Practice as Research

Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry

Estelle Barrett, Barbara Bolt, Estelle Barrett, Barbara Bolt

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857736215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Practice-led research is a burgeoning area across the creative arts, with studio informed doctorates frequently favoured over traditional approaches to research. Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry is specifically designed as a training tool and is structured on the model used by most research programmes. A comprehensive introduction lays out the book's framework and individual chapters provide concrete examples of studio-based research in art, film and video, creative writing and dance. Comprehensive in its approach, the volume draws on thinkers including Deleuze, Bourdieu and Heidegger in its examination of the relationship between practice and theory demonstrating how practice can operate as a valid alternative mode of enquiry to traditional scholarship.

1

INTEREST: THE ETHICS
OF INVENTION

Paul Carter

The problem of assessing the value of inventions is not new. Writing in 1787, in an open letter to Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham coined the phrase “invention-lottery”.¹ Referring to the mechanism of invention as art, he called those who engaged in it projectors. Two hundred and thirty years later, this vocabulary is still familiar to us. Bentham took a fairly broad view of art, probably meaning to indicate any and all the crafts that lead to the improvement of the amenities of life.

The emergence of practice-based or creative research as an overarching term to describe the nature of work across a range of fields formerly considered distinct (at least in the academy) curiously circles back to Bentham’s conception. It may seem obvious that the techniques different modes of creativity use are different: the great divide between language-based and image-based arts remains. In Material Thinking (2004) I have questioned this distinction, arguing for a hybrid discursivity, common to both when they circulate in the public realm.² But in any case, we can agree with Bentham that, insofar as these different modes of imaginative projection can be grouped together, the property they have in common is that of invention.

In the process of invention the heterogeneous interests of the poet, the choreographer, the hip-hop deejay, the AutoCad designer and the landscape architect display their common interests. The condition of invention—the state of being that allows a state of becoming to emerge—is a perception, or recognition, of the ambiguity of appearances. Invention begins when what signifies exceeds its signification—when what means one thing, or conventionally functions in one role, discloses other possibilities. The ambiguity noticed at this time is the excess of materiality that resists semiotic distillation, the supplement of matter that haunts communication. It is the pun or homophone in language, the Freudian form in architecture, the sound in-between in musical composition, the both-and gestures in choreography. Aristotle advised the orator that there were rules of invention. Similarly, we all have techniques of invention. The poet explores the ambiguous realm between language and music; the deejay between music and the materiality of noise. In general, a double movement occurs, of decontextualisation in which the found elements are rendered strange, and of recontextualisation, in which new families of association and structures of meaning are established. This double movement characterises any conceptual advance. In philosophy, it is the Socratic method. The distinction of practice-based research is to mediate this process materially, allowing the unpredictable and differential situation to influence what is found. Technique is necessary, but in the transformation it falls away.

In our context, this double movement of invention is not simply a matter of praxis, it also represents the critical difference of creative research from other forms of critical enquiry: for cultural scholars—anthropologists, sociologists, historians—are no doubt skilled in analysing the underlying structures informing our symbolic forms, but they cannot put back together what they have shattered. They are suspicious of our reconstructions, precisely because, in incorporating self-differing qualities of growth, transformation and excessive materiality, they defy a unilateral semiotic reduction. However different their forms, the outcomes of creative research, or art in Jeremy Bentham’s terminology, share a common belief in the epistemological value of invention. It is not simply that they want to improve the status of creativity in the Australian research culture. They argue that invention embodies a distinct way of knowing the world. It is a powerful, because complex and multi-sensorial, method of real-world analysis, and its aleatory, constitutionally open, anything-goes character, which is said to weaken its claim to rigour, is, in reality, a sign of its sophistication. In the present research environment practice-based research represents a concerted attack on the institutionalised separation of the heuristic disciplines (the Sciences, broadly) from the hermeneutical ones (broadly, the Humanities). This is not to say that reintegration is assured: the greatest obstacle to progress is the lack of a language that can mediate the meaning of our constitutionally localised inventions to a community that identifies power with abstraction and the dematerialisation of thought from the matrix of its production. It is precisely here that Material Thinking seeks to make a contribution.³

