TowARds

Notes/Reflections on Artistic Research (AR) before starting

In his doctoral dissertation "Image Automation: Post-Conceptual Post-Photography and the Deconstruction of the Photographic Image"1, German artist-photographer and researcher Michael Schwab – currently editor-in-chief of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) - seeks to counter prejudice in relation to artistic research (AR), especially one that seeks to syllogistically demonstrate that if all artists are always in research, then AR has to move the idea of research towards an academic/theoretical/discursive becoming of artistic practice. Wrong way, warns Schwab. By putting together an illuminating demonstration drawing from the paradigm of conceptual art, and more precisely from the works of Art and Language, Schwab deconstructs this prejudice, and in this deconstruction, I find, personally, a solid argument for my decision to enter the stage of AR. According to him, an element of understanding is to be found in the way in which conceptual art of the second half of the twentieth century has, by transferring the validation of the work of art towards and into its discursive figure, invalidated the possibility that the notion of AR could be understood as a theoretical extension of artistic practice. According to him, from the moment a conceptual statement became equivalent to the very art object, in other words, that theory became the object of practice and of the artistic exchange, and the artist also became objectively and ultimately his/her own theorist, completing and fulfilling the artist's thinking identity as a researcher. In other words, if the artist always "seeks" (and "finds") is capable of producing a discourse on the object of his/her art, and that discourse can ultimately replace the object itself, then the artist is effectively a researcher, since his/her discursive production becomes the object of contemplation and exchange. No, it would be misleading to find the origin of AR, according to Schwab, rooted in this history of conceptual art ("there is no straight history connecting Conceptual art with artistic research"2). AR should not (at all, let's insist!) be the place of and for the theoretical extension of an artistic practice that could eventually replace it. Therefore, this demands that we engage with clarifying its specificity. Making a difference between this becoming-art-conceptual and AR is, in his opinion, not the theoretical statement upstream nor the closing writing (exegesis, analysis) downstream framing and justifying the creation, but what Schwab proposes as: "(…) the conscious creation of an artistic practice mobilising what it can for that practice to come alive"3 and the sharing of this process of awareness. What does this mean exactly?

I understand that the term research when it comes to AR should not be synonymous with aesthetic theorization. It is no more operating from and within the traditional scientific protocolary logic which makes successful "theoretical hypothesis/practical experimentation/exegesis". Instead, it follows another processual path of sense-opening (embedding, and even cherishing, here the polyphony of the term senses), fitting more willingly in the process, no longer successive, but simultaneous and iterative, "practice + awareness of the research + contextualization of this processual simultaneity". Writing (in) AR shifts therefore from the fantasy of scholarly writing on and about the practice (although the recovery of speech by artists has been for a number of artists researchers, understandably, an initial claim of AR), to relying henceforth on finding its own register of sensible/sensory/sensual/sensitive enunciation, as well as its milieu/community of resonance and sharing (a recovery of speech too, but resistant to academic mimicry and instead finds one's own voice).

The definition may seem too simple, even simplistic. Yet it emphasizes a notion that seems to be fundamental in AR, that of uncovering a "concern of awareness" of the practice, attempting away from off the rhetorical register of articulation. AR would thus seek to create the conditions of a double position, different from the practice I theory division. It is a question of implementing a more subtle duality of intra-dependence between practice and methodological awareness of it, whose unveiling of one side or the other would depend on the contexts of their exchange. From then on what is at stake, is no longer – or not only - the finalized artistic object, nor the shift of focal lens towards its production process upstream (in this way, AR differs from process art), or towards its clarification conceptual downstream (critical writing), but the creation of a dynamic of internal exchanges, dissociating itself from a dynamic but binary logic of object criticized/subject criticizing, or space/exchange of practice (and its art object) and space/exchange of translation/transposition of the latter, redistributed significantly, through the know-how (the skills) of artistic practice itself. As Schwab writes, the two "activities" are thus "supplementing" each other, as opposed to the complementary practical/theory logic, more or less simultaneously, in diverse contexts of appearance, and via varying registers of enunciation, but always kept in the sensi/tizi-ng zone of the art, and the artistic.

If AR, unlike basic scientific research, is therefore not the production of a theoretical interpretive extension that would complement a practical implementation, itself based on a theoretical statement hypothesis, but a work on form, materiality, flow, and performance of exchange stemming from the conscious duplication between practice and original enunciation of the conditions of these, my job will be 1. to find a language, 2. to participate in the creation of an environment so that specificity manifests and circulates, and 3. to assemble a community, and ideally, an audience, beyond the community of happy few peers. It is in the elaboration of such a language, mixing object of practice and meta-morphosed redistribution of it, through "sense-writing" (maybe we should definitely get rid of the term ‘writing’ that induces too much of a proximity with rhetorics), directly related in its form to the specificity of the art affordances themselves, that I wish to work. What seems to be a redoubling of the labor, since it is both a question of maintaining myself as an artist by generating gestures and objects of high artistic quality (I do not wish to stop showing my artworks), while conducting research on the forms of AR sharing themselves, as an artist-researcher (I also do not want this showing to be an end).

