|
Critical objects :the practice of research through making
London Guildhall University, England <cdsmith@lgu.ac.uk> |
volume 3 contents
journal home page conference home page copyright |
|
|
full paper ° abstract | |
|
A picture is not worth a thousand words or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture. (Donald Davidson, What Metaphors Mean)
This paper is an attempt to work through, and not yet work out, a number of puzzles of thinking about the relationship between words and images and knowledge. Not least of such "puzzles" is our prioritisation of word over image. These puzzles have, personally, continued to cause some bewilderment, and not a little joy, also some frustration in their complexity too. These terms and the complexity of their relationship seems to be central to debate in visual arts research and has become focused by concerns about AHRB criteria for research. Much has concentrated on whether knowledge is contained in the artefact, and knowledge generation in relation to the artefact as a research outcome. This paper attempts to outline some of the features, which I believe, lead to the position that has caused problems in regard to the place of both practice and the role of artefacts in art and design research. Problems that come from particular models of knowledge, and the consideration of the activity of research as opposed to outcomes and what stands as an outcome. Artefacts are of course the product of knowledge processes, call these methods or rules and are, as such, objects of culture(s). To this extent then they "contain" knowledge (I mean this rather metaphorically). What mechanics we have for the extraction of that knowledge and how we might know those knowledges, inclusive of some intentionality of communication included in the production, is what we are concerned with here. (We seem to obsess about knowledge. But the AHRB refers to both knowledge and understanding. "Understanding" has a less restrictive form in the sense it allows us to deal with percepts and apprehensions (though I contend these are forms of knowledge). There are a range of objects which we may have to speculate about – properly the domain of such speculation is within the humanities, social sciences, archaeology, anthropology and varying histories, etc. There are everyday objects and, indeed, object becomings which may be termed artefacts that exist contextually within the variety of frames of reference of contemporary cultural production. There are arguments that knowledge is not contained in the artefact, particularly the artwork. Stephen Scrivener has argued this powerfully in a paper given at the last conference. Michael Biggs has argued in a paper given to the PARIP 2003 National Conference that it is context that gives meaning and authoritative knowledge to artefacts. To indicate a certain history and problematic to this debate I can quote the following from Michael Oakeshott's essay on "Rationalism and Politics" (1962, 9). The Duke of Ch'I was reading a book at the upper end of the hall; the wheelwright was making a wheel at the lower end. Putting aside his mallet and chisel he called to the Duke and asked him what book he was reading.
"One that records the words of the Sages," answered the Duke "Are those Sages alive?" asked the wheelwright "Oh no" said the Duke, "they are dead." "In that case," said the wheelwright, "what you are reading can be nothing but the lees and scum of bygone men," "How dare you, a wheelwright, find fault with the book I am reading. If you can explain your statement, I will let it pass. If not, you shall die." "Speaking as a wheelwright," he replied "I look at the matter this way; when I am making a wheel, if my stroke is too slow, then it bites deep but it is not steady; if my stroke is too fast, then it is steady, but it does not go deep. The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart. It is a thing that cannot be put into words [rules]; there is an art in it that I cannot explain to my son. That is why it is impossible for him to take over my work, and here I am at the age of seventy still making wheels. In my opinion it must have be with the men of old. All that was worth handing on, died with them; the rest, they put in their books. That is why I said you were reading from the lees and scum of bygone men." Chuang Tzu. Oakeshott was using this quote to extend an argument against a purely rationalist knowledge – what he would see as technical knowledge as separate from practical knowledge, though arguing for both in any activity. I find the quote interesting for two reasons; firstly, under the impetus of death we get an account of wrighting from the wheelwright which elegantly explains a problem which is then theorised into an explanation as to the weakness of explanative text; secondly, it is nicely contradictory in that it is a text that exists to explain this dilemma between text and activity. We are, though, clear that there is a gap, that descriptions do not adequately stand for practice. I would contend that this is also the case in regard to the text and the image. The strands of contemporary thought termed "the linguistic turn" by Richard Rorty has lead, I believe, to a confusion in the relationship between images and text. It is assumed both are read – I would wish to draw a distinction between them; texts may be read, images are imagined. I would wish to make this distinction and draw on W.J.T.Mitchell's term of a "pictorial turn." In doing so I would argue for the exhibition being a properly construed model for outcomes in art practice, because the contribution to knowledge is in the work, and, indeed, in research as activity. An exhibition imagined does embody a form of knowledge. This is equal and as difficult to imagine, as some texts are to read. I try to extend some of these themes below. In addressing the conference theme I wish to take a particular, some may say particularly tortured, view of the artefact. In the conference outline an artefact is described as follows: "artefact (in the sense of man-made, e.g. objects, images, sounds, performances, etc.)." I contend that the "etc." here contains that often given primacy over the artefact, namely text, either written, audio visual, or any attempt through another medium to explain or interpret another artefact. The Online Oxford Dictionary definition of an artefact is as follows: A. n. Anything made by human art and workmanship; an artificial product. In Archæol. applied to the rude products of aboriginal workmanship as distinguished from natural remains.
