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Writing

The Body as a Crease of Knowledge (On Mike O' Connor)

Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts
Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.
Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

2021

"If we look at the whole body as a piece of paper, folding itself over time through movement and resulting in different areas of human attention, we can start to see the possibility of how things relate to each other.“
--Mike O’Connor1

If the moving body can be likened to a folding piece of paper that produces lines, how can we unfold the creases that denote experience and tacit knowledge? How can we trace this movement of folding and unfolding across our “outer material pleats” to our “inner, animated, spontaneous folds”?2 Perhaps, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, a fold is just a change of direction. Yet the philosopher goes on to observe that entire species are defined by degree of development assigned to their ability to fold their own parts and to unfold them.3 Herein lies (human and nonhuman) “knowledge” (or non-knowledge) — something that has not passed through understanding on its path to knowing. Something only “known” while moving; beckoning to the mind while dancing.

To imagine what dance could contribute to cognitive science, to linguistics or to perceptual psychology, one has to leave behind dance as an image-making process, as entertainment, as skill, as a profession, as a tradition, as a given. To centralize this potential contribution in one’s practice, as Mike O’Connor has done, is to step largely into the unknown. It is to transgress dance discourse in one’s search to facilitate the proto-knowledge inherent in dance infiltrating so-called “known” areas of thought. It is to point to the uncomfortable fact that, very often, fields like philosophy or phenomenology or cognitive science have, by necessity, substituted a rational understanding of movement for the opacities of the moving body. O’Connor’s practice invites us to ask what kind of knowledge would be constituted by knowing the body without understanding? What might it mean to work with the body as the means to know it, and perhaps in doing so, to un-know part of what has, until now, constituted “knowledge”? Could we set aside our long-held “understandings” to come instead to new questions, to new opacities? (Who knew that dance could provide a different way of approaching linguistics or that the entangled bodies of two dancers might affect our thinking on gravity?)

These questions also offer new ways into dance. O’Connor’s work suggests the possibility of re-informing how we look at the body and performance in dance practice. It tests ways to move beyond personal choices of individual aesthetic taste; it delves into language functions and the chemicals released by interacting bodies, echoing the body in love. Combining theories of cognitive science and practices of performance, O’Connor has invited dancers to “move around X”, where x is not the unknown, but rather “a known subject matter that is constantly shifting and changing, presenting itself in different forms”.4 Moving onto the “x of y”, he has invited dancers to work with metaphors in a physical exploration of whether the architecture of thought resembles the world around us. (When space becomes a metaphorical landscape, it becomes possible to see language in action.) In “Tertiary” one performer holds a watermelon in her hands, turning it slowly. Another dancer repeats her movements, holding the head of a man in his hands, an object that now appears awkwardly attached to a body. In fact the turning of a neck suggests the drawing of an incomplete circle; an open-ended line in space that carries a trace of the head’s weight. As one dancer loses hold of the watermelon, allowing it to drop downwards for several inches, we anticipate the subsequent drop of a man’s head on the floor. And so we dance in the neuroscientific notion that watching is like feeling; that the borders where one person stops and another begins are blurred.

If dance is a line in space and thinking is a sequence of thoughts in the mind, how can the dancing mind interweave its various strands of knowledge? If we inhabit the dancing body, can we research movement from within and without, seamlessly and simultaneously? The terms of this reflexivity are surely not a reflection on “self”, but a condition in which the body “itself” would be regarded as both interior and exterior to its “self”; the dancing body as both subject and object.5 This marks the inseparability of two folds, which collectively produce the crease or seam along which movement-knowledge is constituted.6

Publication: This is one of seven text portraits by Lucy Cotter, commissioned for and published in Fieldings – Propositions for 3rd Cycle Research in the Performing Arts, published by DAS Publishing, the new publishing platform of DAS Research, the lectorate of the Academy for Theatre and Dance in 2021.

The book was edited under the chief editorship of Sher Doruff, in collaboration with editors Julien Bruneau, Konstantina Georgelou, Rosie Heinrich, Marijke Hoogenboom and Nienke Scholts.

Notes

1 Mike O’Connor, unpublished doctoral research, cited in email correspondence with the author.↩

2 Deleuze refers to “the laws of folds or changes in direction”. He goes on to write, “Even in a physical sense we are moving across outer material pleats to inner, animated, spontaneous folds. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Continuum, 2006, p. 14.↩

3 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 9.↩

4 “Moving Around X” (2014) is described on the website of O’Connor’s dance company in these terms: http://www.awaitingdog.com/MikeOConnor/moving_around_x.html↩

5 I paraphrase the terminology used by Jean-Luc Nancy to consider how the act of listening is both internal and external to the body. Nancy, Listening, Fordham University Press, 2007, p. 12–13.↩

6 Deleuze writes, “And between the two folds, in the in-between of the fold, the Zweifalt, […] the zone of inseparability that produces the crease or seam.” The Fold, p. 138.↩

Writing

Lucy Cotter is a prolific writer; publishing art criticism, cultural criticism, art history, art theory, ficto-theory, poetry, exhibition, performance, cross-disciplinary texts, and catalogue essays. She seeks to create a more generative relationship between art making and writing.

