Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Giuliana Bruno. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 288 pp. 

Review by Meghan Sutherland

27 February 2019

Taken strictly as a physical object, Giuliana Bruno’s Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2014) would be easy to confuse with the exhibition catalog of a sprawling, multisite museum retrospective. Comprised of nearly three hundred thick, glossy pages and dozens of color plates illustrating dozens of film and screen-based art installations, it requires a full foot and a half of lateral clearance just to open the cover; anyone trying to read it on an airplane will need to submit to an ungainly object-oriented lap dance or buy an extra seat. In this respect, the book simply feels like a material product of the modern art museum that is destined to remain there—a book designed almost exclusively for scholars of art, to be read in the institutional reserve of the archive or deposited on a coffee table for regular dusting. 

Nonetheless, the distinct appeal of Surface consists in its effort to break this mold by recasting the entire relation between the rarefied domain of aesthetic experience and the material substance of the world. As Bruno explains in the opening pages, the book’s primary goal is to elaborate a “new materialism” of visual culture writ large—not just “a new form of materialism” that treats the matter of visual experience as something “outside of figuration” and in excess of “optical framings,” but one that is capable in turn of mining the “innovative form of materiality” at work in contemporary screen-based art installations for a complete “reinvention of materiality in our times” (pp. 2–5). And when put in this context, the obdurate materiality of the book itself can be taken as an apt expression of the theoretical challenge at hand.

The philosophical implications of this gambit are striking to say the least. For most of the history of Western thought, both the concept of the aesthetic and the theories of the image it has yielded have been defined as such precisely by virtue of their withdrawal from the physical intransigence of the object world and the practical forms of experience, constraint, and utility that have given the concept of materiality so much critical theoretical weight in the first place—and not only for idealists. For Jacques Rancière and many other major thinkers of aesthetic politics today, it is partly this withdrawal from the realm of immediate material presence that gives both the image and the broader domain of the aesthetic their constitutive critical relation to the political transformation of the world and its subjects. As Bruno’s oblique appeal to the language of new materialism hints, though, the prospect of a materialist conception of the visual tout court would open the way to a different philosophical promise. This is namely a recuperation of the material significance of both art and aesthetic experience that does not rely for its constitutive moment of efficacy on either the figure of the modern subject of discourse; the ocular-centric abstractions of reality, being, and agency that are said to govern the latter’s faculties; the hierarchical values of humanism and representation that have historically vouchsafed this subject’s designs upon the people and things of the world; or the constructivist accounts of social materiality and linguistic discourse that have often served to explain them. So, despite the fact that Bruno gives a breezy historical explanation for both this gambit and its potential implications, citing the rapid proliferation of screens and other media technologies in contemporary life as an occasion to rethink the relation between mediation and materiality in general, let there be no mistake: the principle interest of the argument is the grand philosophical wager at its center, and the implications this wager carries bear most acutely on the methodological tensions and realignments of contemporary theoretical currents, especially where they concern the critique of culturalist paradigms of social materiality.[1] 

Like many scholars who embrace the project of new materialism, Bruno finds the opening for this undertaking in the work of Gilles Deleuze, and specifically, in Deleuze’s conception of “the fold” and the “texturology” of art it inspires. Describing the book as “a sartorial theorization of the visual field” that attempts to think the “real substance” of the visual—and does so by recasting the concept of the “image” as a matter of screen-based “surface” encounters that are affective, relational and bound to the haptic experience of memory, projection, and space—she proposes that materiality itself, so construed, “is not a question of materials, but fundamentally, of activating material relations” in “interarts forms” (pp. 4, 8). As Bruno stresses, the details of this argument “unfold” in a distinctly sartorial way, so that “the texture of writing” is “closely knit to the theoretical fabrication” and conceptual “threads are interwoven” throughout (p. 9). The first two chapters of the book introduce the concept of the fold and its implications for a reconceptualization of the relation among fashion, cinema, architecture, and the projection of psychic interiority. Turning to the designs of Issey Miyake and the films of Wong Kar-wai, they posit “dressing as a form of picture making” and “fashion as a fashioning of space,” with both enfolding the “geopsychic matter” of the soul in the surface of appearances (pp. 22, 27).

