4. SPEECHLESS

Art research has to do with communication, but not in the traditional, linear form. It has more to do with exploring a field.1

At one point during my project I found myself on top of a vast lava field trying to pick out a fragment to photograph. But which one? There were potentially billions of candidates, I just had to make the choice, and I was utterly confused, stumbling around the impasse of the lava field, trying to find my way.

As artists, we constantly have to make choices, and each choice may alter the outcome of the project profoundly. When the choice has been made, a trajectory starts, and being able to follow it with an openness to yet-to-be-discovered possibilities within it is what may develop a project. Such possibilities are subject to yet new choices, and for me the challenge is to make them in accordance with my deepest held intentions and beliefs. To make it count as important to me, where it may hurt. That is what can lead me toward making the kinds of artworks that I would like to see, but nobody has produced yet. This is also a method of presenting the viewers of my works with a situation in which they can experience something new, something unexpected, an unpredictable situation where they have to actively navigate the work and ask questions. To be allowed to remain in a state of not knowing, and to navigate their own field.  

How to facilitate such a state of not knowing becomes a dilemma when disseminating and presenting projects such as mine that attempts to produce open-ended works where meaning lies in the sensual encounter with the artwork. How then to produce an artistic research project and an artistic reflection that describes artworks that are in their very nature, indescribable? They could perhaps be approached indirectly, by charting their effects on their surroundings. But by highlighting one aspect or interpretation of the project and the works, I risk obscuring others. 

In the article referenced in the epigraph Aslaug Nyrnes suggests that we use the “side light of rhetoric” to describe artistic research. This is in contrast to the “top light of scientific theory” which focuses on method, objectivity and truth. New rhetoric, as discussed by Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and others, is a form of speech where the speaker acknowledges that they do not know what they are saying and why they are saying it. Language is a complicated place to be, that often turns out to be the controller of the situation.2 One will have to chart out the territory while speaking. 

Borgdorff notes that artistic research does not observe a separation between subject and object, nor between researcher and the practice of art (as opposed for example to art history). Therefore, there is no theoretical access to art practice that does not shape that practice into what it is. Knowledge and theory is interwoven with practice and objects, and artistic research seeks to articulate some of this embodied knowledge throughout the creative process and in art objects.3 

When describing my project, even though I am referencing artists, art history and descriptions from the visitors to my exhibitions, all I can give is my own interpretation. My opinions about the project, what I choose to highlight, will be influenced by my goals and hopes for what the project can achieve - what kind of artworks I wanted to see when starting out. Each of the chapters in this artistic reflection can thus be read as four different (but overlapping) interpretations by me, four different “side lights” that together can illuminate my intentions, but they do by no means take authority over the subjective experience of those who came to see my work.

Mute works

So what was I doing in this lava field in the first place? Why was I photographing lava? As mentioned in chapter 2 and 3 I wanted a subject matter, or rather a raw material, that was visible, tangible and possible to identify, but that had a minimum of cultural code built into its form. I wanted something that would allow me space to direct attention to how objects are transfigured through the artistic process into cultural phenomena. I was looking for something virginal, and at the same time overwhelming, perhaps lava that just had come out of the ground had not yet had time to be encapsulated by culture? That I could be the first one to do it, to get to be the explorer to a “terra incognita”?4

Now, photographing natural objects with the assumption that they will be “uncoded” or “untouched” in the age of antropocen5 is a complex enterprise, and the act of bringing lava rocks into a gallery space is not a new idea. Olafur Eliasson has for example made many installations in which he has filled exhibition spaces with lava rocks. Where I share an interest with Eliasson is when encounters with nature, and representations of nature make us aware of our own perception and how nature is a cultural construct as a result of framing, but my interest is not so much with direct encounters with the material itself, but how I can transform the material by using it to build layers of representation. I have decided to define these objects as “uncoded” within the logic of my own project, knowing full well that the very definition of these objects as uncoded, and their inclusion in a cultural frame, is undermining that very uncodedness. By doing it anyway, almost through a play of pretend, I can experiment with how this process of assimilation into culture takes place. It also allows me a space to express a lament over the contemporary notion that there is no such thing as an untouched, undiscovered nature. Maybe this could explain why I look to phenomena in outer space, the inside of the earth, or to metaphysics for inspiration. Or why I travel to distant sites to make work, but not more distant than that they can be visited by normal tourists. It reflects a dream of living in a world where there might be new realities to discover after all. Within my own project, my own world, I can pretend that there is. 

