Practice as research: A fine art contextual study

The issue of subjectivity in a performative practice

Doctoral research is recognised as an active process of exploration and critical examination. When such research is carried out through a visual arts practice – i.e. when critical examination rests on embodied, subjective understandings as well as rigorous analysis and as much on creative intuition as on calculated attention to the particularities of adopted media, it is important not to underestimate the valuable contribution the integrated process of practice makes to any outcome, textual and/or visual. As such, if explication is to reflect the dialogic nature of this relationship, it is vital that all aspects of the research process (subjective and objective) are articulated in dissemination. Therefore, my written work is presented in the form of an on-going exchange between self and world, practice and theory (as are my installation works) – a process informed by corporeal as well as conceptual understandings and performed via text and image.

In order to reflect embodied understandings as well as conceptual knowledge, I have adopted a performative writing strategy after performance scholar Peggy Phelan (1997). Phelan states that performative writing aims to ‘enact the affective force of the performance event again’ in ‘an attempt to find a form for what philosophy wishes all the same to say’ (Phelan, 1997: 11). In my research, performative writing translates as a polyvocal text where critical dialogue is positioned alongside field notes, journal extracts combine with rigorous analysis and lived observations interweave between expanded theoretical concepts.

Others that have helped me form an alternative textual framework include philosopher Paul Ricoeur (his understanding of narrative identity), cultural theorist Janet Wolff (texts include personal observation with socio-cultural critique) and cultural geographer John Wylie (combines subjective description with critical analysis). The writings of Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixious continue to inspire me.

Research is an embodied process as well as a theoretical critique and both are echoed in the writing strategy I employ. My intention is that my texts more fully reflect an understanding of the complexity of the relationship between embodied practice and cross-disciplinary theory where lived experience and critical insights collude and collide.

In attempting an articulation of landscape, many questions are prompted but one repeats – just how can the lived be translated? The importance of the personal, the subjective voice, yes, but one that carries over into cultural consciousness and shared experience thereby allowing multiple trans-personal readings. Such is my ambition.

I am following family traces and exploring what and where we might call home. I brought a child’s chair and carried it out into the landscape as a way of alluding to other places, people and times, as a vehicle through which to explore the temporal and issues of constancy and change. Bearing in mind the female lineage of my link with Mull, another concern is to prompt suggestions of the domestic and maternal that reference personal connections to place as well as simultaneously questioning notions of home and the feminine role more generally.

Practice-led research in the visual arts: In debate

The constituency of practice-led doctoral research in the UK has been critically reviewed by MacLeod and Holdridge who state that the implications of the relationship between writing and making remain the ‘predominant issue’. Although noting that ‘no overall consensus’ between institutions has yet been reached, they suggest case studies indicate that ‘the conventionally written academic thesis does not always seem appropriate for the doctorate in fine art’ (MacLeod and Holdridge, 2005: 2–3). The twin roles of the art and the writing are then considered – what role does each play and does the writing reflect the process of making? How are embodied understandings articulated with critical knowledge and how might the production of one reflect the other?

Underlining the conundrum of practice-led research in the visual arts, Barrett and Bolt argue that it is often the very strengths of the particular methodologies of the discipline – i.e. that they are ‘personally situated, interdisciplinary and diverse and emergent’ – that serve to problematise the issue of dissemination by contradicting traditional expectations and challenging familiar models. They further state that in order to recognise the ‘philosophical and knowledge-producing role’ that these approaches offer, alternative methods and models need to be found within which the potential of these processes to generate knowledge might be articulated and developed within and beyond the discipline (Barrett and Bolt, 2010: 1–13).

The generative strength of the relationship between practice and theory similarly concerns Smith and Dean. They state their objective as wanting to ‘discuss the methodological, theoretical, practical and political issues’ surrounding practice-led research and to reflect ‘new forms of research and creative work’ (Smith and Dean, 2010: 9). Here again the issue of subjectivity and alternative writing strategies that adequately reflect the lived alongside the learned is raised.

When research moves back and forth between practice and theory and when corporeal as well as conceptual concerns are paramount, the demands, tensions and contradictions of the process become apparent. As a result, valuable new insights are produced and become embedded within the artworks – new understandings that form an integral part of the research process, and require alternative dissemination strategies in word as well as image to reflect, and include, their contribution to the project.

I suggest a research structure with permeable parameters that permit arguments to expand and develop as questions are raised and assumptions challenged – a dialogical framework that offers potential for further advancement of the performative relationship between practice and theory. In this respect, a model that reveals new knowledge disseminated in an appropriate and equally new form – as for example in my research where embodied understandings of the lived landscape abut, challenge and, importantly, ground the concepts that are vital to the overall remit and reach of my project through the adoption of a performative writing strategy.

Field Note

I returned to the Inner Hebrides alone,

to the isle of Mull, home of my maternal ancestors.

I took a chair with me,

a chair given by my mother to my daughter (now 19)

on the occasion of her second birthday.

I went to visit my mother’s favourite places on the island,

I took the chair with me.

In taking it with me, I was also taking both my mother and my daughter.

I climbed ‘S Airde Beinn, I went with chair, mother and daughter.

