ATTENTION

Boredom, Surprise, Slowness, Being-With, Fascination, Subtlety, Care

For there to be attention, there has to be a rupture within the fabric of habitual perception
or cognition. Something has to stand out, arrest or surprise within the field of ordinary
occurrence. This implies on a deeper level a transformation of gestalt, a shift in the figure
ground configuration. The state that we describe as boredom is when nothing seizes
attention and thus everything is flattened out. It is a state of waiting without much by way
of expectancy or anticipation.

In Latin, attentio means tending to something or holding a tension with that thing. Human
consciousness is attentive consciousness and as such is an act that modifies our
relationship to the world whereby the world becomes the image of our attention.
Attention is located in the middle of the world of appearance, assuming in this a mobile
relationship between consciousness as the signifier of interiority and things or exteriority.
The existence of the subject and the sense of the existence of things are disclosed
simultaneously in perception.

Edmund Husserl1 might be understood not just as the founding figure of Phenomenology
but as such a philosophical thinker concerned with the question of how we come to pay
attention to the process of attention. Philosophy as an activity needed to address and
reflect its own nature in order that all presuppositions might be bracketed out in order to
arrive at pure preconceptual experience (referred to as the technique of the ‘epoche’).
Consciousness is not a thing but rather is a turning to things by displaying an openness
for there to be appearing as such, from which, the term “to things themselves” emerges.
Attention draws together not just the relationship between the seen and the unseen but
does so from the perspective of the turning point. This implies both a transformation in
perception and knowledge within the registration of its instance, ‘the temporality of the
meanwhile’ and it in turn coincides with care.

Attention is subtle, the root of the word subtle is from the Latin sub-texere, meaning
woven from underneath or finely woven. The meaning is rarefied, delicate, highly
refined, elusive, indefinable and intangible. The subtle may be contrasted with the
manifest, which means that which can be held in the hand. On another level subtlety
might indicate a mode of apprehension of that which brings about its own condition.
Subtle thinking pays attention not only to meaning but also to the meaning of meanings
or the fold within the fold of perception.

Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings exemplify the manifestation of perceptual attention
invested again and again to the same objects of attention. The binary difference between
the object of attention and the subject of perception starts to be formed into a loop that
eliminates the order of difference. This connects not only the presentation of slowness but

1
With Husserl the problem of perception became the central concern, with it being described as the initial
basis and origin of all acts of consciousness. The existence of the subject and the sense of the existence of
things are disclosed simultaneously in perception.
rather a suspension of time because the notion of development is withdrawn. Roland
Barthes employs the term “neutral” related to this conception of the in-between. Morandi
erases the drama of visibility in order to present a reality of the hushed tonality that issues
from withdrawal. Bland has often been employed as a critical corrective to his project,
but what if blandness itself signified a ‘now’ state of attention or a mode of being with
the object of attention with absorption without drama or distraction. Blandness in this
sense would appear to close the gap between the subject and object.2

Andy Warhol’s early films paid attention to what was around him. He quickly developed
a practice of filming visitors to his studio, each on 100ft rolls of film with a 16ml Bolex
camera without sound. Everything is stripped back to its raw state, a subject posed before
a camera, anticipating nothing other than a pure exposure of their own appearance caught
within a seemingly indifferent gaze of an apparatus.

Endless repetition can lead readily into the boredom state of going nowhere. It was as if
Warhol was mounting a death wish upon the figure of utopia as the escape from the
dreary repetition of the self-same. Freud conceptualised death as the ‘zietlos’ or timeless
and it is as though through either repetition or slowing down the image is being drawn
into a realm of death. The draining away of difference, the slowing down to the point of
halting time itself is characteristic of boredom in all its various manifestations. Boredom
could be described as the endurance of long time but in this awakens being to the
exposure to time or that which lurks below the surface of distraction. The film portraits
appear to penetrate below the surface of distraction to present subjects being exposed
within a state of limbo that lurks beneath the performative devices that are in general
accessed in order to annul this sense of nothingness. There is a feeling of half panic
invested within this scenario that rather than the depiction being made present within the
medium of times continuity, time is instead interrupted by the anxiety that it might come
to a halt. The resulting image is that of abandonment within a frame of isolation.

