Art in the Age of Greasy Surfaces, Pt. 2

This is part of a three-part series relating contemporary aesthetic philosophy to early modern print culture. I freely admit that I have never taken a class in philosophy, art history, or multimodal composition. Please excuse my amateurish attempts at all three.

2. What I Talk About When I Talk About Surfaces

Here is one recipe for greasy Renaissance ink, adapted from Andrew Pettegree's The Book in the Renaissance:

1. Gather up some wine lees from your buddy, the vintner.
2. Don't feed it to the pigs! Burn it for a nice black soot.
3. Add some varnish to the soot, such as linseed oil. Mix well.
4. The current mixture will probably be a little thin. Crack an egg and separate the yolk. Mix the whites with the soot-varnish mixture. You can feed the yolk to the pig, or add it to your table beer.
5. Print while drunk.

Here's another recipe from Jo Wheeler's Renaissance Secrets, Recipes and Formulas:

1. (Start early on this step.) Order some German vitriol (iron sulphate) from Venice. It should be yellowish green upon arrival. Also order some arabic gum.
2. Gather some oak galls. Crush. Soak for six days in water.
3. Reduce the gall mixture, add the German vitriol and arabic gum.
4. Print while fresh.

If you cut either recipe with water or another additive, you'll get runny ink that stains too much and doesn't stick on the page. Vellum and rag-paper are excellent vehicles for grease.

I wrote about digital networks and greasy surfaces in the last post, and I pointed to the philosophical pairing of the network and the surface: in a word, relational aesthetics. I wonder whether there's a meaningful sympathy in the comparison of an ontological surface and an artist's surface, or a computer network and a network of being. I learned about the network-surface binary through Graham Harman's synthesis of networks and being. Networks with independent objects are two of the basic tenets of a subset of speculative realism known as Object Oriented Ontology. While most people deploy Object Oriented Ontology for its nonhuman ontology--and typically, then, an ecocritical politics--OOO also contains a powerful critique of correlation. Harman wants Actor-Network Theory to dig below the surfaces, and he wants to add a second dimension of or intentional objects to the network.Networks, in this sense, refer to Bruno Latour's ontology. Harman quotes Latour's germinal anecdote in Prince of Networks:

I knew nothing, then, of what I am writing now but simply repeated to myself: 'Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else'... It and me, them and us, we mutually defined ourselves. And for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and set free. (13)

Latour's thought wipes out substance from ontology. Each actant resembles an event in Whitehead's thought, yet without recourse to God (as in Whitehead) for correlation with other actants. Instead, one actants is always separated from a second by a third. To refer again to Harman's Prince of Networks:

Whenever one actant has some effect on another, this can be described as 'action at a distance'--all actants, by the mere fact of being themselves, are distant from each other, split off from others by unknown firewalls. (48)

Harman uses the language of the internet, as in the term "firewalls," but I do not mean to naively apply Latour's network to the internet anymore than I would apply Heidegger's surfaces to JK Keller's. In fact,

• the challenge posed by Sterling et al. asks whether the internet is actually interacting (in the sense of an actant) with meatspace, 
• and the challenge posed by Keller's art asks whether humans can ever engage beyond the surface of our technology (with the inhuman actant of technology).

In a lecture at Carnegie Mellon's Institute of Fine Art, Harman makes a few cool moves towards a non-relational aesthetics. The central point, however, is that there are firewalls between relations, and relations can never exhaust objects. But to answer the above questions from an OOO perspective:

• Is the internet actually interacting? Absolutely! But the internet also has alliances with things like electrical grids, and objects in those alliances engage each other in ways we can't access.
• Can humans engage beyond the surface? Not quite! Depth eventually triumphs over surface. A work of art is neither entirely autonomous nor entirely surface.

What, then, about the other greasy surface--the rag-paper print? The printed page is another object, with its own firewalled history and alliances. The printed rag-paper page has a strong alliance with a vat of linen rags, yet a firewalled relationship with electronic media. The printed page also has a strong alliance with illustrations, yet a firewalled relationship with sculpture.

Following McLuhan, however, digital objects enhance the alphabetical properties of print culture yet obsolesce the chemical properties of rag-paper. In the next post, I want to bring more early modern print culture into this discussion: more, that is, than ink recipes.