Practice as research

Week 43: 8th – 14th July
My studio work has increasingly begun to explore the spaces between art, artefact and interpretation as a way of layering meaning in order to aid audience interaction with the art object. The artist’s book as a medium therefore seems entirely fitting to this task, given how it interrogates its own form, whilst allowing space for expressing additional content relevant to its materiality.

This interest has led me to explore re-workings of original manuscripts, not only of early science and alchemical works (in week 18), but also early literary and religious texts. The understanding of how these subjects overlap in the pre-modern world view also sheds new light on our own modern obsession with the segregation and purification of genres. Recently, it seems that this exploration of original manuscripts is also of interest to other artists, allowing plenty of opportunities for the contextualisation of my work outside of an academic context.

Locating Boccaccio
Examples of these kinds of works are currently on show at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, who staged an exhibition and conference in response to the 700th anniversary of the birth of Boccaccio, writer of the Decameron and contemporary of Dante. In true allegorical fashion, the exhibition charts the changing attitudes to, and interpretations of Boccaccio’s works from the 14th Century to the present day, in order to understand the significance of his work in the 21st Century.

The exhibition catalogue is separated into sections detailing many different elements of Boccaccio’s works and interests including, his response to the role of women in 14th Century Italy; his work as a cultural mediator and humanist; innovations in print and aesthetics of the book; and the effects of censorship laws on the work. This exhibition of historic printed books and manuscripts showcases every one of his works, representing the breadth of the Rylands collection which includes the first illustrated edition of the Decameron. In addition to these literary works, Boccaccio’s achievements also include the development of ‘octave rhyme’ (ottava rima), and his prose writing becoming the basis for the standard Italian language used today.

Boccaccio and the Artist’s Book
Alongside these examples of printed texts and manuscripts, the curators also invited an international group of artists to respond to elements of Boccaccio’s ouvre. The brief for producing the work was left deliberately open and inspired a broad range of responses. The 13 artists included in the exhibition were Carolyn Thompson, Carolyn Trant, Glynnis Fawkes, Heather Hunter, Horst Weierstall, James Reid-Cunningham, Jeremy Dixon, John McDowall, Mike Clements, Paul Johnson, Shirley Greer, Steve Dales and Sue Doggett. The range of works on show gave a good overview to how artists might produce interpretations of historical works as new artworks in their own right. My particular favourites were by Heather Hunter, John McDowall and Steve Dales, as I felt that they explored the form of the book in interesting ways in addition to the content.

Heather Hunter’s work entitled ‘Famous Proba – found’ used the ‘designating duet’ method from ‘Woven and Interlocking Book Structures’ in order to create a patchwork of hand and digital prints incorporating a found poem (cento) and images. The term ‘cento’, from the Latin ‘cloak made of patches’, determined the format of the book. The format of the poem referenced the Ancient Greek tradition of poets creating new works entirely from lines or verses taken from Homer, and was taken from a word pool collected from ‘On Famous Woman’ by Giovanni Boccaccio.

John McDowall’s book ‘Giornata prima’, rebound pages from the Decameron in sequence by taking pages from each edition and selecting the corresponding page (the first page from the first book, the second from the next and so on) to produce a new version incorporating the different interpretations of the work through time. Steve Dale’s book ‘Untitled Alterpiece’ took inspiration from Boccaccio’s ‘De mulieribus claris’ and represents contemporary inspriational women as selected by friends of the artist. The main work is based on the St. Humilitas polyptych (see image) and is accompanied by a booklet which details the reasons for each selection and is embossed with an image of Eve on the cover. More examples and images from the artist book exhibition can be seen here.

Week 42: 1st – 7th July
I’m coming to the end of the first academic year and, even though I’ll be continuing to work through the summer, my thoughts have already turned towards the end of September and the second year of the doctoral programme. The second year (as detailed in week 19) involves the process of developing methodologies with which to create and evaluate new work and knowledge.

