there is merely invert the binary...
Very illuminating. Thanks for your response. I wasn't aware Derrida had invented the work invagination. I was working with the impression, derived from some scant internet research, that he had taken in from embryology. But I agree its neither here nor there ... the images, and ideas, are beautiful
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