Four long paragraphs on Teppei Kaneuji

This text is exactly what it says it is. It was commissioned for Broadsheet (volume 40, issue 1, March 2011, pp. 36-8) for Teppei's participation in the 2011 Singapore Biennale. It has all the hallmarks of SNRI withdrawals. I think I wrote most of it in a park.

Then, I remembered something that I had once seen on a snowy day: a Mercedes Benz next to a pile of dog shit, both of them covered in snow. At first I thought that the juxtaposition of the two made the scene interesting, but I soon realised that wasn’t the reason. What made it interesting was that two completely different things were unified under the same surface.
—Teppei Kaneuji

Let’s think about abstraction for a moment. Let’s think about the point of it — point in the double sense of the term, point as purpose and locus. What is the point of abstraction and at what point does it occur? Because when you think about it, abstraction — and we’re talking about art here, or at least art is around here somewhere — is a rather non-specific term, abstract even. Who does the abstracting exactly? The artist, the viewer, the work? Abstraction, art-historically understood, is relative only to pictorial convention. The notion also says a lot about the lofty role afforded vision in the hierarchy of the senses, abstraction being the shortened form of visual abstraction, according to which the term abstraction, used in proximity to the term art, always infers the visual. When was the last time you heard an abstract sound, breathed an abstract scent, savoured an abstract taste or fondled an abstract surface? Limited to the realm of the visual, abstraction is almost always counterpoised to representation, such that abstraction is defined as its other. A work of art, at least what we can see of it, is either representational or it is abstract, it either depicts something or not. Fair enough. But what, you might ask, of presentational art? Fair enough, too, but it is hardly appreciated in quite the same way. Presentational art exceeds the visual, introduces all those other pesky senses, and even the other, unofficial ones, temporality, movement and so on. Presentational art disrupts the hierarchy of the senses, scrambles it senselessly into nonsense, so that there is only sense. Even abstraction holds no relevance in corporeal reality; vision can only re-establish its eminence, and thus that of abstraction, by representing presentation. But where and why? Which brings us back to the point, or points, as it were, of abstraction. To sidestep the question once more, what of abstract ideas? Can an abstract idea not be expressed through art? And if expression seems too old fashioned, then communicated, suggested, proposed, speculated upon or provoked? But then the work is not the idea, but its medium. The idea is not presented, but represented. Conceptual abstraction, then, is representational. So we have two forms of abstraction — abstract art and abstract ideas. So what is/are the point/s? Who abstracts what? And why? Vision approaching presentation, perhaps? Nursing a secret aspiration to the purity of precritical compulsion, presentation’s prerepresentational expression, but on its own terms? The quest for a universal language, or better — as vision always aspires to go one better — for universal meaning? Where and when do these desires appear, who is party to the exchange, and why, oh why, do they attach themselves to art? These questions need another tangent.

