Practice as research

I’m still in Paris, working hard on the Magicens de la Terre conference. This week we heard paper presentations on a variety of subjects relating to the concept of global exhibitions and Magiciens de la Terre. The subject of the presentations included Latin America as situated between West and non-West, The Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts 1955 and the “non- aligned” artists, Gu Dexin and extended tactility through visual and olfactory qualities of the work, Congo contemporary artworks, Alfredo Jaar, The Anthropocene Project, and outsider artists in Japan.

Speakers
This week we were joined by speakers including Andrea Buddensieg, curator and director of GAM – Global Art and the Museum at ZKM/ Karlsruhe, and Professor Monica Juneja, of the Karl Jaspers Centre, Heidelberg University.Discussions continued about the original Magiciens de la Terre project relating to how the work was conceived and delivered. According to Jean Hubert Martin, the point of magiciens was to problematise the relationship between anthropology and art through exploring the paradoxes and contradictions of reappropriation. The idea was to change Western viewpoints of art production, although the idea of ‘Western’ as a problematic term didn’t seem to figure as part of the conceptualisation.

The exhibition archive from the original Magicien de la Terre show was useful in showing the travelling notes produced in an ethnographic style by curators when visiting artists. These ‘mission reports’ detailed the objectives of studio visits and include letters written to representatives in different countries, showing the network of artistic and curatorial contacts. However, despite their intentions of producing a ‘global exhibition’, not all areas were able to be included. These were explained as mostly pragmatic decisions, specifically due to lack of documentation, contacts or money.

Discussions
As part of our daily discussions around the different themes and paper presentations, we were able to question the original curators about how they felt their intentions for the exhibition were received and how they dealt with the criticisms of the show. The aim was to present the artists as individual maker and emblematic of Modernity. However, based on the works chosen, artists from outside ‘Western’ cultural centres appeared to be more specifically representative of particular aspects of cultural production. I felt that this created a tension and an ambiguity in the way that artists were treated which undermined the concept of the exhibition.

As described by Pablo La Fuente in ‘Making Art Global’, the decision to treat each of the artists as individual makers was seen as a generally positive move away from the ‘nameless’ artefacts displayed alongside Modernist ‘masterpieces’ in the 1985 MOMA exhibition, ‘Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’. However, such a decision can also be decontextualising, severing connections to cultural threads of artistic interpretation and knowledge, as well as further denying the impact of cultural context on the production of ‘Western’ artworks. (La Fuente, 2014, p18)

Production of retrospective
As well as the inclusion of images and other documents from the archive in the retrospective exhibition,  there were also audio visual elements which captured aspects of the production of the work. In particular, Sarkis was asked to leave four holes in the wall works for documentary videos to be projected. These space were labelled with Jean-Hubert Martin’s name and showed clips of artwork being produced, many of it by African artists. When questioned about the possibility of the videos exoticising the artists in question he replied that by showing production of artworks by non western artists he felt was giving more exposure and advantage to these artists over more established artists.

Experiences
Overall I felt that the experience was informative and challenging, allowing me to learn more about the Magiciens exhibition and to meet other researchers in my field.  As the conference took place in the gallery spaces, we became active participants in the exhibition space. This was a point of contention for some of the participants who felt that we were being displayed as a spectacle in much the same way as the original artworks. Personally, I enjoyed being a part of the exhibition, and it seemed that the ‘objectification’ of the participants was an overlooked and unintended consequence of the format that would be addressed in any future versions of the project.

Before attending the conference, I’d felt that I needed to present my work in a more ‘academic’ style but after talking to the other participants, I realised that they were quite excited by the prospect of listening to an artist present their practice, so I decided to take that on board for the next time I present. They were also keen to see examples of my work and I even had a meeting with the artists book librarian at Centre Pompidou.

Our legacy in the retrospective exhibition was the journal that we produced while we were there, which documented our responses to the archive and continued to be distributed throughout the exhibition after we had left. The journal is also held in the Bibliotheque Kandinsky collection.

