chelsea|research

One Response to “What do we mean by research @ Chelsea”  

1. 1 mary anne Sep 26th, 2006 at 10:43 am

   Not so much a ‘comment’ as a parallel ‘text’? (Perhaps someone can direct this to a better space on this site, if there is one.)

   I recently came across a paper that I gave – way back in 1997 – to a conference at Goldsmiths College on ‘research in Fine Art’. The title on the conference was ‘Redefining Art’. For what it’s worth, I’m offering it here as, at least, an incitement to debate…

   The argument this paper tries to make (which may be distilled as: ‘art should redefine research, not vice versa – not the least because art’s ‘meaning’ is (only) multivalent, not ‘infinite’ – thus legible to art’s own constituency of ‘readers’ prepared to invest in multivalent meaning’) was a product of its circumstances. When I wrote the paper, I was in the middle of a PhD at Goldsmiths. At the time – both there, in the Visual Arts department, and in the ‘art-world’ – at least in the ‘international’ market of contemporary fine art – the cult of the ‘Dumb Object’ loomed large. Charles Ray’s Firetruck was its apotheosis. (I wonder what’s become of all that now; it stood resplendent outside Saatchi’s Boundary Road place for a long time, but of course, that’s all gone…) The ‘resistance to theory’ in its least theoretical form was utterly legitimate (how many stories I could tell!), though students still had to grind through a ‘theoretical’ essay in order to gain a MA.

   Now – as before – my position is elsewhere; not at the other pole of this paper’s argument; not claiming that writing is necessary to fine art research by virtue of art’s inadequacy as a mode of knowledge, but rather, I’d want to recognise writing as part of an artist’s practice. (Again, the argument is much distilled.)

   Re-reading this paper (and making a few changes for the sake of clarity), I can foresee a number of objections. In terms of the internal logic of the thing, the claim, via Althusser, that the ‘School’ is hegemonic seems to sit awkwardly with my claim that art redefines research. Perhaps it’s just a matter of turning the descriptive claim into an ethical one: ‘art should redefine research’. Then merely the question of ‘how’ follows…

   There are doubtless other issues, but I’ll leave them to others.

   As for the ‘slides’ / images – well, these were intended in the main less as illustrations and more as counterpoints / points of interrogation of the verbal text. While I can remember the rationale for most of the citations, my intentions for some elude me, wrapped in the cobwebs of nearly a decade… (as is the title for the Kosuth image, along with page numbers for the Althusser quote).

   Which brings me to a last point: yes, the debate about art-as-research is not so young. But it still seems richly inchoate, paradoxically. Apart from the AHRC’s most definite pronouncements, I am not sure what has been consolidated in the last ten years, in terms of orthodoxies, or agreed ‘positions’. That is to say: there is still so much to discuss…

   A paper presented to

   ‘Redefining Art (a conference on research in Fine Art)’
   held at Goldsmiths College London 1997

   ‘Writing, art and research’

   The title of my contribution to this conference is: ‘Writing, art and research’ – three terms that I want to mediate, today. In the first place, ‘writing’ appears only as the medium for exploring the other two: ‘art’ and ‘research’, at least, as I am reading out a written text.

   So: to turn to ‘art’ and ‘research’, which preoccupy the first two sections of my argument.

   1. On ‘Not Redefining Art’

   The way in which the subject of this conference has been presented to us has mediated ‘art’ and ‘research’ in no uncertain terms: (I quote from the organizers’ blurb): ‘research from within the fine art field presents [a challenge] to existing definitions of art’. Unless art is internally fragmented, it cannot redefine itself. So the implication is, therefore, that research redefines art.

   However, I have no wish to redefine art. Indeed, I refuse to. I am happy with it as it is, (which I know begs the question, ‘well, how is it?’. To which I would reply ‘Very well, thank you…’)

   Slide: Joseph Kosuth [title?] from Documenta IX

   [‘“Objects I can only name. Signs represent them. I can only speak of them. I cannot assert them. A proposition can only say how a thing is, not what it is”’]

   Slide: Rose Finn-Kelcey God Kennel 1993 Documenta IX

   In the wake of this refusal, my presence on this platform might seem rather curious, if not perverse. And yet, I have thoughts upon research in art, which, do indeed answer to the title of this conference ‘Redefining Art’. The rest of this presentation pursues an argument that, in the end, dispels this paradox.

   2. Defining ‘research’

   Etymologically, the word ‘research’ comprises the word ‘search’ (as a verb and a noun) and the prefix ‘re’ meaning ‘back’. As such, ‘research’ as a verb and a noun is both a process and a product. And yet, when it comes to defining ‘research’, the emphasis is often on this latter form. (I am reminded here of Raymond Williams’ work on the history of the word ‘culture’ which, as he notes, displays a shift in its predominant usage as a verb to a noun, and in which, too, the noun signifies the product of the process the verb once described.) Like ‘culture’ perhaps, the word ‘research’ marks, in its history and present use, the cultural tendency towards reifying processes.

   It is as a product that ‘research’ concerns me.

