Joel Morrison | Transformative Interface

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Diagrammatic Art – and the Art of Philosophy

Reality is the sequence of the explosive convulsions modeled in a pulsatile and rotative medium exposed to rhythms. The eye as the agent of memory is a means to simplify. … Without a vision from the eye, any representation stays blind. And the reasoning that follows stays insufficient, impotent.    – Roberto Matta (1911-2002), Chilean surrealist-lucid artist (quoted in SpinbitZ, p. 130)

Joel Morrison is both an artist and an integrally-informed philosopher of the interface. Beginning as a trained visual artist, he found his artwork migrating into the exploration of the diagram as a mode of visual art, eventually moving into the domain of philosophy itself.  As he reports:

Having started my life as a visual artist, I gradually discovered that my artistic expressions were becoming more and more philosophical as time progressed. I would often notice that in the back of my mind, as I lay thinking, an unconscious and intricate visual form was taking shape in my visual field; line by line, curving and collecting into shape after shape, unconsciously informing and solidifying the conceptual construction. Finally the philosophy began to rise above, transcending-and-including this everpresent and often unconscious visual art-form (SpinbitZ, Vol.1, p. 26).

The philosophy project now includes art as a fold – the art of philosophy and a philosophical mode of art entwined, opening a dual media expression and exploration of the kosmos. And it was the diagram that came to be the figural genre that served best this project. As the artist explains:

The art remains a key factor in the expression. It is an integral part of a symbiosis; an interface which informs and empowers the logic of the philosophical vision. And often it is through explicit catalysis in the creation of visual diagrams—vision-logic interfaces—that the philosophy itself necessarily unfolds. The linear expression of verbal ideas gains a new perspective through the non-linear and highly parallel expression in a visual form. They feed into and rebound off each other. With visualization, the whole mass of concepts can finally be seen simultaneously, nonlinearly, as one vibrant whole, instead of spaghettified by the linearity of language.... (p. 27).

The diagram is something of a “minor” genre or moment within the currents of Western and European art since the waning Renaissance of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when emblem books and their presentations of the play of word and image (the core of the emblem tradition) were in instances further woven with charts and other non-depictive figural elements, exceeding the semiosis of basic allegory, where there is a simpler coding (e.g., justice personified as a female figure holding sword and scales),  the expression more enigmatic, metaphoric, polysemantic: an aesthetic symbol in the Romantic sense of that term.

The work of Robert Fludd, an early 17th century English mystic philosopher, developed presentations that exemplify this complexifying of the emblem through inclusion of visual geometries, charts, and spatial coordinates.  In the early nineteenth-century, the important German Romantic artist Philipp Otto Runge developed charts of what he called color-spheres, influenced by Goethe’s theories of color and perhaps too by the thought of proto-evolutionist mystic Jakob Böhme. In the early twentieth century, with the flourishing of so many creative modernist art movements and idioms, diagrams and the diagrammatic made their appearance. Kazimir Malevich, the inventor of Suprematism, produced numerous teaching charts – now works of art in their own right – to express the principles of modernist pictorial logics leading up to his own renewal of art of painting.  The brilliant Paul Klee, in the wake of the cubist inclusions of all varieties of signs in the pictorial artwork (script, music notes, etc.), seamlessly integrated arrows into what are otherwise abstractive-depictive images.

During the complex moment of art making of the 1960s and early 1970s, an era still badly neglected in integral circles concerned with the visual arts, so-called Conceptual currents offered diagrammatic presentations as part of art exhibitions, as with several projects by Sol LeWitt: for example, his diagram of open cubes which were exhibited on occasion with three-dimensional executions of such cubes, the 2D and 3D artifacts constituting in tandem the work of art in those exhibition instances.

Morrison’s brilliant and creative forays into the art of the diagram is thus part of a venerable if neglected lineage, a “minor” stream in the Western-European tradition that has yet to be adequately mapped in any scholar detail and appreciation of which I am aware, only sketched in the most rudimentary manner in this commentary. Of course the “minor” is itself not a straightforward notion, as in following the philosopher Gilles Deleuze it is the “minor” which itself can within a tradition turn out to be that which emerges as a major chord advancing that very tradition – to wit, Deleuze’s own approach to philosophy.

What is distinctive about Morrison’s diagrams is that they signify otherwise than the ways of traditional verbal logics and their linearity; exceeding both contradiction and dialectical non-contradiction, exemplifying what John Sallis calls the “exorbitant logics of the imagination.” These diagrammatic art works have then an ineliminable:

The diagrams used in this construction are therefore found throughout this work as they will help the reader to process the abstract linear verbiage through the deeper, nonlinear and vastly parallel sensory functions that all humans possess. It is ultimately through the senses, transcended-and included in higher, more abstract, cognition, that the sense of the text is truly, integrally, embodied.

This is the general goal of SpinbitZ; to make sense of abstract thought through the employment of the human interface of sensation; to empower the conceptual imagination through images. Philosophy as the integrating art of the concept; a philosophy of vision-logic interfaces—and hence an Interface Philosophy (p. 27).

 This art-and-philosophy project is to heal the modern (and postmodern) rift between concept and percept: philosophy as the creator of concepts and art as the inventor of percepts – precisely the respective roles of philosophy and art as forwarded and clarified  by Deleuze and Guattari in their last jointly authored book, What is Philosophy? With Morrison there is an additional chiasmatic move, philosophy orienting towards aesthetics and embodiment themes through concepts like sensation; and the art of the diagram evincing the complexity of the philosophical concept. In the author’s words:

The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened.  [Rudolf] Arnheim’s point, contrary to the interpretations of many of his critics, was not that perception, in itself, was the highest level of cognition, but merely (as the evidence clearly shows) that a training, or even a dabbling, in the arts—i.e. a “percept-training” where the senses are more effectively transcended-and-included (integrated) into the higher forms of abstract thinking—greatly enhances the ability to think conceptually. This is because, according to Arnheim, there is no real division between percept and concept. A training in the arts strengthens the very foundation of concepts themselves, the perceptual infrastructure of the imagination (p. 126).

Michael Schwartz
May 2014