The Art of the Encounter

Ronald Bogue (Bio)
University of Georgia

A review of Baross, Zsuzsa. Encounters: Gérard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015. Print.

Baross, Zsuzsa. Encounters: Gérard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015. Print.

The epigraph of Zsuzsa Baross’s outstanding study comes from Gilles Deleuze: “To encounter is to find, to capture, to steal, but there is no method for finding other than a long preparation.” What Baross puts on display is the art of the encounter—in the painting and 159 drawings of Gérard Titus-Carmel’s Suite Grünewald (1994-1996), in several films by Claire Denis, in texts on the cinema of Denis and on the body by Jean-Luc Nancy, and in Baross’s study itself. The art of the encounter, Baross shows, is a discipline of the contingent, a long preparation for the advent of the impersonal event, “an interruption, an irruption, opening (to) another future” (7). The artist or philosopher cannot will the event into existence. It is “[a]leatory, contingent, it arrives” (11). It impinges on art and thought as the force of an unforeseeable encounter. But the artist and philosopher can stage encounters, if not control them, by assembling images and concepts in experimental combinations, awaiting the arrival of an event, and then, should it arrive, composing paintings, films or texts that capture and amplify the force of that event.

Encounters has three chapters: “In Place of a Preface … ,”an introductory section on the concept of the encounter; “159 + 1 Variations or Painting Becoming Music,” a lengthy analysis of Titus-Carmel’s Suite Grünewald; and “Il y a du Rapport Sexuel: The Body in the Cinema of Claire Denis and the Writing of Jean-Luc Nancy,” an essay exploring the network of relations Denis and Nancy have forged in the creation of their respective works.

Baross opens with a reference to Jacques Derrida’s statement in Dissemination that “this (therefore) will not have been a book,” adding that not only will Encounters likewise not have been a book, but its preface will not have been a preface. This gesture toward Derrida is less a recognition of the problems of origins and closure in philosophical writing than an articulation of the necessities entailed in thinking the encounter. As Baross says of her non-book, “the movements the writing both tracks and sets into motion, pursues and itself generates in the texts abide by a different logic. Aleatory, contingent, fortuitous, its operations necessarily defy any pro- or pre-vision and announce its presence only after the fact” (2). The encounter’s effects may be shown but not predicted, and Baross’s aim is to make her non-book itself a “showing (a ‘monstration,’ to borrow the term of Jean-Luc Nancy, rather than a demonstration)” of the consequences of encounters: “resonances and echoes, montage and variation effects that from a distance join distant texts, texts and images, a writing and a painting, painting and drawing, thought and cinema, the cinema and the body” (2-3).

Baross initially approaches the artistic and philosophical encounter as “a relation by contact,” reviewing various “mediators, transporters, carriers that deliver the new by way of contact, without, however, the power of determining what passes in that contact” (4). She first considers the basic relation of touch and then moves to the relations of intrusion, adoption, appropriation, abduction, and theft. Nancy’s L’Intrus, a meditation on his heart-transplant surgery, provides a graphic figure of intrusion. Denis’s film L’Intrus, inspired by Nancy’s text, exemplifies adoption, in that the film is not a faithful adaptation of Nancy’s essay but a treatment that invents a relation: “The film adopts the book as one adopts a child, gives it a wholly other future, a future unthinkable/unimaginable from the place where it was found” (5-6). Denis’s adoption of Nancy is like the appropriation painters make of earlier artists’ work, such as Picasso’s repaintings of canvasses of Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya, and Manet. And what Jean-Luc Godard calls abduction is the wholesale appropriation of visual and sonic materials he conducts in Histoire(s) du cinéma, a collage/montage of quotations, music, paintings, photographs and film clips that constitutes theft without plagiarism. If Denis’s adoption “takes charge of its ‘object’,” Godard, in his abduction, “takes (what he finds) rather than takes charge of” (5, 6).

