Material and Spatial Immersion: Embodiment Intensified, Dissolved, Transcended and Problematised
By Tamar Torrance McCambridge. Art History 725 – Concepts in Contemporary Art, Grade: A+
‘Immersion’ is a term with equivocal meaning—a homonym, used often to describe qualities of illusion, interaction, involvement, absorption, and so on. However, while certainly manifold in its characterisations, consistently, the conceptualisation of immersion—as both a process and state of being—involves the dissolution, or transgression of conventional boundaries which separate oneself from the external world.[1] In immersion, the boundary between subject and object becomes fluid—uncertain, indistinct, or absent entirely. As outward directed perception becomes indistinguishable from inward directed introspection, one’s consciousness is liable to unfetter from the confines of sensory and perceptual self-awareness—free-floating in a desire to reach towards “greater or lesser states of sublime wholeness.”[2] Gilles Deleuze described this desire as “depending on whether the thing encountered enters into composition with us, or on the contrary, tends to decompose us.”[3]
For Heidegger, immersion, or ‘being-in-the-world’, defines our very existence as corporeal, thinking beings, whose sense of ‘being’ is not habitually dissociable from ‘the world’.[4] Heidegger described this phenomenon as ‘Dasein’, in which ‘being’ defines human existence not simply as entities (nor why nor how), but rather, “in virtue of which entities are entities,” as active pursuers of meaning and purpose.[5] In this manner, rather than a receptive state, ‘being’ resembles an active, reciprocal engagement between oneself and that which is external to oneself, and thereby bears on one’s perceptions of and embodied engagement with the world. This perceptual and embodied engagement occurs through the tacit initiation of what Merleau-Ponty defined as ‘chiasm’, an interlocking exchange between the minded body and that which is external to it.[6] One cannot, for instance, touch without being touched in return, and it is within this reciprocal exchange which states of immersion may be engendered, embodied, assimilated with one’s sense of ‘being’, and at times, transcendental.[7]
Nevertheless, immersion can therefore be thought of as an alternate state of consciousness which arises from the intertwining and assimilation of one’s mind, body and environment.[8] However, whether this emergent consciousness synthesises with one’s own phenomenology or dissolves into space, depends on the artwork one finds themselves immersed in. As such, the following essay will consider the relationship between the art installations of Olafur Eliasson and Teresa Margolles, and states of immersion which occur situated in materiality (and by virtue become embodied), in comparison to that which arises spatially (and results in the dissolution of self-awareness entirely). However, as one’s sensory, perceptual and cognitive engagement with the world exists in a state of perpetual flux, states of immersion are, by extension, ephemeral, unfixed, and mercurial. The ensuing discussions will therefore consider how certain artworks both engender, and modulate immersion in terms of one’s sensory, temporal and emotional experience, and—in terms of spatial immersion—potential philosophical and psychological consequences of this experience. Moreover, this essay will also consider how contextual knowledge inflects and, at times, problematises states of immersion.
Immersion in Material
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If immersion in art has the capacity to displace one’s mind from their body, one might be tempted to parallel this phenomenon with philosophical traditions which have held the intellectual mind, that which is abstract and transcendent, as superior to the corporeal form—that which pertains to one’s embodiment in the here and now.[9] Certainly, within the confines of dualistic thinking, one might conceive of that which is material as antithetical to immersion, as a phenomenon which renders one’s awareness of the body sedentary.[10] However, while one’s explicit, disembodied awareness may be overridden during states of immersion, one’s implicit, sensory perceptual awareness is not.[11]
Sensory/ Embodied Immersion in Material
Indeed, by appealing to (or at times, forcibly evoking) one’s phenomenology via chiasm, art materiality can invite amplified embodied engagement in a manner which engenders states of immersion rooted in this heightened sensory experience.[12] It is this phenomenological exchange which characterises one’s encounter with Olafur Eliasson’s Moss Wall (1994), an installation comprised solely of Scandinavian reindeer moss. Subsuming an entire wall of the gallery in an expanse of lichen woven into mesh, Moss Wall foregrounds natural materiality (that is, literal organic matter) in a manner which evokes the biological materiality of its spectator.[13] As the boundary between subject and object, inside and outside, self and other begins its dissolution, one’s phenomenology becomes entangled with the installation and consequently receptive to sensory oscillations it may arouse.
Olafur Eliasson, Moss Wall, 1994, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2009. Photograph by Nathan Keay/ Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
However, one’s initial sensory encounter with Moss Wall occurs before the installation enters one’s vision. The earthy fragrance of moss fills the gallery space, infiltrating the senses so that one cannot avoid physically inhaling Moss Wall—imbibing the aromatic (if not slightly miry) scent so that the moss is tasted, before it is actually seen.[14] By virtue of this encounter, Eliasson primes an intimate relationship between one’s body and the artwork, drawing the viewer into a prematurely embodied engagement with the installation. Face-to-face, the wall of moss envelopes one’s visual field entirely, optically immersing the viewer in an all-encompassing colony of moss which rhythmically modulates in colour, texture and depth.
As one is phenomenologically entwined with Moss Wall, this undulant matter becomes something which is felt, more so than simply perceived. In ‘The Eyes of the Skin’ Juhani Pallasmaa describes the eyes as capable of touch, as visual perception evokes tactile sensations in a process of embodied mimesis.[15] When considering Moss Wall, it is not difficult to imagine slipping into a meditative exploration of the mossy expanse in which the modulations of textures translate to haptic rhythms. While the latticework of tendrils and plumes lead one’s eye in infinite directions, as one’s gaze settles, it becomes drawn inward—inward and inward—until one becomes lost in rhythmic exploration (and indeed, contemplation) of moss.[16] Were one to reach out, however, and engage physically with Moss Wall, the quality of this embodied immersion shifts. The hands are an enormously versatile sensory perceptual tool, and as such, experiencing Moss Wall in this manner invites a tactile exchange of energy, pressure and heat, between oneself and the installation—thereby intensifying the quality of haptic exploration.[17] It is through this dynamic embodied engagement which one consequently leaves behind the facticity of the moss, to enter into a state of immersion which, reaching past materiality, becomes suspended in a hypnagogic, dream-like, contemplative state.[18]
Immersion in Moss Wall, therefore occurs as a series of sensory encounters which compound and amplify one’s sense of smell, taste, sight and touch—to suspend one’s phenomenology in that of the artwork’s.[19] From this amplified and inflected embodiment of materiality, an alternate state of consciousness may be engendered in a ‘flow of energy’ between one’s mind, body and environment.[20] As Moss Wall is alive—this ‘flow of energy’ is itself somehow organic—natural and symbiotic in its reciprocation.[21] Perhaps one might attribute this natural reciprocity to notions of shared, fluid energy fundamental to monistic philosophies which deny the ontological dissociation between oneself, and the material world external to oneself.
Teresa Margolles, Narcomensajes (Narco-Messages), from the 2009 Venice Biennale exhibition ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?).
