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This publication is distributed under a CC ____________ license. ____________________________________________________ The Artistic Turn: a manifesto Kathleen Coessens Darla Crispin Anne Douglas 1 Abstract The Artistic Turn: a manifesto Despite innovative developments in research in-and-through the arts in the past decade, the emergent field of artistic research remains controversial, and is accepted with varying degrees of enthusiasm in academic institutions. It is our contention that the challenges and opportunities presented by this burgeoning discipline may be better understood by re-emphasising the centrality of the artist. Through a study of the interrelationship between artistic fields and theories of knowledge, and through some consciously metaphorical readings, we examine the contexts within which artistic research has developed. Using this information as a means of interrogating both scientific and artistic research paradigms, and case studies concerning specific artist- researchers, the case is set out for a fresh paradigm – an ‘artistic turn’. The aim is to create a field of meaning that may illuminate the most promising, though correspondingly problematic, aspects of artistic research: the essential ineffability of artistic creativity, and the consequent insufficiency of verbal and written accounts – something which inevitably impacts upon the text presented here. Accordingly, the discourse articulated in this volume does not propose definitive approaches, but charts a constellation of ideas that outlines the new discipline and points to its manifold and open-ended possibilities. Key words: Artistic research, practice-based research, deterritorialization, tacit knowledge 2 The Artistic Turn: a manifesto Contents Title page i Abstract and key words ii Table of Contents iii Preface: The Artistic Turn 1 Chapter 1: Why art matters XX Artists on the turn xx ‘The eye of the needle’ or ‘journeying forth’ xx Art: multiple journeys, multiple forms xx The concept of play xx Chapter 2: Artistic Research and scientific method: two cultures? XX Chapter 3: Deterritorialize the research space XX Knowledge, research spaces and art xx The map and the tracing xx Deterritorialization xx Chapter 4: The ship sailing out XX The metaphor of the ship xx The artist’s compass? Points in journeying forth xx The lessons of experience as a base for knowledge xx The interconnection of artistic practice and research xx Some afterthoughts xx Chapter 5: Vulnerability and doubt XX The artist as hero xx Between beauty and truth xx The Performer and the Objective/Subjective Problem xx Why perform? (could this not be a subtitle?) Xx 3 The expectations of … the artist and the audience Public acceptance, extending the limits of the world(could this not be a subtitle?) Artistic research and the artist’s vulnerability (could this not be a subtitle?) Chapter 6: Why artistic research matters XX Artists and society xx Art and the ‘Knowledge Society’ xx Contemporary developments in education xx Artistic Research in the Knowledge Society xx A MANIFESTO for the artist-researcher xx Acknowledgements XX Bibliography XX Personalia XX Colophon XX 4 The Artistic Turn Preface by Jeremy Cox This book is a self-proclaimed manifesto – a position statement and a call for certain actions. As such, it is consciously situated within the context of the developments and debates that surround the phenomenon of artistic research as we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. As Fellows of a research centre founded in 2008 for the furtherance of the ideas and practices of artistic research — the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (ORCiM) — its authors are part of one of an innovative breed of research communities which are now beginning to spring up with the aim of nurturing and consolidating artistic research activity and thereby helping it to flourish. Such centres tend to have a dual function, both facilitating actual examples of artistic research and, at a meta-level, attempting to define and refine the paradigms of this still relatively new brand of recognised research activity. At ORCiM, these functions are seen as closely complementary: practice evolves within a supportive conceptual framework but it reciprocally feeds data back into the matrix of thinking about artistic research, thereby enriching and nourishing the philosophical debate. But if this is, in a real sense, a topical volume, inseparable from its chronological and cultural location, it is also imbued with important long-range perspectives. Its authors show how the current debates, whilst taking a particular and novel form, are by no means without precedent. The ‘turn’ for which they call is, in certain important respects, a return and, as so often, we find that Aristotle had profoundly instructive things to say on the subject (although he would not have recognised either the expression ‘artistic research’ or the particular slant of thought which it represents). As the authors tell us, the dichotomy between theory and practice, the boundary between which is the battleground for many of the hostile engagements about artistic research, represents a modern elision, and impoverishment, of what, for Aristotle, was