What the Academy Did to Making: The New Textuality for the Visual Arts
Art does not ask a question; it answers one. Why the academy's demand that artists explain themselves sits so awkwardly with the thing that makes art worth the trouble.
18 min read
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965. Folding wood chair, mounted photograph of a chair, and mounted photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of "chair." Museum of Modern Art, New York. A physical object, its image, and its verbal definition, each given equal wall space and equivalent institutional authority. The essay's argument, made in 1965.
There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has passed through an art school in the last twenty years, when the question stops being what you make and becomes what you can say about it. The moment has a texture. A supervision session in which the conversation drifts from the work on the wall to the written document that must accompany it. A panel of examiners requesting an account of 'research outcomes' and 'significance'. The blank field of a conference abstract, asking you to explain, in three hundred words, what your practice 'contributes to knowledge'. The work itself is still in the studio, or in your head, or not yet started. Its fate is already being negotiated in a different language altogether.
It is the consequence of a structural transformation in the art academy that has been accumulating, quietly and without ceremony, for several decades. In the era of the avant-garde that began roughly in the middle of the nineteenth century and ran until the late sixties, artists could still distinguish themselves according to their affiliation with the academy. 'Academic', when applied to art, had a withering ring that suggested sclerosis, sameness, and complacency. Today the art academy is all but ubiquitous, leaving the self-taught to the reckless or the very lucky. The exponential rise in world population means that certified qualifications are a must, and the bachelor's degree, far from the door-opener it once was, is merely the new starting point. It is now the norm for art competitions to stipulate a degree as a mandatory prerequisite for entry. Almost all art schools around the world are tied to a university, where the degree is ostensibly on par with the others in the same institution. And it is by now all but accepted that art is a form of research.
Yet the introduction of this term, more typical to science, is marred by an unresolved wager. While artists in art schools jockey for parity with the rest of the institution, agreeing to wear the new clothing, the clothing is still ill-fitting. Art is considered research, but it is what in Australia is called 'non-traditional', which means it does not accrue the kind of collateral funding open to 'traditional' forms, namely writing. Caught in this condescending bind, and needing to leverage income, art schools find themselves in the quandary where they must support only the forms of research they can justify, that is, which can be rationalised. The answer is to encourage staff and postgraduate students to deliver conference papers on their studio activities. Under the rubric of 'practice-based research', this predicament has created a new trend and a new breed: the artist driven to write more than make, to spill talk than spill paint.
The tension has a witness from inside the practice. In a talk for PhD students at the symposium 'Painting as Research' at the University of the Arts London, Ian Kiaer made the familiar but still relevant observation that there is a 'problem [with] the relationship between writing and making the work, it's a problem for the PhD but it's problematic anyway. From the beginning I would think about this distinction ... the very nature of how an artwork works is so different to [sic] how a text works, how thesis works, a written claim'. That these are fundamentally different activities is obvious enough. That the observation now has to be made at all, in the very rooms built to professionalise the artist, is itself the symptom.
But first, let us look at some of these new terms. Postgraduate students are now 'HDRs', Higher Degree Researchers; a plain descriptor, postgraduate, meaning after graduating from the basic degree, is transformed into a phrase that carries an elevated air, 'higher', and also makes a claim. With blithe semantic fast-tracking, the question as to whether these students are learning to research is comfortably elided. Next, 'non-traditional' forms of research, a term that deserves some scrutiny because of its presumptions and misprisions. For if we are to be captious, we might point out that the visual image predates the written word. Here 'tradition', with no indication as to when this tradition began, really means forms of research linked to the model of scientific verifiability and peer review. More to the point, it is a euphemism for 'unconventional', or, more aptly still, for forms of research that do not suit the standards of those comfortable with the standards they already have, namely most of 'us' in the academy. Once we scrape away the mystification, to abut 'non-traditional' next to 'research' is a way of undermining research without risking too much offence. With this in mind, the phrase 'practice-based' now becomes ironic, since almost all the sciences are 'practice-based'. There is a blatant Platonism at stake here, since the term is used far less in the sciences than it is in the applied arts. The list of qualifiers describes while tacitly undermining; the very need for a qualifier makes the discipline somewhat 'less'.
