In conversation with the critic Stuart Morgan, Richard Wentworth said: 'I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore. Five reasons. Firstly the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works.'
I took the photograph above as a homage to the Richard Wentworth quote probably for another blog about 4 years ago. I dug it out to is today as I think my current obsession with it has something to do with how I feel about writing. I would like to try and write keeping in mind these five reasons, a type of writing like an artwork that is for-itself and not for purpose. This is the kind of writing that they find difficult to teach in school as it does not sit neatly in an established genre. Obviously I can't write a PhD that is just for-itself but I can probably develop an aspect of writing that takes into account scale, the manipulation of words on the tips of my tongue, modesty of both gesture and material, absurdity and of course the possibility that it may work.
I am a few pages off finishing Art and Objects by Graham Harman. I had got a bit distracted by reading his overly enthusiastic version of Object Orientated Ontology late last year. It introduced another set of ideas pulling me in a different direction that trickled into my writing. After the great performative identity deconstruction and necessary rites of passage I had to go back into my RD2 document and strip mine this line of thought. Luckily I didn't really like it that much it seemed very elitist and to be honest preachy like the kid in whistle down the wind who goes around shouting "I know something you don't know" at everyone he meets. The reason I keep coming back to Harman is he actually tries to deal with aesthetics and although he has his very own take on this he sees art in its philosophical conception and more formal history as one of the most important companions to philosophy. To paraphrase him in a way he would surely have issue with he suggests that through metaphor art and aesthetic knowing has the best chance of reaching towards what is unknowable within an object which is it's essential object-hood. What is attractive about this way of thinking is it gives us within a western philosophical tradition an alternative to relativism and post -structuralism; It is an aspect of speculative realism that turns away from the linguistic post structural constructions of the real and offers a flat ontology that allows space for something more-than yet not beyond. To paraphrase Orwell within a flat ontology everything is equal yet within Object Oriented Ontology some things are more equal than others.
In my last supervision I mentioned Michael Taussig as I had read about him in the Elizebeth Groz about art and territory book I was dabbling with last week. My friend Becci has been reading him over lock down and I was wondering whether he was writing speculative ethnography and might be a bit like my hero John Berger. Laura was very good and just said Taussig is interesting but a phenomenolgist and that doesn't seem to be a direction that you are traveling in. We also had a similar conversation about educational theory and where this would lead me in terms of what I would need to take into account. It is clear that within PhD writing there is little brushing up against ideas everything needs to be taken seriously. Simon Nicholson and loose parts theory coming from architecture opens a small can of worms that can just about be managed however this does not mean I should open the large catering tins of worms like tins of artists shit stacked on the shelves of the gallery walls and cafe. One of the tings I know i have learned is that I only now really understand now what Laura is talking about. There comes a point where you pay your money and you take your choice and that choice has to have limitations. I am probably past that moment now I've paid my money in the academic vending machine and all I can do now is type in my number and watch the spiral wind and the Kit-Kat sized manageable snack of knowledge drop into the dispenser draw.
This morning though I decided that in all my reading I hadn't really come across much that actually expanded what art can be from the perspective of an artists trying to enact art into the world. The closest I have come to feeling any real insight into how it feels is Glissants writing on the opaque. Even though this wasn't about art it resonated with me in that it presents what is there but cannot be known. This is what art feel like for me, an unknowable surplus. Harman in his exploration of Kant and the idea of the thing-in-itself also touches on this feeling about the impossibility of knowing yet the certainty that there is something there. I don't know how to write about this without it coming out pompous, bigger than its supposed to be however I do feel-it or as I bring things forth into the world however functional and mundane they may appear at their surface. Interestingly I never think of anything as art or not art it is not a category I find useful beyond funding applications. Definitions and categories are what Harman calls undermining and although assumed to be the way we organize knowledge they do not work well for Art with either a capitol or small a.
In my other writing about how art works in research I suggest that its OK to make art in what ever image you want, a golden calf to worships or everyday acts like brewing a cup of tea. I know its not my position to say this or to give anyone permission to do anything. I go on to say that you will probably be able to get from art what you need if you take it seriously in all its relations This is perhaps one thing you can say about good artists, even if we don't make good art we do take art seriously on its own terms.
In all my reading and most of my conversations within the world of post- Cartesian social inquiry I haven't come across many approaches that expand art in a way that feels familiar or how I have experienced it as useful in the quest to better understand living knowledge. In the writing of John Dewey, Harman, Rancierre, Deleuze and Guattari and Ernst Block I have found a thread that links to Bergson's conception of time. Through Dewey's notions of experience that extends art properly into process. I think this is what I have always experienced art as, a process that relates us to the material world, ties us into the assemblage of what Deleuze would call a life.
Last week as I struggled to start my literature review I ordered Pat Thompsons book about how to encourage PhD students to write. It was a moment of slight desperation. I like Pat and in a way it is a bit of a quid quo pro as Pat does a lot of academic work within my old art world. I always smugly wondered what it felt to write about all this stuff but to be always kept at arms length, just in case you got a glimpse of the king in his altogether. It feels like the other way around now and Pat may be able to help me as a local guide who knows the territory.
Whitehead is another writer I've spent a little time with, he is complex and historically very attractive having a serious finger in the pie of principa mathmatica, quantum physics and later a rather idiosyncratic metaphysics. Sadly he is often reduced like many great thinkers to set of basic principles for which his name is often presented as an inadequate shorthand. One of these is the idea of the lure of the groove and the problem with getting stuck in it. To easily extrapolated from metaphysics the grove gets used to mean stuck in one academic discipline so you can't see anything else - a problem of specialization. The groove for me though is much more about process and how you move forward, the stuckness is in process not in time. The answer in relation to the relations of doing a PhD is not to be frightened of the groove but as much as possible to plough your own furrow.
At this point my thread through the field of the literature I've engaged with is how art is imagined and in turn what affects this has on how we think about knowing the world. The groove that I seem to be stuck in is what this means in the context of new -materialism or rather Post Cartesian research that mostly starts from a position of flatness. How and in what ways can the process of art-making or to follow Dewey art as experience be part of thinking about how we experience and expand the fields of art and living knowledge. Research creation and the origins of practice as research approaches complicated by a search for external academic validation and the search for research funding follows a parallel furrow or groove rich and full of potential but it is a furrow Whitehead may recognize as a groove. On occasion well mostly at the moment the stylus is not staying on the record so I can only speak off it.
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