A Sense of Things not Being There:

Writing about Mark Titmarsh’s “The Thing” in

relation to the Thinking of Martin Heidegger

Cameron Tonkinwise, 2006

Passing the balance over from the merchant to the angel, ie the reversal of
departure, happens as the remembering (the making inward) into the world inner
space at that time when there are such men who “sometimes risk more… by a
breath risk more.”…
Those who risk more are the poets, but poets whose song turns our
defenselessness into the open. Because they reverse the departure against the open
and inwardly remember its unwholeness into the integral whole, these poets sing
the integral in disintegration…
Those who risk more experience defenselessness in unwholeness. They bring
mortals the track of fugitive gods in the darkness of the world’s night. Those who
risk more, as singers of what is whole, are ‘poets in a desolate time.’ (“What are
Poets For?”: 236, 239, 240)
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Writing about an art work is a strange, if not antagonistic, thing to do. If the artist
has chosen to work in the medium of art, then why bring in some other medium, in
this case, the medium of writing, to the work? Does writing about an art work
suggest that the work does not work as a thing on its own?
There are several types of writing about an artwork:
1. Promotions of the work, advertising it, sending people to experience it, after
which the work stands on its own.
2. Extensions of the work beyond its immediate self-contained manifestations,
extrapolating or applying apply what it does there in its own way to other
contexts
3. Translations of the work, re-presenting it or what it says, or rather does, in and
of itself, explicitly in the medium of words, perhaps for those who did not get to
experience it standing there.
4. Exemplifications of the work, where what it itself does nevertheless illustrates
some other idea
5. Explanations of the work, of how it works, its workings, whether they be
immanent to the work itself, historically and geographically transcendent to the
work, or derived from the artist
6. Evaluations of the work, judging its success at doing what it itself attempts to do
All these ways of writing about an artwork remain, or try to remain, distinct from
the work. They are ancillary or subsequent to the work, something done to or from
the work, and consequently not necessary to the artwork’s workings.1

1
These relations have been well-problematised by Jacques Derrida’s analyses of the ambiguity of
the ‘supplement’ as something that is always both a necessary and unnecessary addition. See Of
Grammatology. In relation to writing about what art does, it will become apparent, that what is at
issue in the following is the way Heidegger’s writing about artworks, eg all that he says about a Van
Gogh painting in “Origin of the Work of Art” depend upon the claim that what is described by
Heidegger happens in the artwork itself, and not because of what Heidegger teaches us through his
written descriptions to see happening in the artwork: “It spoke… The work of art has given us to
know what a pair of shoes is in truth. It would be the worst of illusions if we were to want to think
that it was our description as subjective activity which had thus depicted everything and then
introduced it into the picture.” This citation is (a translation of) Jacques Derrida’s translation of
Heidegger in an article entirely concerned with the problematic aspects of this claim, as captured in
its title identifies — “Restitutions of the Truth in Painting” (Truth in Painting, trans. Bennington,
G. and I.McLeod [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], 323). The idea of the ‘truth in
paint(ing)’, of ‘the truth of paint(ing)’, of ‘the paint as the truth of painting’ leads to Mark

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These might be opposed to a more integrated form of writing, a writing with,

rather than on, art:
7. Mobilisations of the work, setting it to work by making it understandable or
connecting it to contexts or audiences in which it can work
This last form of writing, despite seeming to be more intimate, is in fact more
like rivalry. In the long running dispute over which has the greater agency — poiesis
as making things or poiesis as making meaning — writing makes a treacherous
manoeuvre, indebting the artwork to the motivating power of writing. In getting it
started, in engaging with it in order to engage its operations, the writing completes
what is thereby rendered incomplete, energises what is otherwise inert. In this case,
the artwork is effectively nothing without the helping hand of writing, the handle
that in turning the artwork on like some mere device, overturns it.