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The real problem is that art is not verifiable. Art, to borrow a cadence from Wittgenstein, does not ask a question; it answers one. It still remains unresolved amongst both students and academics what the artist-researcher must be doing. Must he or she set about finding the question to which the work of art is the answer? The problem sharpens in the visual arts PhD. A Masters degree requires the demonstration of a high level of proficiency in making works of art, and their critical analysis and historical positioning; a PhD is 'new knowledge'. This is easy enough to understand in the sciences, the isolation of a protein, the correction of a hypothesis, and in the humanities too, a new historical insight, the rethinking of an old problem, the exposure of a theoretical inconsistency, but when it comes to visual art it is unique from the very beginning, and whether it amounts to new knowledge is another matter altogether, one that hinges on whether the art is 'good'. Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, we need to ask whether art ever deals in new knowledge at all, or simply reasserts the fundamentals of existence.
It would be absurd to attempt to evaluate this, to gauge whether a work of art increases our awareness of something by more or less, since there is no effective standard on which to base the critique. We are back to the beginnings of art history and its foundation in the connoisseur, the one who simply knows better, due to greater knowledge and better taste, a quality that can never be wholly taught. The academic examiner is placed in this role but plays it imperfectly, since the criteria remain obscure. Any academic who has done enough examinations will be forced to admit that students can pass on mediocre work that is nonetheless plausibly argued, a film, say, accompanied by a forceful written thesis that makes a strong case for the components and apparatus of the work, as opposed to its net effect.
The difference between researching and inventing is sharpest in identity art, one of the more common and tried of recent artistic formulas. Artistic research of this kind is research run back to front, an accounting for the uniqueness of something that is already unique. Consider the minor celebrity who agrees, on camera, to have a past found for him. The format is by now a fixture: a presenter, an archive, a researcher who has done the real digging off-screen, and a slow walk toward a revelation timed to land before the ad break. These shows are voyeuristic, self-indulgent, and maudlin. The celebrity goes to archives, conducts web searches, and is sent on some personal pilgrimage to a town whose name he cannot pronounce. A gap is identified: there is stuff about granddad he did not know. The gap is closed with information: granddad was a Nazi. The more dramatic the better.
An artist embarking on a similar task will perhaps begin in a similar fashion. This stage of unearthing, ordering, and justifying data is, indeed, research, and at this point nothing distinguishes the artist from the genealogist or the camera crew. What the artist does next, if the work is any good, is something else, although the recent bluster about research has precipitated forms of art that pursue a fairly dry research model in earnest, hence the rhetoric about 'the archive' and the like. Say the artist goes to a site with a special historical resonance and makes film footage there, or takes photographs, or makes drawings. The footage may have an evidential quality, but that will not be its sole purpose, nor the only purpose of the photograph or the drawing, for the medium becomes a vehicle to a wider imagining, one that is speculative and prospective. The work uses this subject matter as a basis, a touchstone, for generating a series of imaginary attachments that make the transition from unearthing facts to invocation. It reaches to areas of thinking, perception, and experience that are not limited to the material substance of the site, and that lie well beyond the site itself. The work uses facts to reach the spaces to which raw factuality is inaccessible. My Nazi granddad was here and executed a bunch of gypsies, how was it? In many cases to find out the facts is to lose the wonder, and the delight in wondering.
Works of art engage in a refashioning in which facts are but an integer in the process. Because of this refashioning and reshaping, the result is generally different from the original intention, and this surprise in the final form is the basis of most analytical inquiry. In order to evaluate what has been done, the artist-researcher will embark on an explanation of what the work means, and weigh up the effectiveness of its content and approach, almost turning him or herself into a personal critic. This is one beneficial outcome of the process, as it helps to refine the self-criticism and self-valuation that, at best, assist in independent reflection. Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum open their book on how artists think with the plain statement that 'artists often begin something without knowing how it will turn out. In practice, this translates as thinking through doing'. But the advantage holds only for certain forms of art practice. Art may be rich in meaning and insight, but it also embraces the oblique and the obscure. Fisher and Fortnum point to the currency, alive in art, of 'a kind of liminal space where not knowing is not only not overcome, but sought, explored, and savoured; where fervour, boredom, frustration and getting lost are constructively deployed alongside wonder, secrets and play'. The traditional and scientific model is about overcoming wonder and dispelling mystery, while art is about keeping it alive. If the riddle in the work of art is solved, then it dies. This is the double bind that the artist-researcher is ultimately faced with: demystify, or risk not being taken seriously. The best the artist-researcher can wish for is to play at unpacking the work while ensuring that it stays shrouded in its own perpetual ambiguities.
