Micheline LO Series

COSMOLOGICAL PRELUDE: THE LIVING FORMATIONS

With the Chemins des écritures, we have to go beyond the field of brains, and to introduce a new cosmological interlude, this time on living formations in general. The word "formation" had to be taken in its active sense. What is concerned here is not the forms as a result of an act of forming, according to one of the meanings of "formation" in French ("des formations rocheuses"), but rather the process through which forms are obtained. The German language is clearer in this respect, as it makes a distinction between Gestalt (form) and Gestaltung (formation, the act of forming). Gestaltung, and not Gestalt, properly translates the word formation(s) here.

Until recently, traditional painting attempted to produce forms, more precisely, perfect forms, exemplary and archetypal, so much so that Michelangelo destroyed almost all of his sketches. And when Picasso deforms, it is to produce new forms. Now, what interested Micheline Lo, as other contemporary cosmogonists, who like her had become radically evolutionists, was to offer a perception and an experience of the formation processes, of morphogeneses, those movements and logics of our contemporary Universe. We chose here five of those new paradigms, the first three of which are ontological, the fourth, epistemological, and the fifth, almost ethical.

INTRODUCTION

Micheline Lo's Chemins des écritures (1996-1999) is a suite of some fifty wide-shaped canvasses, approximately ten square feet in surface — some are somewhat broader, and only three exceed forty square feet (6.5 x 7.5 feet). On first impression, the eye catches fragments of figures, letters, geometric and topological forms, body members and organs, efflorescences and rhizomes, the size of which varies between four and twelve inches square. They could be said to be "plastic cells" as understood by Weidlé, i.e. portions of a work where the destinies-choices of the work as a whole can be found.

1. THE TRAIT

Yet, the eye cannot rest on anything. None of the elements glimpsed are there for their own sake. It has no contour and no part. It is not an event placed next to another event. It is not even a segment before or after another segment, as in the polymeric cells of Dubuffet's Cycle de l'Hourloupe.

To the contrary, everything happens as if the eye were caught in each portion of surface and there read — or at least suspected — some underlying elements, so that, as it catches that particular portion, it also catches the one that comes next, or before, or above, or below. These are not data, but sequences in the strong sense of the word. What is to be seen are not the Generated, but the Generation. And less the generation of one by the other than a Self-generation which enables to apprehend the one and the other, the other and the same. There are therefore no specimens and no species, even, but the generating principles of the species and specimens. Structures and textures, while not negated, are thus never accomplished, nor even definable or discernable, hardly namable. Their exposure, decided but transitory, is there only to create a perception of the work of those ultrastructures of which they are the transient, metastable emergences. Hence, no forms, only formations. In sum, each painting in its own way achieves the same theme: the generalized biological, technical and semiotic Generation.

To fulfill this, the drawing leans on the properties of writing in that the emerging elements, instead of lending themselves to a one-by-one identification, are rather like characters disposed in sequences that would reveal the strokes from which they follow, with the result that the sequences at once come out as (re)sequentiating, as each character already turns into another one, which will in turn become another one. This, from all around, causes singularities that are not so much individuals (non-divided) as relays of individuation, as understood by Simondon. And those relays are not singly describable, narrable, countable, since they are transitions and metamorphoses. Far from all dialectic, there is nothing predictable beforehand, while nothing is either unexplainable afterwards.

The singularities thus produced are uncountably multiple and diverse by reason of the fecundity of the process from which they originate, i.e. the dynamic (re)sequenciations. But they are so, too, because they continue to remain elementary, staying on the level of the digit, the stroke, and in particular of the seven catastrophes of differential topology: crease, fold, dovetail, butterfly wing, and the three types of umbilicus: hyperbolic, elliptic, and parabolic; or yet again on the level of the prime principles of mechanics and hydraulics. As a result, they carry everything that is primary in the anatomy and physiology of the living, as in geometry, algebra, the written character, the element, the object and the technical process, the technical gesture. By reason of this elementarity, each painting often seems to comprise as many actual or virtual signs as did the whole history of images, or even more.

In as much as the stroke or the spot stay under the formation, the least digitalizable deviation suggests a new form of analogy, while all analogy keeps inducing a fresh digitalization. With, however, — as in any phenomenon that is akin to writing — a certain predominance of the digital over the analogic. For, while it is true that in this case there are never any departure or arrival but only relays between anterior and posterior potentialities, such relays could not be distinctly analogic, or they would give rise to narrations and descriptions, which are not to the point. Therefore, the digital initiates the first groupings, of which the still abstract dynamism suggests more concrete analogies, that are in turn again disseminated.