For, I take it that the point of art, the defining objective of art, is to be self-
sufficient.
Art’s struggle (to exist, in a society that does not seem to need it, and against its
own history of resulting compromises) is its insistence on being independent, of
being quite distinct from market forces, usefulness, even meaningfulness. Despite its
patent dependence for subsistence on institutions, and times and places, on
histories, and on materials and techniques that cost money, and even on makers, all
instances of (the) art(s) lay claim to the idea(l) of Art, of being in touch with what
exceeds its locations, its pragmatic origins and destinations and means.2
If an artwork has truck with particular finances or certain people or situated
frames, to be Art it does so only contingently. Even if the artwork is ‘site specific’, its
Art-fulness lies in the way it brings to those limited contexts something sheerly
distinct. That utter particularity of the artwork, its autonomy from what it is amidst,
is paradoxically what grants it, if successful, a certain universality. It exceeds its
particularity not by reaching out and representing some universal, drawing (on)
some theological entity, the people, or an ahistorical truth — these were only

Titmarsh’s project of ‘conceptual painting’ and ‘painting’ without a canvas, ie without a support, or
frame, as a mere thing.
2
“In one way or another, art would thus be in default or in excess of its own concept. One could
say: ‘art’ never appears except as a tension between two concepts of art, one technical and the other
sublime;” Jean-Luc Nancy, “Why are There Several Arts?” in The Muses, trans. P.Kamuf [Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996]. Most of what follows is an attempt to understand what Nancy’s
important essays in this collection might mean.

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premonition of Art proper — but through its inward autarchy. Its self-sufficiency is
the source of it being surfeit, effusive; it is more than it is by being completely itself.

Or at least, I take it that this being-more-through-being-for-its-own-sake is the

point of Modern Art.
But is there any other type of Art? Can we call the pre-modern arts that were
means to an end, either serving those they depicted or that which they beautified,
Art? Whilst instances of Art perhaps now can be found in pre-modern times, their
existence depends on what Modern Art accomplishes and so defines, and only
thereby reveals retrospectively.
The issue for what follows is more whether this is still the point of Art, after the
project of Modernism. I will try to argue that it is not that Art no longer strives for
these Modernist ideals; it is just that these are no longer possible. Indeed, precisely
because post-Modern Art fails, it reveals that we are still yearning for the
autochthonous, but in ways that point to something else, or more precisely, some
things else.

The hermetic effectuation that is (Modern) Art means that artworks are very
ambiguous things.
In their striving to be self-contained, they strive on the one hand to be ‘things’.
The notion of ‘a thing’ is deliberately very broad, but in the end, it indicates objects
or concepts or anything in between that are nevertheless discrete. Things stand forth
as distinct beings. The way of being a thing is to be (able to be) by itself, on it own.
Heidegger, who was fond of asking after things that others, even other
philosophers, find obtusely abstract or uselessly general, asked on several occasions
(if not throughout everything he thought3), ‘what is a thing?’. In a lecture with that
question explicitly as its title,4 one of Heidegger’s initial responses is that:

3
Heidegger’s philosophy is self-defined as the pursuit of the question of being, of the question
‘what does it mean ‘to be’? Precisely because Heidegger was concerned with what it meant for all
things to be, the nature of existence in general (‘why is there something rather than nothing?’), and
not just the selfishly therapeutic issue of ‘the meaning of (human) life’, Heidegger’s question
involves asking after the nature of things as a whole, the (historically) different ways in which things
manifest — eg as themselves, as ideas, as (deity) created entities, as (human technology)
manufactured products, as sheer stuff, as nothing (significant).
4
Heidegger’s 1935 seminar, “Basic Questions of Metaphysics: Kant’s Doctrine of
Transcendental Principles” was published by Heidegger in 1962 (partly to counter an unauthorised

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There is no thing in general, only particular things; and the particulars, moreover,
are just these (je diese). Each thing is one such this one (ein je dieses) and no
other…
Being singular is obviously a general and universally applicable characteristic (Zug)
of things… A thing is always a this one. (What is a Thing?: 15, 18)
Things clearly lie amongst other things, but this contiguity is accidental. Things
are not inherently relational or networked. The nature of the thing is that which
remains when everything else that can be taken away is taken away. Nor are things
inherently many or dispersed amongst several; there may be many things, but
precisely in the sense that there are several separate things, each unique.
To put this another way, things are finished, complete. They are what they are;
they are not becoming. They are factual, actual(ised). This is why we tend not to
refer to the living as things; or if we do, we are ignoring that what we are referring to
is alive, changing, with its own potential and developmental direction; we are taking
what is there as just so much static stuff for us to change as we see fit.5
If this is the nature of what it is to be a thing, then this is what (Modern)
artworks strives to be; each having attained its end as itself. An artwork is not a
component, interspersed, but its own thing; not just one of a kind, but its own kind,
even if part of a series, each a ‘that and only that’ unsubstitutable thing.6
No artwork qua being a thing, should be therefore with(in) writing, indiscreetly
depending on writing to become what it is.