The first film created by Warhol was ‘Sleep’ which consisted of eight hours of John
Giorno asleep on a couch. The film is shot in real time, but it is projected at a slower
speed, lending in the process, a hallucinatory effect. Then he made ‘Kiss’ which
consisted of 100 ft rolls (3.5minutes) of people kissing. Connected to this was the film
‘Blow Job’ which portrayed the close-up face of a man receiving fellatio within a time
frame that extended for 35 minutes. The film ‘Empire’ was the last silent film and
consisted of eight hours of the Empire State building being shot from the 44th floor of the
Time Life building in 1964. In all these films each of the subjects are revealed in an
intensely isolated frame, an in itself state creating a tension between camera and subject.
Warhol stated that: “I made my earliest films using for several hours just one actor on the
screen doing the same thing: eating or sleeping or smoking: I did this because people
usually just go to the movies to see only a star, to eat him up, so here at last is a chance to
look only at the star for as long as you like no matter what he does and to eat him up all
you want to. It was easier to make.”

2
Francois Julien, In Praise of Blandness (London: Zone Books 2007)
The fascination with Warhol’s work appears to reside in the choice between the
engagement it appears to offer between a camp posture of indifference and the depiction
of states that expose the relationship of temporality and the image that implicate either
boredom or death.

Fascination with aesthetic encounter is not so much an outcome of recognition in the

form of knowing what it is one is looking at but rather a registration of misrecognition in
the sense of being affected by a dimension that escapes cognition. There is a painting in
the Wallace Collection by Velazquez, “The Lady with a Fan” (1636-8) that exemplifies
this principle. Unlike many of his portraits, there is no evidence of the sitter’s identity,
but this uncertainty is heightened by the painterly investment which Velazquez exercises
in relationship to the treatment of the upward pointing left hand. It is as if the face is
undetermined and that in contrast the gloved hand is overdetermined but there is no logic
for this other than the reorganisation of attention according to the working of desire. The
face is static whereas the hand has an inner mode of animation. If there is a secret to his
art it as if his attention as a painter, it is that his attention lingers in places that are
elsewhere to what might have been anticipated. He might have been a loyal to his role as
a court artist and diplomat but beneath this, he was true to the art of painting. The
treatment of textiles and costumes reveal the pure pleasure of painting that brings the
painter close to abstraction. Optically nuances appear and then disappear within the play
of underpainting and overpainting. In part this was learnt by looking at Titian, this what
in turn was learnt by Manet from Velazquez, and in the 20th C, what Bacon learnt,
creating a chain of transmission related to the elsewhere of this. There is no historical or
signifying chain for this outside of scopic sensitivity and investment that implicates
something closer to rapture, as opposed logical causality.

Sometimes I just want to leap continents in order to occupy an aesthetic and temporal
elsewhere. For a moment I am in the Beijing studio of Hongang Xiong. He doesn’t speak
English, neither I Chinese, but I am simply invited to being-with outside the mediation of
words. Instead of talking, we drink tea together. I have a strong sensation of presence but
equally a quality of being on the edge of a continent that might be understood as a
memory body relating to the Classical tradition in Chinese art. Books and museums act as
a exoteric recording machine but there is also an esoteric aspect to transmission which is
beyond this or beneath this. The exoteric generation is understood as history whereas the
esoteric dimension is close to what Catherine Malabou terms plasticity3 which does not
mirror the image of the existing world but is closer to the production of form of new,
possible worlds. To feel, and to feel all over again the circulation of the malleability of
time that is nothing other than the spacing of time and time as spacing within a new
materiality of form, the capacity to both give form, receive form but also annihilate
form. Plasticity is thus an excess outside of the rule of signification or recording,
closer in fact to a generative power.

Anyway, I am there, observing, and in between observing, gesturing. What am I

looking at and what do I sense?

3
See Catherine Malabou, Plasticity and the Dusk of Writing (New York: Columbia University Press 2009)
When the mark making begins, it as if they proceed at a pace that is faster than
thought thus closer to dance than any other determinate bodily action. What
becomes manifest on the level of appearance is spliced together with what might be
intuited such as the trace lines retained from the economy of the breath, the spacing of
matter and void and all the subtle attentions to attentions. There are no erasers in this
process of inscription, just a process of releasing the mutual storage vessel of both the
visible and invisible that serves to mulch upon temporality itself.