As with Eliasson’s Moss Wall, it is through the foregrounding of materiality which Teresa Margolles’ 2009 Venice Biennale installation ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?), draws viewers into a powerfully immersive encounter which resounds, via chiasm, with one’s own body matter. However, inserting death into this immersion (a borderline sacrilegious contrast to Moss Wall’s vitality), Margolles forcefully ruptures and problematises this experience.
What Else Could We Talk About? manifests as macabre procession of bodily matter. Margolles’ ‘temple of blood’ is pervaded with the fluids and substances of Mexico’s dead; mixed with cement, methodically spread across exhibition floors, impregnated in fabrics, drained in the sea, and even dragged across Lido Beach as ‘public actions’.[22] It is such base materials which the artist’s Narcomensajes (2009) have been saturated in, swathes of fabric stained with blood collected from narco-execution sites at the northern border between Mexico and the U.S., now dehydrated to the colour of wine and rust, which mars the material in uneven and erratic stains. Over the duration of the Biennale, these fabrics were progressively embroidered with golden-threaded messages taken from execution sites—disquieting omens which cartels leave in the wake of their devastation; [23]
SEE, HEAR AND SCILENCE
UNTIL ALL YOUR CHILDREN FALL
THUS FINISH THE RATS
SO THAT THEY LEARN TO RESPECT
Narcomensajes is therefore shaped in terms of materiality, foregrounding that which is immanent and corporeal in a manner which inherently evokes one’s own biological matter. Drawing viewers into a chiasmic engagement which confuses the subject/object boundary, the haptic topography of Narcomensajes therefore becomes embodied—inextricably interlocked with the viewer’s sensory perceptual experience. As such, patterns of dirt, dried blood and creases which cover the fabrics in intricate latticework may come to evoke (not unlike Moss Wall) erratic rhythms and sensations which penetrate one’s phenomenology so they are felt pre-reflectively, more so than simply observed.[24] Offset by the meticulous stitching of golden threads, however, these once uncontrollable rhythmic sensations which carry palpable tension, become susceptible to shifts and oscillations, at times evoking, instead, a steady cadence which is innately palliative.[25]
However, while one’s sensory immersion in Moss Wall and Narcomensajes alike evoke an undeniably haptic, embodied experience, in terms of deeper phenomenological engagement, this is perhaps where resemblances allay. Beyond the tacit rhythm both installations conjure by virtue of displaying an expanse of materiality, when one engages with Narcomensajes in terms of its abjection—embodied immersion becomes patently problematic. Certainly, as the materiality of Narcomensajes becomes imposed onto one’s own skin via chiasm, raw impressions of violence carried in the spilled blood evoke sensations of one’s own body being violently torn, dirtied and haemorrhaging. While spectators are invited to inhale and physically imbibe Moss Wall, the suggestion of breathing the scent of Narcomensajes and tasting copper becomes repellent—sickening in a manner which turns the stomach. In effect, the meditative ‘flow of energy’ engendered amidst one’s immersion in Moss Wall is ruptured and rendered entirely undesirable, offensive and dismaying by Margolles. Rather than a contemplative, perhaps even transcendental state of consciousness, one’s sensory immersion in Narcomensajes becomes something one violently recoils from.
Temporal Immersion in Material
Alongside one’s sensory engagement with materiality in states of immersion, one’s experience of temporality also becomes receptive to oscillations and manipulations. That is, as awareness of ‘self’ dissolves into immersion, so too does one’s awareness of time.[26] Indeed, one’s sense of time is something which is innately embodied, and as such, when awareness of the body slips—as cognitions, attention, emotions are no longer regulated—one’s perception and experience of time becomes equally slippery.[27]
When immersed in an installation like Moss Wall, in which one enters into an embodied engagement with organic, living matter—one’s embodied sense of time become inextricably interwoven with that of this matter. As such, while this phenomenological entanglement lends to qualities of heightened sensory experience, it similarly has the capacity to suspend or dissolve one’s experience of time so that it becomes abstract, intangible—rooted in ‘time’ as felt or measured by nature. [28] As one could not feasibly comprehend ‘time’ as measured by processes of the natural world, one’s temporal experience in this moment of immersion becomes immeasurable—simultaneously boundless and eternal.[29]
Olafur Eliasson, Moss Wall, 1994, Tate Modern, London. Photograph by Simon Ingram/ National Geographic.
As with Moss Wall, temporality in Narcomensajes is slippery. While time may become unfettered in immersion, as the quality of this immersion fluctuates, so too does one’s experience of time. Certainly, temporal experience of Narcomensajes—an installation which suspends the violent moment of death of multiple people—is laden with nuance. This installation materialises as a macabre accumulation of finite time, in which each visceral stroke of blood comes to represent the unknown lifespan of an unknown individual. The materiality of Narcomensajes therefore embodies seemingly infinite, non-linear temporal dynamics which play out in the imagination in reverse.[30] As such, one’s sensory perception of time becomes ruptured from its suspension in immersion, only to then be drawn into the abstract and non-linear temporal experiences of the victims embedded in Narcomensajes’ facture.[31] Moreover, confronted with the finite nature of time, one is invariably reminded of their own limited supply in a manner which disrupts immersion—reinstating one’s immanent self-awareness. Temporal experience in immersion therefore fluctuates rather dramatically, at times suspended (and by virtue momentarily inexistent) in contemplation, assimilated with the imagined time of others, or brought violently into one’s bodily awareness.
Emotional & Imaginative Immersion in Material
Given the intensity of one’s sensory and temporal embodiment in states of immersion, it is unavoidable that such states engender heightened emotional and imaginative involvements. From a materialist perspective, if immersion in the natural materiality of Moss Wall can be thought to evoke an ontological ‘oneness’ with the material universe, as previously mentioned, then one’s encounter with this installation may similarly invite existential comfort—perhaps even anticipation.[32] In this contentment, one becomes liable to enter into meditative contemplation whereby one’s experience of immersion is embedded in deep introspection, or ignited outward in imaginative exploration.[33] As such, amidst an immersive exchange with Moss Wall, the spectator may be drawn into a subconscious exploration of ‘self’, or transported to the far North where reindeer moss grows—in the midst of moor and mountain. Almost certainly, this experience is not characterised by mutual exclusivity, but rather, fluctuates reciprocally between emotional and imaginative engagement.
Alternatively, the locus of Narcomensajes’ emotional impact hinges on its foregrounding of abjection—a sensation which defines one’s instinctual reaction of repulsion to threat.[34] As an embodiment of ‘death infecting life,’ the corpse therefore possesses the greatest of threats: [35]
The corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled.
As Margolles brings the spectator into contact with the corpse, it is this repellent and innately threatening material exchange one enters into in immersion, which generates Narcomensajes’ affecting impact.[36] However, while pre-reflective fear and disgust may initially rupture embodied immersion (shocking one from their chiasmic engagement with the materials), as one’s emotions and imagination take over, this state of immersion is reinstated—although experientially different. Through fear and disgust, profound empathy emerges in a manner which re-engenders immersion, now inflected with imagined phenomenologies, memories, impressions, histories and lives of the victims Margolles memorialises.[37]
Teresa Margolles, Narcomensajes (Narco-Messages), What Else Could We Talk About?
