ART&RESEARCH

[Fig. 3]

School Play
PhD research and Nameless Science project

School Play is one of a number of artworks created since September 2007, which address in different ways photographic methodologies and questions raised by my practice-based PhD. The title of the PhD is Sequences, Scenarios & Locations continued (cinematic forms, the still image and celluloid materiality in the space between collective and individual remembering).

This research examines relationships between still (photographic) image and moving (filmic) image with particular reference to theoretical notions of ‘artistic medium’ and the use of analogue technologies in artistic strategies that articulate ideas of memory and narrative.  The impetus for these questions arose from my episodic slide projection series Sequences, Scenarios & Locations made between 2000 and 2005, which is referred to in the PhD title.

The first investigation into these issues surveys the historicization of experimental film practices of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular structural and materialist film and how these ideas inflected ideas of medium-specificity within paradigms of modernism and postmodernism. Seeking out the echoes of this discourse in contemporary artistic practices, I find an entry point into these questions via a remark made by Stan Douglas to Diana Thater about how he would have realized his 16mm film work Der Sandmann had he been “a hard-assed materialist.”

Important within the context of the exhibition Nameless Science is that all my recent artworks, such as Medium (The End), Medium (Upsidedown), Medium (Corporate Entities), School Play, and New Town Project (Extract # 1) ³ are produced in what can be called the art world.  While forming part of the “practice” of a “practice-based PhD”, these works also exist independent of the PhD context. They succeed or fail on critical terms in the institution of art, rather than in the institution of PhDs.

Interrelated and overlapping, the “practice-based PhD” and artistic practice are nonetheless separate, notwithstanding the presence of all sorts of research practices within the domain of all sorts of artistic practice. For me, they are distinct on the level of content, form and institution. A useful metaphor is one coined by Paul Willemen who suggests that the function of research is “to irrigate the ground of practice.”

Response

Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein

Deleuze perceives the unique relationship between philosophy and art as “a system of relays within a large sphere, within a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and practical.” So how to put this in a format like the Nameless Science show? Seen from the viewpoint of the arts, one might recognize the contingency and fictional quality of knowledge or the aspect of oppression and exclusion inherent in knowledge structures like exhibition spaces. Ronan McCrea was not sure how he should deal with the format of presenting his PhD project still in progress. But he did deal with it, together with Henk Slager, the curator of the Nameless Science show. The outcome proved to be a laboratory situation where the artwork has become a strong communicative tool in exchange with the other presentations; a cartography of artistic knowledge production.

Two elements frame McCrea’s contribution: four photographs - color prints out of a series of thirty - on the wall, and a simple wooden table in front with a leaflet on it. The photographs show a bird’s-eye view of a schoolyard with playing children, where Ronan created a series of floor markings suggesting an undefined game. The photographs seem to demonstrate that the games are played spontaneously.

In the leaflet, we read that, a starting point, “Ronan McCrea examines the photographic process of communication” and it ends with the ontological question of “whether playing a game – as an anthropologically ambiguous and in fact undefined phenomenon - could be captured in a decisive moment.”

Immediately the visitor tries to put these elements together. In reference to the bird’s-eye perspective of the photographs, one starts to position oneself physically and psychologically regarding the schoolyard and its playground. As the observer is part of the game, he/she finds him/herself in a performance situation, as part of a spatial production.

A central question for Ronan McCrea is: What characterizes the process by which the interaction of a performance gesture, objects, the subject and the community become entailed in concrete spaces? Could playing a game indeed be captured in a decisive moment, as the exhibition leaflet claims? A frozen gesture – after Flusser? Still – motion, a performative gesture?

I think of John L. Austin and his influential 1955 lecture ‘How to do things with words?’ which I would paraphrase as ‘How to do things with art?’ Austin added the performative to the referential dimension of linguistic utterance. Today, visual art could be considered a paradigm of contemporary culture, since artists position - as is the case in Ronan’s project - referential and performative aspects against each other, while shifting the idea of the world as text to the notion of the world as performance.

The resulting liminal space I experienced in the exhibition is one of negotiation and dynamic. In my point of view, here visual art has become a kind of meta- commentary on our culture, reflecting its fundamentally transitory character while playing with possible meaning and subjectivity. The reality of the schoolyard is the backdrop and context of a redefinition of space as quintessentially dynamic and performative, defined by geographical and bird’s-eye structures of the apparatus and by an understanding of human bodies as open systems of exchange.

Within practice-oriented research, Ronan’s project investigates fictional and non-fictional methodologies to find out what kind of knowledge becomes privileged or repressed the moment performative experience is established as a mode of knowledge acquisition, as a methodology of critical research, or a way of communication. The required research does not comprise a set preliminary work phase of art production. It is a work as such, where artistic research and its product are one and the same. As Ronan McCrea argued, it once again disrupts the dichotomy of practice-led research and theoretical research. According to the cultural scientist Marcel Mauss, the poorly-delineated boundaries between the scientific fields would not display the most urgent problems, but be the place for the as yet “unknown”.

In this liminal sphere, where the performative production of “wild knowledge” or “nameless science” is still unstructured, non-conceptual and uncanonized, a form of knowledge once termed experience in philosophy can flourish. Such knowledge does not occur within the space and framework of the expected. In that respect, Ronan McCrea's project is a clear metaphor of the undefined game we are all playing.

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