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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THE RESTLESS LINE

Refusing to be planned for or prepared in advance, drawing might resist the pressures of premeditation to become meditative, where it is activated as a live and reflexive thinking process taking place only in the present moment. Drawing — the hesitant testimony of a zigzagging line breaking onto the blank page or of a body scoring a path through space, of a life marking time. Liberated from the habitual expectations of representation, the line wanders. Concerned only with the present time of its unfolding existence and the future-possible moment of an encounter with something unknown, drawing becomes restless. However, this restless — even improvisatory — line should not be confused with a form of automatic drawing, intent on accessing the hidden recesses of the subconscious imaginary or of channelling the secrets of some mystical beyond. Instead, the encounter with something unknown or unexpected is conceived as being within and produced by the event of the drawing itself. Here, what is unknown does not belong to some other place — a distant elsewhere or outside — to which the process of drawing affords temporary access. Rather, what is unknown is produced in and through the process of drawing, materially arising unannounced as if from nowhere or from nothing. Drawing without any definitive sense of destination or outcome, teleological expectation is wilfully thwarted or stalled. Such a practice is no longer bound to the description of an observed event now already past nor is it concerned with realising a future image that exists as a mental sketch or projection needing only to be fleshed out. Rather, this is a mode of drawing that attends to nothing more than what is present, giving form only to that which emerges synchronous or contemporaneous to the act of its own coming into being. The act of drawing and what is drawn thus remain contingent upon one another. This drawing attempts to make visible the event of negotiating the terms of its own emergence, the unfolding phenomenon of the very site of drawing itself.

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

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