Methods and methodologies
Research methods and methodologies in relation to Fine Art practice are still a relatively new field in comparison with scientific working processes, and therefore require further reading in order to understand how artistic research might be presented in an academic context. In ‘Research Procedures / Methodology for Artists & Designers’, Carole Gray and Julian Malins, begin by defining the terms ‘method’ and ‘methodology’:

method:
1. way of proceeding or doing something, esp. a systematic or regular one.
2. orderliness of thought, action, etc.
3. (often pl.) the techniques or arrangement of work for a particular field or subject

methodology:
1. the system of methods and principles used in a particular discipline
2. the branch of philosophy concerned with the science of method.

Their commitment to developing new research terminology for practice-led research results in a ‘bilingual’ paper, which charts existing scientific research terms alongside potential artistic equivalents as follows: ‘If meaningful research is to be carried out in any discipline, a suitable strategy / methodology for acquiring new knowledge must be identified. This procedure should be thorough / rigorous, open / accessible, easy to understand / transparent, and be useful in other contexts / transferable (in concept at least).’ This not only helps to elucidate the differences between the concepts of methods and methodologies, but also highlights the ways that these can intersect with art practice.

Research characteristics
Gray and Malins (1993) continue by detailing the characteristics of existing methodologies in the arts and sciences, by comparing and contrasting these disciplines. Through separating the disciplines into categories, they are able to establish common factors of research, with which to begin devising new working strategies.

Scientific models are separated into Newtonian and Quantum sciences, with the former defined by positivism, empiricism and reductionism, and the latter detailing ‘concepts of subjectivity, observer’s perceptions, simultaneity, relativity, uncertainty, randomness, indeterminacy, subatomic anarchy, chaos’ as a response to previous limitations in scientific methods. In addition to these, the social sciences (in contrast to direct observation) favour interpretive and contextual methods, otherwise referred to as qualitative methodologies, which include the use of phenomenological, hermeneutic, axiological, ethnographic and dialectical strategies.

Existing and new procedures / methodologies in practice-led research
The development of quantum and social science methodologies in response to the limitations of empirical science therefore offers potential strategies which can be adapted for use in artistic research, as well as a development framework in order to create new practice-specific methodologies. Examples of principle research procedures which have been adapted for Art and Design research include processes relating to historical, philosophical, experimental, comparative, descriptive, naturalistic, and practical inquiry.

Artistic research procedures have also been articulated through the work of Cornock (1978, 1983, 1984), who suggests a cyclical structure of practice and reflection as inherent within artistic endeavour, which he separates into 6 stages: generation, selection, synthesis, articulation, presentation, and critical discussion. As these correlate with common factors of research identified in scientific methods (hypothesis, data collection, problem definition, development, critical context), this suggests that practitioners may already follow many of these research procedures, if not explicitly.

How to write an artist statement
An understanding of research methodologies in relation to artistic practice also recontextualises the position statement, a textual exteriorisation of the artwork as written by the artist which may include the following information:

What is the practice? (materials / ideas)
Where the work should be seen (gallery or non-gallery space / museum / online)
How the artist undertakes the work (studio practice / exhibition / documentation)
Who are the audience?
Why the artist is doing this (What outcome they want to achieve)

Such analyses, often mistaken for curatorial interpretation, can now be viewed as a methodological document or manifesto of the practice. This therefore creates an understanding of how the art practice functions as research, as well as greater transparency around how the audience should approach the text.

Week 41: 24th – 30th June
The day of the transfer assessment was finally here. I’d written previously about the requirements and outcomes for the transfer process (in week 30), so I knew what to expect, but despite this (and reassurances from my supervisors that I’d done enough preparation) I was still pretty nervous. Thankfully, the assessment is generally quite friendly, as well as being a good opportunity to chat about your project with experts from your field. Three gruelling hours later, I passed without revisions and had plenty of new information to follow up.

Digital humanities
As part of my transfer document, I’d submitted an essay about my research so far, a training plan, images of my work, and a number of online links. However, the work that the assessors seemed most interested in was this blog documenting my PhD process. Although I’ve found it a useful addition to my practice, I didn’t realise how much of a central factor it could be in my research, and it was encouraging to receive such a positive response to my efforts. In fact, the process of live publishing my PhD links directly to the idea of an artist publishing practice, creating stronger links between the theoretical and practical elements of my research and creating a more ’embodied’ text (where the format of the text reflects the content).