Bentham spoke of the promotors of art as projectors. It is another term that curiously anticipates our own. Those involved in creative or practice-based research usually talk about what they do in terms of projects. Their work is a speculative throwing forward of the mind. The image of bridge-building suggests itself, but also the prospect of failure. Here another of Bentham’s observations will no doubt strike a chord: ‘The career of art, the great road which receives the footsteps of projectors, may be considered as a vast, and perhaps unbounded, plain, bestrewed with gulphs, such as Curtius was swallowed up in. Each requires an human victim to fall into it ere it can close, but when it once closes, it closes to open no more, and so much of the path is safe to those who follow’.⁴ If we modernise this metaphor, the urban landscape of creative research remains much the same. We project our work out over abysses of scepticism, often made wider by erosive economic considerations, and, as often as not, our designs, instead of supplying bridgeheads to the new, stand abandoned, like cranes on buildings whose speculators went bust. They point, but to what? I want to come back to the metaphor of the project in a moment, but first I want to take up this question of direction, the notion that the achievements of practice-based research can be strung like beads on the linear rosary of national progress.

The hallmark of modernity is invention and in Australia this statement has a particular nuance. Despite the historical revisionists, it remains, in a sense, correct to say that Cook “discovered” Australia. Etymologically, discover and invent have the same root, and both mean ‘to come across or upon’. As a rational speculation, the colony, which Phillip inaugurated, was the offspring of projectors borrowing against the future. The First Fleet was a bridgehead to enhanced territorial and commercial wealth. Bentham’s topographical analogy, in which the advancement of knowledge and the conquest of new territories go hand in hand, is reproduced a thousand-fold in the literature of colonial exploration and survey: every explorer cast himself as a latter-day Mettius Curtius, prepared to sacrifice himself for the territorial security of those who came after him. But the economic metaphor is as strong as the geographical one. Bentham’s object in defending the value of art and projectors was to combat what he saw as the prejudice against usury or money-lending. The system of lending money at an agreed interest rate was, he thought, essential to material progress. Projectors should be encouraged to borrow, usurers to lend. In a country like Britain, whose prosperity depended on sea trade, he said, this was especially important. Australia was, and continues to be, an invention of this speculative economy. The Australia invoked in school textbooks, by politicians, and even in the national research priorities of the government is an invention whose value depends on the interest it generates. It may be that these oddly speculative origins explain the perennial insecurity said to characterise the Australian psyche. In any case, it underlines the point that Australia and invention are cognate terms. As practice-based researchers, our research is not supplementary to Australia’s interests—it is the interest of our inventions that secures it.

You can see, then, that a discussion about the ethics of invention extends beyond the particular uses to which particular inventions are put. Even the apparently clear-cut issues raised by the invention of the hydrogen bomb, or the progress of the genome project, cannot be understood in isolation from a larger social context. Nor do I mean by this that their social history needs to be written, or sociologies of invention produced (valuable as these are). The larger social context I have in mind does not stand outside the culture of invention but is integral to it. This is evident in the phrase “an ethics of invention”, which does not mean the science that differentiates “good” inventions from “bad” ones, but refers to the custom or habit of invention. To understand the social value of what we are doing, we need to study the process of creativity, rather than its outcomes. The word interest does not refer to an outcome established as operationally efficient or conventionally true, but to a relationship. Interesse means to be between. Interest produces the desire to go beyond oneself. This is why the German philosopher Herbart identified it as the psychological precondition of educability. Education, from educere, to lead out. But for this desire to go beyond ourselves, we could not encounter what is not yet (for ourselves)—what scientists like to call the new but others call the other. Interest is the desire to collaborate: and collaboration is a microcosm of the new relation or worldly arrangement we desire to create. The ethics of invention reside not in the truth of what is found but in the interest of what is done. ‘In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is, that it adds to interest’, Whitehead observed in Process and Reality.⁵ And, when the ideas we put forward fall on deaf ears, another of his aphorisms may console us: ‘Truth is a special case of interest’.⁶ This is why invention always involves an ethical question.