There is a mysteriousness to objects that don't explain themselves, rocks are just sitting there. They are open questions, because we know that they didn't come from nowhere, they have a history that can be discovered, but it is not revealed by the object itself. The lava field and its rock fragments embody this silent, but overwhelming presence, a quality that I recognize from minimalist objects and land art, objects that present themselves without an outspoken message. Minimalism in particular highlighted the tacit, physical interaction between work and viewer, how the work activates the viewer´s phenomenological situation in space rather than communicating content. To me such a mute quality in the works, combined with their strong physical presence actualises a state of not knowing, not being in complete control, akin to digging up an object from an ancient civilisation and not being able to understand its meaning, or to encounter the written pages of a forgotten, undeciphered language.

This quality was refined in Stanley Kubrick's space opera 2001 - A Space Odyssey6, in which an alien technology in the form of black monoliths appears on earth and at different locations in the solar system throughout the ages. Clearly inspired by the visual language of minimalism, the monoliths stand quiet without revealing what they are, or why they have appeared, whilst having powerful effects on their surroundings. Humans try to figure them out, but are unable to fully penetrate their mystery. The same happens in Arrival7, where humans have to decode the written language of an alien civilization. 

Instead of ignoring the encompassing verbal language, one ought to focus on what it does to diminish or strengthen the work of art. My point is not that every art form needs to be accompanied by verbal language [...] My point is that the artistic research process should make the artist aware of how verbal language is functioning in or around art itself.8

In this project my starting point has been how photography can be understood as a way of revealing unseen or inaccessible parts of reality, and by doing so, underscoring their absence. As my project progressed, and my works started, for different reasons, to detach from their initial connection to the lava field, I found that I wanted to build on this possibility for enhancing absence and creating a sense of mystery by being very specific about where and when verbal information was accessible in and around the works.  By withholding verbal information about the background for the works in the exhibition context, I could elaborate on this sense of absence. Could such a strategy then, somehow recreate for the exhibition audience my experience of trying to navigate the lava field, trying to figure it out, to find an entry point, trying to see clearly? Could my works in this way somehow reflect the searching nature of the creative research process itself, allowing the viewer to become the “artistic researcher”? 

Art practice – both the art object and the creative process – embodies situated, tacit knowledge that can be revealed and articulated by means of experimentation and interpretation [...] [Artistic] researchers employ experimental and hermeneutic methods that reveal and articulate the tacit knowledge that is situated and embodied in specific artworks and artistic processes.9  

Tacit knowledge is the result of experience, of having been there, of interaction. As such, the research and experience I have acquired on site and in my work with the project is embedded in the artwork, and by inhabiting the artwork the viewer can take part in it. By keeping the frame of interpretation open, I wanted to also leave space for the audience to fill their search with their own memories, experiences and emotions, and thus build their own tacit knowledge. 

In summary, by first removing the rocks from their context by means of re-creating them as photo-objects, in a context where their ontology became unclear, I found that I could enhance the muteness of the rocks, and introduce “one generation of removal" from the initial referent (the lava field). During the second field trip, the national park authorities allowed me to walk on the lava field on condition that I did not publish the coordinates for each rock, which in Teleportation #1 had functioned as titles for the works. This caused an unexpected turn in the project, which led me to embrace and work with the detachment of the work from the lava field, by making the references to it in the installations more indirect. I found that this could allow the viewer more space to extract potential meaning from the experience of not knowing, of having to ask the question of what kind of situation and objects they were experiencing, and where it all came from. It also allowed me more freedom to use the objects as raw material proper, and build fantasy landscapes with their own internal logic. Finally, by removing visual and tactile information altogether in the project epilogue event, and instead produce a sound collage from sounds from the field trips, Teleportation #2, the space of Teleportation #3 and accounts by the visitors, I could introduce another step of removal, or transfiguration, of my initial raw material, and representation itself could keep spawning new forms of reality.  

In Teleportation #3 in particular, I had to make many choices in order to find a balance between limiting the audience´s previous knowledge about what was going to happen on the one hand, and on the other, relaying some information in promotion, so as to get people to come. By collecting the audience´s phones before entering, I could ensure that images of the installation would not circulate social media, and also help the visitors avoid the distraction of having the phone available. I still wanted background information to be available to those who had already seen the show, and therefore I organised three artist talks where we went behind the scenes and I talked about the project at large. 

