Art, Scholarship, Community: Experiences of Viewing

estudoprévio: revista do centro de estudos de arquitectura,cidade e território da Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, 2019

This special issue of the journal Estudo Prévio is the result of presentations, ideas and exchanges that took place during the 2018 conference "Art, Materiality and Representation" organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute in collaboration with the British Museum and the Department of Anthropology at SOAS in London. Though the organising institutions and the venues where historically loaded sites of anthropological legacy, the event attracted researchers, practitioners and activists from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplinary traditions: visual and performing artists, designers, museologists, curators, art historians, architects, urbanists, as well as anthropologists and those locating themselves in transitioning, often undefined domains.

1 st Conference on Arts-Based and Artistic Research Critical reflections on the intersection between art and research, 2013

* In addition, the images on pages: 99-112; 246-255 are protected by Copyright and cannot be reprinted without permission. See the reference section of each article for more information on the images included in this volume.

In this essay I bracket the formally approved UK definition of impact as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia”. I do this in order to focus on the impact of Artistic Research on the practitioner herself, rather than her stakeholders: I am interested in the effects of research before academia. The discourse in question is Western Classical instrumental pedagogy, and the research in question is that undertaken by instrumental pedagogues in conservatoires. My focus is on the passage from output to impact and the means by which practitioners of Artistic Research incorporate impact into output.

2014

This paper offers a critical perspective having been lecturing in art across the various levels in architecture. The paper knits together aspects of the application of artistic practice within this context. It argues for academic recognition, autonomy, which is the aspiration of the Visual Arts Department, and the understanding needed for an artistic research culture in the contemporary fine arts to establish esteem alongside other fields of research in higher education. This stems from the dichotomy between fine art serving its own specialism, direction and prowess versus art serving other domains. The paper infers reciprocal co-existence whilst upholding that academic autonomy should lead and provoke the best in fine art practice. It reflects upon the appropriate research criteria integral to practice-based fine art research, suggesting more flexible ‘futurefocused’ terms suited to artistic provocation. Finally, the paper contests notions of interdisciplinarity within liberal cont...

We are currently seeking proposals for a stream called "From Socially Engaged Art to Socially Engaged Humanities?: Art, Research, and Social Engagement" at the 2022 London Conference in Critical Thought at Birkbeck College, University of London. The deadline for submissions is March 18, 2022.

Disrupting the Gaze is written in three parts. The first chapter Art Intervention and the Tate Gallery investigates contemporary art intervention at the Tate Gallery. It includes artists, art groups and activists: Graham Harwood, Platform, Liberate Tate, IOCOSE, Tamiko Thiel, Mel Evans, Mark McGowan, Mark Wallinger, Damien Hirst and Britart. The second chapter The Power and the Gaze studies the history of the Tate Gallery, its connection with the Millbank Penetentiary and the “Panopticon", Jeremy Bentham’s design and concept for the prison. The third chapter explores different concepts of “the gaze” and includes feminist, societal and media art contexts. Together they form part of a larger study that looks at dissent in the context of contemporary art, technology and social change. Each artist(s) featured in this chapter delivers his or her own particular unofficial and official mode of art intervention at the Tate Gallery. Whether these interventions concern economic, social or political conditions, they all connect in different ways. Less in their style or genre than as contemporary artistic practitioners exploring their own states of agency in a world where our public interfaces are as much a necessary place of creative engagement, as is the already accepted physical ‘inner’ sanctum of the gallery space. These artists’ and their artworks have become as equally significant (perhaps even more) than, the mainstream art establishment’s franchised celebrities. In his vindication of those artists hidden away in places where the art establishment’s light rarely shines, Gregory Sholette observes that “when, the excluded are made visible, when they demand visibility, it is always ultimately a matter of politics and rethinking history.” (Sholette 2011) This draws upon a contemporary art culture and its audiences beyond the mainstream. These artistic discoveries and discourse arise from an independent art culture that is rarely reflected back to us. Instead, we receive more of the same, marketed franchises. The central, mainstream version of contemporary art has found its allies within a global and corporate culture, where business dictates art value. Meanwhile, a spirit of artistic emancipation thrives. It is self styled, self governed and liberated from the restrictive norms that dominate our mediated gaze.