Interest is what matters in creative research. But we could say this the other way about: for the phrases “what is interesting” and “what matters” are synonymous. What makes creative research interesting is its attitude towards, its ethos, if you like, in regard to materials. This may seem obvious to you, but I assure you that in the abstract discourses that bear on, and sometimes bear down upon, the activities of the artist, designer, choreographer or producer, it is anything but clear. One object of Material Thinking is to show how this drift to abstraction, in which the study of knowledge is separated from the processes that produce it can be reversed. The reintegration of study and process involves a re-evaluation of matter— of, we might say, what matters. The power of thought in the technocratic discourses common to academe, government and business involves an algebraic reduction of language’s richness. In these discourses terms are defined abstractly, in ways that detach them from the poetic matrix of their production, circulation and mutation. Inventiveness is taken out of language. Those charged with maximising shareholder profits or minimising public liability speak as if truth were the elimination of interest.

It is in this context that I speak of strong collaboration:

When nationally valuable research is identified with scientific and technological breakthroughs yielding private industry benefits (technological applications of inventions, the awarding of patents, and so on) or public managerial benefits (information retrieval and processing in the domain of demographic trends, for example), there is no taste for complex interactions. When research is synonymous with problem-solving and crisis-management, criteria of success are simplification, resolution, closure. In the process of conducting research, new “problems” emerge; but these are treated in the same way. Within this model it is self-evident that a research question without a simple answer is not a proper subject for research.

In contrast with these weak forms of collaboration, creative research, respecting the materiality of thought—its localisation in the act of invention—has a different object. It studies complexity and it defends complex systems of communication against over-simplification. It explores the irreducible heterogeneity of cultural identity, the always unfinished process of making and remaking ourselves through our symbolic forms. Its success cannot be measured in terms of simplification and closure. Exploring the reinvention of social relations at that place does not produce a “discovery” that can be generalised and patented. It is an imaginative breakthrough, which announces locally different forms of sociability, environmental interactivity and collective storytelling.

These effects of national interest will be missed so long as the “nearly wide open anything goes” collective desire of self-becoming is not regarded as a legitimate research field. Creative researchers and “industry partners” (to follow the present rubric) can only broker strong collaborations if they share this mythopoetic goal. Public artists, say, can have no effect on public space design if their commissioning agency segregates them from the design process as whole. Even if their material thinking is admitted to that larger conversation, it can make no difference unless all parties commit themselves to a process of self reinvention. That process has a technical aspect, and represents a procedural challenge, but the value of the complexity it introduces into the relation between poiesis and place-making is that it mirrors the complexity of the “client”, who is not a committee but a more or less nebulous collectivity of heterogeneous interests representing the “unfinished” character of society at large. (Carter 2004: 13)

The act of according value to matter is not simply a precondition of your art, as Bentham put it. It is a philosophical attitude or ethos. Material thinking—what happens when matter stands in-between the collaborators supplying the discursive situation of their work—is a different method of constructing the world in which we live. Throughout the history of Western philosophy, invention has been a missing term. Resolving the great question the Greeks bequeathed us, the reality or otherwise of change, has been hampered by a disdain for what the practical arts have to teach us about the construction and reconstruction of the world we make. With distinguished exceptions (Vico and Bachelard amongst them), philosophers have ignored the ethos of materials— their tendency to combination. When Husserl, for example, wrestled with the problem of the historical transmission and development of geometry, he found the evolution of an ideal form paradoxical because he left out the interest that drove its invention and re-invention. Material is never brute matter; it is always between ourselves, hiding us from, but also leading us towards, what we may come across. But for its being interesting, there would be no reason to act at this place.

