Art, Disobedience and Ethics

 I worked in Bristol last week. It was a new project with Jennifer and I was nervous about it for all sorts of reasons.  I called it coming out of my Covid coma.  It was the first thing I had done since the start of the pandemic that felt like a new challenge. I was as worried about the drive as I was about the work.  Jennifer goes to bed very early but on Thursday night she spent a couple of hours coaching me which was helpful. She helped me to recognise things I already know about the PhD writing process  and galvanized the idea that PhD writing is a process I  need to fully engage with.  It is no longer any use to dance around the edges and write large amounts of words that are not a PhD.  

I have some nice work to do at the moment. A build project with Tom at Highfied adventure playground, the Shadow-Play project for Sheffield Theaters, the We Are Our Stories project in Bristol and the most excellent Trees project. Along with a few projection events this is possibly about 70 percent of what I was doing before my PhD as a freelancer.  Leaving 30 percent for PhD writing which seems just about doable as the funding has now finished. 

I've been having a strange exchange of ideas with Tim where we send each other short video clips.  He is normally in his cellar and I can only see the top of his head. I am in the cemetery walking the dog. My films are a bit like a first person video game.  He is trying to help me find a way through, his comments mainly focus on the purpose of writing a PhD not so much about creating new knowledge more about what the PhD is for.

One of Tim's suggestions was to think critically about my work with the academy.  To look at how I work on research and how I bring my practice to research projects.  In itself this is not very useful as I tried to explain that this is where I am and the type of critique I would probably like to make would need to come from the outside of where I am.  Perhaps from the world and work of artists and musicians trying to find a place for their disciplines to thrive or at least find value within the world of research. I am on the inside now, I feel like I am on  the inside trying to make new-sense.  Working freelance again especially on research projects has allowed me to feel a position again, a position where I feel I am of value. The difference between my PhD and these arenas is that on the projects I can bring a practice, bring arts methods and know enough about how theory works and how the academy work to have the confidence to contribute. Feeling out of my depth is always part of this but I rarely feel like I am drowning.  Picking up on projects like Treescapes and the Stories project in Bristol have reminded me how I work but also made me think about how my PhD project at the playground is very different to this way of working.

My initial work with Abi was actually a perfect  example of how research can work between disciplines, bring something distinct and different and looking back it really helped me to think in new ways about fractures and interventions and collaboration.  At the playground I'm actually on my own, there are no other disciplines or projects to intervene in so there is no middle space.  What has evolved over the 2 years of my residency is an interplay with theory - the theory has become the thing that intervenes, the middle place.  I say theory as distinct from the literature.  It is as if I am working in a cross disciplinary way with Delueze, I have accidentally invented this relationship for the project to try and make an in-between. 

It feels quite clear now that in developing my own project as an empirical study I was unable to actually explore what I had been doing for years which was to be in residence within a research project.  As I was constructing and building the project myself there was nothing (no event) intrinsic or transcendental to intervene with. I produced the  research myself so there was a different possibility of interaction.  I also identify as a visual artist and not a researcher so there is an element of performing research that never sat comfortably. 

I am working through Dennis Atkinsons book on art disobedience and ethics.  Laura suggested it was a book very much about art education and since she pointed this out I have read with this in-mind which has made it easier to understand.  I would say it is a book that places art and the creation of something new within the context of school pedagogies  or perhaps schooling.  The book points out how art is disobedient and will not settle - art is like a dog with a bone.  I haven't taken notes,  I don't take notes when I read books I find difficult as the interesting thoughts, if they are good are held within the difficulties.  I also find that when I take detailed notes they can often miss the point, find the easier routes to understanding which for me often removes feeling the books affect.  

There is a lot that resonates for me and connects to my experience.  Immanence is introduced really well - the not-yet, the enunciation on the verge of becoming. The speculative possibilities of art to engender difference to be more-than - to over-code to be in excess to capture.  With my theory head on and given that I haven't quite finished the book there is a worry for me that art is been tasked with doing or having the potential to do more than it perhaps can.  I read the book in bed at Jenifer's as I thought about our next day in school.  A big part of me was in complete agreement with thoughts from Rancierre and Spinoza and Whitehead and Deleuze and Guattari and I was laying these thoughts and agreements on the lesson plan for school.  What I realized is that to have any type of freedom you had to first be let in.  To be let in you had to be trusted and that it was too much to expect art to be disobedient without building a context for this disobedience.  It also felt like a weight of expectations almost like art was a panacea or a magic corrective wand. Dennis's book does not aspire to be  practical guide and it is brilliant in many ways, it does bring the key thinkers that come up again and again together in a way that makes sense, it does explain through example and creates connections and it does challenge some foundational bedrocks within schooling that have a massive impact on schools at every level.  The perception of good learning and teaching and quantifying it is an oppression. I welcome any well thought through challenge. 

Reading the book and then going into school and dealing with the practicalities, personalities, research project, expectations and pure logistics did make me wonder where it fitted.  I felt I aligned with the core ideas about learning and it was good to see them clearly laid out and beautifully referenced.  The book is like an external justification of a practice and an approach I passionately believe. Yet the mechanisms that come into play to hold onto and work with this ethos seem more complex and nuanced in the world.  It feels like the trick is not to know when to stick to your guns but to be able to compromise without  loosing site of an ethos, an idea, a practice, a way an art.