A line is simultaneously a colour, a texture, and a tone: it is the abutting edge of positive and negative, the breaking up and adjoining of two planes, the touching point of autonomous bodies. To see form[1] as relational, is an undoing of the human—no longer at the centre, or with a centre, from which to establish single stories of origin that articulate and mark the stakes of (human and non-human) freedoms,[2] a fraying of peripheries, an unravelling of mind, a suspension of perspectival lines of sight for the extension of multidirectional lines of flight.
Following posthumanist scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, Karen Barad, and Cary Wolfe, this entry serves as a collection of aesthetic insights on composition (line, colour, texture, and shape), gathered in an abstract painter’s studio as fieldwork towards a posthumanist account of painting. Working from the understanding that we are first technological beings, I imagine abstract painting as a piece of technology that is a culturally constructed tool for critical perception; a tool that exercises visual perception towards the relational quality of form. Through a posthuman lens of formal analysis, the compositional elements of an abstract painting become a prosthetic for looking at the entangled nature of bodies interacting (bodies used here in the broadest sense to include all human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, form and formless bodies).
In contrast to much creative and scholarly work since 1960’s, this conception affirms the importance of formalism in painting, though it does so through a methodology of care/full looking, which traces the contingency of formal relationships so that a more robust ethico-onto-epistemology emerges.[3] In posthumanist painting, form is considered relationally and iteratively, so that it axiomatically establishes an ethical entanglement between being and knowing.[4] Developed through my evolving practice of care/full looking, which is situated in my own painting practice and training as an artist, a posthumanist account of abstract painting decentres notions of human exception through reflection on the relational, rather than fixed, quality of form.
To look with care is to observe the dissolving line between independent things—figure and ground. It is to witnesses a peculiarity of form as it erodes an idea of autonomous bodies. These formal observations decentre subjects from the very form that they appear comprised of. Stable representations are destabilised as single “agential cuts” where the observer necessitates the observed and not the other way around.[5] A studio practice of care/full looking revives abstract painting from the reductive and essentialising tendencies evoked throughout modernism to attend to the fluctuation of heterogeneous forces that manifest a composition—acknowledging the queerness of form itself as a non-conforming shapeshifter. To hone the “situated knowledges” of a painter’s studio is to expand on formalist concerns of compositional knowledge that embrace making kin of all kinds.[6] To, in fact, become oddkin with the animate materiality of edges, colours, and shadows.[7] “Can we really afford not to think about composition now”, contemporary painter Amy Sillman asks, “when we seem surrounded by the decomposition and deformation of bodies and social structures?”[8] Line is the architecture of form that makes shapes both positive and void, simultaneously corporeal and implied: a theatre of relations that form and inform on a knot of topography in formation.
In a posthumanist context, abstract painting is retheorised as a practice of radical care that, through critical perception, disrupts normative conceptions and reproductions of Western constitutions of bodies and being, where there is no longer a centre or an edge from which to maintain individual entities as single matters of concern.[9] Care/full looking is a style of thought to reimagine the “purity” of Greenbergian formalism from static manifestation to shimmering contamination, an ethico-onto-epistemological position on matter that illuminates not only a relational conception of composition, but, likewise, the relationality within and between social, political, and ecological bodies. Ethico-onto-epistemology is an ethics of indeterminacy—a body of knowledge that acknowledges the dissolution of the body for relations in flux. There is reparation at the foundation of such observations. Care/full looking is a scholarly tool and artistic practice to dispense with the exception of autonomous bodies, the ascetics of borders and barricades, and engage with bodies as variegated, heterogeneous, configurations. Care/full looking is an act of care (a political act of repair[10]) to undo a current foothold of representational perception, so that one might discover an ethic of entanglement embedded within a performative conception.
Composition: Fieldwork Towards a Posthuman Conception of Abstract Painting
I. Line
A line is a punctuation between light and shadow, the division between wake and sleep, an expanse of fracturing planes, an uneven topology of exterior façades, the flow of water, a break in the ice, an advancing coast, an intersection of decomposition and regeneration. Line is the delicate containment of life, a registering pulse, a walking path for bodies, eyes, and hands in the dark, the bones of drawing,[11] the architecture of thought—a habit, a direction, a pattern of behaviour.
A line is a sentence, a circumference, a shifting cartography of imperial control. Animated by elation and fatigue, lines are the expansion and contraction of skin—a scratch, a stretchmark, a tear, the folding of inside and out, a mobius strip. A line is the crossing of territories, and personal boundaries; the persistent impression of things unsettled yet bound together in an uneven distribution of form. It encloses possibilities of perception, a subjectivity that refines an object of attention to a singular position of fact, but this line of thought is porous—malleable and inconclusive. It is a sociogenic trace of enclosure that is historically drawn,[12] a fiction systemic yet radically contingent to differentiation, mutation, and dissent.
