Artistic Research - Friend or Foe?

 

A question that has become increasingly urgent in recent years, but that few have dared to even ask, let alone answer, for fear of being exposed as deplorably ignorant ruffians with no claims to a place in civilised society, concerns that elusive branch on the fruit laden tree of knowledge known as artistic research. What actually is artistic research? What is it good for? Does it involve excruciatingly painful experiments with actual artists being used as guinea pigs? Or is it in fact something altogether more sinister? Should we be scared of it? What precautions would be well advised, in order to avoid actual physical harm?

The following article will endeavour to shed some degree of light, albeit faint and flickering, on the questions outlined above.

First of all, let us turn our attention to one of the more common and well known forms of normal, unartistic, research, namely that of measuring. “How long is a piece of string?” is a good example of a fundamental question that has kept mankind up at night ever since that first antediluvian afternoon when our bearded, monosyllabic forefathers and foremothers put the day’s exhaustingly practical tasks aside to allow their minds to wander freely in search of intellectual sustenance. From there, the next steps were inevitable: “How long is the leg of a sabre-toothed vole?” “How wide is my friend’s skull?” etc. Thus, the quantitative research method was born.

However, this novel way of making sense of the world was eventually found to be insufficient in certain crucial respects. It is all very well to be able to adequately answer the question “How long is a haddock, medium sized?”, but quite another to say whether it is any good to eat or not. Another approach was needed, in order to understand the aspects of our surroundings and our fellow beings, physical and mental, that would not let themselves be captured by the blunt instruments available to the researchers of the day. This became known as the qualitative approach, and has since given rise to much grievance and quarrelsome discussions along the lines of “yes, five ants may be more than four elephants, but it doesn’t feel that way”. No end of trouble, in other words.

In later years, yet another variation in the eternal search for knowledge and enlightenment has reared its curious little head in the academic cabbage bed, namely that of artistic research. How, then, does this peculiar beast differ from its aforementioned predecessors? First of all, artistic research is, as has often been noted by connoisseurs of the topic, practice-based. From this term we can infer that artistic research involves a lot of practice, in order to get it right. An illuminating example: first measuring and then cooking a haddock requires little more than the ability to use a tape measure and to follow simple instructions, but making said haddock sing a song takes a not insubstantial amount of practice, not least of all on the part of the haddock, whose innate understanding of music is usually sadly limited.

Secondly, the artistic process is central in generating new knowledge in artistic research. Thus, by interacting artistically with, for example, a haddock, the artist/researcher will be able to uncover new forms of understanding of both their own artistic process (do not leave uncooked seafood in the studio for more than two days, or your neighbours will start complaining), and of society as a whole (fish show a terrifying lack of interest in current affairs, especially after you have carved out their insides with a palette knife and eaten them raw in front of an audience).

Thirdly, the results of the artistic research project will typically manifest itself not in the form of  a book or an article in a research journal, but in the form of an artwork, an exhibition, a performance or a small heap of dry fishbone left behind in unexpected places.

These are but a few of the ways in which artistic research stands apart from other forms of research (of which there are many; apart from the ones touched upon above we might also mention optimistic research, cannibalistic research and euphemistic research). To more fully appreciate the richness of the artistic mode of research, and to perhaps render it somewhat less frightening, we will conclude with a prime example of an artistic research study carried out by some of the disciplines foremost exponents, the research group known as The Exploding Breakfast Society, and their recently published work “The Tunnel Vision”. The level of complexity present, implicitly and explicitly, in the way in which this work addresses, contradicts, supplements, inspires, disparages, ennumerates, opens up, elucidates, intervenes with, reflects, regurgitates, narrows down and obscures the patterns inscribed in the intersecions between linguistic, extemporous, relational, posthumanistic, prophylactic, illiterate, semiotic and protobiotic discourses present in, overarching and underlying the multilayered stratum of contemporary theoretical attempts at uncategorising precisely those components that are at the chore of a geothermal heat pump, is such as to induce a treacherous raster of uncertainty and unfulfilled expectation in the myopic reading of the inevitable intertextual collisions of the user’s manual. Make sure to turn the sound up, and please do not use your mobile telephone for viewing.

The Tunnel Vision - by The Exploding Breakfast Society