Representation must no longer be understood as the externalized animation of a dead object, such as an ornate vase or a carved chair, but rather ought to be thought of as having the qualities of a brick, which actively inhabits multiple modes of being. The brick is an eternally immanent object, lost in its own multiplicity, both containing and obscuring its image, referring unambiguously to itself, forever trading places with – while never actually touching – the word that describes it.
Materials have long been thought of as passive receptacles awaiting realization by the ideational force of form, but this conception fails to capture the interplay of the two in processes of production. To take on the shape of a brick, clay is not imposed upon by a preexisting mold; rather, it becomes individuated through a negotiation with form. Clay is not simply molded, it has a prismatically reciprocal and attuned encounter with its potentiality – setting rules about the form it can take, based on its extemporaneous physical and phenomenological properties, prepossessing an energy that becomes actualized in the process of production. Clay ultimately assumes the form of a brick with a complexity surpassing what a standard representational model can account for.
Individuation doesn’t fix raw matter into a final form; it continues to be individuated over time. At the end of several years – or several thousand years – the brick turns back into the dust from which it was originally made. Degradation is not a loss of form; it is continued form-taking. The individuation of bricks from clay (and their eventual return to dust) mirrors the formation and lifespan of artworks. Any originative manipulation of matter into an artwork – the crystallization of a manic present – represents just one possible and necessarily temporary configuration within the artwork’s ongoing process of becoming. At some point in its existence, a brick might break through a window or land upon a helmeted head. Representation, likewise, must navigate a wilderness of resistance.