All of these relations by contact—touch, intrusion, adoption, appropriation, abduction, and theft—offer Baross means of conceiving of the art of the encounter, but her goal is to discern as well relations of resonance and variation, which are relations of “contact, without con-tact. Between bodies, between bodies (corps) and corpus of writings, between traits and colors, concepts and musical notes, at a distance” (11). Relations of contact entail violence, the violence of forces that intrude and collide, and the violence of counter-forces that adopt, appropriate, and abduct those forces. Relations of resonance and variation, by contrast, function otherwise, Baross argues. They do so as Deleuzian “becomings,” encounters in which, says Deleuze, “‘what’ each (term or body) becomes changes no less than ‘that which becomes’” (10). A figure of this becoming offered by Deleuze is the “unnatural nuptial” (noce contre nature) of the orchid and the wasp, in which the orchid’s wasp-like coloration and scent induce male wasps to engage the flower as a female wasp and so collect pollen and carry it from one orchid to another. In this nuptial, the becoming-wasp of the orchid makes it a sexual partner of the wasp, and the becoming-orchid of the wasp makes it a reproductive organ of the orchid. “This erotic sensuous image of a nuptial,” says Baross, affords the conception of an encounter “whose force is without violence, without the violence of a forcing” (10). Resonance, like the sympathetic vibration of an open cello string when a piano note sounds, is one such nonviolent encounter at a distance. In resonance, interacting vibrations, waves, or currents are activated among bodies, but what passes among them is resonance itself. “The wave, the agitation, the tension do not come to bodies from the outside. It is in their resonance—something they have differently in common—that they encounter one another, consummate as it were their nuptial in resonance” (11). Variation is a second form of nonviolent encounter, complementary to that of vibration. In variations on a theme—a harmonic progression, a line, a color, an image, a figure, a concept—each new variation aspires to contract a relation with its predecessors across the intervals that separate it from them. Variation is “a quest for nuptials,” a search with the hope that each “new element will contract with the rest, with the past, that it will compose with other elements, enter into a relation of variation with variations already in place in a new block of becoming that the Variation itself will have become” (11).

Crucial for Baross is that vibration and variation, unlike violent forms of encounter, are “machines,” by which she means that they are “generative of impersonal a-subjective effects that are spontaneous and involuntary,” and equally important, that the effects of these machines occur in “the realm of the senses or sensation” (11). Her object in the chapters following the introduction is to detail the operations of these machines in Titus-Carmel, Denis, and Nancy and isolate the effects of sensation that escape signification or rational conceptualization.

In her lengthy chapter on Titus-Carmel, Baross provides clear, concrete examples of the workings of vibration and variation in the realm of sensation. (For those with an allergy to abstraction, a useful strategy might be to read this chapter first and then take on the introduction.) The object of her analysis is Titus-Carmel’s Suite Grünewald, a work consisting of one painting and 159 drawings created in response to the central panel of Grünewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece (1512-1516). The acrylic painting is of the same size as the Grünewald altarpiece (256.6 cm x 332.6 cm), and its elements correspond, with varying degrees of abstraction, to those of the altarpiece—Christ on the cross at the center of the composition; Mary swooning in the arms of St. John the Evangelist on the far left of the painting; Mary Magdalene kneeling to the left of the cross; John the Baptist, pointing at Christ, to the right of the cross; and a small lamb on the right between the feet of Christ and those of John the Baptist. The 159 drawings, identical in size, but smaller than the painting (70 cm x 60.5 cm), are in mixed media: “chalk, crayon, acrylic wash, charcoal, lead pencil, and—cut or torn, then pasted on the subjectile—thin often transparent ‘Asia’ paper, itself in smooth pastel color” (20). In the 2007 exhibition of the Suite Grünewald at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris (the installation on which Baross comments), the acrylic painting is mounted on a panel at what would be the altar of the Collège’s Gothic nave, with the 159 drawings displayed on the room’s left and right walls flanking the altar. Baross’ book includes a photograph of the exhibition space, as well as color reproductions of the Grünewald altarpiece, Titus-Carmel’s corresponding acrylic painting, and 67 of the 159 drawings. The ample illustrations convey a clear sense of the Suite Grünewald, and their inclusion in the book allows the reader to follow Baross’s complex analysis readily.

The encounter that occasioned Baross’s study of Titus-Carmel was a synesthetic sensation when first visiting the Suite Grünewald exhibition: “I believe I hear music—a trill on a single instrument, a short piano trah-la-la—faintly emanating from the picture-space of the drawings” (19). Her response to this contingent, disorienting event is to consider the Suite as a musical composition—not in some vague, impressionistic sense, but in a rigorous, philosophical sense that questions the limits of painting and music and seeks to uncover a becoming-music proper to Titus-Carmel’s artwork. She finds the musicality of the Suite in various formal relations of color and line, extracted from Grünewald and then reconfigured, and in their variation within and across drawings. The variations of these extractions and reconfigurations ultimately generate a temporality specific to the Suite, one that discloses a zone of indiscernibility between the forms of painterly and musical composition, a time-space of a becoming-music immanent to the artwork itself.

Baross identifies in the disposition of the drawings a basic schema of “n + 1.” The drawings are displayed in two rows along each of the nave’s facing side walls, in groups of three above three, four above four, and so on, the groups punctuated by an additional drawing on the bottom row with no drawing above it. (In other words, the bottom row is a continuous row of evenly spaced drawings, whereas the top row parallels the bottom with an empty space appearing at irregular intervals above a drawing on the bottom row.) The groups form blocks of variation, the first three above three group, for example, consisting of six treatments of Grünewald’s kneeling Mary Magdalena, the same figure in each drawing but submitted to diverse modifications across the series. Each block of variation (three above three, four above four …) has its own dynamic, its elements varying in their degree of apparent self-coherence (some blocks contain anomalous drawings that echo drawings in other blocks) and in the extent to which their elements bear a resemblance to Grünewald’s. The “+ 1” drawings punctuate the blocks but also serve as joints or pivots that link each block to the next, as if each + 1 drawing were engendering a successive block of variation. In this sense, the n + 1 schema is both generative and open-ended.