So let’s think about design. Let’s think about the arrangement of visual devices that knows what it’s doing. Let’s think about abstraction with a purpose. Why abstraction, you ask? Because abstraction is frequently dismissed as design. You’ve heard the remark; possibly even made it yourself. But unlike abstraction, design is so self-assured it doesn’t need to represent. Or to not represent. There is no dichotomy of representation and abstraction, only the two poles of function and desire. Design can render the functional desirable and the desirable functional. It can happily steal our dreams, remould them into attractive shapes and shades, and sell them back to us. With a healthy mark-up, of course (otherwise why would you bother, eh?). The generic to the generic, the cosmopolitan to the cosmopolitan, with all manner of mentorships in taste and the lack thereof available to those who aspire to them (or not). It presses difference into the service of equivalence, an equivalence it takes to be universal, based not on anything so pretentious, precritical, prerepresentational as language or meaning, but on the universal mediator, the gold standard, money baby, quantifying and rationalising all that comes before it, even at the behest of the most senseless or insensitive twitching of the sexual organs, made sensible as the sex appeal of the organic, giving full meaning to the term commodity fetishism. And while like presentation it has no need of sensory hierarchies, it never forgets to flatter vision, for vision is its vainglorious benefactor. Here’s to keeping up appearances! Here’s to the proliferation of objects that will not only make life simpler, but which, like well-raised children, will also be noticeable when required and fade into the background when not. Objects that will make us better people. For all this, there is nothing inherently wrong about design, just as there is nothing inherently right about art. Art might lack design’s assurances, but both are just as capable of being reassuring. Design is an extraordinary human faculty, possessed of the capacity to make the products of human labour, and indeed that labour itself, more efficient, more sustainable, more productive. If we were to define it along the lines of Marx, Franklin and Arendt’s homo faber it is the process by which humans improve the products that differentiate them from all other forms of life. This would be the meaning of culture. The more anthropological account of the homo ludens, as expressed by Mauss, Levi-Strauss and Huizinga, among others, would see humans as the perfectors of ever more intricate games in politics, law, warfare and love. This would be the meaning of labour. But to design is not only to improve, but also to designate. There is a neatness to design, a typological imperative, that seems to belie its talent for channelling excess. Design can only ever be associated with excess; it can never be excessive. It needs to name, to measure, to quantify. Any excess it invokes or provokes can always be counted. Even the term ‘overdesign’ designates a reduction of functionality or return. One can utilise a designed object with an excess of force, but that object in and of itself contains no such force; it remains a technology. If we were to appeal to the universal equivalence then when it comes to the question of art and design, we might see that excess is the price of assurance and purpose. Design has a point; abstraction does not, which is precisely the point.

Let’s think about installation, if only because it allows us to draw back a little, to stop staring so intently at objects and take into account all those other pesky senses. Smell something, step in something. Twitch. Maybe space and time have something to tell us. Q: What’s the difference between a Mercedes Benz and a pile of dog shit? A: That’s not the point. As Boris Groys reminds us, for all the dominance of the art market over the production and circulation of art—and, though Groys doesn’t mention it, the production and circulation of publicity surrounding art—the form under which art is most frequently encountered today is installation. It is also the form under which the artist assumes the greatest sovereignty, transcending, however momentarily, the rational-critical public-sphere ideology of the modernist white cube to take control of the process of making decisions about what is included and in what fashion. This authority for a process appropriated from curators with their public accountabilities by artists with no such accountabilities amounts to a temporary privatisation of public space. Here, the exhibition itself becomes a medium, one that no longer relies on the primacy of the visual for its legitimation as art­ — rather it is its performativity as installation that now takes on this function — and its designation as one kind of art or other. Perhaps this is why the broad emergence of installation at the very point of the exhaustion of postmodern pictorial strategies so often found representation and abstraction — in the sense of an arrested, immobile, visually perceptible and analysable non-representation — deployed not in dichotomous or rhetorical relation to one another, but as so many performative modalities among others. If such work maintains fidelity to anything, it is not visual language as such — there is no signifying or non-signifying gesture, or even one that might attempt to signify everything, or worse, to be everything — but the material and its organisation in space, its role in mediating the relationship between the human body and a given set of structures. Faktura and tektonika are the double terms of the installational turn, and their relationship to each other is dialectical. No mutual exclusions here. Interestingly, subsequent trends in art production, most notably video, have taken place within rather than against installation. So even if reproductive technologies have returned questions of representation to the neat formalist dialectic of faktura and tektonika, they have done so in accordance with its presentational logic, its production of a mode of spectatorship qualitatively distinct to the modular ocularcentricity of the modernist white cube. This is the mode of spectatorship that requires of the viewer an awareness of their own corporeality, their own weight and movement, their finitude and libidinality, their completion of the work, their agency in entering or leaving it, in submitting, however paradoxically, to the sovereignty of the artist. Oh, what Sade could do for contemporary theory, when the sovereign could just as happily assume the role of subject! Have we digressed far enough yet?