As I climbed, I gathered my grandmother, my great-grandmother

and the others before them.

The matter of description

In order to expand on the role of the body in research practice, I have examined human geographer Nigel Thrift’s conceptualisation of non-representational theory and its relation to practice. Thrift writes of the necessity of changing the way in which we look at the world in order to understand the dynamism of embodied experience, adding that one of the ‘purposes’ of non-representational theory is to afford such a shift in perspective. He advocates that we ‘undo what we think of as theory’ in order that we might address practice and focus on the vital role of embodied knowledge alongside theoretical abstraction, stating that non-representational theory grows out of ‘the simple … observation that we cannot extract a representation of the world because we are slap bang in the middle of it’ (Thrift, 1999: 296–297).

When Thrift writes of ‘representation’ it must be understood that he is not referring to literal representations as in visual artworks or descriptive prose but is reacting against theoretical representations of located practice that ‘must be affixed prior to any attempt at engagement’. He adds that it is ‘actively constructing webs of significance which are laid out over a physical substrate’ to which he objects, writing instead of the dynamism of practice and engagement with the world (Thrift, 1999: 296–297).

Thrift draws on Wittgenstein’s observation that the problem lies in anticipating an answer or reasoned account. Wittgenstein proposes that ‘the solution to the difficulty is description, if we give it the right place in our considerations’ (Thrift, 1999: 296, my italics). It is this assessment that underpins Thrift’s request that we challenge our assumptions and, as a result, change the way in which we view the world. A similar understanding sustains a cross-fertilisation of the corporeal with the conceptual in my research inquiry – as assimilated in practice and as disseminated through a critically informed combination of analysis and description. Hence, I propose that we follow Thrift and accept that ‘we cannot extract a representation of the world because we are slap bang in the middle of it’ and instead, after Wittgenstein, consider that ‘the solution to the problem is description’ – i.e. that we find the right medium through which to express ourselves in order to effectively challenge existing re-presentations of the relationship between practice with theory.

Such an approach is necessary in order to adequately reflect the active dialogue of practice with theory in practice-led research. In my work, theory is not imposed on practice; there are no ‘webs of significance laid out’ but a cross-fertilisation of associations that underpin (and are implicitly embedded within) the work, both visual and textual. So, how might such understandings of the value of embodied practice be articulated? Where might we find the evidence of theory in/forming practice in order to support such rethinking and rewriting of the relationship between practice and theory?

A complex mix of environmental perceptions begin to rub against the concepts I am exploring and, in the process, the implications of the place, my presence and the haunting presence of others begin to come together to form the piece. It is a question of paying attention and of listening with all my body, of paying heed to measures of intention and improvisation as they come into play.

It is not a matter of explaining my practice but of giving background information that evidences how I have engaged with the landscape and how I have subsequently articulated an experience of place – the work coming out of the time and place of engagement as a result of juggling intention and practicality, levels of control and necessary abandon.

Evidence of theory in/forming practice

The terminology chosen here is not arbitrary. In/forming: the theory embedded in practice; the critical informing of practice through theory (and vice versa); and the influence of theory in forming the practice/artwork.

The etymology of the verb dates back to the Latin inform are: to fashion – the ‘fashioning’ of practice through theory. Contemporary dictionary definitions include:

To impart information to; to make aware of something;

To acquaint (oneself) with knowledge of a subject;

To give form or character to; imbue with a quality or an essence;

To be a pervasive presence in; animate.

So where (one might ask) is the ‘evidence’ for such interplay of theory with practice? This is the conundrum for practice-led research where the boundary between practice and theory becomes increasingly blurred in the process of carrying out embodied research; one is implicitly (even if not explicitly) in the other, each serving to both inform and form each other in the process. The theory, I propose, is evident in the criticality of the practice.

The aim behind the adoption of performative writing is not only to indicate the centrality and criticality of my practice but, importantly, to assist the reader by focusing on the broad and dynamic role of the practice in expanding theoretical understanding. In this respect, the practice becomes a vehicle for the abstraction of theory and the artwork the concrete manifestation of a research practice, where the artworks serve as concrete evidence that research output (in this instance the artwork) in itself demonstrates evidence of what educator Katy Macleod terms the see-saw between theory and practice (MacLeod, 2000). My rationale follows the understanding of anthropologist Daniel Miller:

One of the delights of dialectical theory, alongside its cultivation of extremism, is that it includes within itself clear strictures about what one should do with theory … But to be consistent, dialectical theory must imply that just theory alone, like everything else humanity produces, will always tend to become destructive and follow its own interests, oppressing rather than serving humanity … It is only through the subsequent process of maturing and re-grounding theory in its application to everyday lives and languages that such cleverness becomes transformed into understanding and re-directed to a compassionate embrace, rather than an aloof distance. (Miller, 2010: 79–80)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Suze Adams, Communion (2011), film still.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Suze Adams, ‘S Airde Beinn, Mull (2010), digital photograph.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Suze Adams, Communion (2010), digital photograph.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Suze Adams, Communion (2011), film still.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Suze Adams, Communion (2010), digital photograph.