The Exposition of Practice as Research
Michael Schwab
Plymouth University, School of Art and Media, 19 November 2014.
Nietzsche, Attempt at Self-Criticism, 1886
2.
... Today I would state that it was the problem of scholarship itself, scholarly research for the first time grasped as problematic, as dubious. ...
Created out of merely premature and really immature personal experiences, which lay close to the threshold of something communicable, and built on the basis of art (for the problem of scientific research cannot be understood on the basis of scientific enquiry)—a book perhaps for artists with analytical tendencies and a capacity for retrospection (that means for exceptions, a type of artist whom it is necessary to seek out and whom one never wants to look for) ...
MusicExperiment21 performance-lecture in Buenos Aires, May 9, 2014
Journal for Artistic Research (JAR)
JAR is an international, online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal for the identification, publication and dissemination of artistic research and its methodologies, from all arts disciplines.
Experimental systems are to be seen as the smallest integral working units of research. As such, they are systems of manipulation designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able clearly to ask. … [E]xperimental systems are vehicles for materialising questions. They inextricably cogenerate the phenomena or material entities and the concepts they come to embody. Practices and concepts thus 'come packaged together'. (Rheinberger 1997, p.28)
Initially, the epistemic thing [the not yet known object of knowledge] may be conceived as nothing but an empty point of contact between the graphematic and the representational space. It is first of all an unknown that enters representation as a question: what is this that I have suddenly in front of me? In its most basic form, one may conceive of research as the ability to [produce and] register a question with an unknown answer in a space of representation. (Schwab 2013, p.7)
Rheinberger, H-J. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Standford: Stanford University Press.
With the notion of ‘exposition’, we wish to suggest an operator between art and writing. Although ‘exposition’ seems to comply with traditional metaphors of vision and illumination, it should not be taken to suggest the external exposure of practice to the light of rationality; rather, it is meant as the re-doubling of practice in order to artistically move from artistic ideas to epistemic claims. As suggested elsewhere, depending on the practice in which one is actually engaged, constructs such as ‘to perform practice as research’, ‘to stage practice as research’, ‘to curate practice as research’, etc., are all equally suitable. Through such re-doubling, artistic practice is able to install a reflective distance within itself that allows it to be simultaneously the subject and the object of an enquiry. In this way, practice can deliver in one proposition both a thought and its appraisal. (Schwab & Borgdorff 2014, p.15)
Radical epistemology has broken free from ontology. What the world can be is limited only by our ability to radicalise our episteme, not by what the world is.
Schwab, M., ed. 2013. Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
In artistic research, a particular thing belongs to a particular world, which no other, preconceived world can replace or explain. Roland Barthes – in a different context – calls for an ‘impossible science of the unique being’, a thinking particular to a particular.
Schwab, M., and Borgdorff, H., eds. 2014. The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press.
Evaluation
JAR peer-review form
Question 3. Does the submission live up to its potential?
Please reflect on the potential of the submission and the way it is realised. How might the submission be improved to better match its potential?
Question 4. How does the submission expose practice as research?
JAR is open to submissions from various methodological backgrounds, as long as they expose practice as research. By this we mean that the submission exposes, translates, stages, performs etc. the practice it presents so as to engage with its own meaning, to challenge existing epistemic horizons or to offer new insights. Please take into account:
- Whether or not the submission contains a description of the question, issue or problem that is explored, and if not, if such an omission matters;
- Whether or not the submission shows evidence of innovation in content, form or technique in relation to a genre of practice, and if not, if such an omission matters;
- Whether or not the submission is contextualized and the context is referenced, which may include social, artistic and/or theoretical issues, and if not, if such an omission matters;
- Whether or not the submission provides new (kinds of) knowledge, interpretation, insights or experiences, and if not, if such an omission matters;
- Whether or not the submission’s methodology is adequate and thorough, and if not, if such an omission matters.
Ultimately, a submission may successfully expose practice as research despite disappointing conventional academic criteria for the assessment of research. If applicable, please state where the breaching of such criteria is detrimental to the submission.
So as to 'say something about' I am asked to presuppose that there is something of which something is going to be said, and what all to quickly happens here is that singularity becomes a something that occupies not only a position of antecedence but also sup-position or, in other words, sub-stance. (Lomax 2010, p.24)
There is not other word for it: you are seeing the thing in the midst of as being-called. As is not referring back to and presupposing some (prelinguistic) thing, but it is shimmering; for what you are seeing is a double movement, and it is taking place between the name 'tree' isofar as it is naming the tree and the tree insofar as it is named by the name 'tree'. This is the exposition that is being made to you, and with it you are seeing a delicate interval in which arises a pure appearance - a pure being-in-language. ... [the appearance] is neither the subject presubposed by discourse nor what is said in discourse of it. For you, it is the moment when you see what is named by the name appearing in language in the form of not its presupposition but, rather, its exposure. (Lomax 2010, p.104f.)
Expositionality
Exposing a pratice as research
(Re-)constructuion of a particular interrelationship of in- and selfdetermination.
Creating differential knowledge
Difficulty of integrating what exists as 'artistic research' into a single notion.
Differential units of meaning after a presupposed unitary world has been put into doubt through e.g. deconstructive processes.
Exposure, in other words being such-as, is not any of the real predicates (being red, hot, small, smooth, etc.), but neither is it other than these (otherwise it would be something else added to the concept of a thing and therefore still a real predicate). That you are exposed is not one of your qualities, but neither is it other than them.... Whereas real predicates express relationships within language, exposure is pure relationship with language itself, with its taking-place. (Agamben 1993, p.97)
Lomax, Y., 2009. Passionate Being: Language, Singularity and Perseverance. London/New York: I B Tauris.
