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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STEPS TOWARDS DANCING SOLO

Habitually coupled with the preposition from, dissent is often defined by the thing against which it takes a stand or strives to differ. It is brought into existence by the very terms that it wishes to challenge, constituted by the logic of the same system that it simultaneously seeks to dispute or resist. Based on a practice of alterity or of being otherwise, dissent sets itself in wilful opposition to the sentiment or conventions of the majority opinion, the ascendant order. In doing so perhaps, it inherently plays into the sticky trap of binary relations where two partners are coaxed into the hold of a slow-playing conceptual waltz where one term will always lead and the other follow. Each creates the momentum that keeps the other in play, the awkward choreography of an uneasy dance pair forever bound to, yet repelled by one another. Parallel energies pulling in opposite directions create the dynamic of rotation or revolution, the close coupling of two systems transferring force from one to the other and back again. The relationship between dissent and its oppressive antithesis is often symbiotic. Each is propelled by the power of their opponent’s resistance or reaction. Every new manoeuvre is conceived in tentative anticipation of the other’s next step. In order then, for dissent to truly refuse the terms of the system in which it finds itself ensnared and encoded, it must devise new rules — a new choreography specifically for the purpose of going it alone, for breaking established pattern or protocol, for dancing solo.

From Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016), p. 9. Revised extract of a text that was previously published as a pamphlet entitled Yes of the No, commissioned and published by Plan 9, Bristol as part of The Summer of Dissent (2009).

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