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One way of doing this is to provide 'artistic context' for the work. Here the candidate places the studio work within the terrain of his or her peers, and attempts to cite the family values, the artists either contemporary or historical who together amount to a particular sensibility. This is far less problematic at Masters level, which only needs to demonstrate a firmness of knowledge without the onus of large claims of importance or originality. If we are to run with the above example, let us also pretend that this is a PhD candidate in her mid-twenties. It is feasible that in one part of her writing she will compare herself to other artists in this vein, from Tacita Dean to Christian Boltanski to Gerhard Richter. It is tenable to explain her areas of affinity and of difference, but the question of parity, which is theoretically necessary to defend the originality of her contribution, is altogether moot.
The process of mounting an argument for the relevance and importance of the work of art has led to its own enclave of jargon. It is much the same for art academics, who now need to write short manifests to the research office for each of their 'non-traditional research outputs'. 'Traditional research', the peer-reviewed journal article, can simply be submitted as an example of research activity, while the 'non-traditional output', an exhibition, must be accompanied by a text explaining the work's 'outcomes' and 'significance'. In so doing the artist makes a case for the originality and, in the end, the aesthetic usefulness of the work. This is not so hard if the artist is using technology, or if the work avails itself of some dimension oriented outside the aesthetic, for the 'merely' aesthetic remains an anathema.
Heaven help a painter working in the still-life tradition. Ironically the word tradition comes up again, though now it is the kind that matters to art, since many practices work closely within established traditions and mean to continue them. The purpose is not to do something new, just to do it well, to participate in a dialogue with the past and to safeguard a tradition into some imaginary perpetuity. So a ceramicist would likely lose out, but to make traditional pots in a glaze with a new chemical compound would be of interest to research. Abstract painters are also in jeopardy, since it is typically the purpose of non-objective abstraction to reach to where words cannot. The best they can hope for is to receive reviews and other forms of media attention that account for the work's 'impact', irrespective of the history of art being full of key works that got lost in the critical mail when they were first exhibited.
To counteract this there is a list of words I like to call 'vector words'. They are like the verbal Viagra for the explication of artworks. A few examples: 'challenge', 'dispute', 'reposition', 'gap in knowledge', 'respond to a lack', 'mobilise', 'cross-disciplinary', 'new knowledge', 'cross-pollinate'. It is unlikely that a research manifest will not have these words, which begs a very big question as to whether the value of the work rests ultimately in the written argument. The postgraduate student, the HDR, will at least have his or her work shown alongside the written thesis; for the art academic the visual work ends in words. His or her research is ultimately at the behest of a different medium and a different logic. Excepting the few and the fortunate, artists are expected to write more in order to stay artists.
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The antagonism between the written word and the visual image, as well as their symbiosis, is a venerable one. The most famous statement from Horace's Ars Poetica is ut pictura poesis, 'as is painting so is poetry'. The phrase has been read for centuries as a licence to treat the two arts as siblings who do the same work by different means, but it was famously countered in the first studied examination of the formal properties of the arts, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Lessing took as his occasion the ancient sculpture of the priest Laocoön and his sons writhing in the coils of the serpents, and asked why the figure does not scream, where Virgil's verse had let him raise his cries to the stars. His answer was that the two arts labour under different limits. Painting and sculpture are arts of space; they hold bodies still in a single instant, and are therefore bound to choose the one moment that will best repay prolonged looking, the moment Lessing called the pregnant one, the instant heavy with what came before it and what will follow. A face held permanently mid-scream is repellent the longer one looks, and so the sculptor sounded the note just below it. Poetry and writing, by contrast, are arts of time; they unfold action in succession, and can let the scream ring out because the reader is already moving on to the next line. Painting, then, is a spatial and more or less instantaneous phenomenon, while poetry and writing are diachronic and unfold within time. And although one is encouraged to take time over a good painting, one's apprehension remains within the confines of what is materially given; it unfolds in a completely different way from painting.
The distinction did not stay technical for long. The Romantics, with Kant's account of the sublime behind them, turned the limits of the visual into a kind of vocation. For Kant the sublime was precisely what overwhelmed the faculty of presentation, the magnitude or the force before which the imagination failed and gestured, in its failure, toward something it could not contain. From there it was a short step to the conviction that the highest art is the art that points past what any word can fix, and that a picture's falling silent might be the very mark of its having arrived somewhere words could not follow. By the time of Russian and Greenbergian formalism this was a distinction taken as a given, used to distance the visual, in late modernism primarily painting, from the written word, in a phase where painting attempted the sublime and numinous, as with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. A Rothko asks to be stood before rather than read, and its admirers have always spoken of it in the hushed register kept for the chapel. This leads inevitably to a form of mysticism which, once the enthusiasm wears off, enforces a silence, a wordlessness, that can be quite boring.