Proto-objects
Schwab, M. 2012. “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” In Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research, edited by Florian Dombois, Ute Meta Bauer, Claudia Mareis, and Michael Schwab, 229–47. London: Koenig Books.
I propose to define artistic research as an activity that produces intelligible material whose initial lack of explanation within given contexts (such as ‘art’, ‘science’ etc.) is transformed through linkage procedures into identities that count as knowledge. This requires deconstructive operations that open up space for moments of potential knowledge, as well as constructive operations that reconstruct knowledge around what has been made, giving it identity and meaning. (Schwab 2012, p.240)
‘Stephen Melville … expounds how the work of the work of art is to establish itself as (as painting, sculpture, print and so on), that is the artwork must reaffirm what it is, for example, a piece of sculpture must declare itself as such. … [T]he as marks the work’s unfolding and the unfolding is not simply an unfolding on to itself as “the conditions of its appearing”; it is more generally the conditions of matter which could be said to “give itself over to articulation”.’ (MacLeod & Holdrige 2006, p. 4f.)
Encounters
Paolo Guidici http://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/99317/99318/1028/7124
[E]xpositions of artistic practice as research are little machines, practical assemblages of statements and visibilities; their epistemic outcome is differential knowledge that, remaining immanent to the machine itself, is strictly speaking not an outcome; finally, artistic research is a socio-historical threshold, contingent but not arbitrary, that “produces” new knowledge out of those machines.
Given certain knowledge, what exposition is capable of producing it? And given a certain exposition, for what can it be used?
Rancière, J., 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
To this practice of stultification he [Jacotot] counter-posed intellectual emancipation. Intellectual emancipation is the verification of the equality of intelligence. This does not signify the equal value of all manifestations of intelligence, but the self-equality of intelligence in all its manifestations. (Rancière 2009, p.10)
Schwab, M., 2012. “Exposition Writing.” In Yearbook for Artistic Research & Development, Stockholm: Swedish Research Council, pp.16–26.
In other words, second-order art-making needs the possibility of first-order art without ever being fully able to reach the claim of a negativity and autonomy that only first-order art can afford. Consequently, second-order art making utilises neither a different nor a minor form, as the history or theory of art might suggest. The fact that we think an ontological difference between it and first-order art must exist is due to the radical construction of the latter — it has to be different to be the first. (Schwab 2012, p.23f.)
MacLeod, K. & Holdridge, L., 2006. Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research. London and New York: Routledge
‘As painting thus explores the terms of visual practice in a field for which language is an ineradicable given; in doing so it aims at a visuality not so much supplanted by language as possessed of an articulation or thinking internal to it. This would be what it means to speak in terms of a “theoretical practice” or a “theoretical object”. “Theory” here would be less something a critic or historian brings to the work … than something to be traced in it, and writing would belong to such a work as part of its unfolding, a continuation of the conditions of its appearing.’ (Melville 2001, p. 19)
‘[T]hese acts of reference are all the more assured since they rely not some much on resemblance as on a regulated series of transformations, transmutations, and translations. A thing can remain more durable and be transported farther and more quickly if it continues to undergo transformations at each stage of this long cascade.
It seems that reference is not simply the act of pointing or a way of keeping, on the outside, some material guarantee for the truth of a statement; rather it is our way of keeping something constant through a series of transformations. Knowledge does not reflect a real, external world that it resembles via mimesis, but rather a real interior world, the coherence and continuity it helps to ensure.’ (Latour, Pandora’s Box, p. 58)
‘To know is not simply to explore, but rather is to be able to make your way back over your own footsteps, following the path you have just marked out.’ (Latour, Pandora’s Box, p. 74)
Melville, S., 2001. Counting / As / Painting. In As Painting: Divison and Displacement. Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts MIT Press, pp. 1-26.
'Rather, the 'as' [in 'performance as philosophy'] (in exchange for the 'and') signals and opening to reciprocal (in)determination or mutual transformation, as well as questioning the attribution of differences based on conventional disciplinary lines alone.' (p.22)
'Might we, in other words, say that peformance itself thinks, that performance itself philosophizes - not in a way that reduces it to being the same as philosophy ... but in a way that enriches our very concept of philsophy?' (p.25)
'...to re-open the very question of what counts as philosophical thought.' (p.27)
Seeking defence
Plato, Republic, Book X, 607 c-e
‘However, let us freely admit that if drama and poetry written for pleasure can prove to us that they have a place in a well-run society, we will gladly admit them, for we know their fascination only too well for ourselves; but it would be wicked to abandon what seems to be the truth [namely, that art should not be admitted]. I expect you feel the fascination of poetry yourself, don’t you,’ I asked, ‘especially when it’s Homer exercising it?’
‘I do indeed.’
‘It is only fair, then, that poetry should return if she can make her defence in lyric and other metre.’
‘Yes.’
‘And we should give her defenders, men who aren’t poets themselves but who love poetry, a chance of defending her in prose and providing that she doesn’t only give pleasure but brings lasting benefit to human life and human society. And we will listen favourably, as we shall gain much if we find her a source of profit as well as pleasure.’
‘Yes, we shall gain a lot.’
‘But if they fail to make their case, then we shall have to follow the example of the lover who renounces a passion that is doing him no good, however hard it may be to do so.’