In my reading about practices of art research, I came upon a PhD extraction of Natalie S. Loveless and this led to me starting to read her book, Knowings and Knots (2018). I was attracted to her view of research as a creation project, namely calling it ‘research-creation’. I like to think of my practice as making, discovering and sharing. I would argue that critical thinking happens most of the time during writing about and whilst making/exploring work. I do think that working with a living thing, fungi, brought me to a practice where I, most of the time, weave creativity and technical and theoretical knowledge together. During this process, I can be playful, curious, explorative, and solemn. I agree that art practice plays a huge role in cultural production and has enormous potential to make a difference in the world due to its potential for more speculative and imaginative visual propositions. I like the idea that knowing and not knowing are embraced.
Gilles Deleuze writes about the fold, and I will also look to Natasha Myers who explores ‘intermedial’ approaches to creating knowledge. I do like her relation to anthropology which looks at affect, embodiment and the senses and how this could help me to be tuned to my research. I do like the idea that, in a way, with this approach, one challenges a more linear way of research. In this way, I feel text (academic writing/research) as meaning is becoming more attuned to a process of doing work, as both will be the outcome within a final body of work I envision. I know I need to bring reading, quotations, citations, and writing and entangle them with my making. I would think of this as ‘knowings and knots’ to use Loveless’s idea.
(https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/full/10.22230/cjc.2012v37n1a2531#fn9)
Practice in the Flesh of Theory:
Art, Research, and the Fine Arts PhD
Natalie S. Loveless
In the notes, I read the following to start me off thinking of art as research: “…If we take the etymology of “re-search” seriously—to circle again and again—”
It did this in service of an ethics of knowledge production that might remodel the academy as a location of care and curiosity, and that insists that we learn to work with multiple modes of difference. On my reading, the exhibition asked that we see the Fine Arts Phd not as an institutional gesture that equates artistic knowledge production with normative university research practices, but rather as one that obliges us to ask how we understand that labour we call “research” in the first place, wherever it is done. true research, it suggested, must be understood as an embedded entanglement that reconfigures all participants in unexpected ways. As an invitation to rethink the stakes of the political as well as the social, this approach to research pays attention to non-reproductive, or queer, models of engagement that impact not only theories of participation and collaboration in the arts, but also pedagogical and disciplinary debates within the humanities and social sciences.
12 these debates centre on conflicting understandings of art’s political possibility, as well as conflicting understandings of what it might mean to think pedagogically. they necessitate a mode of research in which the question emerges responsively from the encounter; an encounter that, at its most fruitful, is
characterized by what Anna tsing (2005) calls “friction.”
Daily practice
Generally understood to have emerged in the 1960s
under the auspices of Fluxus, the instruction piece
or score is a form with a (now) long history in
contemporary art. With the instruction score, the
frame of art is mobilized to reorient habitual modes
of being, to invite unexpected encounters, and, in its
feminist mode, to bring attention to the maintenance
labour that sustains our every day, at every scale of
existence. The art/life form of “daily practice” adapts
the traditional instruction score by insisting that an
instruction be performed daily and for an extended
period of time. This daily-practice orientation does
something that the one-off score does not. While
the booklet or the exhibition of scores works to seed
the critical creative imagination in unexpected ways,
the daily practice instruction or event score insists
on the value of dailyness, of the quotidian. Grounded
in a history of debate on art/life and the everyday,
this talk frames listening and walking as modes of
daily attunement with ethical and methodological
implications for art and/in the Anthropocene.