She is the author of Reclaiming Artistic Research (Hatje Cantz, 2019, expanded 2nd ed. 2024), a book foregrounding the singular nature of artistic thinking in dialogue with acclaimed artists worldwide. She is a regular contributor to books on contemporary art by academic presses, and has published in catalogues and monographs on Haegue Yang, Rabih Mroué, Katarina Zdjelar, Brian Maguire, Manuela Infante, and Brian O’ Doherty, among other artists.

She is the editor of several exhibition catalogues, including Cinema Olanda: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh for the 57th Venice Biennale, and has guest-edited a number of art journals, including Third Text. Her work has appeared in Flash Art, Mousse, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Oregon Artswatch, CARA, Field Day, The Brooklyn Rail, Typishly, Cirque, and Frieze, among other journals.

Books

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research: Expanded Second Edition

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    Expanding the original book with additional artist dialogues and a new essay, this edition explores the changing stakes of artistic research in a world reckoning with social justice, climate change, and the rise of artificial intelligence through a series of 24 in-depth dialogues with artists worldwide.

    2024

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    In twenty conversations with leading artists worldwide, Lucy Cotter maps out an epistemology of artistic creation. She manifests a type of research that is dynamically engaged with other fields, but thinks beyond concepts into bodily and material knowledge that exceeds language, revolutionizing our perception of art from the ground up.

    2019

Books in Progress

Books Chapters & Essays

  • unraveling: practice-led curating

    Companion to Curatorial Futures

    Bridget Crone, Bassam el Baroni, Matthew Poole, eds.

    Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • Global Engagement and Modalities of Looking in the Work of Brian Maguire, Richard Mosse, and Yuri Pattison

    Routledge Companion to Irish Art

    Fionna Barber and Fintan Cullen, eds.

    London: Routledge

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • Haegue Yang: Day and Night

    Haegue Yang: The Great Forgetfulness

    Fergal Gaynor, ed.

    Cork: National Sculpture Factory

    forthcoming 2024
    2024

  • Delegitimizing the Continuum of Violence

    Brian Maguire: The Grand Illusion

    Dublin: The Hugh Lane National Gallery

    2024

  • Fact as Fiction: A Dialogue with Rabih Mroué

    Rabih Mroué: Interviews

    Nadim. Samman, ed.

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    2023

  • Theatre as Thinking, Art as Nonknowledge

    Manuela Infante: Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking

    Giovanni Aloi, ed.

    Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

    2023

  • The Warp and Weft of History

    Kristina Benjocki: The Warp and Weft of History

    Amsterdam: Looiersgracht 60

    2023

  • Braiding: Transgenerational Artistic Comradeship

    Katarina Zdjelar (monograph)

    Middlesborough: Institute of Modern Art & Teeside University

    2022

  • (tropisms) away from and towards the thing, it, she

    Natasha Pike (artist's book)

    Dublin: Arts Council

    2022

  • Beyond the Walls of National Identity: The Triangulation of Art Criticism, Curatorial Discourse, and Artistic Practice

    Irish Art 1920–2020: Perspectives on Change

    Yvonne Scott and Christine Kennedy, eds.

    Dublin: Royal Hibernian Academy

    2022

  • After a While, Reflectively: Performing an Ecology of Composition Practice (On Alison Isadora)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • The Body as a Crease of Knowledge (On Mike O' Connor)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Preparing for Liquefaction (On Siegmar Zacharias)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts, eds. Julian Brumeau, Nienke Scholts et al. Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/Amsterdam University of the Arts

    2021

  • The Accidental Symbol: Performance as a Conduit (On Jennifer Lacey)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Between and Beyond the Dramaturgical (On Nienke Scholts)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Walking the Wrinkled Plane (On Gustavo Ciríaco)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • The Space Beyond Boundaries (On Rosie Heinrich)

    Fieldings: Propositions for 3rd Cycle Education in the Performing Arts

    Julien Bruneau, Nienke Scholts, Konstantina Georgelou, and Sher Doruff, eds.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Art Stars and Plasters on the Wounds: Why Have There Been No Great Irish Artists?

    Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader

    Fintan Cullen and Róisín Kennedy, eds.

    Cork: Cork University Press

    2021

  • Unknowing Culture

    Persistent Traces of Things to Come

    Marjoca de Greef and Anastasija Pandilovska, eds.

    Amsterdam: Sun and Stars

    2020

  • Mercurial States: A Curatorial Reflection

    Art and Education/Classroom

    2019

  • Towards an autonomy of self, towards a community of self

    Katarina Zdjelar: Vladimir

    Lucerne: Centre of Contemporary Art

    2019

  • Cinema Olanda: Toward a Platform, Realized and Anticipated

    Blessing and Transgressing: A Live Institute

    Defne Ayas, ed.