On the other hand, artworks equally strive to be no mere things. They are not just
one type of thing amongst so many other things, but are made to be unlike any
(other) sort of thing, particular in their insistence of being more than things. An
artwork is not (just) some finished product, a static object. It is, as an artwork, at

and unauthored transcript that was circulating) under the title Die Frage nach dem Ding. The
English translation is entitled What is a Thing?, but this obscures the relation between this lecture
course and Heidegger’s more famous essay “Die Frage nach der Technik”, “The Question
Concerning Technology”, something that will be important for what follows.
5
As will be explained below, Heidegger’s critique of technology turns around this notion of
things. In a world not under the dominion of the technological way of being, things manifest in
their own way; under globalised technology, (all) things are Bestand, resources ready for
manufacture.
6
Hence, originality and authorship are essential to artworks insofar as they strive to be things.
Walter Benjamin’s insight parallels Heidegger’s given the way technological reproductions ‘de-
thing’ artworks, that is, remove their ability to shine forth as their own thing.

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work. Though complete, it is still underway, on the move.7 It is not just there, a
remnant of what was, or an indicator of what will or might be; it is more than there,
there and elsewhere, a thing that goes on producing effects, projecting things
beyond its being there, energetically alive between what it is and what it does.
In his famous lecture on works of art, written at the same time as his lecture series
‘What is a Thing?’ Heidegger makes this clear:
The artwork is something over and above its thingliness… This something else in
the work constitutes its artistic nature. The artwork is indeed a thing that is made,
but it says something other than the mere things itself is, allo agorenei. The work
makes publicly known something other than itself, it manifests something other:
it is an allegory. In the artwork something other is brought into conjunction with
the thing that is made. The Greek for ‘to bring into conjunction with’ is
symbállein. The work is a symbol. (“Origin of the Work of Art”: 3)

The work that artworks do means that they are not (only) self-sufficiently-
contained, but (also) efficiently self-actualising. They are (self-)motivated to
accomplish affects, making things happen. These ongoing achievements are what
differentiates artworks from all (other impotent) things.

Nevertheless, this beyond-thing-ness of (Modern) Art is performed by each work

itself. They must not be the result of some interrelation between the work and other
things, like writing. This dynamism is generated autonomously; it is of each
artwork’s own doing.
This is why artworks, while being essentially more-than-things, are even so still
solely things. Artworks are not not things because of how they move (themselves
and thereby us, things around them, the world). They are exactly ambiguous things,
things that are not things as well. This is in fact how and why they are dynamic.
In a response to Adorno’s observation that “It is the artwork itself that points
beyond its monadic constitution. The only way to relate an aesthetic particular to

7
In the same way that Heidegger’s central concern, ‘being’, directly involves the extent to which
this notion is both a noun and a verb, so too Heidegger understands ‘the work of art’ as both ‘a
finished product of artistic work(ing)’ and ‘the work(ing) that (an) art(work) does long after the
artist has completed it.’ To this extent, Heidegger is always trying to recover two Aristotlean terms,
and recover them as meaning exactly the same thing: energeia (translated as actualitas) in the sense
of ‘at-work’ (en-ergon); and entelechia (translated as ‘perfectum’) in the sense of having-its-end-in-
itself (echein-telos-en); which together mean something like ‘always-complete-even-always-still-
changing.’