Each drawing is like a cinematic frame, Baross argues, a rectangle of unchanging dimensions that crops various elements of Grünewald’s canvas, now in extreme close-up (Mary Magdalena’s hands), now in close-up (Mary Magdalena’s torso), now in mid-shot (Mary Magdalena, Mary and St. John the Evangelist), and so on. Each framing is in service of what Baross labels a method, “namely, the progressive fragmentation, abstraction, denouement of the original” (26). The object of this method is to extract color and line from Grünewald’s representations and render palpable the strictly painterly forces immanent within them—forces Titus-Carmel identifies in his notes accompanying the exhibition as torsions, convulsions, suffocations, the slowness of the movements that disturb the figures, the whirlwind of reds, and “the agitations of a secret wind,” among others (27).

But schema (n +1) and method (extraction through cinematic framing) are not enough to make the artwork a creative event. It is variation that does so. The schema provides a dynamic structure for variation, and method supplies extracted elements for its operation, but variation is the machine that generates productive encounters. Each extracted element is turned into a motif, or “prototype,” which Baross defines as “an a-signifiant, non-signifying element,” which has been “cut off from its origin” (30). The prototype is then subjected to experimental variation and set in resonance with other prototypes within an emergent composition of forces, rhythms and movements. That which converts heterogeneous prototypes, individual drawings, blocks of drawings, and the central painting into a composition is “the variation machine that the Suite invents and assembles and whose invention and assembly are coterminous with it” (33). Titus-Carmel’s “long preparation” for encounters is in the schema and method, but the creative formation and functioning of the variation machine is one he merely oversees as its operator, not its author, for the machine “coincides with its autogenesis” (33).

The Suite is like a musical composition in that it is an active deployment of forces, rhythms and movements, but the becoming-music of the work is to be found above all in its temporality. Following Pierre Boulez, Baross identifies the “musical object” as “the aftermath of a retroactive, posthumous re-appropriation—paradoxically, not of an object, but of a passage…. … So that what gives itself is not a complete and accomplished whole but something that passes, is in passage … a passage that makes itself pass, breaches its own paths” (44). A melody, for example, passes in time, one tone after another, but only becomes a coherent melody through constant retrospective assimilation of the preceding tones into their successors as part of a complete yet open-ended passage. Baross’s claim is that the apparently spatial object of the Suite is really a temporal object, and that the variation machine generates passages among the diverse elements of the composition. She identifies three different temporal dimensions of the Suite. The first is chronological, marked by the dates of composition of the drawings, which are posted as titles of the various drawings (#1 June 20, 1994, for example). This succession has its own rhythms—sequences of one drawing per day, sets of drawings over two or three days, a hiatus of over a year, followed by drawings dated only by month and year and then a resumption of drawings including the day or days of composition. The second dimension is anachronic, passing forward and backward across the intervals between drawings. As Baross shows in great detail, #16 appears as an anomaly until #44 offers a variation of the earlier drawing’s elements, at which point a back-and-forth movement sets the two in resonance, and in the process activates # 28 as a belated member of the ensemble. And the third dimension is vertical, manifest in the cut and torn pieces of Asia paper pasted on the drawings. The translucent sheets covering portions of the drawing (and often covering other sheets as well) are layers of time, Baross argues, the mark of the drawing underneath the Asia sheet representing “a present that is past but not absent … a present that is both past and present, presenting itself” (56). The interval between the drawing and the sheet of paper “is between two presents simultaneously present, while, impossibly, also standing in a relation of present/past” (57).

The culmination of the Suite as temporal object arrives in the final painting, dated 1994-1996, which is the time span that encompasses the creation of the work as a whole. Baross likens the painting to an electronic music machine called the “harmonizer.” Every musical note includes the overtones of its scale, though the ear does not perceive the overtones as discrete entities. The note is a contraction of multiple notes occurring at such speed that only one note is perceptible. The harmonizer retards the vibration speeds and thereby “liberates a whole series of virtual sounds, a selection of which will be articulated (prototypes) in a new composition” (59-60). The final painting is in one sense a culminating contraction of the 159 variations and their temporalities, but also a generative center whose virtual elements manifest themselves in the 159 variations. The painting thus is both before and after the variations. And further, the painting is also a “harmonizer” of Grünewald’s altarpiece, a machine that sets free the virtual forces of that canvas. Hence, “rather than singing praises of the master’s work, the Suite makes the painting itself ‘sing.’ In 159 variations, it liberates something like a song from the Crucifixion, a song of lines and colors which has been silently (virtually) present…. Or more precisely (or creatively) … the Suite gives its time to the tableau” (19).