Teresa Margolles embroidering fabrics stained in blood collected from narco-execution sites at the border between Mexico & the U.S. with golden threads.
Contextual Interference & Inflection
Immersion is therefore profoundly variable by nature. Certainly, as one’s sensory and perceptual engagement with the world is not detached from cognitive, ‘higher-order’ processing, immersion, by extension, must also be influenced by such processing.[38] Although, the relationship between immersion and a critically-distanced engagement in art is by no means linear or rigid. Rather, this relationship is multifaceted, simultaneously closely interlaced and dialectical, while at the same time contradictory and dependent on one’s own disposition.[39]
Considering immersion as a cerebrally stimulating process, the contexts within which installations are created and situated bear significant. Eliasson is known for art which unearths (often literally) and challenges perceptions of the natural world—engaging in dialogues which resonate with philosophies central to ‘new materialism’. [40] Moss Wall is part of the exhibition Take Your Time—a blasé idiom with which Eliasson encourages viewers to engage actively in a dialogue with materiality, although asks that in this dialogue one relinquishes control, allowing matter to speak for itself. In terms of materialist theories, Moss Wall therefore resonates beyond sensory perceptual experience, gesturing to very ways in which one’s perception of the ‘world’, as distinct from the ‘earth’, informs and shapes our habitual engagements with the material world. Within the confines of the gallery—an institution of ‘world’ in the earth/world dualism—Moss Wall reinstates the humble materiality of earth.[41] As such, Eliasson arranges Moss Wall in a manner which evokes the memory of the architecture it envelops—visualising the subsumption of ‘world’ by the force of ‘earth’ as an immanent embodiment of chaosmos—the struggle between intellectual, actively imposed form and receptive, passively witnessed formlessness of materiality.[42] One’s immersion therefore becomes swept up in this struggle, oscillating amidst the broader themes Eliasson is critically engaging with.
It is this same tension between semiotic and asemiotic processing which characterises one’s immersion in Margolles’ Narcomensajes. While traditions of visual representation envisage death as a transcendent experience—one which spells an ethereal eternity—Margolles tears this tradition back into physical reality in furious protest, foregrounding and exposing death in its raw materiality. Margolles engages with the corpse in terms of abjection, cast-down, ignoble and debased as a means of inciting affect in viewers which mirrors the reality of the Mexican collective experience under the oppressive weight of extreme narco-violence.[43]
As aforementioned, one’s immersion in Narcomensajes is deftly, if not unceremoniously, ruptured with the realisation that the installation’s materials—which previously echoed one’s own materiality—comprise human remains. Disturbed from immersion, one is invited to engage with the fabrics of Narcomensajes analytically, rather than exclusively in terms of embodiment—initiating an critical engagement through which meaning comes to bear. In one’s semiotic encounter with Narcomensajes, the severity and flagrancy of social injustice in Mexico becomes palpable—viscerally reifying Margolles’ protest that “rich and poor do not die the same way.”[44] The golden messages threaded into the fabric’s surface jar against its basely materiality, conjuring ‘a friction between luxury and greed,’ and the ‘peculiar moral code’ sanctioned by every execution.[45] As Medina observed; [46]
In sum, this work uses the artistic space to reveal the complex economy of abjection and desire that bubbles along quietly, like murder without end.
In essence, while such enriched, although semiotic, engagement momentarily ruptures immersion, once reinstated, immersion becomes inflected and shaped by this knowledge.[47] As such, one’s sensory, temporal, emotional and imaginative immersion in both Moss Wall and Narcomensajes fluctuates and intensifies episodically as the relationship between one’s ‘asemiotic’ and semiotic processing oscillate reciprocally.[48]
Olafur Eliasson, Moss Wall, 1994, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, 2000. Photograph by Koinegg.
Immersion in Space
~
Both Moss Wall and Narcomensajes serve as apt psychological diagrams for states of immersion which arise from one’s embodied engagement with materiality. [49] While immersion in art which foregrounds matter (whether that of natural or abject corporeality) depends on this matter ‘entering into composition’ with oneself as Deleuze suggested, the following discussion will turn towards installations which, alternatively, engender states of immersion which ‘tend to decompose’ oneself.[50] As the former hinges on materiality to evoke embodied immersion, the later arguably depends on space as a conduit through which to dissolve one’s consciousness of embodiment entirely. In spatial immersion, consciousness reaches out, stretching against the confines of embodiment and self-awareness to test its own boundaries.[51] By shedding the materiality of the ‘limited corpus’ either via sensory overload or deprivation, one’s consciousness is liable to unfetter, dissolve and expand into space.[52]
Sensory/ Embodied Immersion in Space
Immersion in space therefore relies on sensory experience—a reliance which arises in both Olafur Eliasson’s Din blinde passager (2010) and Teresa Margolles’ Vaporizacion (2001), installations which manifest as all-encompassing illusory environments and spatially overwhelm one’s phenomenology to engender immersion.[53] Din blinde passager was Eliasson’s final instalment in the ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst’s UTOPIA series—a ninety metre long corridor flooded by dense, opaque fog illuminated in oscillating bright hues.[54] While one’s sight is obfuscated almost entirely, with visibility at just 1.5 metres, viewers are invited to make their way through the colourful fog—robbed of sight so that one must appeal to their baser senses for guidance. Relying on auditory, tactile, olfactory, and perhaps even gustatory perception in this manner, the boundaries between these ordinarily separate senses become fluid—indistinct and uncertain. One’s immersion in Din blinde passager therefore arises as a heightened sensory simulation of being in an entirely illusory world, which gradually takes shape as one physically moves throughout it. While upon entering blind into this passage one’s sensory experience becomes explicit, heightened as a means of compensating for loss of sight, as the viewer ambles forward, immersion arises amidst sensory exploration of space.
Olafur Eliasson, Din blinde passager, 2010, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, 2010.
While the mind may therefore wander during immersion, so too might the body. Din blinde passager embodies the meta-stability which exists between mindfulness and this mind/body wandering. That is, as the viewer moves through the installation, they may become periodically aware of their blindness in a manner which reinstates self-awareness. However, as one relinquishes control and eases into sensory exploration, this self-awareness dissolves and transcends corporeality—thereby dislocating one’s consciousness from within the confines of the body.
