the principle of mess

In May I did a presentation called The Many Practices of Practice Research. In it I proposed 9 principles of practice research and I thought I’d share them here one at a time. The first is called the principle of mess.

We normally associate research processes with words like methodical and rigorous, and most certainly we do not think of research as ad hoc.

In The Mangle of Practice (1995) the sociologist and historian of science Andrew Pickering describes the practice of science as an unpredictable “dance of agency” (Pickering 1995: 21). Pickering’s goal was to make a case that scientific practice represents a “dialectic of resistance and accommodation” (Pickering 1995: 22-23) and that it is overwhelmingly ad hoc.

Something ad hoc is makeshift; an emergency; it is improvised, impromptu and expedient, It is to “practise or create by using ad hoc measures, […] to assemble or organize chaotically” (noauthor 2021).

To work in an ad hoc way in artistic practice — as it is in science — is a strength, not a weakness. This is the principle of mess. The principle of mess does not discount the importance of methods and rigour. Rather, it brings mess (or practicing in an ad hoc way) into a dialectic with rigour.

references

Pickering, A. (1995) The Mangle of Practice. Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

noauthor (2021) ‘Ad Hoc, v.’ in OED Online [online] Oxford University Press. available from <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/289448> [14 December 2022]

what to share

I was asked the following question by a reader who is nearing the end of their artistic research PhD:

I’m in the messy decision making process of how to share practice to close the public aspect of my project … and what to share for examination alongside the thesis. It’s the hardest part for me, surrounded by ideas and possibilities but also thinking “what’s the minimal viable product”? What’s good enough?

My suggestion is to return to the research questions. It is the clarity of the project’s research questions that help determine what to share, how to share and what is enough. This is because as the RQs have emerged with the research methods then they start to act as the spine on which such decision making is built. If the RQs do not help then in my experience this is because they are not clear or precise enough to function in this way. If the questions lack the kind of specificity that is useful, then work and re-work the questions as you wrestle with the question of what to share. The RQs are the spine of the project; they help determine and constrain the limits, possibilities and excesses of the research.

Here’s Dirk Vis from Research for people who (think they) would rather create (2021, 1st edition)

In an ideal world, you would start your research by formulating a research question that is concrete, focused, and limited to a certain time, place and/or (set of) example(s). In reality, this is the exception rather than the rule. You will most likely start with hunches, intuitions and personal fascinations – as 99% of all students find their real research question somewhere along the way, halfway during the process or even at the very end. They find it through preliminary research of a broader topic which they then gradually narrow down. Be prepared to keep formulating and reformulating your preliminary research question, changing it countless times throughout the process – continuously making it more specific. (p.25)

Coincidentally, there’s a two day symposium at UniArts Helsinki (and online) this Thursday and Friday (27 and 28 October 2022) with the slightly overlapping theme of making artistic research public: https://www.uniarts.fi/en/events/earn-gathering-making-artistic-research-public/.

One more thing. I’d suggest that about 9 out of every 10 artistic research PhDs are too big in the sense of how much practice is shared and documented. My experience of these (including my own) is that they are akin to a shotgun approach to research: that is, if you fire enough times you are bound to hit something. In such projects students have failed to contain or gather the research such that the contribution to knowledge is clearly held by the RQs, the methods and what is shared. I’ve written previously about the relationship between questions, answers and methods here:
https://practiceasresearchblog.wordpress.com/2020/11/26/situated-position-and-questions-answers-and-methods/.

digging and patience

There’s a chapter in Art as a Thinking Process: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production by Jeremiah Day called Digging.

In it, Day describes helping a friend Erik Smith by videoing him “digging holes in Berlin on a piece of property that is in limbo” (p.65). Day asks Smith if he knows what kind of structure he has discovered but he:

prefers to sustain the period of this kind of discovery, through digging, attending to the soil and ash, in which a different kind of information is possible, one that is not axiomatic or verifiable.” (p.66)

The desire to name seems so tightly connected to the desire to know. But Smith’s focus on remaining with the digging is a powerful attitude and practice, regardless of the epistemic conditions or traditions of one’s field of discovery.

Reference:

Day, J. (2013) ‘Digging’. in Art as a Thinking Process: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. ed. by Ambrožič, M. and Vettese, A. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 62–67

epistemological core of artistic research is not fixed

Mika Elo’s chapter in Futures of artistic research: at the intersection of Utopia, academia and power is called FAQ. The chapter deals quite directly with the unknown in artistic research and how "sometimes one is lucky enough to come up with a question that points at something unforeseen" (p.49).

Elo writes that the "epistemological core of artistic research is not fixed – some even say it is empty – and appears only indirectly at the intersections or boundaries of different contexts" (p.51).

I take a lot of pleasure in the possibility that when we practice artistic research we might be filling this epistemic core (even if only for the duration of the research) and that the substance of that filling is strongly context dependent.

Elo’s thinking reminded me — rather tangentially — of how Jon Kabat-Zinn has described meditation as the method of no method. In a way I understand artistic research to be a method of no method. It is certainly not a set of protocols that is more or less followed by its practitioners.

But where does this very slippery thinking leave artist-researchers new to the field? Is there something more tangible for these people to grasp before they are able to live in the "mangle of practice" (Pickering, 1995) akin to Keats’ negative capability?