And again ….1927 G. MURRAY Class. Tradition 243 Poetry.. is an "artifact" I mean, it is a thing made If we then consider the text – that is written or verbal explanation and contextualisation (though we could include any audio visual, and thus vision/language structured "text") – as artefact, then we have to consider the equal placing and merits and problematic of meaning generation of these as artefacts, as we have to consider those of artworks and the products of craft practices. Indeed if they are one and the same, i.e. artefacts, we would be lead to consider them in the same way. We could not, and should not, privilege one over the other. We could consider that they contain knowledges in varying and differing ways, and that the interpretation of those knowledges is equally problematised by social, cultural, and philosophical considerations. I make these remarks in particular regard to the often fraught question that seems to be a constant of discourse in the field of art and design research; namely, does the artefact contain knowledge that is transmittable and, in the hard case, remain constant? It seems to me that this is presented as a particular epistemological question when it is in fact more a social and political question, relating to the issue of iconophobia - a fear of images, forever reduced by a sense of their inherent subjectivity and strangely their power to deceive and corrupt - rather than to the particular certitude manifested in this artefact or that artefact. I will be expanding on this latter point later in this paper. In a paper delivered to the PARIP 2003 National Conference Michael Biggs has argued that intrinsic and extrinsic factors need to be controlled for effective communication to take place. (I hope I am, here, fair in paraphrasing his argument. I am not attempting to critically analyse his thought provoking paper; rather I am drawing on threads that I hope characterise a dilemma.) He argues, by drawing on museological studies, that current debate in that area does not justify any claims for the artefact (here separated from interpretive and explanative material) as capable of communicating separately from a context and a controlled contextualisation system. He accepts that the Humanities offers interpretation rather than answers to problems and indeed supports a case for works that problematise or raise issues. He also raises the issue, and indeed problematises the issue of knowledge embodied in the artefact; this sometimes referred to as "work" and sometimes "object", as capable of intrinsic embodiment of knowledge. The shifting interpretive schema of classifications and perceived relationships between objects, as outlined in the work of Foucault and Kuhn, is used here to dismiss the possibility of works standing on their own, but, rather, that it is these extrinsic classifications which convey knowledge and not intrinsic aspects of the objects. He also draws a distinction between the passive act of seeing and an active notion of interpretation. There is a use made of museological studies that seems to refute intrinsic knowledge in artefacts. He considers that there is little material difference between some artefacts, and that this leads us to have to consider them, in particular archaeological "works", as fixed and consistent in their meaning or function. He makes use of Vergo's distinction of "aesthetic" and contextual exhibitions. The former implicitly echoing Wollheim in his critique of the "physical object" hypothesis. In part Biggs presents for us a case which, whilst moderated later in the paper, suggests that the artefact will need to be contextualised for any research outcome status. I am not here going to argue against the idea that there is an interpretive act that constitutes both an aesthetic reading of artwork as a category of artefact which may or may not be objects (objects, not necessarily being man - made), as well as a critical, functional examination of such objects. For surely an aesthetic seeing, reading, is a felt phenomenological and interpretive experience. What I would claim is alongside Biggs is that the contextualisation of work allows it to be read and may or may not allow it's reading (or in my terms imagining) to be to this or that position. I might conjecture that the fact of separating objects into artefacts and, therefore presumably a category of non - artefacts, will need some rules. When is a rock a tool and therefore an artefact? Does it remain outside of the category of artefacts if there is no work done on it? Is that "work" physical or mental? Categorisation operates as a function of active human life – a life that would not be possible without such acts of differentiation. Objects become artefacts, become artworks, become paintings, etc. Becomes these, both as an act of production and viewing, in a cycle of meaning production within social and cultural contexts. These are established in themselves as rule sets both of production and viewing. Both require competencies of maker and viewer in the cycle. They may of course be different rule sets and indeed there maybe a multiplicity of rule sets that need applying. A question I ask is of the rule sets of reading required for the written text, or is there in this case an assumption of a competency of the reader or viewer in the specific context of research? Again, where I say "reading" I stay with the now normalised method or paradigm where what I would wish is that we talk in relation to images of imagining. The issue of competency is often fraught, Charles Harrison argues for a return to conceiving spectators as being inquisitive and willing to engage with the artefact. For "…the re-emergence of a fully active and inquisitive spectator – one emancipated by doubt and insecurity, one who could be considered as a contributor to some sort of conversation – like activity." (Harrison: 