In the Chinese Classical tradition painting there is a sustained and sustaining connection
between poetry and painting, with painting being often referred to as silent poetry (wu-
sheng-shi).4 If in poetry there is a rhythmical spacing of empty words, within painting
there is always a space beyond representation, the void, that occasions the within and
without, and with this, the play or fold of emptiness and fullness. This points in turn to
why Classical painting and poetry are elusive, even sparse on the level of either form or
appearance. There is in this a process of refinement that is required, a journey in which
marks or words have to be processed in ways that strip the mind of their habitual
orientations.

The Japanese painter-monk Sesshu (15th C, Muromachi Period) was said to have walked
across the entire extent of Japan. What was the knowledge he gained from paying
attention to the information secured from his feet? Perhaps he talked about such things,
but it is more likely he remained silent about such matters. He visited Ming China but
was disappointed about the teaching in the monasteries and the art that he witnessed
being practiced. He did though get to walk in the mountains and collect some examples
of Song Dynasty painting, which he took back with him to Japan. These paintings had a
profound influence on the direction and formation of Zen painting. One of his most
famous paintings called Long Scroll Landscape (15 meters) depicts travelers passing
through all four seasons. It is a visual paradox that captures transience within a vast
stretch of time.

The German artist Wolfgang Laib started his career as medical researcher who travelled
to Southern India in order to investigate water, but on completing his research, gave up
science in order to become an artist. He begam by collecting pollen week after week and
when the opportunity arose, he presented a large square of it on a gallery floor,
simultaneously as an object of vision and of scent. The slowness of the gathering process
is integral to the aesthetic presentation of the work, perhaps as the fold of labour and its
valorisation as an artwork. There is nothing to be worked out or concluded, just a mixture
of silence and scent without the imposition of rule. The work itself appears to open out
the gap between the working of intuition and the concept. Intuition is a mode of
representation which “relates immediately to an object of experience, and which has its
source in sensibility” whereas the concept is a “representation which relates mediately to
an object of experience, through the intermediacy of all other representations, and which

4
See Francois Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing (Hong Gong: The Chinese University of Hong Gong Press
2016) P15
has its source in understanding.”5 For the given works to be perceived as live events there
should be the sense of immediacy that is not governed by the process of deductive doubt.

A monk asked Tozan when he was weighing some flax: ‘What is Buddha?’ Tozan
replied: ‘This flax weighs three pounds.’ This story presents the question of what is Zen:
is it a process of representation or the direct pointing towards reality? This difference
highlights the nowness in the way reality is encountered and by implication the stripping
back of habitual responses that render reality opaque. Tozan simply answered with a
mind empty of pre-occupation or ennui.

Lygia Clark developed a mode of participation art within the context of the military
dictatorship in Brazil which had banned all public gatherings. As opposed to a cognitive
political response, Clark developed an affective-sensual aesthetic structure of implicit
resistance. Modes of resistance within the aesthetic realm are invariably lacking in any
programmatic sense. Community is the spacing of relations and bodies as opposed to the
imposition of instrumental intervals. These spacings are defined by energetics
(expenditure), therapeutics (care of the self), aesthetics (excess), sense (co-extensivity),
all folded within each encounter. When Clark left Brazil to teach in the Sorbonne, she
made the decision to withdraw from the role of the artist for a more therapeutically
defined practice. She elected to be true to the object of her attention rather than the
category of whether or not this might constitute art. The question for her was simply how
things or relations between things meditated by perceiving subjects might be attended to.
In letting ethics precede aesthetics, she was able to take her next step but what it was the
mattered to her was being true to her intuitive experiment.

So suddenly skies are substantially emptied of aeroplanes, thus skies start to invite other
forms of attention. Gestalt patterns are shifting, common sense disturbed, and attentions
reconfigured on both minor and major scales. What to do and how to take the next step,
to work out the difference between what rises and what falls, such things are opened in
ways that open out a relationship to surprise.

Thinkers: Husserl, Malabou, Cheng, Julien

Artists: Warhol, Morandi, Laib, Xiong, Sesshu, Clark, Velasquez

5
Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2008) P.6
The difference between concept and idea is that the idea is “a concept which itself goes beyond the
possibility of experience and which has its source in Reason.”