In particular, the emerging field of Digital Humanities is one that seems to particularly reflect my interests, and is also currently championed by the book artist and academic, Johanna Drucker. Her collaboratively written book on the topic begins by setting out the parameters for digital humanism.

‘Digital Humanities asks what it means to be a human being in the networked information age and to participate in fluid communities of practice, asking and answering research questions that cannot be reduced to a single genre, medium, discipline, or institution. Digital Humanities represents a major expansion of the purview of the humanities, precisely because it brings the values, representational and interpretive practices, meaning-making strategies, complexities, and ambiguities of being human into every realm of experience and knowledge of the world. It is a global, trans-historical, and transmedia approach to knowledge and meaning-making.’

This equates to asking how networked technologies enhance the possibilities for the production, interpretation and distribution of cultural products. Within this also exists the ethical question of processing and curating vast swathes of data including personal stories and experiences, otherwise referred to as the difference between close and distant reading.

Networked interpretations
These kinds of enquiries open up new possibilities for my project, not only from a philosophical standpoint, through the use of the rhizome, but also in considering non-modern readings of the object through the application of network theory to material culture. In other words, the network as a contemporary computational device merely expresses a pre-modern way of seeing and understanding, whereby objects are context specific and reflect the relationships around them. In practical terms, this knowledge also enables me to comfortably connect my online and offline research activities under the heading of Digital Humanities in order to explore these networks through curatorial installations and digital archives.

Further reading
Mackenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto, Harvard University Press, 2004
Charles Leadbeater, We Think, Profile Books, 2010

Week 40: 17th – 23rd June
‘Religion has always been characterised as much by embodied experience as by abstract theological dispute. From the sounds of the adhān (the Islamic call to prayer), to the smell of incense in the Hindu Pūjā (a ritual offering to the deities), the visual emblem of the cross in the Christian tradition, and the ascetic practices of Theravada Buddhism, sensation is integral to a range of devotional practices. At the same time, the history of many faiths is characterised by an intense suspicion of the senses and the pleasures they offer.’

How do things become holy?
So began the introduction to Sensing the Sacred: Religion and the Senses, 1300 – 1800, an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of York, exploring affective and sensory aspects of religious practice through material culture. The first keynote speaker, Christopher Woolgar, set up the themes of the conference, which seemed to be more specific to the senses in Western Christianity. The idea of sensory contamination was an overarching concept throughout the presentation, and explored the processes by which objects (and people) became holy or desecrated.

To this end, the precision use of words for efficacy in consecrating objects was explored, but also the ways in which it was believed that these same words, actions and objects could be used to produce effects for unholy purposes. This required protective measures to be undertaken by the priest through various means, including the curation of sacred objects in reliquaries, rituals for desecrated hosts, and even the segregation of suicide victims, as they were believed to be contaminants to cemeteries due to dying ‘unconfessed’.

Choosing the sessions
Unlike the last PGR conference I attended, this one was separated into parallel sessions, meaning I had to choose the sessions that I wanted to attend. I’d read the conference abstracts before arriving at York and was interested in following my previous interests of gestural performance in material culture. However, after hearing the keynote speech, I became interested in the different ways that the senses were experienced in medieval culture, so I opted for the papers on the more visceral sensations of taste and smell, as opposed to language based sensory media such as speech and gestures.

Elizabeth Swann and Ruth Mullett explored medieval associations of the gustatory. Understandings of taste and appetites prevail as metaphors for knowledge and excess in our contemporary culture, but even more so in pre-modern cultures where taste also operates as a variation of touch. As taste is believed to reveal the presence of God, so each of the physical senses expresses a parallel spiritual sense in vernacular understandings at the time.

As smell and taste sensations are prone to dangerous misinterpretation, sufferance against temptation was also encouraged, in order to gain heavenly scents in death. Alongside the content of the papers, both speakers also gave handouts containing the original Middle English text, which they recited and translated during their presentation. Although I had difficulty understanding the dialect, I found it an interesting way to allow transparency and further interpretation.