Steyerl on specificity and singularity

Hito Steyerl is an experimental video artist. She also has a PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

In 2010, she wrote an article for MaHKUzine: Journal of Artistic Research called ‘Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research as Discipline and Conflict’. You can find it in lots of places but here’s one version: transversal.at/pdf/journal-text/270/

The writing covers a lot of ground including how "current debates [in artistic research] do not fully acknowledge the legacy of the long, varied and truly international history of artistic research." (Steyerl, 2010, p.32)

One section in particular caught my eye and I’ll quote it here at length:

In all these methods, two elements collide: a claim to specificity clashes with a claim to singularity. What does this mean? One aspect of the work claims to participate in a general paradigm, within a discourse that can be shared and which is manufactured according to certain criteria. More often than not, scientific, legalistic or journalistic truth procedures underly this method of research. These methodologies are pervaded by power relations as many theorists have demonstrated.

On the other hand, artistic research projects in many cases also lay claim to singularity. They create a certain artistic set up, which claims to be relatively unique and produces its own field of reference and logic. This provides it with a certain autonomy, in some cases an edge of resistance against dominant modes of knowledge production. In other cases, this assumed singularity just sexes up a quantitative survey, or to use a famous expression by Benjamin Buchloh, creates an aesthetic of administration.”

While specific methods generate a shared terrain of knowledge – which is consequently pervaded by power structures – singular methods follow their own logic. While this may avoid the replication of existing structures of power/knowledge, it also creates the problem of the proliferation of parallel universes, which each speak their own, untranslatable language. Practices of artistic research usually partake in both registers, the singular as well as the specific; they speak several languages at once.

— Hito Steyerl 2010, p.35

So much of this language is vague: "certain criteria" (which criteria?), "more often than not" (how can one disagree with this?), "pervaded" (compared with what?), "power relations" (as if they are always ‘bad’), "many theorists" (what of theorists who have demonstrated alternatives?), "relatively unique" (relative to what?) … you get the drift.

But I think Steyerl articulates a genuine issue for practice-research when she places specificity of methods in tension with the singularity of epistemic claims ("its own field of reference and logic"), and her sense that artistic research exists "in both registers".

The problem, as I think of it, is to recognise that we — artist-scholars — are in common with other practitioners in (at least) three ways: i) how we go about making work; ii) who our practices are in relation to; and iii) how the form-content of our practices is in relationship to those other practices. Indeed, I see this understanding of being in common (and being ‘in difference’) as a clear division between artistic research and just plain making art. That is, in order to do artistic research it behooves us to clearly acknowledge the ways in which we are part of a field of practice. This is not to say that artists making work do not do this (clearly artists acknowledge — and cite — influence all of the time), it’s just not a necessity.

The alternative, in which artist-scholars just go about making work with specific and singular methods, is precisely the proliferation of Steyerl’s parallel universes: individual bubbles of originality adrift in epistemic wonderland.

Reference: Steyerl, H. (2010) ‘Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research as Discipline and Conflict’. MaHKUzine. Journal of Artistic Research (8), 31–37.

responsibility and community

In 2003 Peter Thomson published an article in Studies in Theatre and Performance called Practice as Research. The article is an edited collection of exchanges that happened online on the SCUDD list-serv in 2002. The whole exchange is fascinating, not least because it makes clear just how many of the contestable aspects of practice-research in theatre, dance and performance in 2002 remain somewhat controversial today.

In this post I want to draw attention to Caroline Rye’s contribution to the exchange and I quote it at length here:

Maybe the assumption is that the more ‘visible’ and revisitable our research, the ‘better’ that research is, and that the production of documents will facilitate this availability and confirm its quality as research. The emphasis on a repeatable form of dissemination might occur in order to maintain some notion of a ‘complete’ research community, which can have non-exclusive and unconditional access to the research in order to benefit and progress the whole ‘research’ organism.

Wouldn’t that be a slightly simplistic model of knowledge production? Our field of performance research is a highly contested area (as is, I imagine, research in other disciplines). There is little or no consensus, and any number of contradictory ideas and beliefs can be held by any number of ‘research bodies’ at any time. To admit to this much more fractured composition of the research community may also involve the replacing the notion of the ‘academy’ with a number of ‘academies’.

Additionally, we may also have to admit that some forms of knowledge are context-specific, but that, nevertheless, some kind of knowledge-exchange (modification/realization) has taken place, which is of benefit to the discipline as a whole (in the way individuals or groups might produce new work, talk, write, experience performance etc.). This is one of the challenges that PaR presents to the ‘academy’. Must, then, PaR practitioners articulate their activities in a manner which the academy finds acceptable (conventional, accessible)?

What I like about Rye’s challenges (or perhaps ambivalences) is that they hint at a question of responsibility, and how broadly we — artist-scholars — might take our responsibilities. That is, we certainly have some responsibility to the specifics (and perhaps uniqueness) of the artistic practice(s), but what do we imagine our responsibilities to be towards the artistic and scholarly communities at large? To present our work in some ways might serve the form-content of the practice, but render it inaccessible or even irrelevant to the research community (or academies as Rye describes). How to navigate this balance between responsibility and community?

See also Biggs and Büchler’s concept of Situated Position: practiceasresearchblog.wordpress.com/2020/11/26/situated-position-and-questions-answers-and-methods/

Reference

Thomson, P. (2003) ‘Practice as Research’. Studies in Theatre and Performance 22 (3), 159–180.