the triumvirate of theory, practice and creativity. For Aristotle and his contemporaries, doing and making were qualitatively different, even though much doing involves making, and very little making is possible without an element of doing. The difference, though, largely lost to us in our modern culture, is crucial – and especially so to the debate on artistic research. Doing, without the enriching component of making, is largely utilitarian, often repetitious and frequently banal; making, on the contrary, is engrossing, dynamic and often its own reward, whatever usefulness its products may also possess. In making, we move from nothing to something; from the speculative to the determined; from the unknown (or only partially known) to the known. This last aspect is central to the themes of this book, in that it underlines the fact that every act of creation results in an expansion of knowledge. The trajectory of the creative act is therefore essentially that of research. To create requires some intimation of what it is that will be created; this intimation springs in part from collective, prior experience but also requires some personal, intuitive spark to prime the act of stepping beyond that prior knowledge; the act of creation itself is intrinsically an act of ‘proving’ – of testing out the intimations and speculations (in research, we would call them hypotheses) and determining how they stand up under rigorous scrutiny in the world of ‘real’, made things; finally, the object or event created carries the results (the research data) of this proving encoded within it. Every product of creation, artistic or otherwise, therefore bears the proud, but invisible, imprint upon it: quod erat demonstrandum. 1 Whilst there will inevitably be shades of opinion concerning the above, few would dispute its fundamental validity. But the difficulty arises in the final clause. It is the invisibility – we would probably prefer to call it the ‘tacitness’ or ‘embeddedness’ – of the knowledge encoded in creation that causes problems and divides opinion. If there is some new knowledge there, the rational, verbally-oriented world insists, then surely it must be possible to say what it is: to define it, analyze it and demonstrate its reliable and replicable presence. In the terms that this challenge is posed, the proponents of tacit knowledge have no satisfactory response – indeed, they cannot, by definition. To give verbal articulation to tacit knowledge is to make it no longer tacit. By stretching language to its limits, and moving outside the traditional vocabulary of research discourse, we may perhaps succeed in winning a few border skirmishes along the frontier between the explicit and the tacit, but what we put into words will always be less than what we are trying to describe. It is this that leads the authors of this manifesto to call for an ‘artistic turn’, by analogy with the previous cardinal ‘turns’ in philosophy, perhaps most notably — and most sensitively for debates about tacit knowledge — the ‘linguistic turn’ executed by philosophers in the twentieth century. Rather than respond to the question of defining the embedded knowledge that arises through creation in the terms in which it is posed, this new turn requires a re-framing of the reference points of the question itself. To achieve this is no small task. The territory of research is densely colonised; vested interests, whether individual or institutional, conscious or unconscious, carry a natural resistance to new settlers. If the first phase of this manifests itself in exclusion, the second, that of enforced assimilation, is no less dangerous for all that it may appear superficially more tolerant. Artistic research is currently at this second stage. Its presence is accepted, although often grudgingly, but it is under pressure to show its gratitude for this recognition by conforming to the dominant ideologies, criteria and methodologies of research culture. As long as it behaves itself, it is now allowed a modest place – decidedly ‘below the salt’ in terms of funding – at the research table. The Artistic Turn spells out the dangers of this situation, as well as relating something of the narrative concerning how artistic research came to be in this position. In Chapter Two, the authors discuss the respective characteristics of scientific and artistic research and argue that, as well as crucial differences, there are important underlying parallels and compatibilities. Both types of research have their own legitimacy and, say the authors, can learn from one another. Their goal is to find new ways of bringing the practices together. Recognizing the scale of the challenge, the authors proclaim in their third chapter the need for a ‘deterritorialization’ of the research space. The turn of thinking which they advocate is based upon a belief that artistic researchers are not, and do not wish to be, newly incoming settlers on the overcrowded, built-up areas of traditional research. Their natural habitats lie elsewhere and should not therefore compete for space with the existing research community. However, it is important that their terrains, too, are recognised as joined to the research continents – not islands, but, in the words of the poet John Donne, ‘part