When the reviewer from the newspaper came, a delicate situation arose, because I asked her out of concern for the audience to not describe too much, which she understood and agreed with. We also agreed that I would send images that were not from the inside of the installation. However, at some point her editor insisted that they were allowed to take their own photos inside, citing the principle of a free press, and I had to negotiate with her and explain that this would ruin the experience for the audience that had not yet seen the work. Eventually we luckily reached an agreement where I posed for a corny picture in the entrance to the installation (the review can be found in the appendix). 

Altogether, this situation created a certain mystique around the exhibition. Soon after the opening, visitors told us that they had gotten the show recommended, but that the person recommending it to them was keen on not explaining any details, rather asking them to go “see for yourself”. The secrecy of the situation seemed to generate a lot of curiosity and anticipation, and the way that the show passed through “the grapevine” made it start to live its own life. I particularly enjoyed how this sense of obscurity could enhance the numinous aspects of the show, by turning it into a clandestine event known only by a select few. 

Tino Sehgal is an artist who sets up interactive situations in museums and art institutions where the visitors often are engaged in conversation with performers, who act following certain scripts. Sehgal is very consistent in not allowing photo documentation of his works, and he even resists writing down instructions for his pieces. When a museum buys a piece there is no contract, just an oral agreement and an instruction that has to be memorized and passed on by the museum employees. This way he is insisting on a situation where the work has to be kept alive through oral description, not unlike the myths and stories of peoples without written language. It also opens up the possibility for the work transforming, like in a game of “telephone”. 

Such an approach also reflects an attitude toward the idea of insisting on lived experience. That it is through the here and now, in the immediate encounter with the artwork that the art is located. Documentation will always be a transformation and a diminishing of the situation. I found that in particular Teleportation #3 did not function well as traditional photo documentation.10 The whole experience was based on the bodily encounter with one's own perceptual and individual response to the situation. I saw the space and the elements inside it as a stage, a facilitator for a personal experience, and that the artwork happened in this oscillation between environment and response.  

Conversations

One way to talk about the relationship between artist, artwork and viewer is through the categories of “backstage” and “frontstage”. These are terms that originate in performing arts, and are used to denote the part of the performance visible to the audience (frontstage) and all the activity and objects that hide behind the scenes, on the backstage. We could use these concepts to talk about the intentions of the artist, the research that s/he does, the coincidences during the production process and so on as the backstage. And the frontstage could be the expectations that the viewer has toward the experience they are about to engage in, what information they are given, and the situation and objects they encounter. 

My strategy of withholding information about the experience about to unfold, to underscore the silent interaction between work and viewer, meant that I also gave up control over the interpretation. In a situation where knowledge about the work becomes tacit, how can background intentions and processes of the project still be allowed to “seep through” to the frontstage? What new discoveries and trajectories can appear in the transformation of my intentions that happens in the encounter between viewer and artwork? And how is my experience and interpretation of the work different from that of a viewer with no prior knowledge?

If we consider an artwork or an exhibition as a question, it can also be seen as the beginning of a conversation. A conversation between artist, artwork and viewer. 

The artist asks the artwork: “What is it that is important to me? Is this how I want it? Can you show me more of this?” and so on. 

Consequently, the viewer may ask: “What am I looking at? What am I to make of this? Why did he do it like that?”

The artwork may reply to both: “How do you see it? What is your background? Why did you come here? What do you want from me?”

If they feel a need to answer, each participant of this triad enters the conversation from an individual standpoint, and will give different answers to the questions based on their situation. 

Both artist and viewer are individuals with a unique history that provides them with a singular point of view. As an artist I have, as mentioned, always tried to find that place where I feel naked, so as to make work that only I could come up with as a singular individual. This way I can give the viewer an experience of encountering something that they haven't seen before, an unpredictable situation. When presented with a new and unpredictable situation one may try to navigate, try to figure out the map of the territory from within, seek out information and ask the questions that may lead to an overview and to regain command of the situation. Some prefer to rest in the uncertainty of the situation and let the questions hang in the air. 

As mentioned, the idea to not relay information about the exhibitions in the form of written statements and the like in the exhibition setting, was a result of a combination of coincidences along with questions that I asked from the artwork and the project as a whole. Is this how I want it? Is this me? Is this the work that I want to see as a viewer?