Further info:
http://monoskop.org/Information_%281970_exhibition%29
http://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennials/biennial-of-graphic-arts-slovenia
http://www.artnetweb.com/oldenburg/entropic.html
http://africandigitalart.com/2012/10/reassemblage-from-the-firelight-to-the-screen
http://www.ihabhassan.com/postmodernism_to_postmodernity.htm
www.mcgill.ca/files/crclaw-discourse/Can_the_subaltern_speak.pdf
SubTerrain: Artworks in the Cityfold
Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan
The Global Contemporary: Artworlds after 1989

On the evening of the Monday 30th June 2014, I arrived in Paris for the start of my research residency at Centre Pompidou. The event (part exploration of the archive, part conference) had been organised in response to the 25th anniversary of the exhibition ‘Magiciens de la Terre‘. I had been selected, along with 23 other scholars and academics, to present my work in relation to the relevant themes of the exhibition, and to produce a new piece of writing in response to the exhibition archives.

As part of the 25th anniversary celebrations of ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, two of the fourth floor galleries in Centre Pompidou (the original venue for the 1989 exhibition) had been taken over by a documentary exhibition. This consisted of posters of artworks from the show, selected and arranged by the artist, Sarkis. Alongside this were vitrines of selected items from the archive, which included notes, drawings, maps and contextual information, as well as sound and video. All of this aimed not only at giving more context to the production and interpretation of the artworks, but also to the processes involved in creating an exhibition on a global scale.

The conference
The conference took place every morning within the exhibition galleries of the dossier-exhibition of ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, and were presented as three main sections: the genealogy of the exhibition, its critical reception, and the theoretical displacements it generated. Conference papers were presented by each of the invited participants, and each discussion was chaired and ‘activated’ by a different international keynote speaker. During the afternoons, participants were invited to attend tours of of Parisian museums and institutions that had  “contributed to the critical reflection and research around the historical construction of collections and global discourse”.

In addition to this, participants took part in collective writing workshops, with the aim of producing a journal which would be distributed throughout the exhibition for its duration. The journal was to be aimed at a wide cross-section of the exhibition-going public and was intended as an interpretation of our research inside and outside the archive, as well as of the ongoing discussions around the exhibition as a whole. The journal was designed and produced by the graphic designers of s-y-n-d-i-c-a-t (François Havegeer and Sascha Leopold) who also supported Sarkis in the exhibition design.

Meeting the curators
On the first day we were introduced to the initiators of the project,  Mica Gherghescu and Didier Schulmann, curators for the Musée national d’art moderne, Bibliothèque Kandinsky/ Centre Pompidou, Paris; Jean-Hubert Martin, the original curator from ‘Magiciens’; and Annie Cohen-Solal, curator of the Magiciens 2014 programme, who would remain with us for the duration of the 10 days. Alongside these were a range of speakers and contributors who would introduce us to the conference themes, gallery and museum tours and library archive. The first set of discussions focused on the premises, genesis and concept of Magiciens de la Terre and we were joined by contributors to the original exhibition, artists Sarkis and Miralda, photographer Bernard Lüthi and curator Mark Francis. Martin and Francis discussed the benefits of personal networks in finding artistic and curatorial collaborators.

Throughout the first week we were also joined by CNRS researchers and anthropologists Benoît de l’Estoile and Carlo Severi; artists Sarkis and Miralda; and Université Paris 8 Professor, Laurent Jeanpierre. During this time, myself and the other invited participants also presented our research relating to the history of the Magiciens exhibition on topics as diverse as Aboriginal art, digital archives, the Brussels International Exhibition of 1897, the agency of artists and artworks, contemporary installation art, Latin American feather art, oral histories, art journalism, and the poetics of relation text.

Museum and gallery visits
A series of visits were planned to galleries and museums in order to contextualise some of the histories of global exhibitions. Our first visit was to the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration which was the venue of the original colonial exhibition. Such international exhibitions were originally conceived to show ‘the world in one place’ and to convey the ‘mutual benefits’ of colonisation to their 19th Century audience. The immigration museum had updated its displays to show how France had progressed beyond its colonial history, however it was generally felt that using the space for the new museum was problematic and it might have been better preserved as a historical archive of colonial practices, as with the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Our next visit was to the Musée du Quai Branly, formerly Le Musée de l’Homme (or The Museum of Mankind). Although attempts were being made to address previous colonial collections and relationships, the collections were still predominantly comprised of objects from the previous museum of Anthropology. To deliver their mission of showcasing global cultural practice, the museum had invited aboriginal contemporary artists to contribute to the building by producing their paintings directly onto the museum architecture. They had also attempted to purchase more contemporary African photography to complement their collection of research and travel photography from fieldwork.