of the main’. In Chapter Four, the geographical metaphor is pushed further still: perhaps the natural domain of artist researchers is not terrestrial at all. At home, like seafarers, in an environment that is dynamic, volatile and metamorphic, artistic researchers are like the navigator-explorers of the research world, steeped in knowledge, lore and experience which is hermetic to their own community and, when recounted to their land-dwelling ‘traditional’ research colleagues, can seem like fishermen’s tall- stories. The authors use case studies of artists who have brought back such mariners’ tales to illustrate how enriching these can be of our understand of the artistic process. But, as they show, the 2 paradox of expressing the inexpressible still persists in these accounts. For, as Chapter Five demonstrates, there are dimensions to art and artistic research which lie beyond the uniformly clarifying illuminations of rational research enquiry. Art, like the Moon that appears as a symbol in so much of it, has its dark side — a component of its literal and of its emotively emblematic nature that is essential and ineradicable. Just as the artist must often wrestle with demons and embrace vulnerability as part of going about his or her work, so the artistic researcher must be similarly immersed in his or her practice, risking, at a minimum, the loss of objectivity and potentially undergoing a high level of personal exposure with its attendant emotional toll. This, of course, would appear to be at odds with one of the most fundamental tenets of research practice, the disengagement of the researcher from the object of his or her research. Artistic research must be rigorous, but it cannot be simultaneously objective and artistically engaged. Yet another turn is required, a fundamental re-appraisal of the role and legitimacy of the interposed sensibilities of the researcher and one which perceives them as validating the research, rather than compromising it. But why should any of this matter, other than perhaps to artists working in academe and anxious for the next tranche of project funding? The authors believe that it matters because art itself matters, and when something matters it is natural that we should want to understand it as fully, as richly and in as many ways – both verbal and non-verbal – as possible. In a circular architecture which mirrors the turn of their title, they construct their manifesto from a first chapter which examines the meaning and importance of art itself to a sixth which explores these same attributes in artistic research. Despite all the problems and challenges which they uncover along the way, the authors’ final stance is optimistic as to what this new discipline can bring to art, artist and society in general. 3 [Leave page blank for insertion of image.] 4 Chapter 1. Why art matters Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fängst, ist alles Geschicklichkeit und läßlicher Gewinn -; erst wenn du plötzlich Fänger wirst des Balles, den eine ewige Mit-Spielerin dir zuwarf, deiner Mitte, in genau gekonntem Schwung, in einem jener Bögen aus Gottes großem Brücken-Bau: erst dann ist Fangen-Können ein Vermögen, - nicht deines, einer Welt. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Gedichte, 2009, p. 683.1 The question ‘Why does art matter?’ is difficult, if not impossible, to answer. For at least two thousand years, philosophers and writers have tried, with only limited success. It is a question which falls under broader and even more fundamental questions: 'Why does life matter?' and 'Why do humans matter?' Moreover, there are so many art forms and art media, so many different approaches, so many fields and such a wealth of implied participants, actors and spectators that this multiplicity of fields, art forms and agents gives rise to a whole raft of sub-questions, which serve only to underline the immensity of the task. What does music tell us that painting may be inadequate to convey – and vice versa? What does dance offer us, as opposed to writings? How do the poetics of theatre and those of sculpture differ? How can we compare sound and sight, movement and word, gesture and representation? Should we look at art from the point of view of play or from an aesthetic approach; from the perspective of the process or the finished object; considering its beauty or its truth (insofar as these are separable)? Should we consider the artwork’s cultural or its personal aspects; its representational or its transformational power; its economic or its ethical value? Do we need to inquire into its past, its origins or into its present and, possibly, its future? Should we take as our reference point society or the individual, the artist or the spectator, the individual or the group? Moreover, how do we take into account alterations of time and context and the shifts in focus that follow worldview and 1 Catch only what you've thrown yourself, all is mere skill and little gain; but when you're suddenly the catcher of a ball thrown by an eternal partner with accurate and measured swing towards you, to your centre, in an arch from the great bridgebuilding of God: why catching then becomes a power- not yours, a world's Rainer Maria Rilke (as translated in Gadamer 2006, p.v) 5