Simon D. O'Sullivan

From Stuttering and Stammering to the Diagram: Deleuze, Bacon and Contemporary Art Practice

This article attends to Deleuze and Guattaris idea of a ‘minor literature’ as well as to Deleuzes concepts of the figural, probe-heads and the diagram in relation to Bacons paintings. The paper asks specifically what might be usefully taken from this Deleuze–Bacon encounter for the expanded field of contemporary art practice.

Contours and Case Studies for a Dissenting Subjectivity : (or, how to live creatively in a fearful world)

Contours and Case Studies for a Dissenting Subjectivity : (or, how to live creatively in a fearful world)

Cultural Studies as Rhizome, Rhizomes in Cultural Studies

machines operate within concrete assemblages: They are defined by... the cutting edges of decoding and deterritorialisation. They draw these cutting edges.

Myth-Science and the Fictioning of Reality

Abstract In what follows I put forward an idea of contemporary art practice as a form of myth-science, itself defined as a kind of fictioning of reality. The article draws on and develops ideas first put forward in O’Sullivan 2014. The term mythscience is borrowed from Sun Ra and Afrofuturism more generally (see Kodwo Eshun’s discussion, “Synthesizing the Omniverse”, in Eshun 1998, 154-163). The artist Mike Kelley, in an essay on Olaf Fahlstrom (Kelley 1995), links the term more particularly to expanded contemporary art practice. Most of what follows has been developed in relation to the collaborative ‘performance fiction’ Plastique Fantastique (and especially in conversation with David Burrows) and thus, in acknowledgement of this parallel research programme, interspersed throughout the text are images from our practice and, in particular, a performance itself titled ‘Myth-Science’. “Myth-Science” was performed in 2014 at the “Webewoche” exhibition/event, Stroom den Haag, The Hague and at the “Schizo-Culture” exhibition/event, Space Gallery, London (see http://www. plastiquefantastique.org/performance25.html). Plastique Fantastique, for this performance, involved myself and Burrows alongside Alex Marzeta and Harriet Skully. I hope that this local ‘scene’ might resonate on a more global level, but also that my comments will not be read as being solely tethered to this particular collaboration (indeed, my article intends the mapping of a more general trajectory in art). The article ends with a brief Coda on Felix Guattari’s concept – from Schizoanalytic Cartographies – of ‘fabulous images’ that offers another inflection on my theme. ...theres some thing in us it dont have no name... it aint us but yet its in us... (Russell Hoban, Riddly Walker)

From Possible Worlds to Future Folds (Following Deleuze): Richter's Abstracts, Situationist Cities, and the Baroque in Art

In this article I want to think through the notion of possible worlds as developed in Gilles Deleuze’s book on Proust and, more significantly, his book on Leibniz. In particular I want to produce an encounter between certain philosophical concepts - such as the monad and the fold - and a specific art practice, in this case the abstract paintings (or “Abstracts”) of the German contemporary artist Gerhard Richter. The art practice here is meant not as an illustration of the philosophy, rather the article attempts to think a kind of Deleuze-Richter conjunction, to set each alongside the other and in so doing produce a new kind of assemblage between the two. Indeed the article is an experiment in this sense, an exploration of the resonances between two kinds of thought which although logically distinct seem to parallel one another in their creative and affirmative character. Leading on from this conjunction I want to think a little about the “new” - or expanded - baroque as Deleuze understood it, and which might be characterised by the city, and especially the Situationist city as it was theorised in the writings of Ivan Chtcheglov. We might say that this fictionalised and utopian city is an example of the Deleuze-Leibniz monad being opened out onto an expanded field of inter-connectivity. We might also characterise this new baroque as the introduction of a logic of participation into art practice.

The Chymical Wedding

The Chymical Wedding’ was a parade and ritual performed at Tate Britain, London, and included the showing of two films of previous Plastique Fantastique performances (‘What is a pre-industrial modern?’ (in gallery 9) and ‘24 hour puja for the people-yet-to come’ (in the South Gallery)). The Chymical Wedding’ draws upon the custom of ‘mumming’. Traditionally, ‘mummers’ would wander the country, drunk and in masks, and gatecrash New Year festivities to perform a play. ‘The Chymical Wedding’ also draws upon the examples of Sascha Masoch and John Dee to enact a bodily transformation and a communion with angels through physical stimulation and ritual performance. The ritual summoned forth the ‘Third Thing’.

One Day in the Life of a City (21 July, 2006)

parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online # 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13534640601094833 Stockholm: travelling Arrive Stockholm Arlanda airport via Schipol interzone. During the course of the journey the photograph in my passport is checked against my face a total of seven times. It seems that to travel is to arrive at another location having your identity held firmly in place: you may travel but you must stay the same. What occupies the gap between photograph and face and then back to photograph? A process of encoding where subjectivity is written on and by the London: the set-up We are in the middle of a heat wave, the hottest July on record. It’s London-heatdeath, with all life flowing slowly towards the stinking Thames. The previous day I had travelled all around the south and east of the city in a last minute gathering of materials. Starting in New Cross, with a work meeting at College, I had then crossed the river to Whitechapel to pick up cheap glasses and as many fat candles as I could carry. David had Figure 2. Figure 1.