Modernitiés Plurielles
The last visit of the week was to the rehung collection of Modern art at Centre Pompidou. The exhibition, ‘Modernitiés Plurielles: 1905-1970‘ comprised of over 1,000 works representing a global history of art of 400 artists and 47 countries. Although the exhibition followed a historical, chronological perspective, it aimed to shed light on alternative movements and temporalities, with rooms focused on specific artist groups and countries such as a focus on Latin America and art movements such as ‘Anthropophagy‘, ‘Indigenism‘, and ‘Totemism’. In attempting to redress the collection to include previously uncollected or unexhibited artists, the exhibition also focused on a large number of works by women artists.

Throughout the exhibition were ‘wallpapers’ of magazine covers and reviews from Art journals and artist manifestos of the time, including Ma, Zenit, Proa, Život, Black Orpheus, and Souffles. This ‘manifesto exhibition’ “illustrates the complex, dynamic relationships between modernity, identity, universality and vernacular culture running through the entire history of modern art. This contextual exhibition re-situates the masters of the avant-garde within networks of artistic exchange and emulation typical of this period… By confronting the canonical, linear viewpoint of movements with a history of marginal and peripheral approaches, it replaces a history of influences with a map of connections, transfers – and resistance movements too”.

Further info:
http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/revision-of-modernity/race-time-and-the-revision-of-modernity-homi-k-bhabha.html
https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volumes/schorch.pdf/view
http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/hayward-gallery-and-visual-arts/hayward-gallery-exhibitions/past/africa-remix
http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/la-triennale—between-the-near-and-far-concerning-ethnographic-poetics/
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/27107
https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/144/passion-rich-collectors-and-the-export-dollar-the-/
http://marten.org.uk/2013/10/26/modernites-plurielles-de-1905-a-1970/

I’ve been invited to participate in a 10 day conference and research residency at Pompidou Centre, Paris from 1st – 10th July 2014. The topic we will will be discussing is the exhibition ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, which is now celebrating its 25th anniversary. The exhibition was, and still is, the subject of intense scrutiny and debate, concerned as it was with unifying modes of artistic practice across global dimensions.

Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper moons from Nahuatl
In preparation for this visit, and to further contextualise my practice of working with museum objects in an art  context, I decided to investigate previous examples of artists producing exhibitions using cultural artefacts from different countries. One such example was the work of the Scottish artist, Eduardo Paolozzi, a sculptor best known for “taking bits of machinery or other found objects, and synthesising them into new associations”.

Paolozzi’s inclination towards finding inspiration in found objects, led to him curating the exhibition ‘Lost Magic Kingdoms’ at the Museum of Mankind, London in 1986. The invitation to work with the museum collections came at a time when other institutions were expressing an interest in the relationship between modern art and ethnography. However, unlike the Museum of Mankind’s previous retrospective of Henry Moore’s work, or the exhibition ‘Primitivism in 20th Century Art; Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’, concurrently held at MOMA, New York, Paolozzi’s exhibition was to focus directly on the question of the production of contemporary art within the context of a museum collection (1985, p15)

Exhibition style and themes
The exhibition (of several hundred items) existed as a bricolage installation of elements, exploring such themes as: the artist as curator, material semiotics and technologies, classification, authenticity, reproduction, and divination. Drawn from an early interest in visiting the collections at the Museum of Mankind and Le Musee de l’Homme, Paolozzi was influenced by the contemporary ethnographic style of display, where artefacts were densely packed in cases and were mainly intended only to show the objects, rather than to provide interpretation. (1985, p26)

Furthermore “the majority of these displays were organised on one or more of a small number of principles. The first was the wish to show something of the life of a particular region or group by exhibiting ‘typical’ items of material culture. The second principle was that of [showing] underlying similarity [between objects]… Thirdly, some displays were organised to show how societies and their material culture might have evolved…” (1985, p26)

Object identities
Such decontextualisation of objects and images has proven to be destructive through “a dismemberment and denial of the normal associations between phenomena and an expunging of the contexts which helped give them meaning”. However, it is suggested that Paolozzi’s process of continuing this disassociation of elements, was intended both to critique the strategies of the museum and also to discover “how far the item’s meaning is contained within itself and how far it changes by being placed in association with other items”. (1985, p25)