A statement such as Kiaer's, however, which has been sounded many times, is not to be seen in the same context as Lessing's, but is rather sounded by the consciousness of what visual artists now need to do to get a higher degree, which means to write, and to use linguistic channels foreign to the artistic process. Anyone who has observed the march of professionalisation through the art academy, and the development of the visual arts PhD in the new millennium, will have observed candidates who are very good artists but whose suitability is less than appropriate because they are not particularly good writers. This means the art PhD is of a particular genus, and the long-term effects remain to be seen.
The mandate to write is only compounded by the need to show a work or an exhibition's importance according to citable values. As any experienced artist knows, reviews are arbitrary at best: it is either to do with the venue, the subject matter, or who you know. Few magazines run reviews, and newsprint is only interested in what the non-specialist public is likely to read, such as the current blockbuster at the National Gallery. One way to address this is to give conference presentations on 'practice-based research', where the artist effectively writes an analysis of the studio work for formal discussion in an academically sanctioned environment. Leading conference organisations like the College Art Association, the Popular Culture Association, and their various offshoots, down to the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand, are all now open to contributions by 'studio researchers', and actively encourage them to deliver alongside those presenting more 'traditional' kinds of paper. This would have been the exception in the 1980s, and unheard of earlier, unless the artist also had an established reputation as a writer, a Robert Motherwell. Today the testimonial model is unquestioned, and welcomed.
Yet there are obvious virtues to the traditional default, in which the externality of the critic to the artistic process admits of a more objective setting for ideas and observations. An artist discussing his or her own work has a fundamentally limited amount of critical distance. Another positive justification for the testimonial-style conference paper is exposure against a publicity market that is erratic, fickle, and fashion-conscious.
But self-promotion can only go so far. There is as yet little agreement on the form and shape of the research testimonial, the artist giving a formal presentation on his or her own work. There is little account taken, for instance, of the fact that the overuse of the first-person pronoun actually dims the critical faculty, on the part of both deliverer and audience. In so writing, the artist enters into a quasi-diaristic genre in which subjective choice and point of view are privileged over dispassionate evaluation, and an over-enthusiastic presentation can have the opposite effect. Nonetheless, there are now a growing number of artists in conferences, as there are journals about the artistic process. More knowledge and more opportunities are welcome, but we might also reflect on how this knowledge is skewed, and on the forums in which it is aired. Art is now not only exhibited, it is exhibited for the sake of being turned into an academic presentation and an article.
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Marcel Duchamp's lapidary statement, 'stupid as a painter', was meant to be provocative and ironic. It both defended and satirised the romantic stance of the modern artist who protected himself from the barrage of verbiage through the bastion of a visual domain that words found impenetrable. It also suggests that the artist has an air of the stupid about him to anyone who is not an artist. Then there is Georges Braque's statement that 'one can explain everything about a work of art except the bit that matters'. Perilously misunderstood, it does not discount words altogether, since it can equally suggest that in the explanation one comes closer to the 'bit' in question. The conceptual artists of the sixties were responding to what they thought was an anti-intellectualism that had seeped into art; the high-modernist belief in a pure presentational visuality had run its course, and the exclusion of words was deemed specious and overly severe. Let us also not forget, as Tom Wolfe famously remarked in his classic study of Abstract Expressionism, The Painted Word, that the movement about pure visuality had hitherto never been so insulated by so much writing.
The new textuality in the academy is something different again, a kind of rationalisation by stealth. It might be salutary to notice that in art's campaign to find parity with 'traditional research models' it runs the risk of escaping itself. The escape is gradual and well mannered, conducted in the language of outcomes and significance, and it is most complete in the artists who are best at it. As art in institutions continues to curry favour with other disciplines, the reward for compromise is so far only the prize for second place.
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References
Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum (eds.), On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013.
Ian Kiaer, "Studio", in Fisher and Fortnum (eds.), On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), trans. Ellen Frothingham, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.
Joseph Kosuth (born 1945), One and Three Chairs, 1965. Wooden folding chair, mounted photograph of the chair, and mounted photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of "chair". Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Horace, Ars Poetica, c. 19 BCE.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett, Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.
Barnett Newman (1905 to 1970), Onement I, 1948. Oil and oil-based paint on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Joseph Beuys (1921 to 1986), I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974. Performance, René Block Gallery, New York.