Line evokes the impossibility of two forms touching; it is an edge between bodies that marks a contoured shape of relation—of love, or hate, or reciprocity. Line is a carving out of space, a reversal of ground, a break between forms that does not solidify separation but illuminates an entanglement of interrelation. On one scale a line is a border, but on another scale a line is a field—open to vast microbial networks, chemicals, UV rays, words, and shadows. A line is never only a line, it is a manifold event—a ripple of relations across a field in flux.
Figure 4. Harbridge, Maegan. Mountain View, acrylic on paper, 2019. Photo by Laura Findlay.
II. Colour
Color is relational, and these relationships, these fluctuations of form that illuminate a shape’s surface, are primary sources for re-storying the world.[13] Formalist theory—seemingly esoteric, historically coded, disciplinary knowledge—is a toolkit for a posthumanist paradigm, an attentional prosthetics for critical perception, a sharpening of senses as the arming of oneself against a brutally insensitive present.[14]
Colour is biologically and socially constituting: a matter of perspective—stable and symbolic, concrete, associative, and transparent. It is a mirage of micro-expressions and macro-aggressions—a social construction of stop and go, the crushing tone of watching an oil spill grow. Colour defines the shifts between nuance and void. It is an economy of taste—both toxic and intoxicating, a resource for capital and control, light and dark, cool and warm, a division of boundaries that both disrupts and integrates wholes.
Colour is the advancing and receding of atmospheric lines of sight and its ever-increasing absence is the technophilic capture of all the wavelengths of light. It maintains implicit and explicit relationships, simultaneously translucent and opaque. Hue is an “existence without standing”[15] wavering between loud and nuanced, tangible and sensed. It is the oscillation, absorption, and differentiation of light.
Two pieces of paper overlap—one Cobalt blue, the other a Cerulean hue. Two bodies touching, their boundaries of colour inform one another. The attraction and repulsion of analogous blues, of varying temperatures and intensities, imply depth and distance. This “push-pull” of pictorial space,[16] a founding tenet of modernist abstraction, is not a modernist reduction but a metaphysics of interconnectedness that produces emergent forms[17]—of intensity and calm, illusion and fact. A discrepancy of value, temperature, and tone, two blues together relay depth perception and fluctuate as a performance of their own.
III. Texture
Texture is both corporeal and implied, solid and unstable. It is an index of temporality, a collection of beats, an uneven topography of cracks and crevices, a pocked surface of ridges and ravines. Texture is a lattice-like skin, a barrier and a sponge: soft and sinuous as silk, stucco and porcelain-like paint that stirs the intangible, inequitable, experience of embodied understanding.[18] Texture is a legibility, a proof, of both the witnessed and sublime; it is the impression of a tightly fitting watch and the striations of liquid as it sets to solid over centuries of otherwise unmarked time.
Texture, a perceptual phenomenon, is sensed as a haptic event with affective power.[19] We touch it like a wool blanket, with “fingery eyes,” and its many associations live in our body.[20] In painting, it moves us to its surface and substance, its silhouette and swell. Painting recalls texture so vividly that it is an actant, a thing, that contains its own vibrancy, its own liveness, “enmeshed in a fortuitous assemblage of other (especially nontext) bodies.” [21]
Texture is tangible, transitory, and transformative. It is felt as a light source into the world—a spectacular view onto an exteriority, but it is sensed in and through the body. It speaks in intimate gestures of address about mark-making; how bodies press upon one another as a reaction in action; a touching that matters. Flat and voluminous, attractive and repulsive, texture is everything and nothing—solid and space. Texture becomes line, becomes shape, becomes shadow, within an iterative effect appearance is fixed (as a single, fragmented cut).
IV. Shape
Speaking is the domain of figuration, but the “shape of shape” is a silence,[22] an abstract painter’s punctuation for reflection: stiff, solid, delicate, and indefinite—an offering of space for unarticulated bodies of historically underrepresented forms. A synchronous occupation of multiple terrains, shape is full with “quantized indeterminacies”[23]—emptiness, and void. Shape is an ever-expanding inconsistency of associations, a simultaneity of faces and spheres—a singular yet archetypical gesture of emotion, an implied contour around a dimension in motion. A shape radiates exquisite rage and fear, disquiet and delight. It is the face of chaos, a virtual trace. Stoic, yet never fixed, shape is a transfiguration; a protrusion and collapsing of configuration; a constellation of colour, planes, and positionality; a chimera of absolute definition in an ever-unfolding state of variation.
