Research Catalogue

Is there a method to die?

 In the spring of 2009, I attended a course in aesthetic-based qualitative research at Stockholm University. My mother was becoming very weak at the time. As I set out to write on method and methodology within the course, she had to go to hospital for some days during which I kept her company as much as I could. Tests didn't prove anything wrong with her though, and she was sent back home. When she was lifted from the stretcher and gently put her back in her own bed by the transport team, she looked around her and smiled. From the well-known paintings on her walls and the books in her bookshelves, she turned her attention to at me. Still smiling, she looked into my eyes, saying: "And now begins a new and exciting phase in our lives."

Less than a month later, she deceased. 

 The day after her death, I took one of her carpets on the back of my bike and went to the shore of a lake to clean it, the way she used to do it when I was a child. Out of this situation, the question emerged. Absurd though it seemed, it echoed through my further reading, listening and thinking.

This study sets out from an artistic workshop designed to investigate light, colour and spatiality. During the original event, a number of participants joined to collaborate by means of painting, dialogue and movement. From a presentation of the workshop (as determined in time and space), the text argues that the character of an artwork is essentially unfinished; an ongoing ”truth process”. Adopting lines of reasoning from philosophers Vilém Flusser and Theodor Adorno, I gain a first understanding of how the artwork could be reconstituted within the limits of a scientific essay. Once more turning to the workshop's course of events, I find experiences within the actual situation relating to abstract concepts such as ”spirit”, ”quality” and ”freedom”. Next, the text pays heed to Ludwig Wittgenstein's observation that human knowledge is gained and mediated by language-games of various kinds. The selected concepts are consequently tried out in expanded ”studio talks”, involving artists from different fields such as painter Matts Leiderstam, writer Robert Pirsig and sculptor Joseph Beuys. The operation allows me to single out some specific conditions pertaining to artistic dialogue, from which I seek transitions to philosophical discourse. The text briefly reviews three contemporary, art-based projects offering such discursive exchange: haptiska blickar, Thinking Through Painting and Freikörperkultur. Against this backdrop, I seek to articulate an understanding of knowledge-making which embraces artistically as well as philosophically grounded practises. I find support from philosophers John Dewey and Hans Larsson – Dewey characterizing the esthetic and intellectual faculties as complementary movements within the human mind, and Larsson propounding intuition as the unifying and superior form of thinking. Assenting to their views, I conclusively suggest methodical introspection as another field for discursive interchange between art and science.

I include questions I was given at the Janine Antoni workshop, Toynbee Studios, in 2010, as feedback to my work, which I presented with my artistic pseudonym, Betty Nigianni. Much of Janine Antoni's art is about the female body and cultural identity. I address the participants by the first names they used to introduce themselves at the workshop. The questions were given in writing to each participant by the rest of the group, to offer material for thinking further their artistic practice in their own time. I include the answers I would give now, if I was asked the same questions. Artists, architects and designers give interviews about their work. Amongst them, architects tend to write more and publish more written work in relation to their practice.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023. BA Photography. The research paper Echoes of a Journey Through Eco is a record of several-yet-one-and-the-same journey(s). I departed guided by the two questions: What can I learn from the forest? How can I learn from the forest? The first part of the journey I started as a humble, aimless observer in Haagse Bos, where I would sit and let my surroundings dictate what I would write. The symbolic, yet totally non-existent line between culture and nature became subject of my research. I did not even know the history of the forest, or anything about trees from a more universally agreed upon perspective (science). I had to alter my approach to the research. Slowly the humble observer discovered a part of him inquisitively searching for questions and answers. I was approaching the field of ecology. Some months into my journey I carved the fateful words “bark bark” in the bark of a tree. I questioned myself as an artist making a mark on nature. I started writing a text to underpin a few things I think an artist should think about when their practice takes place in and with nature involved. Some very critical, almost cynical part of me took stead of the humble observer. It seems I needed to vent some things. The final paper holds fragments from all parts of the journey, from the humble observer to the cynical critic. As a journey it has barely begun, and as a text it is full of superficial reflections, very subjective opinions, and shortcomings. But, as the seed this text sprung from was planted only 6 months ago, it should be expected that it is still only a sapling about yay tall (20-30cm were I a Scots pine). If there is one thing I learned from trees, it’s patience.

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This is an invitation to generate your own article about playfulness and its power to reconceive failure in artistic research, through a simple game of chance and knowledge. This text contextualises the game within the experiences of the authors, researchers at Orpheus Instituut, who have been engaged in creating explorative spaces for new types of collaboration, using the principles of playfulness. Through a combination of artistic and theoretical work and practical experience with iterative case studies in which game mechanics are tested, refined, and tested again, the authors are engaged in a process of discovery within a “magic circle”. Open-ended experimentation and collaboration are central areas of focus. Failure is re-conceived as a learning process and its catastrophic effects are integrated into the make-believe space of the game, while the insights and experiences drawn from these failures are retained once we step out of the magic circle.