   As such, I want to argue that ‘research’ is very much defined by the academy. And research in art no less. This can be supported by invoking various theoretical traditions (Foucaultian and Marxist for example). I quote from Althusser, writing on the defining role of ‘Education’:

   ‘[…] one ideological State apparatus [what Althusser calls ‘ISAs’] certainly has the dominant role, although hardly anyone lends an ear to its music; it is so silent! This is the School.

   It takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most “vulnerable”, squeezed between the family State apparatus and the educational State apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of “know-how” wrapped in the ruling ideology […]’ (‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’)

   If we, as ‘researchers’ are no longer children, then we are still ‘at school’, only different from our younger counterparts, perhaps, by virtue of the fact that we might be allowed – just occasionally – to glimpse the ruling ideology (via reflexive critique). It is worth considering what is seen when ‘research’ is the subject of this gaze.

   One of the explicit stipulations for research is for originality ‘shown either by the discovery of new facts or by the exercise of independent critical power’ (in the University of London’s description of PhD research). Much could be said about the culturally specific nature of this mandate: the rhetoric of Elizabethan seafarers meets the oratory of Dickens’ Mr Boundaby: two distinct but deeply related moments in the growth of the market-economy come together in research: the will to ‘discovery’, and ‘facts’.

   Another manifest demand relates to the requirement for a linguistic presentation (‘in English’) of this knowledge or critique. And what’s naturalised here (but needn’t be) is the slippage from (the English) language (which would include oral delivery) to writing (in English).

   3. Research as writing and the implication for research in art

   When art-as-research has to take the form of writing, there are several consequences. As the organizers of today’s event have suggested ‘“Research in Fine Art” is a matter of writing, however much or little it many involve a mechanics of writing. It is always already writing in so far as research writes.’ Or to put it more brutally: art is writing.

   [This latter gloss, if memory serves me correctly, was on my part a hyperbolic articulation of what I took to be the conference organizers’ deconstructive urge to claim that all representation is ‘writing’ in the Derridean sense of ‘writing’ as a system of inscription across different media. That this ‘urge’ simultaneously assumed a preference for writing in its colloquial sense was something that I think I fairly attributed to the organizers, too.]

   Consider an extreme scenario in which the outcome of research in art (whatever that involves) is only writing. Because its production is located within the ‘department’ of a certain discipline (‘art’), this is named ‘art’, not ‘art-theory’ or ‘art-history’ or something hitherto undisciplined, such as ‘artist’s writing’.

   Common sense tells me that this is a theft. The theft of a ‘proper’ name (may be two). And this theft might be seen, too, as an act of fraud.

   Common sense supposes that names are ‘proper’ in the sense of ‘belonging to things’: the word preserves its Latin origins which may be glossed as ‘one’s own, special’, and the common-sense concept of naming is emblematized in Adam’s naming of the animals in Genesis: to each animal the name that is ‘due’ to it. But the concept of linguistic ‘theft’ is not ruled out in less common-sensical ideas about language.

   If the idea of names as ‘due’ to pre-existing objects can be referred to as the ‘representationalist’ theory of language, then the idea of names / words-for-things bringing objects into being (as discrete entities), is known, via Richard Rorty, as the ‘antirepresentationalist’ view of language.

   As one of the most recent philosophers of ‘pragmatism’, he writes:

   ‘On an antirepresentationalist view, it is one thing to say that […] an ability to use the word “atom” as physicists do, is useful for coping with the environment. It is another thing to attempt to explain this utility by reference to representationalist notions, such as the notion that the reality referred to by “quark” was “determinate” before the word “quark” came along’. (Philosophical Papers Vol 1 p. 5).

   For Rorty, the act of defining is acutely a question of politics, because the construction of things by words always has a use-value; it is tendentious – serving a particular world-view. Thus while using ‘art’ in a particular, say, new way, may not mis-represent the truth of the thing represented (as, according to Rorty, this does not exist before the word), it can mis-represent the ‘thing’ relative to other uses of the term.

   Hence either way: I still claim that art construed as (just) writing is a theft; words can be ‘abused’ on either side of this theoretical divide.

   4. Against art as writing

   There are useful and pleasurable distinctions to be made between the two activities referred to as ‘art’ and ‘writing’. The sort-of-formulation ‘art’ as ‘research’ = ‘writing’, would avoid ‘art’ as the outcome of research at great cost. To my mind, the fact that this writing might have to do with art is no compensation. Indeed when this is the case, I’m led to remember Baudrillard describing the wasteland of postmodern culture (in The Evil Demon of Images): ‘there are only simulacra’ (p.21). The problem is not that art is just a sign, but rather, that, ‘art’ is just the sign of art.

   Or, better, one could cite George Steiner, here. For in offering writing in place of art, we are, he contends, substituting ‘real presence’ with ‘the secondary and the parasitic’. So doing, we postpone the possibility of his ‘ideal polity’ in which only primary production is permitted. As a version and critique of Plato’s republic, Steiner’s utopia, or imaginary city, is one ‘[…] for painters, poets, composers, choreographers, rather than one for art, literary, musical or ballet critics and reviewers’. (Real Presences p.6) But Steiner does not banish criticism per se; just the critic. Indeed, crucially, he asserts that:

   ‘All serious art, music and literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold’s phrase “a criticism of life” […]. But literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain […] the readings, the interpretations and critical judgements of art, literature and music from within art, literature and music are of a penetrative authority rarely equalled by those offered from outside, by those propounded by the non-creator, this is to say, the reviewer, the critic and the academic’. (Real Presences pp.11-12)

   So ‘art’ is art and the sign of art.

