Artistic Research Does #7 - 'Tactics for Not Knowing' by Emma Cocker

This research exposition is conceived in conjunction with the publication, Artistic Research Does #7 (2023), which presents a translation of Emma Cocker’s essay ‘Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected’, originally published in Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum, (eds.) On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, (Black Dog Publishing, 2013). See https://i2ads.up.pt/publicacoes/artistic-research-does-7/ In addition to the translation and re-publication of the original text, the revised version of ‘Tactics for Not Knowing’ in Artistic Research Does #7 offers two further interventions in the form of annotations. In one column of margin notes, Cocker shares additional reflections, referring to some of her more recent artistic research projects and collaborations that continue to resonate with the concerns of the original text. In parallel, a second column of margin notes comprises the titles of additional pieces of contiguous writing drawn from two collections of Cocker’s writing, The Yes of the No (2016) and How Do You Do? (2023). Within this online version these margin notes include hyperlinks that enable the reader to access these different thought-fragments of writing. Artistic Research Does is edited by Catarina Almeida, André Alves. Artistic Research Does is published by i2ADS – Institute of Research in Art, Design and Society is a R&D unit based at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP), financed by the Portuguese agency Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).

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BEYOND THE SPEAKING I

Linguistic articulation of a material practice foregrounds a challenge therein, for the speaking I can only tell things from her own side. Her account is filtered through the prism of her individual experiences and senses, her memories and desires. No matter the duration of relation with a given material, the encounter is unavoidably mediated by human eye and hand. The situation from the material’s side can only be guessed at, never truly known. Certain descriptions emphasise the performativity of such a practice, privileging the agency of the performing body. Objects and materials are conceived as either a prop or trace, apprehended through a sense of expectancy (objects waiting to be handled, to be activated) or as the residue of a performance passed (the material remainder of what has been). So too, epistemological accounts of artistic enquiry often cite the tacit knowledge or embodied know-how involved in creative production, the personal possession of a knowing (or not knowing) not easily transmitted or shared. While challenging the authority of rational, discursive thought, these other ways of knowing maintain the hierarchy of the human as the holder of knowledge. Yet what does each material know or store? What does it remember or forget?

From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)

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