Epidemiology: Sculptural and Musical Growth and Decay

This paper reconsiders the mid-2000s critical turn toward matter and affect, alongside a group of sculptural and sound-based works by Terry Adkins from the same period. In particular, I examine influential arguments by Lauren Berlant and Jane Bennett that rely on ideas about food and fatness as a cipher for both self-evident appearance and what eludes evidentiary determination. For Berlant especially, fatness poses an epidemiological problem with an indeterminate cause. In its simultaneous recruitment for and resistance to regimes of evidence and accounting, fatness seems to offer these writers an image of corporeal growth and decay that demonstrates the power, but also the productively enigmatic character, of matter and affect as critical terms. I discuss a group of works—Columbia (2007), Darkwater Record (2003-2008), and Native Son (Circus) (2006)—that involve layering and occlusion. The works draw on what Adkins repeatedly described as a practice of “potential disclosure,” in which sculptural material is understood to both hold and reveal affective and historical accretions. Berlant’s preoccupation with the so-called “obesity epidemic” seems occasioned by what to her is a paradoxical concomitance of indeterminacy and overdetermination, growth and decay, life and its curtailment in and as debility. In place of the apparent double binds that drive Berlant’s account of sociality, I argue that Adkins’ work offers a set of nonoppositions that help unwork the conceptual knots around which much of the critical discourse on affect and matter has turned.