2001, 177) I would like to extend this notion of a conversation like activity – what we talk about and how we "talk" about it, is a question of the political power of artefacts and supporting materials, texts, and films, within the particularity of judgmental regimes. It is not therefore the competency of right judgement based on templates of taste but an entering into a critical discourse about intentions, what passes as competent work, etc. (Harrison's arguments in regard to the spectator are too complex to summarise in this paper but I refer the reader to them for a possible model of looking) I would at least wish that we allow that the issue of competency in spectatorship is an issue of visuality, and not just of readings from texts as explanatory of image. Further, it would seem there is an issue of competencies in relation to the artwork, or for that matter artefacts, in research outcomes. We need to consider this carefully for it is in judgements of competency that ratings of research must reside. It is just such competency that seems to be in question here in regard to artefacts. But I must ask whose competency? Those who constitute peers as practitioners, or other disciplines, or assessment by the AHRB? Biggs seems to suggest that context is everything in the reading of objects - or does he mean artefacts or works - the latter two already becoming in classificatory regimes with their rules and criteria. Why is there a suspicion of the exhibition that seems to be categorised as merely aesthetic? In other words, aesthetic exhibitions being exhibitions without other contextualising materials. I would contend that this is part of a long history in iconophobia. An Iconophobia which finds the image problematic in so far as there is a mistrust of the image. This has been echoed in philosophical discourse and also some critical debate (see Richard Rorty and Susan Sontag for example). I would like to draw upon the work of W.J.T. Mitchell to develop this section. I will attempt for our purposes here to indicate the complex relationship that he has drawn between image and text. He is interested in the language games that we play with the notion of image. There is a sense in his writings of the imaginary as idea, playing on the recursive problem generated by the relationship between idea and imagery. He, in this sense, does not allow the Platonic sense of dealing with eidos and eidolon, in the former case a supersensible reality and in the latter that provides a mere likeness. He cites and analyses a number of thinkers Bacon, Lessing, Burke, Wittgenstein, Marx and Rorty, which leads him to surmise an iconophobia in their thought. He sees them presenting an anxiety about visual representation and a need to defend speech against the visual. He does not contend they deal with the visual in one single thesis, rather that in their work they display this anxiety. Yet, beyond this anxiety, there is a world dominated by the visual. He argues that the following paradox seems to exist and in what manner this generates a "pictorial turn": If we ask ourselves why a pictorial turn seems to be happening now, in what is often characterised as a "postmodern" era, the second half of the twentieth century, we encounter a paradox. On the one hand it seems overwhelmingly obvious that the era of video and cybernetic technology, the age of electronic reproduction, has developed new forms of visual simulation and illusionism with unprecedented powers. On the other hand, the fear of the image, the anxiety that the "power of images" may finally destroy even the creators and manipulators, is as old as image – making itself. (Mitchell: 1994,15)
He brings into doubt that texts have the power to explain images and that text and image can be dealt with in the same manner. Whatever the pictorial turn is, then it should be clear that it is not a return to naïve mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of "pictorial presence": it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies and figurality. It is the realisation that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or "visual literacy" might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality. (Mitchell: 1994, 16)
I have quoted Mitchell at length here because it seems to me to set a research agenda for us about visuality; namely, one that places the artefact central to research concerns and the outcomes of practice. If we take this with Stephen Scrivener's position that the proper goal of visual art research is visual art, then we a placed in the situation of asking how is some form of knowledge transmitted through the "works". Scrivener avoids this problem by removing art from a traditional sense of knowledge; that is, knowledge as true belief. I would though argue that his "apprehensions" define knowledge in broader terms. I agree that works do not construct a propositional knowledge (though I am not sure it is not possible to construct it as such with the work of Art and Language). Perhaps in AHRB terms we should use the term "understandings"? In her paper to the last conference, Linden Reilly suggested that the restrictive definition of knowledge as "true belief" is no longer tenable and argues for giving sensation and imagination a greater role, thus permitting the arts practitioner a space to engage in the debate about the nature of knowledge (Linden Reilly: 2002). It maybe imperative that we engage in such discussion for practice based research. The problematic of the visual image is often placed in the possibility of multiple interpretations, the polysemic nature of the image. Indeed the informational matrix that is a "work" could be interpreted in many differing ways. No one would assert otherwise. But we come back to the issue of competency, for we are not talking about practice as research and review by peers being outside of