As I'm writing a PhD and not making an artwork, the flow doesn't make the same kind of sense - it keeps flowing out of sight into texts. The idea of residency as method is about sense making - a slant telling of the truth or more correctly a truth. The truth that came to me in the bath this morning before embarking on squeezing the round peg of my brain into the square hole of the RD2 writing process was the absence of critical aesthetic thinking within the art orientated educational research papers I have read. Aesthetics are also a little absent in some of the spacial thinking from Soja to Massey and although Sara Pink writes a whole book from an aesthetical perspective in doing sensory ethnography, she doesn't really name it as such. Culture and socially constructed norms are present yet there is little critical aesthetic theory from a current or historical perspective. I can't say this with confidence as I haven't read that widely, there may well be a whole massive body of literature just concerned with aesthetic theory within educational post -qualt research. If so, I haven't encountered it yet so it's okay to say that some of the papers I have read lack a position or a perspective on aesthetics whilst explicitly situating a practice within the aesthetic realm. Perhaps this is due to some of this work positioning aesthetics within the relational/diaolgical/everyday in some ways denying it a ontological category for itself and to an extent historical context.
I was reminded in bed last night as I closed my eyes to go to sleep of my favorite quote from Brecht "Something is missing". The quote is so great because the thing that is missing isn't a thing or a thought, it is the space that is opened up by the feeling that something is absent. Aesthetics are absent in this way from the papers, not the aesthetics we can describe, the historical chain of thought from Plato banishing the poets to to the aesthetics of the everyday, they hover in the background. For me the lack is more aligned to Dewey and his sense of rhythm within art and experience, a lived and felt aesthetics of bodies moving in space in time. I feel a sense of a disjuncture, an absence of understanding, perhaps a fault line where the uncomfortable feeling of things not being quite right locates itself.
In her Blog on the Odd project Becky Shaw describes me as an 'education artist'. I must admit, like the other prefix people put in front of my title such as local or community, I would much rather just be an artist. This is important for my generation of artists as it allows the necessary amount of flexibility in role for us to remain unfinished. It affords me my nomadic status and legitimizes my choices. At a time when artists are not that bothered about what they get called and become producers or activists or community development workers there is a need to ask questions about what we lose and what we gain from thinking ourselves different.
I took a break, wrote some field notes and then read Geoff Bright's excellent position paper on auto ethnography from his PhD. It's really interesting as he clearly explains why the method lacks traction within educational research. It made me a little sad to read it as Geoff's struggle felt a little like mine. He says that within auto ethnography he could find a real contribution to knowledge production as he could work with his 45 years experience as youth worker and activist in an honest way, a way where this knowledge could be drawn into the field pulled in by the great attractor, the gap, the void, the undefined thing that we all feel is missing at the heart of arty-farty-research.
I also felt quite liberated. Geoff wanted to make a mark in the world of educational ethnographic research and every time he wanted to do something really interesting something hobbled him. Like the scene in Misery where Kathy Bates smashes James Caan's ankles so he can't run away, when Geoff finds something that works he has to hold it to one side as nobody will publish anything that smells of auto-ethnography. It is contamination - it is dust - it is self obsessed and self promoting, it is not knowledge. I would love to read Geoff's proper auto-ethnography and I think this is why we both find ourselves returning to John Berger's writing, especially 'A Fortunate Man' which is the best ethnography I've come across. Geoff's writing is a cautionary tale and a reminder that I have and never have had any intention of becoming an ethnographer of education and to an extent this is liberating.
I hope there is no Kathy Bates character waiting to chain me to a bed and hobble my ankles and if there is that I can work out strategies to navigate them that are not too demoralising. In adopting the life of a professional nomad in the post-structuralist sense of leaving behind the singularity of my consciousness, the gift or the payback is a freedom from the restraints of intellectual belonging, the rules of being accepted within any school of thought place of worship or field. This position has its drawbacks but also its advantages. Geoff could not turn to auto-ethnography as he would not be taken seriously by the world of educational research, the world he wanted to step into and at the very least find some level of intellectual validation. I don't share this desire, my validation lies elsewhere. As I am just about to set fingers to typing my RD2 I wonder how much of my desire to hold onto my identity as an artist I will make visible, how much of this process needs to be treated as a game and how much of it is a genuine place for growth.
I am Icarus making wings of feathers and wax, I am not sure they will get me off the ground so at the moment have no worries of flying too close to the sun. I have 6000 words to write and I am reluctant to start as they will pin down my thoughts in a way that chains the aesthetic mind of touch, sense and emotion and breaks with the rhymes and rhythms of my day to day. This is what I am taking on - this is my new nomadic home.
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