Potency: experience and experimentation

The processes of creation involve unconscious and volitional factors. The acts which may lead to art are neither solely intentional nor only contingent. Experience is indeterminable (experience is endured), and experimentation is a form of will (experimentation is acted out) (Casado, 2007: 26). The effectiveness of creative acts links to the combination of experience and experimentation, of what happens to you and what you do. One barely experiential creative practice is nothing more than therapeutic entertainment, and has no artistic interest; a solely experimental creative practice fails to affect the acting subject subjectively and is of no vital interest.

Experimentation is, in principle, a way of provoking experience: we want something unexpected to happen and alter our consciousness unpredictably. But experimentation itself, understood as a test of procedural, material and methodological resources taken from different sources is the outcome, usually, of a compulsive making, which even before the outset is undertaken in the expectation of some kind of precise result, albeit a novel result. Due to the tendency to foresee, this memory-laden experimentation obstructs rather than allowing experience (I call it "memory-laden" because as a forecast, your only possible reference bank is your memory); to expect the unexpected, it delays its own arrival ad infinitum, and removes all possibility for the truly new, beyond mere novelty. This kind of experimentation becomes a self-satisfied indulgence in impossibility which inhibits us precisely from experiencing impotence as a stimulus to desire. Therefore, it also prevents technical development.

However, experimentation grounded on the continuous confrontation with the abyss of the impossible is not the result of a test of resources that will lead us, like gambling, to novelty. This second kind of experimentation is trying to see what is new in what you inevitably do in a specific personal way. This abysmal experimentation, as compared with the memory-laden one, is the way the subject may come to see what he or she cannot see. To launch oneself into the search for the unconscious requires a change in subjective position. To the extent that the unconscious is something that remains outside consciousness and seems to come from somewhere else than the self, it is the opposite of the subjective. Hence experimentation is also a search for objectivity as the highest subjective goal. Accordingly, it would involve the effort to achieve the objective, to step out of oneself.

This is because experience happens unsought. Or rather, it only occurs at the point where it was not sought, where it was not for the self. Experience only happens within the objective, in the field where the subjective, understood as the awareness of what is happening, is cancelled. Experience takes place in the realm of the unconscious. You can live it, but as a conscious entity you can only access it through memory: "Youth I never lived, might I dream again of you,” said the poet Antonio Machado. In the practice of painting, experience involves the advent of the objective without intentional consciousness, and it is the result of experimentation which, while necessarily conscious, turns its attention to the unconscious.

To crosslink the ideas of experience and experimentation, as they are proposed here, we would have a new concept that, following Nietzsche, I will call potency. Potency corresponds to the realm of the unconscious and the objective integrated through the subjective crossing. In other words, installing the subject in his or her potency would result from her or his individuation process. It would mean overcoming the limits of individual psychology and widening the concept of "I" to include. All of this is embodied in a technical fact, the fact of painting.