“The event subsists in language, but it happens to things.”¹

By way of Michael Polanyi, originator of the term and author of the book The Tacit Dimension (1966), “we can know more than we can tell”²: Experience, knowledge and expression are connected through the tacit dimension and the material world of things and bodies. The latter is not just an empty vessel for this connection. It also communicates, but in ways that do not translate directly into language. According to Polanyi, the tacit dimension is what forms “the bridge between the higher creative powers of man and the bodily processes which are prominent in the operations of perception” in order to establish an intellectually and practically interpreted universe.³ Similarly, thinking is not only a virtual endeavour but also a biological process intrinsically tied to the physical organ that is the brain—if there is no brain, then there are no thoughts or actions. I do not reside any more in my thoughts and ideas than in the glands, fluids, and organs constituting my brain and bodily Self. On the contrary, my thoughts and ideas are automatic functions of this bodily Self, which is not a medium for them. From the embryonic state, the human brain and its ideas—and with them, materiality and virtuality—emerged as one. Intelligent material. Tacit knowledge. And just like any other skill, my ability to think is merely a refinement or extension of a bodily capacity; thinking is to the brain what walking is to the legs. Both are transports. From a philosophical viewpoint, however, what makes the brain special in comparison to other organs is that it forms the physical structure associated with the mind and the ability to think, and thus effectively collapses the dualistic mind-body divide otherwise prominent in traditional Western thinking and culture.

As a ‘philosophy’ of sorts consisting in physical, visual, and virtual appearances, I would argue that the arts cannot be confined within a purely mediumistic understanding. Just like the human brain, an artwork is the condensation of thought and materiality into one, and it is simplistic to reduce the material to be a medium for the expression of the artistic idea or intention. Whenever the word ‘medium’ is used, dualism is evoked whether consciously or unconsciously. In spiritualism and the arts, a medium is a channel for something other than itself, and thus the term implies a divide between body and thought, material and intention, where the former serves as vessel for the promotion of the latter, which is imagined to belong to a fantastic sphere beyond the reign of natural logic. But even if there are many kinds of mediums (e.g. mediums for physical effects, sensitive or impressible mediums, auditive mediums, speaking mediums, seeing mediums, somnambulistic mediums, healing mediums, pneumatographic mediums, to name a few from The Book on Mediums⁴ by famed spiritist Allan Kardec), they all share the fate of being secondary to the idea they express and the signal they transfer.

Despite numerous historical, conceptual, and theoretical attempts at reaching a pure medium-specificity in the arts—“the fact itself”⁵—and to reject any illusory representational approach to art making, the sheer use of the word ‘medium’ as a signifier of artistic materials conjures up a duality between artistic intentionality on the one side and the material it is carved into on the other. Even if the artist’s intention is to formalistically highlight the medium in its own right, labelling the material as ‘medium’ still establishes a split between intention and material and thus continues to produce them as opposites. This is problematic in any number of ways, not least due to the fact that, many artists today have moved beyond the constraints of working within a single medium, and so the mediumistic approach hinders an understanding of post-medial art altogether. Furthermore, it fails to grasp the new materialisms currently arising in the field of contemporary art.

Moreover, the dualist structuring of im-/materiality in art, maintained by the continued use of the word ‘medium’, rests on a hierarchy in which the virtuality of the mind ranks higher than the physicality of the body (—but what about the physicality of the mind and the virtuality of the body?). No doubt the notion of material as medium has proven useful in a conceptual paradigm that focuses on the idea or concept as a machine for the unfolding of art as an analytical, linguistically-founded continuation of continental philosophy. However, the human experience of thinking through organic matter shows us that the mediumistic approach to art is, at best, insufficient if not directly faulty, if we want the relationship between materiality and virtual intentionality to resemble the complex reality we are faced with in life. Not only does the mediumistic approach render the hierarchy between idea and material absolute, it also establishes a fixed order of appearances in which the idea comes first, leaving the material to be nothing but a passive function of this idea—inanimate materiality, a corpse cadavre, awaiting the invocation and entrance of the loa⁶ into its physical body: the inspired play of the idea. Inspired, in spirit: the entrance of the spirit in the physical flesh. However, we just need the example of the biological conception of a child to show us that the development of flesh and consciousness/spirit are two sides of the same coin—that it is unusual for a conscious spirit to anticipate the body, at least in the case of human beings.
According to Gilles Deleuze⁷ it is sens⁸—sense, direction, meaning, and blood—that establishes the frontier between seemingly dualist pairs of opposing orders: things and bodies versus the virtual language of event-effects. Making its incisions into a world of gradients, however, it is also sens that holds the promise of reconnecting the two sides of this established duality through their immediate opposition and reveal them as nothing but different phases of the same faculty stretched out on a single spectrum spanning from virtuality to materiality and back again in a process in which nor the artist remains on the outside.

The material moulds the artist, too. This the body knows.