Paolozzi’s methods for investigating the meaning of objects incorporated explorations of material and form; for example, how different cultures use similar materials to produce objects, and what functions those objects might have. The use of recycled or repurposed materials within artworks was also a subject of interest within the exhibition, which included a Mexican mask with electric light bulbs for eyes. (1985, p35)

Art and magic
Although Paolozzi stated that his interest was in highlighting “the sublime of everyday life” (1985, p159), and in subverting the tendency to exoticise the other, the choice of the exhibition title ‘Lost Magic Kingdoms’ and the inclusion of divination tools within the selected objects, seemed to run counter to this suggestion. Such techniques were intended to expose the artist’s practice of producing meaning through the correlation of images and objects, but the title also suggests that these original techniques and societies have been superceded or ‘lost’.

The relationship between art and magic has continued to fascinate artists and curators, throughout, and despite, modernity, and I will continue to consider this within the context of the ’Magiciens de la Terre’ exhibition in the coming weeks.

Further reading:
http://www.paulwye.co.uk/index.php?/writing/recontextualisation-of-the-artifact/
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/paolozzi-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-dog-t06943
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/33086
http://www.davidchalkley.co.uk/David_Chalkley_Selected_Portfolio/gallery/Pages/Lost_Magic_Kingdoms_2013.html

Framing art practice within an anthropological perspective is related to ideas about the ways in which cultural context contributes to art practice and creativity. Such ideas show how patterns of thought can re-emerge in societies, through the gradual “restructuring of a certain number of elements already given (Jameson, 1983, p123)” (Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007, p4). For example, although our increasingly technological society is generally viewed as a recent phenomenon, scholars are now becoming interested in the ways that contemporary media reflects elements of historical events and conditions. In particular, the Media in Transition series, published by MIT Press, has brought together essays under the mission of showing how “the media systems of our own era are unique neither in their instability nor in their complex, ongoing transformations”.

Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage
Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage is one such publication in the Media in Transition series. Published in 2007 and edited by Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine, its aim is to “identify some of the ways in which digital technologies have transformed the traditional museum, [thereby] altering our understanding of such fundamental words as indigenous, artifact, heritage, space, ecology, [and] the past”. Although previous publications have discussed the role of technology within the museum, many have tended to focus on the effects of these digital capabilities rather than placing these developments within a historical context (Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007, p1).

While digital technologies continue to shape the museum experience, conversely, “cultural heritage ‘ecologies’ also appropriate, adapt, incorporate, and transform the digital technologies they adopt”. Given that “collecting organizations are vehicles for the enduring concerns of public spectacle, object preservation, shifting paradigms of knowledge and power”, the challenge is to ensure that the ‘intellectual capital’ of the museum becomes, and remains, accessible throughout these transformations, particularly to the communities from where these objects derive (Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007, pp.1-30). The book, Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage, is separated into three sections: Replicants/Object Morphologies; Knowledge Systems and Management: Shifting Paradigms and Models; and Virtual Cultural Heritage.

Replicants/Object Morphologies
The collection of essays in the Replicants/Object Morphologies section of Theorizing Digital Culture and Heritage is primarily concerned with the ways in which the use of images and new media technology influence the production, interpretation, and dissemination of art and heritage collections. Peter Walsh details the history of photography, particularly in the roles of object acquisition and the dissemination of collections. He also presents the museum photograph as a cultural artefact itself, an argument continued by Andrea Witcomb in ‘The Materiality of Virtual Technologies’. Here she argues that “taking digital media [interpretations] as material objects in their own right [enables] the emergence of new perceptions on the relationship between the display of objects alongside digital media elements”  (Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007, p6).

Concerns about the virtual/real divide often relate to concepts such as materiality, aura and authenticity, authority, interpretation, representation, knowledge, and affect, based on “[vision] as the interpretive frame and physicality as a stable, truthful, and objective marker of culture”, thus positioning the digital and virtual in opposition to the real. However the discursive framework ‘epistemic relativism’ discussed in Replicants/Object Morphologies, “views knowledge of the ‘real’ as derived through our ideas and concepts, including linguistic, spatial, cultural, and ideological compulsions… [therefore] objects and their meanings are now seen as contingent, fluid, and polysemic” (Cameron, 2007, pp.53-54).