By allowing myself to answer such questions honestly, and also by allowing myself to detach from the initial project description, the project progressed through a technical inquiry into the photographic medium and its relation to art history, indexicality and mapping/navigation, into more open ended situations. I shifted focus toward the phenomenology of encountering the aesthetic situation, the viewer's experience of physically being immersed in a liminal space between fiction and reality, and how I could modulate this experience by staging disappearance and appearance.11 Eventually I discovered that I wanted to work with these topics because they resonate with a certain existential and even spiritual curiosity on my own part. When writing the last sentence I am getting this feeling of being naked - It could be a sign that I am onto something where my work may appear sincere. 

I don't remember if I said anything then, but I seem to remember thinking that I had to allow myself not to say what I experienced [...] because I wanted to preserve it. I guess that is why I did not want to run into anyone, because I wanted to stay inside that space that I had… or that, even though it was an external space it's also a space within me that I can enter when I´m in that physical space. Again, an unarticulated space within me, but something that I did not want to jump out of right away. [...] It is probably something that I could articulate but it is more a kind of… I am also christian, so for me it gets kind of, even if it's not, or that I'm living with this … space, a kind of invisible or yeah very unarticulated. It is a feeling that there is something bigger than the plain world. That the world is a bit flat, and then the wall expands, and there is something that you can move about in without defending yourself or having to explain, just “here I can just be”, and again, words are not enough. It's something like that.12

I wanted to take seriously the notion that the viewer is part of the creation of the artwork, that the artwork is one third of a conversation, and that the viewers should also have an opportunity to discover their own truth about the work, to project their own life experience into it. Could this make the conversation between them and artwork happen on a deeper level than if presented with a “recipe” for understanding it? And could their experience be allowed to be part of the story told about the project after it is over, in the form of documentation?

What did the viewers of my exhibition take away from it? What were they left with? What were the questions they asked when they were there? 

I have included several methods, consciously and unconsciously, planned and accidental, to access this information. Just the simple experience of being at the opening of the first show of the project, gave me interesting clues as to how people responded. 

Later, I would be the exhibition host, receiving the audience and minding the exhibition. It occurred to me that some visitors felt a need to explain to me what was in there, what they just had gone through, and the more overwhelming each exhibition was, the stronger the need to recount their experience. This need seemed to increase when I had the visitors go in alone one by one in Teleportation #3. It made me think of how victims of disasters give an account of the event in minute detail, often again and again. It is as if there is a need to confirm to oneself that it actually happened, to process it, by externalizing it, sharing it with others, in order to make it real. 

Documentation

For Teleportation #3, I also decided to collect the audience's reactions in more structured ways. The installation depended to a significant degree on the first hand experience of the viewer, their movement through the space, how their senses responded to the situation and how the sheer lack of information through the use of darkness brought each person's individual associations and memories into the foreground. Because of this, it appeared to me that traditional documentation by means of still photos and video would not be sufficient as a record of the exhibition. Perhaps a collection of viewer reactions and memories would provide a better form of documentation? And perhaps, I could use this material as a research material to understand the exhibition and the project as a whole? Could it even be used to produce new work?

This idea was taken literally in the Teleportation epilogue, where I used recordings of visitors to Teleportation #3 who had been asked to wear a microphone when entering the exhibition. If they felt like it they could describe what they were doing and experiencing, or just let the microphone pick up their reactions to the situation. With this material I produced a surround sound collage, to be performed in a completely dark space. This way, the material could be taken one step further away from its origin, I could add another layer of representation and leave out visuality altogether. The exhibitions themselves and the experiences people had of them, presentation and reception, could blend and start to create their own reality.13

I also interviewed some visitors to Teleportation #3. These interviews are part of the appendix, and are also quoted from in this artistic reflection, because as much as I can try to describe my intentions, questions and methods, there are several hundred versions of the works out there in the minds and memories of those who came to experience them. 

