Last month I linked to Tim Ingold’s talk at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to it it’s well worth it. Some things that Tim said stood out for me:
Research is the pursuit of truth.
Truth is aspirational.
It is absolutely not objective fact.Truth is the unison of imagination and experience in a world to which we are alive and that is alive to us.
Truth requires that we take ourselves into the world. We can’t remain outside of it.
There is danger in conflating truth and objectivity.
It is the search for truth that underpins research.
Search and search again. Research is continually conducted in the dark.
Most of this bit happens at about 45min into the talk.
Listening to the talk made me want to own my search for truth; and because truth is a word that seems to have been spurned in the academy (and certainly in the arts and humanities), that now seems an ideal time to welcome its pursuit. That there things at stake in the claims we make as artist-scholars.
practice as research blog 