This gives a pictorial echo to the revolution recently brought about by biology, in the sense of Physis, or Prime Generation. Since the beginning of time, Physis had been supposed to work following imagetic copies (Yahweh makes Adam "[a] man in our image, after our likeness"), or metamorphoses, or scissiparities of the same, or detachments of the same, or reciprocal conversion (the yi of the yin/yang), in sum all sorts of processes governed by the One, and where, as a result, there is never anything more in the effect than in the cause. Such is the traditional causality, source of constant and consistent ontology and epistemology, and ultimately perceivable, in part by the creatures, and wholly by Providence, Allah, the Tao, the Dharma, the Polynesian Mana and Kamo, the Mexican Quik (thick blood). But we showed earlier that at least five characters of current living formations depart from this view. Prominent there are the quantic effects. Binding is replaced by start, rerouting, triggering. The process is never strictly plastician, i.e. made up of previously imagined continuities (plattein — to model, imagine).

This is indeed what this painted writing, or rather scriptive painting makes us share. Articulation is no longer punctuation of a totality or of integrant parts, but rather emergences in ubiquitory overlappings, where one can no longer continuously point to an instant-point where A generates B, or where B is distinct from A. One has in mind non-commutative geometries, involving (self-)regulations of elements as much as simply elements.

2. THE COLOR

With this in mind, color must be just as revolutionary as the drawing, since it could no longer work in contrastive layers — as in the Flemish primitives, or Piero della Francesca, or even David Hockney — nor be simply valorizing, as in De Koninck or Jasper Johns.

Color must also be triggering and overlapping, working by rerouting, sequence, sequenciation, resequenciation, positive and negative reactions, feedback and feedforward. And yet, unpredictable. The expletive, "What colors", often elicited by the first contact with this form of painting is not caused by the surprise of broad differences sensed in a single view, but by the partial surprises, in leaps, in formative singularities, generative and self-generated in their leaping. Someone trying to be more specific would usually say, "And then", "Oh, and then", "Ah, and now", and the like. Color that traces and branches off, down to its science values. Released or else flattened to be, in turn, generative, ultrastructural.

Surprisingly seen in Mexican color, which is never that of an object, but that of some force behind, before or among objects, which are then only relays of that force.

3. THE SUPERIMPOSING DISTRIBUTION

The more so as, in such a system, composition gives way to superimposition. All forms of arts, at all events since Çatalhöyük, until then had com-posed, i.e. put together (ponere, cum) previously defined elements in a space-time, also defined, or predefined; this derived from that structure par excellence that is the frame, the framing. Even Dubuffet, in his metamerizations of L'Hourloupe, knows that at one moment he will reach four edges where he will have to stop, bearing in mind that edges attract and repel, and that therefore they are the ultimate referential of the perceptivo-motor and logic-semiotic field effects of a painting.

But in our case, the edges are no longer stop lines to expansion, but lines of reflux. The are the ensemble of the space-time points from which the previously produced graphic and colored (re)sequenciations continue by reverting to themselves (this is what began as the copies of Saint-John Perse's Vent went along), in some sorts of close or distant folds, and more often distant rather than close. For each time we were given to glimpse Micheline Lo's brush strokes, they were just as leaping at a distance and in all directions as those of the Impressionists, of Bonnard, or Chagal.

With this, superimposition itself changed its nature. In traditional composed paintings, it usually displayed changes in design, global or local. Our x-rays reveal subjects initially on the left who have moved to the right, even if the first layer was finally used as a substrate for the new. Now, in the Chemins des écritures, superimposition (right > <left, top > <bottom, above > <below) is a continuation of the same design but in reverse, or retreat. It is the generalized dynamic (re)sequenciation that goes on, flowing back to its previous states, thereby indexing other ultrastructures of those states. The return then multiplies on the whole the graphic and colored irruptions (suddenness, emergence), with a global prevalence of singularities over generalities, and — this needs stressing — of the digital over the analogic.

For those reasons, ultimately, the energy of the project finds its origin mainly in the dimension of depth. Painters are people of few words, but one thing Micheline Lo kept repeating was that it has to go on and retreat at the same time. The pictorial cell is first circumscribed here by this palpitation. One will have understood that acrylic paint was indispensable, as it dries fast enough to allow a distinction of the layers while not excluding their conpenetrations and crossing, to lay a fresh accent on the ultrastructures.

A comparison with music will be helpful here. Admittedly Bach's music is almost antipodal to the Bushy Evolution of our biologists. What mattered for a musician contemporary with Leibniz was to express the Multiple of the One while saving the One in a supreme realization, through sound, of the Western monotheistic eternity. Yet a number of Bach's counterpoints, as Contrapunctus 8 in Die Kunst der Fuge, make their progression by sound handles, formed by a sequence of notes bunched together in chords that are more horizontal than vertical, with the end of a handle at the same time being the beginning of the next, in what could be termed harmonic curves, or modal scrolls, thereby creating a melodic harmony as opposed to Mozart's "accompanied melody". Now, these sound handles (Scherring would take his pulse before playing the Grande Chacone) throw some lights on the curved visual handles that cause the pulsing of the pictorial cells of the Chemins des écritures. It is significant that jazz musicians in the 1960s would play Bach between their own improvisations at the Newport Festival.