Eliasson described this experience of Din blinde passager as a ‘journey’.[55] As such, while one oscillates between an ‘out-of-body’ immersion and reinstated self-awareness as they physically move throughout Din blinde passager, this oscillation which accompanies motion becomes essential to the very essence of one’s immersion. In Din blinde passager, one’s immersive experience is not static, but by the very nature of this installation, in motion—perpetually shifting experientially, and therefore translatable to sensations of progression. This sensation is accentuated by lighting which illuminates the opaque fog in bright colours, which themselves oscillate in time with one’s movement throughout the passage. In this manner, colour signals one’s progression through the fog and therefore embodies an abstract temporality which in many ways drives this ‘journey’ forward. As such, memory, in particular colour memory, becomes an evocative register on which temporality is experienced.[56] This is particularly affecting as perceptual after-images accompany one’s perception of colour—manifestations of the enduring trace of a moment just past, as it penetrates the present.[57] In effect, one’s ‘journey’ through Din blinde passager, therefore becomes temporally fluid—interpenetrating the past with the present— although in motion and therefore progressive and oscillatory nonetheless. [58]
Like Din blinde passager, Margolles’ Vaporizacion manifests as a mist-filled interior, the dense vapour illuminated by bright lights which emanate from above. Physically enveloping viewers and obscuring the entirety of one’s visual field, immersion arises in Vaporizacion (much like Din blinde passager) as one’s sensory perception is engulfed, overwhelmed and assimilated with the environment.[59] Infiltrating the senses and dissolving against the skin—both Din blinde passager and Vaporizacion physically disrupt and permeate the subject-object boundary.[60] As this boundary evaporates, immersion manifests as an emergent state of consciousness, free-floating in sensory exploration of space.[61]
Teresa Margolles, Vaporizacion, ACE Gallery, Mexico City, 2001.
However, while this experience might engender something approaching transcendence in Din blinde passager, in Vaporizacion, one’s experience becomes replaced by abject horror with the realisation that the vapour inhaled comprises water used to wash the corpses of Mexico City Morgue. Immediately, this permeation of the subject/object boundary becomes grossly problematic—symptomatic of a contamination or intrusion. Indeed, as immersion in Vaporizacion is intimately entwined with one’s sense of taste, smell and touch, Margolles draws viewers into this receptive, although seemingly innocuous, sensory exchange—only to then transmogrify this exchange into a sensory violation. Where Narcomensajes can be seen to impose death, Vaporizacion instils it, as an environment deceptive in its immersive allure—enticing viewers, often unwittingly, into an intimate and viscerally physical involvement with the corpse.
Engulfed by this sea of vapor, the fluids of the dead threaten to merge one’s own flesh—permeate across the skin, infuse with the lungs and absorb into one’s bloodstream.[62] Margolles therefore gives new meaning to the abject as “death infecting life”—a notion as innate as it is penetrating in its threat to the living.[63] In one’s attempts to recoil from perceived contamination, embodied awareness (amplified by abject fear and self-preservation instincts), becomes forcibly and unceremoniously reinstated—rupturing immersion entirely.[64] However, while one’s self-consciousness is heightened in a manner which violently disrupts transcendent or ‘out-of-body’ immersion, it might be suggested that this amplified embodied awareness becomes in itself, an alternate state of immersion. That is, as one becomes engrossed in their embodiment—intimately aware of the vapour as it coats the skin, its smell and taste as it is inhaled—this engrossed involvement with one’s own body is itself an alternate state of consciousness, although one of absorbed embodiment.
Philosophical Implications of Immersion in Space
While immersion is therefore oscillatory and malleable in nature, when one’s consciousness becomes unfettered—as experienced in both Din blinde passager and (however temporarily) Vaporizacion—the philosophical implications of self-dissolution come to bear. Certainly, as the ego dissolves and consciousness becomes free-floating, immersion may manifest as an ‘oceanic feeling’—a sensation, as defined by Sigmund Freud, which arises from being inextricably, indissolubly entwined with and belonging to the world outside of oneself.[65] Rather than a Cartesian, analytical experience, this sensation manifests as profound, semi-mystical contemplation, in which (no longer anchored to one’s awareness of embodiment) one’s perception of self, time and space unmoors—melding into material eternity. [66] The oceanic feeling is therefore simultaneously timeless and boundless—qualities which invariably resonate with monistic philosophies central to materialism in their gesture to the all-encompassing ontology of materiality.[67] Although, it is such material ‘oneness’ which becomes experiential amidst sensations inspired by the oceanic.[68] As such, in terms of one’s immersion in Din blinde passager and Vaporizacion (preceding one’s awareness of the origins of Vaporizacion’s vapor), the oceanic feeling arises as a multi-sensory and emotional entanglement with one’s immediate environment—which then assimilates with, and expands into the eternal embrace of materiality.
And from this intimate entanglement, a change or metamorphosis of sorts may be engendered. Indeed, it is here in which the rupturing of subject-object boundaries, dissolution of self and manifestation of an alternate state of consciousness, may give rise to what Deleuze and Guattari defined as ‘becoming-animal’. That is, when immersed in something, this ‘something’ momentarily becomes an extension of one’s being—indistinguishable, and inseparable from one’s conscious and phenomenological awareness. As such, amidst this process, one is said to make an exchange with their immersive environment in a manner which brings about ‘new unity’—that is, a change or transformation in which one becomes something else.
Olafur Eliasson, Din blinde passage, 2010, Tate Modern, London. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg
To clarify Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming-animal’, and how this ‘new unity’ arises in states of immersion, it is worth outlining the concept of ‘assemblages’.[69] Across his philosophies, Deleuze explored the puissance of being as attributed to one’s ability to affect and be affected in return—a notion not dissimilar to Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm.[70] Within this exchange, however, one retains the ability to form new ‘assemblages’ and ‘emergent unities’—terms which signify the drawing together into a single context, of any number of heterogenous ‘elements’, ‘things’ or parts of ‘things’.[71] ‘Becoming’ therefore speaks to this process of change or motion within an assemblage, and the relationships between elements. If one’s being (and indeed, one’s consciousness) may be conceived as an assemblage, when drawn into alternative contexts—as those engendered by Din blinde passager and Vaporizacion—this process of change results in the ‘becoming’ of an emergent unit with its own ‘independent, ontological status’.[72] It might therefore be suggested that amidst one’s immersion in Din blinde passager, and Vaporizacion—these installations change or alter one’s being irrevocably.
However, not only is one drawn into an alternative context in a manner which incites ‘becoming’, but a physical exchange also transpires between oneself and these installations. If indeed, one’s being is altered irrevocably amidst this process of ‘becoming’, then the implications of immersion in Vaporizacion manifest perhaps too dismaying to contemplate. As one is immersed in Vaporizacion, their body becomes intimately involved with death both metaphysically, and physically—in an intimate exchange across the skin, deep into their lungs and throughout the bloodstream. Incapable of physically and psychologically distancing oneself, the receptor is assimilated with and therefore becomes irrevocably touched and changed by the corpse.[73]
Olafur Eliasson, Din blinde passager, 2010, Tate Modern, London.
Olafur Eliasson, Din blinde passager, 2010, Tate Modern, London.