So now that we’ve had a chance to think about all that, let’s think about Teppei Kaneuji. Because Teppei Kaneuji is the real subject of this essay (and as such has assumed a subjective position in any case). The long paragraphs above on abstraction, design and installation were completely disingenuous. Know that. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course; they were carried out with Kaneuji’s work in mind. It’s simply that with another artist in mind, they may have been carried out differently. Indeed, with another artist in mind, they may well have not come together in the same combination at all. Because there are three integrated strategies that appear in Kaneuji’s practice, which we will term, for the sake of whatever clarity we can muster, as overabstraction, redesign and apoinstallation. We can locate Kaneuji within a strand of Japanese practice that begins with the highly influential though still underexamined Kodai Nakahara, and continues through Kenji Yanobe and Takashi Murakami to Kaneuji’s magpie peers in exonemo, Paramodel, Hiraku Suzuki, Koki Tanaka and Ujino. Or, for Australian audiences, we can see parallels with the ludic, open-ended installation of Hany Armanious, Mikala Dwyer, Christopher Hanrahan, Koji Ryui or Huseyin Sami. Or we can call on surrealist juxtaposition, cubist collage, nouveau realisme, affichisme, neo-Dada and simulationism to understand what he’s playing at, or Kaneuji’s personal heroes Fischli and Weiss, Christian Marclay and Tim Hawkinson. But beyond a catalogue of names, clarity can be aided by description, and Kaneuji’s methodology is helpful here. In his most representative creations, Kaneuji works by accumulating a vast array of objects, sourced from hardware stores, toyshops and variety markets, the more functional and precise in their design the better. Their utility is then discarded, with the objects being organised into such categories as ‘things that look like bones’, ‘things that can be piled up high’, ‘things that have space inside them’ and ‘transparent things’, that is, according to their materiality and potentiality. These things become the base elements of new constellations and constructions, the struts, cantilevers and minarets of totem poles, towers and winter gardens, whatever we think we can find in Kaneuji’s extraordinary assemblages. And all is unified, obliterated and coated in a monochromatic sludge, a pigmented resin that hardens in drips and flows, which is both allusive and non-descript, which approaches the condition of contemporary revisions of minimalism — Peter Robinson comes to mind  here — signifying nothing but never closing itself off completely to metaphor. But what is design without function? Pure desire? Or baseless desire, in which sense we would find a desire without foundation and without limit, a desire that could just as easily be nothing as it could be everything, or more radically, more subversively, a design and a desire utterly indifferent to quantification? For our purposes, in thinking through Kaneuji, in attempting to gather our thoughts in encountering his work, an encounter which takes place as and in and through installation, with all the sexual politics on which this encounter relies, design would thus be abstraction with a purpose but without a function, purposeful desire or desiring purpose, in any case desire detached from utility, not by chance but by design. This is the beauty of Kaneuji’s Borgesian typology, which attempts to designate, to design, not what is but what could be. This is redesignation, redesign. Objects accumulated for the sole purpose of being covered in viscous, libidinal gunk. Objects whose obliteration of function does not equal an obliteration of being. They are abstract, useless and assured. This is an excess of abstraction, an excess of uselessness: overabstraction. Overabstraction is the abstraction that obliterates representation and ideas. It requires neither but demands both. The point is the radical reordering of perceptual categories, radical insofar as it goes to the root of things, where the root is the potentiality of materials. A Mercedes Benz and a pile of dog shit hold in common the capacity to be covered by snow. That is the excessive double point of abstraction, or the point/s of overabstraction, which has no need prerepresentational purity, of linguistic and semantic universality, because its unity is always to come, always elsewhere, always elsewhen. A Kaneuji installation is apoinstallational because of the sense it produces in time and space of this elsewhere in time in space. That’s the point, and it points away. To leap to the furthest point of our digression, then what might be, what might be to come, what it might be to come, is the point where sovereignty and subjecthood are no longer defined by the separation of bodies, but are bound by an interchangability whose mediating tension is as libidinal as it is dialectical. We are bodies that might be covered in snow.