Corona 19 isolation enters its fourth week. In terms of doing a PhD the enforced isolation which felt very cerebral for most of last year gets its real life realisation. I'm doing lots of systematic reading and balancing this with a plethora of odd jobs such as mending the garden chairs.
I had a thought this morning in my notes on how to make art at the end of the world by Natalie Loveless. Here goes - although research creation is in many ways seductive the art it talks about is very much located within the academy or art school. I do not come from a research institution that validates works of art in this context even though I see it as part of my tradition. I think I said in my notes that 'the spectator was not fully emancipated by an unfair distribution of the sensible.' To reference Rancierre to myself obliquely in my notes shows how far I've come but how little I have really traveled.
My thought for today which is tentative and emerging from the miasmas of thinking and reading is that the research creation in action as presented by Loveless is not particularly new materialist in its ontology. Loveless talks of Boundary Objects and matter out of place and trandisciplinary research. I like all these ideas but the feminism or feminist edge of this writing although drawing on Harraway finds itself in ideas of Eros and Care rather than universal ontological entanglements that emerge from Barad. Basically the discipline of art is working within an expanded field and part of this field enfolds research. She describes multiple outcomes in different forms and places well. The boundary object is good here - it makes sense of lots of things I do.
She also gets around the problem of Shart or shit art by saying the art is not really art - its something between art and research so shouldn't be seen within the same category of art proper. This doesn't feel like an excuse just an explanation of what is happening. So for example if the research creation object/subject of study is a way of communicating more fully with neuro divergent young people then it is within this frame of influence or audience that this thing/object/work should be considered - not a gallery or an art mag but within the expanded field of Art/research. I liked this approach and it made sense of things.
The thing I thought of next was who is working within Research Creation from a clear and acknowledged new materialist perspective. I have been suspicious from the start that much contemporary art/ art school practice does not align with some of the central ontologies of the New materialism especially those drawing on Barads agential realist ontology. We slip in a bit of love and desire and we locate this in the human body where it is most often located.
I am not sure if Manning and Massumi are new materialists at all. They are essentially Deleuzian who was I think in some ways a vitalist, at the very least a philosopher of life and becoming - he presents a life force not located within an individual . The distinction between the Deleuzian assemblage and Barads Phenomena is that one has the potential of an outside in a very complex entanglement with the immanent becoming where the other denies the ontological possibility of an outside or an - external to. Barad is harder to draw into the artistic creative tradition - or method.
My literature review and method could be drawn together by taking a new materialist approach to research creation that begins within the expanded field of Sculpture - I'm going to google that now as I've not read much about this ontological issue yet.
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