As I mentioned in an earlier post Julie Copeland interviews the Australian feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz on the ABC's Sunday Morning programme about the creative process.In summing up Grosz says:

The thing is that art is, in part, an excess of the body’s capacities and productions. Art is that which the body does in excess of need, and every body, I think, to some extent performs art, it’s just not publicly recognised as art or publicly valued, and indeed nor should it be in most cases. I think everything living has this artistic impulse to excess and to the revelry and the pleasure of that excess. It’s only some of us who have the rigour and the discipline to impose form on that sensation to give it life.

She says that art, according to Deleuze, doesn’t produce concepts, though it does problems and provocations…that’s where this idea of art producing sensations and feeling comes from, from Deleuze. Grosz responds:

Yes, it does, and he has a very wonderful book on art called The Logic of Sensation which is a reading of Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon, of course, lends himself very well to be discussed in terms of sensation. But in reading that book it struck me that one could actually extract from Deleuze a much more general theory that didn’t apply to 20th century art or to abstract expressionism but to art in general. He had the resources there. The idea of sexual seduction is not particularly there in Deleuze, and I owe a debt, of course, to French feminism and to French theorists in general for making the sexual element of art really clear. But Deleuze is very brilliant on this question.

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