Is the use of such descriptions however not in direct contradiction to my ambitions to create works that generate meaning on a nonverbal, preconceptual level? And are such oral accounts not simply a replacement for photos and video, insufficient ways of relaying something that is not possible to recreate, because you had to be there? Is not the endeavour of describing the indescribable doomed for failure by definition? The poet, writer and essayist working at Konstfack in Stockholm, Rolf Hughes describes this dilemma in relation to the exposition of artistic research as a phenomenon, citing Caroline Rye:

Issues of documentation are of critical concern to the question of practice as research in performance and are particularly charged for two paradoxical reasons. First, because the research may be concerned with exactly those qualities of the live encounter and the production of embodied knowledges which cannot, by definition, be embedded, reproduced or demonstrated in any recorded document. Second, more pragmatically, if one wishes one´s research to have a life beyond its original live manifestation [...] the practitioner/researcher has to engage with the creation of appropriate performance documents.14

I found that the act of actually doing these attempts at documentation and interpretation, as an experiment, was needed for me to become conscious of these dilemmas. To include the audience responses in this artistic reflection is a way of using the context of artistic research to discuss their relevance and efficacy in relation to my intentions. Although the interviews and live recordings turned out to be neither particularly superior nor inferior as documentation as compared to other formats, I could use them as guides for how to build upon and develop my works further, by checking if the experiences of the viewers aligned with mine, and how I could steer the project toward what I wanted to see in the works (and that I wanted the audience to take part in). The fairly large range of reactions and responses was also an indication that I had not produced one-dimensional works, and that they were open to several interpretations, indicating a certain complexity.

Intention and interpretation 

When is something an artistic intention, and when does it become an interpretation? How are the two intertwined in the artistic process? The background for making the interviews was an experience I had in Teleportation #1:I noticed how several viewers were inclined to touch my works and feel the surface of the objects that I had created. And then I had to try to remember, was that part of my intention? To be honest, my intentions were more on the optical side of things, to investigate the photographic illusion of depth by adding volume to a photographic surface. However, when seeing how viewers were touching, almost “reading” the works with their hands, it occured to me that the works engaged with the contrast between the physical reach of the body (its limited ability to extend into space and touch things) and the almost infinite reach of the eyes (aided by photography), something that has interested me for a long time. 

The eyes have the possibility to reach across vast distances. Vision is able to transcend the limitations of the physical body in which it is situated, and has traditionally been regarded as superior to touch. Touch has been regarded as a superficial, almost animalistic sense.15 It occured to me that the works that I had produced somehow levelled out the hierarchy of the two senses. This unexpected finding led me to exaggerate the element of touch in the next exhibition, and eventually, by introducing an aspect of blindness/darkness in the third one, so as to allow the sense of touch to take full primacy over vision. What would happen when vision was forced to look within? Although the outspoken motivation for making the works using this layering technique was an ambition to explore the relationship between the photograph and maps, could I have subconsciously chosen this particular way of giving the idea form because I saw that the outcome could facilitate a discussion about the relation between vision and touch? And that this, by extension, could be a way into an inquiry about absence? Could such an inquiry into aspects of absence and presence ultimately provide me with a space for making works that explicitly manifest numinous qualities, a sense of sacrality?  If I dig deeper into the initial motivations for the project, I find that the reason for exploring just the relation between photographs and maps, was precisely to look into aspects of immersion and detachment in our reception and engagement with photographic material. How we can experience something absent. 

Since art school, I have been grappling with how I can use such a medium specific exploration to express my personal sensibility toward all things religious, spiritual and existential - issues that run deep with me and where I feel the most naked. I realize this might be one reason why I have been hesitant with putting them front and center. Going ahead and doing it anyway, showed me how, by believing in my project, by making it my own and ensuring that I reach into that place where it may hurt, the issues I wanted to bring up will find their way to the frontstage in a different, perhaps more elegant guise than when translating theory more directly into a project description, as one does in the beginning of a project.  

A photograph, an oral account or even an artistic reflection can never replace the tacit knowledge developed in the encounter with an artwork. But by presenting the work from different angles, by casting different side lights, to use Nyrnes´ term, by adding together my account of my intentions, interpretations and the production process, along with the accounts given by the audience, one can start to piece together the conversation that has been taking place between artist, work and viewer. I find the task of artistic research to be that of providing the arena for such a piecing together of different approaches to artworks, and thereby allowing space for the artworks to do their thing on their own terms.

References

Nyrnes, Aslaug. 2006. «Lighting from the side: rhetoric and artistic research» Focus on artistic research and development (3): 7-23.

Borgdorff, Henk. 2006. The debate on research in the arts. Bergen: Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen.

Schwab, Michael. 2014. The exposition of artistic research: Publishing art in academica. Amsterdam: Leiden university press.

Petersen, Anne Ring. 2015. Installation art: Between image and stage. Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press.