Contextual Interference & Inflection
However, a reoccurring theme which seems to manifest time and time again throughout this essay, is that immersion is exceedingly volatile, variable and pliable in nature. Even when one’s consciousness becomes unfettered, one’s immersive state is no more resistant to oscillations and disturbances—as observed in both Din blinde passager and Vaporizacion. By virtue of such oscillations and disturbances, the context and broader critical themes which these installations engage with become significant, given room to inflect the quality of immersion as it is re-engendered.[74]
Beyond an innate experience, immersion may therefore come to reveal more about the nature of perception and consciousness, and the very essence of one’s ‘being-in-the-world’. For example, as one moves blindly throughout Din blinde passager, one’s senses are heightened—intermingling with one another as well as the surrounding environment as a means of compensating for loss of sight. Amidst this exchange, in which one’s sense of taste, smell, touch and sound merge into space, this chiasmic and embodied engagement between oneself and the environment gives rise to an internalised compass—one which allows one to navigate through the dense fog without the guidance of sight.[75] As one relinquishes control, becoming receptive to their own phenomenology, immersion arises amidst this intensified embodied exchange with one’s environment—inviting (more so than simply allowing) the boundaries between subject and object, inside and outside, self and other to dissolve amidst sensory exploration.[76] Eliasson himself describes this experience as utopian in nature, as the artist explained in an interview:
For me, utopia is linked to the now, the moment between one second and the next, it constitutes a possibility that is actualised and converted into reality, an opening where concepts like subject and object, inside and outside, proximity and distance are tossed into the air and redefined. Our sense of orientation is challenged and the coordinates of our spaces, collective and personal, have to be renegotiated. Changeability and mobility are at the core of utopia.[77]
Journeying through Din blinde passager therefore draws on one’s ability to orient themselves within the material world in a manner which is not dependent on visual perception, but rather, that which is embodied. Reflecting on this innate ability, one may reconsider the prevalence placed on vision in one’s perception of the world, and indeed, reality itself—revealed here as a construct which lulls one into suppressing, and making sedentary, embodied and phenomenological perception.[78] As one’s embodied engagement with the world therefore defines one’s existence of ‘reality’, and this engagement is itself subjective, then reality too must also be subjective. Dine blinde passager therefore makes explicit Eliasson’s view that ‘reality is relative’—and in the process, invites viewers to explore the vast relativity of their own realities.[79]
Teresa Margolles, Vaporizacion, ACE Gallery, Mexico City, 2001.
Vaporizacion’s resonance similarly extends beyond the innateness of one’s immersion, although, in a manner which—suffice to say—diverges entirely from any semblance to Din blinde passager. Margolles draws viewers into a direct encounter with the corpse—evaporating not only the perceived boundary between self and other, as is the praxis of immersion, but in doing so transgresses the very boundary separating the living from the dead.[80] Unlike Margolles’ earlier works, however, which foreground the corpse in terms of visceral brutality, installations like Vaporizacion echo the artist’s stylistic shift towards minimalism, as a means of instilling sensory impressions of death, more so than visual impositions. As Cuauhtémoc Medina observed:
La búsqueda de shock fue reemplazada por la invención de una variedad de formas conceptuales de duelo, mucho más sutiles y afines a la reflexión contemplativa.
The search for shock was replaced by the invention of a variety of ways to conceptualise pain, far more subtle and related to contemplative reflection.[81]
As such, rather than through visceral shock—as that conjured by one’s encounter with Narcomensajes—Vaporizacion affects, instead, metaphysically. While indeed, the visceral distress incited by the vapor’s origins may rupture one’s initial immersion, as one allows themselves to be in this installation and become receptive to ‘la vida del cadaver’ (‘the life of the corpse’), the conceptual resonance of Vaporizacion comes to bear. As was noted by Klaus Biesenbach, this installation, comprised entirely of vapour, visualises the “physical memory of the last washing.”[82] When made aware of the vapor’s origins, one instinctually conjures abstract memories of corpses cleansed with the materials comprising Vaporizacion’s atmosphere. In this manner, imagined recollections of the bodies lying in Mexico City morgue translate to unknowable and therefore seemingly incomprehensible temporal dynamics attached to every life lost amidst extreme narco-violence. As one envisages the dead evaporating into the atmosphere, this very process of dissolution metaphysically echoes the disappearance of life into obscurity—"unclaimed,” “forgotten,” bodies of the marginalised, “many of whom have died violently,” and will thereafter find “anonymity in the morgue and eventual undignified burial in a mass grave.”[83] Enraptured, although intimately uneasy, this contemplation of unfathomable loss of life embodied in the materiality of Vaporizacion causes one’s immersion to shift—drawn into the lives, deaths, phenomenologies, memories and histories of Mexico’s dead.
While immersion in space may therefore dissolve one’s embodied awareness, assimilating it, temporarily, with the materiality of one’s environment, the nuance of this experience depends entirely on the artwork one finds themselves immersed in. The same can certainly be said for immersion which arises amidst one’s absorption in material—as previously explored. This phenomenon defined simply as ‘immersion,’ is therefore exceedingly difficult to pin down, and certainly impossible to constrain to any single meaning or interpretation. Indeed, as both a process and state of being, immersion may arise as intensely affecting, illusory, transcendental or entirely problematic in its effects.
Given the profound although inherently enigmatic nature of immersion, this essay will conclude not with a reconciliation of our understanding (that is, not with an attempt to distil the complexities of this phenomenon into a palatable deduction), but rather, a rumination on the essence of immersion and its resounding impact on our experience as corporeal, thinking beings who inhabit a material sphere of existence. As immersion is conjured amidst an interlocking exchange between oneself and the world external to oneself, this phenomenon speaks, fundamentally, to the materiality of being. If time and space are material—as is, of course, matter—it may be suggested that amidst immersion, these parameters which define (and by virtue, often constrain) one’s experience of corporeality, become unconstrained. In immersion, consciousness strains against the limitations of the corpus, reaching towards the ‘sublime wholeness’ of materiality, as materiality reaches back. And amidst this interlocking exchange, one may very well unfetter from the confines of self-awareness to become, momentarily, amorphous—as timeless and boundless as Meillassoux’s conception of ache-fossil. In a diary entry, Virginia Woolf mused: “I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky,” and indeed, in immersion, this becomes entirely possible. [84]
[1] The online Oxford dictionary, for example, defines immersion as ‘the action of immersing someone or something in a liquid,’ or ‘deep mental involvement in something.’ (“Definition of Immersion in English,” Oxford Dictionary (English), Lexico, https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/immersion)
[2] Joseph Nechvatal, “Towards an immersive intelligence,” Leonardo 34, no. 5 (2001): 418. (This term, ‘sublime wholeness’, echoes notions of ‘oneness’ with the material universe central to monistic philosophy and materialism—themes which feature prominently throughout this essay.)
[3] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1984), 21.
[4] i.e. that which is external to oneself.
[5] Taylor Carman, “The Question of Being,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. Mark A Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 89. (This notion of one as an ‘active pursuer’ conceptually complements the aforementioned innate ‘desire’ to reach towards (pursue) greater or lesser states of ‘sublime wholeness’.)
[6] Robin M. Muller, “The Logic of the Chiasm in Merleau-Ponty's Early Philosophy,” Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4 (2017). (Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies situate the body as a sensory perceptual tool which shapes our very experience as conscious beings.)