Shape is the holding of tension between friend and foe, a temporal surface and substance of ebb and flow—non-talk, “unthought,”[24] a contesting of the logic of chronological time.[25] Shape flattens observation into a plane of smooth space, animating the possibilities of an excess of form, an accumulation of forces, a strange topology in flux. Everything that exceeds representation is a shape and a shape is the delineation of everything representable. It is a border line of difference, texture, color, and tone that is a surface appearance of the most enigmatic matter, an active ambiguity of anchored physicality. Shape is a carrier of opinions and feelings, indifferent of their texture, color, and tone. It is a suspension of stance to hold space for exception, mutation, and change. Shape flickers the unresolved emergence of matter, an architectural intensity of internal and external fluctuations, an intra-action of line, colour, texture, and volume in space.
Conclusion
Abstract painting matters as a socially constructed tool for seeing. It is a technology for looking at the relational qualities of a mercurial world. Care/full looking is a way of thinking with Barad’s exploration of the indeterminacy and queerness of quantum scale reality and is about putting language to the indeterminate and intra-active nature of a painter’s studio and beyond. Like line, the color, texture, and shape of an abstract composition exist not as independent bodies but inform as a compilation of relationships: the coming together of component parts, as the materialization of emerging matter. But this topology is not fixed. As a line wavers between contour and edge it displays the indeterminate nature of bodies. Learning to see relationally, through a posthuman practice of care/full looking, decenters representational modes of looking that have been integral to the “overrepresentation” of Man at the expense of everything else.[26] To see form as relational is an emergence from a haze of reflexive narration. It is to acknowledge a radical otherness—yet interconnectedness—of all things, simultaneously fashioning and refashioning a temporal present.
Care/full looking entails a realignment of perception from habits of subject/object differentiation to an attentiveness towards the allied nature of form, which is to observe a continuation, an integration, between bodies as they manifest an entanglement of being. This is a cultivation of ethics through perception where a sensing body is confronted with the stakes of its own contingency—to see form as iterative, connected, and in relationship to everything else, reveals the instability of autonomous bodies and illuminates their alliance as a co-constituting reliance. Practices of care/fulllooking highlight the lively, rather than static, quality of composition—a self-consciousness that is, in itself, a response to Barad’s call for matter’s ability to respond. To see the companionship of form is to see connections between animate and inanimate materiality.
The simplicity of a line within an abstract painting mobilizes a simultaneity of sight, where a line is always itself and other: an edge, a color, a shape, or a shadow. This is not a modernist reduction but a fluctuation of form, the wavering of visual perception as it advances and recedes, expands and contracts. To see the contingent quality of composition through care/full looking is “learning to learn”[27] the alliance of form, where interdependent kin of all kind animate the multiplicity and entangled topology of a heterogenous world: a process-orientated ontology that can’t help but evade the possibility of representation. Posthuman painting rethinks a modernist, formal sensibility of purity to contamination, activating an alternative lens for perception that reveres a display of disparate forces mixing and manifesting as a continuous performance of relations.
Notes:
This is a shortened version of the essay “A Line is an Edge, is a Colour, is a Shadow: Towards a Posthuman Account of Painting, published in the journal Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, June 2023. https://ecocene.kapadokya.edu.tr/index.php/ecocene/article/view/145
An earlier version of these ideas were also explored in a previously published essay under a different name. See Harbridge, Maegan, 2022, “A Shadow is a Colour, a Body is a Shape, an Edge is a Line: Towards a Posthuman Account of Painting,” Parts 1 & 2, Borderland, 14 November. https://espaciofronterizo.com/borderland/a-shadow-is-a-colour-1/.
[1] Formalism, as attributed to aesthetic modernism, is “the critical position that the most important aspect of a work of art is its form—the way it is made and its purely visual aspects—rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world” (see Tate.org’s definition of Formalism). Formalism, reimagined for the critical posthumanities, accounts for the relationships between heterogenous forces that manifest composition; rethinking the formal boundaries of what constitutes edges, borders, and bodies.
[2] McKittrick, Katherine, and Sylvia Wynter. 2015. “Unparalleled Catastrophe For Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, 9-89. Ed. Katherine McKittrick. North Carolina: Duke University Press.McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human,.
[3] To see form as relational is to think with Karen Barad’s term ethico-onto-epistemology (as the inseparability of ethics, ontology, and epistemology) in aesthetic terms. See Kleinman, Intra-actions, 77 for a discussion of ethico-onto-epistemology.
[4] Barad, Karen. 2020 “What is the Measure of Nothingness”, 1. A posthuman account of painting evokes formalism as an ethico-aesthetic technology to experience an entanglement between being and knowing–looking, thinking and action. For Barad matter is never fully fixed but is a process of determination in constant flux, manifesting iteratively and in relation to other matter– “matter is never a settled matter.” Because matter manifests in relation to other matter this co-determination explicitly binds the mattering of all phenomenon and therefore creates an inseparability between ethics, ontology, and epistemology. (see also Kleinman, Intra-actions, 77)
[5] Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3: 801 – 831.
