Ambiguity

 

I had a long conversation with Richard Steadman-Jones yesterday where I worked through some thoughts that have been hovering for a while about ambiguity.  One of the things I have noticed in conversations at ESRI and in some of the papers I read are striving for clarity within texts.   I don't think this is about trying to be straightforward but I do wonder if it comes from the Anglo-American  analytical tradition within philosophy.  This is surprising as much of the writing seems to draw heavily from  the continental tradition. This can ends up leaving a sense of chalk and cheese, an attempt to pull definitions or applications from texts which were trying to make a new-sense of themselves on different terms.  I am sure that all the clever people are very aware of what from the outside can feel like a contradiction; it is in many ways necessary if this feral french thinking is to be brought to heal and put to work  within social science.

What struck me and surprised me in the conversation with Richard was the way ambiguity works if you give it space.  There is a tendency to try and pin words to definitions that creates the building blocks of knowledge, some kind of common sense system of exchange.  What I've taken from my slow reading of 1000 Plateaus is that it is within the vastness of the whole books layered ambiguity that its real use lives.  Everything that comes after  that tries to say what the pair of thinkers actually mean by concepts such as Assemblage try to lesson the ambiguity move towards sense.  Because art is generally not literal and not tied into a regime of signs in the same way as language it offers an opportunity to break from trying to explain things or more specifically translate them into spoken or written language.  Although research creation probably makes this proposition and brings the process of art into art and into the idea of process philosophy there is still a strange disjuncture that happens when art has to become encoded or perhaps over-coded so we can recognize it as art.  

Rusty nails marking a table can be seen as art because it doesn't really serve any other purpose, what the hell else could it be other than incidental? There is clearly something intentional about their arrangement and then the waiting for the rain. 

 

Most people would probably not see the marks that the nails left on the table as serious art or art at all but that doesn't really matter as I can call them an art work with a level of clarity and certainty.  Making the giant territorial platform for loose parts play to take place on is much more ambiguous. For most people it is clear what it is, an area, a summer house, shade, shelter, storage, a frame, a ground, a surface, the thing that comes before art, the stretching of a canvas at best.   

So it is not its failure to be art or its queering of arts definitions or anything fuzzy that is important it is a deliberate striving for ambiguity neither one thing or another and importantly not in a process of becoming one or the other.