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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NURTURE AN AFFIRMATIVE NO

Seeing and doing — within a visual culture, these two modes of activity can seem privileged above all the rest. While seeing and doing are often directed towards something (towards some external object or even towards some destination or goal), there are other ways of being that remain more receptive or open to whatever comes. Doing things can be a way of spending or passing the time, while other activities take time, where time is part of their very fabric or constituency. Yet it is not so much that seeing and doing lack sensitivity but perhaps rather that they are more susceptible to the rule of utility, the pressures of instrumentalised time. Beyond execution, the carrying out of deed or course of action, at times let things slide. Beyond the ocular, mobilise a multisensorial engagement with both self and world. Exercise one’s neglected senses. Expand the sensitivity of one’s feeling range. Cultivate a tactile seeing, tender touching rather than grasping towards. Recognise if pernicious hurry steals into one’s doing, then take time to decelerate one’s breath and step. Slowing down opens an interval of time for tarrying and drifting, for trepidation and anticipation, for doubt and hesitation. Inhabit the generative experience of doing nothing. Engage Bartleby’s passive resistance of preferring not. Decelerative practices dismantle the binary logic that posits no only in resistant relation to an accelerated yes. For this binary no can all too easily descend towards hopeless critique that points only to the problem without promise ever of solution. Much lamented as imposed from without, the accelerated conditions of contemporary life are also collectively co-produced and so may need to be collectively dismantled. There are times for recognising one’s sticky complicity in the conditions of one’s own exhaustion, as a catalyst for conceiving life otherwise. So too, one’s own way of life might inadvertently exhaust the lives of others. Bring delicate awareness to the ethics of one’s daily decisions. Nurture the potency of an affirmative no.

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

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