Abstract/Summary

In his arabesque to the handmade ceramic pitcher1 , Ernst Bloch interrogates the object many different directions, adopting the visual perspective of a moving camera. "The social history that has impressed itself into the object, leaving its traces on the lines and crevices on its surface, is now brought to life, spiritualised by the fully controlled immersion in the object that is key to Bloch's interpretive practice."2 The immersion in the object locates the self and extends to the world, across time. How can this mode of immersion and omni-directional perspective be applied to the objects and substances of contemporary manufacture, and to their re-formulation in contemporary art? This thesis is composed of two sections: Giving Suck and Deeper in the Pyramid. 3 Giving Suck sets out a mode of multidisciplinary representation I name the ‘metasemiotic real’.4 This is a multi-modal approach to art, that draws on metonymic extension, script, abstraction, and picturing. It circumvents the Greek/ Platonic notion of capture or mimesis, to establish art as a dialogue with what that has come before and what may come next. Deeper in the Pyramid identifies a substance on which this immersive practice is performed – one belonging to its own unique category – milk. It is at once a vital human/mammalian body fluid and one of the most technologised fluids on the planet. As much as it is made industrial, it is made metaphorical – standing for excess and nurture, as well as capital exploitation, precarity, the rinsed out, the violently invaded. Whilst rich with narrative history, it acts a template for future-science with its vast datasets of genetic recalibration and array of biotechnological applications. Milk can be liquid, solid, powder, emulsion – it becomes indexical, figural, at once subject and object, a medium of synthesis and mimesis, cipher and wild abstraction, pure and excessively visceral.