One work : a rhizomatic treatise on the creative act

Abstract

This work is a phenomenological and formal investigation into the tensions between the human tendency toward creativity and the institutional structures that control how that work is shared, including museums, galleries, public-art-funding government, social media, and the Academy. It is common for artists to be expected to work between assignments or bodies of work, as it were—artifacts of a creative process with a beginning, middle, and end. In this model, the initial goal is to execute an idea, and the final goal is to publicly display the work when it is finished, often to exchange it for capital. I propose a different model, where one’s artistic life is devoted to the experience of inquiry and experimentation, where artifacts may become secondary to the process, and where the art objects are tools as much as the media that may have made them. These objects are impermanent manifestations of inquiry and may become assembled and disassembled without heartbreak or fuss, always in service to the process of learning. I find points of intersection and departure between my own multiple modalities as an artist, thinker, and educator and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, particularly as they address the concepts of, assemblage, multiplicity, repetition, accumulation, and ritual, and their metaphor for non-hierarchy, the rhizome. In a rhizomatic structure, all points connect through nodes, but removing a node doesn’t destroy the connectivity of every other node. In contrast to arboreal thinking, rhizomatic thinking tends toward weighing the connections between things as more powerful than the things themselves