You feel that you have lived too long in this dry and tasteless life. Mostly, you are tired of the dreadful art which surrounds you. Overcome with the desire to be free of consciousness, constraints, conventional square frames, representation, and narrative, you seek a new path. You must procure movement of free, random, involuntary character, employing manual traits of confused sensations. A new rhythm. You throw your easel in the trash and take a walk. Ambling fitfully along the ‘daily round’ you find yourself caught ‘frozen in the middle of a strange stroll.’
A philosophers search for The Moment, as in Sensation and Affect, resembles the surfer travelling endlessly for The Perfect Wave. The taste in that Moment is so sweet, yet fleeting, you search on, in a state of wander-lust. You wonder briefly if you are really forging a ‘new path’ or if this is indeed a place of ‘escape’? An obsession grows for ‘loss of control,’ ‘confused sensations,’ ‘a movement “in-place,” a spasm,’ ‘the actions of invisible forces on the body.’ One’s appetite grows stronger and may begin to crave more ‘violent methods,’the ‘frenetic dance,’ ‘hysteria,’ ‘chaos,’ and ‘flight.’ But this journey need not occur in some exotic locale. For the artist, ‘the entire battle takes place on the canvas.’ But it can be assumed, that on the other side of that moment, of catastrophe, is without question, ‘the emergence of another world.’
In-Between-Ness rests in a location neither here nor there. The seduction of dreaming within interstitial places is irresistible and bewitching, you will easily embrace the unknown. There is a restless peace in the non-committal nature of such a position. Though you can move on, you prefer to remain on the fence, swinging on the gate between subject and object, between many points of departure in the optical landscape…
What are the maps to these lands? How does one construct a sensory diagram which claims to both ‘the abandonment of any visual sovereignty and control’ while maintaining that it ‘must remain operative and controlled… must not be given free reign…’ These are the dangers you meet when exploring new frontiers. When eager enthusiasm for the ‘pure’ and ‘new’ encounters sobering threats which challenge your very existence. The shady shift to diagrams which ‘unlock areas of sensation’ and ‘collapse visual coordinates’ such that you flail madly into a ‘vanishing grey point,’ an abyss. It is a leap, to be sure, ‘continually changing direction’ and undoubtedly folding back upon itself at all angles in a most unpredictable manner. In being here, you are transformed. You are deformed. You experience ‘orders of sensation,’ ‘levels of feeling,’ and ‘shifting sequences.’ You will want to realize these sensations, ‘to paint between things’ to capture and express the vital movement, this transgression. Different tools must be found, alternative canvases and new agents of form and figuration.
Because in the Land of In-Between, in that elusive land of elusive names, a land where the tactile ground is a gateway to new horizons, and even the lines are nomadic creatures, diagonally evading contours and appearance – you will inevitably overcome the chaos. You “must emerge from the catastrophe,” even if it means emerging dizzy and with a whiplash.
/anna ingebrigtsen
archandphil 
February 25, 2012 at 12:19 am
This is a really evocative dive into the logic of sensation, as given to us by Deleuze, and begins to unfold the story of the four-legged woman…could begin to make it a nice feminist-affectve manifesto? H.Frichot