[7] And therefore, at times, self-annihilating… although that is a matter for another essay.
[8] Jinsil Seo, and Diane Gromala, "Touching light: A new framework for immersion in artistic environments," Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 5, no. 1 (2007): 6.
[9] This portion of the essay will explore the sensory (foremost) as well as the temporal, emotional and imaginative qualities of immersion which arise amidst one’s immersion in material, before considering how such experience may then be ruptured and problematised.
[10] In reality, one’s cognitive and sensory experience of the world—and therefore art (and therefore states of immersion in art)—is not only shaped, but engendered by one’s body, rather than a mere by-product of disembodied cognitions and arithmetic. Certainly, as human beings who inhabit a material plane of existence, it follows that one would not perceive (and therefore think) in terms of disembodiment, detached from the physical reality within which we are conscious.
[11] This explicit, disembodied awareness may also be conceptualised as ‘semiotic’ or ‘cognitive’ processing—or perhaps, in Heideggerian terms, ‘present-at-hand’ (Vorhandene)—in which one’s sense of ‘being’ is reinstated as distinguishable and separate from ‘the world’. In art, when one is ‘present-at-hand’ immersion is ruptured, as self-awareness is restored and one becomes cognizant of the art’s ‘objecthood’. Alternatively, implicit, sensory perception may otherwise be conceptualised as ‘asemiotic’, ‘phenomenological’ processing—or the Heideggerian ‘ready-to-hand’ (Zuhandene)—in which one’s sense of ‘being’ is indistinguishable from ‘the world’ (a fundamental characteristic of immersion). In terms of one’s immersion in art, this art (object or environment) becomes momentarily an extension of one’s consciousness (both perceptually and sensorially). (Martin Heidegger, John D. Caputo, Robert J. Dostal, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, The Cambridge companion to Heidegger (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 346.
[12] That is, “by means of the five senses, one absorbs the external world into their internal world.” (Seo, and Gromala, "Touching light: A new framework for immersion in artistic environments," 4.)
[13] This phenomenological entanglement can be seen as initiated (tacitly) via Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm. (Muller, "The Logic of the Chiasm in Merleau-Ponty's Early Philosophy.")
[14] Certainly, this lends to somewhat literal conception of the artwork entering ‘into composition’ with oneself during immersion (as Deleuze would suggest).
[15] “Even the eye touches;” Pallasmaa observes, “the gaze implies an unconscious touch, bodily mimesis and identification. As Martin Jay remarks when describing Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the senses, ‘through vision we touch the sun and stars’. (Juhani Pallasmaa, The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses, (Chichester, West Sussex U.K.: Wiley, 2012), 42.)
[16] As Moss Wall is three-dimensional, depth is a significant feature in terms of the installation’s haptic evocativeness, whereby one’s eye is liable to be drawn inward, rather than simply across the surface. It might be suggested that this feature translates to the depth of one’s sensory-perceptual immersion in Moss Wall.
[17] Seo, and Gromala, "Touching light," 5. (Indeed, Moss Wall invites this tactile exchange—extending onto the floor of the gallery so as to physically encroach on the viewer’s space.)
[18] This is what is meant by immersion inducing an ‘alternate state of consciousness’, or ‘new consciousness’ in which one’s awareness dissolves in moments of intense reverie to, momentarily, become indissociable from that which it is absorbed into. As Austrian architect Manfred Wolff-Plottegg posited to Eliasson; “Before, your wall of moss would have shown me the difference between architecture and art, but since—neither in the one nor the other—it is no longer a matter of objects, forms, colours and since I too am disappearing as a subject, it seems to be rather more a matter of transfer.” (Manfred Wolff-Plottegg, “Updating Transforming Principles in Architecture,” in Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings Surrounded, Essays on Space and Science, ed. Peter Weiber (Graz, Austria: Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 657.)
[19] This phenomenological entanglement arises implicitly. Certainly, to alter one’s experience of consciousness, immersion must occur implicitly (ready-at-hand), as explicit awareness (present-at-hand) invariably reinstates the artwork’s ‘objecthood’—thereby obstructing one’s absorption into it.
[20] Seo, and Gromala, "Touching light," 6.
[21] This symbiotic association is perhaps also evoked by the visual similarities which can be drawn between the patterns of blood vessels—which carry life-sustaining blood around one’s own body—and the latticework of lichen (indeed, strikingly similar in appearance). Moreover, like the human bodies, Moss Wall shifts and changes in a manner which indicates its vitality. That is, without water the moss shrinks and fades in colour, although when hydrated it expands, its deep green colour restored, as it emanates a pungent odour.
[22] Teresa Margolles, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and Taiyana Pimental, Teresa Margolles: What else could we talk about? (Barcelona: Editorial RM, 2009), 27.
[23] Margolles, Medina, and Taiyana Pimental, Teresa Margolles: What else could we talk about?, 47.
[24] Narcomensajes therefore affects in a manner which evokes Georges Bataille’s ‘base materialism’—foregrounding materiality which is neither ‘classifiable’ nor ‘controllable’, and that which “can never serve in any case to ape a given authority.” (Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosis,” in Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl et al., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 51.)
One’s control over their phenomenological experience is therefore relinquished to base materialism. Although, while base materialism bears heavily on embodied phenomenology, the artwork thereafter assumes control in the regulation this experience.
[25] That is, when one’s immersion becomes situated in the meticulous oscillatory stitching, this haptic rhythm evokes a steady cadence, a controlled tempo which (if only for a moment) eases sensations of volatility and violence otherwise embedded in the facture of Narcomensajes.
[26] i.e. ‘self’ as separate as distinct from ‘other’.
[27] Marc Wittmann, and Stefan Schmidt, "Mindfulness meditation and the experience of time," Meditation–neuroscientific approaches and philosophical implications 2, (2014): 200.
[28] In addition to the suspension of one’s temporal awareness in the materiality of ‘nature’ (from a new materialist perspective, ‘nature’ here is equivalent to ‘earth’ in the earth/world dualism), Moss Wall also embodies multiple layers of non-linear time; for instance, that of the moss’ lifespan beyond the gallery, alongside its lifespans within the gallery. As such, it is worth noting that one’s perception/ experience of the moss’ temporal trajectory beyond the gallery, is likely informed by the series of photographs Eliasson displayed adjacent to Moss Wall, titled The Horizon Series (2002)—comprised of forty colour photographs documenting fields of moss and volcanic soils around Iceland. The Scandinavian reindeer moss which Moss Wall is made up of is native to Iceland, and as such, The Horizon Series evokes visualisation of the landscapes from which Moss Wall originated (and by extension, incites one’s contemplation the of moss’ broader lifespan/ temporal trajectory).
[29] Indeed, material of the natural world (like moss), invariably speaks to temporality in terms of Meillassoux’s ‘arche-fossil’—a measurement of time as immemorial—that which preceded the advent of consciousness, and will continue eons after consciousness ceases. (Peter Gratton, and Paul J. Ennis, The Meillassoux Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2015).