4. THE CEREBRAL LANDSCAPE IN MOTION

David Hubel tell us that he was amazed to discover, in the 1960s, that the colors, forms, and movements of the objects of our vision were carried by nervous pathways that are distinct and nowhere totalized. Others have investigated the selections, accentuations, and redistributions done by our visual nerve relays — ganglia, thalamus, and brain areas. In 1982, David Marr, in his work Vision, offered an initial computational program of the stages which retinal data, first blurred, incomplete or too complete, need to go through to finally result in a 3-dimensional "perceived", after a stage which, he said, was "2.5-dimensional".

This pertains to the eternal painter whose vision, since the cave age, goes back to those moments of an object when it has not yet been fully defined but is still under cerebral construction. It may even be assumed that for any major painter Marr's computational stages have specific particularities, for example that of being slower or faster, more hesitating, more accentuated, at all events more exploratory and explorable than in the ordinary man. Yet, for the rational Occident, such stages were taken as a prerequisite, which were more or less shaded off or erased from the final result. Or they might be maintained, but in states that were at least stabilized by contours that negated perspective, as with Joan Miró, or by modulation of luminance, as with Cézanne.

In the Chemins de écritures, one should as far as possible move among those preliminary perceptive stages inasmuch as generation (self-generation) as such is concerned, with its ultrastructures lying beneath structures and textures. The neuronal landscape is part of the pictorial theme, as is the landscape of the living. The painting is then genetic on two counts: in the perceived, i.e. the living formations; and in the perception, i.e. the neuronal reticulations, with in both cases the same importance for the quantic rerouting. The notion of interface is present everywhere, in so far as there is no ontological and epistemological fracture between the perceived and the perceiving, unlike in the matter/spirit dualism. They both have the same behavior, working by releases, and by "punctuated equilibria" (S. J. Gould). They invite to reading in graphs rather than geometries as in traditional Western art, or in pulses as in traditional non-Western art.

5. FROM CONTEMPLATION TO PERCEPTIVE AND HERMENEUTIC EFFERVESCENCE

Let us now situate this experience within that of art in general. Homo is a physical, physiological, technical and semiotic organism subjected at every instant to very diverse and heterogeneous stimuli that form as many pools of attraction that trigger, among themselves, field effects. As a technician and semiotician, he experiences for himself logic-semiotic field effects, while sharing with other animals perceptive-motor field effects that are fixating, kinematical, dynamic and "excited" (René Thom).

While other animals have no use for "excited" field effects which would hamper their action, Homo by contrast takes pleasure in thematizing them in rhythm, for then they help him neutralize general functionings for a time, thus eliciting the presence (apparition, apparitionality, autostranslucency) that accompanies certain functionings. Such is the role of euphoria induced by drink and drugs, dances as those of fakirs, the orgasmic caress and paraorgasmic experiences, certain hypnotic prayers, and chiefly works of art — poetry, dance, music, architecture, sculpture, painting. Craving for pure presence Homo will indulge in rhythm to ecstasy. An animal is not rhythmical, not even the ape rocking to and fro and which simply responds to a Baldwin reaction (perception >> movement >> perception).

In art, the ancient chiefly tried to be contemplative, to hold many things together, as in the sight or the unifying pathway of a temple (contemplare, templum, cum). The West sought to go from parts to wholes, with the hope of a consented rest, of a Spinozian "acquiescence" in the Whole of wholes. This was so as late as Renoir and Cézanne, and even Mondrian. The perceiving stood in front of the work, dominating and integrating it. But the look that meets the Chemin des écritures is no longer in front of anything, but is physically and cerebrally in its midst, an activity among activities, with no attempt as with DaVinci to attain the sight of the embracing God but to identify as far as can be with the Universe of which he is a state-moment.

Contemplation has been replaced by mental, or rather neuronal, effervescence, introducing another form of the sacred. The ancient sacred was exemplaristic and eager for stability and the dazzle of the Eternal and the Expected. The new form of the sacred, apart from the mechanical and hydrodynamic invariants, meets infinite "singularities", an "inexhaustible alterity", a "once, never more", the "explainable only in hindsight". A Chemin des écritures — in that it assembles metastable states, is wrought by its ultrastructures, its (re)sequenciation reflux, its secret graphs, and its interfaces of perceiving and perceived — is the most intense and the most "Universal" brain activator that one can conceive.

Micheline Lo was very much aware of this, and on a loose sheet she noted, "Chemin des écritures: multiple signs in interactions launched into space-time: diverse cultures, signs of every category stored in order or disorder, embarked not on a Ship of Fools but on a voyage across the Universe where they will perhaps be deciphered and reconditioned under a new logic of which we have no premonition."