Choice Reviews Online, 2014

In his joint biography of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, François Dosse tells the story of the meeting between Deleuze and the painter Francis Bacon, about whom Deleuze had recently written with much enthusiasm in his book Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation. Bacon had apparently responded to the book with equal admiration: 'It's as if this guy were watching over my shoulder while I was painting.' 'What was supposed to be a great meeting', Dosse recounts, 'turned into a disaster.' Deleuze's editor, Joachim Vital, also a great admirer of Bacon, arranged the meeting. He described it as follows: The meal was awful, as awful as their discussion … They smiled at each other, complimented each other, and smiled again. We were flabbergasted by their platitudes. We tried to salvage the discussion, mentioning Egyptian art, Greek tragedy, Dogen, Shakespeare, Swinburne, Proust, Kafka, Turner, Goya, Manet, Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, Artaud, Beckett. Each one tried to take the ball and run with it alone, ignoring the other one. 1 This often happens when philosophy meets art. When philosophy meets contemporary art, the situation can be even worse. Contemporary art is badly known. To transform our distance from it into that 'unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be', 2 upon which experience of its art character depends, however -to use our ignorance as a spur to knowledge -is more difficult than is suggested by most of the writing that this situation provokes. To make contemporary art the object of some kind of reflective philosophical experience -in an affective engagement with the most fundamental claims made upon us by such art -seems, at times, almost impossible. This is ironic given the well-remarkedupon 'conceptual' character of so much contemporary art. Yet it is precisely this conceptual character that is most often the source of misunderstanding: the idea that such art requires no more than a conceptual interpretation, for example; or that such an understanding is purely or ideally linguistic, in the sense of being reducible to direct propositional expression. 'Straw conceptualism', as this might be called, is one means of sustaining ignorance about contemporary art (which does not mean that there are not some artists whose works are made of such straw). The alternative reduction of art to its aesthetic dimension -pure sensuous particularity -with which the projection of a straw conceptualism is often antithetically associated, is another. The idea that contemporary art is somehow exempt from historical judgement in the present, by virtue of its contemporaneity, is a third. Perhaps the greatest barrier to a critical knowledge of contemporary art, though, is the common-sense belief that the phrase 'contemporary art' has no critically meaningful referent; that it designates no more than the radically heterogeneous empirical totality of history of contemporary art -a genre dominated by second-generation October art historians -remains largely documentary and reconstructive in character. Its professional formation discourages art-critical judgement, although it often involves a documenting and reconstruction of critical positions held by artists and critics at the time: a kind of criticism by historical proxy. Studies in visual culture often appear closer to art-critical discourse than art-historical ones -indeed, they increasingly occupy institutional spaces of criticism -despite their even greater distance from questions of art judgement. However, this appearance covers over and hence helps to sustain the general absence of historically grounded criticism of contemporary art. The situation dates back to the failure of the project of a 'critical postmodernism' in the face of the problem of judgement, in the early 1980s. Hal Foster identified the problem early on, but made little headway with it theoretically. 6 Just how blocked it would become can be seen twenty years later in the October roundtable discussion, 'The Present Conditions of Art Criticism', in which the very idea of critical judgement caused consternation among the discussants, most of whom still associated it, exclusively, with a late Greenbergian notion of 'quality'. 7 Thierry de Duve attempted to break the impasse with his return to Kant after Duchamp, replacing the former's 'This is beautiful' with the latter's 'This is art', while insisting that the latter continue 'to be read as an aesthetic reflexive judgment with a claim to universality in the strictest Kantian sense', despite the accompanying claim that the term 'art' functions in the judgement as a 'proper name '. 8 Ultimately this foundered on philosophical confusions about both Kant and naming alike. Nonetheless it set a standard for the articulation of art-historical, art-critical and post-Kantian philosophical discourses to which little subsequent work has aspired. Meanwhile the general theories of representation, both epistemological and political, which predominate in studies of visual culture -usually, if unwittingly, semiotic culturalist variants of the liberal pluralism of US political science -have shown themselves to be singularly ill-suited to grasping the specific and deeply problematic character of the experience of contemporary art. The character and object-domain of the field remain plural and contested, their relations to art unresolved. But the situation is exacerbated, rather than mitigated, by the covert visual essentialism that has inadvertently but inevitably accompanied the formation of the new proto-discipline, in an ironic reprise of the terms of its original adversary, formalist modernism. 