[30] That is, one is incited to ponder the exact moment of the victims’ deaths, and then, in reverse, the temporal trajectories which perhaps lead to this moment.
[31] As such, one’s immersion in Narcomensajes is reinstated, although temporally experientially different.
[32] That is, in terms of monism as it understood in the context of materialism—when art evokes a sense of monistic ‘oneness’ with the material universe (as it might be expected to when one becomes immersed in organic materiality), such sensations of ontological unanimity are innately comforting—the inherent implication being that once one’s physical vessel eventually disintegrates, as all material eventually does, this signals one’s return to the eternal embrace of materiality—rather than oblivion.
[33] Indeed, when one’s visual field is enveloped entirely by Moss Wall, it is hard not to imagine oneself soaring far above a sprawling forest, gazing down over boundless canopies.
[34] Lydia Spurrier-Dawes, “The Art of Teresa Margolles: Communicating the Message of Death and Loss in Mexico” (BA Hons., Cardiff Metropolitan University, 2014), 2.
[35] Julia Kristeva, “Approaching abjection,” Oxford Literary Review 5, no. 2, (1982): 544.
[36] Indeed, what could be more viscerally affecting than a corpse?
[37] That is, while the abject corpse inspires pre-reflective fear and disgust (hardwired responses to perceived threat and reminders of own biological immanence), with time these sensations dissolve into empathy—and in turn, it is through this empathising that one may reflect on the lives lost—often through violent means—amidst rampant narco-violence in Mexico.
[38] Interestingly, in neuroscience states of mind-wandering (which might be conceptualised as a formulation of immersion) and mindfulness ( ‘willed-concentration’ in which awareness is reinstated and immersion ruptured) have been found to correlate with different brain activity. Alternative areas of the brain are therefore active during states of immersion vs. states of awareness. However, significantly, this processing is dynamic, whereby neural activity fluctuates spontaneously between these states—indicating that one’s immersion is not entirely distinct from cognitive processing. (Christoff et al., 2009; Hansenkamp et al., 2012)
[39] Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 13.
[40] Materialism (from which ‘new materialism’ would stem) denies the objectification of matter as receptive, passive and inactive—meaningful only when a minded subject has imposed form onto its formless materiality. Drawing on monistic philosophy, new materialism arose in efforts to reach across the world (‘matter-for-us’)/earth (‘matter-for-itself’) dualism, in a plight to dismantle, undermine and expose this misguided tradition of thought. As such, Eliasson engages with this plight in a manner which critiques institutional spaces which have otherwise neglected formless matter—or ‘matter-for-itself’. As the artist observed; “Looking at nature, I find nothing… only my own relationship to the spaces… Just by looking at nature, we cultivate it into an image.” (Madeleine Grynstejn, Olafur Eliasson (London: Phaidon, 2002), 27.)
[41] Such work invariably recall Robert Smithson’s Nonsite sculptures, Walter de Maria’s Earth Room (1977), as well as Urs Fischer’s You (2007), which transpose the materiality of ‘earth’ into the gallery space—Eliasson is therefore engaging in a dialogue (often restoratively) with these works which dismantle the world/earth dualism to undermine implied hierarchical distinction between the two.
[42] Fred Evans, "Chaosmos and Merleau-Ponty’s View of Nature," Chiasmi International 2 (2000): 63.
[43] Having worked formerly as a forensic pathologist, Margolles sources these materials either from the Mexico City morgue (where the artist has worked since 1990), or directly from the sites of devastating violence in cities such as Culiacán.—Sinaloa (part of the capital city of Culiacán) is both Margolles’ home state, as well as the place of origin of the Sinaloa Cartel—thought to be ‘the most powerful drug trafficking organisation in the world’. (Margolles, Medina, and Pimental, Teresa Margolles: What else could we talk about?, 15.)
[44] Frac Lorraine, In/visible: collection productions, (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2006), 304.
[45] Margolles, Medina, and Pimental, Teresa Margolles: What else could we talk about?, 23.
[46] Ibid.
[47] As Eliasson himself suggested; “It is a double action: you “see” and you “see yourself seeing”… as you immerse yourself in something—visually or with more of your senses—while being aware of that immersion; you hold an internal and external perspective on the situation at one and the same time. And as you constantly evaluate the nature of what you see, you as the co-producer become responsible for your ‘experience.’” (Gina Fairley, and Sarah Hetherington, "Olafur Eliasson: Take your time," Eyeline 71 (2010): 85.)
[48] ‘Asemiotic’, as in one’s sensory-perceptual, embodied phenomenological experience vs. ‘semiotic’ in terms of one’s disembodied, ‘higher-order’ and analytical engagement.
[49] Before delving into this discussion on the nuance of one’s immersion in space, it is worth noting here that unlike the previous discussions under the heading ‘immersion in material’, this section will not dedicate separate paragraphs to the temporal and emotional qualities of one’s immersion in space, but rather, integrate these qualities throughout the ensuing discussions. Unlike ‘immersion in material’, this section will also focus on the philosophical (and often by extension, psychological) implications of immersion in space.
[50] Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 21.
Immersion in space is distinct from immersion in material, as materials are inevitably recognisable in their materiality—delineated in a manner which is apparent to the spectator. Space, alternatively, often has no such delineations or parameters of representation, and as such might be considered more absolute in its immersive impact. (Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, 14.)
[51] As Youngblood formulated in his discussions on the ‘Expanded Cinema’, “When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness[…] man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes.” (Isabella Buczek, "The aesthetic of immersion in the immersive dome environment (IDE): Stepping between the real and the virtual worlds for further self-constitution?" Technoetic Arts 10, no. 1 (2012): 4.)
[52] In art, both sensory deprivation and overload may be used for different ends; meditation, contemplation (which come to bear in the following exploration of Eliasson’s installation Din blinde passage), self-erasure, self-annihilation, expansion/ dislocation of one’s consciousness, allocentrism, and so on. (Michael Fried, Why photography matters as art as never before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008))
[53] As these installations spatially engulf viewers, one is incapable of visually colonising the artwork and are therefore absorbed into it. Additionally, one’s ego has a definite bodily basis—and as such, when the body’s position in relation to space dissolves in such installations, one’s grasp on the ego becomes equally tenuous.
[54] Din blinde passage translates to ‘Your Blind Passenger’—a Danish expression for a stowaway.
[55] “Din blinde passage,” Artwork, Studio Olafur Eliasson, https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK100196/din-blinde-passager
[56] Jonathon Crary, Your colour memory: Illuminations of the Unforeseen (Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2004)
[57] Crary, Ibid.
[58] This is, however, only a gesture to Eliasson’s interest in memory, as Crary observed; “for the piece in its pulsating overlaps of colour build up and delayed complementaries, activates, even imperceptibly, a deep affecting field of sedimented longer term memories associated with colour. His work attempts to develop the ‘persistence of vision’ in ways that are fully outside any mechanistic appropriation of the eye.” (Crary, Ibid.)