contemporary culture(s) or that there is not a shared intersubjectivity which might allow an imagining of meaning in the "work". But this should be understood as an imagining within frames and references of a taken - for - granted assumptiveness. This could even be a taken - for - granted assumptiveness to be on my guard about either the intentions that are in the piece (I can take it as an intention that some artists may allow for and desire multiple imaginings) or the auspices of my critical, analytical and judgmental criteria. Harrison in following Wollheim says the following: My sense here is close to what Wollheim calls "expressive perception," which in his account follows from "seeing in." See especially Painting as an Art, Princeton [Princeton University Press] and London [Thames and Hudson], 1987, pp.80-89. "Expressive perception stands to expression in much the same way as seeing – in stands to representation" (p.85). For Wollheim successful recovery of the meaning of a painting depends on the being looked at in the manner conforming to the artist intention - allowing intentions to be possibly, indeed importantly unconscious. "Intentions must be understood so as to include thoughts, beliefs, memories, and, in particular, emotions and feelings, that the artist had and that, specifically, caused him to paint as he did" (p.86). Wollheim gets around traditional objection to expression theories - that we have no means of confirming that what we experience conforms to what the causal conditions in question have produced - by stressing the spectator's obligation to look at it in the right way; that is to say, by looking at it as it is made to be looked at. I follow Wollheim in holding that if a work of art is not made so as to produce a relevant response in a competent spectator then it is an incompetent work of art. But we might want to allow a work of art to be the of some critical exchange between the competencies in question. (Harrison: 2001, 226 -7)
That art as a practice has allowed the ideology of the aesthetic to be supplanted by the ideological seems to move us from modernist dilemma of the either / or of inner necessity or doing it for money, one authentic the other inauthentic, capitalist or socialist. (Danto's Institutional theory worked large with and against constructions of inner necessity and a constructive individualism.) There may of course be a problem in the universalised Duchampian object in so far as it makes a claim that only operates through metaphorical space and context. There is also a problem in so far as it has come to stand for a range of contemporary practices. Whatever, the Duchampian paradigm has created a space where context becomes everything, whether this is the gallery or the textual placing. It has taken from its work the inner complexity of the work. The work stands merely for the other. I would like now to move from the above which sketches a dilemma and a space from which objects, artefacts, are treated somehow as problematic and in a manner that might dismiss or leave them to stand on their own merely as a "cue" for other more profound activity. I would like to move on to separating the outcomes of research and the process of research. Maybe defined as exhibition and activity. Making work is the research activity of the artist. Strategies, tactics and methods vary by artist and genre but most likely by the latter, the former finding themselves in genre in a psychological and pragmatic manner(s). The maker / artist researches in a form of encounter with, more or less, ideas, and the forms of artistic production and transformation. There are a range of tryings out, workings out, that constitute the activity of production. This in turn can be seen either as translational or transformational. This translational and transformational activity takes place in history and culture. In so far as it is making sense within rules (or breaking rules) it is conditioned activity. It is conditioned by the broader community and is understood in regard to difference and similarity. I say nothing, I hope, that is not recognisable to a practitioner. Makers refer to their own practice - to their own body of work and to the bodies of work of their own and other genres: there is a theorising that is contained in this working out; it can be a critical theorising. It is certainly contained in the practice: in the wrighting. There is a critical debate that exists between objects in and across the body of work of the individual artist, their genre and the work of others in that genre. We can also make cross genre comparisons. These can be done through reference to the materiality of the constituent features of the object. If we pick up the theme of this paper, that is, to deal with a problematising of the relationship between writing and wrighting, that is also the problem of the relationship between text and artefact as well. We find ourselves in this arena whereby language and art become intertwined but at the same time declare separateness. This confusion properly spoken of (con meaning together, and fusion – fusion together): such an intertwining, gives us some strength to be going on with. In the work of Art and Language over the last thirty plus years we find a relationship between text and image that echoes the ambiguities of the relationship between text and image. But the possible "crisis" is dealt with in the manner of moving the "audience" from spectator as passive consumer to participant (Harrison: 2001, 196). This required a particular organisation of display. Michael Baldwin has said of the Art & Language work of the late 1960's that it was subject to a reciprocating form of "emergency conditional": it was "art" just in case it was (taken for) "philosophy," and it was "philosophy" just in case it was "taken for art" (Harrison: 2001, 19). The sense of a stability of