ART&RESEARCH

These jottings touch on five elements of method that I should like to relate to art practice and research. Two are sketched below followed by four truncated entries for future elaboration “Lund”, “Confucius Lab”, “Uddevalla Volvo”, “Nameless Science or the Unnameable?”

Mulling Over Method

(1) The query that crops up right away with the idea of  “visual art as knowledge production” is: “what sort of knowledge?” Hard on its heels “What marks out its difference, its otherness?” Should we not rather speak of non-knowledge - activity that is neither hard-nosed know-how nor its ostensible opposite, ignorance? The question is especially pertinent in today’s expanding knowledge economy that we should not only see as a “technological development” but as an emerging overall condition of living that I prefer to speak of as the “grey-matter” environs.

(2) “Visual Art as Knowledge Production” involves sundry epistemic engines and contraptions that we might broadly refer to as “Thinking Through the Visual”. What do such modes of knowing entail? How do they tick?

With (1) above, we can get bogged down fairly quickly with the daunting notion that nothing counts unless it has the systematic rigour of “science”. This might be an unavoidable, bracing test-demand of today’s knowledge scene. However it should not blind us to the fact that what we lump together as “science” is often a congeries of quite divergent activities, disciplines and domains, each with its own kit of objectives and logical procedures. We should be wary of treating them as if they added up to a monstrous monolith. In any event, many scientists themselves remain more than a pinch circumspect of philosophical attempts to sum up their activities with a single overarching methodological principle. We might do better to keep matters open, perhaps with a feel for the hodgepodge of methods, even muddle, that attends the lab workbench. Though Gaston Bachelard’s musings might in parts sound a touch dated, his view of “science” as a plurality of practices in which “each secretes its own epistemology” - each, arguably, with its own “degree of approximation to truth” - serves as an antidote to a solo, make or break, subsuming principle of knowledge, truth and method.¹ His account resonates with the state of play in art practice and research that also amounts to a proliferation of self-shaping probes, stand-alone inquiries, motley see-think-know modes. Their sheer heterogeneous spill tends to stump and stonewall generalizable principles - at any rate; they resist being wholly taken under the wing of systematic methodological explication.

Two examples fleshes out the point: Marcel Duchamp spent years devising a lingo, with rules, anti-rules and measures, mingled in with doses of quirk, chance and random intrusion for his Large Glass project (1915-21). Sometimes they appear to strive towards formulation as abstract principles of method - as “algebraic expression” in his phrase - that can be applied at large. At other moments they hunker down to one-off use - with relevance only to a particular, unique, intensive instance. There is a billowing out towards the global scope of “method proper” countered by retraction to the modestly local, here and now. Duchamp damped down wider claims for his methods by noting that they were “probably only applicable to individual works” such as his own Large Glass. With the Passage from Virgin to Bride we feel a process of becoming - emergence from brooding states of possibility - towards a kit of disposable rules of engagement that seem poised to dissolve back into a pervasive, unpredictable, creative muddle. In contrast to Duchamp’s conceptual domain, the second example is from the retinal field: David Hockney’s look at regimes of seeing, Secret Knowledge (1990) - a project that might be seen as “art research” avant la lettre. He rubs up his examination of retinal-optical schemas and their underlying structural principles against his keen observations of how they are often modified and moulded by the artist’s eccentric eye or touch. We glean that the drive to render, regulate and represent perceptual experience on the back of methodological formulae is constantly amended by the artist’s handling, by embodied knowledge.

What comes into spotlight with these two somewhat iconic examples - the sample could be expanded to take in Mario Navarro, Seydou Boro, Tamar Guimaraes, Thomas Hirschhorn, Lu Jie, Huang Xiaopeng amongst others - is the point that method is perhaps less about given, handed-down procedures than about approaches that have to be thrashed out, forged again and again on the spot, impromptu in the course of the art practice-research effort. I am left pondering the idea that method is not so much readymade and received as “knocked together for the nonce” - something that has to be invented each time with each research endeavour.

Any Space Whatever

With the above we have what looks like a roller coaster between the methodological pole of “universal application” and that of the rule of thumb restricted to the “particular”. How to portray something of this oscillation in theoretical terms? Deleuze came to explore the sense of an unfolding flux between the “poles” in all its phases and variability through the notion of “any space whatever” - drawing on a series of examples from film.² In his critique, “any space whatever” takes on the force of method: it embodies the concept of “singularity” that cuts across the poles of the universal and particular dissolving them. A strand in the backstory of this notion, as we might deduce from his reference to Bachelard, seems to lie with Ferdinand Gonseth who had tussled with the “any space whatever” in mathematics, with rules that undergo change, with process and contingency. In the framework of a non-Aristotelian logic, Bachelard had used the term for an alternative tack to the Kantian principle of the “universal” - also, to bridge the gap between thinking either in apriori or aposteriori terms, in empirical or in rationalist key.³