    London: Cornerhouse

    2018

  • Cinema Olanda: Projecting the Netherlands

    Cinema Olanda: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, ed. Lucy Cotter, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, p. 11–21

    2017

  • Between the White Cube and the White Box: Aspen 5+6

    Brian O Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique, ed. Christa Maria Lerm Hayes. Amsterdam: Valiz

    2017

  • Between the White Cube and the White Box: Brian O’Doherty’s Aspen 5+6, An Early Exposition

    The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia

    Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff, eds.

    Leiden: Leiden University Press.

    2014

  • Close Listening: Katarina Zdjelar’s My lifetime (Malaika)

    Katarina Zdjelar: Of More Than One Voice

    Vitoria-Gasteiz: Artium Basque Museum-Centre of Contemporary Art

    2013

  • 180 Degrees: The University after Artistic Research

    Art Education: A Glossary

    Tom Vandeputte, ed.

    Amsterdam: Sandberg Institute

    2013

  • Libia Olafur: The Future of Hospitality

    Under Deconstruction: Icelandic Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale

    Ellen Blumenstein, ed.

    Berlin: Sternberg Press

    2011

The above contributions are selected from 2011–2024. A complete list from 2005–2024 is available on request.

Art Journals

  • TBA Review: FORCE! an opera in three acts

    Performance review, Oregon Arts Watch

    11 September 2024
    2024

  • Empathy and Eros: Ralph Pugay’s The Longest Journey

    Exhibition review, Oregon Arts Watch.

    11 December 2023
    2023

  • Brian O’ Doherty and his Many Selves

    Tribute article, Brian O’ Doherty memorial publication,

    Brenda Moore-McCann, ed. The Brooklyn Rail.

    May 2023
    2023

  • Brian O’ Doherty, Paradigm-Shifting Artist Dies at 94

    Tribute article, Hyperallergic.

    9 November 2022
    2022

  • The Weft of History: Kristina Benjocki at IKOB, Eupen

    Exhibition review, Metropolis M

    1 June 2022
    2022

  • The Promise of “Opacity”: Takahiro Yamamoto’s Opacity of Performance at Portland Art Museum

    Performance review, Oregon Arts Watch

    24 June 2022
    2022

  • Disintegrating Language: Will Rawls’s “Amphigory”

    Exhibition Review, Oregon Arts Watch.

    23 November 2022
    2022

  • The Art of Zoom

    Essay: “The Art of Zoom”, republished, In the Pause of an Echo, There May Be A Shadow, online symposium publication.

    2020

  • The Art of Zoom

    Essay, RUUKU Journal for Artistic Research, Vol. 14

    6 August 2020
    2020

  • Design as Relationality, Aesthetics as Agency (On dach&zephir)

    Essay, Sophie Krier, ed. Issue 4, Field Essays.

    2019

  • Plants as Other: Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art

    Performance Review, Mousse Magazine

    17 May 2019
    2019

  • Wendelien van Oldenborgh at CA2M, Madrid

    Exhibition Preview, Artforum, Summer edition (print and digital).

    2019

  • The Exhibition after Time and Space: On Mario Garcia Torres’s Survey ‘Illusion brought Me Here’

    Essay, Mousse Magazine

    Spring 2019
    2019

  • Beyond the White Cube: Sixty Years of Brian O’ Doherty’s Letters

    Book review, Frieze.

    25 February 2019
    2019

  • Rob Halverson, Enthusiastic-Remotest-Tree

    Exhibition review, Flash Art

    5 June 2019
    2019

  • An Intimate Dance of Objects: Gordon Hall

    Exhibition review, Mousse Magazine

    11 June 2019
    2019

  • Mia Habib, ALL – a physical poem of protest

    Performance review, Flash Art

    27 September 2019
    2019

  • Writing as Experiment: A Dialogue with Sher Doruff

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1, 2018

    2018

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research… First Thoughts

    Introductory essay

    2018

  • Sound as Knowledge: A Dialogue with Samson Young

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

  • Knowledge as Production: A Dialogue with Liam Gillick

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

  • Black Urban Choreography: NIC Kay’s Pushit!

    Performance Review, Mousse Magazine.

    26 October 2018
    2018

  • Becoming the Archive: A Dialogue with Euridice Kala

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1.

    2018

  • Beyond Language: A Dialogue with Falke Pisano

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1.

    2018

  • Research as Play: A Dialogue with Ryan Gander

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

The above contributions are selected from 2017–2024 only. A list of earlier journal publications from 2003–2018 is available on request.

The keys of a computer are not entirely different than those of a piano. Fingers moving across a plane, producing sounds that are spoken or read. Tracing how material and embodied sensibilities can undermine the imposition of language; how words can act as placeholders for emerging subject positions and worldmaking. Embraced as a medium, writing aligns itself with the internal logic of art making.