In this dynamic, AR seems to take a political dimension (and an economic one too, as a correlate of this political dimension). By inventing a new "language" as a new medium for its dissemination, it evades the obligation, or single way, of a market logic indexed to the rigid (concrete and conceptual) framing temporalities of art-making project and finality (and profitability). By making itself program and no longer project, AR might go sideways (I am taking here, I assume, an idealistic posture, not taking into account - the jump into the void requires a certain naivety I guess - the reality of the academic market, probably also made of competition, production of desires and worried economies of attention) tangenting from the ecology of art production as short-term, successive and (at best) ascending logic, indexed to the valuation levels, to develop another time ecology (and this begins to resonate directly with my research topic), that of duration, lingering, repetition, diachronic iteration too, in which the notion of failure does not sanction and weaken, a path but on the contrary is considered, as a possibility to move forward (in this hospitality of the notion of failure and not in its methodological logic as we have seen, AR can perhaps be compared to scientific fundamental research). This is an important characteristic of AR: the alternative temporalization of the art-making, coupled with the constructive hospitality to failure, shall I say of "foirade" to use a dear Beckettian term. The gap, the spacing, the awareness-increasing (conscientisation in French), and a certain benevolence towards giving time and attention (contribution/community/public) allows stuttering, awaiting, error, misleading tracks - a certain posture of active reserve - and gives them not only a place but a generative value at the heart of the visibility and discussion of research. It is this environment, proactive and vulnerable, inventive and at-risk, that the advocates of AR I wish to partner seek to professionalize as much as possible, in order to "sustain" it economically, which, in a neoliberal entrepreneurial era, is not without posing an ideological (and ontological) difficulty because how, in short, to fund artists researchers by valuing their mistakes, or even by backing them up to fail (Beckett would maybe say here to "fail better"4). This is story logic of poetic (and political) failing-better in the face of success; an interesting political, economic (and aesthetic) provocation of AR.

As a theatre director, I made the decision ten years ago to drift away from a certain traditional and institutional logic of "making theatre". By traditional and institutional logic, I refer not only to a logic of given and guaranteed aesthetic regime (this theatre-making I call in vitro, according to the centripetal theatrical paradigm, i.e. processing from the paradigmatic obviousness of what is a stage, indexed to a certain spatial-temporal architectonics and metaphysics of the present/presence) but also to a socio-economic-political logic of labor, visibility and career within the institution (in France, in National Drama Centres or regional/national scenes supported by public funding), all three subjected to a principle of validation, both public and professional (expertise), of successive and successful results. Once "out" of this ecosystemic logic of production, where the time dedicated to making art (not to mention experimenting) was increasingly fading to almost nothing (in French I would say réduire à peau de chagrin, literally to decrease to a skin of sorrow), because of the entrepreneurial obligations required by a system that I started to consider sick, I, as freelancer, carried out an opening work - a "deterritorialization" - on the one hand geographically (traveling outside the black box in which I had already stayed a decade) and on the other hand generic, by settling in Berlin (at that time still the paradigm-city then of slipping and blurring identities) and probing the logic of action of an intermedial, transdisciplinary and collaborative artistic regime (art of installation, situation, contextual art, relational and collaborative art) out of the authorial and omnipotent logic of the dominant director, still the main figure of mainstream theatre production realm. The theatre practice within the mainstream institution thus appeared to me to be doubly blocked: on the one hand in an aesthetic impasse, in the repetition of these formats, involving spatial conditionings of the creations, both from the point of view of their making, that of their visibility; and on the other hand, and it is economically linked to have gradually, in recent decades, been subject to the logics of production sets and markets specific to the neoliberal context and according to which the theatre directors have transformed themselves into entrepreneurs, administrative producers and clientelist marketing managers5 in order to perpetuate their "productions" in a closed network ("productions" on which they have no time to concentrate due to their new entrepreneurial obligations, which occupy almost all of their "working time").

Faced with this situation, the recent development of the AR community thus seems to me to be a horizon, an alternative zone to take the time to configure, invent and support a new ecosystem for the practice of theatrical art released from these aesthetic, economic and political impasses (is this a utopia? It will take a few years of exploration and analysis to find out). This is an ecosystem/environment in invention and openness where artists (and works of art in their deployment) can take the time to reset their practices and function within the collective in correlation with the establishment of new parameters of production, visibility, and dissemination of the artistic experience.