Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy continues a project that began with Erin Manning's Reference Manning2007 book, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. In Politics of Touch, Manning used the relationship between sensation and the body in Tango as a site for re-articulating the body-politic, analyzing the coexistence between states and bodies, and conceptualizing a democracy that implies a flexible and unpredictable politics (Manning Reference Manning2007, xxi). Just two years later, Relationscapes addresses relations in movement more generally. It lends a certain ubiquity to movement, which Manning defines broadly to include everyday movement, movement of thought, scientific experiments measuring motion, paintings that map movement, choreographed body movement, and choreography as it is represented on film. In each instance, emergent experience provides a framework for considering relation in terms of time and space. Manning discusses characteristics and qualities of various artistic practices, ranging from Étienne-Jules Marey's nineteenth century movement studies to Norman McLaren's contemporary animations; David Spriggs's animate sculptures to Aboriginal paintings by Dorothy Napangardi, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, and Clifford Possum; and Leni Riefenstahl's films to Thierry de Mey's film of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's choreography. Manning uses these practices to exemplify her articulation of movement as “relationscapes.”

Manning spends the first half of Relationscapes building the philosophical premise for her more comprehensive discussion of relationscapes that culminates in Chapter 7, “Relationscapes: How Contemporary Aboriginal Art Moves Beyond the Map.” A relationscape is a topological experience relating to non-representational, non-narrative, and non-illustrative movement diagrams such as Aboriginal painter Dorothy Napangardi's Mina Mina. This painting, one of several discussed in Relationscapes, consists of white dots that map salt lines on a black ground. The movement that Manning identifies in Napangardi's work begins with the artist's painting technique. Napangardi moves her paintbrush with the same digging motion that she would use to dig with Karlangu, which are digging sticks associated with Warlpiri women in Aboriginal culture (189). Manning explains how Napangardi puts herself in the digging movement rather than merely representing it.

The movement in Napangardi's work does not stop with her painting technique. Unlike a representational, narrative, or illustrative map, Mina Mina is a diagram “not of a territory but its passages, the trace it leaves in the landscapes it uncovers” (155). Manning suggests that this mapping “encourages us to look-across, to move-with the fragile dotted lines that compose its labyrinths” (153) and directs a viewing body to move in relation to the liveliness of an emergent location (155). I would argue, though, that most visual artworks beckon a viewer to “look-across” or scan with the eyes. How is Mina Mina different? Earlier in her argument, Manning explains how relational movement assumes a connection between a moving body, for example, and the environment that it creates. She relies heavily on the work of philosophers Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guatarri to conceptualize movements as events that create time and space (7), as opposed to a situation in which a body enters a preexisting environment (15). Of course any artwork requires scanning to some extent, and Manning is not the first scholar to suggest that bodies move to create time and space. What is distinctive about her argument is that Manning ultimately uses a philosophical groundwork to suggest movement practice as a different approach to relating to artworks. In the case of a viewer moving in relation to Mina Mina, the viewer and painting are two bodies moving together to create a relationscape. This approach leaves more room for alternate perspectives such as Mina Mina's non-Cartesian mapping.

“Relation” has been a buzzword in the art world for some time now. Neo-concretist Lygia Clark, for example, used “relational objects” in her 1960s performance art to incorporate viewers in her practice of experiencing sensation. Like Clark, Manning places an emphasis on the sensorial (226, 244n123). She uses her work on sense and experience to foreground movement practice as a methodological approach with significant implications for rethinking movement against Euclidean and Cartesian structures of relation. Instead of oversimplifying movement by relying on one form of experience or illustration, Manning urges her reader to move with “the complexity of the concurrent planes of thought, expression, conceptualization, articulation” to displace “identity as the point of departure of a body” (11). Just as she refers to flexibility and unpredictability in Politics of Touch, in Relationscapes Manning considers how complexity in movement leads to the experience of a certain instability that instigates a rethinking of time and space.