In the chapter on Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy, Baross continues her meditation on time and resonance as these concepts relate to the body. If music is a temporal object, as is the Suite Grünewald, so too is the body itself, according to Baross. Bodies are formed of multiple, coexisting times that are like the passages of melodies. They “are constituted in the birth and passage (enchainement) of presents.” They are durations, “the always singular durations (or becomings) of an aging, a dying, a growing tired … passing through or being actualized in this or that body” (67). Neither a dimension nor a milieu, the body’s time is “constitutive,” and it is inseparable from the forces, themselves temporal, “that pass through it and traverse it, and to which it submits” (67). The time proper to a given body is singular but not personal, “not the attribute of a body but the expression of a life, of rhythmic variations in the ‘melody of an existence’ at ‘this’ or ‘that’ time” (68). In this regard, a given body is less a discrete entity than a “locality of durations—a dying, a suffering, a jouissance, a falling asleep—taking place, accomplishing itself, in time, in the place (lieu) and ‘locality’ of the body” (68).

The body’s temporality, however, is not Baross’s primary topic in this chapter, merely “a preliminary and provisional” digression “in order to give time to the body, to give bodies their proper time” (67). Rather, her focus is on the pairs “sense/sensation” and “touch/resonance.” In Corpus, Nancy aims not to write about the body, argues Baross, but to let the writing be the body itself. Nancy works within language, but in this text “he writes toward the limit of language, toward its very edge and on the border of its sense” (70). He writes toward what he calls “the sense without sense” (sens sans sens) at the limit of language, and toward the body’s own sensuous sensations. He explores this zone between sense without sense and sensations through the figure of touch. In his text, it is as if the limits of language and the body, their respective skins, were entering a relation of touch, the writing being “a movement toward,” and the body “that which withdraws from it” (71). The text’s touch never makes contact, but resonates in “a rapport without touching, or rather, a rapport that self-touches while it also touches the other at a distance” (70). In the text, a “rapport or intercourse—something untouchable, inappropriable—takes place between the sense that is without signification, which arrives to writing at its limit” and “the sense of sensuous sensations (neither senseless nor without sense): micro vibrations, imperceptible tremors that traverse the surface of the skin” (71).

Baross finds a similar investigation of the touch of bodies and the limits of sense and sensation in the films of Claire Denis. Denis works with the significations of the bodies, treating themes of racism, colonialism, and sexism, but in Baross’s analysis Denis also presents bodies of sensation, without signification, through a cinematic touch without touch. Through various techniques, she deploys a tactile vision, what Alois Riegl called a “haptic” near-seeing as if the eye were seeing with the hand. But in so doing, Denis also discloses the visible body as an image. “In the visible, image and body are linked by an exceptional complicity…. The body is image …, always already cinematic: in the visible, it screens—that is, extends—the visible” (74).

Baross offers numerous examples of the body’s disclosure as sensuous asignifying image in Denis’s cinema. Notable is the section in which Baross analyzes three scenes from White Material, a film set on an African coffee plantation during a time of social upheaval. Baross shows how the complex images of contact between the white plantation owner’s son and black child soldiers and a black maid force awareness of relations only possible between bodies of sensation: the son’s bare neck and the point of a lance, a black hand running across the son’s shoulder tattoo, a bundle of cut hair thrust into a black maid’s mouth and then vomited to the ground. Equally impressive is the succeeding section, in which Baross surveys images across Denis’s oeuvre that participate in events of sensation: hair/fur/feather; the scar; a wound; the heart; the hand; the skin of the night.

Baross closes the third chapter with a commentary on Nancy’s short review of Denis’s Trouble Every Day, speculating that the review offers an approach to the body that is absent in Nancy’s Corpus and that marks the most intense zone of resonance between Denis’s cinema and Nancy’s thought.

Baross writes in the parenthetic mode, thought within thought, allusion within allusion, but also in the modes of projective anticipation and recursive reconfiguration, of adoption, appropriation, and abduction. I have numbered only a few of the concepts that Baross deploys in the invention of her own conceptual composition, ignoring Nancy’s “expeausition” and “excription,” Deleuze’s “spiritual automaton,” Barthes’s “punctum,” Foucault’s “dispositif,” among many others. The success of Encounters, however, is not in its use of sources, but in its operation as an autogenic variation machine, a machine that in its coherent incompletion, its rigorous openness, and its activation, through scrupulous selection and long preparation, of dynamic relations among texts, paintings and films, creates and perpetuates genuine encounters.