Furthermore, in certain cases digital reproductions can be seen to transfer qualities of the original. For example, in ‘Te Ahua Hiko: Digital Cultural Heritage and Indigenous Objects, People, and Environments’, Deidre Brown discusses the relationship between Maori taonga (cultural treasures) and non-Maori museum classification. Here she proposes that Maori cultural values and taboos are transferred through virtual or augmented replication (Brown, 2007, p79). In this way, such technologies create the conditions for the repatriation of objects. However, they also require specific protocols in relation to the viewing of images. For example, “many restrictions are placed on institutionally archived images of deceased Maori — a consequence likely to be transferred to digital replicants” (Brown, 2007, p85).

Knowledge Systems
Part two of Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage – Knowledge Systems, Management and Users: Shifting Paradigms and Models – focuses on the ways in which knowledge (in the form of objects, texts, interpretations, etc) is organised and presented, and the impact this has on audience learning and access. Key questions raised in this section related to ways that audiences could be engaged through personalised experiences and possibilities for co-creation. As Parry and Arbach state: “The new space for online museum learning represents a shift in the conception and design of Web-based education provision for museums, carrying with it a greater emphasis on specificity, reciprocity, and activity” (Parry and Arbach, 2007, p290).

Such community co-creation programs (referred to as Digital Cultural Communication), aim to increase audience participation by expanding the museum’s curatorial mission “from the exhibition of collections to the remediation of cultural narratives and experiences” (Russo and Watkins, 2007, p149). Systems which allow for personalised navigation pathways and individually profiled users can enable “information [to be] organized, manipulated, segmented, reworked, and delivered in modular and multifarious ways (Manovich, 2001, p131)”. However, although these methods can produce “alternative and sometimes mutually contradictory object interpretations” (Cameron and Robinson, 2007, p186), for Harald Kraemer such audience interpretations can also add to the rich historical documentation of the (contemporary) artwork. In capturing user interactivity with the object through virtual museum systems, Kraemer suggests that these relationships “become an integral part of the work of art” and positions “the recipient as a coauthor [with] the artist” (Kraemer, 2007, p193).

Cultural Heritage & Virtual Systems
The third, and last, section of this anthology, Cultural Heritage & Virtual Systems, “examines the intersection of cultural heritage research, documentation, and interpretation—as it is mediated through the techniques and modalities of virtual reality” (Cameron and Kenderdine, 2007, p10). These essays explore how and whether virtual and augmented realities can express and transmit ‘real’ experiences, particularly in relation to place. As Erik Champion and Bharat Dave state in ‘Dialing Up the Past’: “A sense of place in virtual environments and real experiences is not just a consequence of being surrounded by a spatial setting but of being engaged in another place. A place is particular, unique, dynamic, and memorably related to other places, peoples, and events, and it is hermeneutic” (Champion and Dave, 2007, p344).

These ‘multiple modalities’ include exploring the possibilities of tangible or sensory experiences of virtual places and objects, coupled with crowdsourced data linked to user perspectives and experiences, with the aim of providing a wider interpretation. In relation to this, Scot T. Refsland, Marc Tuters, and Jim Cooley discuss the potential for developing an online collaborative project for mapping cultural heritage: “Virtual heritage could greatly improve its efficacy by developing user-centered and dynamic systems for nonlinear storytelling [through a definitive archive of spatial culture]. Such a system would give users the sensation of being able to navigate beyond the official story of heritage into a web of interconnected complexity” (Refsland, Tuters, and Cooley, 2007, p415).

Conclusion
Through an understanding of the ways in which Cultural Heritage is interpreted, disseminated and received, artists can conceive of new methods of producing work that responds to its potential exhibition environments. Conversely, by presenting new methods for understanding the context of production, art can be considered through anthropological factors, enabling greater equivalencies with which to compare art cross-culturally.

Further reading:
The Wired Museum: Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms

One of the criteria to achieve doctoral status is the production of new knowledge. For Practice Based Research in Art this includes the possibility of exploring new methods of research as well as the creation of new artistic works. In understanding how practice-based research contributes to knowledge in an academic sense, it is useful to reflect on the current state of theory relating to artistic knowledge.