   Slide: Anish Kapoor Madonna 1989-90

   Especially in the light of this last point, I find it hard to see the argument in favour of redefining art as writing, either wholly or in part. However, I think it could emerge as the negative condition of the argument against art-as-research to which I now turn:

   5. Against art as research

   In the transcript of an interview concerning ‘studio doctorates and objective standards for studio practice as research’, Christopher Frayling contends that:

   ‘The best definition [of research] could be “an enquiry that leads to communicable knowledge” […] and that word “communicable” for me is the key. Art is in its nature multivalent, can be read in a million ways. That’s why it’s great, people bring different things to it, see things in it, come away with different meanings. The range of meanings is potentially almost infinite. Whereas the punchline of research can never be that multivalent, it has to have limits and boundaries somewhere, and say “this is what I’m trying to put over”’.

   Slide: Albrecht Dürer Draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Woman

   And he adds:

   ‘Somewhere in that space is fine art research but I must say I find that incredibly difficult to locate.’ (‘Nourishing the Academy’ in Drawing Fire Vol. 1 No. 3 Winter 1996).

   Slide: Zoffany The Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772-8)

   What needs locating first and foremost in this argument, is the putative origin of art’s multivalence. Frayling’s comments, which, in their opacity, owe something doubtless to the fact that they were spoken and not written (an argument for research as written language, yes), may be teased apart to suggest the following:

   • art is intrinsically multivalent: this is one of its properties
   • people bring different things to art
   • when these ‘different things’ mesh with art’s intrinsic multivalence, there is a compound effect (of multivalence) – in the direction of the ‘almost’ infinite.

   When this is the case, ‘multivalence’ is a quality of all texts – not just art’s – at least as all texts are subjectively construed. In Frayling’s scheme of things, non-art texts would simply be less multivalent, across the community of their readers.

   Moreover, in defeating Frayling’s argument, which is implicitly against just art as research, it should be noted too, that the ‘multivalent’ – ‘many meanings’ – is not a synonym for ‘the infinite’. (Yes, as Frayling carefully notes, the multivalent is the ‘almost infinite’). Multivalence is a bounded condition which therefore succumbs to the most naive notion of communicable knowledge as something finite.

   The case against art as research looks weak from both these points of view. And others too.

   Slide: picture of the opening page of Alice in Wonderland [‘“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures […]?”’]

   As the outcome of research, art has been refused, also, on the grounds that the visual per se is inherently ambiguous (which is not quite the same as being ‘multivalent’). By comparison, the verbal is seen as less treacherous, as being more decidable. Writing is thus privileged above visual art and permitted as the final form of research. Much could be said here, as it has been elsewhere, on this verbal-visual hierarchy, but time forbids… My counter to this charge against the visual is to refuse to locate the production of meaning (or its absence) at the level of a given medium: visual art or writing:

   6. Redefining ‘research’

   Open, at random, a page from a scientific journal, as a non-specialist, as I have done for you, and what can you make of it?

   Slide: excerpt from Perkins Royal Society of Chemistry Journal

   Perhaps not very much. ‘Decidability’ is clearly not a function of writing (chemists will assure you that this text is to the point). Rather, it’s a function of the nexus of author-text-reader. In other words, ‘meaning’ (which might be the guarantee of communication) is community–specific. With Edward Said, we might ask: ‘Who writes? For whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances?’ (‘Opponents Audiences, Constituencies and Coummunity’ in Hal Foster (ed.) Postmodern Culture) (Indeed, an illustration of this point is the recent initiative within the Scientific establishment of COPUS – an organisation, fronted by Professor Lewis Wolpert – which seeks to promote public understandings of, and access to, science, in the face of its perceived opacity.)

   The analogies between art and science are instructive. And none the less so if they support the case for art without writing as research. Though we must be careful not to stretch comparisons: for instance, it seems to me that when research in science comprises a practical investigation, followed by the ‘writing up’ of that, it is wrong to argue for a writing-element in art-research, likewise. In Chemistry, for instance, the writing is integral to the research process; it is the embodiment of the knowledge. In art, the object, or the image, is art’s ‘knowledge’. No further means is required for art’s audience, constituency and community.

   For related reasons, both art and the sciences propose a re-think on research and its relationship to meaning, accessibility and communication. In the case of art, this proposes that conventional expectations for the form of research are redefined, as ‘research’, it can be argued, is not a form (of text) but rather a mode of knowledge (albeit one which, from some theoretical perspectives, can be seen as multivalent and moreover, audience-specific).

   In this way it is possible to argue that art redefines research (in art). This presentation answers to the title of the conference as it re-defines its title, to recognise the first word adjectivally – not as a verb: ‘redefining art’. Art is the subject, not the object in my reading of the phrase. Active, and not passive, in this ideal scheme of things.

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