A Brief Introduction To My Research

The following is an introductory text produced for an exhibition of research staff currently teaching at Gray’s School of Art.

Throughout my career as an artist and academic, I have always been interested in the theory as well as the many practices of representation. During the last 5 years this interest has developed to the point that my research has become wholly devoted to the theory of representation and its wider implications, most especially as it pertains to perception, communication and consciousness.

What is representation? By "representation" I mean precisely what we commonly mean by the term in ordinary language. Representations are stand-ins typically, although not exclusively, used for the purposes of communication. Even political representatives act as proxies for the people whose political views they represent. In short, representations are useful substitutes for the things they represent (although substitution alone is obviously not sufficient for representation).

The means by which representations function might seem to be extremely varied, because they are can involve so many different techniques. But in fact representations can be divided into three distinct categories (vide Donald Brook 1997, 2013), two nonverbal and one verbal. The two nonverbal strategies of representation rely on two importantly different sorts of resemblance, whereas verbal communication relies upon the capacity to accept almost anything as a symbolic substitute for anything else. This is an extremely sophisticated skill, almost entirely restricted to most humans.

It is my view that our prodigious skill in the use of symbolic communication is the result of a long history of tool-use and especially of practices of social exchange in which objects and behaviours become interchangeable due to socially negotiated attributions of value that are ascribed to them. It is this process—this technique—of value attribution that I regard as such a vital factor in the emergence of practices of symbol-use and the ascription of symbolic meaning.

It will be clear then, that I regard symbolic meaning as an exclusively human invention because it is fully dependent upon the capacity to treat objects and circumstances as having significance that is not a quantifiable property of them. When we say that a ball means "playtime" to a dog, we need not be committing ourselves to the belief that the dog regards the ball as a symbol of playtime. We merely mean that the dog knows that the ball usually accompanies playful activity. In other words, we take the dog to be capable of forming associative responses to things and thus to know what they mean in this limited sense.

Returning to nonverbal representations, we find that language enables us to treat these also as verbal constructs, but it does not follow that it is always appropriate to do so; to treat them as messages, signifiers, descriptions or texts. What a nonverbal representation is of is what we might regard as a first-order representational feature. What it is about, on the other hand, is a second-order representational feature and thus depends on a different set of interpretive resources on our part.

There is another common confusion that my research seeks to disentangle. Images, for example, do not resemble things in the same way as models. Models, copies, replicas, reproductions, re-enactments, and exemplification etc. all function because they share features in common with the things they represent. These shared features may be approximate to various degrees, but they are not the result of effects. Images, on the other hand, are only fully like the things they represent in certain ways and under certain conditions. In other words, depictions can sometimes be mistaken for the things they represent, but such mistakes rely to a very significant degree on the particular circumstances of presentation or encounter (i.e. the level and evenness of light, our point of view, our level of attentiveness etc.). This is the basis of many illusions of course.

Finally, to say that an image is a description or that a description is a picture or that a picture is a model or that models delineate the world etc. is to talk in circles. My research is intended to show how the theorisation of philosophers, researchers and sometimes even scientists can go awry when they carelessly confuse, misunderstand or mischaracterise distinct categories of representation.

In Significant Research

Inasmuch as institutions of education are devoted to various forms of evaluation and assessment it seems logical that the research of art teachers should be assessed just as that of other academics. If the professional practice of art teachers is to be given comparable credence as other disciplines, and is to be financially supported, then presumably art teachers should be able to demonstrate the value of their output to the wider community – and the more significant the better. Nonetheless, as a discipline, art does not fit comfortably within the regime of research assessment (See REF), not least because of the continual emphasis on the very term "research". Do artists conduct research? Does it make sense to define the work that artists produce as research?

Most people think of artists as practitioners, as makers, certainly not as bookish academics or scholars lost amongst the shelves of a dusky archive and even less as lab-coat-clad experimenters. But perhaps this is to make a caricature of what is surely a heterogeneous practice in which many forms of enquiry are engaged. Neither is it intended to suggest that artists do not concern themselves with questions of knowledge or understanding. They do. But the search that artists are involved with articulates itself primarily through a frequently messy and unstructured engagement with materials and processes. Art concerns itself with experience from the inside, as it were, and looks to knowledge as a means to deepen this experience, much less as a means to understand it. In recent times this form of enquiry has come to be called "Situated Knowledge" or "Material Thinking" and it seems likely that these terms, and the arguments that underpin them, have emerged as a backlash against the preponderance of emphasis placed upon more conventional forms of knowledge production that are so venerated by the Research Excellence Framework and its like.

If art creates knowledge at all it is certainly not because artists deliberately seek it in the ways that, for example, scientists do. Artistic Method, if there ever were such a thing, would doubtless be a singularly ineffective means to accumulate knowledge or articulate it. Any knowledge that comes about through the creation or interpretation of art does so as a by-product of experience - experience that must first be felt and interpreted to be understood. Experience is the point, both in the making and in the contemplative encounter with art, even if the experience, as such, is the discovery of knowledge. Art shows us how the experience of forming - as distinct from 'acquiring' - knowledge can, in itself, be more edifying and fulfilling than knowledge alone. Where art is concerned, experience eclipses knowledge.

“It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of ‘culture.’”