9 For the supplement of 'the visual' restores to cultural analysis an aesthetic idealism of vision at the very historical moment in which art's visuality, however pronounced, is its least distinguishing trait. Moreover, in so far as 'the visual' is the constituting focus of conceptual interest in visual culture, whether as a given or a construct, it is in principle indifferent to, and hence cuts across, the art/non-art distinction, which cannot be reduced to any particular visual regimes -notwithstanding Michael Fried's generalization of his optical reduction of Greenberg's medium-specific conception of modernist painting. 10 Fried's opticalism is currently enjoying a revival on the acknowledgement of inadequacy turned aggressively outwards into a judgement against its cause (namely, the claim of such artworks to the hallowed signifier 'art') and thereby ultimately against contemporaneity itself. Hence Danto's subsequent coinage of the term 'post-historical art'. Schaeffer returns this claim to its philosophical context when he argues that what he calls 'the speculative tradition' (which runs from Jena Romanticism to Heidegger) misunderstood art from the outset. In this respect, for Schaeffer, the legitimation crisis of contemporary art is the delayed effect of art's philosophical sacralization by Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century. However, in so far as it derives from a claim for art's autonomy (by virtue of which it is able to usurp a certain philosophical function from philosophy itself), this sacralization is actually constitutive of 'art' in its modern sense. The aetiology, then, is broadly correct, yet the diagnosis and treatment Schaeffer proposes -a philosophical 'desacralization' of art, or what we might call metaphysical disinvestment -are precisely wrong. For, to the extent that there is a legitimation crisis of contemporary art (and one might be excused for believing it oversold, since the market provides sufficient legitimation of its own: 'creative industry'), it is actually a sign of the continuing, if problematic criticality of contemporary art -a sign of the fact that art's authority and critical function remain problems within contemporary culture, a problem for which art's continuing if uncertain critical and metaphysical dimensions are a conceptual condition. Danto and Schaeffer represent alternative variants of one primarily negative way in which late analytical philosophy has contributed to recent art-critical discourse. Each is a positivist of a different kind: an analytical-Hegelian positivist and a logical positivist, respectively. 18 However, far more significant has been the affirmative turn towards the conceptual resources of the post-Kantian European philosophical tradition, in the wake of the gradual diffusion of an interest in post-structuralism into Anglo-American art criticism. Heideggerian, Merleau-Pontean and a variety of post-phenomenological approachesassociated with Lyotard and Derrida, and more recently, Deleuze, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou -have all enjoyed sustained attention. This has revived interest in the place of art within the German idealist philosophies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Kant, Schiller, Hegel and the Romantics, but also Schelling, to a lesser degree Schopenhauer, and of course, Nietzsche. There is little doubt that this return to the post-Kantian European tradition has been, in part, a culturally conservative phenomenon, despite the radicalism associated with its more recent main French proponents. It is 'against Cultural Studies' (in its initial formation, at least) and against certain kinds of both 'difficult' and 'popular' contemporary art. But it has also performed a crucial critical function by raising theoretical issues associated with the idea of art in its distinction from other cultural forms of representation -issues that are literally dissolved by the semiotic reductionism and sociologism of most culturaltheoretical approaches. Furthermore, in its recent Rancièrean and (on occasion) Deleuzean of the 'aesthetic regime' of art, by which Rancière appears to believe art is still governed. 20 Badiou's 'inaesthetics', on the other hand, while apparently the opposite of aesthetics, is actually just a paradoxical, alternative...

2018

The term ‘artistic research’ is generally referred to as research in the arts, or ‘art as research’. More distinctively, it is also described as ‘research in and through art’ (Wesseling 2016, 8), distinguished from other types of research in the arts and brings to mind the popular yet seldom consistently discussed categorical distinctions from Christopher Frayling (1993). With increasing discussions to identify, describe, and legitimise artistic research against the largely scientific traditions of ‘research’, there has since been a growing amount of literature on the subject. Despite this accessibility of literature on artistic research—many written in English and published in easily available or open access journals—they often remain as efforts isolated from each other. I highlight this as an opportunity for mapping key ideas and developments of artistic research within recent discourse. This essay attempts a brief yet condensed discussion on artistic research using six recent key texts on artistic research. Chronologically, they are single books from authors Graeme Sullivan (2005), James Elkin (2009), Henk Borgdorff (2012), Mika Hannula et al. (2014), Janneke Wesseling (2016), and Danny Butt (2017).