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the moment of universality is through its closure as a monad,” Jean-Luc Nancy

beautifully captures the ambivalent thingliness of art:
Art is the transcendence of immanence as such, the transcendence of an
immanence that does not go outside itself in transcending, which is not ex-static
but ek-sistant. A ‘transimmanence.’ Art exposes this… And that is why these
works themselves work a definitive torsion on the couple
transcendence/immanence.8

Heidegger’s account of this ‘ec-intra-thinging’ that works of art are and do

becomes the Sameness9 of earth and world, the self-closing and the self-opening:
The setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth are two essential traits
belonging to the work-being of the work. Within the unity of that work-being,
however, they belong together. This unity is what we seek when we reflect on the
self-sufficiency of the work and try to express in words the closed, unitary repose
of this resting-in-itself… [which is better understood as] a happening… [even]
strife. (“Origin of the Work of Art”: 26)

This struggle, within the art thing, is what powers its being more. And for
Heidegger, particularly at the time of his writing, this power was considered to be
the most powerful of all. Artworks are original, in the sense of originating, by
revealing and preserving that from which they originate, the revealing and
preserving in, through and as, which all things be. Because art wrests from and rests
in how beings be, it accesses the ability to make sovereign bestowals, founding and
grounding, protecting and projecting, a people’s historical mission.

But are artworks (still) such things?

At this point, I should say more mundanely that I am writing about Mark’s artwork
because he and I are colleagues at the University of Technology, Sydney, in the
School of Design. We are colleagues also in the etymological sense that we read
together, in particular, we read Heidegger together.
We also share a dispute, an enjoyable bicker given what is stake. The fight is
something like: in these distressful times, art or design? Which has more agency in
response to, or which is instead the agent of, what Heidegger calls Gestell — the
recasting of all that is as just stuff available for transformation?

8
“Why are there Several Arts?” op cit, 35.
9
The Same is Heidegger’s notion of that which is both and neither Identity and/Difference.

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Crudely, Mark’s commitment, as an artist, of course lies with the power of art. As
I understand him, Art’s radical autonomy protects a space from impending total
design, the latter being exactly what recasts things into mere usefulness, or worse, a
merely useful look (ie style).
I rather tend to believe that “In all these connections Art is, and remains, with
regard to its highest vocation, a thing of the past.”10

Our dispute in one sense is captured in the closing moments of Heidegger’s most
well-known essay, “The Question Concerning Technology.” Heidegger cites
Hölderlin: “where the danger is, grows the saving power also;” and “poetically
dwells man upon this earth.” Heidegger, by way of concluding that essay suggests
that art might be the possibility opened here for us these citations. His argument
draws on the fact that the Ancient Greek term, techné — the know-how peculiar to
poiesis, revealing through making — encompasses what we today call Art:
Once there was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was
called techné. And the poiesis of the fine arts also was called techné…
Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that
revealing lays claim to the arts most primarily, so that they for their part may
expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our
look into that which grants and our trust in it?…
Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation
with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of technology,
that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the
coming to presence of art… (“The Question Concerning Technology”: 34-5)

However, pace Heideger and contra Mark, I would suggest that a better
translation for the techné of poiesis, particularly one that captures the revelatory
making that facilitates our dwelling on this earth, is design. That this term also lies,
according to Mark’s own logic, closer to the techno-danger, strengthens its
appropriateness as the source of a saving power.

This is no doubt a very academic argument, since what we are both after is quite
simply a more artful designing, a way of bringing more, more revealing, more
protecting, and granting and questioning, to everyday things of use.

10
This is Hegel’s famous pronouncement. It is very ambiguously noted by Heidegger in an
“Afterword” to the “Origin of the Work of Art”, 51.

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But if this is the most obvious meeting point between us, what I have glimpsed in
Mark’s artwork is a meeting point ‘on the other side’ as it were. Obversely, in the
place where, or better, at the time when, Art is no longer capable of the project of
founding new historical directions, when Art’s ability to world, even within the
design process, has been overwhelmed by the un-worlds of designed products,
Mark’s work — or rather, and this is crucial, his ‘un-work’ — registers that unartful
design will never be total.
I will try to explain this in what follows, but for now, it is probably appropriate
to say that what is at stake is: things.

That the saving power grows closer to design than art is also evidenced by the fact
that, despite occasional albeit famous references to art, Heidegger is more often and
more deeply concerned with non-artwork things.
‘The Question Concerning Technology’ was originally one in a series of four
lectures that Heidegger gave in early 1950 under the general title of ‘Insight into
That Which Is.’ The first lecture was entitled ‘The Thing.’ In that lecture,
Heidegger builds on his account of thingliness in his 1935/6 lecture on the artwork,
extending the pairing of Earth and World to a fourfold of Earth, Sky, Divinities and
Mortals, which ring together as World through essential things. This conceptual
expansion is related to where the lecture begins, lamenting the abolition of distance
associated with technology that nevertheless brings no nearness. To counter this
“uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near” (“The Thing”: 166),
Heidegger turns to a nearby thing, a jug, and points, through his poetic rendering of
its being, of what is at work in its being made11 and used, to a remoteness that
nonetheless lies close by — the earthly protecting and divine giving of libation to
mortals that the jug, by containing (a void, a sky, in which to hold) fluid, makes
possible.
This example and the lecture as whole makes clear that at the heart of the
question concerning technology lies the thingness of things. In the final of the four
lectures, ‘The Turning’, Heidegger makes this clear:

11
In this context, the opening of ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ which recalls the
Aristotelian doctrine of fourfold casuality, seems to outline what that process of careful designing
(making or ‘occasioning’ as it is called there) would involve.

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When oblivion turns about, when world as safekeeping of the coming to presence
of Being turns in, then there comes to pass the in-flashing of world into the
injurious neglect of the thing. (“The Turning”: 47)

The crux of the matter facing us today lies not with artworks, which are, in
conspicuously non-compliant ways, more-than-things, but with how
“inconspicuously compliant is the [modest] thing” (“What are Poets For?: 182).
These everyday artefacts of careful design harbour our saving:
Just as it is a part of our unshieldedness that the familiar things fade away under
the predominance of objectness, so also our nature’s safety demands the rescue of
things from mere objectness. The rescue consists in this: that things, within the
widest orbit of the whole draft, can be at rest within themselves (“What are Poets
For?”: 130)

But are there (still) such things?

Look again at that sentence from ‘The Turning.’ What flashes at us in a moment
of insight into what is, is not the clear presence of some thing resting in itself, but
the blinding absence of things due to our neglect. What we sense in that momentary
glance is that there are no thingly things (any more); that the thingness of things is
being concealed by:
the object-character of technological dominion… [in which] things dissolve into
the calculated market value…
the frailties of things [are being replaced] by the thought-contrived fabrications
of calculated objects… produced to be used up… the more quickly they are used
up, the greater becomes the necessity to replace them even more quickly… [so
that all that remains] constant in things produced as objects merely for
consumption is: the substitute — Ersatz.” (“What are Poets For?”: 114-5, 129-30)

We see, in other words, that we are surrounded by crap, by unnoticed collections

of unused and unusable shells of things. But also, we realise, if only fleetingly, in a
way that cannot be retained but must be forever resought, that this concealment of
things beneath piles of junk is not oblivion, but safekeeping; that this withdrawal of
things is not the result of market over-production — this grants too much agency to
technology, which is afterall not some thing-in-itself, but us — but a protection of
things from technological dominion, a letting of objecthood exhaust itself in its own
repetitive superficiality.

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This is why the saving power is not near the danger, or in the danger, as if it were
different from the danger — ie art or design as near or in technology — but rather
the saving is the danger itself: the disappearance of things is itself an appearing of
thingliness, as what is glaringly not there.
In this case, the appropriate response to Gestell is not some-thing-that-is-also-
more-than-a-thing, like a Modern Artwork, but something-less-than-a-thing,
something that draws attention to the withdrawal of the thing.

Mark’s artwork “The Thing” is not in the end a thing. It is not a ‘just this one’. It is
many things, none of which is a thing in its own right. It is in fact four semi-things,
or more precisely, a fourfold of perspectives on things.
Let’s take stock:
The first impression of Mark’s “The Thing” is perhaps something like its
‘dimensionality’: three main elements — resin on the floor, string in the air and
moving images on portable screens — brought into relation through a common
palette of bright colours. The resin’s static, 2D flatness with suggestions of weight
contrasts with the light, ever so slightly waving, almost 1D lines of the curved
hanging strings, which together mark out a 3D volume. Both the resin and the
strings in turn contrast with the small, moving images whose immateriality allude to
a fourth dimension of time. The strong, almost mathematical, togetherness of the
distinctly contrasting elements clearly opens oscillations within the work, rhythms
that make notions like space and time part of ‘the more’ at work in this art thing.
Importantly, the prettiness of the overall first affect is involving, making the
thoroughly perspectival a further dimension. For, each element is dependent upon
how it is perceived: the resin nearly trips the viewer, standing out from the work,
not trapped in a binary relation to the strings, inaccessibly beneath them, but there,
to be looked at up close and even touched; the moiré effects made by strings alter as
one moves about the work; and each screen can only be seen through interaction.
Given that the “basic characteristic of the thing, ie that essential determination of
the thingness of the thing to be this one, is grounded in the essence of space and
time” (16), and that “the ‘this’ is not characteristic of the thing itself [but] takes the
thing only insofar as it is an object of a demonstration… a subjective addition on
our part” (26), Mark’s “The Thing”, with its perspectival dimensionality, seems to
exhibit the conditions through which things can be things, but for this very reason,
it does not exhibit a thing itself. We have aspects of the appearance of things, but no
thing.

