Embeddedness2

embeddedness

Pia Louwerens

My name is Pia Louwerens. You may be surprised to read a text written in the first person in a lexicon of collective material practices, but I would like to ask you to read my I, myself, as a collective effort in and by itself. Without you I wouldn’t be here after all. And whatever I have done, as a ‘junior embedded artistic researcher’, I didn’t come up with that myself. I held the job of junior embedded artistic researcher at the research project that this lexicon is part of. I decided that my research, asking how the artist performs within the institution, had to start with this peculiar job description.

In this case, the word embeddedness has an institutional provenance. The governmental organs who funded this research project are tailored to academic research in which this term indicates a specific institutional relationship. You can imagine
a research project in the field of biology, in which case
a junior researcher would do their research at one of the commercial partners of the project (the laboratory of a company, for example). They would, as a result, be ‘embedded’ in that company.

When you replace the biologist with an artist, you can see how this description inadvertently sketches out an unusual practice, reminiscent of the placement of artists in non-art organizations by the Artist Placement Group in the 1970s and 1980s. On top of that, I was placed or embedded in an exhibition space, which already works with artists, but in different capacities. They exhibit artists, and the staff is also populated by many young artists. I would be embedded as an artist in an institution, but not working at the institution as an artist; it would be different. How,
I didn’t know yet.

Online searches for embeddedness quickly lead to a specific context: it denotes the position of journalists who travel with the military to report from the front lines. I can’t think of a more paranoid image. In addition to these two perspectives, I also like to think of the more basic reading of embeddedness: two objects of different materials, one big and one small, where the smaller object is firmly lodged inside the other. I imagine a stone in a riverbed, creating an impression with its shape, while it gets smoothed over time.

My adoption of the condition of embeddedness
as a research subject, was precisely the start of my performance of embeddedness. Because of certain misconceptions that originated in modernity, artists are not encouraged to embed or lodge themselves firmly in their own conditions. This relates to causality: as an autonomous artist, the primary cause for action should be your own initiative (inspiration, or creation). Artists, like artworks, like art in general, strive to be free and independent, separate. To explain the misconception I think of a Spinoza Symposium at the contemporary art space West Den Haag, where I first heard Spinoza’s parable of the stone that was thrown. If the stone, Spinoza wrote, would get a consciousness mid-air, it would mistake itself into thinking that it made itself fly. If the artist is a stone, then ‘the institution’ (see institution as practice) controls most of the conditions that make it fly and keep it flying.

When considering the embedded state of a stone, we might observe its conditional dependence, but we can only do so by grace of its difference. There is by definition a difference between the stone and the riverbed, between object A and object B. If they were the same, there would be no embeddedness to observe. To get back to this particular project: if I, as an artist, use the infrastructure of the institution in the same way as other artists, I would not be embedded anymore. Or, if you insist that all artists are in embedded relation to the institution, I can point out that I wasn’t only embedded in the institution, but in the institutional position of embeddedness as well.

Something that helped me think through the tension between embeddedness and difference is the figure of the parasite. As A.M. Gullestad wrote: ‘Parasites are both a part and not a part of the host’s body, neither self nor non-self.’ They exist in relation, yet do not assimilate. Through time, the strangeness of the parasite might be appropriated by the host. This phenomenon is deeply ingrained in our bodies: the mitochondria that energize our cells are said to have started out as parasites, they even have their own DNA. Gullestad links the notion of parasite to the notion of ‘minor literature’ which Deleuze coined in a book on Kafka, a writer who lived and worked in Prague as part of a German-speaking minority: ‘To Deleuze, minor literature is therefore not external, but internal to a major language, yet at the same time “foreign” to it.’ This sounds a lot like embeddedness. Thinking through the parasitic, embeddedness evokes paranoia: who is using whom? Am I using the energy that the mitochondria provide, or is it the mitochondria ‘who walk through the local park in the morning... thinking my thoughts?’

This parasite/host relationship is not clear-cut.
Just like we have parasites fuelling our cells, we have bacteria in our intestines, digesting our food; strangers truly are inside of us. I can fantasize about being external to the infrastructure of art, for example, but we, as artists, makers, readers of this lexicon, are the bodies through which the institution of art propagates. I host the institution, as much as I am a parasite.

Before despairing—because how does one research something one is so much entangled with?—I tell myself that there might be no true distance, no separability to hold on to, but there is no true proximity either (see criticality). I am a different material, I practice differently. Following the model of embeddedness does not have to lead me to assimilation. The main questions I ask myself are: Which shape does the institution that is embedded in me imprint on my practice, and which shape do I imprint on the institution as an embedded artistic researcher? How am I hosted and how do I host?