Sculpture 307 2012: September 2012

1 Deleuze on Becoming

Deleuze's concept of becoming is useful because it describes thing not in a fixed state but as constantly changing. Deleuzes uses an example from Alice in Wonderland, to say Alice becomes bigger is to say that while Alice is bigger than she once was, but is smaller than she may become in the future. Thus Alice paradoxically alway both bigger and smaller at the same time. In terms of sculpture the sense of becoming may be related to a sense of provisionality and casualness

Clip form Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951)

ROBERT THERRIEN, No Title (folding table and chairs, dark brown), 2008
Painted metal and fabric

http://www.gagosian.com/artists/robert-therrien/selected-works

Sarah Sze's work has the quality of a system that is living and growing, in this sense can be seen as an example of becoming...

Sarah Sze Triple Point of Water, 2003, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

http://www.sarahsze.com/

Urs Fischer's works are often exhibited in a state of becoming, in the case of these large candle works, one might say that they are becoming melted, or becoming liquid, the image is disolved as the material asserts itself:

Urs Fischer, Untitled 2011

Paraffin wax mixture, pigment, steel, wicks

Urs Fischer, Untitled 2011

Paraffin wax mixture, pigment, steel, wicks


	Urs Fischer, Rotten Foundation (Faules Fundament) 1998, Bricks, mortar, fruits, vegetables.


	Urs Fischer, Cold Coffee Waits, 2003	, Iris print in frame of polyurethane resin, acrylic paint, glass, cardboard

http://www.ursfischer.com/images

Becoming can be seen as a conceptual tool that allows us to talk about transformations that are ongoing, change that will continue to change.

2 Deleuze and Guattari, Becoming Animal

Deleuze on Becoming Animal:

"The deformations which bodies undergo are also the animal features of the head. There is in no way a correspondence between animal forms and forms of the face. In fact, the face has lost its form in the process of being subjected to operations of cleaning and brushing which disorganize it and make a head burgeon in its place. And the marks or features of animality are moreover not animal forms, but rather spirits which haunt the cleaned parts, which draw out the head, individualizing and qualifying the head without a face. As procedures used by Bacon, cleaning and features here assume a specific meaning. What happens is that the man's head is replaced by an animal; but this is not the animal as form, it is the animal as outline, for example the trembling outline of a bird which spirals over the cleaned area, while the simulacra of face portraits, beside it, serve only as 'witness' (as in the 1976 triptych). What happens is that an animal, a real dog for example, is outlined as the shadow of its master; or conversely the shadow of the man assumes an autonomous and unspecified animal existence. The shadow escapes from the body like an animal to which we give shelter. Instead of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is azone of the indiscernible, of the undecidable, between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but he does not become so without the animal simultaneously becoming spirit, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in the mirror as Eumenides or fate. This is never a combination of forms, it is rather a common fact: the common fact of man and animal. To the point that Bacon's most isolated Figure is to begin with a coupled figure, man coupled with his animal in an underlying act of bullfighting."

from:

Deleuze, G. (1981). The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming Animal. The Artist's Body. T. Warr. London, Phaidon.

full text here: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~robert2600/fbacon.html

Francis Bacon on the Southbank Show, interviewed by David Sylvester: