Title - Smooth and the Striated

Keywords – Haptic. Smooth space. Striated. Orientation. Location. Linkage. The abstract line. Contours. Horizontals. Verticals.

Thoughts - Haptic doesn’t establish an opposition between two sense organs but assumes that the eye may fulfill a non-optical function.

“one can back away from a thing, but it is a bad painter who backs away from the painting he or she is working on”

Smooth – is both the object of a close vision and the element of a haptic space which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile. The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation. Examples are the desert, ice, seam local spaces of pure connection.

Striated – relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space.

Orientations – change according to temporary vegetation, occupation, precipitation. There is no visual model for points of reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an inertial class assignable to an immobile observer.

Orientation, location, linkage are present in the most famous works of nomad art : twisted animals have no land beneath them; the ground constantly changes direction.

Striated versus Smooth – where there is close vision, space is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, non-optical function: no lines separate earth from sky, which are of the same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor limit nor outline or form or centre; there is no intermediary distance. The desert, sky, or sea, the unlimited first plays the role of an encompassing element, and tends to become a horizon: the earth is thus surrounded, globalised, ‘grounded’ by this element, which holds it in immobile equilibrium and makes form possible.

The effect, the line is abstract when writing is absent, either because it has yet to develop or only exists outside or alongside. When writing takes charge or abstraction, the line downgrades and tends to become concrete even figurative. The abstrct line is the affect of smoth space. It cannot be defined as geometrical or rectilineasr. What should be termed abstract in modern art? A line of variable direction that describes no contour and delimits no form.

Take a system in which transversals are subordinated to diagonal, diagonals to horizontals and verticals, and horizontals and verticals to points (even when there virtual). A system of this kind, which is recitiliear or unilinear regardless of the number of lines, expresses the formal conditions under which a space is striated and the line describes a contour…….On the other hand, a line that delimits nothing, that describes no contour, that no longer goes from one point to another,…is constantly changing direction, a mutant line without inside or outside, form or background, beginning or end and that is alive in continuous variation – such a line is truly an abstract line, and describes smooth space.