category seems then to be in doubt. Certainly, the relationship does not prioritise text over image or vice versa, but echoes the conversational character mentioned earlier. The sense of text theorising the image and explaining it might be a legitimate claim for an encounter from another discipline, but for artists / makers then there would be a sense (rightly) of playing with those other disciplines. The artists may find themselves in a space of authenticating their work through a range of disciplines such as cultural studies, sociological studies or art history or criticism. Though this may not be the voice of the artist nor inform us of the image. Readings and analysis may not be the same as looking or seeing and imagining as we have indicated earlier. Other disciplines deal with art under the auspices of their disciplined methods of enquiry. However there is an alternative in self - generated theory through practice. Indeed, the criticism of the studio is different from that of the discipline of art criticism. Art and Language present to us work that is partially generated from theory - theories other and theories self generated - it is also work that is worked out in the studio through iterative attempts to achieve a "working out" and a theorising, therefore, in process and progress. What their work has been about is a conversation, an attempt to, as Harrison has put it, generate " a transforming and self - transformational conversation" (Harrison: 2001,196). This sense of conversation was put together as an Index in an exhibition at Documenta 5 in 1972 where according to Harrison the texts were set to speak, interrogate and argue with each other. There then followed a number of other indexical shows. These, according to Harrison had to function in a particular way: It is the function of an index to open pathways through a composed body of material, to indicate the world from which that material has been drawn and thus to lay open to scrutiny the processes of composition themselves (Harrison: 2001,197).
In exhibiting work there is both a call on the original conversationalists and a call on the spectator to enter conversation. The original call is that of composition within, through and in contest with genre, whilst the latter calls on the spectator to become collaborator. The idea of exhibition can be extended beyond Vergo's contrast of aesthetic and contextual exhibitions. Griselda Pollock has stated that she is interested in the idea of exhibition as encounter: The exhibition as "encounter" is what interests me. I think it is a form of research and a form of art. Or rather there is an aesthetic consciousness at work in trying to find forms of presentation and contextualisation that are sympathetic to the art works I am dealing with. That is radically different from academic work or curation that imposes a frame upon works and makes them the objects of knowledge and display. (Griselda Pollock in: Raney: 2003,155)
It would seem to me, then: we have to consider the way artefacts come into being and the indexical and creative ways the idea of exhibition is constructed in terms of research. This presumes a sense of contextualisation of artefacts in the way in which they may speak to each other and to the competent viewer. In regard to artwork there would not be an adequacy in research terms for a single work to be an outcome, arguably we would see work as a body of work emerging from an enquiry. It is possible that the work is so opaque that it is difficult. If so then I am not sure that this negates the work as research outcome or that it could be claimed it does not engender new percepts or apprehensions. We may prefer clarity but that is a disputable criterion for judging work if we take percepts as a form of knowledge which is equal to and as complex as knowledge gained through text. In this paper, to summarise, I have attempted to work through a number of related themes to establish a case for the way context exists in and through a body of work. We need to seriously look at the relation between text and image and to accept differences between reading and imagining. We also need to further our understandings of exhibition and perhaps the criteria that may be needed for the case of the "research exhibition." Does this lie in a textual contextualisation, or can we have as I have tried to establish accept a contextualisation through the materiality of the work? References Biggs, Michael. 2003. "The role of "the work" in art and design research" Parip National Conference 11-14 September 2003 http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/bigg.htm Davidson, Donald. 1979. "What Metaphors Mean" In: Sheldon Sacks (ed.) On Metaphor, Chicago and London Harrison, Charles. 2001. Essays on Art and Language, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press – 2001. Conceptual Art and Painting, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press Mitchell, W.J.T 1987. Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press – 1995. Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press Oakshott, Michael. 1962. Rationalism in Politics and other Essays, London: Methuen Raney, Karen. 2003. Art in Question, London and New York: continuum Reilly, Linden. 2002. "An alternative model of "knowledge" for the arts" Working Papers in Art and Design Volume 2. http://www.artdes.herts.ac.uk/papers/wpades/vol2/reillyfull.html Scrivener, Stephen. 2002. "The art object does not embody a form of knowledge" Working Papers in Art and Design Volume 2. http://www.artdes.herts.ac.uk/papers/wpades/vol2/scrivenerfull.html |
to cite this journal article: Smith, C. (2004) Critical objects :the practice of research through making. Working Papers in Art and Design 3 Retrieved <date> from URL http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/ papers/wpades/ vol3/csfull.html ISSN 1466-4917 |
|