What do artists know?
In 2009, the Stone Summer Theory Institute held their annual conference in Chicago. Organised by James Elkins, and entitled, ‘What Do Artists Know?’ it was initially conceived to interrogate the conceptualisation of art education worldwide, from Foundation level through to PhD. However, in the process of organising the conference, it became clear that there were other ways of understanding the question. Therefore, co-organiser Frances Whitehead also introduced the subject of her own research; the types of knowledge that are particular to the activities and processes undertaken by artists. Such ideas include theories around tacit knowledge and aesthetic cognitivism, “the doctrine that knowledge is contained in artworks”.

The conference was conceived as a series of seminars rather than paper presentations, and each of the topics were discussed among the group in order to draw conclusions which would be published at a later date. The topics included: the relevant histories of art education, their practices, ideas, skills, techniques, and how these impact on the current conceptualisation of art education; an understanding of different methods of artistic training outside of major international art schools; and how the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’ apply to artworks, both as vehicles for knowledge and as traces of transformative processes. Elkins outlined the conference proceedings and conclusions in his preliminary report which was published in maHKUzine. Conclusions and areas for further research were published in the book ‘What Do Artists Know?‘ by Penn State University Press in 2012.

On not knowing
Contained within ideas of ‘artistic knowledge’ is the deliberate practice of ‘not knowing’. In the publication ‘On Not Knowing: How Artists Think‘, Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum (eds) aim to “map an expansive field of reference that situates the idea of ‘not knowing’ in relation to the artist’s sense of self, the place of the studio and creative problems of language, interdisciplinary practice, education, philosophy and of course, the experience of the viewer… where not knowing is not only not overcome, but thought, explored and savoured” (Fisher and Fortnum, 2013, p7).

These essays not only explore art making as thinking through doing, or practice as research, but also consider it in relation to the histories of Western metaphysical thought and the production of knowledge itself. Art as a mode of enquiry has been explored by theorists, including Kant’s ‘genius’, Plato’s ‘technē’, and Levi-Strauss’s ‘bricoleur’. In each case, the ‘artist’ in question veers between knowing and not knowing, utilising the resources at their disposal (in the form of tools, materials, technical ability, and historical awareness) in order to create a framework within which “to experiment without a plan and allow something unforeseen to emerge” (Jones, 2013, pp.20 & 27; Fortnum, 2013, p76; Siukonen, 2013, p92).

Not knowing in practice
Emma Cocker’s essay, ‘Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected’, resonated most strongly with my own feelings toward art making. Here she states: “Artistic practice recognises the value of not knowing, less as the preliminary state (of ignorance) preceding knowledge, but as a field of desirable indeterminacy within which to work. Not knowing is an active space within practice, wherein an artist hopes for an encounter with something new or unfamiliar, unrecognisable or unknown. However, within artistic practice, the possibility of producing something new is not always about the conversion of the not known towards new knowledge, but rather involves the aspiration to retain something of the unknown within what is produced”. (Cocker, 2013, p127)

She continues by outlining particular tactical strategies that artists may use “to produce the conditions of uncertainty, disorientation or indeterminacy”. Such methods include “submission to the logic of a rule or instruction… as a way of surrendering responsibility, absorbing oneself of agency or control within a practice in order to be surprised” as a way of creating a space for not knowing or “rupturing the terms of what is already known” (Cocker, 2013, p127-130).

Practice as research/Research as practice
Exploring art as a method of thinking or mode of enquiry has allowed theorists to consider the lateral benefits of art making in a knowledge-based economy. For example, Estelle Barrett suggests that the value of art may extend, and even surpass, the production of the work, due to its specific “processes of enquiry and their potential for innovative application” (Fortnum, 2013, p77). Equally, Donald Schön felt that artistic processes were particularly suited to negotiating risk due to their nature of “reflection-in-action… by which practitioners… deal well with situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness”. (Siukonen, 2013, p92) As Fisher states in her opening essay ‘In a Language you don’t Understand’, “such modes of working have helped to reconceptualise art as ‘a place where things can happen’ rather than ‘a thing in the world’.” (Fisher, 2013, p12).

However, while it is beneficial to consider the particular benefits of practice and art making to the production of knowledge, the essays here often appear to position text and writing as synonymous with knowledge. Therefore, although text may occupy a hierarchical precedence over image, I propose that the benefits of practice based thinking can also apply to the process of writing and the experience of text in affective terms.

Further info:
http://video.mit.edu/watch/act-lecture-michael-corris-what-do-artists-know-10199/
Mike Jarvis “articulating the tacit dimension in art making”
http://www.visualintelligences.com