Dissolve, Coagulate, Repeat

The images in the preceding pages constitute the second installment of an open series of collages by collaborative duo Ryan M. Pfeiffer and Rebecca Walz (Pfeiffer + Walz) under the title Solve et Coagula. In previous reflections on their work (RSR 48:1), I drew upon ulterior surrealist Georges Bataille's concept of “heterology” to comment on some conceptual and technical aspects of these works. Heterology entails the examination and activation of dynamic relations between “two polarized human impulses: EXCRETION and APPROPRIATION” (Bataille, 1985, 94). By Bataille's account, the usual orientation of human thought is toward appropriation, with excretion, taken to be a secondary impulse, serving only as the endpoint in establishing a “homogenous representation of the world.” By contrast, heterological thinking and practice lead to a “complete reversal” of the usual course of human thought and impulses, such that appropriation “now serves excretion” (97). The “elementary form of appropriation is oral consumption, considered as communion (... incorporation, assimilation),” Bataille writes. Thus, “consumption is either sacramental (sacrificial) or not depending on whether the heterogeneous character of food is heightened or conventionally destroyed” (95). A heterological approach obtains in Pfeiffer + Walz's collages. The title of the series, Solve et Coagula, takes its name from the alchemical principle of transformation, where commonplace materials are broken down or dissolved (solve) in order to be recombined and resolved into new and extraordinary substances (coagula). In this sense, the destruction of homogeneous, familiar matter is a necessary phase in a process that culminates in the creation of something exceptional, unusual, or other—a heterogenous element.1 For Pfeiffer + Walz, collage is a heterological process analogous to alchemical transmutation. Cutting out and cutting up art-historical and other images, these artists effect a reversal of the usual course of thinking and making, where the rational order is reproduced and reinforced. Here, the appropriation of images excised from textbooks and the like—purveyors of a rational order—does not serve to recreate and extend that order. Rather, the artists' “sacrificial” cutting is analogous to solve: not the homogenizing assimilation of images, but the destruction or dissolution of source materials in the service of recombining them into new configurations, a coalescence that “posit[s] ... a heterogenous element” (97). To echo Bataille's alimentary example, these artists cut out and thereby “consume” images, but in a manner that heightens the heterogenous character of that which they appropriate. Thus appropriation is the initial, but not primary, moment in an iterative process that serves excretion—the extraordinary coagulation of images you find in these pages

Economic Theory and Policy · Philosophy