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That Mark’s “The Thing” is in many ways thingless is further evidenced by the
fact that there is a 4th component to this installation itself (ie before the viewer is
taken into account). There are the resin sheets, the strings, the moving images. And
then there is some writing: not just a title, or an extended title, or some biographical
notes, or acknowledgements, but a series of statements that explicitly move the work
in different directions.
This writing is clearly part of the installation, not an unnecessary accessary, but a
series of further contrasting extra-dimensions that intentionally amplify what is
happening within this experience. Yet, as a disparate set of references, these writings
do not integrate the other three aspects into some coherent wholeness; they stretch it
unevenly, connecting it to multiple, incompatible practices, contexts and
phenomena, so that it lurches without constancy or centre.

This is not a criticism. Mark’s practice as an artist, if not always though often his art,
has always involved writing, as his recent collation of writings evidences. All these
writings have to do with the institutionalisation of art: its media, curation, market,
geography, history. Mark has recently begun to refer to this as the ‘ecology of art’,
the interdependencies that sustain this phenomenon, or the connections that need
to be repaired or altered if this phenomenon is to be sustainable.
Of course, in an ecology there are no discrete things, but instead a system of
relations. The creatures that make up an ecology are heuristic distinctions imposed
by observers to make sense of the changing interactions happening in an
environment. So, for Mark, the post-Modern writing artist, art is manifestly
something requiring designed dispersal to be alive.
If it is therefore less strange to write in relation to Mark’s artwork than to write in
general about (Modern) works of art, it is because Mark’s artwork already involve
writing, writings that explicitly de-autonomise and so de-thing them already.

In the writings that are then a crucial element of “The Thing”, Mark writes of
things as mute material obstacles, mythical things in popular visual culture, things as
desired consumer products, and the things involved in ‘conceptual painting’. The
writings plug the components of the installation into the age of the world picture,
the totalizing market of ecotechnics.
With these things in mind, some subsequent impressions of the installation arise.
The pocket televisions seem to draw attention to the ubiquity of broadcast images,
these electromagnetic non-things surrounding us wherever we are. This is our sky,

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the air we breathe, but perhaps also the trace of our lost divinities, broadcast from
who knows where and when. The strings, mapping a region, a clearing of sky within
a building, are builders’ strings, for measuring and levelling, for staking out
property, determining the common scale of the things we own, things we worship
and so tie ourselves to over our mortal lifetimes. And the resin sheets, so reminiscent
of the lolly coloured blob casings that are currently styling our communication and
information technologies, lie on the floor, revealing in their deceptive translucence,
the earth,12 the impenetrable concrete that stretches beyond the gallery to the road
outside and to the other buildings and the whole city and beyond. Like chewing
gum or vomit, these undigestable, unsustaining surface stains, turn the ground into
a canvas, revealing what we rest on, what we take for granted — as opposed to the
airy strings and the almost interplanetary images of moving (over) paint.
With the writings in perspective, what is exhibited is not merely the mathematical
conditions for the appearance of things, but the economies that have obstructed
some thing from therein appearing. What is there is the thing that is not there to
ring together the fourfold of sky, earth, divinities and mortals. What remains are
unworldly materials, pretty but insubstantial.

The closest thing to a unifying aspect in Mark’s installation, what is common to the
paint in the moving images, to the devices receiving the images, the strings, and the
resin sheets, is plasticity.