For our purposes, it is Georgio Agamben’s “whatever” that will have to do as a more digestible, more spelled-out version of a methodological alternative to the “universal/particular” polarity - to what can be slotted neither into the category of the “individual” nor into the “generic” without grievous distortion. He broaches it as modal oscillation illustrated by the example of the human face. Its constantly changing liveliness, its vivacity, he notes, embodies a singularity that is neither an individual manifestation of a “general pre-existing facial template” nor a “universalisation” of the unique traits of one specific face. Perhaps not unlike an ever morphing ripple between the extremes of “all faces in a crowd” and “just this one” in front of us? He goes on:

In the line of writing the ductus of the hand passes continually from the common form of the letters to the particular marks that identify its singular presence, and no one, even using the scrupulous rigour of graphology, could ever trace the real division between these two spheres. So too in a face, human nature continually passes into existence and it is precisely this incessant emergence that constitutes its expressivity. But would it be equally plausible to say the opposite: it is from the hundred idiosyncrasies that characterize my way of writing the letter p or of pronouncing its phoneme that its common form is engendered. Common and proper, genus and individual are only the two slopes dropping down from either side of the watershed of whatever.⁴

His sum up can sound a trifle pat, even reductive. He evokes something elusive graphically only to nail it down all too firmly as a principle. Deleuze, on the other hand, teases out, frame by frame, the diverse ways in which “whatever singularity” comes to be embodied in specific scenes - a diverse sequence of examples that cannot be fixed into a rule that has “universal” coverage. Agamben highlights the tricky methodological poser we cannot easily shake off - that by opting to treat art practice and research either entirely under the universal or the particular, either exclusively on the immanent or transcendental plane, we miss out on reckoning with its intrinsic condition, its “singularity”.

With (2) above, we have to clock both senses of the phrase “Thinking Through the Visual” in order to latch onto its import for method. It is not only about thinking by means of the visual, via its sticky thick as it were. It is about unpacking it, taking apart its components, scouring its operations. A point that crops up at this juncture is what makes the texture of visual art thinking quite its own, its difference? What is its distinctive thrust in contrast to other disciplines at the more academic end of the spectrum - to forms of inquiry tied up with, say, mainstream anthropology, sociology, literary and communication studies or historiography? Does it spawn “other” kinds of knowledge they cannot - what I’ve elsewhere called “xeno-epistemics”?⁵ How to sound this obscure surge without treating it as an unchanging essence of art practice? What I am trying to finger eventuates not so much in the well-trodden terrain of the academic disciplines or in the so-called gaps, chinks and cracks between them or in any designated “interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary” belt. Rather it is a force in its own right, always incipient in “whatever” spaces - windswept, derelict brownfields and wastelands - where intimations of unknown elements, thinking probes, spasms of non-knowledge emerge and come into play. It is distinct from the circuits of know-how that run on clearly spelled out methodological steel tracks. It is the rather unpredictable surge and ebb of potentialities and propensities - the flux of no-how. The term is Samuel Beckett’s although I intend it here without that shot of bleakness with which he normally imbues it. No-how embodies indeterminacy, an “any space whatever” that brews up, spreads, inspissates.⁶

This is not to say that visual art practices do not interact with established discursive-academic circuits and think-know components. They do so vigorously - glossing and translating them, aping them with bouts of piss-take, subjecting them to détournement. However, this should not lull us into seeing the discursive as the only or the prime modality of “thinking through the visual”. Alongside, runs its intensive non-discursive register, its seething para-discursive charge and capability - both its “pathic” and “phatic” force, its penumbra of the non-verbal, its somatic scope, its smoky atmospherics, its performative range.

For method, the job is to draw a vital distinction between “thinking through the visual” and the somewhat crimped mode of “visual thinking”. By the latter, I mean those approaches to the visual that treat it predominantly as an “image-lingo” - basing it on a linguistic model ostensibly with codes of grammar, syntax and related regularities. The rise of this view accompanies strands of Conceptual Art - also the poststructuralist-semiological dispensation where “reading and telling” the visual is styled as an almost full-blown linguistic and “literacy” enterprise. Its impact is to restrict the visual to verbal-discursive legibility - a linguistic turn and dexterity exemplified by Lacan’s pronouncement that “the unconscious is structured like a language”. In this perspective, “talking over the visual” - in the sense of mulling it over - literally turns into “talking over and above it”.