Manning writes of embodied knowledge to draw her reader into an experience that highlights the complexity of potential relations in movement:

This description is indicative of Manning's philosophy of movement. She focuses on the moment before a dancer moves in the walking structure to bring her reader's attention to the potential that precedes a set structure. While this facilitates and, perhaps, necessitates two peoples' acknowledgment of and agreement to move together within the structure, it is not universal. This is clear in Manning's discussion of Napangardi's culturally specific practice. The fact that Napangardi's work requires relationality outside of Euclidian and Cartesian systems reflects Manning's proposition that relationality gives access to various modes of relating, or various perspectives. Paintings of Aboriginal landscapes provide relationality distinct from the Western tradition of landscape art. Manning explains how different modes of relating to land, mapping, and movement are important to understanding, for example, political battles over land rights (163–170).

Integral to the political stakes that drive Manning's claims, the dancer's body “provides a glimpse into the ways in which movement creates the potential for unthinking dichotomies that populate our worlds: abstract-concrete, organic-prosthetic, alive-dead, mind-body, actual-virtual, man-woman” (14). Manning does not argue that movement implicitly undermines these dialectical concepts; she suggests that it allows approaches from other perspectives as illustrated by relationscapes such as Napangardi's paintings: “I propose that we move toward a notion of a becoming-body that is a sensing body in movement, a body that resists predefinition in terms of subjectivity or identity, a body that is involved in a reciprocal reaching-toward that in-gathers the world even as it worlds” (6). Manning describes movement experiences to preserve the complexity inherent in experience and, she argues, lost in representation. “Reciprocal reaching-toward,” distinct from other structures of experience such as Merleau-Ponty's chiasmic reversal (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty1969), places import on movement as it engenders subjectivity and identity specific to cultural situations and politics.Footnote ¹

The crux of Manning's argument on the “becoming-body” emerges in chapter 4, “Dancing the Technogenetic Body,” when she brings her movement theory to bear on interactions between dance performance and technology. The machine has played a significant role in the history of analyzing movement and politics in dance. Dance scholars Ramsay Burt (Reference Burt1998) and Mark Franko (Reference Franko2002) acknowledge how mechanization influenced the ways society related to the body and dance in the 1930s. Felicia McCarren has considered the historical relationship between machines and moving bodies (2003). In the contemporary moment, this history has manifested itself in the possibilities that digital technologies bring to proscenium dance performance. Scholars including Johannes Birringer, Scott deLahunta, Susan Kozel, Susan Broadhaust, and Steve Dixon have explored the practical and artistic potential for contemporary media in dance experiments. In dialogue with this discipline, Manning observes, “What we see in dance/new technology performance is often a prosthetically enhanced body where the prosthetic ‘makes the difference,’ contributing technologically to the stage-space” (64). She laments that work on dance and new technology too often falls short of what she calls “new ecologies of experience,” instead settling for interaction at the level of representation (64):

Manning looks at experiments with technology as one opportunity for new relations toward experiential transformation. She describes an experience similar to the ones Clark strives for in her performance work. Manning, however, chooses not to use artwork to illustrate this claim in Relationscapes. Instead, she makes a call for dance to work in her philosophical framework and to use technologies to foreground the complexity of sensing and feeling movement in practice. This necessitates working outside of traditional spectator–performer models of relation. The aim in this performance tactic is to bring the performing body to a new level of sensation. Manning uses technology as one potential relation.

Manning proposes movement in time and space as a way to conceptualize relation outside of representation, narrative, and illustration in a contemporary moment. Looking across artistic disciplines, she reads artwork, writes philosophy, and describes movement experiences. Whether or not Manning succeeds in defying representation is up for debate. While Mina Mina maps a trace, painting ultimately mediates and represents the movement of salt. Similarly, it is not immediately obvious that Manning's descriptions of relationscapes manage to reflect her political claims; as she herself acknowledges, movement does not necessarily escape representation. While subaltern artistic practice is crucial to addressing identity and cultural specificity in Manning's argument, her movement descriptions suggest universal access to relation. And while Manning identifies cultural specificity in artistic practice and subsequent relationscapes, she does not address the privilege of access to this relation. Thus, Manning assumes an unmarked viewer. Still, this book does important work by offering an approach to artistic practice that undoubtedly places pressure on the dichotomies that Manning challenges and proposes one method for relating to movement.