12
I became aware of this aspect of Mark’s installation through Nancy’s reading of the Lascaux
cave paintings: “For the first time, [that first painter] touches the wall not as a support, nor as an
obstacle of something to learn on, but as a place, if one can touch a place. Only as a place in which
to let something of interrupted being, of its estrangement, come about. The rock wall makes itself
merely spacious: the event of dimension and of the line, of the setting aside and isolation of a zone
that is neither a territory of life nor a region of the universe, but a spacing in which to let come —
coming from nowhere and turned toward nowhere — all the presence of the world… By painting
the wall, the animal monstrans [both monstrous because to separate image from thing requires that
one be outside of itself and the world, but also etymologically, monstration is a showing] does not
set a figure on a support; rather, he takes away the thickness of this support, he multiplies it
indefinitely, and it is itself no longer supported by anything. There is no more ground, or else the
ground is but the coming about of forms, the appearance of the world.” “Painting in the Grotto” in
The Muses op cit, 75-6.

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 Tonkinwise A Sense of Things not Being There (2006)

Plastics are perhaps the end of materials.13 Materials before plastics had inherent
properties; they had an elemental specificity. Even if the product of some
manufacture, some process of purification, non-plastic materials bear an analogue
relation to their natural occurrence. For this reason, they are evidently
understandable. But plastic is only an abstract name for an otherwise overwhelming
diversity of materials, a name that should always be in the plural. What unites
plastics is their lack of unity; they are an ensemble of synthesised products each with
contrasting properties; they can be any length or thickness or thinness, any colour or
transparent, any weight or any strength, conductive or resistant, to electricity or
water or air or select elements, etc. They are digital materials in the sense that they
are at remove from their sources (petrochemicals, but also plant oils) that is
insurmountable without the requisite code (the protected trade secrets of chemical
engineering). They give and receive nothing to the touch, and bear no marks of time
— they remain the same from their first day through to day when with mysterious
suddenness they crack and fall to pieces. Yet these no-longer-materials are
everywhere. Over not even the last century they have mutatingly reproduced into
every corner of our lives. If they are not the casing of this or that thing directly
about us, they are the surface treatments covering other materials, the laminates and
paints suffocating the naturalness of other substances; or they are the bindings
holding everything together, or the insulators concealing the metals transmitting our
lifeblood of information. Their pervasiveness is such that we no longer notice their
take-over. Only the odd unnaturally bright colour in what is otherwise transparent
hints at their ubiquity.

Mark’s installation is just such a brief brightness, an unmistakably explicit set of

plastics.
As such, on the one hand Mark’s installation marks not just the absence of the
thing from economies of form, but also the loss of thingliness from the world of
bare materials themselves. It displays that plastics are the last material, the material
that completes the subsumption of the material into the immaterial. Without an
ability to make sense of materials, there is no thing left; our last way back toward the
thingliness of things disappears.

13
The following paraphrases the work of Ezio Manzini in The Materials of Invention and the
unpublished “Plastics and Quality”.

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 Tonkinwise A Sense of Things not Being There (2006)

And yet, on the other hand, as a brightness, there remains something there, a
sensation. This vestige is not aesthetic: the incompatibility of the components — the
layered sheets, the hanging string, the small moving images, and the written
references — means that they do not work, in the sense of the work that art things
do. Yet there is an aesthesis, a minimal experience of something. Mark’s installation
can only present the almost complete loss of things by being itself a presentation, a
presentness (since it is not a presence) whose patency attests that that loss is only
nearly complete, that is not yet complete. Or, to put it more strongly, Mark’s
installation affirms that that loss cannot be complete, that in the most ecotechnical
domain of plastics, there persists something, something that always can be traced
back to what could and should be there.

After experiencing Mark’s installation, I began to see the plastic that sustains the
styling of contemporary design. It began to touch me as I went about my days.
What I was noticing were not devices in use, but unemployed objects, products that
because temporarily or permanently disabled, no longer withdrew beneath their
designed functions, but just sat there in their materiality, as colours in space and
time. I felt like a kind of bower bird, not seeing what things were for, or that they
were not for anything anymore, but merely that they were there, coloured remnants
scattered about my dwelling. I sensed that these traces could only be experienced as
the fall out of attempts at total design, as what defies the complete functionalisation
or informatization of all things; that to work these fragments up, to assert them as
things, to display them as Art, would be to reconceal them, re-immersing them in
function or form. In not doing this, in undoing this, Mark’s “The Thing” protects
what it so barely reveals.

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