The point of these general remarks is to assert the value of invention— which, I maintain, as the distinct focus of creative research, is located neither after nor before the process of making but in the performance itself. This can be the case because the making process always issues from, and folds back into a social relation. It is this back-and-forth or discourse, that provides the testing-ground of new ideas, and which establishes their interest. From the point of view of creative research, materials are always in a state of becoming. They are not to be imagined as crystalline, dry or elemental but as colloidal, humid and combinatory. The good artist calibrates rates of exchange, and, in this sense, Bentham’s figure of art as a mastering of abysses needs to be recognised as a peculiarly wilful and environmentally-alienated conception of innovation. As I have suggested in Repressed Spaces (2002), the story of Mettius Curtius, the brave young citizen who offered himself as a human sacrifice when a fissure opened in the Roman forum, may be an allegory about the engineering spirit that disregards the lie of the land and its ghosts. In any case, ours is a period when the car assembly signifiers of innovation need to undergo change. Complexity replaces simplicity; swarms, blebs, groups, degrees of randomness, qualities of asymmetrical temporality and local difference provide units of design that supersede linear qualities of self-sufficiency, repetition, smoothness, symmetry and global homogeneity. It is in this way that the materiality of materials, materialised in the act of invention, assumes an ethical role in human affairs:

Materials become material signs when, in the process of creative collaboration, they hand themselves over to each other. But it is important that the handing over occurs in the right way. There is an ethics of scattering and recombination…. A right attitude towards materials is itself a concomitant of a right attitude towards collaboration. And this combination of right handing over at a material and interpersonal level expresses the idea of a different social relation, in which people may inhabit their environment recreatively rather than destructively. (Carter 2004: 183-184)

In 2002 I had the opportunity to present these ideas in the context of developing a public space strategy at Melbourne’s Docklands. A group within the property developer Lendlease had signalled their desire to break the tower-plinth approach to the design and arrangement of built structures across their site, and invited me to develop ‘a robust template or ground pattern that can be used as the basis for the siting, scaling and distribution of urban and landscape design elements throughout the site’.⁷ My approach was to define two principles that would allow the site analysis to take into account aspects of the site that eluded conventional recognition, and to produce a set of what I called “Descriptions” or thinking drawings, that sought to notice, if not to notate, movement forms whose traces were integral to the characterisation of the place. First, I enunciated what I called “The Argo Principle”:

Historically, the Harbour has been a site of exchange. Exchange occurs wherever a place of meeting produces change. As the focus of trade, the Harbour married movement and change. To pass through the harbour meant a change of value and state. It meant entering a zone of flux and transformation. Over time every element in the Harbour was replaced, repriced, relocated, re-invented. This principle doesn’t mean ignoring what is reported in recent Melbourne Docklands Heritage Studies. It simply means looking at that information in a different light—as a legacy of appearances and disappearances. In short, a history of change. In this way attention shifts from static objects to mobile processes. It becomes possible to see the space as a dynamic, self-reinventing network of tracks, outlines, shadows, edges, sightlines and wakes—to see it as if it were reflected in the ever-changing face of the water. The Greek hero, Jason, sailed to get the Golden Fleece in the Argo. It was a long voyage, and gradually the ship’s timbers rotted. By the time Jason came home, every timber of the Argo had been replaced. The Argo was a completely new ship. In this way the old ship survived through constant movement and change, completely reinvented. Hence the Argo Principle: applied to Victoria Harbour, it states that the essential mobile, changeful character of the site is best described as a heritage of invention. (Carter 2002: 7)

Second, I described what I called “The Asterisk Principle”, arguing that:

The character of the Victoria Harbour site is often found in what is left out of conventional histories. Conventional histories document the foundation of places, the growth of communities, architectural and other events of importance. By this definition, Victoria Harbour hardly has a history. Early maps either leave it as a blank space, or simply write “swamp”. Foundations, of course, cannot be put down in swamps. As Melbourne grew in civic pride and self-consciousness, so the low land west of the old Batman’s Hill, and north to West Melbourne Swamp, dropped out of consciousness. It was a non-place, rubbish was dumped there, and polluting industry. The Victoria Harbour site had no place in conventional histories. In compensation, it was an area where dreams multiplied. These were mainly engineers’ dreams: from the earliest days of white settlement to the period of containerisation, imaginative engineers and surveyors have been drawing residential, commercial and marine utopias over the site. The Victoria Harbour is the place where dreams of other places have collected. This fact was reinforced when the swamp was transformed into Victoria Docks, becoming a port of national and global significance. The languages of the sailors, the starlore of ship’s captains, the gy...