Scent in material culture
Jay Zysk and William Tullett considered the use and metaphors of incense in ritual proceedings. Through the rising of the smoke, the incense acted as a metaphor for prayer which combined with the scent and the noise of the censer to create a synaesthetic experience. This excess of sensory information was intended to elevate the laiety, however, the same excess was also criticised for directing worship towards external pleasures and away from God. Similarly, incense was linked to the secular perfume imported from the East, metonymically standing in for the exotic or Other. This shared material history of incense and perfume was also present of the trading cards of perfumers which displays religious imagery.

Although, the conference appeared at face value to be somewhat unrelated to my subject area, the information I obtained from the papers inspired me to think about new connections in my project. In particular, the areas of smell and taste in material culture seem to be rich in possibilities and less researched as aspects of contemporary art, so I am beginning to consider how I might use this in relation to my print and publishing work.

Week 39: 10th – 16th June
I’m in another exhibition and this time it’s at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, which feels like something of a coup in artistic terms. The exhibition is a continuation of the 16 project, which was organised by AMBruno and has previously been exhibited in Leeds and Bristol. Now the 16 project had been selected to be part of the BALTIC Artist Book Fair, curated by North East based artist Theresa Easton, as part of an overall programme entitled ‘Fabulous Books, Fantastic Places’.

Fabulous Books, Fantastic Places
The programme, spread over several levels of the BALTIC Centre, encompassed a range of bookmaking activity and exhibitions, including artist books, handmade stationery, photo books and zines. The marketplace on Level 1 was a hive of exhibition stalls and interactive archives. The exhibitions continued in the library on Level 2 with Yvette Hawkins’ collection of travelling suitcases, ‘The Book Apothecary’ and works by graduates of Cleveland College of Art and Design.

Sumi Perera’s exhibition of handmade books (15:1), which were created during her teaching visit at Beijing’s Central Academy of fine Arts (CAFA) in 2007, explored experimental book structure and paper engineering. Workshop practice was also integrated into the exhibition programme with ‘The Sunderland Book Project’, an exhibition of books created by workshop participants which explored print and bookmaking techniques in response to themes of storytelling, identity and social history.

Collecting books
Recently when I’ve attended book fairs, I’ve tried to buy works for my own collection, as it’s a good way of collecting affordable artworks and it supports the artists directly. The two purchases I made from this fair were ‘Theory of the Celestial Motions’, a limited edition screen printed book based on Copernican astronomy by Theresa Easton, and ‘This is an Artist’s Book’, by Laura Little of Pink Parrot Press, detailing descriptions of artists’ books by authors in the field.

I tend to use a number of factors when selecting books to buy including price, value (based on edition size, media, etc), aesthetic, function, relevance to my research, and even sometimes the friendliness of the artist. Each of the books I buy appeals to me for different reasons. For example, the Celestial Motions book is interesting from an aesthetic and research point of view, as it uses historical sources of mapping and world view to create pseudo pocket guides as part of a contemporary book practice. The second book uses self-referentiality to explicitly investigate what a book is, a sort of meta artist’s book.

The BABL archive
Although I was only visiting for the day and had support from fellow invigilators, Julie Johnstone and Barbara Greene, I found it quite tiring, due to the sheer amount of visual stimulation and inspiration. It was fortunate therefore, to stumble upon Lucy May Schofield’s project, BABL (Biliographic Artist Book Library), a touring archive of books collected for their affective (and supposedly healing) qualities. As part of the installation, Lucy was on hand to discuss your needs and choices, as a sort of travelling apothecary. Each of the books had been purchased from, or donated by artists, and categorised according to meanings derived from conversations with the artists.

I found the project really interesting, as it seemed to deal with a number of concerns related to the exhibition and interpretation of artists’ books, namely audience interaction; art vs artefact; affectiveness and agency. The conversations seemed to create more layers of meaning, and it would be interesting to see if and how those conversations permeate through later incarnations of the project.