[6] Haraway, When Species Meet, 389.
[7] Haraway, “Making Kin in the Chthulucene,” Staying with the Trouble, 4. To become “oddkin” with the formal attributes of painting is to think with Haraway’s invitation to “become-with” “[…] in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles.”
[8] Sillman, Amy. 2020. Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings. Paris: After 8 Books.
[9] Obrist, Hans Ulrich Interview with Timothy Morton, 2024. DIS Magazine. A conversation held on the occasion of the Serpentine Galleries’ Extinction Marathon: Visions of the Future.
[10] Odell, “The Case for Nothing”, 23. Odell propose via activist Audre Lorde that self-care is “an act of political warfare.” Here, care/full looking, as a honing of one’s own perceptibility, is positioned as an act of self-care in the sense that Lorde insists.
[11] Line as the bones of drawing is an idea building on Amy Sillman’s investigation of Abstract Expressionism, in her 2020 book Faux Pas, where she likens drawing to “the bones of thinking itself,” 91.
[12] The idea of a line as the refinement of fact thinks with Fanon and Wynter’s concept of “sociogeny” where lines of experience, thought, and sight impress into the psyche of the colonised and coloniser as “psychopathologies” (“ways of knowing and seeing”) that are precarious and can be interrupted (Erasmus 2020, 9). See Erasmus, Zimitri. 2020. “Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of the Human: Counter-, not Post-humanist.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 37, no. 6: 1– 19.
[13] McKittrick, Katherine. 2015. “Yours in the Intellectual Struggle: Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of Living.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, 1-8. Ed. Katherine McKittrick. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 4.
[14] Weber, Interaction of Color, xi. Donald Judd suggests that what the most crucial point of Josef Alber’s Interaction of Color was, was the establishment that an increased sensitivity and awareness of colour gives us a “weapon against forces of insensitivity and brutalization.”
[15] Moten, Fred. 2013. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 112, no.4: 737 – 780. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 738.
[16] Sillman, Amy. 2020. Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings. Paris: After 8 Books. 48.
[17] Following Simone Bignall and Daryle Rigney formalism, as explored in this essay, accounts for the fluctuation of heterogenous forces that manifest as composition rather than the reductive or essentialising account of composition evoked throughout modernism. See Bignall and Rigney, “Posthuman Ecologies,” 164
[18] Embodied understanding, suggested here as inequitably experienced, builds on Jacques Rancière notion of the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière and Gage 2019, 11). Rancière’s distribution of the sensible refers to the opportunity an individual has for sense experience and the correlation of that capacity to their assigned class. He illuminates this correlation by referring to Plato and the worker’s role in politics. Rancière questions who can participate in politics if the worker does not have the time. He determines that politics is actualized in taking time that is otherwise not available to take. In an interview with Rancière where these ideas are discussed in the context of art, Mark Foster Gage terms the moment where there is a disassociation of the eyes from the working body and the worker reclaims agency over sensory experience as the “reattribution of the sensible” (2019, 11). This is a pivotal moment in emancipation for Rancière, where sensory equality precedes social equality, suggesting that an aesthetic revolution would proceed a social revolution.
[19] Graw, The Love of Painting, 20.
[20] Haraway. When Species Meet, 249.
[21] Bennet. “Systems and Things,” 232.
[22] Sillman, Faux Pas, 76. The Shape of Shape was the name of Amy Sillman’s 2019 curated exhibition at the MoMA, in New York.
[23] Karen Barad evokes the space of the void with an explanation of virtual particles, which are quantized indeterminacies-in-action. That is to say, the space of the void is never empty but brimming with possibility. See Barad, “On Touching”, 23:15.
[24] Katherine Hayles makes reference to Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness as a gesture towards the space of knowing that precedes consciousness. For the Handdarata this space is “unthought”. See Hayles, Katherine. “Transforming How We See”, 1.
[25] Chronos, the conception of linear time upheld by the “Royal” or “Major” sciences, explored in Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman Knowledge, is contrasted to Aion time, which she attributes to peripheral and “minor” knowledge formations integral to an ethical transformation of the Critical Humanities. See Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 126
[26] Ferreira da Silva, “Before Man” in Sylvia Wynter on Being, 101
[27] Sundberg distinguishes “learning to learn” from simply learning as the gathering of knowledge from being in the world; as a walking with or “participatory reciprocity, which frames knowledge as a social activity and entails learning to perceive and receive Indigenous epistemes as part of the geopolitical present.” See Sundberg, “Decolonializing Post Human Geographies”, 40.