Indeed, sense memory has significant implications in terms of one’s immersion in installations which rely on the heightening of one’s sensory experience. Although unfortunately, that discussion will have to find its way into another essay.
[59] This occurs in much the same manner as one’s immersion in Din blinde passager—although what separates Din blinde passager and Vaporizacion here, is this aforementioned ‘journey’ one experiences in the former. Din blinde passager therefore manifests as more exploratory in nature, whereas Vaporizacion is fundamentally contemplative.
[60] Perhaps best noted by Lorraine; “No critical distancing is possible, nor any protection… the work submerges and penetrates the visitor, short-circuiting any reflection.” (Frac Lorraine, In/visible: collection productions (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2006), 304.)
[61] Thereafter, the imagination surmounts self-monitoring, to assume colours, sounds, rhythms, sensations and impressions of the environment.
[62] Margolles, Medina, and Pimental, Teresa Margolles: What else could we talk about?, 19.
[63] Julia Banwell, Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death (University of Wales Press, 2015), 134.
[64] The water which comprises Vaporizacion was sterilised—so this contamination is symbolic in nature, originating in the imagination more so than from the vapour itself.
[65] Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its discontents, ed by David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2002)
(While I have stated that the ‘oceanic feeling’ was defined by Freud, it would be more accurate to note that this term arose amidst the correspondence between Freud and French novelist/ art historian, Romain Rolland—some of which can be found transcribed in Freud’s Civilisations and Its Discontents. Moreover, in Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud posits that this feeling of the oceanic may stem from pre-childhood—as infants do not distinguish between themselves and ‘the world’, and as such, one’s sense of self (‘ego’, ‘id’ and ‘super-ego’) exists in a state of ‘oneness’ with that which is external to oneself. The oceanic feeling therefore emerges in adulthood as an effort to, in some way, retain or preserve this feeling of ‘oneness’ with the world.)
However, it might also be suggested that if one were to think back on the Heideggerian notion of ‘being-in-the-world’—one might conceive of the oceanic as simply “’being’ as a verb.” (Caroline Rooney, "What is the oceanic?," Angelaki 12, no. 2 (2007), 19.)
[66] Paul C. Cooper, "The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism," Psychoanalytic Review 89, no. 2 (2002)
However, it is worth noting that like the ‘sublime’ and Freudian conceptions of the ‘uncanny’, the ‘oceanic’ arises in one’s consciousness as feelings. As it is subjective, this indicates that oceanic feeling is therefore a-generic—and consequently difficult to render into a single concept (a similar problem one encounters when attempting to narrowly define the ‘sublime’ and ‘uncanny’).
[67] Rooney, "What is the oceanic?," 21.
[68] Rooney, Ibid. (Certainly, if monism was characterizable by a feeling—one might expect it to be oceanic in nature.)
[69] ‘Becoming-animal’ is one of Deleuze and Guattari’s many formulations of ‘becoming-’ which speaks to the “creation of something new with regards to the human”—and indeed, has nothing to do with imitating animals. (Brent Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 141.)
[70] “Gilles Deleuze,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published May 23, 2008; substantive revision Feb 14, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/
[71] This process of drawing elements into assemblages lends to myriad effects—aesthetic, mechanistic, creative, pernicious, coercive, illustrative, and so on. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari identify two tendencies of assemblages to move either towards stasis or change. (Adkins, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, 142.)
[72] Deleuze often uses the coming together of the wasp and orchid as his favourite example of ‘becoming’/ symbiotic emergent ‘assemblage’. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Gilles Deleuze.”)
[73] While from a disembodied perspective, both Din blinde passager and Vaporizacion—involving the envelopment viewers in formless, dense mist—therefore appear strikingly similar in appearance, the nuance of one’s spatial immersion and its philosophical implications in either installation could not be more dissimilar.
[74] Again, as immersion oscillates—perpetually disrupted and reinstated—once reinstated, the quality of immersion becomes inflected. As one engages with installations such as Din blinde passager and Vaporizacion analytically, one’s cognitions, feelings and emotions which stem from greater critical understanding and knowledge, come to bear on the quality of one’s reinstated immersion—having an often intensifying impact on this state.
[75] When one’s visual perception is overwhelmed in this manner, visual representation no longer dictates perceptual experience, and as such, immersion arises as one’s other senses project and assimilate with the environment.
[76] In saying things like, ‘becoming receptive to their own phenomenology,’—it is helpful to liken one’s phenomenological experience to an innate, implicit embodied consciousness—one which is entirely real, and shapes our very existence as conscious beings, but is often diminished in favour of disembodied cognitive processing. Such installations signal a return, at least momentarily, to the foregrounding of phenomenological awareness.
[77] Michelle Aldredge, “Olafur Eliasson: Your Blind Passenger,” written July 25, 2011, https://www.gwarlingo.com/2011/olafur-eliasson-your-blind-passenger/
[78] Indeed, Deleuze described visual perception as a ‘malady of representation’ which inherently sustains the subject/object boundary. (Gregory Flaxman, "Transcendental aesthetics: Deleuze’s philosophy of space," in Deleuze and Space, ed. Ian Buchanan, and Gregg Lambert (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 177.)
[79] Grynstejn, Olafur Eliasson, 86.
Eliasson therefore subverts the often misguided belief that one’s vision is an objective representation of reality (it also might be suggested that one’s experience of ‘being-in-the-world’ is fundamentally subjective in nature although nonetheless a ‘reality’). Also notice that Eliasson names many of his exhibitions in terms of the individuality and subjectivity of the viewer—‘Your activity horizon,’ ‘Your colour memory,’ ‘Your compound view,’ ‘Your concentric welcome,’ etc. and therefore gestures to the subjectivity of one’s experience, and therefore their version of reality, in the title themselves.
[80] Vaporizacion does so by infiltrating all of one’s senses, rather than appealing foremost to vision—an aspect which prevents one from critical distancing nor ignoring its effects. (Banwell, Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death, 133.)
[81] Cuauhtémoc Medina, “SEMEFO: La morgue”, in México D. F.: Lecturas para paseantes; Una antología de Rubén Gallo (Madrid: Turner, 2005), p. 348.
[82] Klaus Biesenbach, “Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rate of Bodies and Values”, in Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rate of Bodies and Values, P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center / KW-Institute for Contemporary Art, New York, 2002a), 36.
[83] Banwell, Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death, 133.
Additionally, such associations echo the absence of societal or institutional acknowledgement for the victims, often of low socioeconomic status. This notion of fading away may also allude to the process of decomposition which all bodies eventually succumb to—thereby inviting viewers to consider their own biological immanence. While metaphysically resonant, this installation is invariably inlaid with feelings of distinct unease.
[84] Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1977-1984)
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About the Author:
I graduated with a double major in Art History and Psychology, and will soon be completing my BA (Hons) in Art History and then pursuing an MSc in Psychology – the intersection of art history and psychology is where I live! I specialise in cognitive/ perceptual psychology (and neuroscience) so any opportunity to marry this with concepts in art history (i.e. when considering phenomena like immersion) is a massive pleasure.