Agglutinatives

“Thinking Through the Visual” - at odds with “visual thinking” - is about what we may dub the “agglutinative mode”:
(i) To speak of it both as “liquid, wordless syntax” and as the “grammarless zone” of unknown possibility sounds a bit double-tongued. But the mode is shot through with contraries. Its principal thrust is decisively beyond the organizing, classifying spirit of grammar, beyond the divisions and discontinuities associated with the way regular lingo cuts up and shapes thought and expression. Henri Bergson saw such categories - verbs, substantives, adverbs - as brittle, arbitrary functions of the intellect-analytic. They rendered the ever-changing flow of time, experience and consciousness in terms of static representations, stills and freeze shots. He likened this to the “cinematographical mechanisms of thought” - to “cut and paste” techniques that conjured up the illusion of movement instead of immersing us in duration, flow and change - in the “streamsbecoming”. Duchamp and Deleuze sought to articulate such passages of transition and transformation - precisely by a “turned around” use of film stuff that Bergson had railed against.⁷ In articulating the “streamsbecoming”, the agglutinative brings into play associative manoeuvres, juxtaposition, blend and splice, non-inflexional modes of elision and stickiness. We have a dramatic contrast by setting it off against parsing - a function that epitomizes the “slice and carve” mechanism of grammar. It is about chopping up flows of information, experience and thought into combinatory bits, modules, units and packets to configure them into algorithmic sequences - into the computational mode. It stands at the opposite end of the spectrum to the agglutinative’s “stick on” processes of figuring forth, of constellating assemblages. Whether this puts it entirely outside the ambit of grammar remains arguable. More likely we are faced with an agrammaticality that has the capacity to oscillate rapidly between several modalities. In this sense, it is at odds with the computational constancy and equilibrium of know-how and closer to the all-over smears, surges and spasms, the unpredictable swell and dip of no-how.

The Wiring Diagram: 01.10.1974

[Fig. 1. The Wiring Diagram. 01.10.1974. By John Hoskyns. Reproduction from  ‘Just in Time’ (Aurum Press. 2000)] (PDF 708KB)

John Hoskyns spent ages perfecting his diagram of factors and protagonists in the sorry saga of the mid-seventies British economy.⁸ An arresting piece of visual thinking, it reminded Mrs Thatcher of a “chemical plant”. At first sight, it seems a jumble of pathways, routes, cul de sacs. But as we pore over the carefully plotted circuits and linkages, we become aware of the array of social forces and institutional relations teetering on the brink. In the larger sweep of historical events, it is perhaps a miniscule, if sparking, footnote to Mrs T’s tough remedy for the “sick man of Europe” - a cure that involved  “rolling back state bureaucracy”, halting creeping socialist control and a “long march” to the free market economy. Systems theory, cause and effect relations, feedback loops shape Hoskyns’s visual exposition. The various positions have a sense of reversibility, an air of linear-causal rationale. The impression we have is of a set of relations that can be re-run with much the same result each time - or with little leeway for difference of outcome, for detour and digression. It lends a stamp of reliability, consistency and coherence as would be expected of a considered socio-economic statement. This is at odds with how we might understand repetition in art practice and research where such degree of “exact repeatability” would be looked upon not only as unlikely but undesirable, where each rerun would spawn unique, one off variants - where repetition amounts to unpredictable generation of divergence and difference.

(ii) Whether we take the Ezra Pound/Marshall McLuhan exchange on the copula of dialectical thinking pitted against agglutination⁹ or James Joyce’s sticky lingo in Finnegans Wake or Derrida’s reading of Jean Genet against Hegel¹⁰ or Michel Foucault’s unpacking of the “Western episteme” - we have probes galore looking for an escape hatch from the closures of dialectical thinking in which Hegel is usually billed as the bugbear. The point here is whether the agglutinative offers a less overbearing logical structure and is less of a “no-exit” contraption than its dialectical counterpart? The complaint against the latter is that from its opening gambit, its proposition already contains the outcome - “foreclosing” engagement with radical difference. It leaves no room for the “other” to put in an appearance in his or her own terms. We are presented with a thesis which already prefigures and tailors the antithesis of the “other” - groomed for   “cancellation and carry over”, for “Aufhebung”, onto a “higher” plane. From the word go, the “self” who makes the proposition calls the tune in constructing the “other” - a view of dialectical procedure that comes in for heightened criticism under post-Marxist, postcolonial eyes today. Deleuze relates the agglutinative to a “loose, open-ended logical structure-in-progress”. Its components are linked together by no more than a lick of glue - threaded together with no more than the humble conjunctive form and+ and+ and+…” Elements join up in an add on ad infinitum scenario at odds with the assimilative force unleashed by dialectical relations. The sort of non-assimilative threading is not unlike a “list that can be added onto interminably” that is Feyerabend’s riposte to the streak of control freakery in dialectical thinking. It is not surprising that he and Deleuze cite Kurt Schwitter’s merz-assemblages as models of non-dialectical method seeing in his art practice a kind of Dada epistemics - a shuttle between Muddle-Method-Madness - an opening to otherness and difference that cannot be known in advance.¹¹

Method Fever

The preceding issues of method are largely in theoretical vein. Below are notes on (i) & (ii) institutional (iii) economic (iv) historical factors that have a bearing on the story.

[Fig. 2]

(i) The Disputation at Lund. 15.09.06 [Fig. 2 Cedric Bomford, Disputation at Lund. 15. 09.06. Pen and Ink Sketch of first visual arts practice PhD candidates at the public defence of their doctorates, Lund Stadsalle.]