John Cage does an excellent job here of clarifying the difference between various kinds of involvement and how, as we remove ourselves further and further from being 'in' an experience, the more passive and pointless the exercise. Art is not a declarative process - it does not hand itself over easily. The power of art resides in the degree to which it rewards concerted engagement. You have to work at it and the closer you approach the condition of the maker - in fact of supplanting them - the more rewarding the experience promises to be. At its best, art transforms its audience, in the act of interpretation, into creators, not viewers, not listeners, nor even performers, but makers: creators of significance.

There are deep pleasures to be gained from this process: "The pleasure of finding things out" as physicist Richard Feynman put it, not of being told, nor even of possessing new knowledge, but of engaging to the point of discovery. Art is not simply something we consume then, but rather something we make anew for ourselves.

It should be apparent by now that the skills, insights and imagination of the artist are only fragments in the overall constitution of the artwork, though indispensably important ones. But without the engagement of an audience the artwork can be little more than an inert and anonymous object. Each engaged audience, each thoughtful viewer, re-creates the artwork - the more they devote, the more they are likely to reap.

But if it is we who re-create the artwork, if its significance is largely of our own making then why credit the artist at all? Moreover, if the significance of an artwork is, to some indeterminate degree, a projection of its audience then how can an accurate estimate of the contribution of the artist ever be formed? This is a question for which no criteria - whether for the evaluation of art students or art teachers - will ever provide a satisfactory answer.

The impact of any experience emanates in multiple directions like ripples on an already turbulent pond. Quite how the influence of any particular impact can be assessed from the ensuing tumult is highly questionable. Granted, large impacts create a measurable increase in overall activity but if Chaos Theory has taught us anything it is that small events can sometimes have profound consequences.

Culture is the product of collective activity and the ripples across its surface are a complex interleaving of causes and effects. By singling out only the measurable influences, not only do we vastly exaggerate their perceived significance, but we also overlook the significance of a multitude of other constitutive, and therefore vital, contributions. The outcome is a situation where those individuals who are already successful reap yet more rewards, whilst the untried, the speculative and the unpredictable are simply ignored, thus promoting and perpetuating a culture of risk aversion, performativity and self-regard.

The Co-Creativity of Hand and Mind

The following is the text portion of a presentation I made at a staff research meeting (a “pecha kucha” in fact) held a few days ago at Gray’s School of Art. The theme of the meeting was “The Co-Creativity of Hand and Mind”:

“Nothing ever conceived of, was made by thought alone.”

I found myself saying this during a tutorial recently in an attempt to encourage a student to take more risks and learn from the process of making rather than simply thinking about making. There are forms of thinking, one might argue, that are only possible when we work with certain materials in certain ways. We literally think differently when physically engaging with materials and processes such that when we cease to use those materials and processes we become divorced from their associated forms of imagination.

But with the rising costs of materials and the increasing financial pressures upon students, is it any wonder that they seem ever more unwilling to learn from the messy and uncertain arena of experiment, failure and discovery? And is this process of making, of testing, of production - and by association - of acquisition, consumption and disposal as benign and impartial as we might ideally wish it to be?

It strikes me that whilst our thoughts and imaginings - these ephemeral products of consciousness - are an undoubted gift, in this culture of objectification and quantification we’re often unsatisfied with - and even distrustful of - the intangibility of imagination. We seek externalizations and evidence: measurable, concrete, palpable realities. We’re unconvinced by ideas without form, by words without effect, and this sets up a challenge for all of us who consider ourselves dreamers as well as makers: what manner of impact do we desire upon the world and what price are we prepared to pay for it, or rather; what price are we prepared for the world to pay?

When we speak of the co creativity of the hand and mind, of course the hand is simply a metaphor for describing our interactions with the world and our manipulations of it. We touch on things and we are, in turn, touched by them: by the impress of the world. We feel our way through a sensory and somatic landscape that subtly and profoundly registers our presence and invites our contemplation. Our minds are formed and informed by nothing but sensory impressions and our manifold meanderings through memories, dreams and imaginings. Embodied Knowledge is the only knowledge we will ever truly know, for our bodies are the only interface we possess.

Much of what we create can be divided in two ways: as an extension of our senses or as an extension of our capacities. These two impulses are by no means the same. We extend our senses in order to gather data and to locate ourselves in the world more precisely. The extension of our capacities takes the form of toolmaking and our manipulations of the environment, to bend it to our will and to locate ourselves in the world more comfortably. Our senses reach out into the world in order to perceive it for what it is despite our presence. Our capacities, on the other hand, reach out into the world to make our presence felt. Our senses gather what comes to them unimpeded, whereas our capacities reach out to grasp, to manipulate, to possess and to consume. What our senses take makes no impression save on our minds. What our capacities make is nothing but impression, influence and impact. The impress of the world upon our senses is as intangible as emptiness, whereas the impress of our mind upon the world can be seen and felt in the entire constellation of existences that live and die by the hand of man.

But there is, perhaps, another less sinister and therefore more hopeful aspect to our capacities: we have the ability to give, to share, to transform and probably most importantly of all, to protect, to defend, to heal and to nurture.

And these thoughts raise another more encompassing question: in a context where learning emerges in large part through the consumption of materials, energy and resources, where should creativity and pedagogy reside within this fragile ecology of hand and mind?