The next five chapters reconsider the relation among cinema, architecture, museums, and modernity, exploring the “materiality of projection” and the “public intimacy” of exhibition culture as they remediate the contemporary experience of space, time, and place—an argument for treating the luminous surface of the screen as a “cultural fabric” that is just as crucial to the materiality of urban space and social relations as it is to the experience of memory in works by James Turrell, Isaac Julien, Janet Cardiff, and others (p. 74). Bruno then concludes the book with three more chapters on the “cultural construction of materiality” via the empathetic experience of “collecting and collective images,” embroidering on an explicitly personal selection of aesthetic experiences, including a trip to Havana and seeing Sally Potter’s Yes (2004), to elaborate the precise role of empathy in this process (p. 189). The resulting argument is a tour de force of aesthetic interpretation that is honed to a distinctly theoretical end: enacting the “texturological” method promoted by the book while also “lay[ing] the ground for [a] future archaeology of media”—a genealogy of cinema and the modern museum that is built upon the haptic materiality of the canvas instead of the specular vista of the window (p. 107–8).

To the extent that this methodological approach is designed to impress the conceptual contours of Bruno’s argument directly onto the sensory-affective “surface” of the reader, it may come as no surprise that it can leave even the most sympathetic one with more questions than answers, especially if that reader is interested in parsing the theoretical significance of the claims about materialism. Many of the book’s most compelling theoretical provocations arise from intricately crafted readings of art works that make little pretence toward the conceptual details of the claims themselves or the theoretical context in which they matter. While this aspect of the argument’s construction highlights the insights to be afforded by such an approach, it can also highlight the limits of that affordance. This is especially true where the matter of language and signification is concerned. Indeed, for a book so emphatically committed to staging a theorization of aesthetic materiality that does not depend on the codified realm of figuration or the subject of modernity it implies—and, in keeping with this new materialist scenario, insists that the concept of the fold is not “a trope” or “formal gimmick” but “an actual element of fashion” that “houses the materiality of spirit”—it has surprisingly little to say about the materiality of tropes or form (pp. 22, 24). This oversight seems significant because Bruno relies acutely on the consolidating effects of rhetorical figuration to broker the aesthetic “transmission” of relational materiality across the figures of the image, screen, and surface that she conceptualizes—a cluster of terms declared ontologically coincident without much qualification.

One could say something similar of the “matter” at stake in the book’s new materialism. Because Bruno’s aesthetic treatment of this concept is elaborated exclusively through her texturological description of contemporary screen-based art installations that treat the same theme of visual materiality—without any discussion of aesthetic experiences in everyday life or what the terms matter and materialism have meant to either the history or present of critical theory, philosophy and politics—it can be difficult to get a handle on the broader theoretical significance she attaches to it outside the art world. Although the book makes enticing gestures toward the sociopolitical ramifications of its intervention, noting for instance that the collective “architectural imaginary” it summons “functions daily as the place where social relations and perspectives are modeled” and thus “fashions our social existence,” it has little to say about the aesthetic mediation of social relations and its bearing on what or who “matters” today, or how or where this imaginary can be consolidated without some recourse to the abandoned realm of figuration (p. 191). At times a reader may even wonder whether Bruno has simply reinvented the wheel of modernism on the terrain of affect theory, such that the materials of the medium itself remain the constitutive “message” of fine art as such, and it falls primarily to the critic of such art works to determine how a particular aesthetic experience could renew the sensorial subject of modern technology more generally. Bruno’s account of art pieces that deal directly with the specters of modernity’s own violent history of material appropriation—or that work to redefine the experience of modern vision and influential modernist concepts such as empathy without the abstract subject of modernity as their lynchpin—can feed this concern. In a chapter on Isaac Julien’s installation of Vagabondia in Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, for instance, she reconceives the spatial projections of the modern museum collector in affective terms without addressing the now notorious link among the “planetary” subject of modern colonialism, the reduction of black and brown people such as Julien to the status of racialized objects, and the appropriative “collection” of these and other “resources” on the basis of those same projections.

Such omissions press the issue of just how well an aesthetic conception of materialism that eschews any serious reckoning with the logics of representation and figuration that have defined the very being of what matters heretofore can do to transform those logics. And yet, as important as it is to address this question, it would be a mistake to confuse the answer with the significance of the argument per se. Simply by compelling us to contemplate what we would want from an aesthetic materialism worthy of the name—and doing so by mounting a virtuosic performance of her own deeply aesthetic response to that problem—Bruno has done a tremendous amount to reframe the matter of materialism today.

[1]I’m invoking the language of Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s critique of social constructivism in the introduction to their influential volume on new materialism; see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Coole and Frost (Durham, N.C.), p. 3.